Hey, it's Michelle Newman, and this week goes to some genuinely strange places.
James from San Francisco, the Post Street ghost guy, returns with stories from his decade working at UCSF Medical Center on Parnassus. The kitchen where he worked used to be a morgue before a remodel in the forties or fifties, and the activity followed. Voices building outside a private bathroom door that vanished the instant he opened it. Small hands pulling at the back of his shirt on the basement stairs. And on one ordinary morning, something that looked exactly like volcanic smoke rising, bubbling, and turning in on itself out of a urinal before being sucked back in the moment he reached for his camera.
Melissa, formerly of Pittsburgh, calls in about her internship at Greystone House, a stone mansion built in the 1700s as a stagecoach inn and brothel, later converted into a group home for teenage boys. Faucets throughout the massive house would turn on full blast in empty bathrooms. And every single day at exactly 6 PM, while the boys sat down to dinner, the doorbell rang. Every door. Front, back, and side. Nobody was ever there. No running footsteps. No pranking teenagers caught in the act.
A caller shares a story about a group of friends in a five-bedroom rental house with one room by the main entryway that nobody can keep filled. Four separate tenants have rented that specific room, and all four ended up developing serious drug problems or going to rehab. This leads into a discussion of Dr. Gabor Mate's concept of the hungry ghost from Buddhist tradition, a being with an enormous belly and a throat too narrow to ever be satisfied, trapped in an endless cycle of craving and emptiness, and the unsettling possibility that some rooms hold onto the specific flavor of human suffering the same way walls hold onto cigarette smoke.
Chuck from upstate New York calls in about an empty lot at the end of his street where a house burned down decades ago. A woman in white stands motionless among the weeds, visible only in peripheral vision. The moment you turn to look at her directly, she is gone. Chuck assumed he was imagining it until multiple neighbors, independently and without prompting, described seeing the exact same woman under the exact same conditions.
Diane from Sedona, an experienced diviner, calls in about a Ouija board session that went further than any session she has done. Helping a stranger contact his deceased father, her hands went ice cold, and her body began shaking uncontrollably. She has no memory of the session itself, only fragments, the planchette moving even after the client lifted his own finger off it entirely to test whether he was the one moving it. When the session ended, the skeptic sitting across from her was pale and shaken. She had told him specific, private details about his father that only the two of them could have known.
Cindy Ketron from Avon, Indiana, closes the episode with a family story from the early years of the Great Depression, when her great-grandfather was approached in a hayfield by a man in a business suit holding a notepad and pencil who identified himself as the devil and offered a contract to solve his problems. Great grandpa's response was simply, what if I told you I did not want the offer. The devil did not know what to do with that and disappeared.
00:00 Intro
00:35 James from San Francisco and the volcanic smoke from the urinal at UCSF
03:18 Melissa and the doorbell that rings at 6 PM every day at Greystone House
06:18 The rental room that has sent four tenants to rehab
12:03 Chuck and the woman in the empty lot who vanishes when you look at her
14:04 Diane's Ouija board session in Sedona
17:06 Cindy Ketron and her great-grandfather's encounter with the devil
Have a real ghost story of your own? A haunting experience, something you heard, something you cannot explain? I want to hear it. Call 1 (701) 484-2666 or visit tellmeaghoststory.com to share your story.
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