Hey, it's Michelle Newman, and tonight's five calls each involve something watching from just beyond the light.
Marissa from Dallas calls in with a true ghost story from when she was five, watching shadows in her room take the form of a tall, faceless man in a top hat standing in her doorway. He pressed a hand into her sheets and vanished. Five years later, in a new house, he came back, closer this time, surrounded by other watching figures in the hallway, before leaning over her bed and touching her leg through the blanket. That was twenty years ago, and she has never seen him since. This matches a well-documented pattern in paranormal research known as the Hat Man, an unusually tall, faceless shadow figure reported consistently across cultures and continents.
David from Ocala returns with a story from 1983, completely separate from his movie theater ghost. Driving home from a party at 1 AM in his 1967 Camaro, he checked his blind spot and found a two and a half foot tall glowing figure standing in his back seat, smiling, its whole body lit from within. It lasted only seconds before disappearing. The folklore term for what he saw is an imp, a small mischievous being with roots in English and Germanic tradition, most famously depicted in the legend of the Lincoln Imp, a stone carving inside Lincoln Cathedral said to be an imp turned to stone by an angel after wreaking havoc inside the church.
Ashley calls in about her sister's historic estate in Carmel, New York, where flickering electronics and a heavy, distracting presence followed her through more than one guest room. Carmel sits in Putnam County on land with Native Wappinger burial grounds and Revolutionary War history, and is home to Smalley's Inn, one of the most documented haunted locations in the region, where the ghost of toddler Elizabeth Smalley, discovered buried beneath the tavern's own basement floor, has reportedly tugged at patrons' clothing and giggled in empty rooms for well over a century.
Julian calls in from Bend, Oregon, and this call is different from everything else in this episode. Rather than recounting something that already happened, Julian's message plays out in real time, lost in the woods, cold, hiding in an abandoned house, followed by something he describes as taller than the trees with a distorted face. If this is you, Julian, or if anyone recognizes his voice, please contact local authorities in Bend, Oregon directly.
Cindy Ketron from Avon, Indiana closes the episode with a story from her parents' first apartment in 1957, shared with a couple whose young son had died before they ever moved in. The ghost tore up trash bags and flushed an empty toilet nightly. Cindy's mother, a practicing psychic, eventually led the boy's spirit by the hand back to his grieving parents, and in doing so told them something nobody could have possibly known yet. That she was pregnant. With Cindy.
00:00 Intro
00:00 Marissa from Dallas and the return of the Hat Man
07:23 David from Ocala and the glowing imp in his back seat
10:28 Ashley and the haunted estate in Carmel, New York
13:00 Julian's call from the woods in Bend, Oregon
14:38 Cindy Ketron and the little boy ghost of Speedway, Indiana
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Theme music: Sexy Sax by Cool Cascade
Production: Newman Media