Grandma's Ghost
Share82@aol.com
When I was a small child, my family lived in Pensacola, Florida. My grandmother who was of Native American ancestry lived a portion of the year with us. She shared my bedroom when she visited and slept on a bed placed at the foot of mine. She shared stories of her life with me and in the course of talking, reminded me that if something should happen to her that her wedding ring was to go to my Dad's oldest sister. When I was six, my grandmother suffered a stroke and refused to go to the hospital for treatment or to be given I.V. treatment. She refused food and water and after a week died. During that week , I would try to talk to her and she would look at me and turn her ring on her finger. Finally I remembered her wish that the ring would be given to my Aunt. I assured her that I would tell my Dad and went into the kitchen where the rest of the family had gathered. Since I was only six years old, no one paid any attention when I related her wishes. Upon my Grandmother's death her ring was given to my youngest Aunt. About a year later, I was awakened during the night by my bed rocking. At the foot of my bed stood my Grandmother twisting the ring on her finger. My body was lifted off the bed and I screamed for my mother. When my Mother came in I was crying hysterically and she tried to convince me that it was only a dream. That was 45 years ago and I know it wasn't a dream now as I did then. I made a point of finding that ring when I was about 20 years old and getting it to the proper person. I have never seen my grandmother again but over the years have had many paranormal experiences.

Haunting in Salt Lake City
drl217@nyu.edu
Well, to begin with, I've never "told" my story, except to a few slightly suspicious friends, and their looks told me, "she must be tired...overworked...what a freak." So, I thought I'd try you guys, because I can't get it out of my head. My husband and I had rented an old farmhouse in Salt Lake City, Utah, and lived in it "peacefully" for two years. Admittedly, looking back, there were "signs" of unnatural behavior for a house, but we chalked it up to "settling" or "weather changes," or even lack of sleep. Everything was fine, we lived and laughed in this house, and felt deeply connected to it. The problems started when we began to box up to move out. We had moved our matress from the upstairs bedroom to the downstairs living room, to make it accessible for the movers. Each evening before bed, I would head upstairs to check things out before shutting out the lights downstairs for sleep. Each morning when I went upstairs to read the paper on the porch off of the bedroom, the two closet doors would be open. I would shut them, thinking my husband had opened them. (though, why would he...we had emptied the closets for the move) After a few days, I mentioned the closets to him. As an experiment, we put heavy boxes in front of the closets to keep them from opening. But the opening didn't stop. Soon, at night, lying downstairs, we could actually HEAR the boxes being moved. We would go up, find it freezing, the boxes moved, but the closet doors not opened. The morning of the move, once again I went upstairs to bring the boxes down for the truck. As I was moving down the stairs I heard distinctly, two children giggling, and one crying. We moved out that day, and I told my husband that evening. He called the landlord and was told that the house had been used as an elementary school in the late 1800's, because the original elementary school had burned down. It was apparently a school house for one year. That's my story. B. in New York

Experience At The Biltmore Hotel
geminilexzino4zionrevolution@hotmail.com
It was a warm august night back in 1999. My friends and I decided to go see the Biltmore hotel in Coral Gables. So we parked at our friend's house who lived a block away then we proceeded toward the huge landmark. We walked in like as if we owned the place, right by the bellboy and the front desk, straight to the back of the hotel and then outside. There were 5 of us including myself. Two of my friends stayed at the golf course just talking as I and my other 2 friends crept into the utility elevator in the back. We pressed the 3rd floor which then takes you to the main elevators. We got to the third floor then found the other elevators. I was surprised to see the elevator to the far left leads to the tower. We got on that and pressed the infamous 13th floor. It didn't light up. We then took the elevator to the lobby, but before getting to the lobby it stopped on the 7th floor. The doors opened, we stood still for a couple of seconds, then the doors closed (why it stopped at the 7th floor, who knows). We got to the lobby but before we were able to walk out a man with a suitcase walks in and asks,"Going up?" We said "Yeah" and stayed inside. The man's destination was the 14th floor. He slid a special key into the elevator which gives access to the tower floors. He asked what floor we were headed to, I kept a poker face and said 13 please. He pressed it and it lit. We got to the 13th floor and the doors opened, we thanked the man and proceeded outside. The 13th floor is not like the other floors. It is more like a 10 foot enclosure with double doors facing you. We tried opening the doors but they were locked. So we decided to call on the elevator. We stood waiting and it sounded like rain falling down the elevator shaft. We decided to go back down to the lobby, but before we got to the lobby floor the elevator automatically took us to the 7th floor again. We got spooked then and decided to get off on that floor and take the stairs to the bottom. We told our friends outside what had happened, and they didn't believe us. So we all went back and took the elevator to the 12th floor, got off and took the stairs to the tower. We passed the exit to the 13th floor, we got to the exit on the 14th and it was locked. We got to the 15th floor and opened the door. To your right there is a door labeled "Merrick Suite" we opened it and went inside. It was dark but through the darkness you could tell it was a detailed and beautiful room. We noticed that there was two windows opposite from each other. One was facing the front of the hotel and the other facing the rear (toward the golf course). These windows were enormous about 10 feet high. We also noticed that we were in a sitting room. There was more rooms inside the actual suite. Two on one side and one on the other side. We walked into the first dark room turned on the light and felt the temperature difference immediately. It was really cold in that room, despite the fact that all rooms were served by the same air conditioning system. One of my friends was going to open the closet but I told him not to touch anything. We heard a noise coming from the elevator area. We all froze, looked at each other and ran down the stairs to the lobby. My legs were in pain. Imagine running 15 flights down! Somewhere on our trek down the stairs we left two of our guys behind, so we took the elevator back to the 12th floor and took the stairs to the 15th again. We were just nosy, because we still hadn't found our other 2 friends that we had gone back for. We walked back into the room we were in and as I remembered we had left the lights on, however to our surprise the lights were off. We paid it no attention and opened the room next to it. This room faced the corner of the hotel, it too was dark but one could see the beds were unmade, which we thought was pretty weird. We walked into the last room across which had double doors. We were shocked to find the room lit. We closed the doors and exited the suite. We decided to go back down, but use the elevator this time. So again as we waited, we heard sounds of hard rain which definetely caught our attention. The doors soon opened and we all let our a shriek when we found our other two friends inside. We all ran into the elevaotr and pressed lobby, but it took us to the 7th floor again! What was it with the 7th floor?! We also noticed that it was ice-cold on that floor. We waited for the doors to close and went to the lobby. We walked back out into the golf course and looked up to the window at the Merrick Suite. We saw what seemed to be the shape of a person looking straight down at us. We all stopped and stared and one of my friends gave a suggestion by saying it was probably a vase or something. But I knew that wasn't no vase! We walked the damp golf course grass just to walk off our scare. We walked to the end and turned around heading back to the hotel. I knew we were going back a different way too. Something gave me the feeling to look back at the grass behind us. To my shock there was more than a couple of footprints. Lets do the math now, 5 guys equal 10 sets of footprints. Right? Well someone explain to me why there was at least 20 footprints going in all directions right behind us. We knew the prints weren't there before because in front of us the grass was perfectly smooth. So we all take one step at a time. When we took about 2 steps together I turned around, again the zig-zagged steps, about 15 or more of them. We all ran out of the grounds and didn't stop until we got to my car, where we went home. There is a sequel to this story. Myself and one of my original friends who was there returned in 2001..... I'll write back about that freaky incident also in the future, I'm tired, so until next time be safe and don't ever doubt the haunting of the Biltmore....

The Old House
jstewart@icdc.com
My husband and I bought an old Victorian house in D**********, Chester County, PA. It was a definite fixer-upper; the previous owners had really let it go to seed. They did a lot of "cosmetic work" (including putting Pergo over the original hard wood), but let the serious structural work go for at least 20 years. We closed on the house in 1999 -- right after we got married. I started researching, and discovered that the house was originally built as a boarding house for railroad workers -- somewhere between 1890 and 1896. We immediately began to refurbish and remodel. THAT'S when the weirdness started. The third floor was where we started. In both rooms, the plaster was water-damaged, and too old to take a patch, We started to knock it down, in order to re-plaster. It was in the third floor great room walls that we found several curious items, which we saved: a man's pillowtick railroader's cap, a ladies' black straw mourning cap (with veil), several ladies' undergarments (corsets and such), several small medicine bottles, American flags with 38 stars on them, and a box of old letters -- most of which were illegible. The appeared to have been deliberately secreted there -- almost all of it was neatly bundled up in a roll of canvas. As soon as we opened the walls, I got extremely uncomfortable in the house. I felt like I was not alone, and that someone was watching me. It got bad enough that I would not work on the house by myself -- especially not on the third floor. Tools began disappearing and reappearing in odd places. A screwdriver left in the second-floor guest bedroom would pop up in the basement, or a box of nails would disappear from the laundry room and reappear in the attic....when no one had been in to work on the house. If I worked in the living room, I would hear what sounded like "phonograph music" -- sort of old and scratchy -- from the third-floor bedroom. To this day, I will not go up to the third floor bedroom -- even in broad daylight. Eventually, we stopped working on the third floor altogether -- it still isn't finished. All of this stepped up yet again when I became pregnant. Worse yet, I went into pre-term labor, and was put on bedrest. I was stuck in bed on the second floor for three and a half months. I could hear all sorts of patterings and movement from the third floor -- and I KNOW it wasn't mice,as we have 2 cats! (I know it wasn't the cats, either -- they won't go up there. Sometimes they sit at the foot of the stairs and just look up there.)One afternoon, it sounded as if someone was throwing boxes. Now that I have had the baby, things are still rollicking along up there. Our daughter will giggle at nothing, babble and baby- talk while staring at the doorway to her room....it really frightens me. Even as I type this, can hear furtive movements upstairs. I even hate walking past the doorway to go back and forth to the bathroom.

Ghost Tale
Tnvols4me@aol.com
As a teenager, I found myself spending the summer in Tennessee with my sister who was in college. She had a nice apartment in the Knoxville area, but for a teen that wasn't old enough to drive, I found my time alone while she was busy kinda boring. Walking around the back of the apartment complex, I noticed a fenced in area that had a small opening in it. When I looked inside I found a grown over family graveyard that dated many years back. The whole area was just open weeds with one tall oak tree sitting over on the side. I climbed in and looked around the area noticing that the way I came in was the only way in or out of this since the fence was a good 6 foot solid fence. Being bored and being the type that hates to see grave markers grownover, I took it on myself to clean this graveyard up that summer. I managed to get all the weeds down and get all the rocks cleaned to where you could read them. I noticed the one directly in front of the opening was of a young girl not much different in age than I was at the time. I found myself as a kids standing there and talking to the deceased as if they were there. Asking them if they liked the way I had cleaned the place up and asking if there was anything else that needed to be done. I was sitting there one day in front of the rock for the young girl and was just jabbering to her as I stared at the opening in the fence that I had crawled through. All of a sudden I noticed something out of the corner of my eye and I turned to the right. There under the oak tree sat a girl about my age looking at a book. At first I thought, cool, someone to talk to, but as I said Hi and she looked up, I realized that she was dressed in very old style long dress and a chill went through me. I dove through the opening in the fence shaking at the thought of seeing the ghost of the girl I had been talking to. As I got to the outside, better senses prevailed and I thought, wait a minute you dummy. That is just a young girl and you are blowing your chance to get to know her and she was very pretty. I turned right back around and climbed back through that opening. I looked under the tree, but nobody was there. I walked all around that little area and never did see her again. There was no way anyone could have gotten out of there without me seeing them, so I guess maybe that was her and this was her way of showing me that she appreciated what I had done for her family.

Ghost In My Apartment
cdalton1@frontiernet.net
I moved into an apartment, well more like a duplex, it was an old house that had been converted into a double. At first things were fine, but then some things started to happen. There was this one time when I was scolding my two young girls for something and the blender was on the counter and plugged in w/o the pitcher, but it was turned off and had been for quite some time, anyway the girls were leaning against the frig and I was scolding them when suddenly the blender just turns itself on we all were like 'oh my God'. Then in the same house I would be getting ready for work early in the morning and I always felt like there was someone watching me, I'd be taking a shower and the door would be open when I got out, even though I know that I closed it. Then one time the scariest part was when I was sleeping down stairs on the couch and woke up to voices whispering. At first I thought that it was my girls, so I looked but only saw my dog, went back to sleep, though only to wake up to the feeling, the actual pressure of someone sitting beside me and holding both my arms and at the same time hearing whispering, saying,"Ok,hurry, hurry before she wakes up, she's going to wake up." That freaked me out so I went upstairs to sleep in my room. Next to my side of the bed was a table with a glass of water sitting on it, after I laid in the bed the glass fell over when I reached over to pick it up I felt a very cold air, so being freaked and curious, I reached out my other arm to feel the air over there and it was much much warmer. I wasn't really afraid of thease things as i was facinated by them, but needless to say I moved anyway due to other circimstances, and have experienced nothing since.

Ghost in the Hospital
quiksand@ix.netcom.com
In North Miami off 441 just off the Cloverleaf Interchange, an abandoned hospital sits off the expressway. The best view of the hospital comes from the Palmetto Expressway, as you get on the highway from 163rd street. A friend of mine was working security there for a short period of time, so some of us went to visit him. He would sit on the 1st floor right next to the morgue. Keep in mind, the hospital is completely empty except for some equipment. My security guard friend told us stories of how the place was haunted and how he heard weird noises during the night. One story he spoke of was of a woman who was giving birth, but had to be taken to O.R. to deliver...the story goes the woman died during the birth, but to this day she still roams around on the second floor in search of her baby. On two occassions we roamed the hospital taking a look around, and let me tell you the feeling was a scary one. We walked through the O.R. on the second floor and we walked through the emergency room and cafeteria, and it was freaky. But the scariest moment happened on my second visit. My friends and I rode the elevators to different floors inside, and we would mess around by trying to leave each other out of the elevator, stuck on the floor. Some floors were lit up, while others were pitch black. We ended up on one floor and got out of the elevator. Can't remember the floor. The hallway had a lanolium tile, like in schools. We were about a quarter of the way down the hall, when we heard the noise of someone screeching their shoes against the floor as if they were walking. The thing was, no one else was in the hallway but us. The scary part is, that noise kept getting close as if the person was walking towards us. So we hauled ass, and made our way into the stairwell, and closed the door behind us. As we made our way down the stairs toward the first floor and exit we heard the sound enter the stairwell, that sent goosebumps down my spine...I was totally spooked after that incident, I never returned. To this day if you drive by the hospital, different room lights are lit. But it's impossible, someone is turning on the lights, cause the hospital is empty...So who's doing it???

Poisonous Plant Lady haunts Miami
RedandBlack.com
MIAMI -- Julia Morton, aka Poisonous Plant Lady, has been said to haunt the University of Miami's Media Relations building since her death in 1996. Morton worked in the building as a botanist and began living in it after Hurricane Andrew destroyed her house in 1992. As one of the world's leading botanical experts, Morton created the Morton Collectanea in Fairchild Tropical Garden, which has been used as a major source of information by poison control centers throughout the country. In the 60s, she was sent by the National Institute of Health to seek the causes of an epidemic of esophageal cancer in South Carolina. Later, during the Vietnam War, the Department of Defense sent her to Southeast Asia to research and write survival instructions for troops. Michelle Baro, a student at the university from 1990-1994 and an employee at the Media Relations building since 1991, says that she saw Julia Morton before and after she died. "I don't remember the date exactly when I was working in my office upstairs and I saw her walking in the courtyard," Baro said. "She always wore dresses and some sort of 'turban' on her head, and this day that I saw her she was walking as she always did from her office across the courtyard to the front office wearing her fuchsia head piece." Baro said that she also saw the ghost of Julia Morton in the office that Morton had occupied before the building was remodeled. Keith Bowermaster, online communications manager for the Division of Communications at UM, says he saw Julia during his second week working, before he had heard the stories. He says he saw her on one of the staircases in the courtyard area of the building. "As I walked through the lobby door into the courtyard, I saw something -- or someone -- on the stairs to my right out of the corner of my eye. When I turned to look nothing was there," Bowermaster said. "Later that day I jokingly asked co-workers if the building was haunted because I saw a ghost that morning." The university plans to build a new building on the site of the current Media Relations building. "If the Media Relations building is haunted by the ghost of Julia Morton, she's a friendly ghost," Bowermaster said. "But it makes you wonder: if she's here, will she occupy University Village, which will be built on this property, and will she be happy that her 'home' was torn down?"