My Family Ghost Stories

The best thing I can do is tell these stories exactly as they were told to me, to the best of my memory–except for the bits I personally experienced which my ego might incline me to overelaborate.

Firstly, we all knew that the defunct radiology hospital in Kansas that had been converted into the college art department was haunted. It was obvious to everyone. That place gave us all the creeps — kids, students, and teachers alike. So I will tell that story last.

My parents knew a friend during grad school whose family lived in a house with a lot of, shall we say, activity. It was the kind of house where things liked to go missing. If you had a glass of water, for example, and you set it down for a few minutes, you might turn and say, “Hey, what happened to my glass of water? It was sitting right here.” And the family would tell you, “Oh, it’s up in the attic. Don’t go get it.” And it was! Every time, whatever had vanished sat right inside the attic door, and apparently upon opening said door, you were met with a sense that something inside was bidding you further in. According to my parents’ friend, most of his family had the wherewithal to decline this unspoken invitation. All the same, it was a generally upsetting house that left everyone in that family on edge. One sibling–and I don’t know the full details of this–experienced dark and unruly changes of temperament that went on to plague him for the rest of his life. It’s not the kind of place I’d ever want to stay the night, but I’m embarrassed to confess, I would love to visit for lunch, if only to see what goes missing.

Something I’ve noticed about hauntings is that while in the midst of one it can be difficult to acknowledge what you’re experiencing. They have a fogging effect that often doesn’t clear until after gaining a degree of distance. A forgetful daze sets in. If you’ve ever wondered why people living in haunted houses tend to stay put instead of pack up and run, this may be why. Hauntings induce a drowsy quality that can cause one to diminish or even forget moments of otherwise unparalleled terror–like a mother with labor pains. My family moved to Georgia when I turned 16 and stayed in the same house for roughly 10 years. They finally moved out about four years ago, at which point all of us–me, my parents, and my five sisters–began comparing notes.

Let’s establish the house. Two stories. I’m not sure how to describe the design, but it’s like a boxy late-20^th century attempt at a southern colonial style with a full-length porch, which stood at the top of a small but steep hill near the mouth of a rather large suburban subdivision along a busy street near an even busier interstate. Nestled so close to that much activity, you wouldn’t expect to see deer in the backyard, but you’d be wrong. Deer infest this part of the south, but they wandered into our backyard with special frequency, and not just deer but butterflies and assorted birds. Like the ghosts, they chose us for our location–at the top of a hill on the way to many places when coming from many places, some nearby woods, a creek to either side of us, a graveyard up the road, with everything close but not too close. We were kind of like a cross roads or a natural highway. From my understanding, this is similar to the theory by which “ley lines” work, which is probably why the deer and the ghosts both gave us this same impression. We never felt as though there was one consistent personality sharing the space with us, but perhaps we were a weigh station or a sort of connecting airport for travelers heading this way and that.

When you walked through the front door some days you would catch the brief smell of dead flowers like in a funeral home. Turning to your left was the dining room which had one corner where electronics never worked and cell phones couldn’t get any reception into which dogs would stare and bark. Turning to your right was a guest room or parlor with big thick locking doors that never quite behaved. According to every occupant who stayed in said room, these doors which were impossible to open during the day and difficult to lock when you wanted privacy would open on their on in the middle of the night, and there was a general feeling of never being alone. This constant sense of being watched permeated the house, and a lot of it can be chalked up to the energy of the architectural design which just didn’t flow right. The hallways were too narrow. The centrally located staircase destroyed line of site and left one suspecting that something always waited around a corner. There was also the kitchen window without any blinds which made one certain after dark that someone was standing outside and looking in — aside from the deer.

I don’t have a lot of memories from the three years of high school when I lived full-time in that house, which should frankly say something regardless of how many hours I might rationalize having spent out and about on extra-curricula activities. Time just slipped away. All of it. But apart from that constant feeling of someone waiting around a corner, I didn’t have too many experiences… Except for the demon cardinals which would dive like suicidal bomber into every window or car mirror they could find, all hours of the day, at the back of the house, the kitchen, the front windows, the car windshields and rear-view mirrors, not like birds accidentally flying into their own reflections but diving repeatedly with aggression as though trying to hurt something or themselves or something else.

The first experience reportedly occurred within the first new nights after moving in when my parents witnessed my baby sister sitting on the couch near the fireplace and heard her quietly ask, “Who is that crying?” The question was never resolved.

The next oddity was a pair of photographs that seemed to be the school portraits of an African American brother and sister of around 5 or 6 years old. The pictures first appeared in a cabinet of the laundry room when my dad was changing a light bulb. Having no idea what to do with them, he put the photographs on a shelf in the living room until he could ask the landlord about sending them to the previous tenants, but a few days later, they were found again in the cabinet of the laundry room. I’m not sure where he put them next for safekeeping, probably a box in his upstairs closet, until a few days later when they turned up in the laundry room cabinet yet again. This cycle repeated apparently a good half dozen times over the course of a couple of years until my dad finally determined that if someone wants them in that cabinet, that’s where they should stay, from which point on they didn’t move again.

Now we’d all heard the sounds on the roof. Especially during the day, you’d think a family of raccoons lived above us. However, despite slanted roofs with ideal visibility, nothing was ever seen from the outside. It was apparently worst in the master bedroom where you could hear a constant “clomp, clomp” plodding.

My dad liked to sit with his laptop at the kitchen table, and it’s important to understand the layout. The kitchen table was separated from the rest of the kitchen by low hanging cabinets and an island sink which together formed a median or barrier in the middle of the room. Visualizing this, you’ll understand that if a piece of plastic dishware resting on a counter on the far side of the kitchen were to launch itself across the room at my father it would need a pretty precise trajectory in order to make it over the sink and under the cabinets to successfully reach the table. Fortunately, the large plastic tray that one afternoon suddenly vaulted itself across the room from its semipermanent resting place between our bred and the refrigerator was about a centimeter off on its path and was stopped by the lower-most edge of the hanging cabinets. I must emphasize that things don’t usually fall sideways and upwards at a 15 degree angle with momentum.

Another oddity we all experienced involved the lights. Light bulbs burned out quickly in that house, which could have something do with the electrical work, but lights would also turn themselves on. One might assume after finding a light in the middle of the night or first thing in the morning that a member of the family had snuck downstairs at some point for a late night snack, but rarely did anyone confess to that–except for myself on occasion–and yet a light or two was on most mornings. And often the front door would be unlocked or even ajar. And one night at around three in the morning my dad awoke to three loud knocks, “Knock, knock, knock!” like someone at the knocking door. When he went downstairs to investigate, all the lights in the house were on. Every. Single. One. The next morning he learned that my aunt, his sister, had passed away, and that he had been woken at the exact hour of her death.

If there are other stories from our little house atop the hill, I can’t remember them at the moment. They’re overshadowed by clearer memories of the fuller-bodied encounters we’ve collected.

I lived in Savannah, Georgia for a year with my wife, though she wasn’t my wife at the time, and we shared a little apartment right on the edge of the historic part of the city. It was the downstairs half of an old two story house. The heating was lousy, the electricity was worse, and the insulation was worst of all. Sunlight shown through cracks in the hardwood floor and you could see straight down to the dirt and leaves beneath us. A few of the walls were practically hollow, and I had to personally install a lot of fiberglass insulation immediately upon moving in to help keep us warm at the end of the winter. We quickly learned that a little room in the middle of the house was the easiest to insulate and temperature control, and it became the de facto bedroom even into the hot Savannah summer when the city alternated between short refreshing rainstorms and otherwise constant boil. One summer night I woke up to what they always warn you might happen in such a dangerous city: someone had broken into the house. I could hear the intruder rummaging around and talking to themself, and 22-year-old me put together what was happening almost instantly because I was clever and I’d heard other people describe these situations–a junkie was high and wandering into random places to swipe stuff while in that state of mind, and all I could think was, “Please, find something and leave before you get this far into the house.” I share all of this to emphasize that I was awake for a hot minute in order to having these thoughts, and I could move my head to check the time and see that it was 5:00 am, and I could turn to see that Rachel was fast asleep beside me, and I could shift enough to remind myself that I’d been sleeping in my underwear and that this was not how I wanted to fight someone — so with all that thinking and moving, I can confidently state that what comes next was not sleep paralysis. The figure that stumbled into our room from the kitchen hunched in a way hardly befitting the blue naval uniform they wore or their proud powdered wig sitting high on their dusty gray head. This stranger of about six feet tall glanced around my room with deep eyeless sockets until landing his gaze on me, who had been attempting to appear asleep. He looked down at me, breathed incredibly deep like he was filling his lungs with all the air in the room, and as his chest filled with that breath, he rose with it and disappeared into the ceiling. I sprang out of the bed, and though it was the middle of the summer in Savannah, the patch of air precisely where he’d stood was ice cold. Savannah is known for wondering spirits, and I also hear there’s something called a Boo Hag which is a type of ghost that really only wants to be noticed at the end of a long night.

When I told my customers and coworkers this story, they informed me that it was par for the course in such a famously haunted town. Furthermore, I later learned that it wasn’t even the most interesting ghost sighting in my own family.

When my dad was a teenager living in Jackson, Mississippi, his family moved into a particularly malevolent house with activity that even my mom once witnessed. His childhood home had recently burned down, and they lost most everything in the fire. When they first arrived at the house on Monroe street, movers had completed most of the work for them of hauling in furniture and boxes so my dad and his brother quickly began settling into their rooms when suddenly my grandmother appeared in a panic demanding, “Who shot that gun? Who heard that?” Well, my father and his brother hadn’t heard a thing, which set a bit of a guilty look on my grandmother’s face. “Oh. Well,” she said, “I was told that the woman who built this house and lived here before us shot herself.” And after that they would all hear the gunshot–frequently, even, and like it was right inside the house. But when one person heard it, no one else would. Always, “Did anyone hear that?” And always, “No, we didn’t.” My dad’s room was the deepest into the house, and as he describes it, well–Let’s just say that when he and my mother first saw the movie Ghostbusters he turned to her during the library scene and said, “That goo! That’s what used to be on the walls.” The walls of his bedroom would sweat and mildew. There was also a shadow that would walk in front of the window. And the light beside his bed would turn itself off and on. There were frequently problems with the light switches. One could walk into a room and the light just wouldn’t want to turn on. Did the bulbs need to get changed? No. They just wanted to stay dark, and this happened all across the house. Well, one night a few years into living there my dad came home to all of the lights misbehaving at once, and he had to feel his way through pitch black darkness in order to get to his room at the back of the house, and as he passed one of the other rooms, he saw that shape that usually appeared in his bedroom window. But this time it had a face. And the face screamed at him. Later in his life when my dad saw horror movies use that now-classic jump scare of a spectral face popping out at the screen like it’s supposed to be 3D, he said this felt a lot like that. He didn’t need to be told twice. He left and didn’t return til the next day–carrying one of those boxy, heavy-duty flashlights with a handle that people usually reserve for camping trips.

The most frequent occurrence in the house on Monroe street was what I’ll call the radio whispers. Imagine, for anyone who remembers radio, the sound of two people talking on NPR, and then imagine that they’re intensely whispering to each other and that the radio is in another room. That was allegedly the sound. Two people whispering on a radio. My dad, his brother, and my grandmother had apparently learned to ignore it over the years, but one afternoon my dad was home from college with my mother accompanying him and they were near the front of the house making sandwiches or something when my mother heard it, too! And if that isn’t the validation that every man wants, I don’t know what it is.

I would love to lie and say that my other haunting experiences are nearly as interesting as what follows, but regrettably, they’re quite tame. While in Savannah, I worked at a historic and notoriously haunted pirate-themed restaurant where I once got the distinct sensation that my legs had been bound in a manacle, which I sincerely thought it was interesting at the time… until I heard about the visitor to the college art department back in Kansas.

The Art Department was in a building constructed in the 1950s for as cutting edge hospital for x-rays, radiation, and cancer treatment. A lot of people died there, and after a few decades it was closed down (some time in the early-to-mid 1970s, I think). By the time we moved to town just before Y2K, it had been long converted into the place where college students painted and made clay pots. My dad, the head of the college’s art department, was frequently there on his own, though we kids would often stop in to visit him and to paint, sculpt, or play around in the computer lab. Again, I can attest to it being a weird and unsettling place. Sometimes my dad’s office would smell of cigar tobacco. Sometimes stuff would turn itself off and on. Well, one day a man walked in off the street in a kind of a huff. He was dressed in plaid or flannel, according to my dad, was middle aged but not old or elderly, and had a pair of cigars in his shirt pocket. And he poked his head into my dad’s office and said, “This used to be my office. Do you work here?” But instead of waiting for my dad to answer he continued to march around. He said he used to run the hospital. He said, “I built this place.” And he walked from to room giving verifiably accurate descriptions and saying things like, “We used to do surgeries in this room,” and, “a lot of people died here.” And my dad couldn’t really manage to get a word in–not because the man talked so much or because was yet unsettled but because my dad just couldn’t figure what to say! While the man knew what he was talking about when it came to the former hospital, his age was off for what we was claiming: “I built this place, I used to run this place,” etc. The man didn’t look too much older than 50 and the hospital had shut down 30 years earlier. Well, the man left as unceremoniously as he showed up, and my dad watched him march in the same hurried manner to the retirement home across the street and pass by a couple of orderlies who didn’t react to him in any way as he entered, and that was the last my dad saw of him. After thinking about it for just a little while, my dad quickly realized that he actually knew the youngest doctor to have worked at that hospital because he still went to our church, and the man we knew was easily older than this gentleman. But then he also remembered hearing that one of the original doctors had recently passed away. Sometimes people just want to check in on everything. I imagine you will, too.

© Nathan Cook, 2022