Hello, my angels or devils, demons, mortals, reanimated ectoplasm, however you identify. Welcome back to another episode of Haunting. We're running into a little problem here at Haunting HQ that I'm not entirely unfamiliar with. We're generating too much at revenue. We're not sure how to spend it. All material goods are of no use to me here, hence
the reworking of my entire brand. So we're in a little bit of a "financial pickle," as my dad's tax fraud attorney used to put it, different sides of the same coin, though we're flush, whereas he was basically doing dishes for the IRS. AnyWho, I had the idea to donate our proceeds to charity.
(mumbles)
Okay? Len and I had the idea to donate our proceeds to charity. Len pitched the American Cancer Society, but I was thinking Camp Conflict, which is a summer program I funded Maine where we manufacture safe adverse experiences for privileged teens so they have something to write their college essays about. It's helped a lot of deserving kids get into bottom tier ivys.
So while Naomi prepares the oversized check, we'll meet James from Philadelphia, who guides a ghost tour through the city where he and his group - Honestly, you can probably guess.
I work with Stephen DeMarco, another ghost tour guide. He's my de facto mentor. Stephen's telling me this story. He had three college girls. They had booked the extended tour. One of them screams, "He disappeared! You didn't see that? He disappeared! You were just talking to him, and now he's gone." They're scared to death because they just watched a man disappear in front of him. Spirits are here.
I don't know why, but they're here, and I'm all for skepticism, but there are many things that can't be explained. My name is James. I am a ghost tour guide in Philadelphia, and we encountered a ghost on our ghost tour. I give extended ghost tours in Philadelphia. It's about an hour tour and they're eight different stops, all from the colonial period. There's a lot of history to it. We don't do flim flammory. We don't set up bluetooth speakers that play scary music. We don't have actors pop out.
It's just me doing historical lessons and telling them about hauntings. Sometimes I use gadgets on the tour. I used to bring like an EMF detector or a spirit box, just to see if they'd do anything, you know, shake it up a little bit. One night, I'm talking about Alexander Hamilton. All of a sudden, the spirit box goes off and
they point, they go, "look the thing turned red." And I've found that I've been able to convince, I wouldn't say hardcore skeptics by any means, but people who didn't believe it and just kind of wanted to see what the tour was about. It was October 2021, right before the season really ramped up, as we were heading deeper into the month towards Halloween. It was brisk. It was a very small group they had booked the extended tour. There was an older woman
in her late forties to early fifties. I'll just call her Ma. She was tall and thin, kind of reminded me of Allison Janney. She was nice enough, she really wanted to be there. This was for her. Her daughter, who was a woman about my age in her mid to late thirties, blonde, a bit shorter. She didn't want to be there, and that's okay, like she had no interest, but she wasn't disrespectful. And then there was a youngest girl. She was a teenager.
They were visiting from Washington, and they got the Philadelphia experience, which is you're trying to cross the street and someone nearly runs you over, and then that car who tries to run you over yells at you. Welcome to Philadelphia, was kind of all I could say. I'm checking them in and I'm trying to confirm the extended tour, and then Ma leans in then whispers in my ear, "You know, I'm a clairvoyant. I can see
spirits around us." Okay, this was unprompted. I'm just kind of trying to get all of this done at this point, and I have stuff I have to say. I have things I have to get through. But they were actually very nice, especially Ma, who really wanted to be there. I get through this standard tour and I'm continuing with the extended tour. I go the extra mile. I bring out some equipment. Maybe it works, maybe we hear something
on the spirit box. Sometimes we don't, and I move on and I try to make it interesting one way or the other. The middle one, the daughter, was on her phone the entire time. She wasn't interested. This wasn't her cup of tea. As my gear was going off and I got more into the ghost stuff, the teenage daughter kind of warmed up to it. She kind of started to ask questions. She kind of started to want to know about experiences that had happened to me. Part of
being a tour guide is personal experience. They want to know what we've seen, what we've experienced. I show people some orbs in pictures I've taken of a certain locations. I talk about times the EMF point a bit nuts, when the spirit box had a full conversation with me. I always work that in. We're walking down Fourth Street, Philadelphia towards Spruce. Those are very old buildings, and if the streets are empty, which they just happen to be, there's a lot of echoes, there's a lot of footsteps.
Some footsteps maybe people walking behind us and some not. Basically I'm listening for anything, but it looked like just your average night on Fourth Street. As I'm walking with my lantern in hand, Ma leans in and she says, "You know, there's a man following us." The thing I thought was someone's jumped on. I've had homeless people try to jump on. I've had people just visiting locations try to jump on. Immediately I turn around, you know, I look for him.
I don't see anyone. It's just the three and myself. And she says, "He is wearing jogging attire, he is bleeding from his forehead and his nose is broken. He died some time ago. His name is John, and he's just checking on us." All this is unprompted. Now, I approach this with skepticism. P.T. Barnum said, if they believe something, let them believe it. And that's a paraphrase.
The thing I noticed about the daughter and the teenage daughter, neither one of them seems surprised, and they weren't shocked. They just sort of were like, oh well here it is like very matter of factly. So I said, I hope John enjoys the rest of the tour. When I got into the Philadelphia market, Stephen was the only one they're giving tours as such. He was my trainer, he was my de facto mentor, so to speak. My name is Steve, and I am a ghost tour
guide in the city of Philadelphia. Now I gotta go forward a bit to when we're starting an Atlantic City ghost tour. You know, they were doing a test run and they wanted me to see how it would look, and you know, give my own two cents about it. So I went there. We're doing a practice and it's me giving Steven a tour. This time, we complete the tour and we're walking back down the board walk. I asked, Hey, has anything ever happened to you on the tour, like, do you have
a personal experience? Stephen then goes into his story. It happened in 2021. I had three young girls in the early twenties walking with me. I just finished up the standard tour and I had an extended tour. We're on Third and Pine Street. It's kind of like the older part of Philadelphia. At night they got street lamps on and on that intersection, it can't get a little noisy. I was just wrapping up the tour and this guy crossing the street came over.He appeared to be in his
mid twenties. He looked like he was jogging through the city because he had jogging shorts on and he was sweaty. Initially, I thought he may have just been like running and it was just kind of crossing paths. But what was so off putting about him was that as he got closer, I noticed a big bloody gash on his forehead and it looked like there was blood running down his face. My first reaction was, I thought that this guy got into a fight. And then he said, "Oh, don't mind me,
I'm just looking in." It was very casual. Who says that, you know? It just was weird, and so my gut reaction was that this guy was like looking for trouble. Basically, I just said, "Oh, I'm sorry, this is a private tour. We love you to have you on the next tour, you know, please check us out. And all he said, and he shook his head, was "Oh don't mind me, I'm just looking in." I'm thinking to myself, if he's on drugs or anything like that, because he didn't seem all there.
So for a three second I turned to the three girls and they're looking at the guy, and I turned back and he vanishes. Boom. He was just gone. I look back, and you could tell the girls were kind of shocked. As I was telling him the story, James interrupted me and said, wait a minute, that kind of sounds like something that happened to me too. I turned to him, I said, "Guess what, Stephen, his name is John, and he's just looking in on the tour." Stephen freaks out at this point, he goes, what are
you talking about? And I tell him the wholeMa story. I see he's visibly freaked out. He goes, "No, you're lying." He's like, well, how could that have happened? "Did the college girls maybe posted on Reddit and the woman in Washington maybe?" But I'm like, Stephen, "What you're trying to give me as a skeptical explanation makes less sense than us having a shared paranormal experience."
What do I think about John? I think that he likes to just come back, and I think he really does like the tour, So I guess we're doing a good enough job.
Mortals kill me. You saw a ghost on the ghost tour and we're shocked. Surely we expected at least the possibility, But I get it, I once did sponsored content for Glowgarden's Advanced retinoid eye treatment. And yes, even though I was hawking it, I did not expect it to tighten my under eyes so well, and at a pretty affordable price point too. Don't worry, that wasn't an ad. Glow Garden ended our partnership after the surveillance footage from that food court bathroom
got leaked. They dropped the charges though, But if anyone from corporate is listening and wants to get back in the Therésa business, just email Len at Huntingthepodcast at gmail dot com. I don't really have under eyes anymore, but I still love the gesture. I digress. Point is we're allowed to be skeptics, but in my opinion, a supernatural experience is like falling in love. It comes when you least expect it.
Right, right, right, or you chase after it obsessively, look for signs where there are none, finally find it, only to realize maybe this was a huge mistake, and then pay a lawyer to help make it go away. What about you, Len, Were you ever in love?
(mumbles)
You met your wife at a Kenny Chesney concert, that really checks out. Naomi? Hate to break it to you, but Phi-Delts Champagne and Shackles probably isn't love. You're right, not for me to judge. Hey, how about this, everyone sound off in the comments and tell us either where you saw your first ghost or where you met your first love, and later I'll try to guess which one it was.
Anyway, so on one side of the spectrum we have James, who's looking for ghosts but doesn't always find them, and on the other side we have Miranda, who's never looking but they always seem to find her.
I just got hit with this bad, scary, terror. It was just like, ugh, I gotta go. I gotta get out . That's the only car there. It's raining, it's nasty, it's pulled out, and I look over across from me. All the plumps are empty, but there's a light. It's just flickering above the plump directly across from me. And I was like, nope, I gotta go. My name's Miranda. I'm kind of like that kid from the Sixth Sense, except I don't see dead people, I feel them.
I lived in Columbus, Georgia in college, and it's known for being a haunted city. There were battlefields and battles there during the Civil War, so it's you know, the stereotypical old timey ghosts that hang out there. I lived in a one hundred and two year old house, and I would notice things from time to time. I felt presences. It wasn't one thing that I felt constantly each time it's a little different.
Sometimes you walk into a room and that room would be ice cold, you could see your breath, and it's summer. Some days my dogs would get all spoofed, and my dog was growling at me. She wasn't staring at me. It was like she was staring behind me and just like looking through me, growling, which is particularly spooky. And then I had this one really awful experience. I was getting ready to go somewhere and I'm doing
my hair and I hear this bang. They'd been doing work near my house, so I just figured, Okay, it's like seven pm., why are they still doing in construction? Just like bang, bang, bang. It kept getting louder and closer, so loud you can feel the vibration. It sounded like it was on my roof just. And I was trying to ignore it blow during my hair. And then I heard my side door. Open and footsteps. It sounded like something ran from my side door through
my kitchen. Oh god, oh no, someone's in my house. I just immediately freaked out, threw a blow dryer down, didn't have on shoes. I was like, I'm. Getting out of here right now. It's all like someone just broke in my house. So I go to run out the front door, and the chain lock was locked. I'd never locked that chain lock in my whole life. I was like, oh god, oh god. I threw it a front door. I ran out, got in my car, and I drove two blocks away and I called the cops. They came
and they checked out my house. No signs of forced entry, nothing was touched. I was just scared out of my mind. I definitely sensed something. It was a really bad feeling. Most times whatever I'm sensing is not very ominous, but this one was terror. I feel like it wants to kill me or hurt me. I don't want to be here, like it was really scary. I had a friend in college and he said, oh, your house is a portal for spirits. So he came
over and he brought some salt. He sprinkled it around like my door frames and burned some sage and said some stuff. I lived in that house for three years and I didn't have any problems after that. I worked in a trauma center. We had six trauma base and trauma four was the biggest room, so that's where all patients that were in the worst shape would go because there's gonna be like twenty people in the room trying to save lives as quickly as possible.
And in trauma four the lights would do this thing where they would flicker, and a lot of people died in frauma four. When the light would flicker, then they sayto my coworkers, I'd be like, "oh, oh, guys, they're here. Looks like whoever's coming trauma four is gonna die." They all me like spooky, Miranda, like stop it, that's weird. Like I'm just letting you know that I send it. I'm not trying to be spooky. I'm just letting you know they're here.
Every time I've sent something or seen that flickering light, it's either somebody's gonna die. Or somebody just die. Even if I'm alone with the patient and they're about to die, it feels like it's more than just me and that one person there. It feels like there's something else there. Thank God, I. Can't see whatever I'm sensing. If I could see it, I would lose it. It already creeps me out one hundred percent of the time. Every time.
I've seen people live that should have died, and I've seen people die that should have lived, and there's not a lot of. Rhyme or reason. One that I specifically remember was really bad. This person's young, they have no health problems, but I have just like an overwhelmingly bad feeling. And I said, something's wrong. They're gonna die, and they're like, oh no. Their oxygen's saturation was really good. It was like ninety nine percent the best you can get to the hundred. And they're like,
it's fine, and I was like, it's not fine. And then the lights flickered and they did end up dying. There's a lot of lights in the room, but the one flickering in the trouba room was the one that's right over the patient bed. I have happened in ambulances where the lights have flickered but I don't know it's landing, just like, oh, something else is here. We had someone that had been shot a bunch of times that was already a losing battle. It was just too much. But
I definitely since that one too. There's always one light right over the patient, and that's the one flickering. I mean sure from a scientific sampoy the light flicker maybe. Just bad wiring, but it's kind of coincidental and it's only at certain times. But I have noticed it in the trauma bay, I noticed it in the ambulance, and then most recently, I. Noticed it at the gas station. It was kind of cold and rainy, and I was running late to work. I don't have enough gasket to work, okay, So I
stopped at the gas station. I don't normally go to, oh my gas, and all of a sudden, I got this overwhelmingly bad feeling, just like a punch you and you're kind of bad feeling. The first thing I did, of course, was just look around, is somebody here? There's nobody there, nothing going on, no other cars but mine, and all the pumps are empty. But there's a light above the pump directly across from me, flickering. I was like, nope, I gotta leave, and. I got out of their fronto.
It was just such a weird, bad feeling, and I haven't felt a feeling that weird or overwhelmingly bad sense, whatever it was, it felt. Like someone was murdered there. The next morning, I was getting ready for work and I googled it and. I with one hundred percent freaked out. A few years back, a man's pumping gas at that gas station and in the broad daylight, some guy in a scream mask gets out and goes to rob the guy. The guy but the pump was like.
Okay, well here's myself take a goat, and the guy in the screen mask just shot him dead. Anyway, the guy that was Killba's pretty young name was Kenneth. One hundred percent think for that was him being like, get out of this place. It's bad, it's dangerous. This gift that I have, I don't want it, honestly, it's creepy and I wish they would just leave me alone.
Oh I hear you, Miranda, but I'd give anything to run into someone like you, or even better, that freaky little kid from the sixth sense who could actually see dead people. Do you know how frustrating it is to not be perceived? I haven't gone this unnoticed since before my first nose job. It's almost like if it weren't for this podcast, that would just be no one drifting through the inbetween mustering all my strength to fiddle a light here and there. And for what the rest of eternity?
But let's get into the comments, huh! Reminder, the game is first ghost spotting or first love! Okay, dog park. Easy, first love. My grandparents' attic. Hopefully first ghost. The bar at the Standard Hotel. Love. The bar at the Culver Hotel, ghost obvi. My high school. Hmmm, could go either way. I'm gonna say love. McDonald's play place. Ooh, ghost. Love Shack Fancy sample sale. Huh. Ghost, probably me. Backstage at a B52s concert. Ghost. Open secret, the B52s are all ghosts.
Okay, Well, I think that's a good one to end on. I've got to get to a meeting with my caseworker, Sharon. I don't want to jinx it, but I've been feeling pretty good about my unfinished business lately, so don't be shocked if there's no new episode next week. Just know if I'm not here, I'll be vibing behind the pearly gates.
(mumbles)
kay, Okay, if you're a loved one has a supernatural experience to share, reach out to Len at [email protected] and you can be featured on a future episode. Happy Len? (mumbles) Okay, love you all Haunting fam, Kisses kisses, see you next time or not wish me luck.
If you have a Haunting story to share, please email us at [email protected]. Haunting is a production of Glass Podcasts and partnership with iHeartPodcasts. Haunting was created and executive produced by Nancy Glass, Andrea Gunning, Ben Fetterman, and Lauren Lapkus. It is hosted by Lauren Lampkez as her character Therésa. Haunting is directed by Aleah Welsh and produced by Trey Morgan. It is written by Aleah Welsh, with additional writing by
Nancy Glass, Trey Morgan, Ben Fetterman, and Kristin Melchiorre. Additional production support by Todd Ganz. Additional voice acting by Trey Morgan as the character producer Len Walker. Editing and sound designed by Matt Delvecchio with additional editing by Nico Aruoca, mixed and mastered by Dave Saia. Operations and production support by Kristin Melchiorre. Haunting's theme and original compositions were composed by Oliver Banes and Dorry Macaulay of Noiser
Music Library, provided by Mibe Music. Special thanks to Speakeasy Sound Studios in Burbank, California. Follow us on social media by searching for Glass Podcasts or by visiting glasspodcasts.com. For more shows from iHeart Podcasts and Glass Podcasts, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.