June 10, 1999: Ghost to Ghost | Open Lines

Art Bell opens the phone lines for his beloved Ghost to Ghost edition, inviting listeners to share their most chilling encounters with the unexplained. A Navy veteran from World War II recounts waking aboard his ship near Okinawa at 3 a.m. to the unmistakable scent of his Aunt Melanie's floral bathing powder, only to later learn she had died at that exact moment. A caller reports a shadowy figure with glowing red eyes lurking beneath her son's bed, while a cemetery photographer describes being led telepathically by a spirit to a freshly dug grave.

The stories grow increasingly bizarre as a parapsychology researcher at a university sleep lab describes watching a translucent apparition of an elderly woman in a flower-print dress float through walls and pass directly through his sleeping research subject. A commercial pilot flying a Cessna over Northern California at night recounts hearing a disembodied voice say "check your six," then watching a phantom World War II flying boat pull alongside before vanishing. He later identified it as the Philippine Clipper, which crashed in the Ukiah area decades earlier.

A mother shares how her three-year-old son's imaginary friend Irving turned out to be a real person buried in the community cemetery, confirmed when the child pointed directly to Irving Riggs' headstone during a walk. Years later, a photograph of the great-grandfather matched the figure her son had described visiting him at night.