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And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with Amelia Cutter will take calls with Amelia next hour here on Coast to Coast. One of her books is called This House, The True Story of a Girl and a Ghost. The girl was a fifteen year old named Nora tell us about her Amelia.
So, fifteen year old Nora is actually eleven year old me. So I made some interesting and I know, yes, I made some interesting editorial choices when I was writing this book, which again was in two thousand and nine, twenty ten, before I was involved in like the true paranormal world
of writing and the paranormal community. This was meant to be just a book for young adults, like a middle grade type of ya, you know, a novella type of read, And so I sort of turned it into a narrative about somebody slightly older than me because I thought I thought that was a good idea at the time, but in fact it is. It's parallel to my own story and my real journal notes from when I was a kid, when I was eleven and twelve are featured.
In the book, and it is.
It does chronicle the true story, but I sort of I changed the names, which is funny because it's really just me so but I had the joy of exploring this house. It's to put you kind of in my place. When I was a kid, I was a goofy kind of I don't know, a nerdy.
I was a special kid. Again.
I loved ghosts and hauntings. I latched onto that as an interest. I fancied myself a junior ghost hunter. My parents said it was okay for me to go inside the house, and so I did and really fell in love with the just the story of the house, what happened here, who lived here, what were their lives?
Like? Who or the ghosts?
You alone?
Yeah, I would, you know, I know right, I wouldn't probably wouldn't do it now, But I did when I was that age, and sometimes my parents would come with me.
And then I did like a I.
Did a presentation on ghosts for like my sixth grade English class, and so then one of my friends from my class came and we did a little we did a little walk through in the house during the day and you know, half the half the first floor floor was missing in one room, so we just didn't go in there, and nobody nobody ever got a leg through the floorboards or anything. We were always fairly safe.
When you were in the house. Did anything bizarre happen?
A lot of things, A lot of little things happened, so a lot of Oh my gosh, it really takes me back. The biggest, the biggest thing, the biggest thing that I can talk about, was when I actually had the experience of seeing the ghost of like a young boy.
Or a young man.
And this was the first and only time in my life. I've had a lot of really fascinating experiences, but this was the first and only time I would say that I was aware that I witnessed like a full body apparition. I had been exploring the house for some time. This was actually the same day that my friend from class, my sixth grade class, Graham, his name was Graham. He
was there with me and my mom was there. This was during this day one o'clock in the afternoon, broad daylight kind of thing, and I had been saying how much I wanted to just see the ghosts again. All the ghosts were sort of nebulously referred to as Walter, but this Walter spirit was supposed to haunt the house, and I kept thinking, I just wish I could meet Walter.
You know, I was a kid, so.
Somehow I willed that into existence. And as we were leaving the house that day, I had like a very sentimental feeling in my life hard about it. I really loved this house, and I loved the idea of whoever these people were in their lifetime.
And as we.
Were pulling away, so the road is very close to where the house was, it was only about eight It's only located about eight feet from the actual from the road itself, And so as we were kind of pulling away looking up at the house, I looked up into the attic windows and then the back cover that would be the left side attic window, that is that's featured on the cover of the book, and I saw a boy or young youngish man, probably not much older than me, teenager type of thing.
I saw him leaning.
Out of one of the attic windows with both of his hands on the window. So I like, I can't remember what happened three days ago, but I can remember exactly what this experience was like. And he was completely white, So I only saw him from the waist up.
He was completely white.
He had no face. There was just a white face where his face would be.
But it wasn't I.
Mean, eyes, nose, mouths.
Correct, So it wasn't like a like a scary like a vacuum or anything. It was just blank, almost like those sort of if you've ever seen one of those, like country style, like Amish dolls, they just have like a white face instead of any like facial features. But
I could see he had curly hair. I could see he was wearing like a shirt with gathered cuffs, long sleeve and suspenders, and each detail in his clothing had it had shadows, and it had texture, but it was all these sort of shades of white and like beige. And as I was looking up at him, even though I couldn't see his face, I had this little swirling static electricity feeling in my stomach as if I was
connecting directly to him. And I could tell that he was surprised that I could see him, and that Graham saw him too. And as the car went very slowly by, his head turned very mechanically and watched watched our car.
Kind of pull away movie. Yes, and it just very I mean.
It was wild, of course, yeah, almost mechanical, like a doll's head almost. And my mom, of course, she's obviously driving, so she didn't see what happened, but she could see that we're reacting to something and we're gasping.
And I asked Graham immediately, I said, what did you What did you see?
And he told me exactly what I saw.
My mom, you know, stopped the car. We're going, you know, point.
Point five miles an hour anyway, but she stopped the car and she's like, should I back up?
Do you want me to back up?
And I remember thinking to myself in my like, you know, young wisdom, I was like, don't back up, because if he's gone, I will second guess whether or not that actually happened, right, And if he's still there, I think then the experience might be then I might be scared.
But as it was, I was just.
Completely I was elated, I was fascinated. I felt honored in this way to have had this experience.
It filled me with a.
Lot of excitement about the world. So I respect and emphasize with people who kind of come from a place of having had really scary paranormal experiences for me, this was very formative in a positive way.
Amilia. Do you think it was the house or the land that was haunted?
I feel like it could have been a little bit of both. So that area, that land was really well preserved. Not a lot had changed about.
The sort of the land, structure and.
Layout of that area around my Lady's Manner.
There were some newer.
Houses that were built on the property within several miles, but they had mostly kept it kind of hacked, and so you know houses houses. This house had probably been there at the time or shortly after My Lady's Manner was built. And so I do believe that whoever this person was, that he had been an occupant of the house, or that he had worked on the property at some point.
The way that his clothes kind of reminded me of it gave me like a vibe of like somebody who would have been like a worker or a stable boy.
Type of thing. And that would be my best guest.
By the way, were you named after Amelia your heart?
I was so.
I named after the Joni Mitchell song Amelia about Amelia Earhart's with the.
Two first I knew it. How many people do you think you've interviewed paranormal.
Wise, gosh, lots.
A lot, a lot. And then I meet people at all the events and thinks that I go to. So people always want are eager to share their stories.
So I've heard.
So many different stories from people and have collected a lot of a lot of information, a lot of emotions over the years.
Probably like me, my role is not to destroy their story, but to get it in, to let people listen and let people make up their own minds about what the person has said. Did you find that to be the case when you interviewed all these people, You're not out to really chastise them or praise them. You're there for the information.
Absolutely, So I'm there for the story. I'm there to understand their emotional connections.
To their experience. And I do think that.
We need to offer spaces for people to tell their stories judgment free, regardless of whether we believe them, whether we believe that it was even you know, paranormal or something else that could have been going on. It's for me, it's like it's not even for me to say and to just sort of be somebody that listens and validates people's experiences because these experiences are real, whether we want to judge them as true or not, They're still there's
still real experiences, if that makes sense. They've happened, and
how people perceive them might be one thing. But I find you know, skeptics are one thing to deal with in believing people's stories, but I think some of the harshest critics are other people who are ghosts and paranormal minded folks are often you know, the biggest poopoers of other people's like stories and experiences, and I've over the years, I've observed that a lot, and I've really grown to want to get away from that type of mentality of just be constant, just be relentlessly bumping.
Have your views on the paranormal changed over the years.
Absolutely, so.
I have kind of gone through the gambit of feelings around ghosts. When I joined the paranormal community here in Chicago around the twenty tens, right when ghost hunting TV shows were super popular, there was a very like formulaic approach to how we're going to look at ghosts and be really you know, I kind of fed into that for a little bit, and now I'm a little embarrassed that I did not that there's anything wrong with some
of those methods when it comes to ghost hunting. But I've decided instead of being there doesn't.
Serve me to be more close minded.
Why am I attracted to this interest with paranormal experiences of my own if I'm going to come into it and be a curudgeon, right, So I had really expanded my horizons, I would say, And then in the last couple of years, I've really tried to broaden into the bigger picture, which I think is trending. A lot of people are starting to do that now, more broadly, looking just a more holistically at paranormal at the world of
paranormal experiences. I know, it's like a joke. People will used to ufo people and big foot people and ghost people used to all be different people, and they were all always getting on each other's nerves. And now everybody's kind of coming together to talk.
We're going to take your calls next hour with Amelia Cutter. Will take your questions or stories that you might have, so jump aboard and share them with us. What do you think a ghost is, Amelia?
Oh, that's a really good question. I don't I don't know, and I've spent obviously a lot of time thinking about it.
I do believe it.
Is something physical, and I think it sort of touches a lot of different areas. It's a little bit of science, it's a little bit of spirituality.
I do think it is something.
I do think a ghost is something physical, whether it is the spirit of a person who has passed on or somebody that has you know, never lived, or if it's an echo that is held in stone and wood and rock and the earth. I'm open to all of those possibilities.
It is truly remarkable. What is your website?
My website is Ameliacotter dot com.
We've got that linked up at costacostam dot com. How many books you've been working on? And what's next right now?
I've got another poetry collection on deck, so deviating a little bit from the paranormal stuff, I'm working on a second edition for the Ghosts of the Old Barboo Inn book, and I'm doing a lot of different research papers and articles right now on true paranormal encounters, including trying to chronicle some more of my own and kind of and get those out there. At the same time that I'm looking into some other cool things as well.
Maryland, How haunted is that state?
Quite very extremely cool states, fantastic state, full of wonderful history and a wonderful landscape sort of packed into the teeny tiny area, and you you know, you'll trip over the haunted places no matter what direction you go in.
Truly remarkable. Meally, we're going to take calls with you that could precipitate any kind of story for you. You might be able to write a new book based on these calls that come in the U Walter story that you told us with the ghost that was whisking her way around, did that ever have a conclusion?
No, I suppose so.
Within the confines of the restaurant itself, people had seen this woman again and again in this sort of victorian dress, and there were some others typical haunting experiences, people afraid to go down into the wine cellar, having their clothing tugged and their shoulder tapped on, so it felt like, you know, whatever was in there was a little bit playful and like to kind of spook people, but predominantly
a friendly haunting. And my dad used to, you know, tell me those stories when he would get home from work late at night.
Where does the evil come in with some of these ghosts.
I just it's hard for me to wrap my mind. I know that people dedicate a lot of study to you know, dark entities, and I've certainly encountered things that didn't feel friendly. I feel like whatever the spirit world is, it consists of different types of entities the way that our world exists, you know, we see things in the sort of biblical good versus evil, you know, black and
white type of thinking. But I don't feel like there would be any reasons for this spirit world to kind of be good or bad according to like our like moral understanding. In other cultures, you know, entities generally tend to be more like, have more human characteristics, where they're
neither neither good nor evil. And so it's difficult for me to sort of put that into to categorize that, especially given that the nature of a lot of evil hauntings has to do with things that you'd think that sort of you know, demons would have a lot more power than just banging around.
In the middle of the night and stuff like that.
But that is not, of course to dismiss like the incredible stories that people have of possessions and and I ask myself the.
Same question, have you ever witnessed an exorcism?
I have never witnessed an exorcism, but I have witnessed people being taken over by some type of energy and it was definitely, uh, nothing to nothing to trifle with.
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