My family on my mother's side have unique abilities. My grandfather, as told to me by my grandmother, was for lack of a better term, a witch doctor. People would come to him because he could cure different types of illnesses. He said my mother would be next in line, but he died before he was able to teach her. She was still able to predict births and feel the moods of people around her. My abilities are the opposite. For me,
it's death and ghosts. I've had many strange things happened to me, and there was one incident that bothers me to this day. It changed my life. There's a church near the Southern Park Mall in Boardman, Ohio, where my brother's friend was a caretaker. It's a church and school combined, so it's a large building with two large chapels, a classroom, offices, and community rooms. A good sized group of us were meeting there to play some game or another. One night.
We showed up early, so my brother's friend asked me to walk around with him to shut off the lights and lock the doors and generally just check the building. It was I that he asked me to do this, because I was always seen as George's little brother, not their friend Christopher. These were all my brother's friends, and I was happy to do it, though, because I saw it as me being accepted into their group. All was okay until we reached the room where the priest gets ready.
The worst feeling hit me. The pressure seemed to increase and there was a disgusting feeling coming from the room. I stopped and I said I can't go in there. My brother's friends said, don't worry about it. You won't be breaking any religious rules by going in. Well, that wasn't quite what I meant, but I couldn't explain why I felt that way, so I went in. It was even worse inside. We walked through and went out the
other side. Instantly everything felt normal again. We locked some doors and turned off a couple of lights before coming back to the room. The second we approached it, I got an awful feeling again and I begged not to go in there. I even asked to go outside and wait by another door, but he said no. It was late February, with the temperatures and the teens and half
a foot of snow on the ground. At six feet I only weighed one hundred and twenty five pounds, so no thermal on me, and I was only wearing a T shirt. But I didn't want to go in that room so much that I would have willingly stood outside to avoid it. I had no choice though. My brother's friend was a former lineman for the football team. He wasn't small, and we went in and the room felt even worse this time, Just like the first time, As soon as we left the room, the feeling went away.
Next we went to the basement, where there were some more classrooms, the cafeteria and kitchen, and some storage areas. Then we went back upstairs and entered the old chapel from the rear side. We had to go across the back to set a couple of doors just inside the chapel. I stopped, I can't go in there. I told him there's a ghost and it doesn't like me, and then I pointed it out to him. He could see the
black shadow near the front by the organ. He uttered an expletive and we headed for the doors across from us, and it started following us. The faster we moved, the faster it moved. There was just the one shadow, not too so it wasn't our own shadows we were seeing. We made it through the doors, moving at a pretty fast pace. It was fifty feet to the corner where the stairs to this third floor apartment were, and I started feeling hot as we walked to it. It was
like something hit me, but it wasn't physical. For a few seconds, I was completely disoriented and I lost all thoughts where I was or even who I was. And I was just coming back to myself when the second one hit. This was worse than the first one. Now I had to grab the wall to keep from collapsing. Well, it passed, and my head was beginning to clear when a third one hit, and this one put me on the ground. My brother's friend pulled me to my feet
and away from that spot. Now I got my head on straight, and I told him to go stand in the spot where I was attacked. Well, he was a big boy, like I said, alignment on the football team. He bounced off the wall like he was nothing. That stirred him into motion, and he grabbed me and we ran up the stairs, and I don't remember touching a single step in two flights. When we got to where my brother was, he asked me how I knew of the ghost, so I told him about my ability. About
a week ago. He said, I was getting in bed with my wife. I just lifted my leg to climb in when a face appeared in front of me. That scared the crap out of me. He paused him minute, and then he added it was just a face. There was no head, no body, just a face. The next day, he and his wife moved out of the church and end with her parents. This happened back in nineteen ninety five, A couple of years ago. I went back there to talk to someone about it, and no one there was
able to tell me anything. I wrote down my name and number, along with a note stating that I'd like to talk to someone about what happened to me there, but no one ever called me. It was still there. I felt it that day that I went back. I want to go there again. There are more details about the church I'd like to clarify, but there are more stories of things that had happened to people there. But whatever is there, it's very strong. Okay, that's a ghost
living inside a church. I don't know something about. These paranormal events are just captivating. They're very believable. Some of these are very believable, and I really enjoyed reading this person's account. Chris, thanks for the story. I really appreciate it. I used to stay with my papa in the mountains of Virginia every year when school let out for summer break. We like to sit out on the porch at night
and enjoy the cool of the evening and talk. On one of those nights, our conversation turned to hunting and trapping. We'd been talking for a bit when Paupaul paused for a few minutes, during which he must have been pondering whether or not to tell me something that happened to him when he was my age. I was sixteen at the time. He said he wanted to go out on his own and hunt and trap and sell pelts, and
times were different back then. It wasn't nothing for a young guy that age to go off and do his own thing. There was an old wooden room cabin way up in the mountains, far away from anyone, that his dad used as sort of a hunting lodge when he was younger, and that's where Paupaul decided to go and try his hand at being an independent man. He spent several months in that cabin, collecting a variety of pelts. But the winter was hard and living off the land
wasn't as easy as he hoped. He spent all of one day hunting and got nothing, and that night, as he slept, a storm blue in, dropping two feet of snow on the mountain. That made things all the more difficult, and Papaul still had to eat, so he set out to hunt some game to sustain him until conditions were right and he could make his way off the mountain. He saw a deer and he took a shot. About the same time he pulled the trigger, something spooked it
and it took off running. Popav said that he'd hit the deer in its hind leg, and he set out to track the blood trail through the snow, but it was getting late in the day darkness covered the mountain and he had to give up. He was disappointed, and he made his way back to the cabin, and he built the fire and made some coffee and tried to stem the hunger with some hard tack next to the warm fire. With the little food in his belly and exhausted, he fell asleep sometime in the night. He awoke to
a strange, deep guttural sound, and he heard voices. Rocks and sticks were being thrown at the cabin. He was scared now, and he stoked the fire, and he lit a lantern, and he hunkered down in the corner with his gun, waiting for the worst. It didn't last long, though, and once things had quieted down, he drifted off to sleep again. A few hours later, he woke up with a start. He was confused and angry with himself for
having fallen asleep in such a situation as this. His cabin had no windows, but he could see sunlight coming around the door. It was morning. Paupaul opened the door slowly and peeked outside. He was still a little concerned, and when he didn't see anything, he stepped outside to find footprints in the snow all around the cabin. They were giant human tracks, he called them. Judging by the size and the number of tracks, he guessed there must
have been two or three individuals. He went around to the side of the cabin to grab some firewood before going back inside, and there laying on top of the wood was a hind leg of a deer. It had a single bullet hole right where Paupau had shot it. Whatever those things were that scared him half to death the night before had tracked the deer that he had shot and took their share for tracking it, and then
they gifted Paupaul the hind leg. He was grateful for the meat, but as soon as he was able, Paupaul made his way down off the mountain, never having seen what kind of buggers could make those tracks or rip the hind leg of a deer off. I was born the youngest of six children in a small Connecticut town. We had a couple of dogs and a whole lot of cats that my siblings that I looked after, since
they were all quite a bit older than me. It wasn't long until they'd all gone off to college or gotten married and moved out, and that left me to care for the animals alone. By the time I was twelve, we were down to just one dog. He was a Norwegian elkhoun with a strong pull. Every day I walked him, or maybe he walked me through the woods behind our house to the tobacco fields far from the road, where
I could turn him loose and let him run. There was a huge track of land owned in part by members of my family and mostly surrounded by neighboring shrub and tobacco farms. At twelve, I was finally allowed to go alone on these daily walks. I wasn't afraid. We had no black bears to speak of back then, and the coyote seemed to stay away, and I'd never seen a bobcat. A few years later, while I was in
high school, I encountered a mountain lion back there. They've only recently acknowledged their presence in my state, but all in all, I had no fear of anything, so I would often take off on my own with the dog Norwegian elkhouns, or a medium sized dog for sort of compact version of a husky. They're known for hunting in packs and bringing down moose and bear. My dog took advantage of my female build and lack of strength to pull extra hard and practically drag me through the woods. Nevertheless,
I started taking him to the fields every afternoon. We walked up the wooded hill alongside my house and wound our way on a well worn path and continue on the thicket and more woods until we got to the fields. Every day, when we got to the top of the hill, which was about halfway on our journey to the fields, I would hear a strange knocking sound and the quiet of the woods. I would hear a long tree cracking,
and then it would be followed by three knocks. I thought it must be a woodpecker, and so I shrugged it off. After a while, I noticed that the tree knocking only started when I stepped foot on a particular part of the path. I never suspected that Bigfoot was anything more than what I had read about in books about the lock Ness Monster and other cryptids, and it never occurred to me that that was what it could be.
But day after day, walk after walk, when we reached that one specific spot on the trail, I would hear exactly three knocks, and then I would go on my way without incident. Pretty soon, though, my happy, go lucky, hearty and hard pulling dogs stop trying to ease so far ahead of me. He became clingy, hugging my side until we got out of the area. Sometimes I could hear something moving around in the woods, but I always thought it was some deer watching me or some other critter.
And it was definitely watching me. I could feel it the footsteps of whatever was making the noise were moving toward me as well, not away from me. And once I stopped, and the footsteps stopped, And when I moved, it moved, and when I stopped again, so did it. Still. I wasn't afraid. I was sure it was a deer. I didn't realize back then that deer don't track people,
and my dog continued to look petrified. As I got older and joined our high school's cross country track team, I used that same route to get in some extra practice. Sometimes I brought my flute with me, and when I got to the top of the hill before the descent into the field, I'd lean up against what we call the big tree that grew there and play freestyle for an hour. Each time I passed by that one spot,
I would hear three knocks. I didn't know to look or listen for sosquatch, so it was quite a while before I realized there were specifically three knocks. Eventually, the pattern became hard not to notice. I started to believe there were forest spirits, more along the lines of ghost rather than bigfoot. I somehow knew intuitively that those three knocks were not for me. They were about me. It was as if they were telegraphing the arrival of the
human into the area. One winter day, I went up the hill to take pictures of icicles on bushes for my photography class. It was my dream back then to become a national geographic photographer. I was enjoying pretending that I already was one as I flopped down in two feet of snow on my belly to get the right angle from my shots. And as I did so, I noticed an odd and increasingly familiar smell that reminded me
of really strong cat urine. Sometimes the smell was there and sometimes it wasn't, but when it was, it was always exactly where the tree knocks happened. I began to look around for cougar tracks. At that point, I had already seen the cougar that lived back there, and I hadn't noticed that there were big, deep tracks all around me, But now I was paying attention. I put each of my feet inside a pawprint to see how big this cougar was. The stride was my whole height of five feet.
There was also a long straight mark alongside the prints, which I assume must have been its tail dragging I was so excited because now I could show my mother and preof to her that I really did see a mountain lion up there. So I ran back to the house and I got her, and she took one look at the tracks, and with a funny expression on her face, she said, I don't think those are cougar tracks. And then that awful smell came back, and she remarked about it.
Her eyes got big, and she said, I don't think we need to stay here. Looking back, I think she knew something she didn't reveal. She tried to dissuade me from following the tracks, but I was determined. She went home and I went tracking, and I followed them, passed a bunch of tobacco sheds to a swamp. They led right up to the swamp, and then they ended. Things felt odd. It was unnaturally quiet. A ghostly steam rose
off the frozen black water. The remains of a couple of old cars from the nineteen fifties poked out here and there, as if they were reaching out for salvation against the encroaching decay of the hungry swamp. The woods felt as if they were encircling me, closing in and reaching out their naural limbs to wrap around me and throw me in the cars. Call it intuition or maybe panic. Whatever it was, I felt like the cougar must be lingering near and watching me, So I turned around and
I ran home. There definitely was a cougar living in that area. I'd seen it with my own eyes, but it wasn't until years later that I realized what I followed that day could not have been cougar tracks. I hadn't paid attention to the fact that it was not a set of four tracks, but it was two feet The imprint I had taken to be the cougar's tail was probably made by someone dragging a stick. My earliest bigfoot encounters went on for six years, and I was
oblivious to them. Only after I saw a bigfoot did I start to research them and finally interpret my childhood's experiences correctly. I often think how lucky I was that I wasn't attacked. Now I've since encountered those who were aggressive. Also can't help but wonder what my silent, hidden audience must have thought of my flute playing. When I was a young girl, I lived in a familiar community in a rural farming area in the Midwest. My grandfather had
one sister, Aunt Roseanne. She lived one mile south of my grandfather's home, and our family's property went almost two miles north to south and nearly one mile east to west. Aunt Roseanne's husband farmed this land with my grandfather, and we lived in another house on the same farm. So I got to spend loads of time with all these wonderful older folks who taught me more about life than anyone else could imagine. They loved telling me old stories,
and I loved hearing them. I especially loved Aunt Roseanne's stories, and I asked her to repeat them over and over. I'd love to share my favorite story with you. I wish I could tell stories like her, but I can't, but I'll do my best to remember the words. When I was a child and through my teenage years, there was a scary old woman who lived down the road from my aunt's house. She disliked my aunt very much
and dabbled in dark, scary stuff. At some point, Aunt Mary was sure the old woman had put a curse on her and her family to scare them or harass them. Every morning, Mary and the girls would do the housework before going upstairs for breakfast. While the men did the barn chores. They would fix breakfasts and sit down together before the day of real work started. Soon they began to notice the beds were unmade, no matter how many
times they made them in the morning. Clothing was on the floor no matter how many times they hung them up. And then strange things began happening in the barn. The animals became skittish, and it seemed impossible to keep up no matter how much they worked. But worst of all, charm marks began to appear on the doors of the outbuildings.
My uncle suspected someone was deliberately trying to frighten them away, but Mary believed it was something supernatural and it had something to do with the old woman down the road. One evening in Midsummer, my cousins had a party on Saturday night. Teenagers from all over the area came to have fun and play games with us. My cousins began to tell us about the strange happenings. They told the story of the fiery man who had been seen around the house, a man who was always on fire, but
he never died. The younger kids who were just hearing about these events. They made great bored out of it by laughing and making fun of the stories. One girl who was wilder than most of us, she laughed a great deal, and she even went to the back door and opened it up, and she pretended as if she was looking for the culprits. Before she closed the door, she cried in her rather loud voice, fiery man, come kiss me. She slammed the door and continued to make
fun of the situation until the evening ended. And as the first kids opened the door to leave later that night, they saw burned handprints on the outside of the back door. We all saw them, and everyone left to go home that minute. No one ever made fun of what was happening in Aunt Mary's house ever again, and none of us were allowed to visit Aunt Mary's house until that dark old lady down the street finally passed away. It was late that evening in August nineteen fifty three when
the phone rang. The caller was one of my mother's sisters, calling to tell her that my maternal grandmother had died unexpectedly while visiting friends in Detroit, Michigan. My father was at work at the time, and I was sent to bed while my mother and aunt talked. I remember hearing my father come home from work and my parents quietly
discussing things. The next thing I knew, it was four AM, and I was being awakened and told to get dressed because we were leaving for my mother's ancestral home in northeast Louisiana, near the little town of Oak Grove. I was told that my grandmother's coffin was being shipped by train to her home on their farm near the Beef River, and the funeral would be in about five days. As I sleepily walked outside to get in our nineteen fifty
one studabaker, all was packed and ready to go. We were living in California's Central Valley at the time, as my dad worked for an oil company there. All of us being Southerners, we yearned to go back home, but not under these circumstances. Blessed with good luck and no car trouble, we made it to our destination after three days and three nights of continuous driving, and as we drove down the gravel road outside of Oak Grove, a column of dust spread out behind us and we could
see my mother's childhood home up in the distance. It was located well off the road, surrounded by their farm land and further back by the dark woods. The house was built long before the American Civil War and had sheltered many generations, some of whom were still there even though they had passed. I never felt comfortable in that old house, especially when it was just me with no other kids around, and at times I felt I was
being watched to make sure I was behaving myself. When we pulled into the front drive, we were met and welcomed and hugged by all the family and friends who had been there off and on since the notice of my grandmother's death. We were fed, and we got a chance to clean up and rest after the marathon driving trip we had just completed. We were told that my grandmother's coffin had arrived and it would be going to the local funeral home first before coming to the family home.
After a rest and a good meal, we were told that Grandma was on her way. The hearse could be seen coming down the dusty road a mile away. It pulled into the yard, and the funeral director and my grandmother's pastor accompanied the family men as they brought Grandma inside and placed her on the byre and arranged the flowers. The pastor blessed all those present the house, and he
blessed Grandma. The funeral director opened the upper section of the coffin, over ground IMA's face and upper torso, and placed a finely woven Gaulls type cloth over that part of the coffin. Then he announced that those who wished could come and see my grandmother, and most people did. Then he took a couple of photos for the family who were not able to come, and suggested to the family that, due to the time elapsed during the train trip from Michigan and the hot August heat, that the
coffin be sealed and not reopened. Everyone agreed. In the South, there has long been the tradition of sitting up with the dead. The deceased will be placed on a buyer in the sitting room or living room, surrounded by wreaths of flowers. Family and friends will take turns sitting with the deceased continually from the time the person dies until they are buried. Some of those present then took up
the vigil once the funeral director had left. The friends, family and pastor and neighbors who had come to the home to pay their respects and help with the vigil got to visit and tell stories and eat the wonderful foods they each had brought. We kids, mostly cousins I haven't seen in months, got to go outside and play. The mood lightened considerably, just like Grandma would have wanted.
After a couple of more days, the funeral director came and took Grandma to bul a cemetery not far from where she lived and where many of her relatives rested in those days. It was already ancient and quite grown up with vegetation, and had to be accessed by going through two cattle pastures and two electric fences. It was maintained by those who had family resting there, and I remember many a day spent their cutting grass and wating. After the funeral service, most returned to Grandma's home for
one last meal and more reminiscing. Goodbyes were set all around, and some of those who had come from greater distances lingered a few days longer. Well. This gave me a chance to play with my cousins a bit more. Anytime we kids would play outside, we would be told to stay away from the woods far across the fields behind
the house. They told us the buggerman lives in those woods and down on the river, and my mother remembers being told stories of sightings of a strange man like being often seen in the woods and around Oak Grove, and in particular a long beef river. Large footprints were sometimes seen in newly plowed fields and on the river banks, and we kids loved to follow my grandfather's tractor when he plowed, because he would frequently turn up arrowheads or
pottery shards and other neat things. Even then, we were admonished to stay near the tractor and not go near those woods. During the summer, when the corner would grow tall and up near the house, we were told to stay out of the cornfield. There had been folks who said that the man would go into the corn fields for the fresh sweet corn, and occasionally vegetable gardens would be entered, and farm animals sometimes would come up missing.
One story I was told by my grandfather was when he got home from World War One in about nineteen nineteen, he and my grandmother were living in the house after they got married. One night, my grandmother was sitting at her dresser, combing her hair, with her back to the bedroom window. People who lived well out in the country at that time didn't usually put curtains on their windows because their nearest neighbor might be a mile away or more. As my grandmother looked in the mirror, she saw a
face in the window behind watching her. She said it was large and dark, but since they were still using kerosene lamps, it was not well lit. Grandpa had brought home an old German pistol as a war trophy, which Grandma kept in her dresser drawer. She is said to have calmly pulled the pistol out of the drawer and turned and fired several shots through the window. Grandpa came running in and she told them what happened. He and a couple of the family men grabbed their shotguns and
started looking around outside. There was no blood, but there were large footprints in the soft damp dirt near the water pump that they used for their water, and faintly muddy handprints high on both sides of the window where it had leaned against the house. Another time, there was an incident during the night of something hitting the side of the house hard enough to jar a hanging number two washtub off a nail that held it. My father
was there that night and told me about it. Also, several times they were awakened by the sound of someone or something pumping the water pump handle up and down, or a hand pump. To work, it has to be primed by pouring water down the top of the pump while you pump the handle, and the water being pumped acts as a lubricant that somewhat quietens the noise of the metal pump. Pumping a dry pump makes it quite a racket and is only done by someone that doesn't
know how it works. My mother also told me some more unusual things regarding that old house. She said, on some days, when they would sit on the front porch at noon or in the late afternoon, there would be the sound of heavy footsteps that would come up the steps and continue across the porch and end at the bench that used to hold a water basin and soap for men to wash up for meals after coming in from the fields. These footsteps were always around noon or
dinner time. People made a habit of never sitting on those steps during that time. Also, there were times when they could sit on that porch in the late afternoon and they would hear the sound of log wagons, wooden wheels and planks creaking, and trace chains rattling as they passed along the side of their house, the unseen loggers driving down a logging road long since grown up and
nearly invisible for over fifty years. And then there was the time my grandmother asked my mom to go into the house and get some laundry soap, which she needed as she boiled the clothes outside in a large iron pot. When my mother opened the front door, there was her Aunt May's rocking chair rocking back and forth. The house was closed up and not a breeze was blowing. Aunt
May was an invalid. For the last few years of her life, the family would place her rocking chair just inside the front door so she could look outside and watch the kids play, or just get a breath of fresh air. She spent her time rocking and reading, and she died in her chair a few years before this incident. My mother did not go inside to get the soap, but she ran to my grandmother and told her what she saw. She and my grandmother went to look and
the chair was still rocking. My grandmother closed the door and waited until my grandfather came out of the field. She told him what happened, so he went and opened the door, but the chair was still. He went inside and brought the soap out to my grandmother, and she asked him what had happened. He told her before going into the house. He said, may, I don't mean to bother you, nine, but many needs a soap to wash the family's close, so if you don't mind, I'll just
take it now. So he got it and he left. As far as I heard, there were no more chair rocking incidents, at least any scene by the family. Now, twice a year, I still make most of that same trip we took in nineteen fifty three, but now it's from my home in El Miraje, Arizona. I have a brother who farms near Oak Grove, and I visit him, and another brother in Monroe who gave up farming. I
am seventy five, and they're both older than me. US eighties still exists in bits and pieces along its old route, but now it's replaced by I ten and I twenty. Today we can ride in comfort at eighty miles per hour through parts of New Mexico and Texas, listening to satellite radio. And we can stop in comfortable hotels and motels and quench our thirst, or get snacks in any of a thousand convenience stores or truck stops along the way.
The house and these people are all gone now. I'm the last of my mother's side of the family from that time. My mother was the matriarch, and she died in two thousand and shortly after, so did her family reunions. None of the young people know about these stories in these people. The land is now commercially farmed. Much of the dark woods are gone, cut and cleared for timber and to make more farmland. Bill a cemetery is still there now, it's an island between paved roads and nearby houses.
And Beef River is still there, as muddy and as slow moving as ever. And I don't know about the bugger man. I assume he moved on, trying to keep ahead of the lumber companies and the farmers. Perhaps he moved west to Falk, Arkansas. It's not that far away still. I like to think that on quiet evenings, just at
sundown in the lonely fields west of Oak Grove. If I were to listen closely, I might hear the sound of lumber wagons long gone, still squeaking and rattling down a ghostly road found now only in my memories.