It was a dark Halloween night. A cold drizzle soaked the leaf-covered sidewalks and extinguished jack-o-lanterns that perched on porch railings and steps, their cold, dark, empty faces even more frightening than their candled-glowing ones from earlier that night. The year was 1964 and this Chicago neighborhood was a combination of single-family homes, apartment buildings and,…
Category: Freaky Friday
Gettysburg’s Legacy
The Civil War battle at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania was a turning point in the war and the war’s bloodiest battle with about 10,000 men killed within the space of three days. I’ve traveled to Gettysburg a few times and it’s a solemn place. It’s not surprising that there are a multitude of ghost stories from the…
New Hope, GA
A couple of years ago, my husband and I got the chance to spend a weekend in Georgia with my daughter, son-in-law, and some of my adorable grandchildren. We drove down from Illinois and when we reached Georgia, we drove down the back roads to their house that is northeast of Atlanta, rather than take…
Between the Lights
The men and women who are part of our Armed Forces are incredible people. They have volunteered a part of each of their lives in order to help our country maintain the freedoms and liberties that we all enjoy. They work long, hard hours and when they are deployed they are often faced with conditions…
The Sixth Scents
When I used to run my own marketing/public relations company, I did a lot of work for funeral homes. (Right, who would have guessed it? ) But part of representing funeral homes was learning about death, dying, and grief. One of the terms in grief counseling is a “grief burst,” which is a sudden onslaught…
Why don’t you spend the night…
We have a cute sign on the wall next to our front staircase. It reads, “Remember, as far as anyone knows, we are a nice normal family.” I’ve often thought that I ought to create a smaller sign and hang it right underneath that would say, “Just please ignore the ghosts.” However, quite frankly, some…
A Permanent Guest
There’s a hotel in downtown Freeport that has been around since 1928. It had a diverse past, from housing workers who were building the railroad to being used as a halfway house during the Great Depression, it’s halls and rooms have sheltered both the upscale and the downtrodden. It was even rumored to have been…
Haunted Inn
Clare (not her real name) grew up in a stone house that used to be an inn along an old stagecoach route. So the ghosts she lived with while growing up were just part of her family’s history. “My mother always talked about seeing the ghosts of a little boy with his governess or nanny,”…
Orbs
Last week I had the opportunity to speak with the Lake Carroll Women’s Club and tell some ghost stories. I had a great time, they were a wonderful audience. Afterwards, one of the women came up to me and asked me what I thought about orbs. She mentioned a friend who has taken photos of…
Say Cheese
On Wednesday, July 12, a trucker named Saul Vazquez encountered a traffic accident on the highway heading the opposite direction from where he was headed. On his Facebook page he wrote, “I took this picture just few minutes ago from the cab of my truck. It was an accident between Campton and Stanton on the…