Nationality: American
Primary Language: English
Other language(s): N/A
Age (of informant): 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: California
Performance Date: November 27, 2023

Tags: Ghost, Ghosts, Ghost Stories, Old woman, Childhood, Superstition, Death

Text/Context: My friend’s college roommate, a 20 year old female, has had a very strong belief in ghosts ever since she was a child. It all stemmed back to a night where she saw a physical manifestation of a woman at the end of her bed, and felt a strange sense of comfort rather than fear. She described the experience in the excerpt below:

“When I was seven years old my family moved to a house built in 1968. One night a few months after moving in, I woke up to find an old lady sitting at the end of my bed with her hand over the covers on my legs. It was hard to make out her features in the dark, but I knew I had never met her before. Although there was a stranger in my room, I didn’t feel any fear, instead I felt a sense of comfort wash over me. It felt as if a grandmother was watching over and protecting me. Almost immediately after waking up I fell back asleep and she was gone when I woke up the next morning. That day I told my mom about the old lady I saw in my room and she calmly told me that it was my grandmother who had come over. Unbeknownst to me, she was secretly freaking out because my grandmother had not been at our house the night before. Years later my mom brought up the old woman in my room, and told me her side of the story. She told me that the previous owners of our house had their mother living with them in the room that was eventually mine. The mother had died in bed of old age. My mom believes that the old woman who sat on the end of the bed was the mother who died in that room, and she appeared to me to show me she was there to comfort and protect me. My mom believes that the old woman was my guardian angel while I was living in the house, and I’d like to believe that too.“

My Thoughts: I think this story is incredibly interesting as it demonstrates how some ghosts can be seen as comforting or protective. Oftentimes in both modern media and older documents, ghosts are seen as terrifying figures bent on striking fear into the hearts of their victims. The ghost in this story was definitely peaceful, and simply wanted to be seen. If I was personally in this situation, it’s hard to imagine feeling comforted and not scared by another person being in one’s room in the middle of the night, but I believe that there was an instinctual reaction my storyteller had that convinced her she was safe. There is also a bit of the social aspect of ghosts shown in this story, as the storyteller’s mother originally tried to cover up the fact that her daughter had seen a ghost. The mother was afraid for her daughter’s safety and didn’t want her to understand what had truly happened. The reality of ghosts is very taboo, and is often not spoken about as if it were a serious matter. Because of this, the mother hid the story of the woman who died from her daughter for years until she felt she was mature enough to understand it. Perhaps the mother even needed time to understand what had happened herself. Lastly, I enjoy the storyteller’s optimistic outlook at the end of the excerpt, as she notes how she would like to believe that the woman was her guardian angel, rather than a malevolent figure.

Nationality: American
Primary Language: English
Other language(s): N/A
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: California
Performance Date: November 27th, 2023

Tags: Ghosts, Ghost, Ghost Stories, Haunted House, Haunted

Text/Context: This week, I sat down with one of my good friends, C, in the dining hall to talk about ghosts. She’s a first year student at USC and we both have a similar belief about ghosts and their existence. I recorded our conversation, and the following excerpt is a written transcript:

“So, I have a family house that’s on the beach and my grandparents built it. They, my grandpa, like literally built the house. Okay, so my grandparents built the house and my grandparents died before I ever knew them. My grandma died when my dad was in high school and my grandpa died when my dad was in college. And um, there have been other like, deaths in the family and my parents have always said that that house was haunt-well no haunted. That it’s spirited. So, basically, my dad will wake up in the middle of the night and hear kids playing on the beach. And there’s nobody on the beach, it’s high tide and it’s like 2am. But he’ll hear the sounds of children playing. Um, I’ll wake up and I’ll see like figures standing in the corners of the room and it’s not like oh my god I’m freaked out it’s like oh I’m comforted right now cause like I know somehow that maybe it’s my family. Like, just watching me sleep. What else… my sister’s friend’s mom, she’s like, very, like I wouldn’t call her a medium but she’s very in touch with the spiritual side of things, and she walked into the house and there’s a staircase that you can see from the dining room. So she looked at the stairs and she was like, who’s that standing on the landing of the stairs? And we all turned and there was a shadowy figure standing there and then it disappeared and she said she had noticed it when she walked in. It was really weird.”

My Thoughts: I thought one of the interesting aspects of this story was the fact that C’s parents referred to the house as spiritual rather than haunted. It showcases how the way people’s opinions about ghosts is very dependent on how they grew up and the people surrounding them. The fact that they call the house spiritual most likely means they feel that the word haunted has negative connotations. Views on ghosts vary from society to society and family to family, and one must understand that there is a large variety of words that can mean similar things. In this story, the ghosts are not threatening, so there is no reason to speak of them in a negative manner by saying the house is haunted. There were also a lot of different occurrences that happened in this house, rather than one isolated incident. This lends to the classic ghost motif of haunted houses which have been prevalent throughout history, with ghosts consistently haunting a house and staying there for long periods of time. It is hard to decipher if the figures that the family is seeing is their grandparents specifically, or just their relatives in general. Unlike other ghost stories I’ve heard, there was no physical manifestation of a ghost that took full human form, and it simply remained as shadowy figures. However, the family members did not feel much fear about the ghosts, going as far as feeling somewhat comforted by the thought of their family members watching over them.