Author Archives: lsaley

Take my hand?

Age: 19

EC: Second one this is a little scarier.

Interviewer: Okay I am ready.

EC: So, I am about 10 years old, and the architecture of our house is very important in understanding this story. In the back of my house is the laundry room, and then down this long hallway is my room. I am in the laundry room for some reason, I don’t know why I was in there I didn’t do my laundry at that age, and I remember I think my parents were outside when this was happening.

It was kind of like mid-afternoon, and it was kind of dark. It was still light out but there were no lights on and it was shadowy, and its already been determined I don’t like the dark. 

So I go out of the laundry room and look into my room, and you know those nest chairs that you put in a wooden frame, I had one of those by my door, so you couldn’t see it, but it was right by the door, this is important to the story. 

So anyways, I am at the end of the hallway, and I look in my room, and there is this black, wrinkled, hand draped over the side of my nest chair. At first I thought it was weird, I could clearly see it was a hand. The hallway was long but only 15 or 20 feet, and I could see the hand all the fingers splayed out.

So I’m really apprehensive at first because I am like what is that, then I thought maybe it wasn’t a hand and it was just like some toys or something I left on the chair because we use it as like catchall.

I am walking to my room and I am already convinced that that is what this was, some random stuff in the chair or a stick reflecting weirdly in the light. 

But, I get about halfway down the hallway, and the hand retracts into my room. And that’s when I went oh, that is not a thing, that’s a person.

I have no idea what made me do this, but I decided to go into my room. I think I was curious and had a lot of innocence, but I remember feeling very cold and goosebumpy, like I am right now, when I tell it.

So I go into my room, and I look to the right where the chair was and the door to my Jack and Jill bathroom, and there’s this hooded shadow figure walking into my room, very short, my height. I can’t see a face, and I can’t see a body but I can see the hand. 

It isn’t walking towards me, it’s walking towards the bathroom. As it is walking through my bathroom door, it was like it was hunched over and it was slowly straightening out. So now I am standing like a foot or so from my bathroom door, and it’s in the bathroom and I’m watching it.

Anyway, it started around my height, and now it is maybe a foot taller than me, it was growing and then all of a sudden it faded. There was no face, there was no body, just hands.

For a while, I tried to convince myself it was just a shadow because that part of the houses didn’t get light at that part of the day. But then I was like, shadows don’t have a form, and don’t have a figure, and don’t have a definite shape, and I can still remember the hand, it was wrinkly. 

And I remember I was just standing there for minutes. I was just scared that it was going to come back somehow. I wasn’t super afraid. It wasn’t trying to hurt me or chase me. 

In my bad dreams, I’m always running from something, so that’s what I’m afraid of, but it wasn’t happening, so I wasn’t really scared; I just knew, hey, this isn’t normal. If this were a person, what was that? If that was a ghost, too, what was that?

That was the big one. That was the closest I think I have come.

Interviewer: So you mean like closest as in distance?

EC: Yeah, because I had a few other stories. These two were the most telling. 

Context: This story is from an informant who has multiple ghost stories from her childhood of feeling a presence in the house between the ages of 7 and 14. All of these stories are with sort of uninterested ghosts who didn’t really engage with her other than appearing to her. The informant’s house is not really old, it is from the 80’s or the 90’s. The informant has lived in several different houses, and things have happened everywhere; the informant is convinced that it is her and not the location. 

Analysis: The informant believes in ghosts, ghost stories, and that this story was 100% real. She said that she tried to convince herself that it was just the light playing tricks on her or that it was some object that was making her perceive some weirdly angled toy like that, but that when she got up close to the ghost, it was undeniable. I believe that ghosts exist, but perhaps only for certain people. In my life, they have never appeared to me, but from stories like this one from my friend, I believe they appeared to her. The very corporeal and detailed descriptions of texture are perhaps the most convincing part of the argument for me.

The Unwanted Cuddle

Age: 19

EC: Pick an age 7  or 10

Interviewer: 7 

EC: So, when I was 7 years old my parents and I took a trip to the Whaley House in San Diego. It’s old, it’s like this old western town?

Interviewer: Were you going to the whaley house looking for ghosts, or just to see what it was?

EC: My family is into weird freaky stuff like that and it’s the most haunted house in America so my parents were into that. We also thought it was a museum more than a haunted house. 

For the most part it seemed sort of like a hoax. My parents thought it was more like a museum than a haunted house but it was like a cute little museum house with a courtroom, a store, and stuff like that so I just thought we were on a boring tour.

So I was looking for stuff to do in this old house, and the tour guide said that it was possible to feel a presence, but it still felt unrealistic and a hoax.  

We walked into their dining room which was a pretty small room and it was a pretty big group, 15-20 people, and I wasn’t paying attention or listening to the tour guide because it was a bunch of history I didn’t know since I was 7.

I am wearing this little pink, magenta little hoodie, and I was just looking around the room and staring at things. I stared at the dining room table and remembered that I thought it looked a lot like my grandma’s house, and I am standing near the table with my hands by my side. I wasn’t the only kid on the tour, and so I am just standing there and I feel this other little kid grab my hand. 

I didn’t think anything of it because there were other little kids and I was a really cuddly child. So I feel this little hand, and I remember its smaller than mine and I have small hands, and literally there was nothing there.

My mom said I shot my hands back into my pocket and I was really spooked about it because it felt like holding my mom’s hand, like it was real. 

And I really wasn’t the sort of kid to make a big deal of things so we finished the tour and my mom just kept asking what happened and eventually I told her that, like, I don’t want to sound crazy, but I really felt a hand holding mine.

My mom tells me that in that room, what the guy was talking about was that the youngest daughter who was part of the whaley family, I don’t remember her name, contracted something, maybe TB? And died when she was still really little.

The thing was that people would say especially little girls or moms would feel a girl grabbing onto them if they were taller or holding their hands. They say it’s because she was really close with her mom. 

But when I told her that and I told her that I wasn’t even listening, she agreed that it was really weird even though she knew it was a hoax. 

Everything I was wearing and stuff was more from her perspective,  but what I remember is looking to my right and expecting to see a person holding my hand, and even after I looked over I could still feel the hand holding mine but there was nothing there. 

Context: This story was told by the informant, who got most of the story and the context of the Whaley family from her mom, and her perspective on the informant’s physical reaction. The actual reaction to the ghosts was all from her perspective. The informant has always believed in ghosts, but the part that made it feel like a gimmick to her was the way that she thought ghosts should have appeared to her, versus how they did (alone like her room, vs. in a museum). She has since been back to the Whaley house twice, and nothing has happened to her since. This story was told to me alone.

Analysis: The informant believes that it was truly a ghost, 100%. She thinks it’s an interesting house, and that when she was little, she didn’t fully see it as a scary place, but as she got older, the energy felt heavier. At first I really believed that the story was a hoax, but as my friend explained more about the story and the way that it genuinely moved her and changed the way she thought about ghosts, and even that visceral story that has stuck with her for so many years, I feel like it has to be a true story, or at least have some sort of truth behind it.