Author Archives: Matthew Hassel

Ghost in the Hallway

Nationality: Irish
Age: 47
Occupation: Registered Nurse
Residence: Long Island, NY
Performance Date: 4/3/17
Primary Language: English

My informant is an American woman from a Long Island suburb who has two children and a husband.

“There was a deadly car crash that happened on our lawn one night where a college boy hit a tree.  One night about a month later, I was up very late typing on my laptop in bed a letter to the town to get more stop signs on our street so something like this wouldn’t happen again.  While typing the letter, I kept looking into the doorway in the hall because I swear I kept seeing this bright, mist… thing height of a man in the corner of my eye.  Then I would look over and rub my eyes and I would think it was gone and would continue typing, not thinking much of it.  But the next day, my son, who was only about eight at the time, came into my room and said ‘can I fall asleep in your bed tonight’ which I thought was strange but I said okay.  After a few minutes of watching tv with him he says ‘I saw something weird last night.’  So I asked him what he saw and he said ‘I think I saw a spirit in front of my doorway.’  To also put this in perspective, our doorways were across the hall from each other.  So then I asked him what the spirit looked like and he said ‘it was bright and misty and it turned, looked at me, and then walked down the hallway.’  I asked him what time he saw it and he said it was around 3:30am, the same time I thought I saw it.”

I find it very interesting the spirit seemed to appear through the doorway in both accounts of the sighting.  Not only did one person witness this, but another person was able to back up the sighting in an unrelated conversation.  When people have these thoughts late at night, many people forget about it and just think that they are seeing things because they are tired.  But to have two people witness the same thing on the same night could be a coincidence or a true sighting of a spirit.

Ghostly Mirror

Nationality: Irish
Age: 71
Residence: Long Island, NY
Performance Date: 4/4/17
Primary Language: English

My informant is a 71 year old woman who grew up in Brooklyn, New York but later moved to Long Island, NY to raise a family.

“We moved into our new house and three days after we moved in I went down into the basement where there were many old things from the last owners.  One thing I found down there was this old mirror and on the back were newspapers from a time that was before Lincoln was president; it talked about the Whig party but I don’t remember the exact dates.  So I thought it was a nice mirror and hung it up at the end of our hallway, right out side my bedroom door.  That night I fell asleep but in the middle of the night woke up, sat up, rubbed my eyes, and as clear as day there were three people dressed in.. I don’t really know how to say it because it wasn’t colonial dress but it was old dress from that time period.  It was a husband a wife and a child all standing there staring at me right outside my bedroom door in front of the mirror.”

I find this interesting as it connects two different liminal places, both a mirror and a doorway, places where many ghost sightings seem to take place.  It seems there was a direct connection between the newspapers in the mirror and the appearance of the ghosts in the doorway, as they seemed to come from the time period of the newspapers.