The Motel Wife Ghost of Santo Domingo

1. Informant name- M P
2. Date of Performance- April 4,2026
3. Age- 59
4. Ethnicity- Dominican
5. Career/Occupation- Retired
6. Hometown- Santo Domingo
7. Informant’s language- Spanish

Story –

In Santo Domingo on the 27th of February a woman and her boyfriend died after a few days of getting married to each other by a car. After everything that happened in that area in the morning around 4 or 3 in the morning she would come out to people. What the people would do when they saw her was they would get into a big car accident. In addition, a friend of my sister was going to get married. It was a Monday and they were gonna get married on Tuesday. He went on a car drive on the 27th of February and died right there , right where she died. She always came out and a lot of people would die there.

Context- 

This story was told to me by my grandma over a motel corner in the Dominican Republic.

Their thoughts-

My grandma is someone who is really connected with spirits so ah bee lives this story heavily. She told me that she was always warned of this corner and would never drive it. She also said when she ever walked past this corner that she could feel a heavy pretense. Over all she believed that there was actually a spirit there.

My thoughts-

Although I do in some form believe that there are entities beyond us I think that all the car crashes here could have been accidents. The ghost of this woman was said to come out really early in the morning so perhaps the people who encountered her were just really tied. For all the crashes that can possibly be chalked up to it being a dangerous corner because many of the streets in the Dominican Republic are behind on upkeep and overall dangerous. With that being said I’m not the most convinced of this story but I also do not believe the story.

The Discipline Devil

Age: 37

1. Informant name- A. M.
2. Date of Performance- April 24, 2026
3. Age- 37
4. Ethnicity- Dominican and Puerto Rican
5. Career/Occupation- Caregiver
6. Hometown- New York City
7. Informant’s language- English

Story –

Growing up with a Dominican mother they have this thing that if you disrespect our parents the devil comes out . So when I was younger I was very slick out of the mouth. I’ve always been slick at the mouth so one night my mom, your grandmother, was telling me to go to sleep but I was just being spiteful and doing stupid shit. So that whole day, that whole night, I placed a figurine that your grandma used to have on a table in the middle. It was like a flower glass and I placed it on the floor.Your aunt was chasing me when I was terrorizing her and she stepped on it. So I got my ass whopped then I was sent to bed. Mommy kept telling me to go to sleep but I didn’t want to go to sleep. So I pretended I was sleeping and then they turned off all the lights. When I looked to the side all I saw was a shadow. It looked like a demon dancing, really tall, about like 8 feet tall, long nails, a long tail, just like dancing. I just saw the shadow so I closed my eyes and covered myself from head to top and I went to sleep. After that I ain’t seen nothing else.

Context- 

My mother was telling me a story about her childhood where she was scared of the devil because of stories she was told by her immigrant mother.

Their thoughts-

At that moment she really believed it and was really scared. Now she doesn’t know if it was real or not and just regards it as a moment in her childhood. The moment itself was real for her but they explain the action behind it is up in the air.

My thoughts-

I think that because she’s already had this idea in her head that the devil was gonna come out if she had it tricked her brain into seeing something that wasn’t there. At night I know that something’s my Brian tricks me into seeing things that aren’t there and I think that the same thing may have happened to my mom.

The Face that was Later Called Grandmother

Age: 19

Context:

One evening, while in front of a campfire at my high school, my friend and I began talking about strange experiences we have had. She suddenly recalled something that had happened to her as a child that had haunted her ever since. It was a moment of confused fear, imagination, and something she still can’t fully explain. This is the story she told me.

The Story:

When she was around six years old, she lived with her parents and two siblings. One spring day, her family was hosting a gathering with relatives. While the adults were occupied, she and her siblings were playing roughly, and their energy escalated into play-fighting.

At one point, she swung at her sister — not hard, but enough for her mother to step in. As a punishment, her mother placed her in time-out in the front foyer, a quiet space near the door where guests would remove their shoes.

A few minutes into sitting alone, she began to feel restless. She turned her attention to the nearby window and looked outside. In that moment, she describes what she saw “not as a typical ghost,” but rather as “a presence that was spying” on her. 

She could not make out a full face or body, but she distinctly remembers the expression: “feminine, stern, and filled with anger.” It was intensely disapproving. The feeling it gave her was immediate and overwhelming.

In that moment, her sense of guilt deepened. What had just been childish misbehavior suddenly felt much more serious, as if she were being judged.

Terrified, she ran away from the window and out of the foyer, breaking her time-out, which led to her mother making her stay in time-out for even longer.

Years later, while reflecting on the experience by the campfire, she came to associate the presence with her grandmother. However, this interpretation was not present at the time it occurred. In the moment, the figure felt unfamiliar and unrecognizable; it is only in retrospect that her memory has recontextualized it as resembling her grandmother.

Informant’s Thoughts:

What unsettles her most is how her interpretation of the event changed over time. As a child, the presence felt completely foreign and threatening. But as she grew older, she began to associate it with someone familiar and close to her—her grandmother.

This shift raises questions about memory itself: did she actually perceive something external, or was the experience gradually reshaped by her mind in order to give it meaning and familiarity in retrospect?

My Thoughts:

I think my friend’s story is definitely connected to spirits that haunt us after making immoral decisions. My friend felt feelings of deep shame for attempting to hurt her sister. I think it’s also interesting that she got in even more trouble as a result of running away from the presence.

What makes this story compelling isn’t just the possibility of a supernatural presence but how closely it ties to guilt. In that moment, my friend had just done something she knew was wrong. The appearance of a disapproving figure, whether real or imagined, seemed to reflect her internal emotions.

Rather than a traditional ghost story, this feels more like a psychological haunting. The “presence” may not have been a spirit punishing her but a manifestation of her own conscience, shaped by childhood fear and authority.

At the same time, the later association with her grandmother adds another layer of unease. It suggests how memory is not fixed but something we reinterpret as we grow older. The blending of emotion, family, and imagination into something that feels real.

What lingers is not the image itself but the uncertainty: was she being watched, or was she learning right from wrong? 

The Nightmare that Growled Back

Age: 34

Context:

One day, as I was leaving my dorm room to walk to class, the maintenance worker for my hallway stopped me to share that a vacuum that had been standing perfectly upright suddenly fell. He said, “It took force to get that down,” however, there was no physical force apparent. I stopped and listened to what he had to say about what he had just seen and then began talking about encounters that he had while living with his mother and grandmother. This is one story he told me. 

The Story:

About fifteen years ago, he lived in a Los Angeles home with his mother and grandmother. There wasn’t one specific moment, but rather a collection of strange experiences that impacted everyone in the household. He said, “Nobody was talking about it until things started getting more physical and hands-on.”

He described a series of nightmares that grew more intense over time. At first, they were recurring dreams of being chased, and he would wake up in a panic. As time went on, however, the dreams began to resemble sleep paralysis. “I would be in heavy, heavy sleep and couldn’t wake up because I felt like an energy was holding me down.”

One specific dream he shared involved him running through a parking lot, trying to escape someone who was chasing him with a knife. He couldn’t wake up while it was happening, and when he finally did, he was exhausted and out of breath, as if he had actually been running.

The dreams continued to worsen and feel more and more real: “I was waking up heavy, sweating, and gasping for air. We all started sharing similar stories, and we all started talking about what we were feeling or how it was feeling.”

Both his mother and grandmother shared experiences of “feeling like somebody was sitting on their chest and wouldn’t let them go. It was the feeling like you wanted to scream and yell, but something was holding you from it.”

One night in particular has remained with him until this day. It happened in the middle of the night. He shared that his grandmother would frequently come in and out of the rooms, so initially, he wasn’t afraid. He described that he was staring at a shadow that was short just like his grandmother.  

Another thing that he and his grandmother used to do was jokingly growl at each other. He said that as the shadow began walking away to leave the room, he began growling at it. 

“When I growled, it immediately turned around 360 degrees, but the way it looked towards me, I immediately knew that that wasn’t her anymore.”

It stood over him and began growling back at him louder and louder. “That was the for real moment that I felt that black presence, that black shadow was staring at me, and it was growling at me. That was one of the most physical moments that I had ever felt.”

After this night, he called his family friend who was an exorcist. With a broom, the exorcist fought with the presence in each corner of the house. After he retrieved the spirit, he found it was an old man and placed it in a box to bring to release it at a cemetery. 

Afterward, he, his mother, and his grandmother were cleansed with sage, white roses, and various mists.

Even now, he says it’s eerie to think about. Both his mother and grandmother have since passed away, and he hasn’t shared this story with many people in a long time.

Informant’s Thoughts:

He doesn’t find the story unsettling just because of the shadow itself, but because of the shared, physically impacting experiences that all of his family members had that were unspoken at first. What stays with him is the identical sensations and the way something unseen seemed to move through all of them at once. Now that his mother and grandmother have passed, there’s no one left who remembers those nights the way he does. No one to confirm what happened or to question it. 

His experience also strengthened his belief in ghostly presences, and he has become more attentive. When something reminiscent of those experiences occurs in everyday life, such as the broom story in the dorm, he is more skeptical, whereas prior to this experience, he never thought twice about spooky presences. 

My Thoughts:

To me, it is very interesting that the exorcist discovered that the presence was that of an old man. It makes me wonder if the man had lived in the house before Alex and his family moved in. If so, what happened to him?

I’m struck by how all of these experiences occurred during sleep at night. Sleep paralysis is most common among children and young adults, which is interesting because all three people living in the home were full-grown adults. This makes me further consider the possibility that the presence was real. It could also suggest a kind of generational haunting, potentially significant in the way it connects us to our ancestors.

This story lingered with me long after he told it, partly because of coincidence—when I heard it, I was on my way to my ghost stories class.

Bloody Mary in the Third Floor Bathroom

Age: 19

The Story:

It was just something we did in elementary school. I don’t even remember how it started, it was just one of those things that existed and everybody already knew about it by the time you heard it for the first time. Someone would bring it up at lunch, usually when things were slow, and by the end of the day there’d be a whole plan. You’d pull together a group of girls, maybe five or six, and you’d sneak up to the bathroom on the third floor because it was the farthest from any of the classrooms and teachers basically never came up there during lunch. It felt far away enough from everything that whatever happened up there stayed up there.

The whole setup was that you had to turn the lights completely off. And that bathroom with no lights was actually, genuinely dark in a way that caught you off guard every time. No windows, no light coming under the door, nothing. Just total black and the sound of everyone breathing. You’d all crowd around where you knew the mirror was and then somebody had to say it. There was always a pause before that part, everyone kind of waiting for someone else to go first. Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary.

We never made it through. Not once. Every single time, the second the lights went off, someone would flinch or grab someone else’s arm and that was it. One person would start screaming and then everyone else would too, even the ones who had been completely fine half a second before. We’d crash into each other trying to find the light switch, spill out into the hallway in a pile, and just completely lose it laughing. Like, unable to breathe laughing. Every time.

And then we’d do it again the next month in the same bathroom with the same plan to stay calm this time, same outcome. There was one time we made it maybe thirty seconds further than usual and everyone acted like we’d accomplished something real. We hadn’t. Someone still screamed. We still ran out.

Nothing ever happened. No face in the mirror, nothing moving, nobody got hurt. I want to be clear about that. But I also don’t think that was ever really the point. Even at that age, I don’t think any of us genuinely believed something was going to show up. It was more like you wanted to be the kind of person who could stand there in the dark and not flinch. And nobody ever was. And for some reason that made it worth doing over and over again.

My Thoughts:

What strikes me is that the fear was completely self-generated and everyone knew it  and it still worked every single time. Nobody screamed because they saw something. They screamed because of the dark, the buildup, and the sound of other people holding their breath next to them. One person flinching was enough to send five people running. More people doesn’t mean more rationality. If anything, it means more surface area for fear to spread across. The thing that actually made everyone run was each other. And there’s something weirdly intimate about being that vulnerable and exposed together, which is its own kind of bonding. Horror doesn’t just scare you, it binds you to the people you’re scared with.