Tag Archives: basement

Staircase Ghost

Nationality: Korean- American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Language: English

Text: When I lived in Missouri, my room was located in the basement. My bed was positioned opposite to my doorframe, which was right next to the staircase. If my door was open, which it often was, I could see most of the basement and the first few steps at the bottom of the staircase. On numerous occasions, mostly when waking up from naps, I would see a black figure quickly move up the stairs and out of sight. I was never motivated enough to pursue it, but I always ended up closing my door to avoid the perceived threat. When informing my parents about this, they would always act like they went to check the basement out, but I was aware they didn’t believe me. I, truthfully, didn’t know if what I was seeing was real or not.

Context: Informant was in elementary school during this time of her life. They recall the previous owners of the home being of older age, and correlate this with the potential ghost near the staircase. Informant was never terrified of the figure, as they were not certain it was real. However, they felt a close- relationship to its presence because of their parents lack of belief in her sightings. Informant believes that, whether the figure existed or not, the chance of its presence promoted her habit of closing her door.

Analysis: This memorate reflects the turbulent boundary of deciphering the known and unknown. The informant cannot be sure of the existence of the figure, but it is clear that the events described had a long term impact on the informant. Drawing a possible conclusion that the figure could have been a past resident of the home, we can see a perpetuation of the commonly held cultural ideas revolving around property ownership and death. This retelling highlights the ambiguity of memorates as legends. Their truthfulness is not essential to their ability to shape behavior. In many cases, proof of presence is not needed for significance.

Tombstone Ghost Story

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Waitress
Residence: Glendale, AZ
Language: English

“So me and my friend right. We took this trip to Tombstone and we did one of those ghost tours in I think it was a funeral home I’m pretty sure. It used to be an old funeral home in Tombstone. And she busted out this um what do they call it? A spirit box where they are just really loud. She had me and my friend stand up facing away from the audience, and there were these purple lights on us too, so you could kind of see if there was any shadows or movement or whatever from the ghost. And um apparently like people had told me afterwards that they had seen the ghost moving my hair cuz it was down and really long at the time. Anyways, with the spirit box, it just saying a lot of random stuff and all of a sudden all you could hear was it really clearly say BITCH! And then my friend just falls to the ground and grabs me and everybody fell.”

Context: The informant was about 14/15 and went on a birthday trip with her friend to Tombstone on Labor Day weekend. Tombstone is a well-known western town in Arizona, known for their ghost tours and mock shootouts. The ghost tour was in the basement of one of the stores which had been somewhat preserved from the time it was a funeral home. The host used a spirit box on her laptop, grid lights, and a barrel of offering which she had audience members stand in front of to invite spirits to touch them. The friend who collapsed claimed that she didn’t know what happened, similar to a short blackout, and she avoided any supernatural experiences for a long time afterward. The host ended the ghost tour after this incident.

Analysis: Although this ghost experience was somewhat institutionalized, the suggestibility of the experience and the host lead the informant into having a true ghost experience. Ghost boxes are devices that skip through radio channels, and the ghosts are supposed to highlight words in response to questions people asked. Initially, the experience had been fun for the informant, being told her hair was being moved by the ghost. This validated and strengthened the belief in the phenomenon in the moment. However, the experience took a turn when the ghost insulted them and her friend collapsed, suggesting that the ghost had pulled her down. With the ghost tour occurring in a wild west funeral home with many violent deaths, the host herself acknowledged the danger by concluding the tour after this hostile incident. Ghosts have been suggested to be especially tied to property and being hostile towards unwanted visitors, which could be a factor for the incident. 

The Basement Ghost of the Chicago Fire

Nationality: American 

Age: 54, 60

Occupation: Producer, Producer/Writer 

Residence: Silverlake, CA, Sherman Oaks, CA 

Performance Date: November 28, 2024

Primary Language: English

CONTEXT:

This story was told by two sisters who were born and raised in a nice metropolitan neighborhood in Chicago in the 1970s.

STORY:

L: Alright so we lived in a building that was built over a graveyard. After the Chicago fire, that whole area was a graveyard, and they dug up all the graves and put the buildings over that area. Why they had the graves in what was potentially some of the best area, I have no idea.

So our house was built over a graveyard; this was not known to me.

We lived in, we had the basement, and we had a bedroom down in the basement–a couple bedrooms and a bathroom. And this was after Roberta had lived down there. I lived down there. And I went to the bathroom, and it was late at night, and as I was–I think I was peeing, I don’t know–the shower, uh, handle– so you have a handle where you turn the water on and off–the shower handle, the backing for it flew off the wall on its own. And so I opened up the thing cause I thought maybe something had fallen, I wasn’t quite sure, and when I opened up the thing, water came out of the shower head. And I freaked out.

And now, you have to understand, I believed in ghosts anyway, because when you live in Chicago you have ghosty experiences.

I freaked out and I ran upstairs to my mother’s room and I said “there are ghosts in that bathroom!”

And she said “what are you talking about? Go away. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She was asleep.

And I went back downstairs and I said okay cool. I’m never gonna shower in that bathroom again, that’s fine. And I went about my business.

Days later, she said “I talked to your sister, Roberta,” who also lived down there “and she said that she agreed with you; there are ghosts down in the basement.”

Roberta, what did you experience?

R: The shower would just turn on. The shower, you’d walk in and the shower would just turn on. 

L: Like it did for me.

R: You’d walk down the hall and suddenly the shower is on, or the sink has been turned on. And there’s no one there. And yeah it’s over a graveyard. It like, they are still finding bones and other body parts when they’re excavating those houses. So… 

L: So I would go into the bathroom, and I would talk to the ghost. I never showered in there again, by the way. I think you did, I never did.

R: I showered in my shoes.

L: I would go in the bathroom, I would pee, I would wash my hands in the sink, and I would talk to the ghost sometimes. I would just chit chat. No one talked to me–I never saw a physical ghost–no one had words back for me or anything like that. But we came to an agreement that I would not use the shower and it would not, I don’t know, kill me.

ANALYSIS:

This story very evidently displays some unexplained instances that occurred in this house, and is a prime example of one element commonly found in ghost stories: improper burial. Because the house in this story is still standing to this day and has not been excavated, it is not known whether or not there were remains under this specific house. But it was made clear that the area was once a graveyard for the victims of the Chicago fire, and the neighboring houses–when excavated–had bones and other remains in their foundations and the soil beneath. So it could very well be possible that the souls of individuals who were given an improper burial still lurk within the basements and abandoned rooms of these homes.

Underground Dinosaur Legend

Text: So it’s actually from elementary school, but we had this like Legendish thing where there was supposedly a basement in my elementary school. And like, you could tell because if you like, knocked on the floor, whatever, it sounded hollow. And so there’s like a basement underneath. And like a long, long, long time ago. They trapped this dinosaur down there. And like with the leftover food from the cafeteria, they like fed it to make it happy and like. And then they would say like, oh, and if you dig up the sand like in the playground if you dig far enough, you’ll find like, fossils and other things. But that was like our lore.

Context:

Informant is a freshman at USC studying Aerospace Engineering, originally from Tulsa, Oklahoma. We are sitting in a USC dining hall as she shares between bites of her pancake. She is excited and enthusiastic as she remembers her stories, using frequent hand gestures to emphasize her points.

“I learned it from the other kids at summer school in Oklahoma. A lot of people knew about it. But, like, we really only talked about it in summer school. I don’t know, like outside of summer school, we didn’t really. And when I was like, fifth grade and stuff, we didn’t really talk about it anymore. But it’s still in the back of my mind. It made it feel kind of interesting because I was like, oh, what if it’s true? Like that would be so cool and interesting. Like, I don’t know, because I kind of like mysteries. And I like not knowing something, you know, like something’s possible. Even though that definitely was not. I was like still kind of hoping that there was something there. I think I believed it at first. At first I was like maybe not a dinosaur was down there, but like the fact that for some reason I thought it was proven that it was hollow underneath. So I was like, what is down there?”

Analysis: This legend is an example of socially negotiated belief. The purpose was to confront individuals with what they actually believe, and present evidence like the floor sounding hollow in order to make one question what they believe to be possible. And even if one It’s evident that beliefs are crafted as a social process, especially within this specific demographic of children who are high on the continuum context, meaning they are more likely to believe this legend. This type of legend might be more plausible in this society of elementary school children as this is the time they are new to learning about dinosaurs and fossils and such items.

Hanged Mom in the Basement

Nationality: White
Age: 51
Occupation: Reality Television Editor
Residence: Santa Clarita, CA
Performance Date: 04/04/2023
Primary Language: English

Text:

GJ: I was in fourth grade. That summer, we moved into a bungalow. The very first day when we were moving in, there was a ring at the doorbell. I opened up the door, and there was this little girl who asked “is there a little girl here?” She had seen my little sister. They went up to play, and I joined them… I was only a year apart from my sister, so we were pretty close. This neighbor from down the street, she proceeded to tell us how her best friend had lived in this house before us, but on the day of her birthday, after her birthday party, her mom committed suicide and hung herself in the basement. Of course, we were really freaked out by this, so we were like maybe she made this up. So we go downstairs, and there were all the streamers and birthday decorations still hanging downstairs. Needless to say, we were scared of the basement. It was an unfinished basement that was very dark, and there was a big part of the basement that you couldn’t see from the bottom of the stairs, and that happened to be where the laundry room was. The laundry room was in front of where the stairs let out, and the rest of the basement was just dark. We… of course, this might have been led by fear, but we were convinced we heard sounds in the darkness, maybe even bits of light, enough to make us race back upstairs. It was quite some time before we worked up the courage to turn the lights on and start playing in the basement. Gradually the fear went away, but that was what it was like when we first moved in for several months.

Context: GJ is a Canadian immigrant who moved to Los Angeles from Toronto, Ontario when he was in his thirties. He grew up in Alberta. Because of his parents’ divorce and his father’s work flipping houses, he frequently moved around. His family prides themselves on being logical, and as such, when I first asked for folklore, he said that he didn’t have any because all of the things he was told were either “religious or true.” It took some pressing before he told me the ghost story detailed here.

GJ: “There had been a teacher’s strike right before that, so I was at a different school. Months passed and it went into the summer so I never got the contact information from my previous friends that summer, so I didn’t have any friends.”

Analysis: This legend of a ghost became a memorate… the story GJ heard about the death in his basement became translated into his own personal experience when he began experiencing things that verged on paranormal, such as the blinking lights and darkness. His avoidance of the basement could be read as ostentation. The fact that GJ was isolated moving in might have contributed to the way that he interpreted the story. He went from being in a large social circle to having no one. The fact that the very first person he meets in a new, unfamiliar neighborhood tells him a frightening story about the very place he lives in might have made him even more scared of it. The girl telling him this story caught him at a vulnerable time in which he was scrambling for security and belief, similar to how college students find themselves questioning whether or not they believe in ghosts. It’s a moment of turmoil in which he had to reinvent himself and redefine his own beliefs. Later, he regarded the story with more of his self-defined rationality, but the evidence remains that he thoroughly believed it at that point in his life.