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.