Tag Archives: ghost stories

Red (a Ghost Story)

Nationality: Chinese
Age: 16
Occupation: High School Student
Residence: Arcadia, CA
Performance Date: 4/28/2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese

“So there’s this ghost story that I heard at Mock Trial state, and… it goes something like… There’s a man who checks into this hotel, and… he’s there alone.  So every night he’s there he goes down to the bar, and while he’s sitting in the bar, having a drink… he observes… up at the counter… he sees the back of this beautiful young woman.  And… he keeps trying to muster up the courage to go talk to her, but as soon as he’s close… uh… she just… goes away.  So he’s keep trying every night and every single night he sees the same beautiful woman and he keeps… trying to bring up the courage to go talk to her.  But she leaves every single time… he’s supposed to go talk to her.
So at night when he retires to his room… he… hears a scratching… at the door.  He wakes up… and he asks, “who’s there?”  But nobody responds.  So… he goes up to the door and looks through the eye hole… and all he can see is red…  There’s nothing there but the color red.  He finds this… kinda odd so he just goes back to sleep.
Uh, when he goes back to the bar he sees the woman again, same chain of events occur… he’s back at his room that night… hears the scratching again.  He looks at the eyehole, asks “who’s there?” No one’s there… it’s JUST the color red.  So the next day… he goes back to the bar… and he sees that the girl is gone.  So he goes up to the bartender and says… “Where’s that girl who sat here every night,  I really wanted to talk to her.  And… the bartender is like… “Oh… um… you mean that young woman?  Well… she left… but there was something really really odd about her.”  And the man asks, “what was that?”  And the bartender says… “Her eyes were colored red.”

My sister heard this story from a friend on a car ride back from a mock trial competition.  She and her friends were sharing scary stories when it was around evening.

My sister was particularly disturbed by this story and claims to think about/dream about it for the remainder of the day and night she hears or re-tells it.  She says that the thing that scares her the most is the connection between the girl’s eye color and the red that the man sees through the eye hole.  The catch is that every night she was here, the girl was peering through the eye hole, watching the man.  She says the thought of being watched in places of supposed privacy frightens her.

When I first heard the story, my first thought aabout the color red was that this either represented a trait of the man or the girl.  I thought that the color would imply something sexual about the story, so I was surprised that the association was quite literal – that the girl’s eyes are red and so when she went to watch the man it covered the eye hole’s view with red.  The story was not as disturbing for me, probably because I was expecting some form of bizarre twist when I had the conversation with the informant, and it was outdoors and fairly light.  The place in which this piece is performed is important. My sister heard this story during the evening in a car – the cramped and dark environment probably contributed to how the story impacted her.  However, I do agree with her on the frightening prospect of being watched without knowing.  I think the element of having the man “watch” the girl without knowing the girl was watching him all along helps emphasize that twist and underlying fear in the audience.

I also noticed that my sister learned this from a high school classmate and was performed in a group of high school students.   I think that the story is scary for high school students because privacy is something adolescents value a lot.  Although adolescents use things such as social networking and are pretty immersed in an environment of disclosure, they also want a certain extent of privacy for their own thoughts.  I feel like high school students like the informant worry about surveillance because they understand how the world they’re growing up in is becoming more and more transparent (partially because of their own practices).

In my opinion, this story shares similarities with other scary stories involving being watched.  The main recurring elements in the story (the girl and the red behind the eye hole) are kept mysterious throughout the entire story – at the end, another character/informant makes the terrifying connection for both the main character and the audience.  But the girl doesn’t really come across as a ghost to me.  She has an unusual characteristic and doesn’t actually speak to the man, but the story itself doesn’t explicitly call her a ghost.  So I find it interesting that my sister calls this a ghost story.

The pervert ghost

Nationality: Greek
Occupation: Art History professor, author, photographer
Residence: Echo Park, Los Angeles
Performance Date: 04/17/12
Primary Language: English

In 2011 my informant published a the book, The Empire of Death: A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses. The book’s 260 photographs were gathered by Dr. Koudounaris over the course of five years, during which he traveled to 70 different locations around the world, studying, visiting, and photographing charnel houses.

Dr. Koudounaris’ travels took him to the Catacombe dei Cappuccini (the Catacombs of the Capuchin monastery) in Palermo, Italy. Part of his process of learning about the catacombs included talking to the various fruit and flower vendors who sold their goods across from the monastery. Because the fruit and flower vendors are directly across from the monastery, they know everything that went on there and were able to tell him a variety of ghost stories about the monastery.

“The fruit and flower vendors are an incredible source of information. It’s hard to understand if you live in our type of society. Ya know, a street vendor, in societies like this is a source of incredible information. The fruit and flower vendors are across from the monastery and they know everything that goes on in the monastery. And everyone goes—it’s not like they go to super markets, they go to these vendors—so they are an incredible source of information if you really want to know what goes on in societies like that.”

The story is as follows:

“In the late 19th century, an old woman who had grown up in Palermo had—she had moved to Campania, and came back from Campania in the late 19th century and she found herself with some vaginal discharge so she went to the office of a gynecologist she had visited when she used to live in Palermo 20 years before. Um—she met a doctor at the office who was not the doctor she had seen 20 years ago, she was told that that doctor had retired but this new doctor had taken over her practice and he could see her and he strapped her into a harness and then attempted to take sexual liberties with the old lady so she uh, she went to the police and she reported the doctor. In the report she said he attempted to eat on my pubic hair like a cow chews the grass. He did not perform the act of cunallingus but he kept eating the hair. I screamed at him to stop—he chewed it like the cow chews cud. Anyways, she broke from the restraints and fled from the doctor’s office and um, ya know this should have been easy for the police to go to the doctor’s office and find the man, but the problem was—the perpetrator she had described had in fact died five years earlier—so it was a bit of a conundrum that she had reported that a ghost was eating her public hair… like a cow chews the cud. Anyways, they went and found his body, which had been mummified in the Palermo catacombs, and they took her down there. His name was Remegious Segumundo, and um cause her description exactly matched this Remegious Segumundo and they asked her if she would be able to identify him and they took her to see the mummy and she shrieked in horror and it confirmed that the mummy was her sexual molester.

The woman was thought to be delusional, but over the next ten years, a series of sexual assaults occurred around the old office building and every time they occurred, the perpetrator was described as exactly matching this appearance of this mummy—um—eventually, I believe this was the 1890’s word eventually got to the widow of the doctor who died and she confirmed for the police that her husband was a pervert. She said that if anyone could stop his misdeeds it was her. So they took her to the Palermo catacombs, to the mummy and she asked to be alone with him—that she had some words for him. No one stayed—they gave them their peace and no one knows what was said between the two because it was a private matter but no sexual assaults were ever reported again involving the mummy. His widow set him straight.”

While often times ghost stories have some sort of moral to them, the events in this one could easily be an account of some random perverted individual, aside from the fact that the perpetrator was not actually alive at the time he conducted his misdeeds. Though the woman was originally thought insane, as my informant explained to me, as similar happenings matching the same description of the perpetrator kept occurring, the police had the wife of the deceased perpetrator visit the catacombs to speak with his mummy. If anything, this story shows us how seriously ghost happenings are taken in Palermo, Italy.