Tag Archives: ghost

Haunted House in Jakarta

Nationality: Thai
Age: 75
Occupation: Retired
Residence: Van Nuys, CA
Performance Date: April 24, 2016
Primary Language: Thai (laotian)
Language: English

Papa’s (my grandpa’s) friend and him were living in Jakarta and in the house they were staying in… a house which they rented… which was haunted because the wife sees all the spirits when the men are out working. There are always noises and sometimes she saw people in the kitchen… doing something in the kitchen, and the husband doesn’t believe her. He says, “I don’t believe. That is nonsense. I wish I could see the ghost. I wish he would show me.” One day he was sleeping, and he looked up and he had a calendar of two girls dancing. He looked at the calendar and it was moving and dancing. The girls pictured in the calendar were moving as if they were real. He was so scared. So from that time on he believed. They eventually figured out that under that house was a cemetery. The ghost followed them from this house to another house they lived in, I even heard stories about it later on. Since that time he was so scared and never mentioned it anymore.

Background: My grandpa was a civil engineer whose work required him to constantly move from place to place. This is interesting to hear secondhand from my aunt, as my grandfather passed away. He told this story to her many years ago. This really embodies the essence of folklore as this version of the story may have been different from the original that my grandfather would have told. I conducted this interview live at my uncle’s house, so this story was told to me in person. I really find this story to be very compelling as the belief of each person who lived in the house varied about the spirits — from the wife and husband, to my grandfather. This was very interesting for me to hear about some of the interesting places my grandfather lived and some of the amazing things he did all over the world.

Haunted Sorority House

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Primary Language: English

Informant: Okay, so, um, my sister’s sorority house is haunted. And, um, she’s in AChiO at Oregon, and they were like the first sorority on campus, or first ones to have their house that they live in now on campus, so basically like AChiO here. So like because it’s been there for so long, two girls have died there and one of them died at the turn of the century. I think she fell down the stairs, but it doesn’t matter much, but the other one, this girl died in the seventies because she was on the stairs in some high heels and her sister as a joke, like, pushed her, but she fell down the stairs, and it’s a three story staircase, and she fell and broke her neck. And so she died in their house on like a normal night, and now she haunts the house and um her thing is that her ghost comes in the form of a cat so people hear weird meows in their room, and also she’ll come in the bathroom and like flicker the lights. She like threw paper towels at somebody, like this girl was just in there and paper towels just flew at her like peoples baskets will just get knocked off the wall. Also, they have a cat statue in their house, don’t know why, but they always say that it’s the ghost of the woman, and they’ll put it in people’s rooms and their suitcases when people go home just to scare them. It was really scary when I went up.

 

My informant is a freshman at the University of Southern California. She is from San Diego, California. We had this conversation in the study room of my sorority house.

 

This is something that seems to be a basis for some fictional stories. There was an episode of Psych having to do with a haunted sorority house. It seems that in this type of horror story, the person who dies always dies in a certain way, and if there are multiple deaths, they happen in the same way. In this case, both deaths happened on the stairs. It also seems common in many ghost stories and perpetuated by the show Supernatural, ghosts inhabit some type of object to haunt people with.

Skullkeeper

Nationality: Thai, Filipino
Age: 48
Occupation: Hospital Lab
Residence: Glendale, CA
Performance Date: April 24, 2016
Primary Language: Thai (laotian)
Language: English

This was the time that mom… she was telling me the story about the time when one of her elder …I don’t remember if it’s the distant aunt or just a very close friend of the family had passed away. And the person that was very dear to that deceased, she decided to keep the skull of the deceased, and instead of cremating the whole entire body she kept the skull. A couple of days later another family member… and she said whatever happened to her she has no memory of it, but she was possessed by the deceased who came to the village looking for her skull and she said in Thai to the woman who kept the skull in her same mannerism… everybody knew how this person was before… she sat down in her usual spot and started looking at everybody because this person was possessed in trance like state “Ni (the person’s name) give me my skull back” in rude, old Thai, in an olden way. In a very… um… not so nice language. And everybody was shocked and of course … somebody who was possessed … had kind of pointed out to the person who took the skull and said put it back in its rightful place. Everybody was shocked. And then I think after that moment the possessed person just collapsed and she woke up from this trance and could not recall anything. She just remembered she was on the bus and then she was here with the family.

 

Background: My aunt knows this story because her mom told it to her, and she remembers this piece specifically because it is so creepy. To her it symbolizes the need for respect for those who have passed away and the need for people to let them go instead of holding on to them, whether it be literally (with the skull) or figuratively. I conducted this interview in person, live at my uncle’s house. I think this is such a creepy piece yet such a good piece of folklore as my aunt and her mother (my great-aunt) both claim it to be true.

Brooklyn Doll

Nationality: Puerto Rican, American
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Manhattan Beach, CA
Performance Date: April 23, 2016
Primary Language: English

So my grandma moved from Puerto Rico to Brooklyn when she was six years old with her mom, like Brooklyn in New York, the city with her mom and 5 siblings, and the rest of her family stayed in Puerto Rico with the dad, and they were gonna move out later after the dad finished his Navy term. She moved into an apartment and her mom, like so my great grandma, really believes in ghost stories, so she had little plants, little cacti with the long leaves, and she believed those fended off ghosts for some reason. So she kept those around the apartment because when she purchased the apartment she got creepy vibes, as my grandma says. My grandma lived in a closet sized room with her sister and they didn’t really have all their stuff with them, so my grandma just brought books with her. She brought books, and there was a little shelf above her bed so my grandma put her books up there and her mom put a plant up there. So supposedly the apartment was protected from ghosts because of the plants. So then one day though they got new neighbors next to them; it was a wife, husband and dog, they had a dog. They had recently moved into building, and landlord came by my grandma’s apartment to tell them they would have new neighbors. The landlord came by and gave my grandma’s family a doll, and it was the first time they had met the landlord, as it was a friend of my grandma’s dad. My grandma thought the doll was a threat to her ghost-protected house, so she put it on top of the fridge away from everything. The landlord, when she gave it to them said it was supposed to protect from death, but then one night, like I don’t know, this is why I always get so confused, I think its my grandma’s exaggerations. My grandma said one night my great-grandma was out of the house, and so grandma had to watch over all the siblings. She was putting everyone to bed and turned off all the lights and all of a sudden the power went out in whole building. Everything was pitch black. The refrigerator stopped working, there were no phones, and my grandma didn’t know how to reach her mom. There was one circular window that shined directly on the top of the fridge exactly where the doll was sitting. So my grandma is looking around making sure everyone is ok in the house. So my grandma turns around and sees the light of the full moon shining on the top of the fridge and the doll missing. So then the landlord comes by, knocks on the door, and says very very creepily three deaths will occur. Because the doll is missing. She basically told them at the beginning that they couldn’t lose the doll because death would occur. And then…so then, and the landlord knew that my great-grandma put it on top of the fridge. And she checked to see that it wasn’t there and that’s why she told us that three deaths would occur. My grandma did not believe the landlord, and she was trying to be protective because her younger siblings were really scared, so then the landlord left. The next morning everyone woke up and my great-grandma was back, but then they were told everyone had to leave the building for some reason, and like everyone was being evacuated and no one knew why. The police was there. They were all standing out in the middle of the street, and they saw that there were three body bags in the middle of the street. The police told them that the people next door had been killed last night. The wife, husband and dog who lived in the apartment next to them had gone to get groceries from the store beneath the apartments, and there was an armed robbery. The robber shot the wife, husband and dog. And ever since then, my grandma has always believed in ghost stories and she gave my family a plant that is supposed to fend off ghosts.

 

Background information: Sarah is my best friend from home, Manhattan Beach. She knows this piece because her grandma has told it to her a few times and that is the reason Sarah has a demon/ghost-protecting plant in her own house from her grandma because her grandma is now very superstitious about ghosts ever since this happened to her. Sarah really likes this piece because it happened to someone who is very close to her, and although it sounds like something out of a movie—three deaths predicted solely because of this doll—it really happened to her and is pretty freaky, not something she can forget easily, especially since it happened to her grandma. Her grandma is from Puerto Rico, and to Sarah, as she mentioned above, she believes it may just be her grandma’s exaggerations, but she still remembers the story very clearly. The story was collected via FaceTime because Sarah goes to college at Middlebury in Vermont.

Haunted Hotel

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Primary Language: English

Informant: There’s this hotel in Boulder, Colorado, it’s like a thing, it’s actually, there’s a thing in Boulder Colorado where this room, it’s 314, I think it’s 314, um, has like, some weird ghostly connection to things. So, um, I was on this thing called the Banjo Billy’s Bus tour, it’s a thing, um, and, he was talking about how in room 314 of the music hall in Boulder, there was like some sort of suicide or something and then in the boulder hotel, not sure what the actual name is but it’s like a very known hotel for ghost stories, and um, in room 314 there was a woman or some sort of suicide and then a woman tried to kill herself with chloroform and then a man tried to kill himself—a bunch of people tried to kill themselves in that room. And when you go to that room, like when we went to that room after the tour, we were standing there and then you could feel like a rush of like chills, and then my mom and I were waiting for the elevator because it was on the third floor and I don’t know why we didn’t just go down the stairs and everyone had already gone down the elevator and we heard footsteps and nobody was there so we ran down the stairs. Fun story!

 

Informant is a sophomore at the University of Southern California. She is studying Narrative Studies and plans to have a minor in Songwriting. She is from a suburb outside of Chicago, Illinois. I spoke to her while we were eating lunch at my sorority house one day. We were sitting together with some of my other informants. Much of what she told me was learned from her own experiences.

 

This is an interesting ghost story, and you can see the connection between the numbers in this story and others. Many haunted rooms are on a floor with the number 13 in them, and this has that flipped around, but these numbers are often found having to do with haunted places. It seems that many hotels have stories about people dying in them.