Tag Archives: Haunted House

Empire Hotel Marquee Ghost

Nationality: Caucasian
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: North Carolina
Performance Date: May 1, 2013
Primary Language: English

The theater in my hometown is several hundred years old, from back when uh Salisbury, North Carolina used to be one of the centers of the state economy. There were a lot of famous actors that went there. Charlie Chaplin went there. Sarah Bernhardt went there, and other stage actors. And the legend has it that there was a passageway that went under the theater, under the street, to the hotel across the way where they would stay. It was called the Empire Hotel. And, um, I went down there one time. It’s sealed off.
Apparently there at one time was a secret passage. People have told me a lot of different things. It could have been an air conditioning shaft. But it was structurally unsound so it’s gone. But they say that the big stars went under there to the hotel. I’ve been in both places.
One time I was in the Empire Hotel. I was—I don’t know if I believe in ghosts or not! But I know I heard one. You’ll understand what I mean if you have too. I was on the third floor of this Empire Hotel after filming, it was Halloween night, I know that sounds really cheesy, buuuuut, I was looking around, just taking pictures for the heck of it, it was really dark, it’s abandoned now, so it’s completely empty, and I got the keys from the manager of the city. When from downstairs, the bottom of the staircase in the back came this like, “meaerrrrrrrrgh!” Like groaning sound. Ha, how are you gonna type that? Um it happened twice. I was with a friend and we both heard it, and we were both just like frozen in terror. And, um, then he was scared out of his mind and I was like let’s go downstairs and check this out. And we did. And we didn’t see anything there except this old, like, boiler, coal room.
But then we asked this sort of living-legend guy Clyde, who has no last name in our town, what that was and he told us it was a certain ghost whose name I don’t remember, who used to stand on his head on the marquee of the theater. Uh, that’s all I know about him.

This is a ghost story FOAF that I, for one, will be spreading. It is a ghost story based upon the town’s rich history. The ghost is apparently known to haunt the Empire Hotel. The hotel is actually infamous for its paranormal activity, as is the town of Salisbury, and the ghost Clyde tells my friend about it not the only ghost known to inhabit the Empire Hotel. Ghost stories are popular about the Empire, because it is an old place where a lot of history took place. Besides, old abandoned buildings are always disturbing—especially on Halloween night. The story gives importance to, and knowledge of the town’s rich history. While in America, especially, such creepy events are likely to be interpreted as ghosts, my friend and his pal might have interpreted the strange sound differently if they were from another culture. They also probably would not have suspected it was a ghost if they had heard the sound during the day, in a different building, and not on Halloween night.

Haunted Civil War House

Nationality: American
Age: 52
Occupation: Aerospace Engineer
Residence: Sunnyvale, California
Performance Date: March 2013
Primary Language: English

“Okay, so when I was a kid growing up in Fairfax, Virginia, there was a house about a half-mile away from the house I grew up in and, uh, it’s a very old house – very well maintained, people do live there – but, uh, legend has it that it served as a hospital during the Civil War and, uh, obviously, injured soldiers would go there and, of course, some of the soldiers died. The legend is that, um, the house is haunted with the ghosts of the dead soldiers from the Civil War and this was well-known throughout my neighborhood among the children, and whenever we passed by the house, we’d always get a little nervous or scared or excited, and, um, we would also play in the front yard. The front yard was quite large – a few acres – and it had beautiful boxwood plants, all around the front yard and we would, uh, play hide-and-seek in the front yard, and it had a creek that ran through the front yard along with trees, and it was a lot of fun to play in the front yard. We also played in the backyard, which consisted of grass and, uh, thick woods. We played in the woods. We didn’t play in the grass area of the backyard, and there were times when I had met other adults my age who had grown up in the same city and, uh, for whatever reason, once in a while we would, uh, talk about that haunted house and the other people would remember that as well – that they had grown up believing it was a haunted house as well.”

The informant describes a childhood folk belief about a haunted neighborhood house. He heard about this folk belief from his peers. They would play in the yards of the haunted house. Though they believed in the spooky legend, it seems as though they played in the surrounding areas to taunt the “ghosts” residing in the house. The neighborhood children freely played outside in nature and allowed their imaginations to consider the possibility of the existence of Civil War soldiers’ ghosts. However, context is important. The children played near the well-maintained house presumably during the daytime. So, the idea of ghosts probably seemed less scary. In addition, the house was not considered taboo or forbidden. In bright daylight they were able to entertain the thought of ghosts and treat it as a subject that was not so serious. Had they met up at the woods around a dilapidated house at nighttime, maybe their attitudes toward the legend would have changed.

Through this pastime of playing in the woods, the children were able to share the story of a neighborhood house. The legend of the house and their playing near it affected the young children so much so that later, they were able to recall this story in their adulthood. This memorable pastime seems to be a defining, shared characteristic of their respective childhoods. Thus, the story holds significance in intertwining personal, regional, and national histories.

Ghost House

Nationality: American
Age: 50
Occupation: Writer/ Teacher
Residence: Detroit, Michigan
Performance Date: 4/13/2012
Primary Language: English

Legend

“I didn’t grow up in Detroit. I lived in this small town outside of it.  It was really nice. All those big houses and really rich people.  There was this one family.  Dad was always out working. Two kids. The daughter had married and moved out.  The mom as home all the time and she got really depressed.  I’d met her once and she was very quiet.  I didn’t know it, but she was an alcoholic and eventually she drank herself to death. Her liver failed.  Her son was left alone.  During the summer, the Dad had to work. So he asked a friend of mine if he could look after his son.  My friend agreed, but he didn’t really look after the kid and we had parties in the house.  One day while we were there, we were telling ghost stories and my friend said, ‘I’ve got this weird one to tell you guys’.  A few nights ago, he had been in his room and he fell asleep.  As he was dreaming, he realized that he was outside of his body.  So he decided to walk through the house and when he came into the kitchen, the entire family of the house was in there—including the mother who had died.  My friend went up to her, and her face was bone white. She was dead.  The mother was holding this little baby.  My friend asked her if she wanted to go and she said, ‘I want to go, but somebody has to look after this baby.’  He woke up right after that.  We were all freaked out by the story.

About a year later, I remembered the story and I asked him about it.  He said that when the father got back from his trip, he told him about his dream.  The father had given him this strange look and said, ‘No one knows this, but my daughter had a baby who died of crib death in this house.’”

My informant is catholic and believed that the mother was trapped in the house to pay for her sins of drinking and leaving her son behind.  She had to take care of another child in the afterlife.  He also believed that the baby couldn’t go to heaven because it was so young and it still needed someone to take care of it.  He said that he liked the story because he liked to believe the stories of rich families with hidden pasts in those big houses.  “You never really know where all that money came from” he said.

My informant’s analysis of why the child and mother were in the house really corresponds well with ghost belief in the church.  A mother who sinned is punished, but the child who hadn’t been christen yet is trapped as well.  A baby is not really a member of the community until that moment and thus is in a state where it is vulnerable.

The House Stays in the Family

Nationality: Caucasian American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student (Film Production)
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/25/12
Primary Language: English

Informant Bio

My informant is a film student at USC who grew up in Pinole, California (Bay Area). She lived there with her mother, sister, and their dogs; her mother bred golden retrievers. Her mother had, and has, many friends among their neighbors, so my informant always seems to know the town gossip, even now when she is away at school.

My informant hopes to become a feature film director; her favorite film genres are historical fiction, film noir, and thriller.

The Haunted House

In Pinole there is a large Victorian house on a hilltop property that belonged to a friend of my informant’s family. The house had been built at the turn-of-the-century by the current owner’s ancestors. Other members of the owner’s family claim that the house is haunted by the previous tenants, all members of the same paternal line. Many claim to have seen familiar looking spirits roaming the halls. The family also claims that whenever a member of the current owner’s paternal line has died, a tree falls on the property.

My informant remembers that when she would visit there as a child, the house was so large and spacious that it was “spooky.” She also remembers that the house was never finished. When she used to go there with her mother the owner was actively involved in renovations, so strange things would seem to be missing or disassembled. “For a long time when I would go up there… so, the house was on a hill, so it wasn’t easy to get to, but still, for a long time there were no doorknobs. [He] took them all out. Anyone could reach their arm through the hole and open the door to come in the house.” My informant clearly found it unnerving that a man could go for so long with no doorknobs or locks on his doors.

One does not often hear these days of land remaining in an American family for generations upon generations. Clearly the story of the hauntings and the trees dying with the newly dead shows the strength of the family’s connection with that land, and their unwillingness to leave it. It doesn’t seem too far of a leap from saying that a family will never leave their property to, no member of the family (living or dead) has ever left the property.

 

Albino Farm, Missouri

My informant is from Missouri, and he tells me that everyone in his town knows about the “Albino Farm” in Springlawn. There are all sorts of stories about the old abandoned farm. The one my informant heard the most was that there was once a family of angry albinos who had been shut off from the community because they were different. They had set traps and if anyone was ever found on their property, they were never heard from again. Another rumor is that it was an underground hospital where experiments were conducted on albinos, and is haunted by albino ghosts. Although my informant never tried to sneak in, many of his friends growing up did–or at least, they claimed too. No one ever brought back any proof.