“I have one that my friends dad told me. He claims its true, we’ve asked him like a billion times, but he refuses to say it’s not true. So my friends dad would always tell us this whenever we went camping. I was a boy scout, and my friend and his dad were boyscouts so we ended up camping together alot. So my friends dad as a kid also would go camping alot and there was one time when they weren’t really camping they were staying at a cabin in northern california that people hadnt used for a while, it wasn’t your typical weird ‘no one’s lived there for a while’ thing, no one had died in it, it was kind of an uncomfortable place pretty much. So he went up with his direct family- him, his parents, his sister, and then his aunt and her family, I don’t know who was in their line of family, but i know some siblings and their aunt was older at the time, like in her 60s. His aunts side was much older than his direct side of his family, so his aunt and her kids were older than his mom, dad and their kids. So they went up there and they were just like, hanging out, would go out and explore during the day. it definitely wasn’t near people, but it was that type of area that was spread out, so there were people around they just werent close and that’s just how all the houses were around there. So the aunt wasn’t mentally stable, it wasn’t like schitzophrenia, it was like the onset-, she doesnt have it but she was starting to get it, and she hadn’t any serious symptoms or anything, but when they were in this house- it’s how ur gonna feel when ur in an empty house, i think anyone gets creeped out in a cabin- so they were basically like uncomfortable to start. But it wasnt anything that was at the forefront of their thoughts, but it was pretty much a back of the head thought. But the aunt, well they knew she was starting to lose it in her age, she started to get really quiet within the first two or three days. She just wouldnt talk alot. So they ignored it. They ignored it but, as each day went on, at first she was really quiet at breakfast but as the days went on she wouldn’t leave her room, she wouldnt get out of bed, they were only there for a week week and a half, so this was probably like day four. And like everyone else kept getting progressively more and more uncomfortable as she got progressively more and more uncomfortable, just kinda unnerved, I mean she wouldn’t leave her room, they would try to talk to her, she would give one word answers, but even that went away, she just kept sitting in the room, she just wouldnt talk to anyone. She would just sit there. Then at night they started hearing like banging noises and stuff, mainly around her room, but they kept going in there and checking on her and nothing was going on- she was just asleep. And again, my friends dad is fairly superstitous so they like checked and looked it up, as much as you could look it up back then, but it seemed pretty normal except for the fact that the aunt was, you know, being weird. But im assuming at this point it was the 5th or 6th night, there weren’t that many noises, at this point it was whatever, they were used to it, so they went to check on the aunt and this time she was sitting up in the side of the room on a chair. She wasn’t looking at aynthing, there was nothing to look at. They tried to talk to her but she just wouldnt respond to them at all. So obviously at this point they were definitely starting to get weirded out, even if she had these symptoms before, its not just something that comes and goes usually, at least her symotonpns werent. it was just a bad weird state. And then every night they’d go in there and she was sitting there, but it was only about the next night because at this point they figured they were planning on leaving and the rest of the family was weirded out by it but they were just gonna take her to a doctor. But my friends dad was superstitious and his cousins were just like, what the hell is going on. And they went in the last night and she was having a hard time breathing, she wasn’t breathing normally, it wasnt supposed to be the last night but they left, my friends dad went to go wake up the parents and tell them she wasn’t breathing right, she definitely wasnt dying but she definitely wasnt all right. I haven’t seen the house so its hard to explain it but I know that to get to his parents bedroom from the aunts bedroom you had to walk through the main entrance past the front door. Also this night the banging had been going on pretty audibly but you couldnt tell where it was coming from, you could just hear it all over. And he was walking through the front door area and the front door literally just slammed open, and it hit the railways really hard and it had been completely locked just because of the area they were in. It slammed open. But basically the door swung open and my friends dad, now says if he thinks about it really hard, he feels like something rushed past him, but he admits that he just saw the door swing open, there’s really nothing else. So he got his parents, because the aunt wasn’t dying but she wasnt doing great, but they just took her and got everything together and left that night. And as for his parents, the door thing they said someone probably forgot to lock it or the wind blew it open, but it was locked and it wasn’t just a windy area and it was like someone threw the door open with all their might. His parents kind of wrote it off. And they took her to the hospital, and 3 days later she was compltely fine. And she said she just felt out of it just tired and didn’t wanna talk to people but she doesnt acknowledge or remember the part when physically something was wrong with her. She doesnt remember that part. She said it felt like she was asleep. And the parts she was sitting up at night she doesnt remember. She thought she was asleep.

What do you think of this?

My friends dad likes to mess with us alot. I’ve heard it so many times, and he’s the kind of guy that will play a joke on us, and keep it up for a few months and then be like I totally got you guys, but he’s been telling us this one forever. And i met the other side of his family and they’re pretty accurate to how he explained it, like he didn’t fabricate his characters.

Were you scared while you were camping?

So yeah it freaked me out a little bit ’cause he’d tell us while we were camping, he never did anything like scare us when he told us this story. It would always end with this story and eveyrone would ask is this real, and he would kinda laugh, but his dad laughs and then his dad LAUGHS, and u can tell when hes joking or when its laugh that he kinda said “yeah” to you. It wasn’t serious but it wasn’t something that he was joking and stuff.

Do you believe in ghosts/spirits?

Yeah, I do, I think. I mean I’ve had very little personal experience, but it’s one of those things that there’s so many people claiming to have experience with it and stuff, and its such a non-natural or supernatural realm kind of thing that it’s hard to put a scientific perspective on it. I mean I’m skeptical, but i think i lean more towards believing in it then not. And that story’s sweet.

I think this story is really interesting because it exemplifies a really weird story used to connect people. The dad acknowledges that he might not have seen anything move past the door, but, it makes sense to add in the hindsight bias in the context of the story. I also question how rational the dad is, and if he is just writing off what he saw, since a doorway is a very common place to see ghosts. Either way, it is a great story that Jamie remembers many years later and has connected the boy scouts every time they are together. I also think the aunt being so confused has to do with it. We don’t know what ghosts can do or what they are, so who says they couldn’t have caused her strange symptoms?