Transcription:

Interviewer: “Do you believe in ghosts?”

Informant: “Um…I believe that may…that we contextualize possibly as ghosts but I’m not sure if they are ghosts. And when I say things, I mean things that are both…normal…and things that are a bit more than normal. Extranormal or even paranormal. But I don’t know if they’re ghosts as we traditionally define them.”

Interviewer: “Do you have any personal experience with the paranormal?”

Informant: “Ah yes my friends and I would often drive around late at night and do things like break into old Tuberculosis hospitals umm or drive on really unpleasant mountain roads. Umm or there was like a couple of…there was one place that was like an unmarked uhh and then repaved over grave in town that a man who had been killed in the town by bandits was buried at. So in the process of doing these things, we had a number of really strange experiences. And also the house I…the house I spent most of my childhood in umm was an old Victorian house that was almost…certainly…like I don’t like the word ‘haunted’ but had a number of freaky and creepy things happen in it. The most well documented thing was that a number of guests in one particular room of the house- this is like a large…old Victorian there’s this there’s this room on the second floor, that was different than all the other rooms. It was like painted all white. It was essentially a guest room, designed to be a guest room. And we had three people who did not know each other and who…who had no opportunity to talk about this experience, who stayed in that room. And each of them reported waking up in the middle of the night to see an old man hovering over them and staring down at them. Um…and a similar- someone who worked in the house uh… like who did catering and stuff there um… said that she saw some like somebody walking down the stairs of the house and then…disappear. Halfway down. Like the same sort of…described as an old man. And then…many-and so I never had this experience personally when I was living there throughout my entire time being there. But, this was years later, like many years after I moved out of that house. My friends and I were driving around one night, and the house was unoccupied aside from like uh…professional events. Like like it’s not designed- we didn’t own it, we just lived there because my dad worked for the place that it was for. But um… we were there and I’m like ‘this house has nobody in it. This is the house I grew up in. You guys wanna go inside?’ And it’s like yeah so we broke in. My friend picked the back door lock and we were walking around in this dark house at night. Um…and… we made it through most of the house. And we were like freaked out because it’s like a dark Victorian house and it’s like no furniture. It’s like freaky. Very little furniture. But we were pretty unfazed. However, we walked into that guest room and it was like 10 15 degrees colder than the surrounding air. We walked in and just immediately this blast of cold air and just chills and just compl-just this terrifying feeling.  And we’re like ‘okay we’re leaving’ and we like sprinted out. We sprinted down like the…the second floor stairwell and we left house and it’s just like ‘all right! That was terrifying’.Um…and so I I I have some experience. That one is the one where it has the most sort of…a number of people reported different experiences including myself. That one stands out to me as something where it’s like ‘that was uncomfortable…haha and there’s something going on here’.”

Interviewer: “And that was in Colorado?”

Informant: “Yes it was.”

Summary:

The informant doesn’t exactly believe in ghosts. He believes that there are indeed things that we perceive as ghosts but may not be ghosts as we know them. He has personal experience with a paranormal experience. In an old Victorian house that he grew up, there was a guest room that was painted completely white. Three different guests, completely unknown to one another, reported that when sleeping in the guest room, they would be woken up by an old man staring down at them. A worker also reported seeing the same old man walking down stairs and disappearing halfway down. However, these were all stories and nothing that the informant had experienced himself. Years after the informant moved out of that house, he and some friends visited the house again. Upon entering the room, the temperature was immediately 15 degrees lower and he had a terrifying feeling. I somewhat wish I could visit the house myself so that I could experience it for myself. I would like to experience something like this to be able to confirm my belief in ghosts or not. As for now, though, I’m still on the fence.