Join Me In The Loony Bin - Tell Your Ghost Story
I’ve been watching the flood of TV shows lately that are centered on the paranormal. While I enjoy them for some unexplainable reason, I have to say that I can dismiss every one of them as either coincidence or pure crap. But I do have one experience that happened back in 1971 that makes me absolutely sure there is something going on that we don’t know about.
If anybody cares to read it and at the risk if being tagged as the resident loony, here ya go...
I grew up in New Jersey. When I was 21, I had a friend with 2 small children who rented the top floor of a 2 story house in Parsippany. The place was supposedly haunted. There had been a recent suicide in the house and several urban myths about strange things that had happened there over the years, but we didn’t believe in that crap, nor did we care. Back then we were all 10 feet tall and bulletproof, and as far as she was concerned the rent was really cheap.
She had a brother who had died at the age of 10 of cancer and she had hung a chalk portrait of him in the living room. She swore that every once in a while it would seem to “come alive,” looking more like a photograph than a drawing, that he would smile and that his eyes would follow her as she moved. She also claimed that she felt his presence around her. She decided that she was going to try to contact him using a Ouija board, so a bunch of us got together one night and started trying to contact him using the board.
She was on one side of the board and I was on the other with a couple of friends looking on. She asked if someone was there and the results were almost immediate. The pointer moved to “YES.” She asked who was there and the pointer spelled out her brother’s name.
The pointer had started moving slowly at first, but the more we “talked” the quicker it would move until we were literally having a flowing conversation with her brother. Being on one side of the board I was sure that it was something she was doing. So I suggested that she get up, let someone else sit down and she ask a question that only her brother would know the answer to. This is when things started getting spooky.
The question was what thing had she put in her brother’s coffin after everyone had left the viewing and before it was taken out of the funeral home to the cemetery. Immediately the board spelled out “BASEBALL.” Her reaction told us all that the board was exactly correct. She then asked if he was watching through the picture and it went to “YES.” As an experiment we took a drivers license from someone, held it up in front of the picture and asked if it could read the number. At the time in NJ, driver license numbers consisted of a series of 15 numbers and letters. The board immediately spelled out the series of 15 numbers and letters correctly.
After that, conversations with her brother became a nightly occurrence. Over the next week or so there were several people at the house every night talking with her brother. Then one night things changed.
There were 4 or 5 of us sitting around “talking” and all of a sudden the board took on a completely different personality. It started to threaten the people in the room. It spelled out “I WILL HURT YOU.” I asked who it was going to hurt and it started to spell out my name… “M..A..R..” At that point my friend took the pointer and flung it off the board.
Now, something she had never told anyone was that she had refused to sleep in her bedroom after about the first week of her moving into the place. She later confessed that she had seen apparitions in the room and it was always very cold. As soon as the pointer hit the ground a hook and loop hasp that she had installed on the bedroom door (supposedly so she could lock it from the outside) flipped up and the door swung open with such force that it put a hole in the wall where the doorknob hit. Simultaneously, her two children who had been asleep in their room started crying and screaming in their sleep. We ran into their room and tried to wake them, but they would not awaken. She went and got a crucifix and tried to command that whatever was making the children scream leave, but the children continued to cry and scream in their sleep. Two of the people who were there picked up the Ouija board and the pointer, and as soon as they put the pointer on the board the kids stopped screaming and immediately fell asleep as if nothing had happened. Later when their mom asked if they remembered any bad dreams, they said they had no memory of anything strange happening.
Needless to say, that was the last we used the Ouija board, but things didn’t stop there. A couple of nights later I was over there and while I was on the floor watching TV I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. I looked up and saw what appeared to be the torso of a man floating. He had on a red plaid shirt (I have no idea what that was about) dark black hair and coal black eyes. He hovered for a second or two, and then just disappeared.
I was working in a band at the time, and the next night I got back to my apartment at about 3 AM. Back then I had a rather unique answering machine. There was a device that sat between the handset and the cradle of the old telephones, and when the phone rang a solenoid would pop up, lifting the handset about ˝ inch, and a microphone and speaker situated under the mouthpiece and earpiece would play a message and record a response. (That has nothing to do with this story; I just think it’s interesting.) Anyway, I noticed that the red light was on and the handset was up, so I picked up the phone to see who was calling at 3 in the morning. It was my friend and all she said was “Please come over.” The tone of her voice sent a chill through me to the point where I didn’t even ask what was going on, I just dropped the phone, got in the car and drove over (about a 3 minute drive.)
I walked up the stairs and the door was open so I went in. She was sitting on the floor in the kitchen hiding behind the refrigerator. All she said was “the picture.” I looked at the picture and saw something that looked nothing like the chalk drawing of her brother. It was a scowling face that I could only describe as pure evil.
I took the picture off the wall and slid it behind the refrigerator so it was facing the wall. We gathered up the kids and they stayed at my place for a couple of weeks until she was able to find another place to move to.
On moving day we had a couple of pick-ups and a bunch of people helping. We had gotten everything out of the apartment except for a rug that was rolled up on the floor. I and another guy started walking up the stairs. We had left the door to the apartment open as we were moving things out. Everyone was outside waiting until we got the last item out. As we got within a few steps of the top, the door slammed shut and we could hear something being dragged on the other side of the door. It could have been the rug, or it could have been something else. We didn’t stick around to find out and as far as I know that rug is still in the apartment.
After that we sought out advice from a psychic. She said that it was possible that we had been speaking to my friend’s brother and something stronger eventually took over. She instructed that we go through a ceremony that involved burning the Ouija board and burying the pointer with a white candle. It sounds like a load of crap today, but back then we didn’t question her advice, we just did it.
So, do I believe there’s something out there? Well, yeah! I also believe that there are places we aren’t meant to go and things we aren’t supposed to explore. That was the first and last time I ever played around with the supernatural and it was the last experience I ever had.
Granted, almost 40 years have passed, but I promise that this is exactly the way I remember it happening… no changes and no embellishes.
Now, anybody else wanna join me in the loony bin?
