B1. Real Ghost Stories Happening to Us!

So, we lived in an old house in England. The house was about 300 years old.

"My house was probably older than anything in America."

"Yeah, most things."

"Yeah."

The neighbour came and she said that there was a spirit in the new house that my family moved into. I was about 15, so I do remember it. The spirit was of an old man — so the neighbour said.

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One time when everyone was out, I was the only one in the house. My bedroom was on the top floor, and I could hear footsteps slowly coming up the stairs, but also the sound of what sounded like a cane. A cane is an old man's stick, like an old man uses to help them walk.

So I could hear the old man's cane, which was tapping lightly on the floor, and the stepping up the stairs was like… but then there would be a third sound of the cane, right? It was like a — it's a slow walking, and then the cane kind of…

And it was getting closer and closer to my bedroom door. And I was thinking, "Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god." And I hid under my bed sheets. I was hiding under the bed sheets as the footsteps got closer and closer.

By this time I was fully covered in sweat, completely wet, a nervous sweat, as the footsteps got to my door. And I was thinking, "Oh my god, this is it. I'm finished."

How you respond to paranormal experiences is with fear, because it's the unknown. You know, it's something completely new that you only hear about in movies where the worst things happen.

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"Did you know it was paranormal at first, or did you think somebody was in the house?"

Well, I was alone in the house for like two or three days and everyone else was gone. And I knew that. But it was the rhythm of the footsteps — that boom, boom, boom, boom — and the kind of little ticking sound of the cane that confirmed to me that was no one in my family. But also, it's not an intruder. All the doors were closed and there was no sign of the intruder.

As it got closer and closer, I was fully covered in sweat, and it got to my door. And then, just as I thought it was going to enter — after two minutes, nothing. After five minutes, nothing. After ten minutes, nothing. And I just went downstairs and kind of looked around. And I didn't sleep in that room for like three days after.

"No, that's — how many minutes later do you open the door?"

Yeah, for me it was about ten minutes. And I remember opening the door like, kind of, "I'm not afraid, I'm going to get it" — like kind of adrenaline, you know? It's just like, whoever's in the house, like, you… I might have even been holding like a baseball bat or something. I was kind of like, right, I have to investigate this. After ten minutes. But I didn't see anything. I didn't see anyone.

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A more physical thing happened in that house, and that was in the same bedroom while I was cleaning my room. I was next to the bookshelf and I bent down to pick up something, and — no joke — a book flew out of the bookshelf across the whole room and hit a wall about twice as far as that wall. So across the room, about eight foot away.

Yeah, a book fully shot out over my head, out of the shelf, over my head, and hit the wall. And it was then that I didn't return to that room for three days. I slept downstairs in the living room after that happened.

But in hindsight, what I should have done is seen what book it was, or the page which it had opened to, and to maybe try and find a deeper meaning. But I was only 15 at the time.

"So maybe something wanted your help."

That's right. Maybe.

And another time I had my acoustic guitar in the corner of the room, and just — not just a light strum, but like an aggressive, loud strum of the guitar happened as well. So that was pretty mad.

"The part with the book is very scary. The steps up the stairs, I'm getting like goosebumps. And then when you talk about the book, it's really like — I felt the jump of the book hitting the wall even though there's no book in here. There's not even a book in this room."

Yeah, I felt like… So I'm not sure if that was the old man spirit that apparently lived in the house, but who knows? Maybe, as I said, it was a very old house. Maybe there's multiple entities.

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Next, my dad — my father is from Italy and he has a house over there. And I knew that one of my friends in Italy, he told me that his grandmother died in that house.

But I was sleeping one night in the — we have a big bedroom upstairs and there's three beds in it. And sometime during the night, before I went to sleep, maybe about 11:00 p.m., midnight, suddenly the bottom half of the bed just went down, and all the springs of the bed just went down, like with the full force and weight of someone sitting on the bed. Like my legs went down with it. There was something sitting on the bed with me.

Yeah. And so again, I went downstairs and I slept in the living room for two weeks actually, like listening to a podcast with the light on. And this was about maybe nine years ago, so I was like 29, 30 years old.

Interestingly enough, a good friend of mine came to visit and he was like, "Well, man, what bedroom am I staying in?" And I was like, "Oh, you can have the upstairs bedroom." I didn't say anything about a ghost.

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But the next morning, as he walked down the stairs to my friend Nikki, he says in his monotonous voice, he's like, "Your room is haunted." And as he came down the stairs for breakfast, he says, "Your room is haunted." And I didn't say anything to him about my ghost experience in that room. And I was like, "Why is that?" And he said, "Something touched my foot."

"That's the worst thing that can happen."

Yeah, that's the most scary thing that can happen when you're lying in a bed. So something stroked his foot in the same room that something sat on my bed. And there's been a couple of times in that room previously where I felt like there was some kind of something else in the room with me. But then when something sat on my bed, that confirmed that there was some kind of entity in that room.

Do you have any more ghost stories, or should I go on?

"Yeah, I've got a couple. The one—"

Okay, go on then.

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"Joseph. Joseph, your book one. So, nothing with me — like, my mother. Your book one reminded me of her book one.

So she's a teacher and she was teaching in a high school. She was taking a nap during her lunch break under the desk, lights off, and a gust of wind came through the room, and she had a stack of books on the table — knocked a bunch of books off. So many books were knocked off. Half of the stack was knocked off, so the top half.

And I mean, wind isn't that powerful. Books are heavy."

Yeah, so it's not — a paper is one thing, like a full book is, you know, something else. I didn't even think about that.

"Yeah, that's a good point. For wind to blow books over — I was just, not possible."

Yeah, unless it's like a hurricane or a tornado or something.

"Exactly. In a room with no windows. So halfway down the stack, the book was open — the last book that was left was opened, and she looked at it, and it was open to the page number of the room she was in. And that freaked her out. She's like, 'What?'

So she went and turned on the lights, went to pick up the books, and she saw that one was open to the page number. She closed the book. That book was called Ghosts."

Whoa, that is a mad coincidence.

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"And she's had a lot of things in her classrooms. She has this weird one, that it's happened in the same seat four years in a row. So either a weird coincidence, or a message to her.

So in the same seat four years in a row, this strange thing has happened. Oh — on the same day of the school year. The unit is called El Autobús, the school bus, and she's a Spanish teacher, so it's a Spanish book.

So as soon as the kids open the book to the page in El Autobús, the girl in one chair — the first year it's not weird — her name is Caroline. Her phone rings, but it doesn't ring. Music starts playing. I don't know if you know these iPhones, sometimes they'll just randomly start playing your iTunes music. She says, 'Oh, I'm so sorry, you know, Miss Lewis, I'll turn it off. I'm so sorry, I didn't mean for it to ring.' 'Okay, no problem.' 'I thought I had my phone off.'

The next year, on the very same lesson, a girl in that same seat named Caroline — when they open to El Autobús, her phone goes off, starts playing music. And my mom at that moment is freaked out. She's like, 'I cannot believe — a second Caroline, same lesson, same circumstance, two years in a row.'

The third year, she's telling the story of what had happened the two years before, and the boy sitting in that seat, he says, 'Oh, my aunt just died and her name is Caroline.' Which it doesn't really fit in, but it's a weird coincidence. Same day, it's the Autobús lesson day, that he mentions that.

Fourth year, when they open to Autobús, an old picture — like an old school photograph from the 50s or 60s of a child — slides out of the book onto the kid's desk. And these books are new, they were printed in the 2000s. But this picture slides out, same desk. And they look at the picture. The last name is blurry, but the first name of the child is Caroline.

Something — maybe she thinks something has been following her from school to school, because I don't know what it is. We did some experimentation — like, not experimentation, but investigation — trying to find, was there a Caroline who died in a bus crash? When my mom told me and my wife this story, we did a lot of investigations, Googled all these murders in Texas, Caroline. And I think if we had stuck with it for a couple weeks… but it was just one of those ghost story nights where we're very excited."

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So these are different signs of different kinds. And one of my best friends in England, him and his mother told me a story kind of similar to what you were saying.

Basically, the grandmother of the family was very sick and was in the hospital. And when they left her that night, they said, "If you pass away, if tonight is your last night, if this is the last time we see you, give us a sign."

And that family, they woke up in the morning and all of the clocks in the house had stopped at 1:20 a.m. Even the digital watch of his sister stopped. It was like 1:22 or something like that. And they went to the special part of the hospital where people go to die, basically, and the nurse said that the time of death was then.

"Oh yeah."

And that's — like, the whole family told me that story. But they've told me quite a few ghost stories.

Another one they said, there was like a random bald man in their kitchen, and they were watching TV, and he just looked like a British skinhead, like about 40 years old. He just kind of wandered out of the kitchen and looked at them, and they were all watching TV, and then he just was just like… and then he just kind of walked back into the kitchen and disappeared. They've got some other stories for those.

"Full-bodied person, or like a—"

A full-bodied. They just said like a bald man came out of the kitchen and looked at them, and they all looked at each other just like, "Who's that?" Then he just disappeared. But they referred to him as a ghost, not an intruder. They seem to all have established that it was a ghost.

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Another one for you is our friend. I won't say his real name, but let's call him Chris. He's the one who's getting married next month.

So when he'd sleep with his current girlfriend, he said that this spirit, a ghost, an entity, used to follow them wherever they lived. He lived with me for four years in different places, and I'd be a bit like, "Oh god, is this spirit going to come to our next house?" It did. It came to like three different houses of ours. So this is one of my best friends, you know.

So anyway, the spirit would watch them, like, sleep — like they knew it was in the room. And he says twice it pinned him down. He's a big guy. Pinned him down, meaning some entity held him down in the bed tightly so he could not move.

And she says that it's possibly the ghost of an old lover or soulmate from maybe like a past life, or some presence that deeply cares about her. And then let's call him Chris, he said he communicated with the spirit: "I will look after her, I will protect her, you know, she will have a good life. Do not worry, like, she's in good hands." And he kind of communicated that to the entity. And obviously he's a good man, and he's provided — they're getting married soon and they have a kid now and a happy life. And yeah, the entity has left them alone.

"Could be like a racist grandfather who doesn't want to see the girl in a multiracial…"

But yeah, that freaked me out. And as I said, I lived with them in three different apartments. This ghost would follow us and I'd be like, "Oh no, the ghost will be here."

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"I was just out in the desert of Texas, as I told you recently, filming out on a ranch. There were some places on the ranch where there had been battles between the Comanche, a Native American tribe, and some white settlers. And there had been some pretty brutal murder, butchery, raiding, all of that stuff. Extreme violence."

Extreme violence, that's a way to put it.

"Yeah, there had been some extreme violence. And it wasn't too far from their house — it's about a quarter mile from the house, which is not far when you're on just open desert land. Which means that it could have also happened at their house, you know. That's old land. All kinds of things could have happened there.

And when we were telling these ghost stories, the ones that I just told you, my buddy there, he couldn't listen to it. He's like, 'No, I don't really believe in ghosts, but I can't listen to these stories because weird stuff happens here.' And he said he lived in a house next to his mother's house, but his stepfather's father stayed with them one night, and the next morning he said, 'I'm never going in that house again.'"

Okay. Did he ever say why?

"He wouldn't say why."

Does he do the real southern American man thing, and just not say his feelings and, "I'll stay somewhere else, buddy"?

"Yeah. So that's what he told us. He said, 'That's why I can't listen to any of these stories. It freaks me out. Please stop telling ghost stories. Let's talk about the stars, let's talk about history.' So we had to change the subject. And I mean, you know, I respect that. He has to live there, I don't. And it means something weird has happened. But you know, when they won't talk about it, it leaves your mind free to think of all of the things that could have happened."

It leaves a lot to the imagination. Yeah.

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If you're enjoying our ghost stories in B1 English, please give the podcast a five-star rating. And also, feel free to share your own ghost stories in the comments. Ooh — Joseph has an amazing YouTube channel and that is in the description, and he shows you all about nature and history in the USA.

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Young children going to the graveyard to see their deceased — meaning deceased means dead — like their dead father's grave or mother's grave. And they start laughing and chatting and they look like they're hugging something. And the living adult of the family is like, "Who are you talking to? Who are you talking to?" And they're just like, "Da, da, da." And this happens more often than you think.

Someone's in people's houses, like the toddler — toddler means a very young kid who's like three or four.

"A toddler. The toddler would—"

Yeah, just be interacting, fully interacting with grandma or, you know, mommy or whoever, as if they're there.

"I haven't been around young kids in a house, but that would freak me out."

So some family member told me — it was either my mom or my grandmother — that when I was a kid, a toddler, I would see a woman at the end of my bed. There were reports of me talking about this. So that's quite peculiar. Peculiar means strange, weird.

"In Vietnam, they have this phenomenon that is well known enough that they have a term for it. I can't remember the term in Vietnamese, but I think it translates to 'hidden by a ghost.' And a kid will go missing, and everyone in the neighbourhood — or the village, more likely — will be looking for the kid. They'll be looking out in the fields. Of course they looked all over the house, they look in the neighbours'. Can't find the kid anywhere. And then they come home and the kid will just be sitting in the chair or under the table or somewhere in plain sight. And they'll say, 'Where have you been all this time?' And the kid will say, 'I was just right here. You were walking all around me. I was just right here the whole time.'"

Whoa. Awesome. Well, on that note, have an amazing day, an amazing week, and — well, if you meet any ghosts, good luck.