“I Was There”: True Stories of the Supernatural from My Family and Friends

Dear Readers,

I will vouch for the fact that each of the stories below is true based on my personal knowledge of the character of each person relating the events.

Unlike most “true stories” involving the supernatural, these don’t start off with, “This happened to a friend of mine,” or, “I knew a guy once who said this happened to his cousin.” These stories are told here as accurately as possible by those who experienced them.

Each story is creepier than the one before it. You might find some of the events so disturbing that you won’t want to finish reading the post. That’s up to you. I promise you, though, that these events happened as they are related here. This is not a stunt or a hoax.

My only regret is that none of them happened to me.

Rats.

Happy Halloween!

Steve

Sandi Duncan: “Bunny”

NOTE FROM STEVE: Sandi is my first cousin on my dad’s side, daughter of his brother Leo.

My mother’s name was Bonnie, and the grandchildren all called her “Mimi Bon.” But when great grandkids began to come along, there was some discussion as to what they should call her. She didn’t like “Great-Mimi” or “Great-Granny,” so in frustration she looked at her three-year-old great-grandson, Max, and said, “Well, buddy, I guess you can just call me Bonnie!” To which Max replied, “Your name is BUNNY?”

We all decided that name was PERFECT, and “Bunny” she became.

Kelly’s photo.

Toward the end of her life, Mother spent a couple of weeks in hospice care, and Max, who was then a teenager, felt especially grieved at the sight of her fragility. He prayed that Bunny would live to see her eighty-seventh birthday, and sure enough, we celebrated her birthday on May 15^th, 2018. She passed away the next day.

The story doesn’t end there, however. At the Hospice House, about an hour after Mother’s passing, my brother Kelly and I stepped outside, both weeping. Suddenly, Kelly drew in a deep breath and pointed at the grassy area right outside Mother’s hospice room. We watched through our tears as two tiny bunnies hopped right across our path and into a flowerbed. Kelly quickly pulled out his phone a got a picture as proof that Bunny was on her way home.

Kristie Skaggs: Our Poltergeist

The flying plaque.

NOTE FROM STEVE: Cindy and I have five children, four boys and one girl, all adults now. Here is an account from our daughter, who has always been a level-headed, intelligent person. You can trust that these events actually occurred—and are ongoing. By the way, the word “poltergeist” comes from the German word for “noisy spirit.” It refers to a mischievous ghost who makes noises or plays tricks on unsuspecting humans.

I lived for a couple of years in Minneapolis. I was there to help out with an inner-city ministry, and I roomed with three other young women, including my cousin Bethany.

We regularly had strange things occur around that old house, and once or twice we found odd collections of dried bones and other objects thrown onto our lawn. We suspected that some of our neighbors (it was a rough neighborhood) were trying to use some sort of magic against us to get rid of us.

So when Bethany and I moved to our current location—a clean, relatively new apartment in a nice area of Wooster, Ohio—we didn’t expect strange things to continue happening. But they did. However, our experiences here are different from Minnesota. In fact, Bethany and I are convinced we share our apartment with a poltergeist.

Why do we think this? Well, let me share some of our more memorable experiences from the last two-and-a-half years.

Watson (my one-hundred-pound
sweetheart of a newfiedoodle)

One of the first manifestations occurred one evening when Bethany and I were talking in the dining room. Watson (my one-hundred-pound sweetheart of a newfiedoodle) was out in the living room. Suddenly, a plaque in the dining room flew off the wall and landed about six feet away on the floor near the bathroom.

Bethany and I just stared at each other.

No one had been near it. No one had touched it. It hadn’t just fallen. It flew across the room by itself!

Another event: Bethany sleeps above the kitchen/dining room area in an open loft. Once she had a box of stuff sitting on the floor in her room. We were downstairs and heard a noise coming from her room. When Bethany went to check, no one was there . . . but some of the items had been removed from the box and were sitting on the floor next to it.

We’ve also had ongoing strange events with package deliveries and suspect our spooky little friend is at the root of the problem. Let me explain.

On numerous occasions we have opened our door—let’s say our apartment number is 36—to find a package outside addressed to a completely different apartment in our complex. And it wasn’t like the number was similar to ours, either, like 136, or 35, or 63. There was no rhyme or reason to the numbers. And time after time we had to take packages to the others’ apartments. Very frustrating!

Finally, we caught a delivery guy leaving a package at our door with someone else’s apartment number on it.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. So why are you leaving that here? It’s for a different apartment!”

“My app says I’m supposed to leave it here.” He showed us. Sure enough, his app said, “Leave package for apartment 247 outside apartment 36.”

That’s weird enough if it happens once, but it could be some sort of odd computer glitch, or someone could have entered the wrong information into the app. But it kept happening again and again. Later we stopped and questioned another delivery guy who was doing the same thing. Same story: “My app says I’m to leave any packages for apartment 12 outside apartment 36.”

Now, here’s the catch: The original apartment numbers were different on each package—it didn’t matter what apartment the package was to go to, the app rerouted it to us. And the delivery companies were different from each other. How in the world could our apartment number have become a drop-off point for any apartment in our complex regardless of whether the package was coming from the postal service, UPS, FedEx, or Amazon? It’s impossible . . . unless someone is playing a prank on us. But how would that person change the information in all those delivery services’ apps? Every time we lugged someone else’s package to their door, was a spooky little face watching us, giggling with his spooky little hand over his spooky little mouth?

Here’s another odd-but-true story. This one falls in the category of “lights that turn on and off for no reason.” Light fixtures in our apartment turn on or off by themselves so regularly that we hardly notice anymore. For example, just last month, Bethany, Watson, and I were standing in the kitchen, and a string of decorative lights by the front door turned on. They can be turned on only with a remote control—and there it sat, on the couch, several feet away from all of us, untouched.

That kind of thing is typical and hardly worth mentioning. But this next “lights” story is a little more mysterious than that.

Video grab of the lighted decoration the night
it turned itself on. Pardon poor quality!

For my birthday Bethany had put up a little hot-air balloon decoration on the wall. In the basket below it was one of those tiny battery-powered votive candles that you can turn on and off, and on top of the candle was a ball of cotton to diffuse the light.

At some point Bethany had removed the candle to put a Funko Pop character in the basket for a little “balloon ride.” Later she took him out but did not return the candle to the basket.

One evening a week or so after that, we realized that the candle was back in the basket and was turned on. And Bethany had been sitting in the living room all evening—neither she nor I had gone close to the decoration!

Bethany made a video recording of me trying to figure it out: “There’s a great big thick cotton ball on top. So you have to take the cotton ball out, pick up the candle, turn the switch on, put it back, and put the cotton ball back. I’m just saying, what other explanation is there? No one else comes over, except Connor [my boyfriend], but he hasn’t been here. So, what other explanation is there—other than a ghost?”

I’ll share one more memorable event that happened this past June. Beth and I were sitting quietly at home in the evening. Watson was sleeping on the couch—until he lifted his head up very cautiously and stared at the stairs leading up to the loft. Suddenly he jumped up, ran over to the gate at the foot of the stairs, and started barking like crazy. Trying to figure out what in the world was bothering him, Bethany let him through the gate so he could go upstairs. He went halfway up and started barking at a space near the wall. Nothing was there—at least, nothing that we could see. Not a mouse or a bug or a speck, but Watson for sure saw something and was losing his mind.

Just then a bag of coffee on the other side of the apartment fell over. So Watson started barking at an empty space in that area. Finally he followed “it” to the door, where I’m guessing it eventually left, because he quieted down and came over to us all proud of himself and wanted to play.

Oddly enough, we’ve never found these experiences scary, maybe because we got used to them in Minnesota. Our poltergeist tends to be a prankster; it clearly has no ill intent. Now, if I saw someone or something supernatural, that would freak me out, I’m pretty sure!

Eric Skaggs: Evil Inside the Door

NOTE FROM STEVE: Eric is one of my three younger brothers. I’m not sure which one he is—they all look alike to me. It doesn’t really matter, though, since they all wish they were me anyway. Aimee is his longsuffering wife.

When Aimee and I were first married, before we had kids, we lived in a mobile home on Crawford Street in Fredericksburg, Ohio. It was in pretty bad shape, but the price was right. In fact, it was so inexpensive to live there that we were able to save up enough money for a down payment on the first home we purchased.

We never had any paranormal experiences while we lived there—except for one autumn evening in the early 1990s.

We came home one night after dark and, as usual, walked up to the side door on our trailer. The door was lit by a street light, and a breeze whipped some crisp, brown leaves around our ankles. I went to put my key in the door, and I suddenly got a feeling of foreboding. I don’t normally get that kind of feeling. It felt almost like what people call a “premonition.” All I could think was, “There’s something evil inside this door that’s waiting for me.” Initially I thought maybe someone had broken in and was robbing us. I hesitated and looked at Aimee.

“Does something feel kind of weird to you?”

I was hoping she would say, “No, brrrrr! Let’s get inside!” But she didn’t.

“Yeah,” she said, looking up at me seriously. “Something’s not right.”

“Wait here while I go in and check things out.”

It was a small trailer, so I was able to check it quickly. There was nobody there—it was all locked up, and everything was fine. False alarm, maybe? I thought.

I told Aimee to come in, and we started getting ready for bed . . . but something still just wasn’t right. It was something we couldn’t really express, but the place just felt “wrong,” and it was scaring us. We got into bed and prayed silently and then tried to sleep. Neither of us could. It felt like there was somebody—an evil presence—in the house with us, waiting for . . . what?

“Maybe if we pray out loud, it will go away, and we’ll feel better,” Aimee suggested. That sounded like a great idea to me!

So right there in bed, lying face-down, we prayed out loud. Aimee went first, and then I started. As I prayed, I felt the gentle touch of a hand on my back. That’s Aimee, I thought, trying to encourage me. It really comforted me.

When we finished praying, I looked over at Aimee. Her arms were under her, and her hands were tucked up under her chin. I couldn’t figure that out.

“Did you have your hand on my back?”

“No, I’ve been laying like this the whole time.”

“That’s weird.”

“What?”

“I felt a hand on my back while I was praying—not evil, but kind of comforting. I thought it was you!”

Just then Aimee sat up and looked out into the hallway. Recently, recalling what she saw, she said, “I saw a light out there, like the reflection of a headlight, but I knew there was no way it could have been from a car—there was no window there to allow light through. The light was hard to describe—it was golden and glittered, and it had a bright stripe moving back and forth across it. It sounds silly, but the best way I can describe it is that it was sort of like fairy dust from a Disney movie.”

Interestingly, neither the hand on my back nor the brief appearance of light in the hallway frightened us. After we prayed out loud, we both felt peace. We felt that the Lord was with us and that the “evil presence” was gone.

Tom Sanders: Raising the Table

NOTE FROM STEVE: Tom Sanders* is a coworker and a good friend of mine. He’s a South Carolina boy through and through (“Go Clemson!”), and he’s an excellent raconteur. (Tom, “raconteur” means “storyteller.”) A while back he told me the following true story from his childhood, and I asked him to write it up so I could include it here.

* Because the actual writer wishes to remain anonymous, I have used “Tom Sanders” as a pseudonym.

“Raising the table” at a seance.

Back in the early 1970s when I was twelve or younger, my parents and extended family participated in an activity they called “raising the table.” They considered it harmless fun, like an alternative to playing a board game or card game, and it had been passed down through my family for at least three or four generations.

A family gathering was the typical setting for the activity. It always occurred after dark when everyone was just relaxing and talking. Someone would ask, “Do y’all want to raise the table?” If there was enough interest, someone would bring a square table (usually a small kitchen table) and four chairs to the middle of the living room. One person sat on each of the four sides. They placed their hands in the middle of the table with their fingers spread out and touching each other. Then the process would begin.

There could be no noise in the room (no TV, radio, or kids playing). Someone would serve as the speaker to coax the table into rising. In the many times I saw it done, only two people successfully raised the table—my father and my Great-Aunt Minnie. Other participants—a mix of family and friends—tried, but they were never successful.

I was always frightened of Great-Aunt Minnie. She had had many paranormal experiences over the years, the most notable of which occurred before I was born. Arriving at their house in a near panic, she told her brother and sister-in-law that their newborn baby was going to die—she said she knew it because a voice in her house had told her so. On the day she warned the family, nothing happened. But two days later, for no discernible reason, his parents—my grandparents—found the child dead in his crib.

Anyway, at the typical table raising, the speaker (either Dad or Great-Aunt Minnie) would say a few words and would ask the table to rise if “it” was truly present and willing to answer questions this evening. There were times when the table wouldn’t rise, and the participants would just give up and move to some other activity. However, most of the time “it” was present, and one end of the table would slowly rise and remain suspended. Sometimes it would rise only two or three inches, sometimes a foot or more.

It’s important to recognize that all eight hands were flat on the tabletop, and all eight feet were firmly on the floor. No human could possibly have been lifting the table in any way.

The leader would ask the table to lower and knock the floor once for “yes” or to just stay suspended if the answer was “no.” Then he or she would begin asking general questions, such as “Did it rain today?” or “Will we have fun on vacation next week?” Then the leader would get more specific. He would ask things like the sex of an unborn baby or the outcome of a potential job promotion. Since many of these questions were lighthearted, like those that one would ask of a Magic 8 Ball, I don’t remember much about the accuracy of any of those answers.

But some experiences I remember clearly because they creeped me out then, and they still do today. One of the most amazing and frightening things that I witnessed was the table’s ability to count the money in people’s pockets. Dad or Aunt Minnie would ask the people in the room who weren’t seated at the table if they had any money in their pockets. If someone answered that he did, the leader told the person to leave it in his pockets and would then ask the table to count it out. For example, the leader asked the table to knock to indicate the number of each denomination of bills; then he or she would ask about coins. I witnessed this experiment on many occasions. The amount predicted was always accurate.

But the most amazing example of raising the table involved my dad’s lost wallet. Dad had lost it a week earlier at a neighborhood park a few miles from our house. He was the leader that night, so he asked the table if someone had found it. The table knocked once: “yes.”

Was the person honest? “Yes.”

Would the person admit to finding the wallet? “Yes.”

Did the person live nearby? “Yes.”

My dad then began naming streets in our neighborhood, asking the table to knock when he named the street where the person lived. Once the table had identified the street, he asked the table to specify the actual address by knocking out the numbers. Now we had the complete address.

This table raising occurred on a Friday evening. The following morning I went with my dad to the address the table had specified. A man answered the door, and my dad asked if he had recently found a wallet. Yes, he had—and he handed it to Dad with nothing missing from it.

Before we left, the man asked my father how he knew to come to this house.

Dad lied: “Well, we been asking around the park to see if anyone knew anything about it, and somebody pointed your house out to us.” I guess Dad was too embarrassed to say, “The kitchen table told us!”

Soon after my parents became Christians they stopped participating in the activity and would leave if someone was going to raise the table. But Aunt Minnie, who still frightened me and whose house I would never visit after dark, continued doing it successfully.

Over the years I asked my father about these events many times. His answers were always the same: (1) It wasn’t a trick. (2) The answers were mostly correct, but not always. And (3) he believed it was of the Devil.

Copyright 2022, Steve Skaggs