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Window in the middle of the floor at the Winchester Mystery House. photo by Kala Ambrose

“The tender word forgotten, The letter you did not write, The flower you might have sent, dear, Are your haunting ghosts tonight” – Margaret Elizabeth Sangster

You’ve heard of haunted houses, but what about a house designed by the haunted to keep the ghosts at bay?

In San Jose, California, a house just of this nature exists. It all began back in 1862, when Sarah Pardee married William Wirt Winchester, the manufacturer of the infamous Winchester repeating rifle. Sarah gave birth to a daughter Annie, who soon died from marasmus at only 42 days old. This fact is intriguing, as marasmus is caused by a lack of nutrients, displayed as energy deficiency (wasting away). Could the haunting of Sarah by spirits, already been around her at this time, depleting her energy and resources while pregnant? Her husband William later died from tuberculosis. Alone and grief stricken after losing her only child and husband, Sarah journeyed to Boston to speak with a spiritualist medium, seeking advice on why her life had been filled with such great misfortune.

The spiritualist medium reportedly told Sarah that she was haunted by the spirits of hundreds of ghosts, the spirits of those who had been killed by a Winchester repeating rifle. These spirits included soldiers from the Civil War, Native Americans and cowboys in the Wild West.

The medium went on to explain that in order to escape the continued hauntings, Sarah would need to move out west and to build a house. The house would not be an normal type of house, rather the construction must never cease. According to the medium, as long as construction was ongoing in the home, it would keep the angry spirits disoriented, while providing a place for the good spirits to commune with Sarah and protect her from further danger. In addition, the architectural design was meant to be complicated and confusing in order to vex and confuse the angry spirits, which would distract them from finding and further haunting Sarah. Sarah took this advice to heart and moved from Connecticut to San Jose, California and bought over 160 acres of land, where she began and continued construction on a home, which is now referred to as the Winchester Mystery House.

After her husband’s death, Sarah received twenty million dollars along with shares of stock in the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. It is reported that the dividends that she received averaged about one thousand dollars a day, along with her millions in the bank. This was in the late 1800′s, into 1900′s, when there was no income tax and the average rate of pay was less than a dollar a day. Read the rest of this entry »

Located on the West Coast, this isolated lighthouse has a beautiful story to share.

July 2011

by Rosemary Ellen Guiley

Mary Pesonen was only six months away from a brand new life, but even that short amount of time seemed too long for the pain and hopeless that had engulfed her.  Early one morning, she decided to bring an end to everything by hurling herself off a cliff into the Pacific Ocean.  Did she have second thoughts and regrets as she made her fatal plunge?  Perhaps, for her ghost is believed to haunt the grounds where she lived and died, at the North Head Lighthouse near the fishing port of Ilwaco, Washington.

The life and tragic death of Mary Watson Pesonen in 1923 caught my attention during a summer trip to the southwest Washington Coast with my sister, Linda, and brother-in-law, Ted.  Ilwaco lies near the base of a long spit of land on the north side of the immense mouth of the Columbia River, which forms the border between Washington and Oregon.  The coastal waters are treacherous and the bar has dangerous currents and sand bars.  The area is known as “the graveyard of the Read the rest of this entry »

Even baboons believe in ghosts.

October 1999

by John Keel

African farmers are often plagued by tribes of baboons who mess with their crops and raise general havoc because of their often mean disposition. You would not want a group of them in your own backyard. But how do you get rid of a mob of baboons humanely?

The African colonists once adopted an ancient system of anti-baboonery. They would trap one of the creatures, paint it from head to toe with harmless whitewash, and send it scrambling back to its tribal area. Its mates would then take one look at this eerie white intruder, start howling, and run away as fast as possible. They would keep running, leaving him far Read the rest of this entry »

My Proof of Survival about friendship beyond the grave.

February 2000

by Don M. Johnson

Dr. Lora G. Anderson was my best friend and metaphysical cohort. For nearly twenty years, I stepped outside of my profession of architecture and managed our mutual business in Lewiston, Idaho. In the early 1980s we moved to Southern California and affiliated with a metaphysical church in Woodland Hills—The Sanctuary of Revelations, Inc. Dr. Barry Lane, founder and current minister of the Sanctuary, is an enlightened teacher, as well as a psychic and trance medium. Read the rest of this entry »

A collection of reports regarding ghosts, phantoms and Bigfoot wearing distinctly patterned clothing.

April 2011

by Robert A. Goerman

For me, the very essence of the strange and unknown boils down to encounters between man and mystery, without the baggage of belief. Some of us have seen the windmill blink. We will never be the same. As if ghosts, bedroom phantoms, enigmatic visitors, and Bigfoot were not weird enough on their own, what are we to make of encounters where these same anomalies dress in plaid or checkered fabrics? We define plaid or checkered here as any fabric with stripes or bars of various colors and widths that cross at right angles. A true plaid has the same pattern when you rotate it ninety degrees. Try plugging the word “ghost” along with “plaid shirt” or Read the rest of this entry »

My Proof of Survival

January 2002

by Mary R. Crawford

In 1990, Wilburn Heath purchased a couple of acres on the outskirts of Scottsboro. The area was quiet and seemed to be an ideal retirement site. He and Nina, his wife of 30 years, were making plans for their “laid back” years, which would be coming in the near future. Wilburn immediately began building the small, compact house that they both had agreed upon. It was at the stage that it could be lived in, but was lacking the finishing touches and trim work. He had completed a very large building which he intended to use for storage and for a workshop. After retirement, he planned to do some small jobs just to keep from getting bored. Wilburn was a mechanic by trade and had a habit of trading for junk car parts. He had hauled in loads of these items to the point that the lots were overflowing.

Right in the midst of their preparation for retirement, Nina was diagnosed with breast cancer. Although she fought a hard battle, she was taken from him within a period of six months. Wilburn was devastated and attempted to Read the rest of this entry »

The ghost of Maria Roux.

November/December 2008

by Jason Day

Tales of phantom hitchhikers and road ghosts span the centuries; since the invention of transport, there have been numerous reports of spectral figures with unfinished business to attend to, or a journey they must complete that was cut tragically short.

As a consequence of the volume of reports amassed over such a long period of time, some of the more remarkable of these encounters are forgotten. The following account is one such haunting.

Tragic Accident

On Good Friday, March 1968, a young couple were driving along the Barandas-Willomere Road in the Karoo Desert, 200 miles east of Cape Town, South Africa. Maria Roux and her fiancé were driving to her parents’ house to discuss plans for their upcoming wedding. As they traveled along the N9 towards Uniondale, high winds began, quickly becoming so fierce they blew the car across the road. Maria’s fiancé lost control of the car and careened into a ditch. Although her fiancé Read the rest of this entry »

This rare story is about the ghost of the famous president. Actually, there seems to be evidence that Mr. Lincoln himself was quite mystic. It is said he dreamed his Emancipation Proclamation.

Summer 1948

by E. Sagerquist

Summer 1948- Vol. 1, No. 2

CARL SCHURZ, the great German-American statesman, was a close friend of Abraham Lincoln.
He had taken part in the Illinois campaign between Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, and in 1861 he
was sent by Lincoln to be minister to Spain. He soon resigned this post and returned to the
United States to join the Union Army with the rank of major-general of volunteers.

After Lincoln’s death, President Johnson summoned him to Washington. On his way there he
stopped off in Philadelphia to visit his close friend, Doctor Tiedemann. Tiedemann’s father was
a renowned professor of medicine in the University of Heidelberg. Mrs. Tiedemann’s brother was
Frederick Hecker, a famous revolutionary leader Read the rest of this entry »

My Proof of Survival: The Bloody Hand Print and South Minneapolis

June 2002

by Warren Brewer

My mother died in 1965 of lung cancer. About a year later, my father died of a heart attack. A month or so after my father’s death, a neighbor came through the back door for a visit. She asked me who the man in the bedroom was. But there was no one in the bedroom.

Several times while leaving or arriving at the house, a large man’s figure was seen moving in front of the window. Searches of the house were relentless, but there was no man in the house.

Then one night, I was going up the front steps of the house with my fiancée when a loud slapping sound was heard. My fiancée screamed Read the rest of this entry »

Ghosting group delves into the frighteningly active historical site and contemporary art gallery.

January 8, 2011: 7 pm – midnight

518 2^nd Street SE, Minneapolis, MN 55414
by Christine Goodrich

The History of the Soap Factory:

The Soap Factory is located in the historic Marcy-Holmes neighborhood in Minneapolis. It was first part of St. Anthony, incorporated in

In the lower left hand corner a faint shadow of a person appears. At the time of the picture being taken there was no one present in the basement.

1855, which is located to the east of the Mississippi River. St. Anthony was eventually absorbed by Minneapolis in 1872. This area was home to the first neighborhood community and commercial center in this part of the region, utilizing the river as its main power source. Many flour and lumber milling companies sprang up in this area, beginning what would later become Minneapolis’ historic warehouse district in 1971.

Built in 1892, the Soap Factory was first constructed as a one-story warehouse for H.R. Carpenter’s Union Railway Company, with another story added a few years later. The building changed hands a few times in the early 1900s, first becoming a syrup manufacturing company and then a battery company. In the 1924, General Chemical and National Soap Factory (later National Purity Soap Factory) bought the building and began manufacturing commercial soap and detergents from animal fats until they moved to Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, in 1992. Read the rest of this entry »