Real ghost stories and the places that inspired them are scattered around the world. Surprisingly, you can visit many of them, and sleep, dine or drink in countless. Almost any destination has its share of tales. I make it my work to explore both, the stories and the destination.
My name is Todd Atteberry, and I’m at various times a writer, artist, photographer, musician – in other words, barely employable. I’ve wandered somewhat extensively the eastern half of these United States, as well as Ireland and England, looking for history and haunts.
On occasion I have witnessed the supernatural on my travels. I’ve heard the laughter of a niece of Washington Irving, author of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, who has been dead nearly two centuries. In fact, I’ve seen the specter of a full garbed Revolutionary War soldier twice in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. I was locked out of Jerusha Howe’s bedroom in Longfellow’s Wayside Inn in Massachusetts, the hook thrown on the door from the inside of an empty room. I’ve seen the white lady in the George and Pilgrim Hotel in Glastonbury, in Great Britain. And I swear I was set upon by a host of ghosts in the Talbott Tavern in Bardstown, Kentucky.
Those however, are exceptions. When visiting the sites of real ghost stories, the best you should hope for is a mood, a setting that quickens the pulse and brings your senses to life. Best of all are the times and places where the present disappear and you feel yourself beginning to time travel.
A place with a gothic mood, steeped in the past will go a long ways towards creating those feelings, and also makes for an interesting place to have drinks or dinner, or to spend the night. If you don’t mind sharing your bed with ghosts.
Real ghost stories run in the family
My own search for real ghost stories began in my family home, long ago.
October of 2018 and I was in the kitchen of the family home. I’d lived here taking care of my parents for nearly a decade. Mom had died. Dad was in a nursing home. I was about to shut off the light and go to another part of the house when I got a whiff of dad’s cologne.
It wasn’t wafting through the room. It wasn’t subtle, as his cologne was never subtle. There’s something about an Aqua Velva Man. Foul smelling stuff but that’s what he liked, strong and manly.
I chalked it up to my imagination, but the scent held on. I said aloud to the silent house, “dad must have just died, and laughed at myself. Those with a gothic disposition are prone to making superstitious statements like that, and I felt kind of stupid for falling into the same trap.
I came upstairs and sat down at my desk and started to work when the phone rang … it was the nursing home. “Come right away.”
That wasn’t the first real ghost story in this house for me. They started before I was five. Not disembodied scents, lights switching on and off, footsteps or any of the smaller pantheon of ghostly occurrence, though those all came later. The first time was a full bodied apparition, and it wouldn’t be the last time I saw it here.
My parents told me it was my imagination, so I spent most of my childhood believing I was crazy. People who believed in such things are crazy, right?
Then when I was in my thirties I told my mother that and she laughed. Turns out she’d seen it too, as had her mother. My dad wouldn’t talk about what he saw, but he was afraid of the house. I thought the spirits in this house had finally found peace while I lived elsewhere for over thirty years. But over the past couple years I’ve come home to find two house guests, sitting on my porch at night, having chose not to stay in the house alone after disturbing occurrences.
And those are the just the people who will talk about it. So it’s safe to say, growing up in this house and coming back to it, I come by this shit naturally. I didn’t have to look far for real ghost stories.
Real science versus real ghost stories, who comes out on top?
So the first question to decide if real ghost stories are in fact real, is are there really ghosts? Having run across them in a number of locations, a number of times, you’ll never convince me otherwise. What are they? Beats the hell out of me.
It’s arrogance to say they don’t exist. There is too much evidence, stretching back far too may years, across too many cultures and civilizations to say with any degree of certainty that nothing is there. Or that it’s simply our imagination, our just awakened mind experiencing half dreams.
On the other hand, it’s also arrogant to state with certainty what they are and the rules of how they operate. If anyone actually knew that shit, it would be easy to prove they exist?
Science can’t prove it because of its own limitations. A scientist has to look at evidence and apply it to what we know of the rules of nature. The same for the historian, the archaeologist. They can only speak on what they can back up with sound evidence. That causes egos to get in the way and when that happens, people start speaking loudly and with certainty over things they know nothing about.
Science gets things wrong all the time. On The Origin of Species is filled with inaccuracies, even if the basic theory is somewhat sound. These people with initials behind their names are only qualified to speak on the existence of things they understand and are within their realm. No one knows the laws of the supernatural, so no one can explain it, nor offer evidence that any scientist could accept as truth. It’s not in their DNA.