KIDS SEEING GHOSTS, KIDS BEING GHOSTS: Real Paranormal Encounters

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:09):
Rachel Rogers was putting her four year old son Thomas,
to bed, when he began talking about a man in
his room. Rachel was a single mother. She and Thomas
lived alone, and as far as she could see, they
were the only two people present. But her son was insistent,
pointing at the empty spot beside her. He's there standing

(00:31):
next to you. Look. Thomas had always been quite shy
and reserved, and I thought this was an imaginary friend,
says his mother. Rachel. I played it down and said
the man was coming out of the room with me
to have a cup of tea so that Thomas could
go to sleep. I remember calling my mother and joking,
Thomas sees dead people. But it didn't end there. Thomas

(00:54):
continued to talk about the man who sometimes visited and
played with his toys, always describing him the same, even
drawing pictures of him. This man had a meanly bald
head and wore very thick rimmed glasses, says Rachel. Thomas
wasn't scared of him, and there was no sense of threat.
He'd say that the man had been to visit, and

(01:14):
I'd say, diddy, darling, that's nice. A couple of years later,
she and Thomas were at Rachel's father's house looking at
old photos because Rachel was researching the family tree. She
was showing her father a picture she'd found of her
paternal grandmother standing beside her second husband, someone Rachel had
barely known and had no photos of at home. Thomas

(01:36):
immediately became animated. Mom that's the man, he cried, the
man who used to come and play in my room.
He matched Thomas's description perfectly, bald with thick rimmed glasses.
Then Thomas pointed at his wife, Rachel's grandmother, who had
died when Rachel was four, and that lady came to
our flat and stayed with you when you had the

(01:57):
car crash. He added, when Thomas was twenty years old,
we'd been in a very serious car crash and I
could have died, says Rachel. Thomas told me that this lady,
my dead grandmother, had looked after me. He was absolutely certain.
I was shocked. The hairs on my neck were on end.
I have to be honest, I do believe he saw

(02:19):
what he said, and that he has a gift. It
was just too much of a coincidence, and there's no
other explanation. I'm Darren Marler and this is Weird Darkness.

(02:41):
Welcome weirdos. This is Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories
of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre,
unsolved and unexplained coming up in this episode of Weird Darkness.

(03:01):
It's been said that kids are more open to the supernatural,
perhaps because their minds haven't been closed off to the
possibilities that ghosts really exist. That make stories about childhood
hauntings even creepier. The real stories I'll be sharing in
this episode include ghosts encountered by kids of all ages.
The stories might convince you that the night light your

(03:23):
child insists stay on in the bedroom needs to stay
on For a reason. There's something inherently chilling about old orphanages.
Maybe it's the fact that scary orphanage stories abound. After all,
the buildings are associated with heartbroken and lonely children, and
not all of these tales concern the living. Plenty of

(03:45):
real life ghost stories feature orphanages filled with restless and
vengeful child spirits. And what should you do if your
child says they see a ghost? Do you tell them
there's no such thing? Do you encourage them to believe
more fully. What's the right thing to do? A couple
of child psychologists have a few ideas on what you

(04:07):
can do now. Bulge your doors, lock your windows, turn
off your lights, and come with me into the weird darkness.

(04:35):
The idea of the psychic child is many centuries old.
In sixteen twenty, William Perry, a twelve year old who
claimed to be possessed, caused thousands to flock to his
sleepy Staffordshire village. He eventually admitted he was faking it,
though not before the poor woman next door had been
arrested for witchcraft. Now it's a growth area in the US.

(04:57):
There are summer camps and workshops where highly sensitive kids
can develop their intuition, spiritual gifts, and energetic awareness. The
hit US TV show Psychic Kids Children of the Paranormal
followed spiritually gifted children as they talked to ghosts, predicted disasters,
and attempted to find missing people. Endless YouTube videos offer

(05:21):
up similar child related spooks. One of the most spine
tingling focuses on Cameron, a boy from Glasgow who has
remembered a former life on the remote Hebridian island of Bara.
Ever since he's been able to talk. His level of
detail is phenomenal. The white house with the secret path
to the beach, the black and white dog, the family name,

(05:44):
all of which turn out to be true when Cameron
and his mom finally take a trip there. All this
interest is set against the backdrop of a surge in
so called magical thinking. It's no longer taboo to dabble
in the paranormal. Robbie Williams has claimed that he used
to talk to dead people as a child. Megan Consults

(06:06):
a psychic, while when at Paltrow's Goop is turning crystals
and cosmic flow into must have items. Gigi Hadid, Jessica Alba,
Demi Levado, and Keanu Reeves all say they encountered ghosts
as children. Children, it's popularly believed, can lead us to
this other realm because they still have a foot in

(06:27):
both our world and the spirit world. According to many spiritualists,
they like animals, are purer than adults, more primeval, with
no cultural filters. They haven't yet been told what to
think or see. This is why they so often surprise
us with their intuition sensing when we're sad or worried

(06:48):
or knowing that we are sick or even pregnant before
we announce it. Emma Salter thirty six, a council worker
from Hull, believes her daughter, Hermione, was born with psychic powers.
As a baby, she was happy to be alone, says Emma.
She'd never cry. She'd lie in her cot looking in
a corner, cooing. As she began to talk. Hermione would

(07:10):
tell Emma about friends in her bedroom. The first was
a boy under the bed wrapped in bandages, which Emma
assumed were dreams or imagination. However, when Hermione was three,
before she'd started school, Emma took her to a Victorian
school museum. She became so excited. Emma remembers she told
me this was like her old classroom and explained to

(07:32):
me what everything was, lifting the desk and telling me
this was where she kept her slate and pencil. There
is no way she would have known what a slate was.
She told me her teacher had a funny cap and
a long cloak and carried a stick. In another part
of the museum, she told me what a mangle was,
and when we came to what looked to me like

(07:53):
a big drum with a stick in it. She explained
that this was where her mother used to wash the clothes.
She recognized everything. By the time we left that museum,
I thought, yes, my daughter can see things and remember things.
I just believed her. Now a teenager, Hermione no longer

(08:14):
displays any psychic gifts, but the family do believe her powers.
Once saved her life. One morning, she had a nightmare
about two scary men that really upset her, says Emma.
She kept crying. She even told her nursery teachers about it.
That evening, Hermione was staying at her aunt's house, Emma's sister,
and the kitchen ceiling collapsed. By that, I mean the

(08:37):
whole ceiling, not a few bits and pieces, says Emma.
Hermione had been coming downstairs about to go in there
when she'd seen the two men from her dream outside
the kitchen, frightening her away. The next night, she saw
them again in her dream, and they were smiling, wearing
white dresses, and they weren't scary any more. They told

(08:57):
her that they'd been there to keep her safe. Claire Waters,
a homeopath who lives in rural Hampshire, has been so
bewildered by what she believes to be her daughter's psychic
gifts that she has recently written a book about her
journey raising Faith. My daughter, Faith had always been a
wise soul, quite reserved, always calm, says Claire, But her

(09:20):
psychic gifts came out of the blue. My husband is
still on the fence. He's a scientific person and doesn't
believe he has seen anything that is set in stone proof.
But I've no doubt that Faith can see spirits around her.
She never reveled in the attention of it. She didn't
even think it was that interesting. It was just normal
for her. As a mother, you know when your child

(09:41):
is telling the truth. Faith first told Claire about her
spirit visitors when she was four, though it's worth noting
that it was in answer to Claire's direct question. Claire
had been to see a medium who told her that
her daughter was all seeing, all knowing. Claire remembers it
as a bizarre and awkward conversation, and when the medium

(10:03):
mentioned her daughter, Claire began to regret going to see her. However,
she couldn't shake the medium's words from her mind. So
one day, while Faith was playing alone on the floor
of her bedroom. Claire plucked up the courage to ask
her daughter if she could see other people. She didn't
look interested or stopped what she was doing, remembers Claire.

(10:24):
She just said yes and carried on playing. I asked
if there were people in the room now. She answered yes,
and I asked too. She shrugged and said lots of people.
She also told me that my granddad, who had died,
read her bedtime stories. I asked if he looked the same,
and she said, yes, but his hair is darker. This

(10:46):
was normal for her, not something she thought was a
big deal. Over the next seven years, Faith opened up
to Claire about her spirit visitors, and Claire's book is
filled with spooky details. When the family moved into a
new house, their dog would frequently focus on full alert,
as if watching something invisible. When she asked Faith, her

(11:06):
daughter laughed and said they'd inherited two spirit cats. Claire
also says that from time to time she became aware
of a strong smell of antiseptic and random places like
the car. Faith told me it was someone I'd worked
with in a former life during the war, and that
she was wearing a nurse's uniform. With a green Cross
on it. I said, I'd only ever know nurses with

(11:27):
a red cross, but Faith was quite sure this one
was green. In fact, there was a Women's Volunteer Ambulance
Corps also known as the Green Cross Corps, during the
First World War. Faith is fifteen now and rarely speaks
about spirit visitors or psychic matters. She still wise, super diligent,
very reserved. She wants to be a normal teenage girl,

(11:50):
says Claire. She thinks I'm the weird one. Deborah Hyde,
cultural anthropologist and editor in chief of The Skeptic magazine,
is unconvinced children have had imaginary friends forever. She says,
I had one, and I also remember doing it for attention.
You can usually put these cases into categories. There's outright

(12:13):
pranking from the child and sometimes attention by proxy for
the adult. Adults have agendas that might be invisible to children,
and if you dig deep enough, you can usually see
adults picking up the story and taking it along as
a way of getting their own message out into the world.
Hide gives the example of the notorious nineteen seventy seven
Enfield Poltergeist, the subject of books, documentaries, films, and TV

(12:38):
dramas the haunting of a modest council house in Enfield,
North London, loud noises, moving furniture and throne toys, centered
on two sisters, Margaret and Janet thirteen and eleven, who
also appeared to levitate. The events made headlines and attracted
parapsychologists who claimed to have witnessed the strange events for

(12:59):
themselves and became heavily involved in the children's lives. Although
as adults, the sisters have admitted to faking two percent
of the phenomena, they largely stand by their story while
also avoiding media attention. First of all, there were many
people who visited and weren't convinced, says Hyde, but their
voices are rarely heard, and the mother didn't like people

(13:21):
coming unless they were believers. Those girls were intelligent, frustrated
and unhappy their father had left home, and that was
unusual in the seventies. I think that what probably started
as adolescents mucking about then brought in some lovely, supportive
male figures and there was too much at stake to stop.

(13:43):
I've met Janet as an adult. She was extremely shy
and very nice. I feel sorry for her. Usually these
cases Somewhere along the line suit an adult's narrative, often
that their own child is special. Hide points to the
New Age phenomena of indigo children. You are supposed to
possess supernatural traits and whose typical qualities include resistance to

(14:06):
authority and being seen as strange. Critics argue that parents
have chosen this label would in fact the children are
displaying classic signs of attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder, autism, or
mental illness. Is this enough to explain all the spooky
sixth sense moments that mums such as Rachel Rodgers may

(14:26):
witness with their child. Then play down and file away,
whatever your beliefs. Even the Spiritualists National Union recommends that
playing it down and filing it away is exactly what
you should do. Children say they can see things. It
might be genuine, they might be making it up, or
they might have parents putting them under pressure. Says Minister

(14:50):
Stephen Upton. It's impossible to know, but children's minds are
incredibly impressionable, and you can create false memories just through
the way you question them. So it's a very dangerous area.
According to Upton, if your child seems to exhibit psychic knowledge,
keep it light, make sure they're not frightened, and move on.

(15:11):
When they're adults, they can decide for themselves if this
is something they want to develop, he says, Until then,
let children be children. Later in this episode, we'll find
out what a couple of other psychologists suggest you do

(15:32):
if your child sees a ghost up next. Has your
toddler ever pointed to the empty space next to you
and told you that someone's there. I'll share a few
stories that might explain why your child insists you leave
the door cracked open so they can see light from
the hallway. You wouldn't want to be in the pitch
black with some of these ghosties either. Washington Post columnist

(16:17):
Rosemary Counter once wrote, when I was about three, my
mother took me to her friend Donna's farmhouse. As the
grown ups sipped tea in the kitchen, I played freely
throughout the house. This was the eighties. Until reporting back
with some alarming news. A little girl was crying at
the top of the stairs. Mom dismissed it as just
my imagination. While Donna's face turned white. She just remembered

(16:41):
what her daughter, long grown up and moved out, used
to see and say as a child, a little girl
crying at the top of the stairs. I don't remember
any of this. Of course, three decades later, this unfact
checkable story has gone the way of many campfire tales.
It's mostly fun and only partly scary, though firm proof

(17:03):
for this undeniable truth. Children are spooky little creeps who
see ghosts, report past lives, and chat at night with
dead relatives. If you don't feel like sleeping tonight, that's
good because you might have difficulty doing so. After I
share several stories from mothers and numerous redditors about children
experiencing and even interacting with the paranormal. Turns out kids

(17:28):
see ghosts all the time. From aerialist. I wasn't allowed
to lock my door as a kid. I was about
seven years old, and one Saturday morning, i'd woke it
up at seven or eight am. I didn't know the
beauty of sleep then, and had found that my mom
had locked her bedroom door when I tried to go
in and wake her. Childishly, I decided to go ahead

(17:50):
and lock my door too, and then figured I'd let
myself enjoy a computer game until my mom woke up.
I was actually in the middle of fighting Captain Hook
when I realized that this weird, metallic clinking noise wasn't
actually coming from my game. With the way my room
was laid out, my back was facing the door while
sitting at the desk, but I had a clear view

(18:12):
behind me if I glanced at the mirror that hung
over my dresser. To my right. The doorknob was turning
slowly but NonStop, almost as if someone were trying to
sneak in as quietly as possible but was starting to
get impatient or agitated. I remember blinking a few times
before asking mom, and as soon as I spoke, it stopped.

(18:35):
Now by this time, as a kid, I'd heard plenty
of scary stories and even stories about supernatural happenings that
had occurred around me as a baby, so I was
a little concerned, but being a pretty sensible kid, I
figured I had to at least double check and make
sure it wasn't my mom pulling a prank. I opened
the door and the hallway was completely empty. I tried

(18:56):
calling for my mom again, trying not to panic and
hoping she was just elsewhere in the apartment, and nothing
just the soft sound of birds and the occasional rumble
from a car outside. With a last bit of hope,
I went to my mom's door and pressed my ear
to the wood, hoping i'd hear her talking at least
or moving around. But instead, all I heard were soft snores.

(19:19):
It definitely wasn't her, I remember. Then the hallway went frigid,
like a twenty degree drop in the space of less
than a minute. My brain went into automatic mode, and
I took off, running down the hall, heading straight from
my Yorkshire terrier's crate. I scooped her up and ran
back down the hall to my room, where I shut
and locked the door immediately. Our dog was still pretty young,

(19:43):
and so she didn't mind much being carried or how.
I sat her firmly in my lap, watching the door apprehensively.
I kept waiting for something else to happen. Finally, after
about five or ten minutes, I turned around and went
back to my computer game, trying to forget the whole thing.
I finally settled back into the game when I heard
it again, except this time it wasn't soft or sneaking.

(20:06):
As I turned to look at the mirror, my Yorki
growled sharply from my lap and I saw the doorknob
twisting violently, the door starting to bang, and my dog
snarled and jumped off, running for the door with her
hackles fully raised and clawing at the door. I didn't
know what to do, so I did all I could
think of. I closed my eyes and prayed. It's funny

(20:28):
in retrospect, because even back then I wasn't religious at all,
despite being raised in a Catholic family and being forced
to do a first communion, but it was the only
thing I could think of to do, and so I did,
mumbling and stuttering through it until my Yorkis growls and
barks finally stopped and the rattling disappeared completely. I think

(20:50):
I stood there for a full ten seconds before I
started screaming my head off, waking up my mom and
getting in trouble for making a ruckus. But I sure
was glad to hear her voice after all of that.
I'm still not sure what happened. It wasn't the only weird,
slash scary thing to happen in that apartment to me,
but I can remember every detail even to this day.

(21:16):
From Mike Carol three point sixty when I was twelve,
my little brother, Rogan was six. I had another brother
and sister that were at friend's houses for the night,
and my dad was on business in Sweden for a week,
so it was just me, my mom, and Rogan that night.
I guess I didn't talk to anyone but my mom
that night, and that was only to get a snack

(21:37):
because I sat in my room playing video games. So
around ten PM, I walked out of my room to
get another snack and passed Rogan's room with its door open.
I looked in for a second to see him sleeping.
Only he was sleeping facing the wall, breathing heavy sweating,
and skin eggshell white. I ran downstairs to get my

(21:58):
mom and tell her that Rogan might be having a seizure.
She told me that Rogan was at his friend Ryan's house.
I said, someone's in Rogan's bed. She didn't believe me,
so I walked upstairs with her to see the bed
and sheets covered in fresh sweat and messed up with
no one in it. My mom called Ryan's house and
Rogan was put on the phone. My mom said good

(22:21):
night and she went back to bed. I didn't sleep
that night and just continued to play video games from
Ashley m mom of two. When we were looking at
condos to purchase our first place, Claire was just shy
of her third birthday. We brought her with us to

(22:42):
all of our showings because we wanted to see how
comfortable she was, as it would be her home too.
When we walked through the door of the place we
ultimately bought, the second floor of a nineteen eleven Chicago
brick three flat, we all knew immediately that it was
the right place. That evening, I asked Claire she thought
that place would be a good home for her, and
her response was yes, and the little boy that lives

(23:05):
there is really nice too. This took me aback, but
I tried to remain calm. I asked her what she meant,
and she said there was a little boy in his
pajamas that she saw in the dining room. She said
that he'd waved at her, he was about her age,
and he was only in the dining room. She knew
his name, which I don't remember now, and that he

(23:25):
was afraid of water. After she went to bed that night,
I looked up ways to clear the energy of a home,
how to communicate with a ghost, so that I don't
bother your family and anything else I could find to
make sure at least I could be comfortable living in
this otherwise perfect condo. Claire never talked about him again,
not even the next day when I asked her to

(23:46):
tell my husband from PM me yor poem. Laying in
bed one night, it's pitch black apart from the light
creeping under the door from the landing. My mom was
actually with me the same room as we had just
moved in, and she was sleeping on the floor. I
look up and the door slowly creaks open, and an

(24:07):
oldish woman tears around the door, looks at me, and
goes away. I just thought I was having a nightmare,
so I turned around really fast and went under the covers,
hoping I would wake up then. I will never forget
my mom whispering to me, did you just see someone
peer around the door? Safe to say, we did not

(24:28):
sleep a wink that night. Riley's mama tells this story.
When my daughter was an infant, we of course had
baby monitors. One night, really late, we heard two people
on the monitor talking, a man and a woman. They
were talking about how peaceful she looked. We both went

(24:49):
running to her room, and she was laying there peacefully
sleeping with no one in the room. My husband swore
it sounded just like his dead grandparents. Reddit user psychedelic
Goat forty two says in high school, I used to
hang out with my friend John almost every day. When

(25:12):
we first began hanging out at his house, I'd sometimes
hear disembodied footsteps, but very often I would see what
looked like the shadow of a person out of the
corner of my eye, only to have it disappear moments later.
After a month or so, I finally mentioned this to
my friend and he got mad. He demanded to know
who had told me that he saw shadow people and

(25:32):
begged me not to joke around with him about it.
I assured him I was serious. Soon we would hear
laughter when no one else was home, doors would close
by themselves, and the TV would turn itself on and off.
One day, after these experiences had grown more intense and
more frequent, I mentioned to my friend blessing the house.

(25:54):
Right as I said this, a box sitting on a
nearby counter flew right towards me. It sounds on believable,
but it was the single most terrifying experience of my life.
My friend and I got holy water and sprinkled it
around the house while saying a prayer, and never experienced
anything in the house again. Months later, my friend came

(26:14):
to stay at my lake house with me for a weekend.
At one point in the night, we both thought that
we saw a shadow person, but decided to pass it
off as nothing. Later that night, we woke up to
what sounded like voices coming from the living room. He
went to investigate, thinking someone might have broken in, and
I stayed put. A few moments later, I heard the

(26:34):
sound of somebody thundering down the hallway and ran out
to see why my friend was running, but he wasn't
in the house. My friend was outside on the porch
and came inside, saying that he had heard a loud
noise from the house too and thought that it had
been me. Nothing else happened for the rest of the weekend,
but the next time I went to the house after

(26:55):
it had set empty for a week, a picture frame
with my photo in it had been ripped off the
wall and thrown down the hall, and the pillows from
my couch were stacked one on top of the other
in the very middle of the couch. I have since
stopped hanging out with John and I have never experienced
anything of this sort. Again from Reddit user little Pretty Things.

(27:22):
So both my parents tend to snore quite heavily when
they sleep, and sometimes one will be loud enough to
drive the other out of the room to sleep somewhere
else for the night. So every now and then, one
of my parents would come crash in my room or
my siblings room, on the spare bed or on the
other side of the double bed. One night, I woke
up in the middle of the night and saw there

(27:43):
was someone sleeping in the bed next to me. I
assumed it was my dad. It sort of looked like him,
and it was dark, and that he had trouble sleeping
in his own bed, So I just figured, no big deal.
It's quite comforting to have a parent around anyway, So
I turned around and went back to sleep. The next day,
just randomly in conversation, I mentioned something to the effect of,

(28:04):
so mom must have been storing quite heavily last night. Eh.
My parents both just kind of looked at me, like,
what me, isn't that why you crashed in my room? Dad? No,
I was asleep in our room all night, I asked, siblings, etc.
No one had gotten up throughout the night or anything.

(28:25):
Who did I see? From Aaron t My son was
around two at the time. We were driving past the
cemetery when he said, look, Mama, dead people. Yes, darling,
I responded kids, He continued matter of factly, and sure
enough we were passing by the children's section. Curious, I

(28:49):
asked if the kids were happy or sad? Happy, Mama,
he said, they're running around that Daddy. All I saw
was a man standing alone with his head dropped. It
warmed my heart, honestly, from mister Hegel. When I was younger,
I used to think I was having dreams of an

(29:10):
old woman in a blue dress and cat eyeglasses sitting
at the end of my bed singing to me. She
had always sing the same song and then leave. One night,
I followed her into my brother's room. He's younger than
me and was around five, and instead of singing to him,
he woke up and they began talking. After like twenty minutes,

(29:30):
my mother came in and asked what we were doing.
My brother said, I'm just talking to the lady in
the blue dress. She made us go back to bed.
I woke up still thinking it was a dream. My
mom told me the next morning that she didn't want
me sneaking out of bed anymore in the middle of
the night to play with my brother. I asked her
what she was talking about, and she gave me her
version of what she saw the night before. To this day,

(29:54):
I believe that was real, and that every night the
old woman would sing to me goosebumps just thinking about it.
She stopped singing to me soon after that, though people
in my family still caught my brother speaking to nothing
on numerous occasions. A while later, an aunt came to
visit from down south and refused to come into our

(30:15):
house after seeing an old woman in cat eyeglasses standing
in the upstairs window. She came in asking who was upstairs,
and then freaked out when my mother told her no
one and let her search the house. You shouted, this says.
My family was very religious when I was growing up.

(30:36):
One time we were in church and they'd asked a
few members to go to the front so they could
pray for someone specific. They were led to a small
wooden railing like a church pew with no seat. My
aunt had gone to the front and brought five year
old me with her. We closed our eyes and started
singing and lifted our hands in prayer Pentecostal, and after

(30:58):
about a minute, I felt someone's hand touch mine, like
flat against mine. I swayed my hand slowly from side
to side, as I'd seen the adults do, and the
person touching my hands followed along as normal. I thought
it was the pastor's wife, who liked me and in general,
really liked all the children of the church. I was

(31:18):
so happy she'd chosen to pray with me that after
a few minutes, I decided to break prayer protocol and
open my eyes to smile at her, but quickly realized
it wasn't her, it wasn't anyone. I looked from side
to side to see if maybe the person had moved
on to pray with someone else, but everyone else was
doing their own thing. There was no one else there,

(31:41):
but I distinctly felt someone's hands touching mine. I know
I wasn't mistaken. I mean, you'd be able to tell
if someone placed their hand on yours, right. I don't
know if this qualifies as creepy, but for me, it's
still unexplained. Up next more stories of children seeing ghosts

(32:08):
and later, how should you react if your child sees
a ghost? These stories and more when weird darkness returns.

(32:42):
We've all heard the stories. A television that flips channels
on its own, the house that echoes with a baby's
cries despite no baby actually living there, a barstool that
skidters across the floor when no one's near, the piano
that plays itself at all hours of the night. And
do ghosts exist? Turns out, if we want an answer,

(33:04):
all we need to do is look at our children.
From Priscilla A. We bought our current house from a
man who was married for forty plus years. His wife
passed away a couple of years before we bought the house.
One evening, while tucking my two and a half year
old into bed, he said, Mama, night night to the
grandma while pointing to the hallway between his room and mine.

(33:26):
What was her room back then? Baron Johnson tells this story.
I woke up in the middle of the night, and
I looked in the corner of my room and saw
a hooded figure next to my dresser. At first, I
thought it was just some clothes hanging off my dresser,
but then it turned and I saw red eyes staring

(33:46):
at me. I immediately jumped out of bed and turned
on the lights. There were no clothes hanging off of
my dresser. I would have just brushed it off as
a bad dream, but then I saw my dog staring
at the corner. I was out outside of the room,
and I kept calling for her to come out, but
she would not stop staring where I had seen the
hooded figure. She did not react at all to me

(34:08):
calling her, and so I finally just went back in
my room and yanked her off the bed. I slept
in the living room the rest of the night, and
my dog slept in my parents' room with the rest
of her life. From another Reddit user, part of my
dad's job when I was younger was to go around
a very old house that was falling apart and check

(34:30):
on these dowel things in the walls. Every six weeks,
he basically replaced them and packaged the ones we took
out and sent them away to find out how the
building was drying out after years of rain leaking in.
This was a listed building and the company wanted to
bring the house back to its former glory, but as
far as I'm aware. Since my dad stopped working for them,
it's back in complete disrepair. I'd go along with him

(34:54):
on a Sunday morning to do the changes of these
dowels since I loved being down there and have always
been interest in history. So off we went one morning
and turned on the generator and my dad got to work.
I normally wander around playing Indiana Jones by myself, since
this was a huge manor house. It was a construction site,
but I was old enough to appreciate the rules and

(35:16):
knew not to go near any holes or find a
way to fall through the floor. So my dad's busy
getting to work on the first dowels when I'm playing
upstairs in one room that I always liked because it
was a child's room, I claimed it as my own
play space whenever I visited. I played for about five
minutes when I felt someone was watching me. When I

(35:37):
turned around to see what looked like a long skirt
follow someone along the hallway, I sneaked out and tried
to see who was there and saw the back of
a lady walk into another room wearing a floor length skirt.
I tried to follow her, but when I went into
the room literally two seconds after there was no one there.
I called my dad and we checked every room in

(35:58):
the house, but no one was there. The only way
to exit would have been to walk past us, So
I have no idea what I saw from amy f
When we moved into our house, Leo two and a half,
was seeing a ghost. He would say ghost and point
to the dining room table. One day, I mentioned mister

(36:21):
Hutcheson's to someone while giving a history of the house,
and Leo said, mister Hutchinson my ghost friend. We confirmed
with a house cleanser that someone attached to the home
like a grandfather figure was here and attracted to Leo's
light in innocence. We have since had our house cleansed twice.

(36:42):
Reddit user sassicide says, I'm not sure if this qualifies
as childhood since I was in my teens, but here goes.
My mom was married to my father, a minister, for
a long time, and when she left him, she left
behind all the traditions they had out of spite. One
of these traditions was blessing a house before entering it. Well,

(37:03):
needless to say, the new house she and I moved
into after their split was in need of a blessing.
It was located between a Civil War era cemetery and
a more modern one. I don't know if it had
anything to do with what was happening with the house.
The first day we were there, the stove had turned
on by itself and shattered a glass pan that we
had sitting on one of the burners. We brushed it off.

(37:26):
From then on, things escalated. The radio would turn on
and off, box fans would mysteriously turn on full blast,
and my dog would end up barking at the corners
with more ferocity than I'd ever seen her use. My
mom got locked in the bathroom once when she was
home alone and had to wait for me to come
home from school to let her out. Thankfully it was

(37:46):
only an hour or so. I saw our visitor once
or twice and took to calling him Sam. To this day,
I can't explain what exactly was going on in that house,
but I'm very glad that I am out of it.
From Semeir broke it. I never met my maternal grandfather,

(38:07):
as he died before I was born at a relatively
young age, around fifty or so. He died of a
heart attack. He was too drunk to acknowledge he should
have gone to the hospital at the time, and instead
sat in a chair in his living room with his
house keys in his hand, and he squeezed them so
hard that they were all bent when they found him
the next morning. My mom described that night feeling his

(38:30):
presence over her with his keys in his hand. Many
years later, when I was about six, my mother told
me about my grandfather for the first time and showed
me some photos of him. She told me the next
morning that I claimed he had visited me the previous
night and handed me a set of bent house keys
to play with. There's no way I could have known

(38:50):
that detail, and I maintained this for many years until
I was too old to recall it, and she told
me the story from Tracy B. My then four year old,
would tell me about a little girl who wanted to
play with her. She apparently wanted to play all hours
of the day and night. When I was finally able

(39:11):
to sort out what was up with my daughter, in
the middle of the night, I left this little ghost
some toys in an upstairs closet so she could play
by herself. She had a stuffed lamb and a stuffed duck,
and I used to find them moved most mornings. The
four year old shared a room with her siblings, so
I know it wasn't her moving the toys from another

(39:33):
Reddit user. When I was four or five, I'm twenty
eight now, my older brother and I were rough housing
in the basement. I remember this very distinctly because I
still can't explain what happened. It was just my brother
and I in the house. Mom went grocery shopping. We
were in the basement when all of a sudden, the
closet door just swung open. We both stopped and stared

(39:56):
at the closet when a dark, black entity floated out
of the closet towards us. My brother took off upstairs
and left me by myself, and I remember just staring
at this black mass. I had no idea what it was.
I blacked out, and when I came to, I was
crying on the stairwell with my mom asking me what
was going on. I was crying, saying there's a ghost downstairs.

(40:21):
She didn't believe my brother and me. To this day,
my brother and I swear a dark entity ghost floated
out of that closet. The weird thing is my brother
slept downstairs in one of the rooms, and at night
he claims he could hear someone walking around outside his room.
One time, his friend stayed over and slept on the floor,
and his friend claimed there was something staring at him

(40:44):
from underneath the bed. A cousin of mine stayed over
one night claimed he saw a black, dark mass roam
from room to room in the basement. He got up
to check it out and found nothing in the rooms,
so he sat down to the rumpus room, where my
brother and I were rough housing, when he claimed he
saw dark mass staring at him at the end of
the hallway. He ran upstairs. We all sat down and

(41:07):
talked about these experiences and came to the conclusion that
someone was possibly murdered because the house had a really
big crawl space. The crawl space entrance was located in
the closet that the entity came from. No idea how
to explain it, so we decided on someone being murdered
from explosive amnesia. I was about twelve at the time,

(41:32):
babysitting my little sister who was around eight. My parents
were out for the evening at the church, setting up
for some event. As I recall, I remember it was
around eight or nine night, plenty dark out. My sister
and I were playing in the unfinished part of the basement,
and in the Midwest, that means this part of the
basement was mostly underground, with just the storm windows at

(41:53):
ground level. This is when things got weird. I heard
the garage door upstairs open and two distinct pairs of
footsteps walking into the house. They did not belong to
my parents. Being familiar with not only the sound of
my parents, but also the sound of the floorboards creaking
above our heads, I knew people were in the house.

(42:14):
I quickly shushed my sister, looking up trying to figure
out what to do. The closest phone was upstairs, where
the footsteps were. I knew better than to call out
two small girls home alone. My only concern was getting
my sister out safely. As the footsteps tread back and forth,
I assumed they were turning out the lights we had
left on upstairs. I could hear two men's voices, not

(42:37):
enough to make out words, but I distinctly heard two men.
As soon as my sister saw I was panicked, she
began to freak out, crying and whatnot. The footsteps immediately stopped.
I slapped my hand around my sister's mouth and picked
her up under one arm, and ran up and out
of the unfinished part of the basement. To get to
the bottom level sliding glass door, we had to pass

(42:58):
the stairs that led from the upper level where the
men were, to the basement where we were. After a
moment of silence, I heard booming footsteps. I could only
assume they heard my sister and were headed towards us.
Running with every bit of I'm gonna die adrenaline, I
heard the thundering sounds of them coming down the stairs
behind us. As I got to the sliding glass door,
I threw it open, shoved my sister out, and screamed

(43:21):
for her to run for help. I tripped out soon
after her. I could feel them right behind me. I
had clearly heard them practically falling down the stairs, huge
booming footsteps. I fully expected to get grabbed. My sister
now screaming bloody murder, had attracted the attention of our neighbors.
I turned around to see no one. They were right

(43:42):
behind me. I heard them. I knew they were there.
I had no idea where they could have gone. Needless
to say, the comps were called and my parents rushed home.
There were no signs of entry at all. All the
upstairs doors were locked, the garage door was shut. There
was nothing missing, nothing at a place. I still have

(44:04):
no idea what happened that day. It was definitely one
of the most terrifying experiences of my life. From DDA Ender.
My four year old will tell us stories about the
little girl who shuts doors and turns off the lights.
He can't tell us what she looks like or where

(44:24):
she goes. I don't talk about ghosts or anything that
would give under this idea. The last time the little
girl was here, I heard the door slam. I ran
in and asked if he had closed it. He told
me no, the little girl did because she didn't want
to play. Browneld shares this story. So this is more

(44:47):
of a collection of stories, and I haven't told them
in a while because even thinking about it freaks me out.
Not to mention makes me question my own sanity. Anyway,
here goes to preface. When I was entering fifth grade,
my dad's company gave him an opportunity to transfer to
an overseas job in Florence, Italy. My parents obviously jumped

(45:07):
at the chance and we lived over there for three years,
which was an awesome experience. For the most part. The
first few months we lived in an apartment across from
Santos Burito Cathedral, and then moved to a small town
in Tuscany called Imprenetta, where my father's company basically paid
for us to live in this awesome Italian villa. I
mean seven bedrooms, five baths. It was the biggest house

(45:30):
I'd ever seen. We started speaking to the farmer who
works the olive orchards around the house and who knows
the family who has owned it for centuries, and find
out that the oldest part of the house was a
five hundred year old hunting lodge owned by the Pitty family,
and the rest of the villa was built around it
in the late seventeen hundreds. Since we were renting it,

(45:51):
it came furnished with all sorts of cool old furniture, art, etc.
My father, in a conversation with the neighbors, heard from
them somectotal stories about the monk ghost who haunted the
house guarding the pities forgotten treasure, and he told my mom,
but they didn't tell my sister and I because well,
they didn't think that it was a true story, and

(46:12):
they didn't want to freak us out. The first thing
I remember being weird about the villa was that I
was never comfortable being there alone. A bit of very
solitary person my entire life, and I usually enjoy time
by myself. However, I can remember right from the start
that any time my parents would leave me alone there,

(46:32):
I'd feel like I was being watched and or there
was another presence in the house. I spent months convincing
myself it was just nerves that I wasn't used to
living there, or that the huge size of the house
was what was freaking me out. Then I noticed that
our cats. We had one house cat when we moved in,
but we also adopted the four to five cats that
roam the property, and some of them moved into the house.

(46:55):
Would act stream, sometimes staring at empty spaces, running up
to a spot like they would a person when there
was nothing there, But it seemed like I only noticed
them doing it when I was there alone. By the
end of our first year in the house, I was
terrified of being left alone. My parents thought I was crazy.
And whenever I was there by myself, which was rarely,

(47:17):
I would lock myself in my bedroom with one or
more cats, who I thought could protect me. I don't
know how or why, it just seemed like a good
idea at the time. At the same time, I started
noticing noises at night, scrapings, clawings, that sort of stuff.
But when i'd freak out, my dad would come in
and remind me that the house was hundreds of years

(47:38):
old and there were probably mice, bats, and other critters
above my room making the noises. It made sense to me,
but I can't even begin to recount how many nights
I got woken up by these strange noises that seemed
too loud or persistent to be a mouse. I started
to occasionally hear random doors shutting, those sorts of things,

(48:00):
but by this point I just kept it to myself
because my parents were already thinking I was crazy. After
about a year, our relatives started to fly over from
the States to come visit us. They basically got a
vacation in Tuscany for the price of the plane ticket,
so we had guests at least once a month, if
not more. The first major incident I remember was when
my aunt and uncle and two cousins came and visited

(48:23):
and stayed in the apartments that were originally the second
floor of the hunting lodge. I'll mention briefly that it
seemed like a majority of the incident's noises, etc. Seemed
to all originate from the oldest part of the house,
which were the three floors at the original hunting lodge
and the root cellar below it. There were two adjoining
bedrooms with a bathroom opening onto the front bedroom. My

(48:45):
aunt and uncle slept in this front bedroom, my cousins
in the back. To make a long story short, my
cousin Casey woke up at like five in the morning,
walked into the bathroom half asleep, and saw a man
standing in there, so he turned around and sat on
the chair outside the bathroom door. He'd been sitting there
for a couple of minutes when my aunt sat up
and asked him what he was doing, and he told

(49:05):
her waiting for Dad to get out of the bathroom,
to which she replied, Dad is still in bed right here,
and he was, needless to say. By the time breakfast
came around, we had all heard the story, and it
was at that point that my father finally made mention
of the ghost stories he heard from the neighbor, and
that supposedly this was the reason the villa had been
empty for a few years until we started renting it.

(49:28):
Fairly the last people to live there had been freaked out.
I pretty much flipped out on all of them because
I felt like everything I had experienced finally made sense
and they'd been making me feel insane by passing off
my experiences as something I made up in my head.
After it was out in the open in my family,
we all started noticing how frequently weird things happened in

(49:48):
that house, and I'll just list a few examples. My
sister had a slumber party for her birthday with five
or six girls, and my mom sat out in the
stairwell around midnight for a bit to make sure they
all went to She started hearing furniture being dragged around
and went down to see what the girls were up to,
but they were all talking and no furniture was moved.

(50:09):
A week later, my parents had the owners come out
and open up the third floor of the hunting lodge,
which were two more rooms they kept locked up as storage,
and inside there were several large wardrobes, dressers, and other
pieces of furniture that had been dragged around at random.
You could see the trails through the dust where they'd
moved anywhere from a few inches to several feet. The

(50:30):
owners got mad at us, thinking that my sister or
I had managed to break in and mess with their stuff,
but the door was locked, and my dad pointed out
that there were no footprints. The owners freaked out, made
a bunch of hurried excuses and dismissive gestures, and left
pretty fast. From Michelle K. My husband's father passed away

(50:53):
several years before my son was born. He died from
the flu, and my husband had always felt guilty because
he'd been the one to share the sickness with him.
We never talked to our son about his grandpa, but
one morning he woke and said, point blank, Daddy, Papa
don wanted me to tell you he's doing fine. We
asked him to describe his grandpa, and he did to

(51:16):
a tea despite never having seen a photo of him.
He said he was standing by a fast car with
a cloud of smoke around him. This made perfect sense
because my father in law raised sports cars and smoked
heavily all his life. This comes from Takai Guy A
few things. As a kid, in the first house I

(51:38):
lived in, my parents and I were sitting at the
table eating dinner when suddenly we heard this whistling sound,
not like the wind whistling through a door, but a
full on song. I was about five at the time,
and remember pretending I was the one singing so that
my parents wouldn't be concerned. My mom immediately told me
to stop pretending and said it was probably the TV dounce.

(52:00):
After dinner, I went downstairs to check, and all of
the lights, TV, everything was off. I don't claim the
house was haunted or anything, but it's something I remember
vividly and have never been able to explain. When I
was about ten, we moved into a new house, and
my younger sister for years would talk about the man
in black that she would see around the house. No

(52:22):
one took her seriously, but twenty years later she still
swears she saw him, although she doesn't anymore. I never
saw anything like that, but can remember hearing cupboards open
or drawers shutting while home alone late at night. Recently,
my dad woke up at three am to find his
TV on full blast, and his phone screen had been

(52:43):
smashed during the night. Lastly, when I was in kindergarten,
I used to have recurring dreams about this black figure
with red eyes following me. My dreams were relatively normal,
but always in the background this figure was stalking me. Eventually,
after a few weeks of this and one of my dreams,
my grandfather confronted the figure and told me everything would

(53:04):
be okay. The figure left and I never dreamed of
it again. I mostly chalked that up to being a kid,
but still kind of interesting to me, especially considering how
vividly I could remember that last dream from flying Kneebar.
When I was a kid, I lived in these apartments

(53:24):
that were pretty normal and didn't seem like they would
have a history of anything odd or unusual. After a
few nights of living there, i'd hear the sounds of
something dragging on the floor. I didn't think much of it,
since it was an apartment that had super thin walls.
One night, the dragging sound was loud like it was
in my hallway, so I took a peek out and

(53:45):
noticed something that looked like a man army crawling on
the floor. It wasn't clear since the lights were off
and the only light I had was coming from outside
through the windows. My immediate reaction was to close the door,
which I did and waited in my room until my
parents woke up. As soon as they did, I tried
explaining to them that I saw a man crawling on

(54:05):
the floor, and they immediately dismissed it as a bad dream.
After that night, I never heard dragging sounds or saw
the crawling man again. Past forward a few years, when
we were finally moving out, I returned the keys to
the manager and asked who used to live in the
apartment before us. The manager stated that a paraplegic gentleman

(54:27):
used to live in there and passed away a year
or so before we moved in. This creepy story comes
from Joe Jaws twenty three. So. I used to live
in Florida and was just a small car trip away
from Saint Augustine, which is one of the oldest cities
in America. One day, my mom, brother and I went

(54:48):
on a nice little sight seeing trip there to visit
a few places. One of those places happened to be
the old lighthouse. When we walked in, there was a
little room giving some history on the place, and as
soon as I walked through the doorway, I just felt
a heavy presence all around me, as if pressure was
being added to the room. Let's just say that we

(55:09):
decided not to check the room out. Next, we made
our climb to the top. My mom's really afraid of heights,
but she went up there anyway. When we got to
the top, we were just looking at the view when
all of a sudden, some lady that looked like she
was dressed in nineteen thirties attire came up to us
and said, Oh, you don't have to be scared of heights,
it's okay. She then walked off, and we then went

(55:32):
around the whole lighthouse top and never saw her again.
We then looked at a picture of some of the
residents that used to live there. What a coincidence. One
of those people just so happened to be the same
lady we saw up in the lighthouse from Lily four.

(55:52):
One time, when I was about six or seven, my
brother and I were playing out in our yard. It
was pretty late. I told him that I'd be right
back because I had to use the bathroom. The yard
is weird since There are two houses on the lot.
My dad lives in the front house and the coach
house is where my grandma lives. My brother was headed
towards the front of my dad's house and I was

(56:12):
headed towards my grandma's. I just stopped dead in my tracks.
Along the corridor that runs on the side of both
houses was a door that led to the alley. I
saw a floating figure there that I can only describe
as the Grim Reaper. It was just floating in front
of the door. I know it couldn't have been someone
playing a trick on me because it disappeared while I

(56:35):
was looking at it, and we'd been playing near that
door all day. To this day, I cannot go near
that door. It creeps me out. From Arvo, the aspy
little things would move around my house while I was
home alone. I live in a very small town in
the south, so during the summer, parents would usually leave

(56:58):
kids home alone. Like kids ten not at least Markers
would go missing while I was coloring in the living room,
only to be found in my parents' bathroom the next day.
Action figures would go missing while I was playing with
them on my bedroom floor, and when i'd look for them.
I'd find them sitting on my very tall I still
can't reach the top of it without a stool, TV stand,

(57:20):
books would go missing, CDs, video games, you name it.
They were never missing forever, with the exception of a
Hillary Duff CD. I was ten okay, and I'd usually
always find them later in the day or within a
couple of days. This only happened when I was alone,
and I still have no idea why. So I guess

(57:44):
ghosts can be Hillary Duff fans. Coming up, we move
away from children seeing ghosts and move towards adults seeing
ghosts of children. That might be something you'd expect in
one of the many haunted orphanages around the world. Also,
what should you do if you have a child who
claims to see a ghost? A couple of child psychologists

(58:06):
have some advice to share on that subject when weird
darkness returns. There is something inherently chilling about old orphanages.

(58:42):
Maybe it's the fact that scary orphanage stories abound. After all,
the buildings are associated with heartbroken and lonely children, and
not all of these tales concern the living. Plenty of
real life ghost stories feature orphanages filled with restless and
vengeful spirits. These scary orphanage ghost stories all take place

(59:03):
at actual haunted orphanages or abandoned orphanage sites around the world.
These creepy stories aren't just camp fire fodder, but are
based off of real life tragedies that actually occurred at
these places. You can even visit these locations if you're
in the mood for a first hand ghostly encounter. Just
be warned. You never know what might come home with you.

(59:27):
And in these cases, you didn't have to be a
child to see the ghosts, but some of the ghosts
could very well have been children themselves. According to Ohio Legend,
Gore Orphanage and Vermilion burned down in the eighteen hundreds.
Rumor has it that the fire was started by a
disgruntled employee or by the owner himself to collect insurance money.

(59:50):
None of the children survived the fire. The site has
since been raised and abandoned, but visitors to the area
claimed that you can see ghosts of the orphanschildren frolicking
about the woods. Others report smelling burning flesh and hearing
the screams of children, and even finding tiny handprints on
their parked cars. The Holy Family Orphanage in Marquette, Michigan,

(01:00:14):
opened in nineteen fifteen. While it was initially meant to
be a white's only orphanage, the first occupants were sixty
Native American children. These children weren't all orphans, Some had
been taken from their mothers in an effort to assimilate
them into white culture. Rumors of abuse were common. One
story says that a young girl who had disobeyed orders

(01:00:35):
and stayed out in the cold perished of daemonia. Her
body was put on display as a warning to the
other children that they had better behave The Holy Family
Orphanage closed in nineteen sixty five, and visitors report hearing
moaning children and sighting ghosts on the property. Saint Mary's

(01:00:56):
Orphanage housed children in Galveston Island, Texas. That is until
a hurricane wiped out nearly all of the orphans in
nineteen hundred. The Great Storm descended upon the island. As
the orphanage began to flood, the sisters working there tied
the children to them with rope as they sought higher
and higher ground. Eventually, the roof collapsed, trapping them inside

(01:01:19):
and slaying ninety orphans and ten sisters. Their bodies were
discovered still tied together by the rope. Today the site
is home to a wal Mart. Employees report toys going
missing and hearing kids phantom laughter. One employee was certain
they heard a child calling for her mother, but upon
a store wide search, no one was found. The Guthrie

(01:01:45):
Boys Home in Oklahoma opened its doors sometime in the
early nineteen twenties. According to legend, one employee of the
orphanage took his own life in the bell tower. Another employee,
a nurse maid, abused many of the boys and seal.
The building was closed in nineteen seventy eight with the
emergence of the foster care system. Today, visitors to the

(01:02:08):
Guthrie Boys Home claimed to hear footsteps in the bell tower,
bells ringing, and even gasping. The ghosts of the boys
can be heard screaming late at night, and the spirit
of the nurse maid supposedly lurks in the main entryway. Raleigh,
North Carolina's cry Baby Lane was once the spot of

(01:02:28):
a Roman Catholic orphanage. When a fire broke out in
the dormitory in nineteen fifty eight, it gutted the building
and slayed many of the orphans. All that remains is
a patch of grass and the cornerstone of the original building.
Months after the fire, neighbors continued to complain to the
city about the strong smell of smoke. People walking through

(01:02:50):
the field felt as though they were being suffocated, and
creepiest of all, they heard the cries and screams of
the orphan children. Because of this, the surrounding houses have
now been abandoned. A privately owned orphanage known as the
Fairmount Children's Home opened in Alliance, Ohio in the eighteen seventies. Unfortunately,

(01:03:12):
the headmaster of the orphanage was said to be a
cruel man who tortured and even slayd the children who
lived there. That is until one night in nineteen forty four.
According to legend, the children rose up against the headmaster
and hanged him from a pipe in the basement. The
headmaster supposedly began to haunt the orphanage, looming over children's

(01:03:33):
beds and appearing as a shadowy figure in the back
of class photos. The orphanage eventually shut down and was
abandoned to the nineteen nineties before it mysteriously burned down.
During the Civil War, orphans of Union soldiers were often
taken to the National Soldier's Orphans Homestead. The orphanage ran

(01:03:54):
without problems for years until Rosa Carmichael was appointed the
orphanage's made. Said to be an abusive disciplinarian, Carmichael reportedly
tortured children in the cellar of the orphanage. Eventually a
runaway out at her abuse, and she was fined for
her transgressions. Apparently, the spirits of the children she tormented

(01:04:15):
don't believe justice was served. The building is now tourist
attraction and said to be highly haunted. Some visitors claimed
to have cited Rosa Carmichael herself trapped and angry in
the cellar. The Elizabeth Orphan Asylum opened as an orphanage
for girls in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in eighteen fifty eight.

(01:04:38):
It closed in nineteen sixty two and was eventually raised
in nineteen ninety six, But during its years of abandonment
it was the site of a lot of creepy folklore.
The basement was rumoured to be used for satanic rituals.
The house became considered a sort of magnet for evil
as it was hit by a small airplane in the
nineteen seventies and partially burned a few years later. People

(01:05:01):
often claimed to see demons or satanic nuns in the area.
Visitors also reported noticing glowing green orbs, almost like eyes,
in various sections of the house. The Montana Children's Center
is also known as the Twin Bridges Orphanage. It was
established by the state in the eighteen nineties as the

(01:05:23):
mining boom of the area declined. While some of the
children there were orphans, many were simply abandoned by parents
who couldn't afford to care for them. Tales of abuse
that the orphanage were numerous. Children were whipped for wetting
the bed, or hung on coat hooks and locked in
dark rooms as punishment. Many children also perished on the

(01:05:43):
property from disease. One former employee said there were thirty
headstones in the yard for children, but they have since disappeared.
The orphanage closed in nineteen seventy six, and the current
owner claims to hear children singing when alone on the property.
It was instigated by the TV show Ghost Adventures, who
communicated with the spirit of an orphan girl and found

(01:06:05):
flashing lights dancing from room to room. Opened by Sisters
of Mercy and the Catholic Church in nineteen o five,
Saint John's Orphanage in Guilbern, Australia, housed two hundred boys
at its peak. By many accounts, the boys were treated
as slaves and cruelly punished. They were given one set

(01:06:26):
of clothing upon arrival, and they were beaten and caned regularly.
Neglect was common, and most of the orphans were not
educated beyond fifth grade. As it wasn't the happiest places,
it's no surprise that it is now known as one
of the most haunted locations in Australia. Disturbing messages are
written on the walls, seemingly by someone who once lived there,

(01:06:49):
and the spirits of little boys supposedly still roam the premises.
The Liverpool's Seamen's Orphan Institution later became a new Sham
Park Hospital, a medical hospital, and then, just to make
things extra creepy, ended its days of actual human occupancy
as a mental asylum before it was finally closed down

(01:07:11):
by the City Council in nineteen ninety seven. This abandoned
Victorian building is just asking to be haunted. The building
once housed four hundred orphans who risked being locked in
unlit naughty cupboards in an attic corridor if they misbehaved.
There have been many ghost sidings at the location on
the building roof and in ward. G Visitors have also

(01:07:34):
reported hearing dragging noises in the dining room and have
feelings of uneasiness in the basement. The Oddfellows Home was
constructed in nineteen hundred in Liberty, Missouri, as a place
for unfortunate souls. It included a hospital, a home for
the elderly, and an orphanage. It was run by the

(01:07:55):
Independent Order of Oddfellows ioof, a fraternal order meant to
help others, but the order may have had a more
sinister purpose. Many residents of the Odd Fellow's Home passed.
Six hundred bodies are buried in the cemetery. That's a
lot of spirits. There's also suspicion that the ioof had
some creepy secret practices, which included using human remains of

(01:08:19):
their residence in their societal rituals. Is supposedly upset the spirits,
who are said to haunt the location, now a winery
to this day. The old orphanage in Savannah, Georgia, was
built in eighteen ten. The Stone Mansion was once an
all girls orphanage until a fire trapped and killed eleven

(01:08:42):
of the seventeen girls who resided there. Today, the owners
claim to hear young girls singing and playing, and say
they often move items around the rooms. There's little factual
evidence to be found on the Good Servant later known
as Good Serpent Orphanage in Vallejo Calm. There was an
orphanage built in rural Vallejo in the eighteen hundreds that

(01:09:05):
closed amid investigations of child abuse and passings. Less substantiated
rumors claim the orphanage housed mentally unsound children who were
experimented on and lobotomized. Whatever the real story, the orphanage
was eventually destroyed. A golf course was built in its place,
and later a housing development. Many residents of the housing

(01:09:26):
development claim their houses, despite being new or haunted, they
hear footsteps and moaning and see the ghosts of children.
There are many haunted buildings in New Orleans, and Saint
Vincent's Guesthouse is no exception. It was originally built as
an orphanage in the eighteen sixties, a time when many

(01:09:47):
children would have died from yellow fever. Today, the orphanage
has been turned into a hotel. Guests constantly report hauntings,
specifically that children laugh inside the walls, the apparition of
a nun stalks the top floor, and spirits move their
possessions and wake them up at night. The Wise County

(01:10:08):
Orphanage in Wise, Virginia was abandoned in the nineteen twenties.
Not much is known about the orphanage itself, but those
daring enough to venture into the area have reported hearing
bouncing balls and laughing children, and seeing orbs of light.

(01:10:40):
The phenomenon of kids allegedly seeing ghosts thrives online, but
no matter how improbable or unprovable, the volume of these
stories alone is enough to make scientists take notice. There
are admittedly lots of reports of kids seeing ghosts, says
Jacqueline D. Woolley, psychology professor at the University of Texas.

(01:11:02):
Willie's research dives deep into children's evaluation and understanding of
reality versus the fantastical. She revels in Rosemary's tale about
the Girl on the Stairs I shared earlier in this episode.
That's enough to make you believe that it's real for
about a millisecond, she says. Though good Halloween fun, there

(01:11:22):
are many holes and stories like that of Rosemary and
the Girl at the Top of the stairs. Willy says, namely,
the brain. Our minds naturally make connections between events, whether
they're connected or not. The brain pays attention to evidence
that fits our theory and ignores the evidence that doesn't fit.
She says. For example, it's far more likely that a

(01:11:44):
child overheard the name Susie one hundred times than the
undead Susie lingers in this realm for an eternity of
tea parties. Next, considered children's fertile imaginations, and you could
easily argue that Susie is not a ghost but actually
an imaginary friend. We know that between a third and
two thirds of children have imaginary companions, says Charles Fernioff,

(01:12:08):
a psychologist at Durham University, where he investigates the phenomenon
of hallucinations. Not too long ago, imaginary friends were considered
a precursor to mental illness. Now we know they're a
positive sign of healthy child development. Now adults come to
me concerned if their kid doesn't have one, He says.
Developmental psychologists such as Gene Pagette have been fascinated by

(01:12:32):
the murky line between fantasy and reality for kids, whether
it's imaginary friends, or dreams or yep, ghosts. Old thinking
assumed kids just couldn't differentiate between what's real and what's not,
while new thinkers such as Woolley believe kids know full
what's real, even if it looks like they can't tell

(01:12:52):
the difference. Fernihoff falls somewhere in the middle. I think
on occasion, kids do mix up imagination and realcy to
have something like a hallucination like experience. If you would
never tell your child their imaginary friend isn't real, or
that they're just imagining things or even lying, you should
treat an encounter with a so called ghost the same way,

(01:13:16):
which presents a strange question. How should you react if
your little one reports a visit from the other side?
Most important, do not flip out. A lot of parents
get worried about imaginary companions and strange experiences. Forredni Huff says,
unless there is real distress, do not worry to know
whether there's real distress. Just ask the child you want

(01:13:39):
to work with the emotion, not the ghost. Willy says,
now is not the time for a grown up lesson
on imagination versus reality, because if they're scared, it doesn't
matter anyway. Instead, Willly suggests you work within the fantasy,
just like you might for a monster under the bed.
Engage with the kid as to what it looks like,

(01:14:01):
what it does, Ask her if she's scared of the
ghost or if she likes it, and if she has
seen it before. A scary ghost can be tweaked as necessary.
Maybe you can help the child pretend he's in old,
tiny underwear, for example, to become a friendly one. Then
it's up to you, as a parent to decide if
you want to encourage or discourage this belief. According to

(01:14:24):
Rosemary Counter, the columnist with the Girl at the Top
of the Stair story, my mother did the former, subscribing
fully to the notion of friendly ghosts, which to this
day are said to haunt our house. As for me,
I'd say a ninety nine percent logical unbeliever, though really
one percent is all you need. Even the scientists agree

(01:14:45):
it's important to never say never, Woolly says, because it's
the scientific way to be it can't be easy, but
child psychiatrist Jim B. Tucker is balancing science and the
paranormal at the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University
of Virginia. We don't take the approach of believer or
non believer. We restore and explore the phenomenon of children

(01:15:08):
who report past lives. He says. Overlapping often are reports
of kids who see dead relatives, including some who were
dead long before the child was born. They tend to
go something like this. When my daughter was three years old,
she started telling us that she was being woken up
in the night by a man who kept tickling her feet.
Read one tale on BuzzFeed. We figured she was just

(01:15:31):
dreaming until we came across an old picture of my
grandparents on their wedding day, and my daughter pointed at
my grandfather and said, that's him. That's the man who
tickles my feet. My grandfather passed away when I was six.
When you hear enough stories like that, you do start
to think there must be something there. Tucker says, I'm
open to it. That's all I can say. Whether you

(01:15:54):
believe or not. His best advice is to be cool.
I don't know if you really have to do anything
other than listen to what your child says. Kids grow
up and grow out of it and let it go,
but do they really. Rosemary is living now three decades
post little girl on the stairs, still loving to tell
her story, and now that she has her own toddler,

(01:16:16):
I'm sure she sponges up all her mother's love of
witches and ghouls. Come October, my guess, Willie says, is
that kids see ghosts much more commonly around Halloween when
their parents believe to boot. One last story from Rosemary.
We were curled up reading books the other night when
my two year old whispered, there's someone at the door.

(01:16:37):
What did you say, I asked, peering at the dark,
empty doorway. There's someone at the door, she slowly repeated.
Then she pointed, matter of factly at the book we
were reading, where little Miss Lucky indeed had a visitor
at her door, proving the only spooky creep in this
bedroom was me. You've made it this far. Welcome to

(01:17:09):
the Weirdo Family. If you like the podcast, please tell
your friends and family about it however you can and
get them to become weirdos too. All stories in Weird
Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and
you can find source links or links to the authors
in the show notes. Haunted Children is by Amanda Sedlick
Heavener for Ranker and from the website. The Every Mom

(01:17:31):
Orphanage Ghosts is by Ella Tharp for Graveyard Shift, and
What to Do When Your Child Sees a Ghost is
by Rosebery Counter for The Washington Post. Now that we're
coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a
little light James one, verses two through four. Consider it
pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials

(01:17:52):
of many kinds, because you know that the testing of
your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so
that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.
And a final thought from Thomas Edison. Many of life's
failures are people who did not realize how close they
were to success when they gave up. I'm Darren Marler.

(01:18:18):
Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness.

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