Art Bell’s Ghost to Ghost episode features callers sharing eerie encounters—photographing spirits near graves, a Navy radio operator smelling his deceased aunt’s perfume on Okinawa-bound Easter Sunday 1944, and a Hawaiian Mormon brother bitten 200+ times after defying sacred cemetery traditions. Others describe shadowy figures, ghostly apparitions in haunted homes (like a skeleton in Redondo Beach or a trench-coated man), and unexplained phenomena tied to emotional attachments or disturbed burial grounds. Bell links red-eyed apparitions—from Amityville to Alaskan churches—to unsettling patterns, suggesting spirits linger when boundaries are crossed or memories discarded. The episode blends personal stories with chilling implications of the afterlife’s persistence. [Automatically generated summary]
And I issue you fair warning, some of what you're going to hear tonight is going to scare the hell out of you.
So if you're alone on the highway driving, at home in a dark room, it's up to you.
Stick around, and as you heard in the first hour, it's going to get rough.
We'll get back to it in a moment.
Here comes the first candidate.
Okay, Art.
It says you asked for it.
You have my permission to post the attached photo on your website as long as you don't release my address or phone number.
I'm a student of religious demonology and help the local clergy when dealing with cases of possession to keep my skills sharp.
I spend a fair amount of time in cemeteries, interacting with and photographing spirits.
And here is a favorite from my collection.
I was walking in a cemetery last night when I sensed a spirit telepathically beckoning me to follow it.
I did so.
And I was led through the cemetery to a freshly dug grave.
Freshly dug.
I took a picture and turned to leave when the spirit told me it wasn't ready.
And when I took the picture, that is to say when I took that first picture, so I recomposed the shot and waited for the spirit to give me some kind of cue.
Shortly, I began to see something through the viewfinder, but it simply didn't register completely visually.
It seemed to register in some other region of the mind.
So I took that as the cue and I snapped the shutter.
I waited for the flash to recycle and took a third photograph at Martha Graveseight to finish the remainder of the roll of film.
And what he has sent me is one of the photographs on that roll of film.
If you will check my website, I suspect Keith will have it up there pretty quickly.
If you have a ghost or spirit photograph, you may send it to me tonight, and we will act with dispatch and get it up there.
My ghost story was precipitated by a world event which I was part of.
Let me take you back a few years.
When I was just 17 and out of high school, I enlisted in the Navy back east, went to Samson, New York for boot camp, and from there, through some testing that they gave, they sent me to the premier radio school the Navy had, which is in Bedford Springs, Pennsylvania.
I know there are certain crazed people who can do that.
unidentified
Anyway, from there, at that time, in 1944, there were no more fleet assignments and submarine assignments.
Everybody was assigned to the amphibious grouping.
And from there, I went to Fort Pierce, Florida, and was assigned to an amphibious group.
And what the radiomen did at that time was to, with the LCVPs that carried the troops ashore, there was a coxswain and a gunner mate and a radioman.
And that's what we were trained for.
After a few weeks there, I was assigned to an APA and we went to the Pacific.
Carrying on a bit, my ghost story was precipitated From a day that I'll never forget, probably not a week or a day goes by that I don't think about it.
April the 1st, Easter Sunday, was the day we invaded and landed on Okinawa.
And we were assigned to carry the troops in waves, as you know, I'm sure he's familiar with it, to the shore, which we did.
And it was kind of scary, but we did our job.
And our ship, our APA, carried a second wave across.
And by the time we finished that day, we got back to the ship and hoi for the LCVPs aboard the ship.
And we finally hit the sack about close to midnight.
This is where my ghost story begins.
About 3 o'clock in the morning, you know, we were all tired as hell, and I think when my head hit the pillow, I fell asleep immediately.
And about 3 o'clock in the morning, I know it was around 3 o'clock because I looked at my watch when it happened.
Nothing startled me.
There was no noise.
I just woke up, sat up in my bunk, and there was, oh, I forgot to preface something.
One thing I hated about the AirFib is I couldn't handle the smell of the diesel exhaust.
Kind of that nauseated me.
I never got seasick, but I just couldn't handle that odor.
Well, anyway, I woke up that morning about 3 o'clock.
I woke up to this sweet perfume smell, and what the hell is going on here?
One of these guys must have taken a bottle of perfume and dropped it or some dance thing.
But then I realized, God, that smell is familiar.
You remember how your old aunt or your grandmother used to splash that body powder over them, the bathing powder after they took a shower?
It smelled so sweet and flowery?
Yes.
Well, that's the smell that I had.
And I had my favorite aunt's smell.
My Aunt Melanie back east, God bless her.
I could never forget that smell.
And that's what I was smelling.
The odor of the diesel fuel was gone.
And the air was gone.
And the odor was prominent.
And after smelling a while, I realized what was happening.
I looked at my watch.
It was around 3 o'clock, and I fell back to sleep.
And that was the end of the incident.
And about two weeks later, I got a letter from my mother who told me that my Aunt Melamy had died on Easter Sunday in the afternoon.
It was exactly at that moment that I woke up when I smelled the powder, the sweet floral scent of the powder that my Aunt Melanie used to put on her body.
And it implies that when one passes to the other side, there is at the very least a period of time when you get to visit with or be near those you love.
There's about every movie I can think of that has dealt with those.
And I guess most recently, the movie with Robin Williams, What Dreams May Come.
You don't go immediately.
You get to console or you get to feel or you get to be with or you get to live with those who you love.
And I guess it doesn't matter where in the world they are, does it?
On a ship near Okinawa with all those time zone changes or anything else.
Because over there, there really is not time, nor is there space.
So you're moving in a different realm.
First time call our line?
You're on the air.
Hi.
unidentified
I am.
I just wanted to tell you I really enjoy your show.
Now, one could imagine almost anything, but one has got to admit that when it's red, glowing eyes, it's not a good message.
unidentified
No.
I would immediately think the devil, and, you know, I'm a Christian and I believe in praying, you know, because things like that, you don't want hanging around you.
I wanted to also tell everybody that we have a new Usenet group that's just been, oh, it's two weeks old, I think, called ALT or ALT Binaries Paranormal.
So anybody with good ghost pictures, we've got lots of great orb pictures up there and stuff.
And as it turned out, it was going to be ruined anyway because he yelled out over the intercom my name, Pat, and he goes, my God, you won't believe this.
She's walked right through me.
And I hear the heavy door of the chamber being opened, and Mike's footsteps coming around the corner to the experimental room.
And he goes, look, look at that.
And he's grabbing my arm with about 500 pounds of pressure.
And there, in the wall from the experimental room into the chamber, comes this kind of misty-looking stuff.
And by the time it was halfway through the wall, just past the EEG, the old Grass Model 6 EEG we were using, it solidified into the apparition of, oh, I don't know, about a 60, 65-year-old woman wearing a flower print dress, and she was just floating with about ankle length down to the floor.
You couldn't see her feet.
And she just kind of floated through the very narrow, long experimental room.
I looked over at him.
Both of our jaws were dropped.
The hair on the back of our necks were just sticking up.
And so when she passed through the shelving on the left-hand side where we store all the EEG paper, just passed through as if it were nothing.
And she never looked over at us or anything.
But we immediately went around over to the left where there's another hallway.
It was kind of a big U-shaped complex on the base floor of the psychology building.
And we were expecting her to come through what would be one of the small little experimental rooms next to our experimental room and then come out into the hallway.
And she never did.
So we went back around, and sure enough, there she goes, floating back into the sleep chamber.
And then we indeed went over to the right-hand corridor where she came through the anechoic chamber and disappeared out the outside wall.
Is it reasonable to ask you whether you think the kind of experimentation you were doing, monitoring sleep, curling photography, something very unusual, might have, in effect, opened a door that allowed all of this to occur, or what's your sense of it?
unidentified
Well, she showed herself a second time art, but the experimental parameters during that time were a very traditional sleep type of experiment wherein we were measuring the temporal regressive reference of dreams dependent upon the effect of alcohol and body temperature.
Listen, I was originally going to take the ghost photographs directly, but I'm too busy listening to you.
And a couple of them didn't go through that I already sent to Keith, and I'm mortified about that.
So, if you have a good ghost photograph, please send it right now to wetmaster at artbell.com.
That'll go directly to Keith, and he'll get it up.
We're going to put up tonight's ghost photographs for you.
And I had a particularly good entity photograph that I forwarded to Keith, and I wish to heck he had received that.
I'm going to probably have to try and send it again.
But for those of you sending photographs now, please send them directly to webmaster at artbell.com.
And we'll get them up, the good ones, as quickly as they arrive.
It's Ghost to Ghost AM.
That's all we're talking about tonight is ghosts.
And we're definitely, so far anyway, getting our money's worth.
This comes from Tim in Phoenix, Arizona.
Art, a contribution to your program.
This experience took place 20 years ago.
And I swear I get goosebumps when recalling this incident to this day.
It was the summer of 81.
I was a typical 17-year-old.
I remember that.
I'd sneak out after my parents were asleep, I remember that, and drive around with my friends looking for girls, of course.
Not that we would have had the slightest idea what to do with them.
Very slim chance that they would have given us a time of day, but I digress.
After getting back home at about 3 a.m., I got out of my friend's car in front of my parents' house, waved goodbye to my buddies, turned around to head towards the front doors.
I looked around.
I was quite startled to see a man standing in the street between me and my parents' driveway.
He was backlit by the street light behind him, so I couldn't clearly make out any features.
I could, though, discern that he appeared to be wearing a long trench coat and a stovepipe hat.
Additionally, he was standing next to an older-style bicycle.
This is an extremely odd clothing choice, considering this took place in the summer heat of Phoenix.
Now, bear in mind that we had just driven up the street directly over the spot where he was standing, and he was not there.
I was scared because I assumed that anyone out of this late, you know, or early in the morning, as you look at it, was most likely up to no good one way or the other, hypocrisy noted, and quite frankly, I had a bad feeling.
In an attempt to ascertain his intentions, I asked him, can I help you?
No answer.
I repeated, can I help you?
No answer.
He just stood there.
Kind of cocked his head to one side, as if trying to figure out me as well at this point.
I'd had about enough, and I began to look around for something to defend myself with, unfortunately.
He stood directly in my path.
I couldn't get to my parents' house with no alternative.
I began walking toward him with my hand out, as if to shake his hand in a friendly gesture.
I got within a few feet of him before breaking into a full sprint, and I simply ran right past him.
And I noted that as I did, it was very, very cold as I ran past.
I didn't look back.
Now, the next morning, my neighbor, who worked the graveyard, Shifno Pun intended, poked his head over the fence to ask me, what was that all about in your driveway early this morning?
While I was somewhat relieved to discover that somebody could corroborate the experience, I was deeply troubled by what he said next.
He said, I know you're going to think I'm crazy, but after you took off running, that man got on his bike, pedaled a few yards, and simply vanished.
Well, my neighbor has been known to take a drink every now and then, the possibility of his being sincere and sober resulted in many a sleepless night.
Creeping down my stairs to the side door of our third-story house, I rounded the corner to the garage, expecting a parlor to pop out from one of the many oak trees.
I continued onward and I saw with the aid of a neighbor's dim patio light a thin five-foot high body of some kind with a gigantic head scurry from behind one tree onto the next tree.
Yeah, it's some sort of comment on human nature, isn't it?
Well, go ahead.
unidentified
All right.
The house that my mother lives in was built in 1974, the year that I was born.
And when I was a small child, see, my sisters and my brother, they all told me this.
When I was a small child, I had an imaginary friend that I called Sam, and I described him as a tall man wearing all black clothes with a black, broad-brimmed hat and long black hair.
I've heard so many stories about people, children that had imaginary friends.
I never had one, and I've always wanted to ask, your imaginary friend, could you see your friend?
Was your friend an invisible friend and you just had this mental image of your friend?
Did your friend talk to you?
What kind of relationship was it?
unidentified
Well, I was so young that I really don't remember.
I was about three or four.
And I was telling my brother and sisters about this.
And come to find out a couple of years after I hadn't talked to him or talked about him or anything, my sisters and my brother, my parents, and a couple of friends were sitting in the living room.
And this man, just as I described, my imaginary friend, nobody saw him appear, but he started walking through the living room in front of everyone and started walking down the hall.
Well, my dad gets up to go look to see who's this man that's walking in the house, figuring it to be a burglar or someone that just was on drugs or something.
When he got to the hall, the man wasn't there.
Now, this happened eight times in front of at least three people each time.
And he's never done anything that harmed the family or anything.
But my family all called him Sam because he was exactly as I had described my imaginary friend Sam.
Now, my wife, when she met me, she's a sensitive.
And when she met me, she knew that something was in the house.
And I haven't seen Sam since I was about 14, 15 years old.
And when I called her tonight to say that you were doing this show and for her to listen, she told me that she saw him go around the corner just the other day.
Just walking, you know, like when you see someone go around the corner, just catch The edge of them.
Maybe the next time you see Sam, it's going to be time for you to go.
unidentified
Yeah, maybe.
Also, my sister, one of my sisters, she says, she relates a story to me about waking up in the middle of the night and seeing a Native American woman standing at the end of her bed that disappeared.
And that happened to her, she told me, three or four times in that house.
Well, when she moved to Germany, she was in the Army and she moved to Germany, was stationed in Stuttgart.
She said that she saw the same Indian woman.
And I talked to her about six months ago.
And she told me that she has seen this Indian woman everywhere she's gone.
Well, as a child growing up, you know, I would hear tons of stories from families, you know, about this sort of thing.
And it'll always happen in the evenings, and we'll get scared.
And the next day, when daylight's out, we're not scared anymore.
Well, a bunch of our cousins, my brother and cousins, and one friend, there was five of us in the car, that evening traveling, just cruising around the island.
And back in the 70s, there weren't many streetlights.
There's not many still today, but there's a lot more today.
And we decided to go out and have some fun because, you know, we say, hey, let's go call the ghost.
One of the things they tell us in Hawaii that you never do is whistle in the nighttime calling dispirit.
But the driver cousin of mine, he totally acted strange.
And when we said, okay, let's go get him, Henry.
Let's, you know, let's go up and get.
And he just, you know, laughed in a strange voice and says, no, no, we'll wait some more.
So we sort of chuckled a little bit.
He said, okay, we'll go along with him.
Well, we asked him to drive up a couple of times.
And when it came to the third time, it was really weird.
This isn't like our cousin talking.
Strange voice.
Keep on saying, no, let him walk down to us.
So my brother, being the oldest in the car at that time, says, well, look, if you're not going to turn around and get him, I'll kick you out of the car.
I'll drive the car up.
We'll get him.
You walk home.
So then he agreed, okay, we'll go get him.
So we were going back up the road.
And as we get closer to the end, we decided to turn the lights off, to creep up on him.
We shut the radio down, but we couldn't see him.
So we sort of made the corner, and we were at the ledge, and, you know, the windows are down, of course.
My brother was a football star in Hawaii at that time.
And he said, let's go, let's get out of here.
You know, joke's over.
So he tried to lift him.
He couldn't lift him.
And my cousin, like I said, small, skinny guy as he was, we couldn't lift him.
Well, when he finally got him in the car, we couldn't talk to him.
Well, what we had to do to get him in the car is I don't know if you're familiar with what the parents used to tell us then if you have trouble, you swear and you urinate or whatever.
Well, I try to do that when you're afraid.
But we're swearing.
We finally get him free.
We're going down the hill, and we're trying to talk to him.
He can't answer us, and we question why was he bending over and real quick now?
Okay.
Well, as it turned out, he said he walked halfway across the road, sat down, and as we ran towards the car, he tried to get up to go towards us.
I'd like to say, first of all, I'd like to preface my call by saying that I've never really been a believer in ghosts, and I'm still not really sure about it, although I have found your show to be entirely entertaining tonight.
I am familiar with electronics, and an incident about 12 years ago, I'm 28 years of age, and when I was about so old, still to have the mind open,
I was sitting at my kitchen table, and back then you had the kids around the neighborhood, and we had quite a few kids in the neighborhood who would come around and ring the doorbell, myself included.
And I'm a longtime Civil War collector of relics and have walked the battleground at Pleasant Hill for 25 years.
And the doctor who owns the land, we've built a kind of extensive museum by finding artifacts.
And all this time, for the last 25 years, we began running into strange happenings on the battleground.
This old, old log house was used as a hospital during the battle and afterwards.
And we had the commander of the Civil War reenactment.
He was going to stay in the old house overnight to be on the scene early in the morning.
And he had a lantern in there, and his daughter had put up a cot, and he was getting ready to go to bed because he had to get up early and command the reenactment the next morning.
Right.
And, of course, they had Civil War reenactors everywhere, but he said it's getting late, and he wanted to go to sleep.
And he said he didn't want to be disturbed.
He told the rest of the reenactors to stay out.
And all at once, this ragged Confederate came in with straggly hair and beard and said, it's your turn to take guard duty.
And it irritated him real bad.
And he said, I've got to command the battle tomorrow.
You go do the guard duty.
He says, no, I'm tired.
It's your turn.
And that he laid down onto the cot where his daughter was laying asleep, and he dissolved into the cot where his daughter was.
Battlefields have long been extremely haunted places for obvious reasons.
unidentified
Let me tell you one more if we have time.
We had a New York boy that came down from up here, and I'd hunted the battleground extensively, and the 171st New York had used a ditch there to fight hand-to-hand combat until they were wiped out.
And so I, of course, used metal detectors to find the relics, and I'd hunted this ditch for about five years and found everything that could be found.
And he said, can I go with you?
I would love to go since my kinfolks.
Now, he was from up north.
Of course, I live in the south.
It's kind of unusual that way.
So he went down there.
He didn't know where he was.
I didn't tell him where he was.
And he found a beautiful brass spur right next to the ditch where the 173rd New York were completely wiped out.
So it was a hot day, and we laid down in the ditch.
And I never get any feelings like that.
I don't know why, but he does, I guess.
And he laid down in the ditch, and he didn't know all his kinfolks had all been killed in the ditch we were laying in.
And all at once, Art, he just jumped straight up out of the ditch like something had struck him with a hot poker.
And he said, something just passed over me.
He said, I've got to get out of here.
I've got to go.
And I laughed, and I knew he didn't know where we were.
And so I said, oh, John, just lay back down.
Just because all your kinfolks all got killed right where you're laying is no reason to get upset.
He jumped out of the ditch and sat down in the old road.
Well, I worked for years with a girl whose maiden name was Riggs.
So I told her, I said, Anna, do you have any ancestors by the name of Irving?
She says, yes, her great-grandfather.
So I told her the story.
And in quite a few years to come, then, she said her aunt had died.
And she went over to help her take the stuff out of the, clear the attic out.
And a picture fell out of a box she was carrying down from the attic.
And she asked her other aunt, who is this?
Yes.
And her other aunt said, that's your great-grandfather Irving.
And so she gave me the picture.
Yes.
And now my son's in his teens, and he hasn't seen Irving, and Irving has just, you know, turned water on, and we always say, oh, it's Irving.
Things are falling off the wall.
There's footsteps.
And so when I came home from work, and I put the picture on the bulletin board by the phone, my son comes running in from work or something, and he grabs the phone to call his girlfriend.
And he stops short.
He hangs the phone up.
He says, Mommy, where did you get that picture?
Who's that picture of?
I said, I don't know.
I said, who does it look like?
He said, remember that guy who used to come visit me?
Can you imagine being taken in the night by a spirit to the place underground where the body, what's left, is buried to spend time with the spirit there.
And my dad and my uncle, they made the bricks by hand.
My grandfather loved cement.
And he would cuss every time he to that house.
I made 100,000 of these bricks.
Well, over time, I moved in.
I was a nurse, and I worked at night, and I lived in South Sacramento.
And over time, the area deteriorated, but the plot of land we had in the house was there.
When we first moved in, things would start to happen.
A light switch.
We had these distinctive light switch.
My grandfather was a scrounger.
And if he could get it from a military base, he'd get it.
These lights would go click, click, click, click.
And we'd be sitting in the living room, and there was a lot of stuff left over from them, but you'd sit there and suddenly hear a click, click, and the light bath, the bathroom in the back bathroom would come on.
The door would kind of jar, and then the pilot would flush.
Don't you realize, though, the potential horror that you're talking about?
In other words, dying.
Being so attached.
I can understand being attached to the work you have done, the stone work you have done, the house you live in, the area you're in, your plot of land, whatever it is.
I can understand that.
But the hell of being forevermore confined, unseen, to roam in these places, it's just horrible to contemplate.
unidentified
Yeah, well, I understand that, and I felt for him.
So we would talk to him.
I'd be sitting there working, and I'd say, how you doing?
And I worked in his office.
I lived there.
I was actually LXC lived there for about three years.
And the final kind of chapter in all this, my girlfriend and me were having a bad night, and we woke up suddenly.
And she got up and I got up.
We walked outside in the living room.
All the chairs were upside down.
The property was being sold.
So they, I think, were upset that they were losing their house because this was a hub of our family.
Well, I've enjoyed your story, and I'm going to amplify on it a little bit.
Thank you very, very much.
If you're very young, you won't comprehend what I'm about to say.
But as you get older, a place that you have built yourself, a place that you have designed yourself, your own property, your own place, would and does carry such a very,
very strong imprint on your mind that I can easily imagine that if there is some sort of existence, be it heaven or hellish after this life, you would not easily, nor perhaps ever, in the real horror of thinking about it, detach yourself from this place that you were so connected to, that you so loved.
That you knew every cranny and crook of that you loved, you know, your place, your home.
That you remain there.
But that's quite a prospect to consider, isn't it?
I don't tell people about this because they'll think I'm crazy, but I figured I'll go ahead and call.
Anyway, this thing pulls up beside me, and it's starting to creep in, and I'm really frantically trying to get this stick to move.
And I just look over, and all of a sudden I just see this face in the cockpit window.
And this thing's huge, four big radial engines.
And the guy kind of gives me a wave, and then he turns off and pulls away, and then all of a sudden it just kind of vanished, and then I can start to hear things again, and I could hear the radio again.
So I made it back to Oakland Airport, where I'm based out of.
Yeah, my thing that happened, it's not a very long story, but it freaks me out.
Freaks me out every night I go to bed.
And it's where I'd be laying, sleeping, and I keep my room pretty dark.
And then I just felt there was another presence in the room when I'm sleeping.
It's dark, but you can still see silhouettes.
But anyway, I'd be laying there with my eyes closed.
I wouldn't be moving.
And I'd just thinking to myself, now, if I get up really quick and look really fast, if I'm going to see anything, just because I felt something else in there.
I jumped up, looked up really quick, and most of the time there would be nothing there, but this time, back to the red eyes, two of them looking right at me.
But the story I have is a friend of mine was telling me this just a few years ago.
And I guess it probably happened within the last 10 years or so.
And it happened in a little small town just south of where I'm calling right now.
But I guess there was a family that lived in this house.
And there was a mom and a dad and three little kids.
And I guess they were pretty young from what I hear.
But I guess one evening, after the kids had gone to bed and the parents were just sitting down watching TV, and all of a sudden these three kids, they come tearing down the stairs screaming, you know, Mommy, Mommy, we just saw some red eyes upstairs.
Yeah, we're scared, you know.
And of course the parents, you know, they really didn't take it seriously, I guess.
They just kind of, well, you know, it's okay.
Don't worry about it.
You know, just try to go back to sleep.
I guess they went up, checked everything out, reassured the kids and everything, that everything was going to be fine and everything.
And so they went to sleep.
And I guess it's kind of a tragic tale, but I guess a few days later, the house burned down.
Number one, you may now begin checking my website because as he receives them, Keith Rowland, my webmaster, is putting the ghost photographs that you're sending, the good ones, up on the website.
Now, we'll see what little section he has prepared for that.
But no doubt you'll find a link on the front page.
If you have a ghost photograph, a spirit photograph, or a demon photograph, this is the night we are not only collecting, but immediately posting them as we do ghost to ghost AM.
Now, you may send them to webmaster at artbell.com.
That's webmaster at artbell.com.
A quick Terrence McKenna update for you.
Terrence is now away with his lady friend for a couple of days.
It's a location unknown.
And I feel quite confident that next week we are going to talk a bit with Terrence McKenna.
He has a rather grim prognosis with a malignant brain tumor in his frontal lobe area.
Shortly, you might want to make your way up to my website at www.artbell.com and see the ghost photographs your fellow callers are sending in this morning as we speak.
Keith is getting them up as quick as he can.
Don't touch that dial.
All right, as soon as we get the first ghost photographs up, and that will be within minutes, you will find them in the newest site editions.
No doubt right above the article from Missoula.
So watch for it there.
It will be appearing shortly as we get ghost photographs up.
That's what we're talking about this morning.
Ghosts.
I don't exactly know what a ghost is, but you can begin to make some assumptions as you listen to these stories.
I used to actually go and participate in some of the ceremonies cleaning bones in caves of ancestors.
unidentified
That's exactly right.
Well, I'm married to a Japanese national here, and we spend a considerable amount of time cleaning the family cemetery and talking about the ancestors, inviting the ancestors to come back to the home.
And so this is all part of a very ancient belief going back to the beginning of Shintoism and before, I'm sure.
But there are quite a few fascinating ghost stories here in Japan.
And one thing I just wanted to share with you this evening is I work at a woman's college in Japan in Kyushu, close to the city of Fukuoka.
And it's buried, excuse me, and it's built on a battleground.
And in 1300, two large troops of samurai or warriors fought there.
And right across the way from the school is this large, what it is, is a kind of practice field for the self-defense forces here.
And they drive trucks around and that sort of stuff.
When they built this big field, this big area, and paved it over and that sort of thing, they found these old pieces of armor and bones and that sort of thing.
And so every year the town does what they call ohadai, which is, you know, they get together and they do a group exorcism of this ground because people, the farmers and the villagers in this small town, see over and over again the spirits dressed in armor of these old warriors who died way back in 1300.
But to go back to the story, though, of the school, the woman's college where I work, the people who work there, the security guards, have seen these phantoms, if you will, these ghosts.
And in fact, one Sunday morning, it was a couple years ago, one of the security guards was at his post, and he looked up and saw three or four of these phantoms walking down the road.
And, you know, in Japan, a ghost doesn't have feet.
And he described it to me as being, you know, a classic Japanese ghost dressed in kabuto and armor and lacking feet, kind of walking together single file down this road.
So you should be in the process of turning native.
unidentified
Well, yes and no.
Anyway, but one thing I did want to mention to you, Art, is that I've written a book.
And this is not particularly, I'm collecting Japanese ghost stories now, but I've collected stories from my hometown in Westminster, Maryland, north central Maryland.
And it's a collection of folklore and ghost stories from that area.
Anyways, it took off up in this grass field where the power lines run through, and I turned up in there and went to try to catch it.
Well, I started catching up with it, and all of a sudden it spun around, and it looked like a skeleton.
And it took off back the other way.
So I got my bike turned around and chased it back across the field, across the street, up this little alley by this park, and it ducked around this corner of this building.
Either that or you weren't rational at that moment.
Either way, go ahead.
unidentified
Well, anyways, it ducked around the corner of this building, and I got up there next to the corner of the building, and it took off back the other way.
So in the process of getting my motorcycle turned around again, now there's two people standing there that weren't there before.
And the girl had long black hair, and she had like on a white gown, and she had real white skin and wire-rimmed glasses.
This guy that was standing next to her had on like a brown trench coat, like a really old-looking old-timey suit, brown suit with a frilly shirt and kind of, you know, like a scissor-cut haircut.
Well, I got to talking to this one guy that I knew that's kind of into crazy stuff like that, you know, and he told me we encountered something of the supernatural.
Well, as it turned out, in the late 60s, there had been a girl who worked at the station who one night had walked in, walked onto the set, and killed herself.
We try and get together every week and listen to your show.
I'm calling about three incidences I had a while back.
The last one was a while back.
It was actually six months ago.
The first one happened a long time ago, years ago, in a room with my sister.
And a little word about some words about my home before I continue.
It was built in the late 1800s.
And for a while, this fellow named Walter lived there who Died, I believe in the 60s or something.
And he lived in our home most of his life.
Anyway, we're sitting there, and there's this light with two switches to it.
And we're both a good 10, 15 feet away from both switches.
And the light suddenly turned on.
The light switch was off.
And so I went down in to investigate.
And the switch was on its on position, so you had to turn it well it was on its off position, so you had to turn it on in order to turn off the switch the light because the other switches switched.
Yeah, so the light the switch physically moved to turn uh on the light, which was kind of spooky because the switch would have to move up to turn off turn on the light and not move down.
And uh I waited for a while uh thinking about it, and I went to the market.
Well, the one thing that I would dredge from that and wonder about is why A spirit or why a ghost would need exercise.
Now, the one thing you would think you would gain when you leave the physical and go to the other side is, you know, we're done with this need for food stuff, right?
And exercise, why would a spirit need exercise?
Physical exercise, mental maybe, but physical, why?
So that worries me a little bit.
Get over there.
Hell, you probably have to take vitamins, the way it sounds.
And I continued to hear this for the next several weeks.
So finally, I got up and did a little research at the town records and the local library and things and come to find out when the church across next door and the house were built in the late 1800s that they had been built on an Indian burial ground.
The Indian place had been tore up to build these structures.
And the friend knew very little, first time I'd ever met her, knew very little about, or actually knew nothing about our individual families and backgrounds.
And I got on the board with her, and we brought up an entity city from Texas.
And we were asking questions back and forth.
And he said that he had died some time ago, and that he had lost a lot of money, had investments in silver and gold, things like that.
You know, as you're beginning to get a cogent conversation, a litany even of this person's life coming from the Ouija board, how the hell could you sit there with your hand on that moving?
Anyway, as it turned out we had a family friend my wife could be at the time and myself whose name was Tetz and he had uh committed suicide uh a couple years before and he had lost money in a silver mine so there he was there he was communicating I've got a wonder from way over on some other side
You could look into the hallway as I'm doing now, which is dark, and you could see them looking at you, and you could smell the beginnings of when you light a cigarette.
Well, we found out that these people had committed suicide, both of them.
Their little boy had been put into foster care.
And it was only three months after I had moved in that they destroyed, they got rid of this place because it had the old place, that it had bad ill feeling.
Well, I started out at 6 o'clock in the morning reading a farm report when I was 17 years old and went into the sales manager one day and said, I want to sell some spots after 9 o'clock.
Anyway, my story is I was about 15 years old, and my mom and I had moved into this house, and this was back in the Cleveland area, Cleveland, Ohio area.
And it was a typical two-story Victorian kind of house with the front porch, and their houses are very close set together.
There was this one empty house that was next door and sat a little higher on the hill.
And my, at the time, I guess she was three years old or so, sister, she was standing on the back porch and she was looking up at this old house, this empty old house, and said to my mom, see the man?
See the man?
He's drinking something in the window.
And we later learned that a guy had died in that house.
And he was an alcoholic.
And he used to walk up the stairs every night and you could hear him fall into bed.
And my little sister described that.
But we were told in the house that we moved into that it too was haunted.
And, of course, we didn't think anything of it.
But it was rather interesting when that happened to my little sister because she couldn't make up that story.
So anyway, in the house that mom and I moved into, we were told, because the people that lived there were actually friends of the family, and we were told that the house was haunted, and we said, yeah, yeah, ha ha.
And when you go in the house, it was a typical, like I said, old two-story Victorian house.
And there was a, as soon as you walk in the front parlor, there was an immediate set of stairs that went up to the second floor, to the bedrooms.
Yes.
And there was three bedrooms up there and a bathroom.
And then there was another door in the hallway there that led up a very tight set of stairs up into the third floor attic.
And my mom would come out of her bedroom window, out of her bedroom, and she'd knock on my door.
Do you hear that?
And I'd say, yeah, I hear that, mom.
And so one night I had a friend of mine over, Gus, and we went up the stairs, and It was one of these deals where you pull open the door, and there was a string that hung down from way up above that would pull a light.
And we pulled on the light, and nothing happened.
The light didn't work.
So we decided to go up the stairs, and we would take two flashlights.
And Gus and I went up the attic stairs, and we got up to the top, and we each had a flashlight in our hand, and up there was also a rollerway bed, one of those old rollerweight beds that folds in half.
And somehow, this honestly got happened to us.
Both of our flashlights went out at exactly the same time, and my belt got caught on one of the springs on that rollerweight bed, and it was like Laurel and Hardy.
We were near a place called Fort Ritchie, Maryland, in Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania.
And the Mason-Dixon line actually crossed through our house.
Actually crossed right through our house.
So you could, depending on what part.
We had a lot of trouble with taxes, where we paid taxes.
But the Mason-Dixon line cut through the house.
And this house was up on top of a mountain.
It was a very, very, very large house, 35 rooms.
An architecture that my mother called Early Halloween.
If that means this place looked like your classic ghost house.
And it had secret passageways.
When I was young, oh, we had a lot of fun with those.
And the secret passageways were left over from the days of the slave trade when people, southerners, who were sympathetic to freedom for the slaves, had a kind of a system where they got them from the south to the north.
And this house had been one of those houses.
And as a result, there were secret passageways everywhere behind walls.
It was really cool.
Wasn't haunted.
I never met a ghost there.
But as a teenager, I spent a lot of time in those secret passageways.
They were really cool.
Wildcard line, you're on air.
Hi.
unidentified
Hi, this is Brian in Philadelphia listening to 1210 WPHT.
Yeah, knock, and it's my dad at the door, and he's getting ready to get in The shower, and he's like, There's someone downstairs.
And I go downstairs, and there's a buddy of mine saying, My grandmother had come to his house and asked to be driven here.
And he came in, but my grandmother refused to come in.
She was standing out at the door.
And so I go to the door, and there's my grandmother looking older and more haggard than I had ever remembered her looking.
And she's in bare feet, and it's snowing, and it was fall when she died.
We had had no snow.
And she's like scratching on the glass.
And I let go and I see her and I'm shocked.
And she just says, Ryan, let me in.
And I just got really, really spooked by that.
And I'm like just standing there saying, come in yourself.
And she's like, no, let me in.
And I refused to do that.
And finally just went, you are not my grandmother.
And I closed the door on her.
And she started scratching on the glass going, there is no heaven.
There is no heaven.
And it really, really spooked me out.
And I went in and my friend gave me some kind of comment about, man, you're really cold or something like that.
And I went upstairs and at the top of the steps, there was my father in a dripping wet towel because he'd gotten out of the shower and he just said, who was that?
And it was his mother that had died.
And I just broke down crying and all of a sudden woke up.
And I woke up and it was the middle of the night and I'm just shaking in bed and I'm like, oh man, man, that was really, really scary.
And it bothered me for a couple of days.
And I finally decided to mention it to the family.
And when I mentioned it, my father got real, real quiet.
And he said, 20 years before, when I was like three, maybe four years old, we had this neighbor that lived next door who was this old woman who had never married.
And she had gone a little loopy, and her relatives had carted her off to an institution.
And my father relayed, he had a dream one night that he heard a pounding on the door and he got up out of bed and he went to the upstairs window and he leaned out and there was old Miss Esther scratching on the glass, begging to be let in.
And his only response to her was, you are not Miss Esther.
And he closed the window on her and he went back to bed and then of course woke up himself.
A few days after that, he was at the supermarket and he ran into Miss Esther's brother who told her, oh, my sister just passed away this week.
From actually very serious cactus country out here, indeed.
I don't think too many programs come from this part of the world, but we do.
And this is kind of interesting from Charleston, South Carolina, which is a pretty spooky place, I'd like to say, anyway.
Hi, Art.
My husband and I loved having this little black cat named Bucky in our lives for 15 Years.
She was correctly labeled as intuitive, intelligent, funny, and loving by many.
She passed away last January.
After her death, I instinctively told my husband that we would never find a soul as special as hers if we took in a hundred cats.
And that's when the felines began inundating us as well.
We took many pictures of the first group of four premature kittens that we bottle-raised, and in the upper corner of one is a fuzzy, cloudy shape that is easily recognized as Bucky, sitting upright, with her tail smugly wrapped around her body.
We'll send you the picture today.
We're now up to 11 new cats and kittens now.
Seems an appropriate loving frank that she's been able to play on us after her departure from this life.
Kathy and Michael in Charleston, South Carolina.
Yeah, I buy that one all the way.
Cats are as individual and full of soul as we are.
And that may apply to other animals.
As you know, a cat fancier.
So would they make themselves apparent after this life?
And they had the typical church doors where, you know, you have the push bar and you have the little window that's probably a foot long and six inches wide.
So you can look through, you know, and so you shut the door and you turn around and boom, boom, boom, on the door again.
And you spin back around, you're looking out through the door and there's nobody there.
And so I'm like, okay.
So I started telling my parents, you know, that really weird things are going on, you know, and they're like, well, you know, just keep it quiet.
You know, it's probably just kids playing jokes, you know, and all this.
And so then I started going down one night when it got really bad.
It started getting worse towards the end of the summer going into the winter.
It started getting really, really bad.
And I walked downstairs.
My mom told me to go get my dad.
So I was going downstairs one night and I passed by the youth pastor's office and I just glanced in.
Well, here's this black ghost of a figure.
And I said, the only thing I can ever equate it out is, I don't know if you remember the old equalizer, that show that used to be on TV.
And I would see just kind of this outline of this person, you know, and you could tell it looked like a person, and you could see kind of, I don't know, it's really hard to describe because you could tell it was a person.
You could see his face, but yet it wasn't real distinct.
And then he would just kind of be crouched down, and then he would just kind of shake his head like in a no, like no, you know, and just kind of shake his head and look away.
And then he would disappear, you know.
And I saw this guy like, oh, man, dozens of times.
And every single time after he would disappear, I would think, okay, next time I'm going to ask him where he comes from or why he's here or something, you know.
And then a few days later, I would see him, and you'd be standing there just going, say something stupid, and nothing would come out of your mouth, you know?
And so because of fire code, they had to put a door from our apartment into my room and then also a door on the opposite side so people could pass through if there was a fire.
Well, this door was right adjacent to a classroom.
So I'd lay down, oh, I don't know, 1 o'clock or so at night.
You'd be sitting there listening to the radio or whatever, like this.
And all of a sudden you'd hear just tables and chairs and stuff just being thrown all over the place.
Sounded like somebody was demolishing the room.
And so you'd go like this.
I'd go over to the door and I'd open up the door and you'd look and you'd think you're losing your mind.
There's nothing out of place, nothing going on.
You'd shut the door and then you're standing six inches from the door and the doorknob's rattling back and forth.
The door's banging in the latch.
It's kind of a goose-fitting door, you know, and it's just going like this.
And you're like, uh-uh.
And so you grab the knob.
I'm almost shaking telling you the story again.
Because it was such a thing when I, especially being that age, it was just quite a traumatic thing.
But you'd grab it, swing it open, and there's just nothing there.
You know, and it perpetually got worse and worse and worse.
Finally, I just wouldn't sleep in that room anymore.
I'd sleep over on the living room floor.
And then they decided, because the living room was attached right to the kitchen, so then this thing or things or whatever decided that the kitchen door was the door to play with now.
And they went to the kitchen door and rattled that all night long.
I even know about one, that twisty little thing that goes through the fog.
unidentified
Yeah, I was coming back from Eureka here back to Santa Rosa from a business trip, and it's pretty dark out there on the 101, and your callers are talking about red eyes.
All these things, and it started burying me deeper and deeper in my seat as I'm driving down the road.
They look into my rearview mirror, there's red lights, and fortunate for me, it wasn't the supernatural.
It was the California Highway Patrol wanting to slow down.
Nice officer didn't give me a ticket.
I told him what I was listening to.
But the story that I have for you is as true as I can believe.
It was told to me about 10 years ago by a Boy Scout leader of mine.
I was in a Boy Scout group when I was younger through a Mormon church.
This was a Mormon guy, real nice guy.
And he took us up to Philmont, New Mexico on a trek, about an 80-mile trek into the mountains.
And we were up above the tree line about 11,000, 12,000 feet in the air.
And one night we were telling stories, this is about before the fifth night of the trip.
And we were all pretty worn out.
And he was telling me, he's a Hawaiian guy.
His name is Alton.
And he'd come over to the United States when he was a teenager.
And, well, anyway, he was telling me this story.
Him and a friend, when he was younger, about 14 or 15 or 16, I guess he had just gotten his driver's license, took a couple of girls out on a date.
And they decided to scare him.
They were going to give him a good scare.
So they took him to a cemetery in Hawaii.
And, you know, if you know anything about Hawaiian cemeteries are very sacred places and people leave food for the deceased and you don't touch the food.
I mean, they tried for minutes, and finally the car stopped shaking.
They opened the door, and their girlfriends were frantic talking about red eyes.
There was red eyes just all in the windows, and they were just totally frantic.
They got in the car and they drove home immediately.
Well, when they got home, my friend Alton noticed, he felt some pain underneath his sock, and he pulled back his sock, and there was a bite mark on his ankle.
Well, his older brother, Alton's older brother, was in the same room, and his grandfather was describing what he had done.
And his older brother, really, the way Alton describes it to me, disliked being Hawaiian.
He disliked his culture and said, oh, you guys are full of beans.
There's no such thing as those types of things.
And later that night, his older brother had talked him into going back to the cemetery.
And Alton reluctantly went.
And they ran all over the cemetery, from one end to the other, over graves, kicking over food, the whole nine yards.
And when they got back, his brother had a lot of pain, like Alton had felt, and they woke up their mom, and mom came in the room, and he took down his pants, and they counted over 200 bites all over his body.
In fact, he had to go to the hospital to have some of these sewn up.
The doctor at this particular hospital, the way Elton describes it to me, was a white man from the continental United States.
He was about ready to call the police.
He said, look, you know, obviously there's abuse going on in the house.
I don't believe you're put on story of ghosts biting you and such.
So he, in fact, called a local police chief who came out.
He was a Hawaiian himself, and he knew exactly what that was from.
And no charges were pressed.
But Falton was also bitten, again, in the hip and where he needed to have several stitches.
And to this day, he still has that bite mark in both his ankle, very deep.
And she showed them both to me.
And I mean, they are bite marks.
They are teeth marks.
You can see the indentations of the individual teeth.
And in fact, he says he doesn't have too much contact with his brother to this day.
But he told me that, in fact, when he talks to his brother, his brother still talks about, you know, he doesn't wear a lot of several, you know, he doesn't wear shorts because he's embarrassed of the scars all over his legs that he received from that.
I tell you, even going back in your story to coming up on a car, literally shaking with its tires coming off the ground on each side and girls inside screaming.
I mean, he wasn't aware of the folklore until after he had talked to his grandfather.
I guess I went to Hawaii when I was about 10 or 11, and my family and I had toured some cemeteries, and I remember specifically the guide saying, stay on the path, never touch the food.
And it was the funniest thing I've ever seen.
People put McDonald's bags with a quarter-pounder with cheese next to the grave sites because they believe that the deceased still eat and need food and water and drink, and they need company and conversation.
And the vision of that car rocking back and forth to the degree that its tires are coming off the road to the surface.
With two girls screaming inside, that'll be with me for a while.
And this whole thing about red eyes.
Glowing red eyes.
It comes up again and again and again.
When we do not just like we have done tonight.
So tonight, when you get home, or if you're on the road, I keep an extra eye out for those red eyes.
That's never good.
Red eyes are never good.
Well, listen, folks, I'm sorry to say that's it for tonight.
Don't forget we've got nine, I say again, nine new ghost photographs from just tonight on the website www.artbell.com Now tomorrow night, you're going to definitely want to listen because a good friend of mine, Mike Murphy, who's done the same kind of material that I've been doing for years on KTMO in Kansas City is going to be filling in.