haunted
Mooney’s Mansion On Walhalla Road
In 1979, while still in high school, I had a profound paranormal encounter. At the time I was working for my brother-in-law for the summer vacation, to earn a few extra bucks. He operated a house painting service in those days.
He came up to me one day and said: “You will not believe where we are going to paint next!” To my shock and horror he revealed that we would be working at Mooney’s Mansion on Walhalla Road – one of the most notorious haunted places in Columbus, Ohio. I humbly requested to work on another project, but he refused saying he needed all his painters out there, since it was a large project.
Going down Walhalla Road again brought back many childhood memories and it still gave me the creeps. As kids we used to take a ride down the road on our bicycles to go by the old mansion. We hoped to see the ghost of old man Mooney and the place where he was supposed to hang himself off the bridge. Continue reading
Ghostly Phone Calls From Grandpa
My wife’s side of the family did not really believe in the paranormal. But that changed when my wife’s grandfather passed away in 2010. After the funeral my father in-law asked me if I would help him paint grandpa’s house, before they put it up for sale.
Soon after we arrived there, my father in-law came up from the basement with a funny look on his face. I asked him what had happened and he said it smelled like sawdust downstairs. The smell was exactly the same as it used to be when his father was doing his carpentry in the basement. When we went to bed I had a hard time sleeping and I remember looking at the clock. The time was 2:30 am. When I rolled over I could see the living room light on. I thought maybe someone got up and forgot to turn the light off, so I got up and turned it off. Continue reading
A Homecoming To Ghosts Of The Past
After my mother passed away, my father re-married and moved away. Soon after I received a call from the people who bought the old house from my dad. They told me that they got my number from the neighbors and they wondered if I could help them with the otherworldly activity that was going on in that house. They had heard that I used to experience the paranormal presence there too. They did not know who else to turn to.
I agreed to come and see them, and when I finally pulled up in the driveway all the feelings from the past, of all the hauntings that I had experienced there, hit me quite hard. I knew once I walked in that door it was still going to feel the same. Continue reading
Ghostly Encounter At My First School
My fascination with the paranormal created quite a bit of mayhem when I started school. I was going to the same school where my sister and older brothers went before me. I had one older brother who still went to the same school at the time, and he kind made a point of it that when I saw him at school I was not to bother him. My brother was also the one who told me about the old annex building at school being haunted. The annex building used to be the original school house for one of the first schools in Columbus, Ohio.
I remember meeting my teacher on the first day and she seemed pretty nice. It made me feel better about the ghost stories my older brother told me. I was not keen to go to school at first. Not only did we grow up in a house that was haunted, could it be true that the school was haunted too! Continue reading
A Ghostly Encounter On Vacant Land
One of the unusual paranormal experiences I have had with haunted homes began in August of the year 1999. My sister and brother-in-law at this time bought some land to build a new house. And since the land was still not dug into, the property offered a great opportunity to show my son what it was like to camp in the “great outdoors” with no electricity, and living “off the woods”. It was a fun way to give him a taste of how life was back in them good ‘ol days.
I expected it was going to be hard on him to be without a TV or computer games. But I had some ideas about how to entertain him. There was a small stream off the land, and there was plenty of fish to be caught. And then there was also the telling of ghost stories at night around the campfire, like my uncle told us kids when we went camping. Continue reading
For The Love Of William
Some time ago a friend asked me to come to her parents’ house, because they felt their home in Kirkersville, Ohio, may be haunted. The property and area has a rich history going back to the early settlers, and it even served as a battlefield during the Civil War. I have been to this house before to investigate a possible haunting, but this time around there was a different type of energy present. She was female, and she was in distress.
Every time I do a ghost hunt in a house, I talk to the occupants first to see what was possibly going on and how long they have been experiencing the disturbances. It appeared in this case that the trouble started when they broke ground for a new house they were planning to build. Continue reading
The Disappointed Jesus In London
To be fair, I did not visit to the city of London solely for esoteric purposes, but I found the energy signature quite different and stark there, compared to Athens and Berlin.
I found the atmosphere in Berlin, for example, electric, yet peaceful. Stepping off the U-Bahn at Wittenberg Platz in the middle of the high season, I was engulfed by a comforting low-level hum of German families and tourists doing their Saturday afternoon window shopping. The people here did not seem to have a care in the world. The streets were crowded , much like that of London, but not once did I feel a sense of angst or claustrophobia. The warm buzz was actually quite welcoming and pleasant… and this is major coming from a highly strung empath like myself.
Berlin woke me up on a Sunday morning with the nostalgic chiming of church bells. I was staying inside one of the surviving wings of the Neues Schauspielhaus on Nollendorf Platz, in the Schöneberg district of Berlin. It was built in 1905 as a theatre and concert hall, in the then fashionable Art Nouveau style. Maybe Bertold Brecht was there in the 1920s, discussing his plays with someone in the very room I slept in that night, or maybe the bands Depeche Mode or The Human League used it as a dressing room in the 1980s. While those bells were ringing in the distance, I almost expected Christopher Isherwood’s character Sally Bowles to sneak down the corridor of this old building, back from a busy, decadent night’s work at the Kit Kat Club cabaret. Continue reading