Fall is in the air, though that’s still no guarantee you won’t be sweating in your Halloween costume in Phoenix. But one thing’s for sure — our listeners are spooked.
The Show asked for ghost stories, and listeners have certainly delivered. All month long, we’ll be sharing your hair-raising tales.
This time, Melissa Williams of Chandler shares a tale of poltergeist activity from her days growing up in Virginia.
MELISSA WILLIAMS: Downtown Newport News is still to this day kind of a CD place. It’s near a ship building or shipyard that builds aircraft carriers and submarines for the U.S. Navy. So I was a little nervous when my friend who happened to live down there asked me to spend the night. I kind of sort of knew what to expect before I got there. You know the houses in that part of town were built two to 300 hundred years ago and they were all broken up into smaller apartments and her apartment was on the top, the top floor. We were both 15. This was 35 years ago so we’re talking stranger things time period.
We go up these stairs, these rickety wooden stairs in the back that go all the way up to the top and it’s like the attic. It’s literally the attic apartment and so we get in there and her parents are there they’re both disabled veterans from the Vietnam era. Very nice people, said hello to them, said hello to the brother. We went into her room getting ready for our sleepover of course you know all of the normal things that girls do or did back then, I don’t know what they do now. We got ready to put on our makeup, you know play with makeup, our hair, doing those kinds of things and when we got bored with that we decided to play cards.
We started playing just a regular game of rummy and all of the sudden the house just started shaking like there was an earthquake or something and I had grown up not in that part of town but that part of the United States and I hadn't recalled experiencing earthquakes or anything like that. But was really surprising was that my friend didn’t even react. It didn’t even phase her that her house was shaking and I looked at her and I looked at her six foot tall brass and glass cabinet. It was just the shelving unit that she had all of these things on, her books and her clock radio and her plant and stuffed animals and things. This cabinet or shelf was literally banging against the wall, 45 degree angle kind of coming off the wall and it looked like somebody was ramming it against the wall like hammering it because it wasn’t falling, it should have fallen. It literally should have fallen.
So I’m looking at this shelf and I’m looking at her and she’s looking at me like what and I’m like do you not feel that and she says oh that yeah, it’s just a ghost. Like it was nothing she didn’t skip a beat. I looked at her and I was like okay did somebody die here that you’re aware of, oh yeah yeah the people who were here before they were a couple a boyfriend, girlfriend something like that and yeah I guess there was a big fight and she broke a beer bottle and shoved it into his skull and killed him and I’m like woah did you know that when you moved into this place and she’s like I don’t know my parents did all of that. I was young, I was little when we moved here. It’s always done this he’ll stop, he’ll stop eventually no big deal.
I was still kind of shooken up hahaha and I run out to where our parents are and in the living room, they’re just watching TV like it’s nothing and there’s this huge mirror on the wall above the couch and it’s just banging against the wall the same way and so I’m thinking is this the shipyard is this shaking from the shipyard or something and I’m like no it’s impossible it’s impossible, it must be a ghost. So go back in the room and we go back to playing cards and it stops. The shaking stops, the banging stops everything stops and then I look behind my friend at her bed where my overnight bag is and I’m like oh my goodness what have I gotten myself into.
