April 25, 2000: Ghost to Ghost | Open Lines
The remainder of the broadcast is devoted to Ghost to Ghost, Art's beloved format of all-night listener ghost stories. A police officer in Salina, Kansas, describes encountering a man with a feed sickle and bloodhound on an old homestead site, only for both figures to vanish seconds later. A family in Bellevue, Nebraska, recounts fifteen years of a ghost identified through a photograph as a man killed crossing the street decades earlier. A caller from Oregon recalls a childhood encounter with a massive hand that slid a couch across the living room.
Other callers share accounts of beds trembling, doors opening on their own, rocking chairs moving with the image of a deceased woman, and a grandmother's ghost apparently communicating the identity of her killer. An artist in Chicago describes painting a ghost that appeared in his studio, which stopped its appearances after being rendered on canvas.
Key Moments
Two witnesses describe five silent V-formations over Clearfield, Utah: Peter Davenport closes out his run on Coast with Debbie and Jen, who describe stepping out of a Utah condo on April 20, 2000 and watching five clusters of bright lights, including a V of seven, sail silently from horizon to horizon at low altitude in graceful, geese-like formations.
The Salina cop, the angry farmer, and the bloodhound that vanished: Art reads a fax from a Kansas police officer who on routine patrol along the Smoky River saw an angry-looking man in old bib overalls carrying a feed sickle, with an old bloodhound at his side, made a U-turn back, and found no person, no dog, and no footprints in the soft ground.
The Dick Tracy hat: the dead neighbor who haunted a family for 15 years: A caller describes 15 years of escalating activity in his rented house, kids seeing an old man with a hat at a 20-foot-high window, his wife seeing a silhouette over her bed, the wood burner lighting itself, and finally identifying the figure when a client brought a photograph of her uncle, killed by a semi across the street decades earlier.
Locked garage suicide and a whisper in the dark: Caller John from Indiana details his ex-wife's grandmother's locked-garage death after a sudden divorce and a son who blew through her $75,000, followed by a year of bed-shaking, shadow figures, and an icy presence sitting on his bed and whispering his father-in-law's name in his ear, ending the day John died in a fog crash.
The Wail of the Dead: a moan on the path the moment grandma died: Chris in Mesa sends in his father's experience walking home from the Frank Lloyd Wright Civic Center library on a sunny Marin afternoon when a breeze hit his neck and he heard a deep moan come from nowhere at exactly 2:40 pm, the moment his 100% Irish grandmother died at a convalescent hospital ten minutes before the 2:50 phone call.