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From the High Desert book cover

From the High Desert

A Cultural History of Art Bell

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October 31, 2005: Ghost to Ghost 2005

Oct 31, 2005
2h 30m
0:00 / 0:00
Art Bell hosts his annual Ghost to Ghost Halloween special, inviting listeners to share their most frightening encounters with the paranormal. A police officer from Ohio describes hearing a child laughing in the woods near a historic estate where two children drowned decades ago. A caller from Quebec recounts his mother seeing an apparition of her own mother the same night the woman died in a fire in Scotland.

The stories grow stranger as a caller from Oregon describes a shape-shifting creature that transformed from a small, hair-covered being into a tall, hooved animal as it moved down his driveway. A young man from San Antonio recalls seeing an upside-down face with glowing eyes peering through the window of a moving motorhome when he was four years old. His father chased a figure off the roof, but it vanished into a field.

Multiple callers describe poltergeist activity, including doors slamming by themselves in an abandoned tuberculosis sanitarium and toys activating without batteries. A woman from Arizona shares how a burglar alarm triggered repeatedly at 2 a.m. in a house where a previous owner had killed her children and herself, and how the haunting revealed a darker truth about the home.

Key Moments

  1. Ohio cop hears children laughing in haunted woods: A police officer working midnights tells Art he and his partner heard a small child laughing inside an empty wood line; years later the caretaker reveals two children from the estate had drowned in the pond and visitors hear them constantly.

  2. Ghost hug at the moment of Uncle Harold's death: A caller meditating in a darkened living room senses a presence by the TV, sends it 'outside' to be met, and is suddenly hugged so hard it nearly knocks the wind out of her. The next day they discover her 90-year-old uncle died at exactly that hour.

  3. Period-clothed apparitions and the angry man who swung at him: A Missouri caller describes three friends witnessing children in turn-of-the-century clothing playing in their living room, then an enraged African-American man kicking in the door, charging the caller, and trying to punch him repeatedly - his fists passing through.

  4. Demonic entity yanks San Antonio caller into the air: A caller describes feeding the family dog when an invisible force grabs his arm, lifts him into the air, drags him down the sidewalk while his mother clings to his legs, and leaves three burning finger-shaped welts before his grandmother chases it off with a butcher knife and crosses.

  5. Voice through a sleeping man, a bloody nose, a girlfriend in tears: A caller in sleep paralysis dreams his suicided grandfather punches him in the nose; a woman in a blue gown intervenes saying 'she's just confused.' He wakes to his sobbing girlfriend who heard the voice come out of him - and his nose gushes real blood.