October 31, 2013: Spooky Matter | Ghost Stories
Callers share accounts from around the world. A soldier in Korea describes military vehicles starting on their own near a site where a serviceman died. A homeowner in Iowa recalls a nine-drawer dresser sliding by itself to block a doorway in a house that would change hands seven times. A Border Patrol agent in Texas recounts stumbling upon a robed ritual circle near the Rio Grande. A woman in Minnesota reports shadow figures, knives flying off tables, and the discovery of human bone fragments buried in her backyard.
Other stories include a colonial-era apparition seen simultaneously by a couple in Boston, a child's imaginary friend in Australia who knew details he could not have known, and a volunteer firefighter in Texas who senses a recently deceased accident victim following him home. Art reflects throughout the evening on the nature of hauntings and his belief that the recently dead linger before departing.
Key Moments
Two men asking about a gate that wasn't there: A 15-year-old in Eastern Kentucky meets two men on a remote gas-well road who fix on his eyes, ignore his machete, and ask how he got past the gate, a gate that had been removed years earlier. Seconds after he passes them on the empty straightaway, they have vanished.
Bowler-hatted shadow with no shadow: Allison in Minnesota describes a six-and-a-half-foot pitch-black figure in a bowler hat that glided across her grandmother's basement, walking a foot behind a bright lamp yet casting no shadow on the wall behind it, 'like a cutout of reality.'
Imaginary friend Roger objects to cigarettes: An Australian father describes his daughter's lifelong imaginary friend, an old man named Roger, who 'didn't like' him because he flicked cigarette butts in the garden, a habit Roger could not have observed since the father only smoked while she was asleep.
Ghost made a phone call from a dead cell: A new volunteer firefighter in East Texas senses a fatal-rollover victim follow him home; about an hour later his mother calls back, returning a call that came from his cell phone, a phone that has zero bars at the farm and was incapable of placing it.
Sulfur, gray-eyed visitor, broken window: Francisco recounts being called at 3:30 a.m. to a friend in the snow with no shoes; the friend says he came home to a sulfur smell, found a well-dressed man with all-gray eyes calmly petting his Rottweiler, felt his soul being taken, and broke a bedroom window because the front door would not open.