Whether you are a skeptic or a surefire believer in the paranormal, we can all admit that there is a lot of mystery surrounding the afterlife. As a natural-born skeptic, I was so sure that ghosts, spirits, and aliens were a figment of the imagination. That is, until I experienced some things that I just could not find a logical explanation for.

Some brave men and women move head first into the unknown and try to contact the other side, hoping to get answers that the rest of us are dying to know more about. From my close ties in the paranormal community, I was able to ask some great friends to share that world with you. These are the experiences that made their blood run cold.

1.

“One of my most memorable and bone-chilling experiences was actually about four years ago at the Beauvoir Confederate Cemetery in Biloxi, Mississippi. […] It was myself and a few other investigators. It was January, so it was quite cold out. As we approached the cemetery, the K2 meter was going all the way to red, but we couldn’t attribute it to anything as there were no power lines or anything electric that could have been giving off EMF (electromotive force) nearby since we were in the cemetery. We kept walking, and I turned the spirit box on. I asked, “Is there anyone here with us right now?” I immediately heard, a deep, eery voice come through the spirit box and say, “Humannnss.” I knew at that moment, that whoever or whatever that voice coming through was, was not human. It sent chills through my body. I immediately asked, “Are you not human?” But I received no response, and I didn’t hear that voice come through again. To this day, I don’t know who or what I was speaking with. My feeling is that it may have been extraterrestrial, but I have never come across something like that again and I still think about it every time I investigate.” – MacKenzie Koncher Casiano, co-founder of XX Paranormal in Colorado, USA.

2.

“The experience that reminds me as more creepy was in Mississippi at the Jefferson Davis Estate. We were in the confederate graveyard and out of nowhere I started coughing, but (and I know this sounds weird) it wasn’t me coughing, and that is what I said! It felt like someone else was coming through me. When we got back to the little cabin we were staying in, Jocelyn (the medium who was with us, but who had not been in the graveyard) woke up and said, “where’s Christine?”. I looked at her and she said, “There is a woman from the graveyard who attached her energy to you, she wants to tell you something about her health. She has a message for you”. We went back to the graveyard in daylight the next day, and in the area I was standing in, there was only one female gravemarker, the name being Laura. Over the course of the weekend, I would ask if Laura was with us, and consistently got responses. I reminded her several times that she could talk to me there, but could not come home with me. Over the next couple of weeks at home, I would get the same random cough and I would tell Laura she needed to go back home. It finally stopped after about a month.” – Christine Theisen Hendrickson, Colorado, USA

3.

“It was my first public investigation, leading about 30 people through an old mill building in Manchester, NH. It was built in the early 1900’s as a textile mill on the Merrimack River, turned into modern private studios/businesses, and had recently been bought out to be renovated into new office space. We had the entire building to ourselves with all businesses having been pushed out, exploring and investigating each of the three floors, and eventually down to the basement, and then to an even deeper level basement. There was a reputable psychic medium in attendance and she as well as several others were drawn off the one side of the room where a large hole seemed to have been blasted out of the brick wall. Approaching the hole and crouching down to peer inside, I could feel a steady cold breeze – colder than the already freezing basement, coming from the other side. Upon shining a light beyond the rubble I could make out two distinct tunnels – one shooting off to the right seemingly spanning the length of the building, and one shooting off to the left. Wondering the purpose, and where these tunnels went as I stared into the dark tunnel on the right- with a flashlight only allowing my sight to reach maybe 10 to 15 feet back, I saw a white mist manifest and move from left to right across the entrance to the tunnel, with just my naked eye. I set up the camera and a laser grid shining into the hole and down the tunnel on the right – We turned the lights out, and I turned on my best communication device, asking if whoever was there, would mind showing themselves again, moving across the tunnel entrance. There was a “With the green?” that came through at that time, and I confirmed that yes, through the green laser lights. Myself and several others stood patiently waiting crouched down in front of the tunnel – our eyes peering out into the darkness, afraid to blink for the fear of missing something. Seconds after, we all witnessed a comet-like energy fly from down the tunnel and out of the hole in the wall above my head- the camera catching the laser beams being affected by the movement of an unseen mass, and the communication device saying “They’re watching,” at the same time. My fiance’s energy was completely drained and was later told that she experienced an attempted attachment that night in the basement. Once safely outside and cleansed, the psychic described a face she saw with a wide open mouth as the energy that flew out of the hole. I only wish we were able to get a name! The link to the video evidence from this investigation can be seen on our Instagram @SpectralVisionsParanormal” – Natasha Dominguez, Founder of Spectral Visions Paranormal, USA.

4.

“I was investigating at an old hotel (in Victor, CO, I believe) where there were no other occupants except our team. Even the front desk employee would go home and we would have to call them if we needed assistance. I and another investigator were doing an EVP (voice recorder) session in the lobby where there was a piano that had a sign on it that said, “Please do not touch.” I usually would obey the sign, but you have to sometimes go against the rules when investigating. So I began playing the piano. After a short time, my partner said, “Dude, you’re so gonna get in trouble”, and nothing significant happened, so we moved on. Later, when reviewing the recording, you hear me start to play the piano, and shortly after, hear a whisper that says, “You’re gonna get in trouble” in the “na-na-na-na-boo-boo” sing-songy way. I initially thought it was when my partner had said that, but then I could hear her loudly say the same phrase, “Dude, you’re so gonna get in trouble”, separate from the initial whisper. And a few seconds later, you hear the SAME whisper AGAIN say, “You’re gonna get in trouble” in the same “na-na-na-na-boo-boo” song-like way. It was incredible. Neither of us had heard that at all during the investigation, but it was clear as day, and TWICE, on the EVP.” – Randi Patton, Colorado, USA 

5.

“My husband and I were investigating an old opera house. It was set up on the second floor of a building that had been constructed in the late 1800’s. At the time it was only the two of us in the opera house, as the rest of our team was in the pub, down one floor and on the other side of the building. We sat in a booth and tried to use our spirit box to get some sort of communication going. As the spirit box was scanning, we could pick out two different voices saying phrases that didn’t make much sense to us. At one point, a soft voice said “four weeks”, so naturally I asked what they meant by that. A deeper, stern voice came over the spirit box and said, “Stop talking”. We then realized that the stern spirit was not speaking to us, it was speaking to the softer spirit and being pretty aggressive about not wanting them to give us any details. We pressed on anyways and tried to ask more questions. Suddenly, we hear a loud bang from behind our booth, coming from the pitch black hallways. It sounded like a metal bowl had been thrown with force and clattered against something else. The mood instantly got very dark and made us feel anxious, which had never happened to us before. For two people who have never run away from anything during an investigation, we sure got the hell out of that opera house pretty quick.” – Anonymous, USA

6.

“Having been sensitive to the paranormal all my life, I feel obligated to find answers. One of my recent experiences was at one of our own team members’ homes. We had a psychic medium come in and he went through the whole house, ending in the basement. His whole demeanor shifted the moment he crossed the threshold, making myself and our other investigator slightly nervous. After All, they call me “Ghost Bait” for a reason. The medium made it CLEAR no women should be alone down there as seeing there was a potentially violent sexual being towards the back of the basement, as well as a small, demonic like creature residing in one of the old wells. So naturally, that’s the exact opposite of what we did. Myself as well as the female owner of the home ended up down there by ourselves. For some reason, when the lights go out, I get ballsy. It’s going to get me in trouble one of these nights, that’s for sure. So I call out to this spirit and say, “So I heard you like messing with women and being handsy with them. If you touch me, I’ll start taking off articles of clothing.” Stupid, right? But I couldn’t argue with the results. I suddenly felt a firm finger go from the base of my neck, trail down my spine, and end at my lower back. Before anything, I try to be a skeptic. I check for wires, things hanging from the ceiling. Something. Anything. Nothing was there. I told the owner to start taking pictures of me, sure enough, there was a solid white mist wrapped around my body. So, both excited and perplexed, I kept my end of the deal and took off my sweater. Seconds later, I felt a hand rest on the small of my back. Then the owner gasped, said something had brushed past her leg, and there was an incredibly loud sound that could only be something heavy being dragged across the floor, straight to the well. Needless to say, we got our evidence and booked it out of there. I still get goosebumps when I think back on it and of the potential of getting freaky with a dead guy. Unless it’s Michael Keaton as Beetlejuice, I’m not interested.” – Sydney Hernandez, Clyde Paranormal Investigation, Ohio, USA.

7.

“As an early paranormal investigator, I used to use investigation equipment in my own home, particularly this apartment I shared with my fiance for about two years. Overall, the spirits were pretty friendly and went about their own business although a number of spooky things would happen every once in a while if we hadn’t addressed them in some time. We were used to this. Then one summer everything seemed to change. There was about a two week period where there was so much activity happening in our bedroom when we were trying to fall asleep that we just couldn’t. Laying there in the dark, there would be creaking in the doorway. I originally thought it was the door being pushed that was causing the creaking sound. Upon further investigation, the door didn’t creak at all but the floorboards in the threshold were creaky when weight shifted on them, as if the sound we were hearing at night was just someone standing there looking in at us. Things were being touched/tapped/flicked all over the room enough to hear it. I had a large knick-knack shelf that had fallen off the wall twice and was laying on my dresser with all the décor still in it. After many nights of noises coming from this shelf, I emptied it and put it in a corner of the room. I also placed all the décor in a pile on my dresser and surrounded it with small pieces of selenite, just because. It didn’t work. That night, the shelf fell over. The next day the selenite was moved like someone flicked it across the table. The energy overall was different from everything we were used to. It felt negative. Laying there without the covers on, suddenly I felt the need to cover up. Waves of energy would rush up on us while we were laying there with our eyes closed. In the daylight I tried to investigate, asking who it was, why it would only bother us at night. I never got any clear answers to this. Then one day, it just stopped and I realized the timing of it all. We lived in a two family home on the second floor. Our downstairs neighbors were just an elderly man and his caretaker but during those few weeks, the caretaker’s adult daughter and child came to stay with them. It wasn’t a good situation. We eventually saw the police and social workers escort her away. And this is when I realized that whatever that energy was, must have been attached to her. We didn’t experience it again after that and it opened my eyes to the possibility that a haunting might not necessarily be spirits attached to a certain place or an object, but it could be your neighbor’s negative attachment coming into your space causing havoc.” – Natasha Dominguez, Founder of Spectral Visions Paranormal, USA.

8.

“We were investigating an old jail that has since been turned into a museum in Colorado. It was the team and I, as well as the museum shop employee who were all in the building at the time. There is a basement to the jailhouse that is very cold and pitch black. In the basement, there are two wide open rooms as well as a smaller room that was called the Ice Room. It gets the name because it really is ice cold in there, and during the wintertime it is where dead bodies would be stored. When the ground was so cold, it was too difficult to dig graves. So the jailhouse would store deceased inmate’s bodies in the ice room until the weather warmed up enough to dig the graves. There were two groups in this basement doing investigative sessions. One was near the Ice Room, and the other was in a wide open storage room, which is the group I was assigned to. Both groups had to speak quietly so as not to disturb each other as we were all fairly close together. While doing a flashlight session with my group, we started asking questions and got a response. When asked if the spirit communicating with us was an inmate, the flash light started strobing. So we knew it could have very well been an inmate who passed away in the jail, seeing as we were in the basement. Suddenly, we hear very distinct violin music coming from the room next to us, where the other group was. We all jumped up and ran over to them to see where it was coming from. The Ice Room group looked up at us with a confused look on all of their faces. They said none of them heard the music at all. My group said that would be impossible, because the music was so loud and distinct. How could we have heard it, but they couldn’t? Well, the session time was up and it was time to rotate groups. We went back upstairs to the main floor and I was chatting with the shop clerk about what had happened. She laughed and said she was not surprised. After all, while researching old jail records, she learned that there had been an inmate who was a very talented violinist.” – Anonymous, Colorado, USA. 

9.

“[…] Last year, we visited the cadeby tunnel located on the outskirts of Doncaster in the UK. The tunnel has reports of a ghostly girl who appears to you after calling out for the ‘Mexborough Ragger’. She is believed to be a gypsy girl, who had been hit by a train in the tunnel after selling rags at the local market during the 1800’s and had died. Her mum was said to have cursed the tunnel and all those who dared to call upon her nickname. We investigated the tunnel and had heard knocks and sounds coming towards the back of the tunnel at times but it was otherwise a relevantly a quiet night. We headed out of the tunnel and our medium, Chrissie, was sensing a man standing and watching us from above the tunnel. We did some more investigating and nothing really materialized and we decided to call it a night and headed back towards the cars. We started to do a protection ritual on us leaving. As we stood round, Chrissie began to speak and I could hear walking coming from all around us. I opened my eyes but nothing was there so I shut them again. Once more, I heard walking, so opened my eyes and again, nothing was there. The third time I heard it, I opened my eyes and saw a torch light and a figure of a man standing at the top of the path just near our cars. I said to the others, ‘Someone is here’. The man stood there then shouted ‘Police!‘ and started to head towards my car. Chrissie shouted back ‘What?’ and he again shouted ‘I’m the police!‘. We started to walk to our cars, and as we did Chrissie shouted back at him, ‘Have you got ID?’. There was no answer. We watched him walk from the top of the hill to my car and he shined his torch directly into my car before he simply disappeared. When we reached the cars, he was nowhere in sight. The cars were surrounded by brambles so he couldn’t have sneaked off into them. He hadn’t ran back up the hill because we would have seen him. I checked under the car, around the cars and even looked for parked cars nearby to see if there was a way he could have gone… But there wasn’t. We were then left questioning who or what we had seen. I was quite shaken and my thoughts were if it was a real person, where could he have possibly gone and were we in danger? […] I went back home and I asked a historian I know to look into the area for me and what he came back with was quite amazing. A man had died in the construction of the tunnel in the 1800’s and fell from the top of the tunnel. Not just that, but in later years, numerous murders and suicides took place around the wooded area on the tunnel meaning that a reenactment of a police officer tuning up wouldn’t be out the norm. I also spoke to the local police who stated that an officer wouldn’t have been located in that area at the time on his own and if he was indeed a police officer, he would have approached us further. The possibility that I had just seen my first apparition seemed more and more likely. My instinct was confirmed further when a local paranormal team approached me and said they had also seen a man in the same area. […] Maybe prior to this experience, I was too naive to think a ghost could come across so strong, as solid as we are, and could interact as good as he did. This leaves one question now though, and that is, if ghosts can look as solid and as physical as they did in life, how do we really know when we have seen a ghost?” – Charlene Lowe Kemp, Paranormal Hauntings, Nottingham, UK.

10.

“Back in the 1980’s my husband and I were buying run-down old houses in Denver, renovating them, and renting them out. Back then you could buy a home with good “bones” for very little money, so it seemed like a good retirement plan for us. We found a small white bungalow home that was built in 1910. It was pretty trashed inside and out, but looked like a good project for us. We purchased the home and started our renovations. All the time I was inside the home, I kept looking over my shoulder because I would hear voices calling my name, or feel some unknown presence standing over me. It creeped me out because I was usually all alone in the house. One time I even felt a hand resting on my shoulder, and when I turned around expecting to see my husband, no one was there. Then there was the red stain on the bedroom wall. I tried everything – Kilz, spackle, you name it – to try to paint over that stain, but that red spot kept bleeding through. It was located about halfway up the wall in a small bedroom that might have been a child’s room. Not knowing the history of the home, I simply dismissed the red stain and instead put a dresser in front of it so that potential tenants would not see it. About 2 weeks after buying the house I got a panicked phone call from my husband. I hurried over to the house and he was standing in the kitchen with the trap door down to the cellar lifted up. I looked down, and sure enough raw sewage had seeped into the cellar all the way up to the level of the kitchen floor! We called the City and they could not explain how that happened, and no other home in the neighborhood had experienced this flooding. The stink and smell of that sewage was unbearable. Eventually it went down and we cleaned that cellar top to bottom. Shortly afterwards we rented the home to a nice young couple. My husband actually knew the man from his work and said he was a very mellow guy. Two months later, we received a frantic call from his wife. She was crying hysterically and asking how she could get out of the lease. She said that ever since moving into the home, her husband turned into a different person — moody, nasty, and just plain mean. He became depressed and would lash out in violence for no reason. Confused, we cancelled the lease and let them both move out. Several more months and many tenants later, the same thing kept happening over and over again. Seemingly happy couples would move into the house, and a short time later we would get a call that the husband would turn into a monster. Women and children moved out in the middle of the night, and several domestic violence calls came to us from the local police. Baffled, we decided to just put the house on the market and get rid of it once and for all. About 2 years later I was reading The Denver Post and my eyes caught the headline: “Woman Murdered By Husband on Her Front Porch”. I scanned the article and my eyes grew wider and wider with disbelief. Not only was the address the very same old house we used to own, but it said that the husband moved into the house and inexplicably started to beat on his wife, and finally just bludgeoned her with a hammer while she was sleeping on her front porch swing right in broad daylight. The “Hammer Murder House”, as we called it after that, was eventually torn down and a very modern building stands on that ground today. I often wonder if the inhabitants of the sleek new house experience the ill effects of whatever macabre history still haunts that property?” – Rose Glenn, “The Ghost Lady of Colorado”, USA.

11.

“I was at the Jefferson Davis Retirement Home in Biloxi, Mississippi. We were in the main part of the museum where there is a large auditorium. From the moment my investigation partner and I walked in, we had a strong sense of another presence with us. We started a spirit box session and didn’t get many responses. After 15 minutes or so we turned the spirit box off and sat in silence to see if we could hear anything or get an EMF reading. We started hearing footsteps across the room, but when we walked over to investigate, the footsteps seemed to shift to the opposite side of the room. It was as if the spirit was avoiding us. Now, in the auditorium, there are two sets of doors. On one side, there was a door left open. As we stood watching some spikes on the EMF, I heard the distinct sound of a door closing. When I looked up I saw a woman dressed in a victorian style gown walk past the doors. I immediately took off running and tried to look for her through the doors, only to be met by a solid glass wall. She looked like she was from the time period where the property was still a plantation. Although I could only see a silhouette, I am completely certain that it was a woman from another era.” – Ryan Shaner, Colorado, USA.