That's kind.

And as I'm walking around the lake, I started to hear this crying, and this crying is like all around me.

Welcome to Tell Me a Ghost Story, the Late Night Calling podcast where we delve into the world of the supernatural and explore the eerie and unexplained.

I'm your host, Michelle Newman.

This podcast features true stories from our callers that will send shivers down your spine and leave you questioning the existence of the afterlife.

So grab a cozy blanket, turn down the lights.

Hi'm Michelle.

His Mark from outside Des Moines, Iowa.

I've never been one of those guys that believes in ghost I mean, I grew up in the Midwest, farmfields, old barns, the occasional creaky house.

But he just kind of chalk stuff up to you.

Just chalk it up to wind and raccoons and stuff.

At least that's what I always told myself.

Seven.

A couple of years ago, I was over at my buddy Dan's place, and we were drinking a couple of beers and Dan's got this big picture window and it looks out over his front yard and the lights were up with the moon was full, so we could see the driveway.

We were mid conversation when I see this movement out of the corner of my eye.

I thought it was a deer or something at first, but then I see the space right up against the collect It was pressed right up against the glass.

It was like it was pale in gray but still like got human face.

But it wasn't like a person standing on the porch.

You could see the shoulders were too high, and the head was bloating, and the eyes were just too dark.

And I didn't say Amy's like at first, but then Dan stops talking, turns his head and whispers, are you seeing this?

Yeah?

And when I look back, it was still there.

It didn't move for maybe a five or seconds, and then it just wasn't there anymore.

There was no footsteps on the porch, no no shadow moving away.

It was just gone.

So we both got up, opened the door and ran outside.

The grass was still at from earlier, and there were no footprints anywhere.

The thing is.

If it were a person, it would have had to walk down the gravel driveway, we would have heard it.

I'm still a skeptic.

I want to believe there's a reasonable explanation, but I really don't know what it was.

Mark.

I hear the skepticism in your voice.

You grew up in the Midwest, barns and fields, and you've got a practical head on your shoulders.

But you and your buddy both saw that face, and that's what makes it so chilling.

It could easily be written off as a human trespasser if you want, but I don't know if that makes it any less scary.

Peeping toms are in my top three greatest fears.

Looking over and seeing a face where it's not supposed to be is number one.

Number two tidal waves, and in the other parts of the world, such as the Philippines, there are stories of creatures that peer through windows waiting to be noticed.

It could have been some elemental spirit out for a stroll, or a good old fashioned ghost wanting one of your beers.

You said you don't want to believe it, Mark, but sometimes the proof is just staring at you straight in the face.

Hello, Michelle, I am calling because I had a weird experience.

Like the precognition experience, there was a feeling and it was it was.

It was a bad feeling with Mollie a whole week where I could not stop thinking about her.

I really couldn't.

And it was like the one thought that just it was like an intrusive thought.

It just came over and over again, just slammed itself into my head.

It was a cycle like I'd say, I think she is gangly now, but you know, I got great bone structure and she's pretty.

And then you know, and she just gets a little older, She's going to be a model.

She'll be so beautiful.

And then the next thought that just come to my head was like she's not going to make it.

It was crazy because she was a grade ahead of me.

Not everybody in my grade really knew her, but I had known her since oh god, we were we were in preschool.

Yeah, when I first met her and we went and her mom was my art teacher.

You know, we went way back.

It was a little bit of like kind of grief and it was also just dread.

But it was but it's kind of sort of punish myself, you know, like stop it, Why are you having these thoughts?

And so you know, there was like just a lot of layers of really just kind of kind of thoughts and feelings.

And then one day, I, you know, went to school and so I walked into the cafeteria and this girl says, hey, do you hear that Molly died?

And uh.

And and I said, oh, yeah, I know.

She died in a car accident.

Clearly you know that, Denise, this person, she was the first person to tell me, because like, actually, the same thing happened to me again about two years later, when I was fishing out in the ocean.

It was like I spent one full day thinking about this guy who was He was like a really great guy.

Actually, like he was a valedictorian.

He was captain or maybe quarterback of the football team, I can't remember.

He was a homecoming king, he was, and he was sweet, like a super nice person.

And I but my, but my thought was I just couldn't remember his name all day long.

All day long, I was just like all I could think about was him, and I couldn't remember his name.

When we got back to shore, my mom says, I have some bad news for you, and then you know, she tells me he died.

We learned more about what happened.

He was hit by a car in New York and he didn't survive.

And that the day that I couldn't stop thinking about him was the day that it happened.

It didn't hit me as personally because you know, I didn't know him the way I knew Molly, because it's very isolating kind of a feeling, you know, just like you know, I don't want to let on that I'm crazy to be not that I am, but you know, it's like that's how I think that people will feel about it.

Like I was thirty eight when my oldest was born.

In forty one, mangest was and I had pretty severe post part of anxiety, and you know, I just like I just had like these thoughts of dread.

But like in my experience, it's just like thoughts of dread.

You know, it seemed to be really real.

You know.

It took a lot of therapy, honestly, and like exposure therapy to get to the point where you know, I could, I don't know, manage and like just understand what the real odds are, you know, and put some of the dread and the panic and all of those like intense negative feelings kind of.

To sleep a little bit.

You know, they're not going to overtake my life by the way you know that they were doing at the time.

Thank you for your story.

I can hear how heavy this must have been for you to carry, to be a kid and to feel this dread about your friend Mollie, only to learn that she died, then to have it happen again, and that can feel like more than coincidence, and maybe it is, I don't know.

In folklore, what you've described is often called second sight.

In Irish tradition, people with this gift would sense or even see death before it happened.

In Greece, they believe that certain people were touched by the fates and given a glimpse of what was coming, whether they wanted to see it or not.

I'm glad you were able to get help to manage the fear level that an incident like this would naturally cause.

I think what you've just described is a haunting of the mind, and honestly, some of those hauntings are harder to live with.

Hi, Michelle, I'm just calling in from London and I wanted to share this story with you.

My name is Harriet and this takes place in Ireland.

Just that sort of go away.

Then I was there with some friends and I I've heard about this church that the preacher in the eighteen hundreds had just dropped dead mid sermon, and apparently he was going to release some sort of his congregation, some sort of secret, and he just dropped dead of a heart attack right then in there.

So apparently he haunts this and so we went to check it out and it's still in use, and it's you know, we walk in and it's it's a dusty country church.

You know, it's got it's just got kind of like heavy stale air, and so, you know, we're walking around, we're looking at stuff, and I'm starting to take pictures with my phone and I I'm taking pictures and I'm walking around and then I start noticing that I'm getting these weed blurry lights.

I'm getting these blurry lights in the middle of our photos, and there was no bright light in the middle of the church.

And so I have like a run of photos that just had this weird shape in the middle of it, just like kind of the shape of an you know, it might be a humor, but yeah, it was pretty strange.

And then we went out and we walked around and looked at the old Grovestones and now we got some lunch.

Harriet, thank you.

I love that you brought us to Ireland for this one.

A preacher collapsing mid sermon about to reveal some great secret sounds like a Gothic ghost ory just waiting to be told.

And those blurry lights in your photos.

Skeptics will say it's lens flair, but in Irish folklore, lights appearing in sacred or ruined places are often seen as soul fire, the energy of the dead, lingering where they can't rest.

You were expecting a dusty old church, but you came out with proof that something in there still wanted attention.

But the most important question, where did you go for lunch?

Hey?

Michelle?

This or Rebecca?

And I called my sister the other day because I was thinking about when we were growing up.

She always had this imaginary friend named DoD, and her and Dodd would go play and all this stuff like how to the playground and all these things, and I was just thinking about it, and so I called her up and I was like, do you remember your imaginary friend Dodd?

And she's like yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm like, what did DoD look like.

She's like sat there and was describing it and was just.

Like like, well, they had long, splotchy hair.

It was like they have bald spots.

They always looked a little sick.

They were really pale.

Uh it had.

Really dark eyes, like black black eyes, and they always seemed wet.

They seemed sick, and they were always kind of like looked like they were wet.

And as he quick as she was describing this, she realized like what she was saying, And I realized what she was saying.

And anyway, I just thought i'd call in uh because it seems like Dodd might have been more than an imaginary friend.

Thank you, Rebecca.

This story made my skin crawl.

Kids with a imaginary friends we laugh it off, right, But the way your sister described DoD pale, wet, dark eyes, that doesn't sound like a playmate.

That sounds like something that belongs to another world.

In Western ghost stories, children sometimes encounter the spirits of other children who have died at a young age, and DoD's sickly gripping description feels closer to something darker, like a spirit that never fully left.

And Rebecca, I think you're right, Dodd might not have been imaginary at all.

Hey, am I actually connected?

Okay?

Hey, my name is Dan form Seattle, and this takes place in Seattle.

There's a part called Green Lake there.

It's pretty popular.

If you're from Seattle, you probably know it.

And one time I was walking around it in the morning and there was no one around, and it was the you know, it was the middle of winter, so it was kind of gray and a little foggy, and you know, it's one of those those kind of spooky days.

And as I'm walking around the lake, I started to hear this crying, and this crying is like all around me, and I'm looking around.

I'm like trying to see someone's hurt.

Is there a homeless person around me that needs some help?

Is something going on?

But there's no one there, and I'm just, honestly, I'm spooped.

So I just I.

Get out of there.

And later later I'm doing some research because it kind of stuck with me.

That whole experience was just kind of weird.

So I'm doing some research and I look up.

I was looking up the history of Green Lake, and while I was doing some research, I was like seeing if a crime had happened, seeing if anything had gone down there, you know, And I found this story about a woman named Sylvia Gaines whose body was found in the lake in nineteen twenty six as she was twenty two years old, and she'd come to Seattle to reconnect with her father, who was a World War One vet.

And apparently in the trial it came out that they had had unnatural relations I'll let you fill in the blank there, and he had killed her in some sort of jealous rage and thrown her body in the lake.

He was later sentenced to death and hung.

But now people say they see a woman, a translucent woman, wandering around the lake crying, And I was like, uh, oh, did I just meet Sylvia?

Wow?

I think I met Sylvia.

Thank you, Dan.

I can hear in your voice how unsettled that moment left you walking alone around a lake, hearing crying coming from nowhere everywhere.

You know, that's enough to make anybody run across the world.

Hearing crying is one of the most common reported hauntings.

In Mexico, there's Laurona Forever weeping near rivers and lakes.

In Ireland, the banshee warns of death with her wailing.

And in Seattle, maybe there's Sylvia, a woman silenced in life whose grief still echoes around Green Lake.

That's all we have this week, Folks, do you have a ghost story?

Call seven oh one four eight four two six six six.

That's seven oh one four eight four two six six six or go to tell Me a Ghoststory dot com and leave your story there.

Thank you to all the callers who left messages this week, and as always, I'm your host, Michelle Newman signing off, see you next week.

Might have beat It

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