When I was nine years old, my dad and I were on our way home from a very important horse show that I hoped would qualify me for the State Fair.

Instead, I had lost my one point. Two years of work down the drain in seconds!

On the way home as we drove down a hill I saw a figure kneeling by a house, dressed in a white robe. Right after seeing him, I said to myself, “If there is a super human being out there, make him give me another chance to qualify.”

A few minutes later, we came to a bridge, and once again I saw the same figure. He wasn’t moving, and I asked my dad, “Do you see that?” He didn’t answer, so I grabbed the wheel and slammed on the brakes.

We skidded across the bridge and almost ran off the road. My dad asked, “What the hell is wrong?” All I could say was, “You almost hit the man! He was on the bridge!” I jumped out and ran back to the bridge. I looked and looked, but he was nowhere in sight.

As I stood there, I felt a rush from my feet out through my fingertips. At that moment, I knew I had qualified for the horse show.

When we walked in the door, my grandma told us that there had been a mistake and I, in fact, had qualified.

J. Eckhoff
Orlando, FL

I feel that what happened to me needs to be told. It proves to me that loved ones still live.

One day I was walking down Clark Street in Bellflower, CA at about 2 p.m. I was going home to practice my music for school. Just as I was about to cross the street, I suddenly felt something pull me back.

Of course I was startled, and I practically stumbled backward. I was shocked to see a car whiz around the corner. I could almost feel the force of it as it came within inches of me.

Once I was able to get across the street I heard someone say, “I’m here, Edith.”

I turned around quickly as no one had called me Edith since I was a little girl. When I looked, I was surprised to see my Aunt who had died years earlier. She smiled and waved, and then faded from view. This dear lady had raised me and was the only mother I had known.

As I continued on my way home, a lady said, “Gee, Miss, you must have a Guardian Angel!” “Oh,” I said, “I do!” It was an experience I will long remember, for I believe my aunt reached out from the other world to save my life.

B. Leddy
Bellflower, CA

When my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer, my husband and I wanted her to move in with us so I could look after her.

However, she refused to leave her own home, and it was too small for us to move in with her. So, we purchased a vacant lot next to her home and built a house on it.

This compromise worked out fine until she suddenly passed away the following summer.

One afternoon, about one month after the funeral, I was sitting alone on my deck looking over at my mom’s old home and wondering what to do with it. It was so close to my new home that renting or selling it would cause us to lose the privacy we enjoyed. Yet, I couldn’t just let it stay vacant and pay taxes and maintain it.

Suddenly, what appeared to be a bright spot of sunlight hovered in front of me and I heard my mother’s voice say, “Take what you want from the house, lock it up, and let it be. On June 8th, the problem will solve itself.”

I told my husband about the incident. Although he thought I was being rather foolish, he agreed to go along with my wishes to follow those instructions.

One night, a vicious storm broke out and the old house was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. It was insured for replacement value, which was three times what we could have sold it for.

The date the fire occurred was June 8th.

M. Sippu
Plymouth, PA

On the day I turned seven, I saw very clearly my two uncles pass me on the stairs of our home. They waved hello as they went by.

My mother asked me who I was talking to. I said, “Uncle Ben and Uncle Will.” The only thing was, they had both died a few years earlier.

After I was married, my husband and I moved into two other homes where people had died. I saw their ghosts so very clearly. I had not known these people but was told that I had described them perfectly.

Time passed and we moved into a friend’s home. One night my husband was working, and I was alone in the house. I was washing my dishes and standing next to a wall when a voice clearly said, “Put your hand on the wall.”

It scared me and I thought, “Why?” Again came the voice, “Put your hand on the wall.”

Instead, I went into the living room and sat on a chair. Then a force I had no control over picked me up, pushed me into the kitchen and made me put my hand on the wall. It was burning hot! To my amazement, the room behind the kitchen was on fire apparently due to a faulty wire, and the house was filled with fire and smoke within minutes.

The fire department told me two minutes more and I may never have gotten out of that house alive.

D. Piotroski
Trumbull, CT

When I was ten years old, I often noticed an older man who had a cane, wore overalls, and slightly dragged his left leg.

When I walked to the store, he would be standing maybe half a block away. When I came out of the store, he would still be off in the distance, never seeming to get closer. And he’d be looking at me.

I never thought anything about it. He never bothered me or scared me. I just thought it was normal for this man to be around.

One evening after dinner, we were looking through family photo albums. I was sitting next to my dad when we came across a photo of the old man. I asked, “How do you know the old man?” Dad said, “What do you mean? This is my father, your grandfather. He died in 1952, before you were born.”

I was born in 1963. I never knew my grandpa, and no one had ever told me anything about him. I said, “But he’s always outside, everywhere I go! You mean he’s my grandpa?”

My Dad looked at me with a puzzled expression. Then I told him about the old man and about how he walked.

Dad said that a stroke had left Grandpa’s leg partly partially paralyzed, and that’s why he dragged it.

After that night, I looked for my grandfather every time I went out, but he was never around. Since I found out who he was, I have never seen him again. My father has also passed away, and I still look for them both whenever I go out.

E. Paniagua
Belmore, OH

My story has a nautical twist to it.

I have been sailing since childhood, having been born and raised in Seattle. I love the sea, and I do believe it holds many mysteries. Here is one of them.

I was celebrating my twenty-second birthday with my girlfriend Tania when we decided to rent a boat and take it out for a midnight cruise around the harbor. It was an old wooden sloop, thirty-four feet long with an inboard engine, and she was a beauty. I love spending time on boats, even when they’re just sitting in the slip.

Tania went below into the cabin while I got the boat ready topside. Then I heard her yell out my name. My first thought was that she had hurt herself, but when I looked through the hatch and went below deck, she had this frightened look on her face.

She said a face had appeared in one of the portholes. I said it was impossible because I was on deck and no one else was on the boat, or anywhere near us on the dock. She looked at me and I could see the fear in her eyes. I had never seen her like this.

Now, Tania is a very down-to-earth person and not one to get excited or to get carried away or to make up things. But she repeated to me that she saw a face staring at her through the porthole and she hadn’t imagined it.

Suddenly, she went white as a ghost as she was staring over my shoulder. I whirled around and there it was. A man’s face staring inside, not exactly at us, but definitely peering in from the porthole. At first I was startled, then I raced up the steps to the cockpit.

But no one was there. And no one was on the dock. It was impossible for anyone to get away that quickly because from the time I saw the face until the time I ran up on deck was maybe two or three seconds.

What was going on?

Fortunately, that was the last time we saw the face that night, probably because we never did take the boat out. I was as scared as Tania was, and there was no way we were going to cruise around that harbor in the dark that night. We didn’t want to be stuck out on the water in the middle of nowhere with strange faces staring through the windows at us.

We learned later on that a few years earlier someone had committed suicide on a boat in the slip next to ours, and similar sightings of the man had been reported from time to time. We were shown a photo of the man, and that was him.

E. Noscati
Chicago, Illinois

My buddies and I were just out of college and looking for a place to stay. We thought it’d be fun to live together in a big house, and we were excited to get a lead on an available place on the outskirts of town.

When we first got a glimpse of it, I can’t begin to say how disappointed we were. Big, sprawling, not well kept, and in need of a paint job – long, long overdue for a paint job.

The interior wasn’t much better. We all stood there and shook our heads and joked about what a dump it was. When the real estate agent said OK, I understand your disappointment, let’s go, we just looked at him. In unison, we said we’d take it.

Hey, we were just out of college. This was perfect for us.

Of course, what the agent neglected to tell us were the unearthly sounds we were to hear at all hours of the night. And we weren’t exactly delighted to hear that a murder had taken place there several years earlier. We were to learn that the nightly sounds first started immediately after the murder occurred. And, worse yet, the killer had never been found.

We were freaked, to say the least.

I was up late one evening in my room when so help me, I saw my top desk drawer open and close, open and close, open and close. It scared the hell out of me and I was too frightened to make a sound. I wanted to yell out for help, but I was tongue tied. I had seen this kind of thing in movies, and I couldn’t believe it was actually happening. It was surreal.

Weird things like that continued to happen during the year and actually we began to have fun with it. The ladies who we’d bring over would often cuddle closer to us as we explained the strange goings on. And they were always impressed that we were brave enough to live there. Hey, we’ll take all the flattery they’ll throw at us.

And one more thing: we asked the landlord if we could split the rent with the ghost(s) that shared the place with us. He said sure if we could collect it from them.

S. Ryser
Cleveland, Ohio

I’ve received your emails for a couple of years now, and I never would have believed I’d be writing to you with my own “out-of-the-ordinary” experience.

It happened a couple of weeks ago when I arrived home from a business trip back east.  The first thing that seemed to be “different” was my dog, Henry, who just sat there instead of jumping up and down and doing his best to bowl me over.

I usually leave him with Jane who stays in my house when I’m away.  It costs about the same as boarding, and this way Henry is not cooped up.  I also feel confident that my house isn’t sitting in the dark each night, making an inviting target for some thief.

For some reason, when Henry first spotted me, he didn’t even bother to get up.  He merely raised his head while remaining lying on his side.  I thought perhaps he was sick but Jane assured me he was fine but a bit scared.

“Scared,” I asked?  “What does he have to be scared about?”  It was such a strange comment.  But not at all strange when Jane told me what had transpired a few days after I had left.

She said that in the middle of the night she had heard guitar music coming from the basement downstairs.  She said she was scared out of her mind, started to call the police, but thought better of it and went downstairs to check it out.

“I took Henry with me for protection,” she said, although she and I both know that Henry runs for cover at the first sign of trouble.

Jane went on to tell me what she saw.  “As I was walking down the stairs leading to the basement, I saw the figure of a young man out of the corner of my eye.  Normally, I would have run back upstairs and out the house, but I didn’t feel the least bit threatened.  It was as if he wanted to say something to me.

“Then when I walked down the final step, I saw that he was holding a guitar, and although he was moving his hand up and down as if he were playing it, I heard no sound.

“And then he vanished right in front of my eyes.  I glanced down at Henry whose tail was between his legs.  He was slowly creeping behind my legs, the brave protector dog that he is.”

When I asked Jane what the young man looked like, I knew at once he was the son of the people who rent out the house to me.  I met him once, just weeks before he passed away from a long-term illness a year ago on Christmas day.

Georgina Lassiter
Montreal, Canada

I have always believed that sometimes spirits of the dead kind of “hang around” until they finish some sort of unfinished business.  And I always hoped that I would experience it for myself because it seemed so exciting.

But my experience in a cabin my folks rented on a northern Wisconsin lake last summer exceeded my wildest expectations.

I had just graduated high school and was getting ready to go off to Boston College, so the trip was kind of a graduation present.  Nothing was unusual when we brought our bags in from the car, and my sister and I playfully fought for who got the cushier bed.

We rented a small motorboat in the afternoon and found the lake to be reasonably quiet and quite beautiful.  After a very nice dinner at a local restaurant, my sister and I climbed into our separate beds in the same room.  Our folks were in the second bedroom, and we were all tired from our first day’s adventures.

When I turned off the lights, I had a strange feeling that someone or something was watching.  I mentioned this to my sister who immediately freaked out and started peeking out the window to see if someone was there.

I explained that I wasn’t afraid of someone stalking us from the outside, but rather from the very room we were in.  My sister, Marlene, just looked at me, turned over and said something derogatory about my intelligence and wondered why a fine school like Boston College would admit me.

Then the “fun” started.

I awoke when I felt a tug on my blanket.  I was half asleep and mumbled to my sister that she should stop messing around.  When Marlene didn’t answer, I realized she was asleep and I let out a small scream.

Marlene sat up and asked what was wrong.  When I told her, she said that she also had felt something tug on her nightgown  but thought it had merely been part of a dream.

Well, we didn’t get much sleep the rest of the night.  In the morning, when we told our folks what happened, my mother turned white.  She said she had experienced the same thing but was too embarrassed to tell our father.

We mentioned this to the manager of the cabin, and he said it had happened to him numerous times ever since he bought the cabin.  He referred to the intruder as “The Playful Ghost.”

Christi Mikan
Milwaukee, WI

This man was born Ehrich Weiss March 24, 1874 in Budapest, Hungary. Ashamed of his birthplace, he later claimed to have been born in Appleton, Wisconsin.

His family was poor and at the age of eight, he went to work to help pay the bills. He sold newspapers and shined shoes until age12, when he left home and began performing magic, calling himself “Eric, the Great.”

He was a mere 5’5″ with a high-pitched voice, but was extremely athletic and charismatic

Soon he became famous worldwide when he astonished audiences with his incredible feats.

In 1926, a member of the audience asked if he could punch the magician in the stomach to test his tolerance for pain. A few single blows caused his appendix to rupture.  Despite the pain, he continued to perform several shows but after one final performance in Michigan, he collapsed and was rushed to a local hospital.

Both of his homes, in New York and Los Angeles are currently said to be haunted by his ghostly spirit, even though one of them burned down after his death.

Harry Houdini died October 31, 1926 of peritonitis.