Hey, it's Michelle Newman, and this week's calls take us further than usual.
David calls in with a true ghost story from 1978, when he went to see Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band at a nearly empty theater in Gainesville, Florida, a detail that checks out since the film was famously one of the biggest box office disasters of its era. About thirty seconds after sitting down, a woman in a fishnet hat and veil, dressed in clothing from the late 1940s or early 1950s, appeared beside him and threatened to call the cops. When David turned around, she was gone. He was completely translucent. Movie theaters actually show up in ghost stories more than people realize, and it might come down to sensory deprivation in those big dark rooms, folklore around residual emotional energy in spaces that held decades of crowds, and old creaky architecture that can sound uncannily like footsteps. None of that explains the fishnet hat, though. That part is all David's.
Jules from Santa Barbara returns with a story from her work at the Marmonte Hotel, where housekeeping found a deep indentation in an otherwise perfectly made bed in a vacant room, shortly after a guest posted a detailed TikTok about something standing at the foot of her bed in that same room. Santa Barbara has a reputation worth knowing about. According to Julie Ann Brown, owner of Santa Barbara Ghost Tours, in an SFGATE feature by Julie Tremaine, the city is sometimes called the most haunted in California, and Brown believes most of its spirits are not lingering out of anger; they're essentially just passing through, enjoying themselves, with no interest in staying. She connects that to the city itself, Chumash sacred land later colonized by the Spanish and one of California's most popular vacation destinations for generations. People have been coming and going from that coastline for centuries, and apparently that transience extends straight into the afterlife. A hotel is the most literal expression of that transience a building can have.
Gary D returns with his third call, this time about a job transferring old patient records in the basement archive of a former psychiatric hospital, completely alone with flickering lights and dark corners. A voice from the darkest corner said help me while he was reading the file of a patient with a documented history of hearing voices. During a storm-driven power outage, something dragged itself toward him through total darkness, breathing heavily. In his final month, something shoved him hard enough from behind to put him on his hands and knees. Spaces that held unregulated or experimental psychiatric treatment from earlier eras of medicine generate some of the most consistently reported hauntings of any location type, and it is not hard to understand why once you look into what early treatment actually involved, transorbital lobotomies, unmodified electroconvulsive therapy, insulin shock comas, all administered in rooms not unlike the one Gary was sitting in. Staff at the hospital more or less confirmed that things happened in that specific corner before anyone knew better.
And Cindy Ketron from Avon, Indiana closes the episode with a story from her grandfather's farm in Seymour, Indiana, where deer in the area were being killed by something nobody could identify. Her family went into the woods at night with rifles, found a whimpering baby fawn instead, and heard a terrible scream from somewhere in the trees while feeding it. They never learned what it was. They took the fawn home, raised her, and called her Dawn.
00:00 Intro
00:00 David and the ghost at the 1978 movie theater
02:48 Jules and the indent in the Marmonte Hotel bed
06:17 Gary D and the psychiatric hospital basement
23:32 Cindy Ketron and the baby deer in the Indiana woods
Have a real ghost story of your own? A haunting experience, something you heard, something you cannot explain? I want to hear it. Call 1 (701) 484-2666 or visit tellmeaghoststory.com to share your story.
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