The Woman You Can Only See When You're Not Looking

That's kind of there. It happened to many people. Every time you close the door, you start hearing voices outside, and they kept on getting louder and louder. It seemed like there's a bunch of people, and then all of a sudden you open the door and be known, there be quiet. 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. Hey, Michelle, this is James in San Francisco. I was the gentleman talking about the post street ghosts. I worked at UCSF Medical Center on Parnassas in San Francisco for about ten years and it was really haunted. Had all sorts of experiences there. For one thing, there was a bathroom in the kitchen, which turns out, by the way, that the kitchen where I worked, I was actually in the office with Fouit service with the kitchen was used to be a Morgue back before they've remodeled the building, like in the forties or fifties, So there was a lot of activity in the kitchen. Iceed to go to this bathroom in the morning that was private by myself, and it happened to many people. Every time you close the door, you start hearing voice scouts on you, and the kept in getting louder and louder. It seemed like there's a bunch of people and then all of a sudden you open the door and be non there be quiet. A couple of things that happened to a lot was coming from the basement where I had to get things out of stores up these stairs, and I always feel like a little hand pulling the back of my shirt. It turns out there was an exorcism there. I don't know when this was, and some people attributed to urban legend, but I guess the eight flour of the Children's Wing was so haunted that they had exorcists there. I think it was in the early eighties of the late seventies. I'll have to find out the data that, but the place was really haunted. Finally, one thing that happened to me. There's so much that did. I guess I could tell you more, but I just wanted to get back to you that I was in the restroom one time, washing my hands after going to the bathroom, leaving myself, and all of a sudden, I looked to my wife in the urinal. It looks like the kind of smoke that comes up from a volcano. It came up out of the urinal and started rising and bubbling and turning in on itself, and I'm tumbling to get my camera. No one's going to believe you, of course, and as soon as I do, the clouds getting stuck back into it. But that was it. There's a whole bunch more stuff I'll try to remember and get back to you on and I have other stories too, but I that just meet James from San Francisco, the Post Street ghost Guy, and thank you so much. I'm really enjoying the calls. I'm going to try to get more people that I know to call you as well. All right, that's a bye bye. M Thank you, James, the postreet ghost guy from San Francisco. There are so many layers of hauntings from an old medical center. I love hearing about them, not only because they are usually scary and weird, but also because they're so credible. So thank you for calling in again. I look forward to hearing more of your stories. Hello with sal This is Melissa. I'm formerly from Pittsburgh and I have a ghost story. That's how so. My story starts in. My twenties, whenever I had I was in grad school and I had an internship at a place called gray Stonehouse. Now Graystone House was a big, drawling house, as the name suggests it was. It was built out of stone, which is pretty rare in Pittsburgh, and it had been built in the seventeen hundreds as a stage coach in and a brothel. But when I worked there, of course, it was not a brothel anymore. It has a group home for teenage boys who had been removed from their parents' care due to drug issues. The most common ghost story I heard there from my coworkers was that the fawcet, like when you walk past the fawcet, it would go off on its own. And this was like any faster anywhere in this huge house, you know, bathroom fawcett, sower fawcett. I remember one in. Particular, my friend Mike walked past the bathroom with the door hanging open. Nothing was a mess. But just a minute later he had to walk past the same bathroom again, and the tour and the sink we're both running full blast, and nobody had been in that bathroom. The story that I had to happen to me personally happened several times, which it definitely happened over a period of weeks, which was interesting. At six o'clock every single day, we would go into the dining room. I would go into the dining room with the boys and we would sit down and eat, and the doorbells would go off, and the doorbells are pretty loud, you know, rowding home full boys. But we would check the front door at six o'clock PM every single day. It would go off. Nobody's there, So then we would go check the back door. Nobody would be there, and then we would go check the side doors because there's quite a few doors here, you know, it's a big place. Nothing we never saw anybody leaving. We never saw any kids run away playing ding dong, genter anything like that. And it was the same time every single day, and it would happen several times, so that we have to keep checking all the different doors. I never saw any physical body or I never saw any like apparitions of people who lived there. I don't know if they were former ladies of the night or who the ghosts might have been, but it was definitely a stick in my mind for a while. Thank you, Melissa from Pittsburgh. Hey, Michelle, I don't know if you ever heard of this, but I thought i'd call him an ask. I have a group of guid friends who all live in this five bedroom house. Each dude rents a room. There's a room by the main entryway door that they can keep failed and they how does it like four people from that room because everyone who ends up renting that room ends up going to drugs a rebab, everyone ends up going to rehab or they end up developing serious drug issues. And I get that, like, obviously it depends on who you're renting to, but that re reamter seems cursed and the entity is terrible. It almost it seems like it's paranormal. So let me know what you think. Thanks, thank you for that call. I need to sit with that for a second, because that's not really ghost story, is it not in the traditional sense? There's no woman in white, no cold spots, no things that go bump in the night. Four different people, same room, same outcome. Before you say it, yes, I know, correlation isn't causation. Maybe they're renting to people who are already struggling. Maybe the landlord isn't screening tenants carefully. Maybe maybe maybe, but four times in a year raises interesting questions. I want to read something from a book that's been living on my nightstand for a couple months now. It's called In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts by doctor Gobormatte. He's a physician who worked in Vancouver's downtown east Side with people struggling with severe addiction. And he talks about this concept from the Buddhist tradition the hungry ghost. And here's the quote. Hungry ghosts are these beings with enormous bellies and tiny, narrow throats. They're forever starving, forever trying to consume something to fill the emptiness inside them. But nothing ever satisfied, nothing ever fits through that throat. They're trapped in the cycle of craving and emptiness, craving and emptiness end quote. Mate uses this as a metaphor for addiction, that insatiable hunger, that hole that can't be filled no matter how much you pour into it. Now, I'm not saying that that room is haunted literally by a Buddhist hungry ghost. But stay with me here. What if some places hold hunger. What if trauma or desperation, or the specific flavor of human suffering can soak into the walls the same way cigarette smoke does. Four different people walk into that room, four people spiral into addiction or relapse so badly they need to go to rehab. The Coller even said the energy in the room feels terrible. They can feel it. In Mate's book, he talks about how addiction isn't really about substance. It's about the pain you're trying to escape. It's about the emptiness you're trying to fill. And if that room has somehow absorbed years, maybe decades, of that kind of suffering, what does it do to someone who's already vulnerable, someone who's already got their own hollow place inside. Maybe they walk in there and something recognizes them, something says, oh, I know this feeling, I know this hunger. This is chuck from upstate New York. I've been listening, and I just got to tell somebody about what happened. There's this MBI wat on the end of my street. If you've been hitting me, my whole life somehow is burning down in the seventies or whatever, and now it's just now, it's just weave and buffed up concrete. Nobody knows what to do with that. Nobody's done anything with that. It just sits there empty. There's a woman who stands there, and I know how weird that sounds, but I've seen her. Everyone in the neighborhood has seen her, and it's always out of the cornt of her eye, just for like a second. The first time I happened, I was packing up a trash and I got that feeling that someone was watching me, and I whooped over. I kind of just going at stover at the lot, and there she was stand and there was this girl. There was this woman standing right in the middle of the weeds, wearing something white, were light colored, I'm not quite sure, not moving at all. So I turned my head actually lowed, and she's just gone nothing there. Honestly, I figured I was going crazy. But then I had dinner with some neighbors last month, and my neighbor Gatherd brings it up out of nowhere, same exact thing, the same exact thing happened to him while he was walking his dog. And then our other neighbor, Susan's like all like got me too, as then one other pH daughters. So she see her like seven times, always the same. You can see her if you don't look right at her or right at the lot, only when you're barely looking, just out of the side of your eye. Of one night even I just stay it on my porch and work for three hours. I'm just staring at the empty walk to see if anything would happen. In nothing not nothing happening. I made honor for she's cobbery out there right now standing in the empty want as long as you don't actually would. Thank you. Chuck from Upstate New York. The woman in the empty lot, what is she waiting for? I think about peripheral vision, how it's actually more sensitive to movement than direct site. How we evolved to catch threats from the corner of our eye. And this woman, she only exists in liminal space, that space between seeing and not seeing, between there and not there. Maybe some ghosts don't want to be seen directly. Maybe they can't be Maybe they only exist in that certain space, that moment of doubt where you think, did I just see? And before you can finish that thought, they're gone. Hey Michelle, this is Diane calling from Sedona. I've been practicing divination for years, and I've always seen the wig aboord as just another tool for channeling energy. Nothing inherently dangerous if you know what you're doing and approach it with respect. But I was doing a session for this guy, friend of a friend, who wanted to contact his deceased father, someone I knew nothing about, had never met. We're sitting across from each other with the board between us, both of us with our fingers on the plan chet. The second we started, my hands went ice cold and I couldn't stop shaking. I have no memory of the actual conversation. I just remember watching the plan chet move under our fingers, but I couldn't register what it was saying. The board was upside down to me, so I was seeing everything backward. There was this rushing in my ears, like white noise. I could see the guy's lips moving, asking questions, but I couldn't hear him clearly. Everything felt distant, muffled. At some point during the session, he actually lifted his finger off the planchet completely, just to test it, to make sure it wasn't him moving it, and it kept going. When we finally said goodbye and closed the session, I came back to myself. That's the only way I can describe it, like I'd been somewhere else and suddenly I was back. My hands were still freezing. I was exhausted, and the guy was just staring at me. He said, you just told me things that only my father and I could have known, specific things, details about their relationship, what his father had dressed up as for Halloween when the guy was a kid, private conversations they had. He was a complete skeptic before that session. After he told me he'd never touch a wig aboard again. Ever, he was too shaken by how accurate it was, how specific the information was. I still use weige aboards, i still practice divination, but I've never had a connection that strong again, and I'm not sure I want to. Diane from Sedona, thank you for your deeply unsettling account. Some connections are too strong, even from beyond the grave. Hi, this is thedycatch from one more tale. It's called Gray Trandpa Leste meet the Devil. Well, this was back in the early grade depression days. The Great Depression had just started, and it was in the early nineteen thirty and Grandpa was one day out in his farm Yardy he's plain bout and Grandma's at howard things only she brought him and the three farmhands some some lemonade and some treas. It was July and Trampa said, I have your everything on the radihill About the drenching version, she said, more people are out of work. And Grandpa was sweating. He was rubbing in his face. When the went across she brought him. She said, why don't you guys take him fifteen minute break? And so they agreed and neigh were enjoying their treats and Grandpa I went back to work after he finished his and he was in the haylow and he said, boy, Vince tookingness. Suddenly there was an unfamiliar boy. Then what if I didn't get you out of your deliver? And Drefflet says, who this? And he went right back to his work and the boys and again, he said, what if I made you an offer you to have reviews? There was a normal man in a vices suit and he had a nope pad with a menthol and he was looking straight at Trampa and Dreaftlin said, who are you? And he told me he said, I'm the Dell Hawaii haven't contract for you? And he grandfleas and uh nothing, And he said, what if I made you an offer you to have refuse? And Grandpa said, what if I told you? I depended what to offer? And so the devil didn't know what to do, and he disappeared from my grandpa, and my grandpa acrossed himself and said, thank you Lord and went about in lane. Thank you for listening. Thank you, Cindy. I love that the devil shows up with a notepad and a pencil, like he's some sort of supernatural insurance salesman. And I love that your Grandpa's response, instead of screaming or running or making a deal out of desperation, it was just no thanks. Sometimes the scariest thing you can do to something that wants power over you is refuse to be afraid of it. 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. I'm your host, Michelle Newman, signing off. See you next week Much