Hey, it's Michelle, and this week's four calls span a movie theater in 1978, a hotel in Santa Barbara, a psychiatric hospital basement, and a farm in Indiana where something was killing deer. This episode is available as a video on Spotify and YouTube.
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. He and his friend sat in a row with plenty of open seats. About thirty seconds later, a woman appeared in the seat beside him, pulled her purse toward herself, and told him that if he did not get away from her immediately, she was calling the cops. David ran. When he turned around, there was nobody there.
Jules from Santa Barbara returns with a true ghost story from her work at the Mar Monte Hotel. A guest had posted on TikTok about an experience in one of the rooms, detailed enough and specific enough that Jules and the director of rooms decided to check the vacant room themselves. The room looked completely ordinary until they looked at the bed. Their housekeepers make beds with near-perfect precision every single time, and this bed had a deep indent on one side, the kind of indent a person's weight leaves behind, in a room nobody had slept in. Jules got a photo before they ran out. If this is your first time hearing from Jules, she has called in before about a man who walked through a solid wall at a hostel in Vancouver and a ghost child who followed her through a Brooklyn apartment.
Gary D returns with his third call to Tell Me A Ghost Story. Fresh out of high school, he took a job in the basement archive of an old psychiatric hospital, transferring decades of patient records into digital files, completely alone in a cobblestone basement with flickering lights and dark corners. The chain rattling started within the first few weeks. Then 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 and seeing things. Staff told him his mind was playing tricks in exactly the kind of environment that plays tricks on people. Then during a storm, the power went out completely, and something dragged itself toward him through the dark, breathing heavily, before the lights came back on to reveal nobody there. In his final month, a stack of boxes fell on its own, and something shoved him hard enough from behind to knock him to his hands and knees. Staff eventually confirmed that unregulated experimental treatments had taken place in that exact section of the basement decades earlier. Gary believes whatever is down there was trying to communicate and did not want him in that space.
Cindy Ketron from Avon, Indiana calls in 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 father, an early paranormal investigator, took the men in the family out to the woods at night with rifles to find it.
Four real callers. Four true ghost stories.
If you 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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Theme music is Sexy Sax by Cool Cascade.
Production by Newman Media.
[00:00:06] Welcome to Tell Me A Ghost Story, the late-night call-in 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.
[00:00:33] So grab a cozy blanket, turn down the lights. Hello, my name is David and in 1978 I went to a movie theater in Gainesville, Florida with a friend of mine to see a movie. I'm 60 years old now. Anyway, we get to the movie and the movie had already just started so you could see through the seats where nobody was sitting.
[00:01:00] So we sat in a row that nobody was sitting in. It was like eight seats. And I sat three seats from the curtain from the wall and she sat two seats to the right of me. I sat down. I'm sitting there and about 30 seconds after I'm sitting there this lady appears in the seat to my left.
[00:01:23] And she grabs, she has this purse and she pulls it towards herself and she says if you don't get away from me right now I'm calling the cops. And I like freaked out man. I jumped up and ran to the aisle and I'm running up the aisle and my friend comes and grabs me. She says David, David where you going? I go that lady and there was nobody there. Okay.
[00:01:46] Now, the deal with this woman was she was wearing clothes from like the early 50s, late 40s. The clothes she had on and she had a fishnet hat that went over her face. I could still, I could see right through all of it. She was translucent just like, just like they say.
[00:02:10] I mean, I'm not kidding you. I've never forgot it. I'm six years old and it, it just, it stuck with me all this time. The movie was Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and with the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton. And I'm convinced that that lady got robbed on that property and maybe killed before that movie theater was built. Okay.
[00:02:35] Now, listen, I know what I saw. No one's gonna tell me I didn't see this. It wasn't my imagination. And, you know, she's wearing clothes from the early 50s. I mean, come on with a fishnet hat on and you could see it. And she, like, you could just see right through her too, man. Just like they say.
[00:03:02] Thank you, David. 46 years and you still remember exactly what she was wearing. I want to talk about the movie for a second because I think it matters more than it seems like it should. Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band came out in 1978, the same year as David's Encounter.
[00:03:22] And it's famously one of the biggest box office disasters of its era, which means the theater in Gainesville would have had exactly the kind of nearly empty house David described. Plenty of open rows and hardly anyone around. So that detail checks out. Movie theaters show up in ghost stories a lot more than you realize. Part of it might be just because of sensory deprivation.
[00:03:47] Big dark rooms cut off from daylight and weather can amplify every little sound and can play tricks on the mind. Some paranormal folklore points to residual energy. The idea that space is holding decades of intense emotion in packed crowds trap some of that energy. And then there's the simple fact that older theaters are old buildings. Settling wood, aging pipe, drafts moving through the walls.
[00:04:11] All of which could sound like footsteps or a voice, especially if you're already primed to hear one. None of that explains the fishnet hat though. That parts all David's. Hi, my name is Jules and I'm calling from Santa Barbara, California. And I'm calling to report something kind of eerie that happened at my work. I work at a hotel in Santa Barbara.
[00:04:41] It's called the Marmonte Hotel. And because we're super in tune with like reviews and like people posting about their stay. This one girl posted about a, on TikTok about like an experience she had in one of our rooms and how she goes into like crazy detail.
[00:05:01] And the extra crazy part is she got a photo of like something, some kind of entity like standing at the foot of her bed. And it was just like, just the way she described it. I just don't feel like she'd be making any of that up. So me and the director of rooms, we were like, oh, let's see if that room is vacant. Let's just go check it out. And it was.
[00:05:29] So we went in, just popped in and you know, it really looked pretty basic. Like nothing. It was just a clean room. And then the next part I have to kind of explain is that our room attendants or housekeepers are really, really good at like almost like crazily good about making our beds. You know, you expect when you go into a hotel, the bed to be like crazy, like perfect.
[00:06:00] But our housekeepers do like an amazing job with that. And so they're really, they're always incredibly like flat, like just perfection. And we're like looking around and I said, you got to look at the bed. And I, we look at the bed and there's on one side, it's a king size bed. On one side, there's like an indent and not like just like one little dent.
[00:06:27] It's like the type of indent that would basically be there if someone was sitting there. And it was just, I'd never seen our bed like that. And just, I just immediately both of us felt like, holy shit, like something's there, something's staring at us, something's sitting there. And we just started running out of the room. I just had this feeling over my entire body was like, we got to get out of here. And I was like, no, no, no, you got to take a picture. You got to take a picture.
[00:06:57] So before she like holds up her cell and she's like taking it real quick. And she actually got a photo of the bed. I don't know if I can submit it or anything, but it was definitely something in there. And that's my ghost story. Bye-bye. Thank you, Jules from Santa Barbara. I've posted her photos on the Instagram so you can see what she's describing for yourself. And I'll also link to the TikToks she mentioned in the show notes.
[00:07:26] I was doing some research after this story and found an SF Gate article called, I went looking for a haunted hotel in Santa Barbara. And what I found was a city of ghosts by Julie Tremaine. I'll link to the article in the show notes if you want to read the whole thing. According to the owner of the Santa Barbara ghost tours, Julianne Brown, Santa Barbara is sometimes called the most haunted city in California.
[00:07:56] And her theory about why really stuck with me. Most of the spirits she's encountered there are not lingering out of anger or unfinished business. In her words, they are essentially passing through, enjoying themselves with no particular interest in staying. It was Chumash sacred land later colonized by the Spanish. And for generations now, people have been coming and going from that stretch of coastline for centuries.
[00:08:22] That context changes how I think of that hotel bed. A hotel is the most literal expression of transience a building can have. People arrive, stay a night or two, leave. Over and over and over again for decades. And if Brown is right, Santa Barbara's spirits are essentially still on vacation.
[00:08:55] Gary D here again with another weird and wacky story for you. This is one that I think about every now and then because of the creepiness of it. Anyways, back, I'm trying to remember if it was back when I just finished high school or maybe I was just about to finish high school. I was looking for a part time job somewhere.
[00:09:18] And through a friend of mine, I managed to get a six month gig or stint. Kind of a neat little job. Because what it was, was that I was doing a data transfer. Basically going through, oh, I don't know how many boxes, but old cardboard boxes full of medical records and photos.
[00:09:43] Which were all private and I had to, you know, sign a release saying that I would not talk about it or anything else. Take pictures. Basically, I was working for a psychiatric hospital. So I was working for the hospital and what I was doing is I went, it was a very old place.
[00:10:05] It had been around, oh, it was made out of old, I'm not sure if it was cobblestone or brick, but it had a history. Probably built turn of the century, maybe the 1910s, possibly the 20s, but it was very old. Really cool architecture. But in any case, I was looking for a job. This seemed pretty cool.
[00:10:27] Because if you know, you do any work in the medical profession, it doesn't matter if you're pushing a broom or you're anything to do with a hospital, you're going to be paid well. So I looked at the job and they said, yeah, it'll probably take about six months, dare or take.
[00:10:45] And the cool thing was, is that I was basically, well, you're going to be sitting in the basement of this old psychiatric hospital, which is almost like catacombs where I had to go down this long creaky stairwell to go into this almost like a cobblestone pit in the basement, which was their archives where they kept all of these musty cardboard boxes jam packed full of, like I say, medical records.
[00:11:11] So basically it's like psychiatric records and photographs, old photographs of patients. And after signing off on all the release releases and all that, basically they set me up where I just was there and I was, I'd have to read through the records and just move everything across and just put everything onto a computer.
[00:11:38] Yeah. And, you know, they allowed me to bring a radio. So I just, it was an electrical, I plugged in my radio and just listened to music, pretty cushy job in my eyes. Plus I was being paid top dollar. But anyways, what was neat, the beginning, you know, I thought, oh, this is going to be pretty boring.
[00:11:58] But the, the location I was in being in the basement and some, you know, light bulbs that tended to flicker and give some mood to it. You think you're in a horror movie or something and nobody comes and checks on you. You're just sitting there all alone doing your thing. You bring, you bring, you bring some food with you. You can climb out of there later and go get something close by or just stay in there with your bag lunch.
[00:12:24] So anyways, I started going through the files, pulling the boxes, opening stuff up. And they said, go through all this stuff. And then the stuff, once you've done it, moved it over, start another pile and that'll all get shredded. And then everything will be in digital, in a digital format as opposed to paper. Or because all of these files were musty and, you know, mice had eaten at the boxes and they were dirty. And I saw some pretty cool things. There were, there were celebrities, there was, you know, mayors, political people.
[00:12:54] Some people I knew, all of their information, the psychiatric problems they had. And like I say, some of the photographs were pretty freaky. So I was going through the stuff. And then it probably wasn't until I'd been doing this job for probably a couple of weeks that the one time I was in there and there were some dark corners in that basement. Because it was lit up where I was and I was listening to the music, having a drink.
[00:13:22] And there were some shady, dark corners where your mind starts playing tricks and you're wondering what's lurking around the corner. So I was sitting there, it was dead quiet and I had the radio off. And I was just doing the keystrokes, moving stuff across. And I could have sworn I heard like an iron chain rattling. So I didn't think much of it and then I heard it again. Okay, so that was kind of neat, kind of different, broke up the monotony and everything.
[00:13:52] And then suddenly I started reading a particular file about someone who seemed to be really in some deep psychological and mental trauma. I'm not sure if they almost seemed like a combination of multiple personality disorder.
[00:14:18] I remember hearing voices, seeing things, blurting out strange things. And it was a long file on this individual. And I was moving it across and some of the photos of this person when they were sitting there, you could just see the look in their eye. Just a really wild, deranged look. So as I'm reading through this and moving it across, I hear a voice.
[00:14:46] At first I wasn't sure if I really heard a voice and then I just stopped and again, it's almost like I hear breathing. I hear a voice coming from the furthest corner. And I go, hello, hello, is somebody there? Nothing. Nothing. I go back to work and then I hear it again.
[00:15:05] And then someone's basically, it sounds almost like, help me, help me, help me. Something like that. And it freaked me out. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I didn't want to go walk in that corner because I didn't have a flashlight. I didn't have a baseball bat with me or anything. But it freaked the crap out of me.
[00:15:30] I hear this in the back while I'm reading this file about this individual. And yeah, the first time I really got freaked out. And that's all that happened that night. And I left and I kind of mentioned it to a person at the hospital area that had set me up. They just kind of laughed. They said, oh yeah, your mind will play tricks on you. You know, look where you are. Look at the job you're doing and the files you're reading. You know you can't divulge this to anybody, family or friends.
[00:16:00] But your mind is going to start playing tricks on you. So I figured, okay, we'll take it for what it is. I believe you. Another few days go by. I go back down there. It just becomes a routine. It's just a Joe job. Get used to it. Get into the grind. And then I go in there the one day. And I think my hours were the same every day. It was kind of like, I think it was eight to four.
[00:16:27] But I go in there the one time and it's just a big storm. It's dark outside. Clouds. It's windy. It's raining. Thunder. Lightning. And I'm down there and there's a brief power outage. All the lights go off. I'm sitting in the basement down there. Lights are off for a few minutes. But it was a hell of a few minutes. I'm sitting down there. Again, I don't have a flashlight. I don't have a lighter. I have nothing for light. No light source at all.
[00:16:57] But while I was sitting in the dark, I started hearing every little thing. Between the thunder strikes and I start hearing somebody or something moving towards me from that corner where I'd heard that voice. I hear something dragging. I hear that chain noise again. Heavy breathing. And that grunting thing.
[00:17:26] But it was, again, it had to be a person. So I'm sitting there and I'm kind of crawling underneath my little desk I had set up there. And I can't scream for help. And it's getting closer and closer. And I'm almost crapping my pants. And, again, I hear something get kicked. It wasn't a bottle. But something got kicked and it was spinning around. And it stopped.
[00:17:56] And whatever it was, was very close. And just like that, the lights came on. They flickered again for a bit. I look around. There's nobody there. There's nothing going on that I could see. But as soon as the light came on, it was flickering. I just booked it out of there. I ran out of there. Ran upstairs. And I went back and I tracked down my contact. And I said, I'm freaked out. I explained what had happened. And they kind of looked at me.
[00:18:25] Not like I was crazy or anything. But they just looked at me and said, yeah. Again, you know, do you want us to get somebody else to do this job? Are you okay? You know, it's fine. Again, it's very easy for your mind to play tricks on you. This is very common. This is the way the human mind works. If you were sitting down there with a group of other people or maybe even one other person, you would be reacting much differently. And you'd be calm and you'd be laughing about it.
[00:18:54] But maybe there's some truth behind that. But I just know I was freaked the hell out. Really was freaked out. But I didn't quit my job. I sucked it up. I went back. And I heard the odd noises here and there. And I got through most of these boxes. And as I made a big pile, they'd come down and someone would come, put them on a buggy, bring them to the stairs, bring them upstairs.
[00:19:22] And then they would, you know, destroy them. The paper records and the photos. And when I got close to the end of my, I think it was probably in the fifth month, was the worst of all the events during that whole string. It was, I think that basement, because I asked my contact, I said, was this basement used at any point in the history of this psychiatric hospital? Was it used for experimentation? Did they do tests or anything?
[00:19:52] Did they do shock therapy or whatever down here? And they said, that's a good question. I've heard stories that, yes, they used to do things down here. Back in the day before they really knew what they were doing, things that they frown upon now. But they did have patients down here. So, yeah, I don't have anything solid. I have nothing that I can show you. I can pull up records. But there has been talk of stuff going on down here.
[00:20:23] So that may possibly explain something. So, yeah, getting back to just before I finished with that job, to say it was a few weeks before I was completely done with them. I was sitting down there. It was late in the afternoon. I had my lunch, listening to music, got bored, shut it off. I'm just kind of sitting there.
[00:20:49] And suddenly in that corner, there were some other boxes, not of records, but some other stuff that they had there. And that entire probably five foot tall big stack of boxes suddenly just falls over and stuff scatters all over the floor. And I figured, okay, maybe one of the boxes gave way because of the mice eating it and the mold and mildew. So I go over and I kind of push it aside.
[00:21:20] And, yeah, so I'm kind of moving the stuff, kicking it, pushing it. And again, the lights flicker. And while I'm bent over in the basement alone, kind of in the shadows, I feel something shove me from behind as I'm bent over. And I kind of go down on my hands and knees. And I turn around, spun around. I figured, okay, it was somebody from the hospital.
[00:21:46] Maybe it was, I knew it wouldn't have been my contact at the hospital that had done this. But I just thought it was somebody playing a trick. Turn around, there's nobody there. I go back, I shove some more stuff. And I slowly walk back to my desk. And then after I sit down for a while, I suddenly hear that strange guttural breathing and groaning from that corner again.
[00:22:15] And I'm starting to think, I wonder if either back in the day, some of that experimentation went on over towards that corner. And whatever trauma and whatever was done to that individual or those individuals, maybe it left like an echo.
[00:22:36] It left these strong, strong feelings that are just permeating the walls in that space, in that landscape, that real estate right there. It's just stuck there. And it just rears its ugly head every now and then. And me spending so many months in there, I'm just picking up on it every now and then. But hearing things is one thing.
[00:23:05] But when I felt a heavy something push me from behind up around my shoulders and throw me right to the ground with nobody being there. How the hell do you explain that? How is that? That's a physical thing. It's not just hearing something or seeing a shadow. But this was a freakiest hell thing that happened then.
[00:23:29] But, you know, afterwards, when I finished that gig, obviously I could not discuss details with anybody. But sure, I told some friends just saying the general gist of what happened to me down there with this ghost or ghost or demon or entity, whatever you want to call them. That they were not happy. They were trying to reach out. They were trying to communicate.
[00:23:59] I don't think they want to be in that space. It, yeah, it left a mark on me. I do think about it every now and then. I have had nightmares about it as well. A very cool but very freaky experience that I will take with me to my grave.
[00:24:21] And hopefully the day, when the day comes that I pass, I'm not going to be suddenly in that dark corner together with whoever was there. And that the two of us are going to be working together to say hello in our own special way to whoever else goes down there. But I got a feeling that this old place is going to be torn down at some point because it is very old. And they'll probably slap up some new fangled building there at some point. But anyways, I'm rambling now.
[00:24:52] Thanks for listening. Take care. Thank you, Gary D. for that one. I want to say something about crisis apparitions and residual trauma because I think it applies here. It's documented in paranormal research. In spaces that have significant suffering, particularly unregulated experimental psychiatric treatments from early medicine,
[00:25:22] generate some of the most consistent and active reports of hauntings of any location type. And if you want to lose some sleep tonight, go look up what early lobotomy procedures actually involved. Through much of the 20th century, treatment, quote unquote, for patients and institutions like the one Gary describes could mean translobal lobotomies performed with something close to an ice pick, insulin shock therapy that induced comas,
[00:25:48] and unmodified electroconvulsive therapy administered without anesthesia or muscle relaxants. Things happened in that basement. And in that corner specifically. Hi, this is Sidney Ketron from Otadabon, Indiana. This story, a true ghost story, is called Something Tried to Kill Us in the Woods.
[00:26:17] Well, anyway, this was on Grandpa's farm in Seymour, Indiana. We had been living there for years. And suddenly, we heard reports from a neighbor that something was killing deer around the area. And we didn't think it was a bear. We thought it was some other worldly creature. No, my dad was an early ghost hunter. And he was a specialty on this subject. So one weekend, we stayed out late on a Saturday night.
[00:26:45] And the men in our family, an uncle, a grandfather, and my dad and his paranormal partner can come out with rifles. They were intending to get whatever it was. But anyway, we were out there exploring the woods late at night. And we had built a campfire. And soon, we heard a baby deer whimpering. And Dad went out and found it. It was a little fawn. It still had spots on it.
[00:27:13] So he charged campfire. He brought along some milk for the occasion he had an ice cooler. And he had a baby bottle with milk already in it. And so he began to feed the baby deer. And suddenly, they heard a terrific, horrible scream coming from somewhere in the woods. And Dad clicked his rifle. And he says, can you kill a monster or a ghost? And we don't know if it was after its prey, whether it wanted us or the baby deer. And can you kill a monster or a ghost?
[00:27:43] This is Cindy Ketron in Amon, Indiana. We got the hat cow in there and took the baby deer with us. But anyway, it grew up on our farm and lived with us for many, many years. And sometimes in the winter, we bring it into the house and let it warm itself by the fireplace or sleep in the basement in the wintertime. And it became more of an indoor pet. It learned to use the kitty litter box. We called it the morning dawn. We called it dawn. So, but it was a girl.
[00:28:12] So, but anyway, just to let you know, stranger things do happen. We never did find out what the thing was. We don't know whether it wanted us or the deer. So thank you for listening to Cindy Ketron on in Amon, Indiana. Thank you, Cindy from Avon, Indiana. Can you kill a monster or a ghost with a gun? I like that your dad was willing to find out.
[00:28:45] That's all we have this week, folks. Do you have a ghost story? Call 701-484-2666. That's 701-484-2666. Or go to tellmeaghoststory.com and leave your story there.
[00:29:12] Thank you to all the callers who left messages this week. I'm your host, Michelle Newman, signing off. See you next week. Let's see you next week.