Historical Hauntings
These ones come with dates and names and newspaper clippings. Real people who saw things they could not explain.
12 stories
Historical Hauntings
The Bell Witch of Adams
A true story about a haunted farm in Tennessee where the ghost was, and I cannot stress this enough, an absolute psychopath.
Historical Hauntings
The Yurei of Yotsuya
A samurai poisons his wife's face cream. Her face falls apart. She dies. Then she comes back, and her ruined face is the last thing he sees everywhere he looks for the rest of his short, terrible life. For two hundred years, actors have visited her shrine before performing this story. The ones who skip it tend to lose fingers.
Historical Hauntings
The Greenbrier Ghost
A young woman dies, her ghost describes the murder to her mother in exhaustive detail, and a West Virginia court decides this is admissible evidence, which is the most West Virginia thing that has ever happened.
Historical Hauntings
The Drummer of Tedworth
A magistrate confiscates a vagrant's drum and learns, over several extremely loud months, that some things are better left uncollected.
Historical Hauntings
The Cock Lane Ghost
All of London came to a house in Smithfield to hear a ghost called Scratching Fanny, and nobody thought to check if the eleven-year-old girl in the bed was holding something.
Historical Hauntings
The Enfield Poltergeist
For fourteen months, a council house in Enfield was haunted by furniture, marbles, and a dead man named Bill who had strong opinions about Janet's sleeping arrangements.
Historical Hauntings
The Hammersmith Ghost
In 1804, a ghost terrorized Hammersmith, a man shot the ghost, the ghost turned out to be a plasterer in his work clothes, and then everyone had to figure out who was responsible for what.
Historical Hauntings
The Ghost of Abraham Lincoln
Dozens of credible witnesses have seen Abraham Lincoln's ghost in the White House, which raises the question of what exactly he is waiting for.
Historical Hauntings
The Phantom Barber of Pascagoula
In 1942, someone broke into houses in Pascagoula and cut people's hair while they slept, which is a crime that sounds made up until you realize it happened at least a dozen times and nobody ever fully explained it.
Historical Hauntings
Spring Heeled Jack
For sixty years, something in a black cape leaped over walls, breathed fire at women, and was never caught, which is the kind of sentence that should have led to more official concern than it did.
Historical Hauntings
The Chase Vault
A family vault in Barbados kept rearranging its own coffins, and the governor of the island personally showed up to find out why, which tells you something about how the governor's week was going.
Historical Hauntings
The Eleanore Zugun Poltergeist
A twelve-year-old Romanian girl was followed by an invisible entity that bit her, scratched her, and pelted her with objects, and a startling number of serious adults traveled to multiple countries to watch this happen.