Three Ghost Stories

True Stories of the Paranormal For Winter Warming

If you’re anything like me you love a scary story. Today I’m going to share three. The first story takes place when I was a six, looking under my front porch. The second involves an inter-dimensional time warp on rt. 22, just south of town. And the third happened right here on this farm.

(I thought after writing so much about real monsters like trauma, homophobia, and depression we could use a little spooky fun around here.)

Ghost stories have always been comforting to me. When I was a little girl I used to collect them from the book fair. I’d read them in my closet with my dad’s big flashlight like I was one of the members of The Midnight Society. I think those stories made me feel safe, because even if your heart-rate increases from words on the page; you’re still safer reading in the closet than people are getting on a rollercoaster or driving to work.

I think by allowing myself to get uncomfortable with the unknown from the protection of my bedroom, the world felt less scary to me. Like I was practicing for being afraid for when it counted.

Full disclosure: I’m not convinced ghosts are dead people revisiting the living. I do think that idea is romantic, even poetic. But I think if ghosts are real - they are something far beyond humanity’s current level of comprehension. I am guessing they’re more along the lines of McConaughey knocking over books in Interstellar—a flash of overlapping time or dimension, something we get fleeting glimpses of—experiences we don’t understand without a tesseract and quantum physics.

Point is, when it comes to this stuff we might as well be dogs trying to use the internet, because at our level of understanding it’s all mystery, sound, and light.

Or maybe it is your grandparents. I have no idea. None of us know what the actual “truth” is but we do have the ability to share what we saw, tell the stories we can’t shake. That’s what I’m doing today, darlin’.

And while a deep-freeze in January isn’t exactly the most cliché time for telling ghost stories, it is a time that involves stillness and darkness - when keeping close to the warm light is so important. And since I will be spending most of this week staying up stoking fires through, I thought I’d tell a few stories. Hopefully some of you will share your own in the comments. If you have a good one, email me, and we’ll do a reader story bonus podstack. (I’m calling audio versions podstacks.)

*Side note: Remember when the kids on Are You Afraid of The Dark would throw a handful of powder onto the campfire and then the flames would burst up in a flash? That powder was instant coffee creamer. Try it! It’s a fun trick at your next campout.

So, get yourself a mug of tea, grab your cuddliest throw, prepare your lap cats and tuck in because;

Submitted for the approval of the Midnight Society, I bring you the tales of:

Under The Porch

I grew up in a big old house with a wraparound porch. My parents bought it in 1976, back when young couples could buy a 4-bedroom, three-story home on an acre lot for half of what a Subaru Outback costs now. We were a normal middle-class family, on a normal small-town block. And since we had this big backyard, I spent a lot of time playing outside.

When I was 6 or 7 years old, I remember following our family’s black cat, Crash, around the yard. It was a sunny day and I loved trailing Crash, seeing what cats did for fun. Whenever I got the chance I would try and scoop her up for a cuddle, but cats being cats, she wanted nothing to do with my grubby little hands. So instead of coming when I called, the cat raced to a hole that lead under the house’s wraparound porch.

Now, before I explain what I saw, I need to explain the house a little. My parent’s home was built into the side of a hill. The basement was dug into that hill, meaning the front door was at street level, but as you walked to the back of the house that ground-level front porch gradually became a back deck. You had to take a flight of stairs from the back door to descend into the yard. Because, hill.

That made the space under the wraparound porch a perfect storage area. The kind of place my dad would park lawnmowers out of the rain and coal was delivered for heating the house before my parents updated to the town’s gas line. (Yes, I’m so Pennsylvanian my childhood home was heated by Anthracite.) Anyway, in that storage area there was just enough room for a short adult to stand up. And since the porch wrapped around the house to the front, you could walk under it from the lawnmower parking lot all the way around until you were directly under the front door.

However as you made your way to the front of house, the crawl space grew smaller. The “ceiling” become lower, allowing only 4-5 feet of clearance. Still easy for a little kid to stand up and explore, but not so much adults. This made it seem secret to me and a little spooky. And like most little girls, I very much liked spooky secrets.

The area where my cat escaped into lead to this most claustrophobic section under the porch, near the front door. It was the farthest point you could go before you were staring at an earthen wall where the original digging stopped. Only the cat holes let in stray beams of light onto the dirt floor.

So picture me, back at this big house with a big yard in the 1980s. I’m a little girl chasing my cat and I just watched her disappear into our diet catacombs. Curious, I got down on the ground and stuck my head into that little hole, not sure what I expected to see, probably just Crash using the dirt crawlspace as a little box.

But…

Under the porch were three adult men in blue jumpsuits. The kind you see coal miners or mechanics wear back in the day. They all had digging equipment, like picks and shovels and it seemed like they were trying to dig out the crawl space under the porch to be larger.

They had dirty faces, wore hats, and had brown dark hair, and when they saw a little girl poke her head to their workspace, the man closest to me looked up at me and smiled. He was probably in his late twenties or early thirties. Thin, shaggy hair under a cap. In my memory they also had on those old miner lights on their heads, (but they weren’t turned on).

The smiling man looked me in the eye and said “Hello there little girl” and I remember the flash of one gold tooth, it caught the light streaming in from behind me. I will never forget it. It sparkled, and it distracted me from the oddness of the moment.