Wednesday, October 31, 2007

David Haunts the Children

The house in Maryville, Mo. was built in the mid-70s. Nobody has died there, but as those who have lived in the house can attest, ghosts don’t come and go with houses. Sometimes they’re affixed to the property.

“My parents’ house is haunted and things started happening from the first day they moved in,” Susan McFee, Kansas City, said.

When Gary Sherlock and his wife Judy moved into the home with their three daughters, Susan, Lori, and Michelle, in 1975 they soon realized they were not alone.

“All my life I’ve heard voices whispering in the night,” Susan said. “We’ve all heard that. You’ll be the only one home and you’ll hear the drawers squeaking away. Cabinets slamming. Doors slamming. The cleaning lady quit because she said something attacked her.”

That something was a “little furry animal running around” Gary said many people – except him – have seen. The thing ran into Susan when she was just a year old.

“My mom said something knocked me over,” she said. “It was a brown furry thing. The cleaning lady said something cornered her and growled at her and it was gone. My parents have five cats. But it wasn’t it.”

Then there’s the little boy.

“All the grandkids (when they were ages) one to two-and-a-half … they’ve all seen it,” Susan said. “And they all say the same thing. ‘Little boy. Nightmare. He tried to take my toy.’ And it was in the same bedroom.”

Lori Durbin, Maryville, has more than a cursory interest with the little boy – her son once interacted with it.

“My son, Brad, he was only two so he doesn’t remember it,” Lori said. “He had a conversation with it and called it David. He was in the other room taking a nap. You’d hear him ask a question and answer a question.”

Lori and her husband only heard part of Brad’s conversation, but Brad was interacting with someone.

“I said, ‘who are you talking to?’” Lori said. “And he said, ‘David.’ We asked where David went and he pointed toward a wall.”

Brad wasn’t afraid of David, but most of the Sherlock’s 11 grandchildren were because they didn’t see a little boy, they saw a monster.

“The little ones, they’re two or three, have become petrified and have said, ‘it’s right there can’t you see that monster?’” Gary said.

The entity may have appeared as a monster to Brad, too, but that didn’t bother him.

“Shortly after that he saw something on TV or in a book, and he said, ‘that’s David,’” Susan said. “The picture was something scary.”

Even when the visage is of the boy and not a monster, it’s not friendly.

“They say he takes toys from them,” Lori said. “The youngest two said he growled at them all the time.”

The sightings have only been experienced by children under three, except one night when Lori was pregnant in her early 20s.

“I’ve seen the little boy, yeah,” Lori said. “I was getting up one night and he was standing in front of this picture and he was dressed in knickers; brown, and a white shirt and he was blonde.”

The visitation didn’t last long, less than a minute, but it was long enough for Lori to remember vividly.

“It scared me,” Lori said.

Although the entity – be it little boy or “monster” – has never harmed any member of the Sherlock family, it has been bothersome to them and dangerous to others.

Most of the visitations didn’t start until Susan, Lori and Michelle were grown and out of the house, but strange things have always happened there – especially in the basement.

“A lot of the encounters, at least early on, were in the basement,” Lori said. “We’ve all heard things like drawers opening. My mom, her silverware will disappear. She’ll buy a new set and within a month it’ll be gone.”

Gary, although he hasn’t experienced anything strange in the house, has noticed the basement “seems a lot colder sometimes than other times.”

Susan became concerned enough about the thing, or things, haunting her parents’ home that she contacted a medium.

“(The medium) said the little boy was lost before he died,” Susan said. “Maybe he was a missing child or he was murdered, she didn’t know.”

But that’s all Susan and her family want … to know.

“I just want to know what happened to the boy,” Susan said. “Everybody gets freaked out, but if we know what happened to him we wouldn’t be afraid anymore.”

Copyright 2007 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt c/o The Examiner, 410 S. Liberty, Independence, Mo. 64050, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Include your name, address and telephone number. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason's book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri's Most Spirited Spots,” is here. Order online at: tsup.truman.edu, www.amazon.com, or visit Jason’s Web site at www.jasonoffutt.com.

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Demons in the Dark

Something dark haunts a slow, quiet street in the small town of Folkston, Ga. Most people don’t realize this evil is in their midst, but gunsmith Eric London does. He’s seen the creatures of this street … and he’s felt their touch.

“They are demons,” Eric said. “They are demons who have not found a human host.”

Eric has seen them out of the corner of his eye; black, human figures or, “shadow people,” lurking in his home.

“My former wife, a year before the divorce, was possessed by one of these,” he said. “I was awakened by her jabbing me in the back while she was screaming at me, ‘There is someone in the room.’ I looked up and one of these solid black things was making its way quickly around the foot of our bed in the dim of the night.”

As Eric jumped out of bed he yelled for his wife to turn on the light.

“I thought, at the time, it was a human breaking in. I was going for my handgun,” Eric said. “She turns the light on by her bed, and has a real smart assed tone in her voice I had never heard before, ‘whatca doin’?’”

With the light on, the figure Eric and his wife had seen was gone.

“I looked everywhere,” he said. “I am really creeped out. She even says, ‘He is not in there,’ referring to a closet I was looking in.”

Then Eric’s life changed; the wife he knew no longer existed. Eric is convinced she was possessed by a demon that night.

“We ended up divorced due to her buying an insurance policy, trying to kill me, telling me she never loved me, etc.,” Eric said. “Do you think these ‘shadow people’ are harmless?”

Eric’s ex-wife stopped communicating with him until she came to his house unannounced about a year later.

“‘They’ entered unwelcome in to my home and told me she was coming back,” Eric said, ‘they’ referring to his ex-wife and what Eric calls her demon. “When I said no, ‘it’ came part the way out of her face in a ‘ghost like’ manner. It made one hell of an ugly face and went back into her and she gathered up her purse and left.”

“They” have not been back to Eric’s house, but he has received a few telephone calls from his ex-wife and knows the demon is with her.

“It still has her,” he said. ”I suffer grave guilt that I could not stop it. But I am told by many I could not have anyway, but feelings are hard to deal with.”

Even though his ex-wife is now gone from his life, he’s still seen these demonic “shadow people.”

“I have seen them inside my home,” he said, once while working at his computer. “I slowly moved my eyes to the side, and yes, it was a human shaped solid black figure. It was totally startled to figure out I noticed. It faded away quickly.”

But more horrifying, he’s felt the ones he hasn’t seen.

“I have actually been grabbed on three occasions so far, all within a month,” Eric said. “I feel them move up from behind me, and on the first try I had one grab my bare calves.”

He felt icy fingers and a thumb grip each calf, spreading cold through his legs.

“This angered me that they would rudely touch me,” he said. “I told it to ‘go away’ and it did.”

Other occurrences ended the same; Eric told the entity to leave, and it did. He doesn’t know why these entities have targeted him, but he knows how to make them leave.

“Tell them to leave you alone,” Eric said. “They are not aliens, not time travelers, not pleasant Disney characters. They are (expletive) demons.”

Copyright 2007 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt c/o The Examiner, 410 S. Liberty, Independence, Mo. 64050, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Include your name, address and telephone number. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” is here. Order online at: tsup.truman.edu, www.amazon.com, or visit Jason’s Web site at www.jasonoffutt.com.

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

The Thing in Her Dorm Room

Katie moved into her fourth floor dorm room the Friday before 2007 classes started at Northwest Missouri State University. This was her sophomore year; she had a job, a spot on the yearbook staff and best yet, no roommate.

She went home to Nebraska for the weekend and came back to find she didn’t have the room to herself after all.

“When I first moved in, it was really damp in the room and it had a different smell to it,” she said. “An old smell.”

A friend, Harrison, noticed the smell, too.

“He said, ‘it’s a fragrance,’” Katie said. “It wasn’t my perfume. I didn’t know if it was something or nothing.”

For the first week in her new room, it was nothing. The second week, she realized something else was there with her.

“I felt a presence in my room,” Katie said. “It’s almost oppressive. The feeling I get I just feel tense all the time. When I feel the presence I start looking over my shoulder a lot. It’s hard to go to sleep.”

Katie see’s things in the corner of her eyes – things that move and vanish when she turns to face them. She sleeps with covers up to her neck.

“I get these images in my mind,” she said. “It’s a guy. It’s a shadow peering over the side of my bed. It’s a loft bed so you’d have to be as tall as the room. It was just dark, but it was definitely a form. I could see eyes, nose, mouth. I just couldn’t see the details.

“I know I would freak out if I saw something, but seeing something in my head is just as bad.”

Katie hears creaking during the night that she can’t explain away as neighbors or sagging floors.

“You know how a laptop sounds when you open and close it?” she asked. “It sounds like someone is messing with my computer but they’re not. Then I just hear random noise. It is in my room. Not next door, not upstairs, not in the hallway.”

Katie flips on her lamp when she hears these noises, but has never seen anything out of the ordinary. And she only feels the presence when she’s alone … but not just when she’s in her room.

A small common room sits between Katie’s room and her floor’s women’s bathroom. She hates going through the common room at night, but sometimes nature forces her.

“The light is usually turned off (in the common room) when I walk through that room to go to the bathroom,” she said. “I always feel like someone’s following me when I leave my room. I still feel the presence in the women’s bathroom. It’s still a very male presence. I don’t know how I know that. I just do.”

Harrison’s girlfriend lives on the fifth floor of the dorm, and when he uses the men’s bathroom – directly above the women’s bathroom Katie uses – he’s never alone.

“The bathroom’s empty except for me and it sounds like someone unzips their pants, but nothing happens, and you hear it zip back up,” he said. “I’ve looked (into the stalls) and no one is in there. I’ve also heard jingling keys in the men’s bathroom. I’m the only one in there.”

Ghosts are usually associated with a violent, or unexpected death. The most recent death on campus was in December 2005 when a male student died of diabetic shock. He died in Katie’s dormitory two floors beneath her room.

Michael, a broadcasting major, lives next to Katie and said he hasn’t heard or experienced anything paranormal. And Evan, a journalism major, lives in the room where the 21-year-old student died. He said his room is quiet, too.

“I picked it because, hey, 214, the Valentine suite,” Evan said. “Then I found someone died there.”

Has he experienced anything in his room?

“No, but if I do I’ll have you on speed dial,” Evan said.

This doesn’t make Katie feel any better. She just wants to be left alone.

“All I know is it’s a guy and I don’t know what he wants,” she said. “I don’t want to piss it off. I don’t want to talk with it. I just want to coexist. I don’t like to talk about what’s going on when I’m in my room. I hate the dark.”

Copyright 2007 by Jason Offutt
Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt c/o The Examiner, 410 S. Liberty, Independence, Mo. 64050, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Include your name, address and telephone number. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason's book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri's Most Spirited Spots,” is here. Order online at: tsup.truman.edu, www.amazon.com, or visit Jason’s Web site at www.jasonoffutt.com.

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

What's it like to live without fear?

Christie Geier-Pratt grew up in Kansas City, spending her youth in one of the grand old houses in the northeast section of the city. The home’s large second floor, like many in the neighborhood, had been turned into apartments for soldiers returning from World War II.

Christie’s family moved into the first floor in 1964, just before she began third grade, and left during her sophomore year in high school. During that time, Christie’s parents returned the upstairs to family living … and awakened something that would haunt Christie for years.

“It started day one,” Christie said.

Her father and brothers were running errands and Christie was home with her mother and older sister.

“My sister was upstairs and my mom was in the dining room,” Christie said. “She told us to stop crying. We weren’t crying.”

Christie’s mother called the girls into the dining room where the sound of a weeping girl spread through the room.

“When you stepped into the dining room you could hear this sobbing and moaning,” Christie said. “It came in waves. It would get louder then it would fade away. If you weren’t paying attention to it you would miss it.”

The crying lasted about 40 minutes, but they only heard it in the dining room. The crying didn’t make Christie uneasy; the feeling of being watched did.

“Never before or never since I lived in that house did I have that feeling of being watched,” she said. “It was acute and was frightening at times. It was in my room on the second floor, and in a few other parts of the house – it was overwhelming.”

So much so, she wouldn’t go upstairs at night without her sister and she never changed clothes in her room.

“There was a huge stairway that went upstairs and I would wait on my sister who was five years older than me,” she said. “I would never go in my room and go to sleep by myself.”

Christie’s friends didn’t want to stay the night because they also felt they were being watched.

“It was just creepy to be in that room,” she said.

Things would bang in the attic, doors and the downstairs cabinets would slam in the night and Christie felt unseen hands holding hers.

“I remember thinking, I wonder what it would be like living in a house that wasn’t haunted?’” she said.

One night when Christie’s older sister, then a high school senior, came home from a date, they both experienced something that made them tell their mother they wanted to move.

“My sister was dating then and would come back and smoke (on the deck),” Christie said. “(One night) she said, ‘stay up and I’ll bring you something.’”

Christie tried to stay awake, but finally fell asleep on her bed.

“All of a sudden my bed started going back and forth,” she said. “It was like someone was pulling my mattress back and forth. I had to hold on.”

Christie’s sister had come home after curfew and, afraid the noise from Christie’s room would wake up their parents, ran there.

“I heard my sister running through the room and she jumped on the bed and said, ‘what are you doing? You’ll wake up mom and dad.’”

She thought Christie had been jumping on the bed … she wasn’t. But it wasn’t what Christie’s sister heard that upset her, it’s what she saw.


“She said, ‘you weren’t supposed to go on the deck without me and I saw you there,’” Christie said. “It wasn’t me. (From outside) my sister saw someone get up from my bed and walk out the door.”

They ran from the room, but something followed them.

“All of a sudden I felt tingling from my shoulders to my knees,” Christie remembered. “I said, ‘do you feel that?’ She said, ‘the tingling?’ Then she said, ‘I’m not living here anymore.’ Now I had validation.”

Christie’s family moved from the house in 1972.

“Lots of people have different experiences growing up and they are just what they are,” Christie said. “But when we moved I had peace, peace to live.”

Copyright 2007 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt c/o The Examiner, 410 S. Liberty, Independence, Mo. 64050, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Include your name, address and telephone number. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason's book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri's Most Spirited Spots,” is here. Order online at: tsup.truman.edu, www.amazon.com, or visit Jason’s Web site at www.jasonoffutt.com.

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

The Hat Man

The tumor was large, about the size of a chicken egg. In the spring of 1971, a surgeon removed the cancerous mass from 11-year-old Rob Langevoort’s brain and Rob spent a month undergoing radiation therapy.

So, when Rob started seeing things that didn’t belong in his home, he didn’t know if they were real or imaginary. His first encounter was summer 1971.

Rob slept in on a Saturday. His mom was shopping and his dad was out repairing rental property so he had their home in Framingham, Mass., to himself.

“I proceeded down the hall to the kitchen to make myself something to eat for breakfast (and) I fell flat on my face,” Rob said. “It felt as though I was pushed.”

Rob tried to push himself up but couldn’t move – he felt someone standing on his back.

“All of a sudden things gave way and my arms had straightened out and I was staring down the hall to the living room just in time to witness what appeared to be a silhouette of a man in a trench coat wearing a fedora move from the living room to the dining room,” he said.

Rob would later call this entity the Hat Man, but despite the attack, Rob followed it.

“What I did next I find hard to believe,” he said. “I ran into the adjoining kitchen, grabbed the biggest knife I could find and ran into the dinning room.”

The Hat Man wasn’t there. The sliding glass door that led from the dining room to the back porch was still closed, the drapes covering it hung still. He ran through the house and found himself alone, clenching a knife. All the doors and windows were locked.

“I searched that house good,” he said. “Nothing. I went back to the dining room and checked the sliding glass door again. It was locked.”

But he hadn’t heard the front door open, so the back porch was the only way out. He unlocked the sliding glass door and stepped onto the porch, thinking the Hat Man had somehow locked the sliding door behind him and leapt off the porch. But 10 feet below the porch railing was rock – and that was the only way down.

“My father had the builders purposely not install a stairway up to the porch to prevent any intrusions,” Rob said. The Hat Man was gone, and he didn’t jump off the porch.

Was the Hat Man real, or just a side effect of the brain tumor? Rob wondered.

“What exactly did I see or did I see it?” he asked. “And how am I gonna tell Mom?”

Rob’s mother listened to his story, and filed it away as a product of radiation or an overactive 11-year-old mind … until she saw the handiwork of the Hat Man herself.

Seven days later, “my mother prepared breakfast in the dining room, opened the drapes and got the shock of her life,” Rob said. “The sliding glass door was shattered.”

The entire six-foot glass door had been broken into small pieces. Not by a projectile from outside the house, but from something inside – only the interior of the double-pane glass was shattered. Rob was sure the Hat Man had been hiding inside the door.

But that was just the beginning. Although Rob hasn’t seen the Hat Man since he was 11, he’s seen similar shadow beings all his life, although nothing has pushed him or broken glass in decades.

Now an Internet programmer with two children, shadow people remain a part of his life.

“I still see them after 30-plus years and more often now since I have moved in with my elderly father,” Rob said. “It’s not disturbing to me other than they won’t stay still long enough for me to take a good look at them. They appear as semi-transparent charcoal gray foggy silhouettes that I catch in the corner of my eye.”

When Rob tries to look at them straight on, they zip away.

“I see them mostly in doorways and hallways,” Rob said. “I saw one once dash around a sofa. This tells me they can see objects – probably including me. I don’t get excited, (they’re) pretty commonplace with me after all these years.

“How often do I see these shadow people?” Rob said. “All the time.”

Copyright 2007 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt c/o The Examiner, 410 S. Liberty, Independence, Mo. 64050, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Include your name, address and telephone number. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s book of ghost stories, “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” is here. Order online at: tsup.truman.edu, www.amazon.com, or visit Jason’s Web site at www.jasonoffutt.com.