1/ Carole : 2/ Cinema Theatre : 3/ Cresent Hotel : 4/ Storm House : 5/ Haunted House:
 

This true story is by a Carole lee Gentle 
from dallas,texas 

Here is one of the strange happenings I had at one house in dallas, texas about 20 years ago. 
My family decided to rent a house that was around 50 years old or older because it had the room we needed as a family.  Right after we moved in we decided to scrub the windows.  There was one pane that was splattered red.  No matter what we did we could never get that red stain  out of the window.  The landlord stopped by to see if we were settled in all right and at that time we asked if anything had ever happened in that house.  Or anything supernatural.  He wouldn't give us a straight answer so we just let it go. 
My husband worked until late at night so my hours were sort of irregular to say the least.  I laid down one night to try and sleep but I kept having this strange feeling that I shouldn't go to sleep.  Something was going to happen.  About 20 minutes later I smelled smoke.  I ran into the room where we had several fish aquariums and found a small fire starting from one of the electric pumps hooked to one of the tanks.  I was able to dowse it out and couldn't get over being shaky.  I kept thinking what could have happened had I gone to sleep.  The house was too old and a fire would have spread immediately.  And my kids and I could have been killed. 
One night I was in the den reading and had the den air conditioner on as it was a very hot night.  All at once I heard a woman scream and she said "don't jump!".  The first reaction I had was to check the boys room  to see if they were okay.  Then I ran outside where the air conditioner was in the den window.  Nothing! I ran to the front of the house to see if something was happening at an apartment house a few blocks from me. 
Nothing was happening there.  I finally went back inside and tried to just forget it.  About three months into our lease with the house I had placed some dixey cups and holders in the bathrooms.  In my bathroom it seemed that the cups kept flying out of the bathroom and into the  hallway.  That continued for the whole time we stayed there.  It was about six months after we moved in that something strange kept happening in the kitchen.  I had an electric stove.  Sometimes when I was using it would go on 'half power' and that's the only way I can describe it.  The lights in the kitchen would dim but it never blew a fuse.  We had it checked out by an electrician and there was absolutely no way this could  occur.  Nothing was wrong with it.  Then I noticed that it would mostly occur at night when I did a lot of baking.  I felt that someone was upset because I was doing it at night and 'it' didn't approve of it. 
But I did what I had to do and the electric power did what and when it wanted to do.  It wasn't a constant thing.  We had the range checked and it was almost new. 
One night I was very tired and laid down on the bed to sleep for a while as my husband wasn't due home for a few more hours.  I laid there thinking about the house and its little quirks.  It was real quiet and the kids had gone to bed several hours earlier.  As I laid there ."something or someone sat down on the side of my bed".  I froze.  I was terrified for the first time since we had moved in there.  But I knew I had to turn on the light on the bedstand.  But I was too scared to move at all at first.  Finally I slowly reached over and turned on the light. I was alone.  The covers on the side of the bed where it sat down were cold.  I got up and went from one end of the house to the other to satisfy myself that no one was in the house other than myself and my kids.  Whom I did check on and they were both asleep.  We would see moving shadows where no shadows at all should be, let alone moving.  It wasn't too long after that that my husband and I decided to get out of the house.  If the spirit had not sat down on the bed with me I think we  would have stayed on indefinitely.  But it was becoming too personal at the level things were at that time.  My husband and I were discussing the whole thing one night in the den when it sounded like a small mountain had been dropped into our living room.  We went in to see what had happened.  But nothing was out of place. 
Well, that's the rest of that story although over my lifetime I have been blessed or damned in other happenings.  But once we left that house the spirit didn't leave with us.  I wonder so often if there are any  people living in the house and if they are having any strange happening. 
Sincerely, 
Carole lee Gentle 

In early 1992, I was dating a man who happened to be the manager for the local movie theatre chain. The building his office was located in was one of the old "Orpheum Circuit" theathres...old, redone so that the second floor balcony was completely closed off.
Everyone always said it was haunted...that they could hear footsteps late at night when in the office and building alone, and that at times, they could hear crying. This piqued my interest, to say the least. So, on the night before it was slated to be closed down, two friends and Scott and I decided to do some exploring. We had a camera, two flashlights with new batteries, and a notebook to record where and when we all 'felt creepy' or had any signs of paranormal activity.
Most of the night, we all had the same feelings...one particular stairwell was colder then the rest of the theatre, and downstairs, where the old bathrooms used to be. We took a significant amount of pictures, but saw nothing. Almost as an afterthought, we decided to go 'behind the stage' to explore. There was a really odd feeling of peace, like we were all feeling really calm back there. There was parphenalia from as far back as the thirties--political signs, old appliances...an eclectic mix of -stuff-. One of the last things we found was a hand-held sickle, like the kind to cut weeds or detassel corn. I remember wanting to take a picture of it, but we'd been long out of film by then...and Scott was going to take it with us...but decided last-minute not to. We all filed out of the building, sad mostly that it was closing, but also that we didn't find anything.
Three days later, we developed the film, in black and white, since contrasts would be more evident. In two of the pictures, the sickle appeared. Both times in Scott's hand. Once in that very same stairwell, over his best friend's head, and once in the hallway with the grand chandelier, another place we'd all felt 'generally creepy'. We checked and rechecked the film; there was no tampering. We had them re-printed...the sickle still showed.
Incidentally, they've recently decided to rennovate the building and reopen it as some sort of convention center...there have been no reports of paranormal or odd activity among the workmen so far, though one builder we spoke to said that he refused to go back, as his equipment simply had too many malfunctions while working there. Supposedly as a result of the old wiring in the building.
For many a year, the abandoned School for the Blind in the small town of Gary, SD, has been surrounded by strange tales and sightings. I had started hearing things about it when I was in elementary school, but I couldn't investigate since I lived in the neighboring town of Clear Lake that was farther than I could ride on my dirt bike.

When I finally did get to wander into the buildings it was oddly enough with my dad during broad daylight. The school lies on the very edge of town next to Gary Gulch-another story altogether. Anyway, it consists of three seperate buildings laid out within about a two-block area; a dormitory, classroom, and an administration building. The school was set up far beyond my time--somewhere in the early 1920's--I'm not for sure. The hallways in the dormitory and the classroom buildings are only about four feet wide, to easily guide It's one-time students to and from class.

Wandering around the Blind School during the daytime, with your father at your side is one thing, but the next time I ventured into the Blind School I was with some of my friends at about 3AM. Armed to the teeth with our trusty flashlights, we wandered down the narrow hallways of the dormitory. Opening the door to one of the rooms, we saw that the entire room was decored in red--walls, carpet and ceiling. in one corner of the room sat an old rocking chair---rocking apparently of it's own volition. We would have dismissed this to the usual excuse of 'it's just the wind', but the window panes were intact and securely shut. Upon discovering this we made a hasty withdrawl out of the school. On our way back to the car, I took a cursory glance back at the buildings and saw what appeared to be a pair of bright orange eyes staring right at me. I froze. My friend turned and noticed I wasn't behind him. He came back and grabbed me by the arm, scaring the bejeezus out of me. When I turned back the eyes were gone. We jumped in the car and left.

I first saw the old house in the last part of 1937. The depression was still rampant in the land and so many were out of work, but if you could get out of town and back to the land, there were always nuts, fruit, and berries to work in and put up for the winter at a minimal cost. There was always empty houses or woodcutters shacks, empty because people had left to go elsewhere, or some farmer had bought or leased land, and didn’t need the house that went with it. Most were not in to bad a shape, usually a stove had been left along with a rough hewn table, some benches, and orange crates for cupboards, nailed to the walls, one made out pretty well.

No one seemed to be on window breaking binges, so the windows were usually intact. With flour sack curtains, a good floor scrubbing, fire in the stove, and a pot of beans cooking, they were a haven to crawl into, and it felt like "home". Most everyone took care of the property and left it as neat, or more so than when they moved in. Sure beat a hole-in-the-wall apartment, or a tar paper, or corrugated shack near the dumps. This district, I believe, was called the Iowa Hill District, strictly a German Lutheran Community. We sure needed a place to stay, we had a baby girl and my husband could cut wood if we could find a place to stay. We moved into the old Storm place, after getting permission from Alex Eischen, who owned another farm about a mile and a half away and farmed this place. We asked about the amount of rent he wanted, but to our amazement he could hardly keep a grin off his face or the twinkle from his eyes, like he had some secret, and he said he didn’t want any rent, as we wouldn’t be there very long anyway. He said sure we could live there, if we could stand it. Up the road the other way lived a bachelor, a thickset German, who only laughed when we told him we were moving in, and he wanted to know how long we were staying!!! We couldn’t figure out what the joke was, but shrugged it all off and moved in. Everyone we saw would say incredulously, "You’re moving into the old Storm House?", and look at us as if we were either to young, or to foolish to catch on. We met many with just open stares, embarrassed grins, or just a shake of the head. Evidently the house was well known!!
There was my husband and I, our little girl and a cousin, or brother who stayed with us, often by turns, who would come to help cut wood awhile. They used one of the old dragsaws, you now see in museums, and were paid $2.50 a cord, cut, delivered and stacked. This was divided two and sometimes three ways, but you could keep a few chickens, and the neighbors gave us milk for milking his cow when he had to be gone. The place looked like a castle as we sure needed a place to stay with a baby and down to our last "nickel", you might say. My husband’s cousin had an old car put together sometimes with baling wire, so we had transportation. Our water came from an old pump by the side of the house, which we had to carry in for drinking, washing, scrubbing floors, cooking, canning, and baths. And of course had to be heated on the cook stove. The well was a deep one and echoed many sounds, like footsteps walking, that never appeared. We dismissed many sounds as just being the well what it was. We did begin to hear no one who ever lived there stayed very long. A cousin of my husband and her family stayed a short time before moving to the North Plains area. Their names were John and Leta Epler. They never would talk about the place, but did say no one member of the family stayed alone, and one time Leta was bitten by a rat as she laid in the bed with a small baby. They used the bedroom off the front room. While we were there, we hardly ever used the front door, or even the front part of the house, as the back door seemed more convenient to the kitchen, woodshed and all. We begin to hear stories, mostly from our bachelor German neighbor, that the Strums had been bootleggers, a man was killed on the stairway leading upstairs, and that there were trap doors in some of the rooms. The bloodstains were still visible on the steps, four or five steps up and also where the blood spilled on the floor. We did find three trap doors that led to nice dug-out spaces below the floors. We kept being told after we moved, no one would live there ever, but we were young and brave, and who believed in ghosts anyway???
And who worries when you’re young. We moved in with little or no furniture, using what we could find, and besides we decided after being around, the other part of the house wasn’t needed, and it wasn’t a very "friendly" part anyway. For awhile everything went along all right, being early summer, we were out of doors a lot, but as it got on towards fall, we begin to notice odd noises. The first seemed to be these resounding footsteps that could be heard on the northside of the house where the pump sat. I would run out to meet whoever was there, glad for any company as the farms were a long way apart in those days, and no one would be there. Since the farms were two to three miles apart, we couldn’t see how the footsteps could echo so. No one seemed to be walking much anyway. The next incident was the sound of someone chopping wood in the woodshed, usually in the afternoons. It would be the sound of measured chopping and I would dash out, thinking my husband had come home early. If the dragsaw was broken down, often his cousin would go to town for parts and my husband would come home and cut wood for the wood range and heater stove in the dining room. When I’d get to the woodshed, the chopping would stop, and start up again when I got back to the house. So I’d think he’d just stepped out side for a minute, and go running out again when the chopping started up again. This would go on and on until it seemed I would wear my legs out. This would go on for days, lasting an hour or so every afternoon, and then maybe go weeks before it would start up again, always in the afternoons only. This went on as long as we lived there. We never did figure out an explanation for this.

There were the sound of men’s footsteps that went to the stairs where the bloodspots were, stopped, and walked on into the living room, we used as our front room. This would go on for some time, and then quite awhile would pass before he would be back again. He seemed to end his walk at the trap door in the room. That trap door was very "active" all the time we lived there. I often wondered if someone was buried there. Every afternoon, without fail, about three o’clock in the afternoon, no matter what you were doing, your head would automatically jerk towards the corner of that trap door. It was a forced reaction and you couldn’t keep from doing it. It became so routine, we just accepted it. We never told anyone about this, as we like to see if it affected everyone the same way. It would and they would get a funny look on their face and say they had to be going. No one ever didn’t jerk and stare at the trap door. The trap door was cut in such a way, that if you didn’t know about it, you didn’t see it, and we didn’t bother to tell anyone about it. We were having a good time with it and thought it was fun. After we moved a few people asked us about it and being young and full of mischief, sometimes we told them, "No, we didn’t notice anything".

About once a month when there was a full moon shinning over the fields and trees, different footsteps walked from the back door through the kitchen, living room and on into the south bedroom, where they seemed to stand and look out the window. These were the steps of a young girl who seemed to be barefoot. Like the sound of bare feet sticking to the floor and then moving on across the room. Was she waiting for a lover who never returned or was killed? The men used to follow the steps, one by one and they didn’t stop until they got to the window. She’s the only one we ever saw, like apparition, barefoot and dressed in a long black cape. we saw her twice. One night one of my husband’s cousins was coming to spend the night. Ruby was to stop at a sisters place down below the hill from us, have supper and visit and then come up to spend the night. It got later and later and she hadn’t arrived so we went to bed, having told her to just come in and go to bed when she got back. Sometime after midnight, the back door opened softly, thinking it was Ruby, I didn’t get up. The bedroom was long with a cot at the far end. As she seemed to stop, or pause at the doorway, I whispered, "Come in, Ruby, and crawl in!"

There wasn’t any electricity and the moonlight was shining in the window so I didn’t light the lamp. She stood in the doorway in her long black coat or cape, so I whispered again louder, two or three times. Still there was no movement and I was getting chills up my back. I woke my husband saying, "There’s someone standing there and they won’t answer." He saw "her" standing there and swung at her with his fist, she disappeared. Ruby never did come, she had played cards and talked until so late, she just made a bed on the floor and slept there. We never told the rest about the barefoot girl. Many footsteps walked to the one trap door, but the other main one never seemed to have any disturbances. We dried walnuts upstairs in the unfinished part and the rats did roll walnuts across the floor to the edge and they rolled down between the wall. We know this accounted for some noises we heard, at least the ones upstairs. Some evenings when we lit the kerosene lamp, a strange wind would come in the house and blow the lamp out. We’d go outside to see if it were windy and the air would be strangely still. Go back in light the lamp, and the wind would blow it out time and time again. This would happen for up to an hour at a time, and then back to normal.

My little girl who was a little over two by this time would be playing with her toys or dolls and would stop her play and jerk around and look intently at "something". I’d watch her so she didn’t know it and she would just look for awhile and then go back to playing. At the time we’d laugh and say "Oscar’s" back, with absolutely no fear. We liked it there with our ghosts. Now I wouldn’t stay in that place. One afternoon Mr Eischen said he’d be up to pick up some of the old prune dryers in the prune drying shed on the place. We told him we’d help load them. We were late getting back from milking and it was one of the evenings when the "wind" kept blowing out the lamps. Hearing pounding in the shed, my brother-in-law said he’d go help Mr. Eischen with the dryers, as it was getting pretty dark. When he got there, there wasn’t anyone there. When he got back to the house, you could hear the trays being lifted, pounding and footsteps. Each time they went down, the noise stopped and no one there. Come back to the house and it all started again. This and the lamps blowing out went on for about an hour. All at once, the wind and noises were gone and everything was normal. The next day we asked Mr. Eischen if he’d come to get the dryer trays and he said no, he had found enough at his place and didn’t need them. Again we didn’t tell anyone of this. It was one time I was uneasy there. One time we had party with food and drinks and company. It wasn’t long until the guests all came and told us they were leaving, if we wanted to stay in such a weird place, go ahead, but they were leaving. We asked them what was the matter, no one would say anything. We were surprised as we had told our "occupants" to behave themselves as we were having company, but the party broke up early and their parting shot was "If we ever moved, invite them again, but not to that place ever. " We were surprised as we never told anything to anyone, partly because we were afraid they’d think we were ready for the funny farm and partly because we enjoyed our secrets. Being young and dumb, we thought it was hilarious and drank to "Oscar" and all the other shady men who lived there with us.

I never heard of a Mrs. Strum, but there were signs of a garden plot, a grape patch and clothesline. The barn was the only place I was afraid of. It was a beautiful big barn and I loved barns. Since I had read and heard about Hobo’s or other homeless people scaring intruders away from the place they wanted to occupy, I went to look and see if this was the case with the barn. On a calm sunny day if I entered the barn, gates and partitions would slam shut with such force they would almost hit me. It was such force it would scare the living daylights out of me. There were no spring hinges, or anything like that that would make them do this. No matter when I went down there, this would happen. The pines were so sad sounding, they signed and sobbed in the breeze. Since the men were away a lot, I put up with the ghosts more than they did. I did stay alone a few times at night, but wasn’t afraid, except at the barn.BR
The summer of 1939 I had a baby boy and there seemed to be less ghostly goings-on. Maybe we were just happy with the baby and I was so busy with both children and lots of washing, to do on the wash board, and did it mainly outside during the summer. Toward fall my husband went to work for Arnold Gnos and since he had a woodcutters cabin on the place he came up the hill and insisted we get out of the Storm place. He seemed really concerned. Again no explanation and we gave none. As we drove away I looked back and thought I saw a movement at the window. One day a neighbor came by on horseback and said he was going to go look around the old Storm place and asked if we’d lived there. He came back in a couple of hours, hair unruly and visibly shaken. He asked if we’d "really lived in that place"? He had spent some time looking at some of the old magazines in the upstairs, but wouldn’t say anything else except "he’d never live there, in fact, he’d never so much as set foot in there again!" Playing dumb I asked why as I wanted to hear someone else’s version of the place, but all he’d do is shake his head as he rode on.

And what happened to the Old Storm Place? A great blaze appeared one day on top of the lonely hill and the old house, and perhaps all the ghosts, went up in smoke, or did they all go live in the barn? The house didn’t burn accidentally, the men of the neighborhood community got together and burned it down. They seemed to know a good deal about the strange going-on that went on in that old house, but none would really speak of it, maybe feeling a little foolish it were voiced aloud, and would tolerate no more of that place. I never went back after the house burnt just couldn’t. We "all" got along fine in the house together and lived together quite well. They tolerated us, but no one else could manage them. Perhaps they liked us, who knows? Being older and looking back, I couldn’t or wouldn’t have stayed there now as I’d have been scared to death. I’ve never talked about it much and now have written it down. My daughter remembers it very faintly, she was three when we left and remembers the good things, a puppy, a pet pig, going for walks and picking the wildflowers, and who knows what friends she had with "Oscar and troop?"

My daughter recently moved into a 1928 home which I believe to be haunted. They recently found out that it was at one time a biker's women's house and someone was killed there. At my daughter's wedding a relative was very uncomfortable and kept saying she wanted to leave. She said there is a presence in everyroom of the house except a room additon. The couple that lived there before sold the house cheap and exited very quickly to her mothers. Nothing has been seen but only felt. One visitor felt something poke her in the back but none was there. Another felt blowing in his ear. A basement light put out a strobe light like effect then would not work again. Wind would blow where there should be no wind. My daughter said she felt uncomfortable there after first moving in but did not know why. Others have told them it was haunted. What should they do? Will these spirits hurt them? Should they put up crucifixes to protect them? How can they get rid of this presence?

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