The Cloudcroft Ghost Cloudcroft, New Mexico, meaning a "clearing in the clouds", is a small mountain town located to the east of Alamogordo, NM ("Cloudcroft"). The town's history is intimately tied to the building of the Alamogordo and Sacramento Mountain Railway that allowed the town to be permanently settled in the late 1800s, and to the logging business that made the town and railroad successful for half a century ("Investigation… Lodge"). As with many frontier towns, Cloudcroft has a number of legends that document the unique and violent events in its history, and also a fair number of ghosts that haunt its historic sites. I was told a story about one of Cloudcroft's more famous ghosts when casually lounging in the undergraduate student physics lounge at the University of Maryland, College Park, with a group of students during a lunch break before class. This occurred during early April, 2005. I inquired whether anyone knew any ghost stories or folklore. A friend of mine volunteered that she knew several ghost stories from her travels. The storyteller was a 23-year-old Caucasian female from an upper-middle class family in Baltimore. She currently lives in Crofton, MD, and is a physics and astronomy major. For a prior internship a few summers earlier, the storyteller had worked at the Apache Point Observatory in Sunspot, NM, studying various solar phenomena. Sunspot is located 17 miles from Cloudcroft. She originally heard her legend from a coworker at the observatory, who took her to visit the place of the haunting. After finishing a story about the ghost of the astronomer Maria Mitchell (who allegedly haunts Nantucket, Massachusetts), the storyteller began the tale of the ghost of The Lodge at Cloudcroft. ... ... middle of paper ... ... Cited "Cloudcroft New Mexico, A Brief History." Cloudcroft Online. Retrieved 5 Apr 2005 http://www.cloudcroft.com/history.htm. "Investigation of the La Fonda Hotel" Southwest Ghost Hunters Association. 31 Oct 1998. Retrieved 5 Apr 2005 http://www.sgha.net/lafonda.html. "Investigation of the Lodge." Southwest Ghost Hunters Association. 07 Aug 2001. Retrieved 5 Apr 2005 http://www.sgha.net/lodge.html. "New Mexico: Ghost Stories and Haunted Places." Haunted New Mexico. Retrieved 5 Apr 2005 http://hauntednewmexico.tripod.com/id1.html. "The Haunted St. James Hotel, Cimarron, NM." Legends of America. Retrieved 5 Apr 2005 http://www.legendsofamerica.com/HC-Cimarron5.html. "The Lodge" Lost Destinations. Retrieved 5 Apr 2005 http://www.lostdestinations.com/thelodge.htm. Wood, Ted. Ghosts of the Southwest. New York, Walker & Company:1997.
The most historic location in Placerville is the 147-year-old Hangman’s Tree Saloon. On the outside wall of the building is a weathered dummy in jeans, cowboy boots, and pink flannel shirt that dangles lifelessly from a wood block. Inside the saloon, where a noose swings on a fake tree, it is said that the hangman’s ghost lingers there. What used to be Elstner’s Hay Yard is where the original tree used to stand, from which the people originally hung. The dummy still hangs from that same location to this day.
Ghosts and goblins are lurking around every corner. Mysterious creatures are waiting to jump out of every shadow. The boogieman and his accomplices are posted under the bed and in the closet, counting the minutes until children go to sleep so that that can attack and scare the life out of them. We all grew up with these fears in the back of out heads. There is always at least one person and one building in every town, whether it be small or large, with a story... a history of mysterious, paranormal behavior. The little town of Canton, Missouri is no different.
In April I sat down with a friend at my house and asked about any urban legends or ghost stories he had encountered. After a couple legends he had seen in movies, he mentioned a haunted bridge about ten minutes away from downtown. He is a twenty-one year-old White male; his father owns an appliance store and his mother helps out with the books. He first heard this story in the ninth grade from a couple of friends. Supposedly, they had heard from kids who had actually been to the bridge and heard strange things at night. The bridge is located off of Uniontown road, between a couple old farms. He has not encountered the bridge first hand but still remembers the story surrounding it:
“MURDER CASTLE OF H.H. HOLMES! EXCERPT FROM "HAUNTED CHICAGO” N.p., 2003. Web. 03 Mar. 2014.
Boom, Corrie, John L. Sherrill, and Elizabeth Sherrill. The Hiding Place, . Washington Depot, Conn.: Chosen Books; [distributed by Revell, 1971. Print.
Corbett, B. (1999). Last call in Pine Ridge For the Lakota’s in White Clay, Nebraska, death is on the house. Retrieved February 6, 2005, from http://ishgooda.org/oglala/whitcla1.htm
The next day, I contacted the University Archivist by phone to inquire about the happenings at the Rossborough Inn. She was happy speak with me, and indicated that the Rossborough Inn has been a hotspot for legends of paranormal activity, having more “sightings” than most any other building on campus. In addition to sharing with me one story of the Inn, she also sent me a script of a ghost tour that she has given on campus that includes other reported happenings at the Inn as well as the history of Rossborough. The story she shared with me tells of a dining services ...
Have you ever had that one bone chilling moments when you feel like someone is there, but no one is? Or when you are home alone and you are positive you heard someone or something. When you turn around when you hear something and all it is a long dark hallway. In this paper you will read about some of the scariest places in America. Imagine walking alone in one of those buildings and hearing a noise or seeing someone or something, but you know you are all alone. Or are you? Norwich state hospital, the Lizzie Borden house, the Stanley hotel, the White House, and the oak alley plantation are some of the buildings where rapes, beatings, death, starving’s, ax murders, and slaves were.
There’s this really small highway town in New Mexico called Cimarron, and it’s small now but in the late 19th century it was a bustling crossroads for all sorts of people – gold speculators, ranchers, oilmen, and especially those vagrant characters, like Billy the Kid, seeking refuge from whatever lawman was on his tail. In Cimarron is this hotel, the Santa Fe Hotel, and they say that this place is the most haunted hotel still in operation, in the west. The lights flicker on and off, and people, visitors just say they encounter really weird things – like if you go in this one room, you might see a woman out of the corner of your eye, sitting on the windowsill and looking out for someone. And when you turn to face her, she disappears, but all of a sudden you smell a subtle waft of strawberry-scented perfume. Weird – yet you still not sure if this is true? Sounds sketchy, I know. Oh – I should say this hotel is haunted because 23 people have been shot to death in the hotel, either from a bar-fight or card-game or something. Well I went to stay at the hotel for a night, before I headed on to a nearby Boy Scout camp. I went with my troop, and we all got our own rooms. Guess what room I got – the strawbe...
Built in 1910 by Hezekiah Eastman Hatch, Hatch’s Camp (later named St Ann’s Retreat, but most commonly known as The Nunnery) has had plenty of time to surface mysterious tragedy information. Many of these stories are told by local teens/young adults to visitors, many of which attend Utah State and are intrigued by the information given. The variations of the story ranges anywhere from Nuns bearing devil children, to Ghost Dogs chasing you if you trespass or even the children born to the Nuns being killed or scarified in the pool or fireplace. Though they make great ghost stories while camping up in the canyon, the facts behind Hatch’s Camp will make this story seem less spooky.
friend that his ghost usually appeared when there were tourists in the building. She wasn’t sure
The author of A Storm of Witchcraft, Emerson W. Baker is a well known historian, archaeologist, and professor at Salem State University. In addition to receiving a Ph.D. in History from the College of William and Mary, an M.A. in History from University of Maine, and a B.A. in History from Bates College, Baker has also received many commendations and awards for his work. Among those awards, he has earned a membership in the Colonial Society of Massachusetts and was honored with the Maine Historical Society’s Neil Allen Award. Baker has also been the Chairman of Salem State University’s Archaeological Advisory Committee since 1990, and he has been the Chair for Maine Cultural Affairs Council since 2000. Baker has also written four other books, Devil of Great Island, New England Knight, American Beginnings, and Clarke & Lake Co.
Urban legends are the supernatural folklore of our modern society. From one generation to the next, they orally travel throughout the world, constantly changing from one region to the next. Although cultural variations exist, the core of all these urban legends remains the same, to unveil the universally known individual and societal fears. “The Graveyard Wager” is a timeless urban legend told again and again, and the one of which I will explore more in depth.
The Nelly Butler hauntings is referred to as the first recorded ghost story in American history (LiBrizzi 5), and possibly the most exciting hauntings to date as there are still many unsolved mysteries. The apparition appeared on more than 30 separate occasions to over 100 witnesses in Sullivan, Maine, just over fifteen years after the American Revolution (5-6). Although the Nelly Butler apparition is one of the most convincing ghosts of all time, it was subject to suspicions of fraud. These claims turn out to be groundless as the evidence reveals the ghost to be genuine.
Savannah is supposedly one of the most haunted cities in America, and later in the week on the same trip, we decided to go on one of Savannah's biggest tourist traps. A ghost tour. We walked around the city on a Wednesday night at ten PM for about two hours. We walked outside of buildings that may have had many deaths in and was supposed to be filled with paranormal activity, but we never went inside. We just got stories of people allegedly seeing ghosts through the window. It was terribly at the time but it was worth it to be