It was February in the year 1991 when I had my experience with a ghost. I was 17 years old at the time. One Saturday evening in Phoenix, my high school was having a basketball game, and afterward my cousin and I left the school gymnasium at around 10 p.m.
My cousin is from Tohono O’dham, and I was going to spend the weekend with my aunt’s family. Like myself, my aunt is Yaqui. She married a Tohono O’dham man some years ago and had two kids. One is my cousin.
We got on Interstate 10 and then switched on to South Highway 15 for the drive to the town of Sells on the Tohono O’dham Reservation. About 40 minutes into our drive, we were deep in the desert.
Because my car needed new tires, I had to drive just below the speed limit. The treads were just about completely worn out. I guess I had the type of car that we Indians call an “Indian car.” It was a pretty beat-up looking car, but it got me where I wanted to go.
Anyway, there we were, driving in the middle of the desert with the CD player going, and the darkness all around. Suddenly, a large javelina crossed the road, and I hit that wild pig with a big old “bang!” I didn’t have time to think about stepping on the brakes, because one second there was just the road before us, and the next there was this javelina.
I knew we had some big trouble with the car, because the radiator began to hiss, and steam began pouring out. I immediately drove to the side of the road and stopped the car to check on the damage. Sure enough, that animal had hit the front grill head-on, and a piece of metal had punctured my car’s radiator.
Directly behind the car in the darkness e could hear the pig loudly squealing. It was a weird experience to be alone at night in the desert and to hear ...
... middle of paper ...
...e before dawn, we were awakened by a truck with two guys who were headed for Sells. They sure did give us a good scare when they knocked on the car’s window, but soon we were introducing ourselves, and they offered to take us home.
The guys told us they were artists driving from California. They were on a photography trip, taking pictures of the desert and Indians for an art project. We tied one end of a rope to the back of their truck and the other end to the front of our car, and they towed us home.
We never mentioned our experience with the ghost the night before. But when we did get home that morning, we told my aunt and her family everything. Everyone agreed that what we had experienced was the ghost of an Indian from the spirit world. Since my encounter with that ghost, I’ve decided, if at all possible, never to drive at night through the desert again.
The story was told to me by one of my high-school classmates, who is a resident of the town of Atco. The nineteen year old young man is currently a sophomore at Clemson University and describes himself as being a Roman Catholic of half Italian-American and half Irish-American decent. The young man also noted that he is normally very socially conservative and a staunch Republican. His father is employed as a general contractor and his mother runs her own catering company. He describes himself as a “self proclaimed expert of all things related to the Atco Ghost.” He cannot remember the specific date when he first heard the story, but stated that he can remember knowing most of the details to the story for most of his life. He also claims to have attempted to see the ghost on only one occasion and after what he saw, he refuses to ever go back to that area of town at night. The following is an almost word for word account, which he checked to ensure its accuracy, of the lengthy story as he retold it to me ...
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.
One night, around 1:00 a.m., my roommates and I were sitting in the common room, and I asked the group if they knew of a compelling ghost story. My one roommate, a 20 year old from Pennsylvania, said she had heard a ghost story at the summer sleep-away camp she had attended when she was younger. She heard the story around a campfire in the woods of Camp Tonikanee, which is in Quakertown, Pennsylvania. She described her story as one that the counselors would tell the campers to convince them the camp was haunted.
So this past year I heard a ghost story from my mom’s coworker and friend. Her daughter recently purchased an old row house in Philadelphia. She lives there with her husband and they have a daughter, who was about two years old. They started to notice REALLY [eyes get large] weird things happening around the house, it was really eerie and started to make them nervous. Their daughter has a playroom in the attic, and she used to say, actually, she still says that there is somebody up there. She describes him as an African American male--well she says it’s a “Black man”--and she says he sits there and watches her play. When she told her parents...
As I sat down with the narrator in his dorm on a Sunday afternoon—not the most appropriate time for ghost stories—he told me this well known ghost story from New Mexico. The storyteller is an 18-year-old male freshman majoring in international relations who is from Bethesda, Maryland. He is biracial with an American father and a Taiwanese mother. Born in California and raised in Colorado, the storyteller is a converted Christian. The teller was in the Boy Scouts, which is where this story comes from:
I searched until I heard a story that gave me the chills. It comes from right around the block from where I live on campus, at one of the sorority houses at the University of Maryland. I collected this story the weekend of April 2nd, at my fraternity house. I asked my friend, a junior from Pikesville, if she knows any ghost stories. Her face lit up as if she was dying to tell me this story since the first time we ever met. She asked “you never heard the story of the ghost in the sorority house?” I replied no. The normally quiet woman demanded my attention away from the TV and went into her story.
Paman, Alex G. "Asian Ghost Stories." Yolk 31 Dec. 2000. Ethnic NewsWatch. Web. 14 Dec. 2011. .
mistakes. My mother always told me to obey the speed limit because one day I
Many scary movies shown the past few years have been based on paranormal activity such as Paranormal Activity 4. These movies have been based on religions, ghosts the devil taking over the inside of a person’s body. A ghost is known as a manifestation of the spirit or the soul of a person after they have passed. The words spirit or demon are alternatives for the word “ghosts” that people use. However the term typically refers to a deceased person's spirit. The belief in ghosts is closely tied to the concept of animism which is an ancient belief which connects with souls to everything ...
Ghosts, as with any other misunderstood group or people, have been preyed upon by others without understanding. The lack of knowledge about ghosts and haunting activity has led people astray as to what they really are. What Hollywood and television portrays is very inaccurate and cannot be relied upon as truthful. They show these spirits of the dead as being evil in nature, filled with malice and harmful intent. But that this is not the case. The field of paranormal activity is amazing. It has caught the imagination of people from every walk of life. It has always interested me and has influenced me to pick this as the topic for my research. Through this research I wish to uncover the truth about the existence of ghosts. I also wish to correct the wrong notions that people have about ghosts and enlighten non-believers.
The car's V-8 engine roared as the driver slammed the pedal to the ground. A wicked smile graced his lips. In in his mind it was all over. Unable to accept the idea of being roadkill, I did the only thing I could.....I turned the handlebars of my bike with all my might, veered off the road and into a nearby yard.
Ghosts have been around for many years and the root of the whole idea comes because it is “based on the ancient idea that a person's spirit exists separately from his or her body, and may continue to exist after that person dies” (“History of Ghost Stories”). Ghost stories have been told through centuries and because of this it is not known where the first spirit could have appeared or why, but one of the first actually recorded experience happened within the first century A.D. A man named Pliney recorded that he had seen a man and heard objects moving around and he could not explain what what happening (“History of Ghost Stories”). Even though the first supernatural experiences are not known, they created worldwide talk to present time about spirits and hauntings.
The paranormal is not what most people believe it is, “ghosts”. There is a wide range in
Haunting Experiences: Ghosts in Contemporary Folklore. Ed. Diane E. Goldstein, Sylvia Ann Grider, and Jeannie Banks Thomas. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2007.
Embarrassed bringing the car to get washed, I sat and waited for the car to make it through the other side. Nervously waiting I was greeted by two more people that were also waiting for their vehicles to be cleansed of minor visual defects. One of the customers was a man in his mid forties and the other was a boy almost the same age as I was. I still sat there in anticipation waiting to see my car pass through the other side.