I used to do contracting for the Coast Guard. We were awarded a contract on a lighthouse, in New London, Connecticut, the Latimer Reef Lighthouse, about a mile from the shore. There were various projects to do there. I arrived at the lighthouse the first day and I was cutting old bolts out of the wall with an acetylene torch. While I was cutting, I heard this music, this folk song, and I figured it was just the torch whistling into the hole. But I continued to hear the song after I stopped the torch. So I thought it must be the cap on top of the oxygen bottle whistling, but it wasn’t. And I kept hearing it. It was a woman singing an old folk song. When I got back to the mainland, I went in to the main Coast Guard station. I told them I had this funny experience. I heard somebody singing. It was an older woman singing an old folk song. They said “that’s the first we hear of anything happening at that particular lighthouse. In other lighthouses we’ve had a lot of ghost reports, but not that one.” So I was the first one to hear the ghost of that lighthouse.

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When I was six or seven years old, I lived in an old house in Seattle. In this one room, by a certain wall, when I walked by, the wall would sort of dissolve and “open up” and it would sweep me inside of it. As I walked past, the wall would just sort of disappear and then I would be inside of it; not trapped between the layers or on the other side of it but in a whole different place. Inside that space was a circle of little people with painted faces. This happened many times. I remember this sound, a really weird, deep sound that I heard while I was in that place and it was frightening. When I was 42 years old I was talking to my sister and I was telling her about the “opening” in the wall. To my surprise, she said “I remember seeing you go through that wall.” I didn’t believe her so I told her to tell me which wall it was and she knew exactly which wall it was. That this happened has plagued me for my whole lifetime. 

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I worked as a machinist in an old factory in Glastonbury, Connecticut. The factory was built in 1832. There was a new part of the factory that was added on later. I worked in the old part of the factory. I worked by myself at night, until about 3:30 in the morning. About once a week at about the same time, about 1:30 in the morning, I would see, out of the corner of my eye, people walking by very quickly. A couple of seconds later I would think “Wait a minute! There is nobody else here but me!” So I saw that a few times. Then one evening I felt someone staring at the back of my neck and I turned around and there were three people, all men, arranged by height. One was tall, one medium, and one small. They were dressed in plain woolen shirts. They looked like average factory workers in the 1800’s, I assume. They had this look like they were looking beyond me. I stared at them for a minute or so and then they just faded away. I didn’t tell anybody because I didn’t want anybody to think I was looney. But then a couple of months later a guy from another part of the factory got very panicked. He had to be calmed down. He was in the old part of the factory getting something and he saw somebody with a broad-brimmed, black hat and a long overcoat - like what you would wear in the mid-1800’s. He went to chase the fellow and as the man in the hat walked into the new part of the factory, he vanished. 

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This was years and years ago when I was working in a theater in upstate New York. It was Summerstock Theater. We had a really long tech rehearsal that went into the wee, wee hours of the morning. In fact, it was just starting to get light when we were heading back… they housed us in dormatories. It was a college. I was walking with someone from the cast across campus and we saw this light coming. It was silent. There was no engine noise. It was in the sky, not very high, just over the tops of the trees. It glided from one part of where we could see to… there was a dining hall and as it came closer, we could see that it was a flying saucer. I swear to God. It was shaped like a saucer. It glowed from the inside. I’m not the kind of person who easily believes in stuff; I don’t really like sci-fi stories. But this was something I witnessed myself. It hovered for a minute over the roof of the dining hall, which is the biggest building on the campus, and then it took off again until we were no longer able to see it. We both saw it. To this day I can’t say that I really believe in flying saucers but what the heck was that? It sure looked like a flying saucer to me.

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In elementary school, my girlfriend and I were in the playground playing on the spider. You know, the rounded, metal jungle-gym. I was near the top and my girlfriend was at the very top. I was watching her. She let herself down through the bars and she was hanging by her hands. She let go to drop to the ground but she didn’t fall. She just hung there in the air, with no contact with the bars. After a few moments, she suddenly dropped to the ground. When she landed she looked at me and said “Did you see that!?” “Did you see that!?” Yes, I had seen it. After that, she climbed up those bars over and over again, dropping herself from the top, just as she had before, but that strange thing didn’t happen again.

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In the early 1960’s, my sister’s boyfriend gave me a reel-to-reel tape player. It was an older one but it worked fine and, at age 13, it felt like a real treasure. I lived in a rural area with few other kids around so I was often bored, looking for something to do. One summer day, walking by myself down one of the narrow, country roads, I saw that someone had taken a reel of audio tape and had apparently thrown it out of their car window. The tape was completely unraveled and tangled in the weeds and tall grass alongside the road. Having nothing better to do, I went home, got an empty reel and returned to where the tape was and started to carefully wind it onto the reel. I finally finished and hurried home to play it. After all, wouldn’t it make sense that a spy or someone like that would throw a tape out of a car window? I turned on the tape. “…the battle which took place tonight…” there was a battle? “… has ended in one of the most startling defeats ever suffered by any army in modern times; seven thousand men armed with rifles and machine guns pitted against a single fighting machine of the invaders…” The Army was fighting a machine? “One hundred and twenty known survivors. The rest strewn over the battle area from Grovers Mill to Plainsboro, crushed and trampled to death under the metal feet of the monster, or burned to cinders by its heat ray. The monster is now in control of the middle section of New Jersey and has effectively cut the state through its center. Communication lines are down from Pennsylvania to the Atlantic Ocean..." What? I live in Connecticut! "Railroad tracks are torn and service from New York to Philadelphia discontinued…” What the heck!? “… except routing some of the trains through Allentown and Phoenixville. Highways to the north, south, and west are clogged with frantic human traffic. Police and army reserves are unable to control…” O.K., that was enough. I ran to my mother and started telling her about this amazing tape I found that had probably belonged to a spy and the Army was defeated and we should call the government or something and… She came over to listen to the tape. Within moments she was smiling broadly and telling me about an old made-for-radio play called “War of the Worlds.”

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I dropped my two older daughters off at school and was going back home with my youngest daughter. There is this long, straight, flat stretch of road on the top of a hill. At the end of that stretch the road goes sharply down, though still straight. About 500 feet down from the top of the hill is a left-hand turn, the first left, the road I take to go home. That morning, I went from the flat part of the road into the down-hill stretch. For a moment I got distracted and looked up to see that I was passing by my turn. Upset with myself for missing the turn, I resolved to take the next left, about another 1,000 feet down the road, though it wasn’t my preferred way home. Heading further down the hill I noticed that, ahead of me, was the turn that I had just missed. Only this time I made the turn. Even though this happened a year ago, you’re the first person I’ve told this story to. I didn’t want people to think I was crazy.

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I grew up in New Orleans. We moved there when I was five. My mother loved it. She and my Dad were from the Mid-West.  My Mom just loved living in New Orleans. She fit right in, which is kind of a hard thing to do if you’re not from New Orleans. She passed away in 1992. She passed away and it was very sad. Years later I went to a meeting there, a professional meeting, in New Orleans. I hadn’t been back for years… since Katrina. I was there in my hotel room and I came out of the bathroom and I just saw this shape in the room and I had never seen a ghost before. I thought “There’s something here.” I just began to cry. On another day, I was in the main room of my hotel room and the blow-dryer hopped off the counter. Maybe I didn’t have the cord wrapped right but I’ve never had another blow-dryer hop off the counter. I think it was my mother. She loved New Orleans so much, maybe she decided to stick around.

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This encounter occurred during the month of May, 1987. I lived in McPherson, Kansas. My parents lived in Salina, Kansas. My husband was a sheriff’s deputy and worked the 4-12 shift.  On Friday or Saturday evenings, I would leave our home early in the evening and take my two daughters, aged 4 and 5-months-old, and drive to Salina to visit with my parents for the evening. I always left my parents' home at 10:00 in the evening, and always called my mother when I and the children returned home so she knew we were safe and off the highway. It was a 30-minute drive from Salina to McPherson on the highway. Lindsborg is 14 miles from Salina, halfway back to
McPherson. As I approached Lindsborg’s lights on my right hand side, I glanced back at my sleeping 4-year-old and also at my infant daughter asleep in her carrier in the front seat of my car. I could see the sodium lights of the rest area, called “Stuckey’s” about a mile ahead and to my right off the highway. I became aware that I saw something outside of my driver's-side window. I looked up in the sky. Around 500 feet up, across the double highway a solid black shape was ‘hanging’ in the air. I recall there was a red light, a green light and a white light and they were in the corners of the object. I determined it was a black triangle-shaped object. It was totally silent, not moving, just hanging there, blotting out the stars and clouds in the night sky. I rolled down my window to listen, but there was no sound except my tires on the pavement. I thought, “I should stop for a moment to see what this is.” I remember pulling over to the side of the road on the highway. There were cars across the grassy center on the opposite side of the highway also stopping. One car behind me was also pulling over. I looked over at my sleeping daughter in the front seat, and opened my car door. I had my right hand on the steering wheel, my left hand on the top of my open door pulling myself up out of the car. My left foot was on the road of the highway, my right still on the floorboard of my car. I looked up and this triangle shape was just THERE. Hanging.  Silent with three soft lights barely shining. 

My car tires bumped up over the raised part of our driveway and I parked my car. I took my 4-year-old into the house and put her in her bed. I returned to the car and got my 5-month-old daughter and the diaper bag out of the front seat. I set her, in her carrier, down on the couch in the living room and was surprised to see headlights turn
into our driveway and flash across our kitchen window. My husband, a sheriff’s deputy, burst into the front door, both angry and worried. “Where have you been?” he demanded. I was rather surprised but told him, “I just left mothers…what are you doing home so early?” “EARLY?” he shouted, “It’s midnight! Your mother has been going crazy calling the department, saying you must have had a wreck. I have half the department out looking in the ditches for you!” I was stunned. I looked at the clock on the stove, it said ‘12:05’. I said that was impossible, that I had JUST left there 35 minutes ago. How could it be after midnight? I told him what I had seen in the sky and when he calmed down a bit, he called information and got the telephone number of the Salina Air Base and handed me the phone. I dialed the number and a nice young man answered. After I explained about the triangle-shaped ‘plane’ I saw, I asked him if the Army was testing any new aircraft over the highway between Salina and Lindsborg. He said he was not sure, but he would transfer me to someone who could answer my questions. Another man got on the phone and identified himself as a Colonel. He was very nice at first, questioning me about who was with me when I saw this shape, what time it happened and more general questions. He then turned cold. “What is your name, ma’am? What is your address?” I put my hand over the phone and whispered to my husband, “He wants my name and address.” My husband took the phone out of my hand and hung up. He said, “They want to know who you are and where you live for a reason.” This was long before the days of caller I.D. and cell phones, being 1987. 

After that experience, I began to develop a fear of the nighttime. I would go in the car at night, but years went by and I continued to lean forward and search through the windshield for “something.” I had a very disturbing auditory experience for years, a low heavy ‘droning’ cycling in and out, I told my husband for years, while holding my ears, “Don’t you HEAR that? It’s driving me crazy!” It sounded like a very large piece of machinery, with a very large engine droning on and on, from very far away. I watched the night sky constantly, and avoided as much as possible going out after dark. I found a place on my right arm, on the back, right above the elbow – there was something sharp and stabbing in my arm. I would squeeze
this area and feel something very sharp deep in the skin. I had it for years. During this time, I would have auditory experiences. If I stubbed my toe or bumped my shin, a hot ‘zip of electricity’ would run along the back of my head from one ear to the other and a robotic mechanical voice could be heard only by me. “The small toe is injured.” “ The right leg is injured.” Always this mechanical, emotionless voice. I thought I was going crazy. I had a total hysterectomy in February of 1997. From the time I had the hysterectomy, the voice, whenever I was injured, stopped. I continued to notice the sharp object on the back of my arm and determined to remove whatever it was, got a needle and began digging on my arm. As I am not left handed and it was on the back of my right arm, this was awkward and not very successful. My husband knew about this sharp object and encouraged me to try to remove it. After considerable digging and squeezing, a piece of razor thin white ‘plastic’ came out of my arm. It was approximately one  inch long and came to a dagger point. I showed my husband the object and he told me to save it. That was in 1999. I regret I cannot remember what I did with this object. My mind conveniently ‘forgot’ whether I saved it or discarded it. 

This is my story. My husband is now a Chief of Police and will verify under oath all that I have related. I am quite willing to undergo hypnosis or lie detector to verify my claim.

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1973, I was standing on the grass, off the side of a road in Washington State, when several police officers, pulling up in speeding cruisers and motorcycles, surrounded me and pointed their guns at me, hand-cuffed me, pushed my face down hard onto the burning hot hood of the police cruiser. I was two weeks shy of twenty years old and had hair half-way down my back. I was with a guy with a butch haircut. They tried to take my backpack off my back while my hands were hand-cuffed behind my back, ripping out some of my hair in the process. They were very rough. As I stood, they pulled off my boots and socks. Their hands went up my pant-legs, in my pockets, down my pants. They knew that one of us was AWOL from the Army and they were going to find out which one of us it was. It took them about 15 minutes to figure it out.

My knapsack had been emptied and the contents kicked around by the police. When they decided it was the other guy they were looking for, they took me out of the back of the cruiser, unhandcuffed me and screamed at me to "pick up that shit and get the fuck out of here!" I was shocked and sickened. They took him away in the back of a police car and I was left alone. I picked up my clothes and other things and put it all back into my pack.  Then I walked the half-mile to the next highway entrance, put my pack down, sat on it and sobbed. I had never been so scared in my life... the freedom they so crudely and completely took from me... and it was the 4th of July.

In 1995, I got divorced. The legal act was completed the following year. But the conversation about ending our marriage, and the actual ending of our marriage, that was on July 4th. It was scary but liberating.

I look at the 4th of July differently now.

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