I’m a sceptical believer. That is to say, I 100% believe in ghosts and all things paranormal — but I’m going to look for the logical solution first before I shout, “Ghost!” Orbs in your photo? It’s more likely to be dust or a bug. Strange, white mist or beam of light in the shot? Probably a lens flare or a light leak. Scratching in your walls or ceiling? Rats. Birds. Possums. Squatters. It’s a million other things before it’s something supernatural.
But I’ve had a few experiences in my time that I haven’t been able to explain. Read them for yourself below, and offer an explanation if you can. And I’d love to hear your experiences in the comments!
MAITLAND GAOL
In July 2017, a few family members and myself paid a visit to the historic Maitland Gaol (or Jail, for those of you unfamiliar with our spelling) in East Maitland, NSW. My uncle had toured the place so many times that he was actually given permission by the staff to give his own tour for a night, and so my aunt, my mother, my cousin, and I went along with a few of my uncle’s friends and his daughter to be his tour group. It was to be part historical tour and part ghost tour, and since my uncle was so well-known to the staff at this point, we were even permitted to do it at night!
I love historical ghost tours. This was the third I’d done (the previous being The Rocks on Sydney Harbour and Quarantine Station on Manly Head, which will be discussed later in this post) and as I always did, I went in with low expectations. I feel like that’s the first rule of going on a historic or ghost tour: expect nothing. My family (see: mother, brother, uncle) are the kinds of people who look for something in everything. When we toured the Rocks, there was a point where all three of them were standing on a street corner exclaiming, “It feels cold here! There’s a cold spot here!”
We were outside. On the harbour. At night. Do you see where I’m going with this?
And I get it. I want to experience the paranormal, too. I want to see ghosts. I want to hear, see, feel things I can’t explain. (Except no I don’t, because sometimes one taste is enough.) But going in expecting nothing gives me a clearer mind, makes it easier for me to see the logic first. And makes any experiences I do have more thrilling.
You can Google if you want to know more, but in short Maitland Gaol is most known for having housed infamous serial killer Ivan Milat for a time. It was closed in 1998, but the first prisoners entered the gaol in 1948. That’s a fairly decent lifespan. I’m sure it ran in much the same way any prison did during this time. Noteably, there was a gallows on site where those sentenced to death would be hung.
Where there’s death, there’s ghosts, right? Well, I didn’t catch anything in any of my photos. There are no orbs or apparitions in my picture of the Gallows. Ivan Milat didn’t show his face in any photos I took of the cells or the grounds. I didn’t spot any prison guards who disappeared through walls. My cousin did take a photo of a guard’s booth where a lot of people claimed they could see a face, but my sceptical mind claimed, “Well, the glass is dirty…”
But I couldn’t explain this away: our group were standing around outside at one point, near the administration building, listening to my uncle talk about something or other that I can’t remember now. I was standing with his daughter, and two of his friends that had tagged along were not far behind us. The four of us were at the back of the group, sort of chatting amongst ourselves while we waited for the tour to continue.
The window beside us rattled.
And I mean rattled. Full on like somebody had their hands against it and was shaking it with everything they had, like they were trying to get out, for a good fifteen to twenty seconds while we watched. Again, this is the administration building. There are no admin staff in this building at night, the lights were off, and the slatted blinds were closed and not moving. If a person had been playing a prank on us, I’m sure we would have seen movement in the blinds. It was the first thing I watched for. But nope, nothing.
The four of us looked at each other. One of the friends asked, “Did you guys hear that?” We confirmed we had. We all agreed it was weird. And then we moved on and didn’t tell my uncle until the end of the tour.
It’s a small happening, but it’s something I haven’t been able to explain. And of the experiences I’m about to tell, it’s definitely the tamest (funny, for a prison!).
A FALLEN FRIEND
Too many of us have similar stories to this: when I was 18, I had a friend who passed in a car crash. I’ll call him E for privacy.
E and I were coworkers at my first job. He was a little older than me and to this day I still remember him as a playful older brother figure. (I imagine this was because he had three younger sisters, so he naturally fell into the role.) He liked to play pranks, and I rose to that challenge by pranking him back. He posed as a secret admirer on MSN Messenger calling himself Mr X; I posed as a secret admirerer who dropped perfumed letters off for him through the restaurant drive-thru (I even had one of our other coworkers do it for me while E and I were on shift together, to throw him off my tracks). The main game we played though was “how much shit can I put on your hat before you notice.” Shit in this instance being pickles and ketchup. Yep, we worked at McDonald’s, and we always had a blast.
He eventually got an apprenticeship and we worked together less and less. Once a week became once a fortnight, then once a month, then hardly ever. I hadn’t seen him in months before he came into the Macca’s one Tuesday night to get food. We had the standard conversaion: long time, no see! How are you? How’s life? Then forty-eight hours his friend decided it would be a fun idea to speed in peak hour traffic, and E was gone.
I didn’t know a single person who disliked E, so it should come as no surprise that our happy little workplace suddenly became gloomy. We flew our flags at half-mast, everyone who could attended the funeral, and there were stories being told every day. And every night.
I happened to be there one night, working the closing shift when we finished up and decided to sit around having a drink. (Of Coke, obviously, because we got it for free out of the drink pumps — manager approved!) It’s nearing midnight, and we decide to lock the doors, pull up a bunch of chairs in front of the counter, and sit around telling stories about E. They were all happy. We were all laughing and having a good time, until the stories started to ease off and the mood started to grow sombe. We were quiet then, all of us in our own thoughts for a few moments.
D — who had been leaning his chair back definitely not far enough to tip it, opposite foot resting atop a knee — suddenly found himself falling backwards, and in his scramble to right himself he threw his cup of Coke all over the place.
Suddenly we were laughing again, the mood lifted. Somebody went to get the mop; our manager S (remember him — he comes up again later) mage sure D was okay.
D was fine, but he was wide-eyed as he said with no humour, “I swear, somebody grabbed my foot and pushed me back!”
S raised an eyebrow in response. “You know what’s funny? Right before that happened, I was thinking in my head, asking E to give us a sign he was here.”
And what a hell of a sign it had been. It was exactly the sort of thing E would have done — nudging D to tip his chair. Boys will be boys, after all, and we were all close enough that such pranks were acceptable.
I fully acknowledge that D very well could have tipped on his own, even if it hadn’t looked like he’d been leaning back far enough. But we unanimously agreed that it was E there with us that night, making us laugh because he wouldn’t have wanted us to be sad for him, and I will believe that until my final breath.
THE WOMAN IN WHITE
Is it even a series of ghostly tales if there isn’t one about a Woman in White?
Remember me saying Manager S was going to be important? Here’s where he comes in. S was the manager that hired me for my first job — in his words, because he was so impressed that I’d shown up for an interview at McDonald’s with a full on resumé and cover letter ready to go, even though my only “experience” was high school. Not to brag or anything, but I ended up becoming one of the best employees in that place. And if words don’t hold true to that, maybe the fact that the owners bought me a legit Tiffany’s bracelet when I resigned nine years later will.
Being the reliable “yes” girl that I was, S and I worked together a lot and grew close. He wasn’t old enough to be my father, so I saw him as a mix between an older brother/uncle figure in my fatherless life. He was there for me after I broke up with my first boyfriend and the idiot sent me a literal text calling me an “emo bitch” and telling me to “burn in hell”. Ex and I were coworkers, and the rostering manager hated me, so S was my go-to for when situations got tough. At sixteen, when our rostering manager skipped out and left me and a fourteen-year-old female coworker alone in the store with my eighteen-year-old ex after 11pm, S was who I called. And even though he was at a party, he picked up and promised to race over if we needed him to. (We didn’t, thankfully.)
I was at that point in my life where I was discovering who I was. I’d gotten into rock music, and you’d usually catch me in fishnets and a long black skirt, with badly done eyeliner because I can only see out of one eye and hadn’t practiced enough to get it right with my lack of vision. (Spoiler alert: I still can’t.) I was also highly interested in Wicca and witchcraft, so it wasn’t unusual that the topic of the paranormal would come up in conversation. S had asked me if I was a believer, and if I’d ever seen anything, and he went on to tell me about his own experiences. I won’t repeat them here, but suffice to say I knew after this conversation that he was a believer. With the things he’d seen, he couldn’t not be! I also got the impression he was Sensitive. As in, he could see and sense more than the average person (me).
Being close, S and I would sometimes hang out in the store after close playing chess, and he would drive me home afterwards. (My mother trusted him, and loved that he helped me out of my shell so much that she once gifted him an expensive bottle of alcohol.) This was one of those nights. We’d been playing chess maybe a little too long, and it was just past 2am when we pulled up in front of my house. I turned to S to say my usual thanks for driving me home, only to find him staring out the front windscreen of the car, his grip white-knuckled on the steering wheel.
“Do you see that?” he asked me.
I turned to look in the same direction he was, towards my neighbour’s house. The street was dark and empty — as it should be at two in the morning. I didn’t know what I was supposed to be looking for. Had he spotted an animal? A fancy car he liked? Somebody breaking into a house? I looked and looked, but I saw nothing. It got to the point where I figured he was joking around, trying to scare me. It was 2am, after all.
I turned back to him. “See what?”
I’ll never forget his expression when he dragged his eyes away from the windscreen to look at me. His eyes were wide, and there wasn’t an ounce of playfulness in his expression. I’d never seen this man so serious. Ever.
“Renée.” His voice was steady, but I could hear something behind it. Looking back now, I’m pretty sure it was fear. “Tell me you can’t fucking see that.”
Okay, so he was definitely not kidding. I had a brief moment of thinking maybe he could see something I couldn’t. He was Sensitive, after all. I was a little scared, knowing there was something there that I couldn’t see. You can’t fight things you can’t see. But then I looked back over.
And I did see.
Have you ever been looking for something really hard and not been able to find it? And then suddenly it’s right there in front of you? That’s what this was like. Once I saw her, I don’t know how I couldn’t have seen her the first time. Right there in front of my neighbour’s house, one hand braced against his low red-brick fence and the other clinging to a walking stick, was a withered old woman.
And she was fucking glowing.
GLOWING. Like that episode of the Simpsons where they think Mr Burns is an alien. Like Casper the Friendly fucking Ghost. The shock hit me so fast that I couldn’t move, and like S had been not seconds earlier all I could do was stare. The woman was slightly hunched, with incredible long, white hair that fell straight to her hips. She looked like she was half way through a midnight stroll, but she wasn’t moving. It was like she was frozen in time. Just…standing there. Glowing.
(I’m freaking myself out just remembering this.)
I don’t know how long we sat there for, just staring at this ghostly woman, before S finally, nervously chuckled and said, “Okay, you can get out now!”
The front door to my house was probably fifteen feet away, but it felt like fifteen miles. I gave S an are you kidding me?! look but did, slowly, hesitantly, climb out of the car. I took two running steps onto the footpath, then stopped. Turned to my right. Stared at this woman who was closer to me than my front door.
I like to think the me of now would go over and ask the woman if she was okay, if she needed help. But I’d be lying if I said I would. Because I still remember the primal fear I felt in that moment, how terrified I was of this woman. I bolted into my house, locked the door, and ran to hide under my blankets. I refused to look towards my window. I don’t think I slept a wink until the sun began to rise.
When I saw S at work the next evening, we asked each other if we’d really seen what we thought we saw. He remembered seeing it; I remembered seeing it. Neither one of us could explain it. If the woman hadn’t been glowing like a fucking lightbulb, I could have believed she was just some old lady out for a walk. But that glow?
Of all my experiences, this is the one I can explain the least. And that terrifies me.
Oh. And possibly relevant information: we lived across the street from a hospital at the time.
Seeing as this post is getting a little long, if you’re interested in reading more I’ll be posting Part II tomorrow!
I have had at least three different paranormal experiences. I am definitely a believer, but I don’t go and actively seek out these types of thrills. I’m not that crazy.
The first was when I had been hospitalized for pancreatitis. According to my ma my white blood cell count was so high there is no way in Hell I should be alive right now. When I went to sleep I saw a classmate of mine in my dream, only he had passed away back in October. He told me it wasn’t my time and shoved me. The next thing I know I’ve woken up and a nurse is asking me if she can take my vitals.
The second was when I worked at a call center and this customer was so unruly I almost tore into her and called her a psychotic b****. I sent her call to a supervisor and just sat there with my head in my hands about to cry when I felt a hand on my shoulder. My father passed away earlier that year so I’m convinced it was him telling me I could get through the rest of my shift when I wanted to quit on the spot.
The final one was this summer when I went on a paranormal investigation with a friend. We were standing at the top of the steps asking if they could touch one of the devices that would show us someone was there. Why they didn’t touch that I did feel a hand on the back of my leg.
I applaud you for ever having been able to work in a call centre. Literally one of the worst jobs I could imagine! I’m glad your dad was there to get you through the rest of the shift. Sometimes it takes a parent to remind us that we’re stronger than we think. =)