The Red Lady & Other Tales: My Ghost Stories

[00:00:00] - [Speaker 0]
For once, I'm not telling you someone else's ghost story. I'm telling you mine. Hello, and welcome to Citegeist. I'm your host, Joshua Spellman. And we're doing something a little bit different today, and I'm showing a side of me that you maybe haven't seen.

[00:00:19] - [Speaker 0]
On this episode, I'll be sharing my own hauntings with you. Now if you've been around, you're probably even surprised that I have any ghost stories of my own given how much of a skeptic I am. Hey. Literally my whole entire brand is built on it, but nobody's perfect. And even by the end of this episode, you may also be asking, with all of these ghost stories, how are you still a skeptic?

[00:00:39] - [Speaker 0]
And I honestly couldn't tell you. In fact, it's part of the reason why I moved into this apartment. And it's supposedly the most haunted building in town. All the townies literally shudder when they figure out where I live. Some are a little bit scared and they beat around the bush with questions like, oh, so how's that going for you?

[00:00:58] - [Speaker 0]
But a lot of them just come right out and ask, how are the ghosts? And these reactions from the townspeople really got me stoked that I'd have some new material and maybe even make a believer out of me. Especially since my apartment is right where one of the most infamous events happened. But so far, no dice. So maybe I just need to collect some more antiques.

[00:01:17] - [Speaker 0]
So while I'm still waiting for something to happen here, let's take a look back at some of my past encounters. And one quick note before I start yapping more than I already am, These aren't the only strange things that I've experienced, but they're the ones that I've been able to weave into a narrative thread for your entertainment. Because otherwise, I'd be rattling off a laundry list of weird and isolated occurrences. But enough chitchat. Let's get to the ghosts.

[00:01:40] - [Speaker 0]
The first story I'm gonna tell is that of the red lady. In my second year of high school, my brother, my mother, and myself moved into a new house. It was a nineteen fifties Cape Cod style. It was two floors plus a basement. And the stairs going up to the 2nd Floor always made me uneasy.

[00:01:59] - [Speaker 0]
It was steep and open. The upstairs hallway kind of wrapped around the opening of the stairs with nothing but a flimsy metal railing to stop you from falling over the edge to your death. And the moment I turned the corner and saw those stairs during the walk through with the realtor, I had this flash in my mind's eye. The best I could describe it is a vision. Yes, I know.

[00:02:21] - [Speaker 0]
Call me Raven. I don't care. It was as if I was lying at the bottom of the stairs looking up, and my whole entire field of vision was tinted red like someone put a colored gel over the camera lens. And remember that detail. So naturally, after that vision, I never liked that staircase.

[00:02:39] - [Speaker 0]
And fun fact, I also have OCD and I developed this compulsion where I had to hold my breath every time I was in the hallway or on the stairs. And not long after we moved in, things just started happening and they all seemed to center around that staircase. The first thing was one night my mom picked me up from a friend's house and when we got home, the living room light wouldn't turn on no matter how many times I flicked the switch. Now the wall of the living room is also the wall of the staircase and as I was flicking that switch, that's when I heard it. Creaking footsteps going up the stairs.

[00:03:17] - [Speaker 0]
And as soon as whatever was walking on the other side of that wall reached the top of the stairs, The lights in the living room turned on. I ran up those stairs and there was nobody there. Another night, my mom put a stock pot of water on the stove for pasta and came in the living room to talk to me. And only like a minute or two later, we heard a laugh coming from the kitchen. And again, nobody there, but the pot, it was a stock pot, like a big stock pot that you would see like a chef working with on television, was already at a rolling boil.

[00:03:52] - [Speaker 0]
You know, I don't really know much about thermodynamics, and I don't know if ghosts do either. But last time I checked, that's not how water works on planet Earth. Maybe another planet where water boils faster, but here? And that's just the boring stories. Years later, my cousin and her family started staying with us while they were getting back on their feet.

[00:04:13] - [Speaker 0]
My cousin and her husband were staying in our finished basement while her two young sons were in a room at the foot of the stairs. And the room was angled just so that when you're in a child's bed and you looked out the door, you could see straight through the door and up the stairway. Now those kids were a nightmare and they never slept. They would scream and cry and get out of bed and run around the house at all hours of the night. And one evening, they were having a meltdown as usual and I stomped down the stairs and told those little cretins to get in their freaking beds because I had class in the morning.

[00:04:50] - [Speaker 0]
And those little creeps looked at me and just said, we want to, but the lady on the stairs keeps watching us. And now I was too tired and void of any patients to process what they had said to me, so I just looked at them and said, Then you know what we do? We close the door. And I did, and I went to bed. I don't know how I was that brave, but I was.

[00:05:14] - [Speaker 0]
Only a few weeks later, I was sitting at my room at the top of the stairs writing some research paper when my brother bursts into my bedroom asking if I had just gone down the stairs. I hadn't moved in hours because back then, we had to write our papers with our human hands and our human brains. And I asked him, why? Why why do you want to know if I went down the stairs? Turns out that my brother was in the upstairs hallway leaning his back against that flimsy railing, talking to his girlfriend who was sitting in his bedroom.

[00:05:42] - [Speaker 0]
But he heard footsteps behind him going down the stairs and he looked over his shoulder and as he did so, he saw a woman with long white hair in a nightgown slowly descending the stairs. Now you at home are probably saying, that could be you. You do have long blonde hair. But back then, I assure you, I actually had a buzz cut. So joke's on you, debunked.

[00:06:07] - [Speaker 0]
Regardless, we searched the house and as always, came up with nothing. But I was curious, and even back then, I was a little bit of a historic investigator. So based on his description of her nightgown and her hair, my expertise in retro television, my best guess was late nineteen fifties, maybe early nineteen sixties. Yeah. She was an older woman with long hair, which wasn't too common except if you're wearing it up or you're getting regular sets, your hair might be a little bit longer.

[00:06:35] - [Speaker 0]
My best guess is that it wasn't the wife or the owner of the house, but it was probably an in law or a parent who was staying at the house. Now investigating the story is still on my list, but the house was only built in 1956, and it was sold to new owners in 1967, both which do line up with these fashion choices and where I would place her. But those census records that I would need to see who was living in the house during those decades are sealed. Years after this encounter, I had moved out and I was living with my boyfriend at the time, but we ended up back at this house after our apartment's boiler exploded, which was really, really fun. And that first night back, we slept on a mattress on the floor of my old bedroom.

[00:07:18] - [Speaker 0]
Now my boyfriend knew nothing about this ghost, but the next morning, he said that he had barely slept. And he went on to tell me that he woke up to an old woman standing just outside the doorway in the hall watching us sleep. He said that he wasn't really scared of her and she felt more like she was curious and she felt more like a parent checking in on their children than anything else. And then of course, when I asked what she looked like, he said that she was an older woman with long white hair. Fast forward another year and another boyfriend.

[00:07:53] - [Speaker 0]
This time, we'll call him Liam. I brought him home for the weekend to meet my mom and to see my hometown, and we had a really good day. We had a good hike in the Niagara Gorge and we ended the night with everyone hanging out in the living room, getting to know each other a little bit better. Once we're alone as we're getting ready for bed, Liam turns to me and asks out of nowhere, has your grandmother passed on? And no.

[00:08:15] - [Speaker 0]
At this time, both of my grandmothers were alive. But something in his tone had me thinking. So I asked him, why are you asking? And he proceeded to tell me that there was a woman standing behind my mother while we were in the living room. And at this point, I definitely knew.

[00:08:32] - [Speaker 0]
So I asked him to describe her without giving him any kind of leading information. And he told me that she was slender, she was wearing a nightgown, had long white hair and was dripping red. He described it not as blood, just the color, as if the color red was dripping off of her and pooling on the floor. And that's what really made my heart jump because that's what I saw the day that I toured the house. I saw the color red on the stairs and the woman that Liam described was exactly what my brother had seen.

[00:09:10] - [Speaker 0]
And I had never told him this ghost story before. So the fact that he came up with those details, not just the woman, not just the color red, but both of those together, really makes you think. Now there's no tidy ending to this story. I moved away not long after and although my brother still owns the house, he hasn't seen or heard anything since. But from what I gather, the red lady isn't malevolent.

[00:09:35] - [Speaker 0]
Sad. Very, very sad. But honestly, I feel like she's protective. And I'm hoping that the next census drop gives me something to work with and I can give her a name. Now if that story wasn't already crazy and woo woo enough for you, I'm about to sound really crazy.

[00:09:52] - [Speaker 0]
And these little stories are gonna give you more context as to the larger story where a dead lady gave me a book. Yeah. Yeah. Hold on to your pants. So I have this thing.

[00:10:03] - [Speaker 0]
I don't really know what you would call it, but sometimes I just know things. I think the Red Lady story is an example of it. Some may call it like claircognizance or even clairvoyance. Others like myself might just say that it's a trauma response and I'm very good at analyzing my surroundings and picking up on information, sometimes on a very subconscious level and expressing it verbally. Who's to say?

[00:10:28] - [Speaker 0]
Listen to these stories and you be the judge. And in the first of these stories, I was driving with my stepmother and she pointed out the window and she said, Hey, that's my friend Frank's house. And out of nowhere, I said, well, it's a nice house, but if I lived there, I think I'd end up killing myself. I know. It's a strange thing to say.

[00:10:46] - [Speaker 0]
I don't know why I said it. It just came out. And a couple of days later, my phone rang and I picked up. There was no hello on the other end. It was just, Josh, tell me right now.

[00:10:57] - [Speaker 0]
Are you a witch? I've been called worse, but also, yeah, I am kind of. Why? So it turns out that Frank had died by suicide the same day that we drove past his house. His body was likely in there when I said that.

[00:11:14] - [Speaker 0]
This could be just a coincidence. It could be picking up maybe on some depressive energy subconsciously, but either way, it was still strange. But don't worry, things get stranger. One night, I had a dream that I was in an asylum and I was flipping through patient charts. And one of these charts had my ex's name, Liam, on it, the guy from the Red Lady story.

[00:11:38] - [Speaker 0]
And right below it, underlined several times in red was make sure Liam takes his medicine. Okay. Very ominous, but Liam did have a history with mental health issues, so despite knowing how unhinged it is to text your ex that you just dreamed of them I did it anyways. It just I just felt like I had to do it. He wrote back and he told me that he actually ran out of his medicine the night before, and he was planning on waiting until the weekend to refill his prescription.

[00:12:07] - [Speaker 0]
It was Monday. And because I texted him and because of the dream I had, he filled it that day instead. And now I like to think that hopefully I helped to avoid some kind of mental health crisis, but even if I didn't, I'm glad that I listened to my intuition in this case. And I would love to say that I always act on that intuition, but alas, I'm a dumb fuck, and that is not the case. And if it were the case, I probably could have saved myself a lot of heartache.

[00:12:36] - [Speaker 0]
About seven years ago, early into dating my last boyfriend, I laid out the ground rules pretty much on one of our first few dates. Since I was living in New York City, I wanted to make it clear, a hard line for me was no hard drugs. No exceptions. That's the boundary. Because I don't have a problem if that's what you do.

[00:12:55] - [Speaker 0]
I just can't deal with that. And so this guy laughed it off and he said, don't worry. I have no desire to do that. And I was like, awesome. Great.

[00:13:04] - [Speaker 0]
Check that off the list. And we continue to date and things started to get serious. And one night, I woke up out of a dead sleep in a full on panic attack because I had a nightmare that he was sneaking around, getting into cocaine, and developing an addiction. I did listen to this dream, but maybe I just didn't listen hard enough. I immediately brought it up to him, and I restated that boundary saying, hey, if that's something you wanna do, that's great.

[00:13:31] - [Speaker 0]
But if you do, I'm out. And he reassured me that I had absolutely nothing to worry about. So I trusted this man and I let it go. Fast forward six months later, and the dream was right. And when I had found out, I got the full gaslight treatment that I was enjoying pretty much the entirety of our relationship.

[00:13:51] - [Speaker 0]
And he had told me that I was overreacting, and eventually he delivered the line, well, when you said it was a deal breaker, I didn't think you actually meant it. Girl, what do you think a deal breaker is? Anyway, that's only scratching the surface that was the gaslight factory of a relationship, but the lesson I learned was, a, don't trust men, b, I should have listened to my gut the first time. Okay. Now, one last little psychic story before we start on the ghosts again.

[00:14:19] - [Speaker 0]
When I was in cosmetology school, one of my teachers learned that I was a little bit witchy and asked me to read her cards while a client's color processed. Now, this was a teacher. I knew nothing about her personal life, but I laid out the cards, and I looked at them, and I just got this feeling. And I just blurted it out because I didn't know what else to do and I was just like, hey, so I don't mean to overstep here and this card usually doesn't mean this at all, but I think that you're gonna have a baby. And my teacher looked at me and she laughed and she said that that was not possible for her.

[00:14:55] - [Speaker 0]
Wouldn't you know it? Two weeks later, she pulled me aside and she swore me to secrecy and she told me, I'm not supposed to tell anyone this soon, but I need you to know that I'm pregnant. So do with those stories what you will. Those are just some true weird experiences that I've had. And now, I'll tell you about one of these types of experiences that led directly to a ghost.

[00:15:17] - [Speaker 0]
So my sister is a real estate agent, but she also likes to, I would like to say, garbage pick, but I'll be really nice and just say that she enjoys collecting treasures. So one day, I tagged along with her and her girlfriend at the time, and we ended up at a farm auction of all places. Just three little queers at a farm auction. It was quite the experience. They were auctioning off livestock, chickens, and a lot of garbage.

[00:15:42] - [Speaker 0]
And when I say garbage, I literally mean garbage. It was like like things that you would find on Pig Man's Road, which if you haven't listened to that episode, it's the first episode of this podcast, and this auction actually wasn't too far from Pig Man's Road. But I digress. As this farm auction was wrapping up, my sister got a call from one of her plugs. And no, not like my accent wasn't cocaine.

[00:16:04] - [Speaker 0]
It was for an estate sale. Because she was part of this vast network of treasure hunters, and so she would often get calls like these whenever there was an estate sale going on or there was a particular treasure spotted on the side of the road. So her guy called her and let her know that a three day estate sale was ending, and there was a ton of stuff left over, and that she could feel free to go and pick through it before it was all donated. And she asked me if I wanted to come. At this time, I really wanted to go home and take a shower to wash the manure smell off of me.

[00:16:36] - [Speaker 0]
I looked at her and I said, yeah, I mean, we can go, but I'm telling you, all that's gonna be left at that place is some old spring rocking horse sitting in the basement and it's gonna all be for nothing. With that, we all hopped in the car and headed back into the city. So we pull up to this estate sale, and we go inside, and we start rummaging around on the 1st Floor. While we were up there, I started to have this weird feeling in my throat. It was feeling really, really tight and constricted, like, I wouldn't say it was like a choking feeling, but almost like there was a literal lump in my throat.

[00:17:09] - [Speaker 0]
It was getting really irritating, and I was clearing my throat a lot, and my sister was asking if I was okay. Naturally, we had just gotten there. I assured her that I was fine, and she let me know that we would leave as soon as we checked the basement. So my sister, her girlfriend, and I all made our way downstairs. In the basement, there were a few long tables full of books, and there was piles of stuff on the floor, and there were a bunch of rooms off to the side.

[00:17:33] - [Speaker 0]
Naturally, I went straight for the books. I'm a librarian. It's a reflex. And a few minutes in while I'm paging through some of these books, I heard my sister's girlfriend yell from one of the side rooms, oh my god, Josh. What the fuck?

[00:17:47] - [Speaker 0]
Now I was worried that something happened and I ran over with a book still in my hand, and I stopped dead in my tracks. In that otherwise empty room, there was only one thing there, an old spring rocking horse. It was exactly what I joked would be there and exactly what I saw in my head. Now again, this could be a coincidence, but to be honest, you don't really see many old rocking horses in an elderly person's home. And it was at this point that I looked down at the book I was still holding, The Crystal Healer.

[00:18:20] - [Speaker 0]
Crystal prescriptions that will change your life forever. Now I don't love new agey things because it reeks of cultural appropriation and it's mainly just white people seeking validation and desperately trying to find some identity outside of Christianity by appropriating the cultures that Christianity itself has suppressed and tried to eradicate through genocide for centuries, but I digress. So while this book wasn't typically my cup of tea, I kept it anyway. It almost felt like it wanted to come home with me or I was supposed to have it. Back in the car, I started flipping through it and I noticed that there was marginalia.

[00:18:56] - [Speaker 0]
There were scribbled notes and stars scattered throughout the pages. As I read more of them, a pattern began to emerge. Holding turquoise to the throat area can help your vocal cords. That was starred. Crystals for thyroid gland disorders.

[00:19:10] - [Speaker 0]
That was also starred. And as I saw more of these, I went white. Whiter than I already am. I I promise, I swear I do have Mexican heritage. That lump in my throat, the whole time I was in that house.

[00:19:25] - [Speaker 0]
Was I picking up on someone's actual thyroid disorder? Maybe, but it could have also been mold or mildew or residual cigarette smoke. It was an old house occupied by oldies after all. And I think that part is the most easily explained. But with the horse and with the book, I do find it a little bit hard to just simply write off.

[00:19:49] - [Speaker 0]
I truly feel like this book was a gift from the other side. But you'll have to let me know what you think. Now this next ghost story, yes, I still have some more. You may have actually heard it if you listen to the original version of this podcast, Crimes and Witch Demeanors. I had an episode that was inspired by this story and led to an investigation of my friend's home.

[00:20:10] - [Speaker 0]
It was summer twenty sixteen, a magical naive time before every day became a living hellscape. It was full of innocence and joy and I was visiting my friend Mary at her sister's house. Her sister had just moved into an old Victorian mansion with her husband and they were still in the process of moving in, just like every horror movie starts. Mary and I had spent the night running around the neighborhood like little hooligans playing Pokemon Go. I may have also set off a security alarm at a church, but that is neither here nor there and probably completely unrelated to what followed.

[00:20:44] - [Speaker 0]
Once we returned to this old Victorian, we were sweaty and exhausted from the summer heat, which was only made worse once we got inside by a stunning lack of airflow. Mary and I decided we would sleep together in one of the 2nd Floor rooms because it wasn't worth arguing over who would get the box fan. We were both dying and we both understood that this was a matter of life and death. So we set the box fan onto a chair in order to get it to window height, and we left the room to go and brush our teeth. Now while we were in the bathroom, we heard this loud crash, and we came running into the bedroom, toothbrushes hanging out of our mouths, and we saw that the fan was on the floor.

[00:21:26] - [Speaker 0]
Okay, that's fine. It happens. It's literally blowing air. It could fall if it's on a chair. So we set it up again and we continue brushing our teeth and we heard it crash a second time.

[00:21:38] - [Speaker 0]
However, when we came back into the room this time is when I noticed how it landed. The chair that the fan was sitting on had a back on it and the fan just didn't simply fall forward in front of the seat. It was on the opposite side of the chair, over the back of the chair. And now this was really weird, but somehow we both still didn't think anything of it. And we did the skeptic INTJ thing, and we just filed it under weird physics, and, you know, we got ready for bed.

[00:22:09] - [Speaker 0]
We left the hall light on in case we had to get up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. We closed the bedroom door, and we went to bed. Not even five minutes into sitting in bed, and I hear this creaking sound. And I open my eyes to light flooding the room. The door swung open on its own.

[00:22:27] - [Speaker 0]
But again, this is an old Victorian house. It creaks, it shifts, doors don't sit flush. So I got up. I closed it. And this time, I wedged a doorstop underneath it.

[00:22:39] - [Speaker 0]
Very hard on the inside of the room. So the door wouldn't open in from the hallway. So I got back into bed and again, only like five minutes later, I feel something tugging on the drawstring of my gym shorts. And I opened my eyes and the door isn't just cracked. It's fully open.

[00:23:01] - [Speaker 0]
Neither Mary nor myself had moved. There was nobody else in the house. And I whispered to Mary, Mary, the door is open. And a little annoyed, almost like I said to my nephews when they told me there was a lady on the stairs. She said, then just close it.

[00:23:17] - [Speaker 0]
Yeah. Mary, I put the doorstop on the inside. So being the manly man that I am, I got up to reset the doorstop, but I couldn't find the doorstop anywhere in the room. And again, remember, the door opens inward. The doorstop was on the inside.

[00:23:35] - [Speaker 0]
So at this point, I was thoroughly confused and maybe a little scared. So I eked out into the hallway and I didn't see anything at first, but then I saw it. The doorstop. It wasn't just outside the door. It was about 10 feet down the long Victorian hallway sitting in the middle of the floor.

[00:23:56] - [Speaker 0]
For that to happen, something had to force open a door that swings inward, force that door over a doorstop that was wedged underneath it, pick up that doorstop, carry it about 10 feet away without Mary and I hearing a thing. Or the disturbing alternative was that someone was inside the room with us, got up, took the doorstop out, opened the door, and then dropped the door stopper during their escape. Either way, not good. So I walked out in the hallway. I picked up the doorstop and brought it back into the bedroom, wedged it back under the door, and looked at Mary and said to the open air, Hey, we got your message loud and clear.

[00:24:37] - [Speaker 0]
You're here. Hi. Hello. But we're really tired and really sweaty. Can you please just let us sleep?

[00:24:44] - [Speaker 0]
And nothing else happened that night. Unlike my own home, I did investigate the history of that house. So I do have some ideas of who that ghost might be. But for my very last story, I didn't have to question who the ghost was. When I was a kid, my stepmother's father had passed away and we had to clean out his house.

[00:25:04] - [Speaker 0]
And just like my stepsister, he loved his treasures, except that it was a little bit more than just love of treasure. Think certified TLC level hoarder. That's that's what he was. So after a day of cleaning out the house and feeling like we got nowhere because we didn't have a dumpster, we we literally got nowhere. Everyone was congregated in the living room debriefing and trying to figure out what we should do next.

[00:25:31] - [Speaker 0]
And eventually, somehow, the conversation had shifted to a vase or a vase that my stepmother was looking for. And no one in the living room seemed to know where it was, and I said, well, I do remember that I did see a glass vase on top of the refrigerator in the kitchen, and I'm not sure if that's what you're looking for. And no sooner did those words leave my lips than we heard a crash. Everyone ran into the kitchen, and as we did so, we saw that the vase that I had just mentioned was sitting upright in the center of the kitchen floor, three feet away from the refrigerator that it was on top of. But it turns out that it wasn't the vase that they were looking for, so I just picked it up and said, sorry, that was the wrong one, but thanks anyway.

[00:26:16] - [Speaker 0]
And then I had an adult put it back on the fridge where it belonged because I was a tiny little child. Again, this vase, it surely could have just fallen off of the fridge. But why at that moment And how did it land upright without breaking? It could have been a ghost or it could have been a very well timed coincidence. And somehow, my skeptic ass will always lead toward coincidence.

[00:26:43] - [Speaker 0]
But that's it for my own stories, at least for now. Maybe this building will grant me some ghostly tales to recount to you. But if you have your own ghost stories, I would love to hear them. You can either send me an email or leave me a voice message at citegeistpod.com. Now if any of these stories spooked you or made you think I was crazy, maybe even made you a believer in ghosts, please give me a thumbs up on my YouTube channel.

[00:27:06] - [Speaker 0]
And if you wanna hear some historic ghost stories investigated using the historic record, please make sure you're subscribed because this is where you'll find those. I'll And be back to our regular episodes next week. And I would give you a clue on the topic, but that was it. That that was the clue. Until next time, I'll see you in the stacks.