Sandy J. Hartwick

All the latest from author, Sandy J. Hartwick

In the Stacks

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Photo by Jaredd Craig on Unsplash

“I was really walking fast now, starting to freak out, because I remembered my roommate had laughed at me a few weeks ago saying ‘Don’t you know it’s haunted down there?”

In the Stacks

J. attended the University of Nevada, Reno in the 80’s. She lived in Nye Hall, one of the noisiest dorms on campus. She tried many times to study in her room, but it was so loud. She decided to try the library, which was better. “It was quieter, but I was distracted by the different people coming and going.” 

Then,she discovered the stacks–deep in the basement, rows and rows of books. “It was so quiet, so few people, and the rows and stacks of books went on and on. You could almost get lost down there.”

One winter night she came down to the stacks to work on a paper. “It was really empty down there that night. I think I only saw a couple of other people. I was working away, deep in my work, when I felt something brush the back of my hair.”

J. had waist length strawberry-blonde hair at the time. “I froze. I didn’t know if there was someone behind me or what to think. I sat there for a second and then a book fell off the shelf to my right. I jumped up and turned around. No one there. The book was a huge volume and I didn’t see how it could have fallen off the shelf.  I suddenly realized how late it was and grabbed my things to leave. As I walked out, the fluorescent lights kind of buzzed and blinked as I walked along one after another. I was really walking fast now, starting to freak out, because I remembered my roommate had laughed at me a few weeks ago saying ‘Don’t you know it’s haunted down there?'”

J. was almost to the stairs when she heard another book hit the floor. She ran up the stairs and didn’t look back. She never went to the stacks again.



 

 

La Llorona

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Photo by Volkan Olmez on Unsplash

My friend M. shares the legend of  La Llorona, the crying woman.  While M. never encountered La Llorona, her grandma used the tale to enforce good behavior.

M. says, “The story varies a little depending on who tells it, but the gist is simple. Basically,long ago, a woman named Maria, married a rich man, with whom she eventually had two children. Then their marriage hit a rough patch–her husband spent less and less time at home, and whenever he was home, he paid attention only to the children.

Eventually, she sees him with another woman. Enraged beyond reason, some versions claim Maria drowned her two children—but she immediately regretted it, crying out, “Ay, mis hijos!” (Translation: “Oh, my children!” or “Oh, my sons!”)

Maria is sometimes said to have drowned herself afterward. But when she arrived at heaven’s gates, she was denied entry, banished back to purgatory on Earth until she could find her lost children. She’s now known as La Llorona, which translates to “the weeping woman.”

My grandma would tell us if we went outside late or by water La Llorana would grab you and no one would ever see you again.

Grandma said that she was punished, because she choose a man over her children. That you could hear her at night calling for her kids.

I don’t know if you notice, but it’s very rare you hear about Latino kids drowning ! We were scared to go near the water !!
If you look up the movie or the story it gives you different versions.”

Your grandma was a tough cookie M.! I probably would never have learned to swim if I heard that story.

 

“My grandma would tell us if we went outside late or by water La Llorana would grab you and no one would ever see you again.”

 

 

 

A Cry For Help

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Photo by Almos Bechtold on Unsplash

“They heard a woman’s voice from inside the car, “Help us! We’re in here.” The men worked harder, struggling against their own hypothermia.”

A Cry For Help

Tonight I’m running short on spooky stories, so I thought I would share a story that some of you may remember–it made national news in March 2015.

First responders arrived at the scene of a car crash in Utah. The car had gone off a bridge and rested upside down submerged in a river. Because the car could not be seen from the roadway, it was 14 hours after the accident before  a fisherman discovered it and called for help.

Four police officers arrived first on the scene. When they saw an arm through the window they jumped into the icy river to search for survivors. They heard a woman’s voice from inside the car, “Help us! We’re in here.” The men worked harder, struggling against their own hypothermia.

They pulled an unconscious, 18 month old baby girl from the wreckage. The baby had been hanging upside down in her car seat since the time of the accident, her head above the water that filled the car below her. They discovered her mother dead in the front seat; her injuries led them to believe that she died on impact.

Reflecting on the voice that had pleaded for their help one of the officers said, “I don’t know what I thought I heard,” he said. “I’m not a typically religious guy. It’s hard to explain — it was definitely something. Where and why it came from, I’m not sure.”

Later, talking over the incident, one of the officers said he thought he was hearing things, but then the  other officers said they heard it too. Here is a link to the story: https://www.foxnews.com/us/utah-officers-say-mysterious-voice-called-them-to-rescue-baby-trapped-inside-car

 

 

 

The Unlikely Hiker

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The Unlikely Hiker

On July 3, 1994, Robert Speer and his cousin were making their way down the trail in the mountains near Twin Lakes, California.

An older lady, around eighty (he guessed) was making her way up the trail. She was alone and dressed in street clothing. The boys said “Hi” and she echoed “Hi” back as she continued up the path.

It seemed odd, because she was headed up the path and the sun was beginning to set. The boys continued down the mountain and forgot about it. Robert and his cousin made it to the little cafe at the resort where they met their parents.

Later that evening at their cabin on lower lake, Robert learned that an elderly woman, an acquaintance of his grandmother had an accident; she and her vehicle had gone into lower lake that afternoon. She had died. When Robert saw her picture he was certain it was the same woman on the trail.

The next day was 4th of July and Robert and his cousin had volunteered to help at the pancake breakfast in nearby Bridgeport. As they were cleaning up at the end, Robert stopped and stared at the crowd on the street.

Walking through the throngs of people, Robert was sure it was the woman they had seen on the trail. He  turned and tried to get his cousin’s attention, “Hey! Isn’t that–“

From behind him he heard her call, “Do you remember me?”

When he turned back the woman had vanished.

 

 

 

 

Photo by Sergei Akulich on Unsplash

“From behind him he heard her call, “Do you remember me?” “

 

Ghosts at School, Home AND Work!

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Photo by Jon Butterworth on Unsplash

“They said the spirits probably followed me home from work at a nursing home, plus living on a haunted campus itself.”

Ghosts at School, Home AND Work!

T. studied to become an ER nurse and while attending college worked at nursing homes.

T. is  part Lakota from the Cheyenne River Tribe and went to college for a semester at Haskell Indian Nations University, located in Lawrence, Kansas. Only natives registered in a tribe are allowed to attend. Haskell began in 1884 and has its own cemetery. It has a reputation for ghost sightings and phenomena.

T. says there were always reports of sightings and paranormal activity.   T. could hear furniture moving around in the room above her dorm room almost every night, but then she got to know the girl that lived in that dorm and the girl said she never moved her furniture around–especially not in the middle of the night.

T. says, “I always just felt a presence there and I was scared of the deep darkness. The type of darkness you can’t even see shadows in. I had told one of my friends and they said the spirits probably followed me home from work at a nursing home, plus living on a haunted campus itself. That’s when I started sleeping with a dream catcher in my window and it got so bad and I was so scared that my friend had a friend of hers come smudge my room for me. It either helped or it made me feel better or both?

The natives believe strongly in spirits and smudging and I loved hearing all their stories about that sort of thing.”

 

A long time ago, I am unsure if I was awake or still asleep and dreaming but I was laying on my left side and I opened my eyes and there was a very tall, lanky man wearing a long black trench coat. He was a dark figure, but I could see the outline of his shoulders in the dark and his grey mustache. But the rest of him was black, however  it stood out in the black of night. He didn’t move and appeared to be looking down at me. I don’t think I’d be as tall as he was–even if I stood on the bed.” (T. is tall.)

 

The trouble did not end when she left Haskell. T. remembers,”Another memory I have is that I was laying in bed and I opened my eyes and in the darkness was the door, straight ahead and slightly to the right. But standing just to the left of it, to where I could see his black outline against the white walls was a dark, bulky shadow. It appeared like it was just looking at me at the end of the bed. It had the strong, dominant presence of a man  and that’s why I always refer to it as ‘him’ when I think back about it. I was so terrified I couldn’t move, felt like I couldn’t breath. He began to move more left around the side of the bed into the darkness. I remember the red digital numbers on the alarm clock on my dresser against the other wall he was now walking by. I squeezed my eyes shut and then the alarm clock started going off. I started to scream and opened my eyes and the lights were on and the alarm clock was off. The alarm clock said 12:13 in those bright red digital numbers.

That was the last time I saw him, but while I lived in that house I was constantly hearing knocking in the middle of the night, sometimes right on the window directly next to my bed. I honestly was always too scared to open my eyes in the darkness while I lived there.”

T. was around twenty when the shadow men bothered her and she was living in Oklahoma. The shadow figures were in two different houses. T. figured that maybe she brought them home with her from work.

She has worked night shift since 2003 and has had plenty of weird, spooky things happen at work as well.  Countless times call lights would go off in empty rooms or doors opened and shut with nobody around. Sometimes there were loud bangs, knocks, and noises down the dark hallways. Always there was no one there. T. remembers several times patients asking about the man standing in their room, in the dark, in the middle of the night. Or they would ask for the identity of  the woman sitting in the chair. T. says, “Every hospital and nursing home I’ve ever worked in, has the superstition that as soon as someone passes, you open the window so their spirit can escape and not be trapped forever there in the lonely hospital.”



 

 

Something in the Closet

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Something in the Closet

This story is from our friend Rich. The story belongs to his wife, but retelling the story dredges up unpleasant memories and terrible nightmares for her and so he sat down with us today and told the tale.

J.’s grandparents lived in an old house in the country in Galt, California. Her grandparents had lived there for a long time–the house was probably built in the 1900’s. There was some conjecture that someone had died on the property, probably in the barn.

J.’s family was a large, Mormon family. When they got together the house was full. At one gathering, while the adults were in another room visiting, J. and her cousins got to playing around; J. was perhaps nine years old.

There was something weird in the closet. Someone got the idea that they should go in the closet and summon whatever was there and ask it to show itself. Three or four of the cousins squeezed into the closet and called, “We invite you to show yourself!”

Something happened and the children tumbled out of the closet. Something had revealed itself–J.’s cousin bore a bruise in the form of a hand print from something grabbing her.

Evidently this was not enough proof for the children, because one of them got the idea to put flour on the floor of the closet. Again they called, “Reveal yourself!” J. saw footprints appear in the flour. It was enough for her and after that, she didn’t like going there. At another time she saw a cross on the wall turn upside down.

Different people saw different things in the house and on the property. As for J. she found that retelling the story  brought on terrible nightmares. The worst one was a recurring theme, she was frozen in bed, unable to wake up  while a horrible, old man pulled the covers off of her.

             Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

” There was something weird in the closet. Someone got the idea that they should go in the closet and summon whatever was there and ask it to show itself. “

 

The Pink Man

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Photo by Dids from Pexels

 

“We didn’t believe in this sort of thing before this…”

The Pink Man

When Lori was a child, her family had good friends that they liked to vacation and travel with. The family was similar to hers with mom, dad and two daughters. The daughters were close in age to Lori and her sister.

One summer they traveled to Oregon to go salmon fishing. At the end of a fun day, the kids went to bed in the campers and the parents stayed out by the campfire visiting. Lori was in bed by the window, which was wide open, and she overheard a conversation not meant for her ears. The couple had recently purchased and then sold a home in Denver, Colorado. They began the tale with, “We didn’t believe in this sort of thing before this…”

The trouble began almost immediately after they had moved into the home. Doors and windows would open and close on their own. Pictures would come flying off the walls. One evening when the family was out, they returned to find the television on and a shoe over each rabbit ear. For some reason, the ghost particularly hated the maternal grandmother and would throw things at her and the activity would amp up when she visited. But the worst of these things were the nightmares that Charlotte endured. Night after night she would wake them all with screams. When asked about it, she would cry, “There is a pink man sitting on my bed!”

Charlotte’s parents told her that they would wait in the hallway outside her room and she could call them and they would come in and see the pink man. They waited a time and then Charlotte called out, “He’s here.” They entered the room and there was the pink man. It was an apparition that appeared pink due to the streetlights coming through the pink curtains on the window.

The parents were disturbed enough that they arranged for a priest to bless the house. The also had Charlotte blessed, because they had observed her in the yard acting strangely and worried that whatever was in the house might be trying to possess her.

Some research on the home revealed that at one time a happy family had lived there–father, mother and son, but the father had been killed in a tragic accident. Charlotte’s room was the room that the son had lived in and her bed was positioned in the same place as the boy’s bed. The father had often sat on the bed telling the boy stories in the evening.

After the blessings, the activity subsided, but the family still sold the place as quickly as possible and moved out.

 

 

 

 

 

The Stricker Ranch

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The Stricker Ranch

Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash (Not an actual photo of the ranch)

Shannon Stowe was the caretaker at the Stricker Ranch the summer of 1996. Shannon explains in her own words, “When I took the job as the caretaker for the summer, several people told me that the house was haunted. It never bothered me, the idea of spirits being around. There were lots of people that died there on the Oregon trail and there’s a small cemetery down the road from the house.

There were several times that I talked to the spirits before I went to bed and said, “OK if you guys are around I’m gonna put this toothbrush, cup or whatever here on the bathroom counter. If you’re around and want me to know that you’re here, move this item so that I find it somewhere else tomorrow morning.” Each time I invited them to move an item, the spirits accommodated and the item would be in a different place the next morning.

You could feel the energy of the spirits around in the home. As the caretaker, I stayed in the back part of the house. The front part of the house is like a museum for people to come in and look around.”

The Stricker Ranch is located south of Hansen, Idaho, on the old Oregon Trail. In 1980, the ranch was added to the National Register of Historic Places. Dating back to 1865, the ranch was an early stopping point for serving pioneers using the Oregon Trail.

The ranch was operated by a German immigrant named Herman Stricker and his wife Lucy Walgamott. The couple let some of the travelers stay in their home and they ran the store. They sometimes had to nurse the sick emigrants. Eventually a cemetery  was created near the ranch, because not all of the ailing pioneers survived. 

The Stricker Ranch has a great deal of history, but it is considered one of the most haunted spots in Idaho.  The state of Idaho has more information in case you would like to check it out for yourself. https://history.idaho.gov/stricker/

Spooky in San Francisco

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Amelia’s apartment in San Francisco.

Spooky in San Francisco

Amelia Davies moved into her second-ever apartment in 2016 with her boyfriend Sam and another roommate. She was excited, because this apartment was huge compared to her last place. The two bedroom, one bath apartment only had neighbors below and was across from Ocean beach.

After the excitement of moving in had passed, Amelia noticed something about the place that bothered her–the apartment had a long, narrow hallway. It was unusually long and Amelia found the space “off putting.”

When she came home at night the switch by the door would turn on a light that only illuminated half of the hallway. She would have to walk  into the living room to reach the switch that lit the rest of the hallway. Arriving home one evening, she turned on the switch and out of the corner of her eye she saw a shadowy figure at the end of the hallway.

Her sister Alethea lived in the area and would sometimes come over and stay the night. Alethea remarked, “I hate this hallway.”

When she stayed the night she would be in the living room on the couch. Amelia found her sleeping with all of the lights on. Alethea was puzzled too, “I’m not usually scared like this.”

Amelia felt as though there was a negative, male presence in the apartment. She felt uncomfortable in the living room and always felt that there was something looking in from the hallway. If she was alone she could not stand to be in the living room by herself and would go to her room. 

Amelia detected needy emotions, “At this point I hated hanging out in the living room if nobody was home. I felt very negative, almost needy energy. I’m not  really sure how else to explain it, like something stirred in the house when I was home and was angry when I left.”

As time passed, Amelia found she was anxious and having sleep disturbances. More than once she awoke to the sound of someone whispering, “Amelia.” If her foot slipped out from under the covers she sometimes felt something was touching it.

“In reality, four of us were in the apartment instead of three.”

One evening she and her boyfriend accompanied a group of friends out on the town; they came back to the apartment for some drinks. At some point the spooky hallway came into the conversation. Her friend Bobby asked aloud, “Is anyone here with us?” There was silence and then three knocks from the hallway. Bobby quickly launched into a prayer in Spanish. There was no more activity that evening.

A coworker approached Amelia asking if she was okay, because she seemed down. Amelia explained the presence in the apartment. The coworker, a spiritual person, nodded, “I can tell something is attempting to attach itself onto you and drain your energy.”

Her coworker gave her some Palo Santo (Holy wood) sticks for smudging. “Take these and go around the apartment. Ask the negative energy to leave.”

Amelia said this seemed to brighten the apartment and she was able to sleep through the night again.

She was still looking forward to the day their lease was up. On the last day in the apartment, as they were moving their possessions out, they met the neighbor that lived downstairs. They had never seen him before. He stood in the building hallway watching them silently. At last he began to yell at them, “Stomping around! I hear you blasting noise day and night! Lasers!”

He carried on and Amelia wondered about his sanity. She also wondered about the noise he complained about, because they were quiet and none of them were home during the day.

Today Amelia lives in an older, two story home which is quite peaceful–just the way she likes it.

 

 

Jagged Blackness

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Jagged Blackness

J. had two experiences with shadow people. The first one happened at his girlfriend’s new apartment. It was night and she had a large clock that faintly illuminated her room. Adjoining the bedroom was a bath and the clock did not shed any light on it–it was  black.

J. awoke with the terrible feeling of being watched. There was no one in the bedroom, but he felt someone was staring out at him from the bathroom. The bathroom doorway was inky black, an unnatural black and the feeling of a bad presence grew.

J. felt certain someone was there, so certain that he drew his gun and yelled at the shadow, “Who are you? What do you want?”

His girlfriend woke up and turned the lights on. There was nothing there.

The second experience was worse. J.’s father and brother had taken him to a shooting school as a gift for his bachelor’s party.  At the hotel, J. chose the pull-out sofa as his bed. They all went to bed, but left the hallway light on.

J. slept and awoke in the middle of the night. He looked around the room towards his right and the television. Everything was normal. He looked back to his left and there looming above him was an enormous shadow person. It was so huge and impossibly black.

He could see its legs and arms, but there was no head, only jagged blackness. J. was frozen and couldn’t move. He screamed and screamed.

His brother and father ran into the room guns in hand, thinking that he was being murdered. J. said he saw his brother and father run through the apparition before it faded away. 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Elti Meshau on Unsplash

” J. was frozen and couldn’t move. He screamed and screamed.”