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Around Halloween people always ask me, “Where can I go to see a ghost?” I always tell them that there’s no time or place in the world at which a spontaneous psychic experience will be even faintly likely. I certainly don’t suggest to them that some commercial and collective event like a TV-style ghost hunt or one of my own ghost walks will do the trick. But every once in a great while somebody on one of my tours believes he or she has seen a ghost. Such encounters happen about once a year.
On a chill night in October 1998, forty people stood at 681 Main Street in Buffalo outside the then-Sphere music club, now the Town Ballroom. Standing under the marquee with my back to the ticket booth, I was detailing the natural and supernatural track record of the site. It had quite the 20th century history, including life as a Prohibition-era speakeasy, the Buffalo hangout of gangster Al Capone, and a series of more recent theaters and music halls. In the group were three of my friends. Two were Ph. D. candidates in anthropology at the University of Buffalo, and the third was an occultist-slash-ghosthunter.
As always I was looking at eye-level, focused on my audience and delivering the best presentation I could. I remember people looking unusually chilled and spellbound near the end of this stop, which at the time I attributed to my unusually effective storytelling. Only later, when I got home and read an e-mail from one of my three friends, did I find that he and most of the rest of the group might have seen an apparition at that site. He started by saying, “You remember that cat that walked right through us as you were talking?”
I had seen the cat well enough to remember it. It was a tiger-striped dust-and-white tabby that came from somewhere to the north of our position, wandered through us like it owned the sidewalk, sashayed close enough to me at one point to brush my pants legs, then meandered off to our south. I didn’t track it after that. My friend and several others he talked to had followed it with their eyes and seen it disappear like a ghost about twenty feet away. He conferred with the rest of the group as they moved toward our next stop, and most of them had spotted the marvel.
On a Lewiston ghost walk in October 2008, my group of ninety stood outside the 1901 Catholic church on Plain Street near its meeting with Fourth. It was about 8:15 and already full dark. As I led the group west for its next stop, the two people at the east end had to wait until everyone else got moving. They didn’t say anything to me when the walk was over, but at midnight their e-mail was waiting, attesting to the sighting of an abrupt dark form that bolted from the shadows of the eastern side of the church, shot right at them for fifty feet like a crossbow-bolt, and disappeared into the shadow of a big tree like it had become one with it. Both people saw it, and both were convinced there was no natural explanation. They were also shook. It had come right at them.
Some sort of airborne apparition on the East Aurora tour marked the 2010 version of this phenomenon, or so they tell me. (As the tour guide, I always miss this stuff.) This was a really big group in East Aurora, well over 150 people, and we were splitting them up at the start, just outside the Roycroft Inn.
While the event people reported on the east side of South Grove Street could well seem a naturally caused optical illusion, at least to me, I wasn’t the one who saw the dark forms of several abrupt, surging figures, some human-like and some not, projected as silhouettes against the dense foliage of several trees twenty feet off the ground. Up to ten people told one of our tour guides, Gerry Halligan, that they saw this fleeting effect, with no handy explanations. Maybe the Wild Hunt was hurtling the skyline in the western distance, and the low, young harvest moon gave us a shadow-play of them.
At once the most dynamic and the best-witnessed group sighting we’ve ever had was in August 2004 on our ghost walk of Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada. (We haven’t done this walk since that year.) Our young tour guide Scott Jones reported a group of fourteen appreciative young women and one big, well-built young man who was openly scornful of supernatural reports and folklore. He could have affected everyone else’s enjoyment, and he didn’t help our tour guide’s concentration. However, as if the eternal forces had a message to send, the entire group got a surprise on the edge of a golf course on the northwest point of the Niagara’s junction with the Ontario.
Fort Niagara was in sight of them to their right, and the lake brooded ahead of them. A dozen or so ghostly, faint bluish, lights were at play a hundred yards into the indigo twilight ahead of them. They were head-sized and flocked about head-height, and they perfectly fit the description of the Iroquois witch lights often associated with old battlefields. This open golf course outside Fort Mississauga was the field over which Lt.-Colonel Winfield Scott and his American army had stormed the village of Newark and Fort George in May of 1813. It was estimated that 400 men could have died in beachside clashes somewhere near it. So much of the fighting was hand-to-hand and steel to steel.
The group observed this effect as long as they looked. The brash lad among them reached persistently for natural explanations, ranging even to boats in the very visible Lake Ontario far beyond. One by one his suggestions faded into insensibility. At last even he had to admit that he had witnessed a marvel. He and all others signed a statement on the back of our signup sheet attesting to it. When they left it was full night, and still the lights continued their play.
The Rohlfs House at 156 Park Street in Allentown is an annual wonder and a frequent satisfier of the ghost hunters in our tours of that part of Buffalo. A lot of picture-taking takes place from outside this east-facing Arts & Crafts style monument, and every year we get several reports of photographic anomalies. It’s almost never orbs or ectoplasm, the widely-ridiculed, lowest-common-denominators of TV ghosthunting. It’s sometimes a murky face in a window, sometimes antic and grim. It can even be some quite material alteration, like–during a time that the building was dark and vacant–a pair of curtains in a window that are parted in a photograph taken at 8:30 and drawn in one taken at 9:15.
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2011 may have already had its sighting, and a generic one: that of the Little Girl Ghost of South Grove Street in East Aurora.
At a very busy time of my year I led a private ghost walk for the minimum fee. I probably needed the time off more than the money. My voice certainly did. (Most Haunted History Ghost Walks tour guides are hoarse all the second half of October.) But the night brought its own rewards.
This gathering featured extended family members from far parts. Among them was a sandy-haired, five-year-old wide-body named Morgan. From Raleigh, NC, his chief pursuit was sneaking up behind me at the front of the tour and trying to scare me by roaring like a lion. At least four times he did this. His roar is not what he thinks it is, but I feigned shock every time, and he bellowed with laughter. He is an adorable kid, and I wish him a blessed life. He does not know the ghost stories of East Aurora, though, particularly ten minutes in. And no one in his family could know the ones I do not regularly tell.
As we left the Roycroft Inn and moved south on South Grove for the first real walking of our night, Morgan came up beside me and asked, “Where did the little girl go to?” He had seen a little girl run out of the Italianate, 1880s house at the northwest corner of South Grove and Oakwood, dash down the sidewalk in the direction we were headed, and vanish. I was looking in the general direction and think I would have caught some impression of a streaking three-foot apparition. Either he was making something up, or he’d seen a ghost.
It would have been a funny thing to make up at that moment. It would not have been a funny thing to see there.
Morgan could not have known that the old Godfrey house is a site is associated with a neighborhood rumor of a neglected, short-lived little girl and psychic phenomena pertaining to her that lasts to this day. Roycroft employees walking to work or driving from it at night often report the fleeting image of this most common ghostly form, a hundred feet south of their Inn. This is a site I don’t even talk about on the regular ghost walk, and I have never published this story. (We have stories all over all our routes that we don’t tell unless someone asks us.) It was even before the spot in our tour at which we discuss the extra-sensory abilities of children. I didn’t know Morgan at all at that moment, but in retrospect, I don’t think he could have been messing with me. He said what he said too seriously. It would be the only time during our two-hour walk that he would turn somber.
I always tell people to be vigilant in their own lives if they want to experience psychic phenomena. It is more common than some of us think it is, and it may be around us more than we think. I guess that goes double for ghost walks, and at this time of year.