Unsolved Mysteries: Ghosts, disc 2

A couple has bought a house in a housing development.

One day an elderly guy showed up and led the husband to the back yard. The couple was going to ut in a pool, and the elderly guy said there were some graves there.

The couple had a back-hoe operator dig down a ways and then they dug by hand. They found pine boards and a skeleton. They called the Sheriff's department in and they did an exhumation. They also found a second coffin with a skeleton.

The couple did some research and found out their home and others were built on top of an African-American cemetery called Black Hope. There were around sixty people buried there in pauper's graves.

The couple had the skeletons reburied after they were able to identify who they were. The couple, particularly the wife, was really upset at having disturbed their original graves.

Unfortunately, a series of unusual events then began to happen. One example involved shoes being taken from a closet by someone and placed upon the graves. It turned out to be the buried woman's birthday, and the shoes were placed there as if they were being given as a gift. A dozen other homeowners in the area reported odd things happening.

Another family in the area saw sinkholes in the shapes of coffins appear in their ground and an odd marking on a tree near the sinkholes. The couple found the person who had marked the tree, and said the marking was to indicate where his two sisters were buried. Their house later had odd shadows and a putrid smell appear.

Other things happened, including what sounding like a door opening and someone walking through their halls, but when the mother and her granddaughter checked, there was no one there and the door was still locked.

One night the husband saw two forms pass through the house and go to his wife's bedroom, where there was now only one form. Shortly thereafter six of their relatives were diagnosed with cancer, and three of them died.

The first couple sued the developer for not revealing their home was built on a graveyard. They won at first, but then the verdict was overturned and they had to pay $50,000 in court costs.

The first couple went bankrupt and lost their house and had to move. The second couple was not allowed to dig to find a body since it was against the law to dig in a cemetery (although no body actually been found on their grounds), so the wife decided she'd dig anyhow. The mother became ill and when her daughter took over the digging she suffered a heart attack and died two days later, even though she was only thirty years old. They sold the house and moved away. Oddly enough, none of the people who later lived in those homes experienced anything unusual.

This is a somewhat unusual episode. The first couple acted in a very respectful manner, yet they were hit with negative things just like the second couple. Neither couple seemed to try and contact any religious people, either; perhaps a minister or a priest might have been able to give them some kind of advice. A very unusual and somewhat upsetting episode.

A family purchased a used bunk bed and when they started using it negative things began to happen.

The three children became ill within a few weeks of starting to use the bed.

The kids began seeing a witch-like woman and the family called in their pastor who said he sensed evil in the house.

One night the husband came home from work and heard things then saw the garage apparently on fire, although there was no fire. Things got even worse in the house.

The family fled their home. Two weeks later they had the bunk bed destroyed. They moved to another city. Another family bought the house and moved in but had nothing strange happened.

Now this is very interesting since I have quite a bit of material on this topic up on my Japanese section. I didn't know it there were any videoclips, though.

Blimps were put up by the Navy to monitor possible enemy activity along the California coastline. (There was a bombing in Oregon by a Japanese plane trying to start a forest fire, and there were also the balloon bombs. Again, more information on this is in my Japanese section.)

On August 16, 1942, one of the airships crashed with no one on board. It was supposed to have a two-man crew, but they had vanished. The two men were never found.

The two men who were flying the blimp were experienced and dependable.

This man was a machinists mate would was supposed to be on the flight, but the pilot told him it wasn't necessary for him to go and he left the blimp while it was still on the ground.

This is the flight plan the blimp was to follow. The islands were 25 miles off the coast.

They called when they were four miles east of the islands, about an hour and a half into the flight, and were investigating a suspicious oil slick.

Three hours later the airport got a report of a crashed blimp.

A description of the scene where a swimmer saw the blimp approaching the land.

The blimp hid the edge of a small cliff and this knocked off its depth charge which made the blimp lighter so it rose up and drifted inland some more. At some point it began to deflate rapidly.

The crash scene. The blimp scrapped the top of a house before settling to ground. There were no injuries among the people on the ground, fortunately.

The gondola part was examined thoroughly. There were two life jackets missing, but regulations said the men were to put on life jackets before they lifted off, so there was no mystery there. The door was apparently open, however, which it shouldn't have been.

The Navy's explanation was that something went wrong, one guy opened the door to look out and see what was happening, and somehow both men fell out of the blimp and presumably were killed upon impacting the water.

(One thing I wonder about was why didn't anyone ask if two men standing on the same side of the blimp while it was in the air would cause it to tip over. If one guy was hanging out a door and the other guy came to help him, maybe the weight caused the blimp to tilt towards the side the men were on, making it easier for them to fall out of the blimp.)

Here are a few of the articles from papers of the times.

Reno Evening Gazette, Aug. 17, 1942

Reno Evening Gazette, August 18, 1942

Oakland Tribune, Aug. 19, 1942

Reno Evening Gazette, August 20, 1942

A guy is talking to a really young girl named Heidi.

The girl (a little older then in the above event, I think).

The parents tried to find the guy she talked to, but they couldn't find him. She also saw, repeatedly, a guy she called Mr. Gordy.The mother is shown proof that the house next door used to belong to a man named Gordy. Another person who lived in the area verified that he was indeed dead.

One of the neighbors brings over some pictures and the girl is able to identify the first person she saw.

Things went ok for around four years, with the girl seeing the ghosts other times, but things then changed. Some kind of “sinister” spirit began to appear.

Heidi's face gets scratched, and a couple nights later her father's side is scratched. He was attacked for several more nights.

A parapsychologist is called in to investigate. He shows her some pictures and (the section was filmed as it happened) she was able to pick out the one that was Mr. Gordy. The parents, by the way, have a wonderful attitude toward Heidi's ability; they think it's a gift and fine (as long as they don't see the ghosts themselves, of course.)

(The episode ends there. There was no identification of the malicious spirit, nor anything said about what the family did, if anything, to counteract it's actions. The show seems to have a tendency to do this; end an episode physically but without ending it in a resolved manner.)

In 1994 a mother and her three-year-old child disappeared while traveling on highway 50, traveling towards Carson City, Nevada.

Five days after they disappeared a couple was traveling the same highway. The wife saw what she thought was naked woman lying by the side of the road. The couple stopped at the nearest phone booth and called the police (they were worried it might have been a practical joke or some kind of trap which is why they didn't stop and investigate on their own.)

The police came but they couldn't find anything in the dark, so the next day one went out to investigate in the daylight and found a child's shoe.

The officer stopped his car and searched, finding the woman's car had driven off the side of the road into a ravine. She was dead by the young boy was alive.

Wilmington, California, where the army apparently must have been using camels.

The Drum Barracks, where Union troops were prepared for active duty.

A woman took over the museum that was there but had fallen into disrepair. She organized an effort to redo the interior, add new exhibits, and make the museum functional.

She talks about various things that have happened, including shades being raised, lights being left on, sounds, etc. It's nothing malicious, though. None of the people working there are frightened, though; they just accept what is going on with no problem. Other people are also interviewed who saw or heard things.

An exterminator even saw an apparition.

A psychic was brought in and she said the place was teeming with spirits. Interestingly enough one talked to her and complained about his chair being too far from the fire. The psychic noticed something odd about one of his feet. The curator did some research and was able to identify the man and that fact that one foot had suffered terrible frostbite and he was in almost constant pain from its effects, even years later.

The leader of the barracks was seen by the psychic once again, and this time he complained about wanting his award and he even showed her the wall he wanted it put on. Some research showed he did receive an award, but apparently the people at the museum were unable to find it.

From the Independent Press-Telegram, California, Sept. 5, 1965, an article on the restoration of the Drum Barracks (although nothing is said about ghosts.)

(This is a badly misnamed episode. It has nothing to do with “profiling” the paranormal. It's concerned only with exorcism, and only with exorcism by a specific group.)

He starts talking about real-life exorcisms.

Then they show an actual exorcism taking place. It's run by a team that specializes in exorcisms and is headed by a physician.

The show talks to a psychiatrist who debunks the exorcism group.

They talk to another woman who claims she was possessed when she started to use a crystal pendulum in hypnotherapy.

One of the group members attacks the use of the ouija board, tarot cards and other similar activities. (They sound like some kind of extreme Christian group the more the episode talks about what the members say.)

The person doing the exorcism for the group is a Bishop “in an order of Catholicism which is not part of the Roman Catholic Church.” Huh?

Late 1800's, two cowboys seen a light which they think is an Apache campfire.

A person talks about seeing similar lights in 1916.The lights were seen again in 1943. Explanations included ball lightning, to St. Elmo's fire, to the ghost of an Apache chieftan.

They talk to a number of people in Martha, Texas, who have seen the lights. Everyone seems to take them quite casually.

In 1989 the show asked a group of scientists to find out what they could about the lights. The total group was around 15 people.

They determine where the lights are normally seen, determine where a radio beacon is, and determine where a road passes through some nearby mountains, marking both ends of the road with lights so they can eliminate cars as an explanation.

They spot something and eliminate the radio beacon or a car as an explanation. They were able to determine it was not from a man-made source. The light eventually just disappeared. All of a sudden it reappeared. They were unable to come up with one explanation and just said it was a “natural phenomenon.”

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