Ghost Hunter Gear & Equipment

The telling of supernatural tales is a long-held, cherished tradition among campers. As they sit around a crackling fire in the dark of night, chilling stories are told of vengeful ghosts and threatening monsters. But these stories, told and retold year after year, are just that - stories.

Yet unexplained things sometimes really do occur out there in the woods at night. Here are some true tales of the paranormal reported by campers. Ghosts, strange creatures, UFOs and mysterious phantoms - encounters that are sure to creep back to mind the next time you’re camping.

White Mountains Creature

K.H. was camping at a National Forest campground in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. On night, after his wife and daughter had falled asleep, he was sitting by the fire when he heard a noise…

• This was different than the usual bear grunt. It was more like someone sneaking in the trees. I immediately grabbed the flashlight. What I saw haunts me even now. I saw a being in the trees. It was naked. It looked gray. And this sounds crazy, but it looked like a person, but not really. It was hunched down, very muscular and its legs were backward, like a bird’s. Then it quickly turned and bounded off down the hill. I couldn’t even follow it with my light. We left the next day. We went back to the same campground this year. Back to the same site. Again, I stayed up late poking the fire and reading. It was maybe one or two in the morning when I heard a noise. I shined the light in that direction. That same creature, being, whatever, was there. It looked exactly the same as I’d remembered from last year. It just sat there, crouched at the small tree line that separates the campsites. I slowly walked toward it. I tried not to make any threatening moves or gestures. I got to within 20 feet when it just jumped backward and disappeared. It looked like it might be five to six feet high if it stood up. It was definitely gray. It had human features, but more leathery. And its face was very wide. Its eyes were so big, and, even though they reflected light, they still looked black, like two intensely black marbles. Its legs were very muscular, but turned backward. I know what I saw. It was real. - Kevnh

Phantom Campers

Nightraven and friend Todd were camping at a cabin in the Upper Peninsula Of Michigan. They were waiting for other friends to arrive when they had an unexplained experience…

• At about 9:30 p.m., it was getting dark, and we were beginning to worry about Randy and Tommy. Only a few moments later, we saw car lights at the front of the cabin. We were in the middle of nowhere, so it had to be them. We heard the car doors open, heard Randy and Tommy as plain as day. I yelled. “We’re on the deck.” The car doors closed, we heard footsteps rounding the corner… and at the point that someone would have rounded the corner… it was silent. I looked at Todd. He was looking at me. It was quiet. I yelled, “Hey, Randy. Hey, Tommy.” We got up and walked around front, and… nothing. No car, no people, no sound. Ninety minutes later, the phone rang. It was Todd’s mother calling to inform us that at 9:30 that evening, a fatal traffic accident involving Randy and Tommy took place 30 miles from the cabin. It’s almost as if they just wanted to keep our tradition alive.
• Northern Michigan is also the location of this strange event. R. Bassil and a friend were at a river-side cabin one night, relaxing. They were about to retire to bed when…
• I had just stretched out when a huge crack erupted from the woods. Both of us thought it was a branch or old tree that had fallen. After he turned off the living room light, we noticed that the light coming from the windows was abnormally strong. This sent our nerves to a new high. The light seemed to pulse several times and got so bright at one point you could have read a book by it. It couldn’t have been a car as we were almost a mile off the road on a dirt trail. Plus, the light came in from all the windows equally. Every so often we would hear a strange humming noise that penetrated that cabin. This lasted almost half an hour. We talked about just running out to the car and leaving but neither one of us wanted to go outside. After the light went out, we sat on the couch, occasionally putting forth theories on what it could have been. Around four o’clock in the morning, there was another loud crack. We worried that the light might come back but nothing happened. - R. Bassil

The Blue Specter at Camp

Devin was away at summer camp in Quebec, Canada where there were the usual camp stories of a ghost. One night, however, he may have encountered the real thing…

My friend and I were walking just outside of the circle of cabins. It was a bright night with all the stars shining and the moon was well lit. There was a campfire going, and in one of the big cabins there was a party going on with music and so on. We were walking, and we both got a really weird feeling, as if we were being watched. We both turned toward the sea… we saw a blue figure, very tall - about 7 feet - walking through the trees. It made no sound at all. It was a bright blue and glowing figure walking through the forest. It was emitting a shimmery aura, and my friend and I both became very frightened. We shouted at whatever that thing was and we were asking it what it was. We got no reply, of course, but we expected one. We stared as it walked away and out of our vision; we didn’t dare follow it. We then ran back to the group of people at the camp fire, screaming and describing what we saw. Another friend of mine claimed he was watching it from a distance not far from were we were and was just as frightened as I was.

The strange, horrifying events that took place in a New England home in the late 1970s and early 1980s have been documented and investigated, but never fully explained. They began as a series of benign if remarkable hauntings and escalated into terrifying poltergeist phenomena, making this one of the most astonishing cases of ghostly activity in recent American history.

The real name of the family involved has been kept secret to protect their privacy, but the investigators for the Psychical Research Foundation provided them with the pseudonym of Berini. First names have also been changed.

The Berini’s unsettling clash with the paranormal started after the father, Joe Berini, moved the family into his ancestral home located in a New England town. The house had been in the family for many years: Joe’s father grew up there, and several family members had died in the house. All seemed normal, at first, as Joe settled in with his wife Rose and her two children from a previous marriage, John and Daisy. It was one night in May, 1979 that Rose began to hear a disembodied voice. It sounded like that of a little girl, Rose said, and the first time she heard it, it said, “Mama, mama, this is Serena.”

No one knew who Serena was or what the voice might mean. It wasn’t until a later investigation into family history that Joe learned that his father had a sister named Serena who died in the house at the age of five more than 50 years previous. But what was Serena’s message trying to convey? It turned out that Serena’s voice would be a forewarning of family danger - on more than one occasion. The very next day after Rose first heard Serena’s voice, Daisy was taken for a scheduled appointment to have her tonsils taken out. Something went wrong during the surgery, however. Daisy’s heart failed and she nearly died.

The girl’s voice was heard on several more occasions, once on a June night before Joe’s grandmother suffered a stroke, and again in November just before the old woman passed away. A fourth time, Joe was awakened by Serena’s voice to find Rose choking in her sleep. Upon being roused from sleep by Joe, Rose said she had been dreaming that her ex-husband was strangling her.

The Boy in White

Then, as mysteriously as Serena’s warnings came to the Berinis, they ceased. Through the end of 1979 to March, 1981, the family encountered nothing more out of the ordinary. But in that spring of 1981, a new series of haunting phenomena began when Rose was startled by the apparition of a small boy, dressed completely in white, walking along the upstairs hallway in the dead of night. “It was almost like looking through a milk bottle,” Rose later told researchers. “It was a very peaceful experience. It stayed for about two hours on and off, coming and going.” The boy’s spirit appeared again a week and a half later, and this time spoke to Rose, innocently asking, “Where do all the lonely people go? Where do I belong?”

The boy in white also appeared before Joe, who says he saw the spirit go to each of the bedrooms and then kneel in the hallway, as if looking for something that lay hidden beneath the carpet. More than curious, Joe later took up the carpet and the floorboards at that spot and found a religious medal with a broken chain. Had it belonged to the boy? Who was he? Joe then recalled that another child had died in that house - his father’s younger brother, Giorgio, at the age of eight. Again checking family history with other relatives, Joe was told that Giorgio was buried in his all-white First Communion suit.

Giorgio began to appear frequently to Joe and Rose over the next few months. The spirit would respond to questions, but seemed distressed over something. At one point, Giorgio accused his twin brother Carlos (who was still alive and living nearby) of taking something from the house, but no one, including Carlos, could figure out what the boy’s ghost was referring to. On one nightly visit, Giorgio’s spirit said, “My oldest brother is the only one who can help me.” This statement caused the Berinis to wonder if the spirit was confusing Joe for his father - Giorgio’s oldest brother. And as the apparition vanished that night, the telephone next to Joe and Rose’s bed was thrown off the night table by unseen hands.

This was the beginning of the poltergeist activity that would terrorize the Berinis in the weeks and months to come.

More than a dozen times, Joe and Rose’s bedroom phone was thrown violently off their night table. Joe took this, along with Giorgio’s last message, as a sign that he should call his parents and warn them that the little boy’s spirit might be paying them a visit. He did so, but each time Joe uttered Giorgio’s name, the phone line went dead.

The Berinis had had enough. They sought the advice of a local priest who said they should merely ignore the spirit if it should appear again. Not good advice, as it turned out. The next time the boy in white appeared to Rose, she did as she was advised and paid it no attention. Immediately, a closet door began to slam open and shut repeatedly. On subsequent days, unexplained running was heard in the house, and box of macaroni was yanked from Rose’s hands and dashed to the floor. Again taking their plight to the Church, the Berinis invited two priests to visit the house, where they blessed it and said mass.

Giorgio’s spirit finally seemed to give up its mission, whatever it was, and appeared no more. But the Berini’s paranormal troubles were far from over. Giorgio’s disappearance only seemed to make room for another entity to enter their home and their lives - one that was not so innocent or benign.

The Dark Hunchback Entity

In June, 1981, the Berinis began to see a sinister hunchbacked male figure clad in a black cape. Throughout that summer, the hunchback, which the Berinis described as having large feet and a gruff voice, appeared regularly in the house. The Berinis tried to get the entity to identify itself, but it only told them it was “a minister of God.”

The dark figure hardly acted like a denizen of Heaven, however. It frequently made its presence known, for example, when Rose was praying with her rosary, trying to distract her with various obscenities. The poltergeist-like activity increased in frequency and intensity. Joe, Rose and 15-year-old John reported that they had been struck by thrown objects. The bedroom telephone continued to fly off the table. A bedside lamp “fell,” striking Rose on the head. Furniture in several rooms were on occasion found overturned or moved: Daisy’s bedroom desk was somehow transported down the stairs. The retractable attic stairs were open and shut repeatedly and with such violence that it cracked the hall ceiling. Several religious objects were removed from walls or broken.

Rose, it seemed, was in particular the object of the entity’s violence. The door of the freezer was swung open, hitting her in the head. During an evening meal, her arm was twisted behind her back and her head pulled to one side with such force that she began to choke. On more than one occasion, Joe testified, he saw Rose pulled out of bed at night, levitated into the air and then dropped to the floor. After one of these attacks, bruises were found on her arms and legs, as if from a powerful grip.

Two months after it first appeared, the dark, hunchbacked entity became its most violent. Not long after Joe left the house to work the night shift at his factory job, a loud banging shook the bedroom walls. “The bed was raising off the floor,” Rose said. “I tried to scream and the door slammed so I could not get out of the room. The dog was growling and the door opened.” Rose struggled to get to the children’s bedrooms, but their doors slammed shut and she was dragged by the unseen force back into her room. Invisible hands began to choke and scratch her. She managed to call Joe. He rushed home and ran upstairs to the bedroom where he saw the bed jumping as high as two feet into the air, and found Rose crouching in a corner clutching a crucifix.

Remarkably, the Berinis still refused to abandon their home. Their minds changed, however, when one morning they awoke to find a heavy carving knife stabbed into the kitchen table.

Fearing that their lives could truly be in danger, the Berinis moved out of the house for a month, putting most of their belongings into storage. Once again, they sought help from a priest, who went to the house and performed a kind of exorcism. When the Berinis returned to their home, the evil seemed to have been vanquished. They no longer saw apparitions of any kind or suffered any more poltergeist activity.

Ironically, it was only after the haunting activity stopped that Joe Berini invited an investigation by the Psychical Research Foundation, based in Durham, North Carolina. (The organization is now the American Institute of Parapsychology, based in Gainesville, Florida.) The investigators were able to corroborate some of the Berini’s claims through friends, neighbors and their priest, all of whom testified that they witnessed poltergeist phenomena in the Berini home.

EVEN PEOPLE WHO believe in an afterlife and the possibility of ghosts are often skeptical when it comes to the idea of spirit animals. They don’t have souls or spirits, goes the argument, and therefore cannot have a life in the next world. But cats, dogs, birds and other animals are made up of the same energy that humans are, and it may be as possible that this energy can survive death, just as it can for people. Anyone who is close to their pets will testify to the psychic connection they share. Psychic energy and spiritual energy may all be a part of the same phenomenon, and so animals might have as much of a connection to the unseen world as we do.

Maybe more. Animals not only may appear as ghostly forms, they may also be more sensitive to the proximity of spirits. Barbara S. tells of a stray black-and-white cat that her family adopted in the Queens section of New York City. They lived in an old attached house that had no history of strange activity, as far as they knew, but this high-strung kitten seemed to be able to see things Barbara’s family could not:

• She would look at the stairs, her gaze slowly moving from the bottom to the top, as if she was observing someone walking up the steps. At other times, her green eyes would be transfixed upon a certain spot on the ceiling above me. While I couldn’t see anything, the cat was definitely watching something. After my son went away to college, I decided to put the house up for sale. One evening, shortly after the real estate agent that I contacted had looked at the house, I sat in my favorite chairwith my little cat nearby excitedly looking at the ceiling above me. I heard people run down the stairs in the house next door. Maybe the noise triggered what happened next, which was truly horrible. What I heard sounded like the heavy, thumping steps of a big man with real heavy boots walking on my living room ceiling upside down. The cat was absolutely frantic. She looked at the ceiling, hissing and spitting. After about ten seconds of deafening noise, there was silence. The cat stopped looking at the ceiling. I checked the upstairs rooms, but, of course, there was no one [else] in the house.

Dogs can be just as sensitive as cats when it comes to sensing the unseen. Elven M. tells of ghostly figures in her home that made their presence known so often that her family actually named one of them: Bill; the other was the ghost of a little girl. Elven believes that her dogs — a seeing-eye trained German Shepherd, Haywood, and a blue healer, Tuscon — were the first to notice them. Elven was on the phone one day…

• Haywood was lying at my feet and began to growl. Tuscon went and hid behind the stereo in the corner. As Haywood stood up, I felt a gust of cold air brush past me, and he continued to growl. He moved to the top of the stairs that led into the family room, and the hair on the back of his neck stood up as he growled and snarled into the dark basement. I feared that someone had broken into the house. I turned on the downstairs light as I stood directly behind Haywood, ready to let him run and attack whoever it was in the basement. I saw nothing, yet he continued to growl. I stayed on the phone and went across the room and pulled into the corner, scared to death. My boyfriend at the time was consoling me, telling me there was nothing there. At that moment, a little girl’s voice came from the vent in the floor next to me. Haywood came and sat beside me as though he was protecting me, growling across the room the whole time. By the time my parents returned home, I was very upset and very scared as the voice continued.

“There is an obscure superstition that goes something like this: Knowing that animals can see ghosts, when an animal sees a ghost one can, from behind the animal, look between their ears toward where the animal is looking and see the ghost that they see,” says Scott P. Yet he tried this very thing and discovered that the superstition is not true. He had the opportunity to test it as a young boy on a winter’s day in his family’s 100-year-old home,which had previously been a funeral home:

• I, with my cat and dog curled up for warmth, sat on a heater vent wrapped in a blanket. I was in the living room with a perfect view of the entryway. From here I heard some footsteps upstairs. The cat’s and dog’s ears both perked up at the sound of the footsteps as they seemed to go down the hall toward the top of the spiraling staircase in the entryway. Both animals watched some invisible presence slowly walk down the stairs and through the living room then into the dining room. I, quite apprehensively, looked between both my cat’s and my dog’s ears as their heads and eyes seemed to follow someone walking though my house. Both animals’ heads moved in tandem and the acted very much aware of the presence. Yet I could sense nothing aside from the sound of steps and the reaction of the animals. I was somewhat disappointed.
• The ghosts of animals may be as common as the ghosts of humans. There are many reports from people who have sensed, felt, smelled, heard and even seen the spirits of recently departed pets. Nina I.’s daughter, for example, had such an experience with a cat named Andy, which was her companion for 19 years. Like human ghosts, animal ghosts can sometimes appear to lend comfort:
• My daughter has suffered with rheumatoid arthritis since age 12, so spends many times in discomfort. For the past couple of years, she began telling me that a ghost visited her on her bed when she was feeling really bad. One morning, she commented that her “friend” had joined her on her bed. “It’s strange, he is always felt just to the right of my feet. Just in that little place. I can feel the mattress depress.” I had an instant brain hit. I told her, “It’s the cat! It’s Andy.” I reminded her that Andy had always joined her in bed when she felt bad. She and I feel Andy is still around offering comfort to her.

In some cases these ghost animals are not particular whom they cuddle up to. Paul N. didn’t own a cat, yet reports these visitations:

• Early in the morning, while still dark, I sometimes have a feeling as though a cat is walking around on my bed. It happens usually when in bed, although it has happened while lying down watching TV late at night, too. The sensation is very clear and definite, exactly like the footsteps of a normal-sized house cat walking gently around on top of my bed linen, sometimes on top of me too, patting around for somewhere to lie down. Eventually it finds a spot, usually lying up against me, but not always. If I move too much while it is walking around the sensation will disappear. It will not be repeated twice in a night.

Ghosts sometimes appear to the living to let their loved ones know they are alright in the next world. That’s the feeling Dennis G. and his wife got from a cat that he was forced to put down because it was severely ill. Sydnie was one of a litter of cats that contracted feline leukemia, but made its presence known after its death:

• I felt like I had lost a child when we took Sydnie home to be buried where she was born. For about a month afterward, I felt depression and grieving for Sydnie. Then one night, while lying in bed waiting for sleep to come, I heard and felt the distinct thump of a cat lunging from the floor and landing on the foot of the bed, which was Sydnie’s custom. I thought it was one of the other cats, but it was their custom to sleep in other parts of the house. I felt with my foot for a cat, but there was nothing there. This went on every night for a week, so I know I was awake and not dreaming. The impact was solid and real, right down to the little grunts cats give when they jump — but nothing was there! I knew it had to be Sydnie’s way of telling me everything was all right.

In many instances, the owners of deceased animals feel that their beloved pets are just returning briefly to say goodbye. In this remarkable case, Robin S.’s black Labrador, Mutt, might not even have been dead when it’s spirit appeared to her. Robin had to give Mutt away because she and her husband had to move and weren’t able to take the dog with them. But five years after the move, Mutt hadn’t forgotten Robin:

I was in our living room and my husband was going out the door with the trash. A black mass was wiggling around his legs and as it came into the living room, I saw it was Mutt. He was wagging his tail a mile a minute and had what looked like a big grin on his face. He sat down stared at me and I heard, “I haven’t forgotten you. I have to go now.” Then he faded before my eyes before I had a chance to pet him! I knew he was gone from his body, but he still loved me enough to come say goodbye

As with human-like apparitions, not all animal apparitions are positive experiences. You have no doubt heard of encounters with shadow people… but how about shadow animals? Kamala relates these peculiar experiences, which began after a real bird became trapped in her house:

• My mom released it outside and it flew away. Our dog, Casey, started following something not sensed by us in our living room. She started acting strangely and continued to sniff and bark at things that were not there. My mom sensed a bird flying over her head. There was no earthly bird to be found. A phantom “cat” has joined our home recently. My mom, my sister, and I have all “seen” it. It is like a dark shadow. I actually thought it was a cat running under the kitchen table! The last thing to join us is a “black lizard.” My sister spotted it in our basement. My mom also saw it there. It was very clearly defined, not a shadow like the cat. There are no lizards around in the middle of winter where I live. They are there one-second and vanish the next. Could these “animals” be manifestations of a negative energy?

Another reader has even reported seeing chicken shadow ghosts.

Stranger still is this story from Neal T. about a very real-looking bird that had some quite unreal abilities, causing Neal to wonder if it existed in some other dimension:

• My father and uncle were sitting in the living room, one side of which is enclosed floor to ceiling by two large French windows. It was about three in the afternoon, and as they were watching television, a bird — possibly a wren — flew against one of the glass panes. They both heard the noise and turned to observe the bird flutter for a moment, then appear to flatten itself out and squeeze through between the frame that encases the top of one of the panes! It flew to the opposite side of the room to the open door of the patio, where it flew away. This, I think we can all agree, is contrary to our conventional perception of reality and reason. The panes are firmly in place, without so much as a crack. So what we’re talking about is what appeared to be a solid form — the bird — pushing itself through another solid form — the glass — without damage to either one. There are two witnesses who saw this. So the trite explanation of “it’s your imagination” can be ruled out.