She Was Waiting Among the Graves | Real Ghost Stories

0:00Today on Real Go Stories Online in high school, they accepted a dare to prove the local cemetery wasn't haunted. But it ended up raising more questions than answers. This is Real Go Stories Online. Thank you so much for listening. We appreciate it. Now remember, if you have a Real Go story, it's really easy to share it with us. If you like to write, just write it down. Go to RealGo Stories Online.com if you would rather leave us a voicemail. Call it in at 855-853-4802. And wherever you are listening right now, hit subscribe. We would appreciate that very much. I'm Carol Hughes, Kathy Gordon is here today, and it just hit me when I said that if you can leave us a voicemail, somebody's out there is like, oh my god, but I can't leave a voicemail. I'm going to screw it up. I will edit it. You will sound great. Oh yeah, that's true.

1:00That's true. Just know that. If you screw it up, if you are leaving a voicemail and you screw it up, just go, hey, Carol, edit this part out. Great. I would be happy to do that. No problem. That's true. Yeah. Because to be honest, I go back and edit everything that you and I record because I edit myself as much as I am. I know. That's true. And you make me sound so much better than I really do sound. No one wants to hear how shitty we really are. That's right. We are horrible people. Like she just takes so much out to make a sound. Oh, you know, you can't even imagine how much editing you have to do. Oh, but you. No, it's funny. It's like, I really, they're pretty much that episodes. But I do just to make sure I go back and clean it all up before I post it. I don't need to, nobody needs to hear Kathy coughing, which she happens to be having a problem with right now. Yeah. You know what I mean?

2:00Yeah. So have you ever quick question? Have you ever gone into a cemetery at night? That is like kind of a right of passage. I think for a lot of people, you know, they might live in a town that they, that's what this story is. That's a great question. I have never been in a cemetery at night. I think I've driven through one. How's that? But I don't think I've actually stopped and got out. I don't think I've ever been in one driven through or walked through at night. I think in high school, we used to drive through the cemetery in Colby, but I sure I never would have gotten out. It was a very drivable cemetery. And it wasn't a very pretty one. It was just off this, you know, kind of a street on the edge of town. And it didn't really have any trees because Western Kansas doesn't have any trees. Yeah, just flat. And it's not like the quintessential, you know, Salem Massachusetts cemetery that we all

3:03have in our head, right? The beautiful one with lots of trees and little rolling hills. Yeah. And, you know, overgrown moss stones and stuff and trying to make out the name, you know, and then just barely getting it out and you hear, you know, like nothing like that. It was just kind of like, you know, Penny so and so died in 1973 or something. You know, it was, you know, and I mean, it's sad that Penny died, but I'm just saying it's, you know, not a very pretty cemetery. Now the one our grandmother is buried in, we kind of have a family plot there. And our mother has already bought her stone years ago. I think that's a nice thing to take care of for people who have to do the planning later. But I'll never forget we went up there for the, you know, the memorial day to put the flowers out. And we drive up there and I get out and her stone is there, right? But it doesn't have the end date.

4:04It just says, man, a lot of people do that. I'm not saying, but she didn't tell me. And I look over at it and I look back. And now also keep in mind, I gave her the money to do it so that she could do that if she wanted to, right? Because that's what she told me she wanted. So I gave her the money for it. Okay. So also we had a brother that died and it never had a stone. Yeah. So when I gave her the money, I said, this is for, you know, I want you to put a stone on his grave and then go ahead and if you're going to do it, you just will do one for yourself whatever. Okay. We pull up, we get out and here are these two new stones there for our brother and then my mom. And I was so shocked and I looked at her and oh, she was just grinning like she'd won the lottery or something. You know, it was the funniest thing. She was so happy and proud of them. But I was like, it's a weird thing to be so thrilled about your, your own grave stone, but okay, mom. It's a beautiful corner, a little place in the cemetery.

5:07And that one is more the older part of that cemetery is more like what you think of. Well, it is a cemetery and it is very old there where they have like pioneers and people that came out in the late 1800s that are buried there. And so some of like one of our ancestors is buried there. Her name is Elizabeth Holt and on her tomb, on her stone, like there's a carved covered wagon because she came out and a covered wagon. So they have these really interesting very old ones like you'll go through and they'll say so and so simple war veteran, right? And I heard that Elizabeth Holt that her stone is the oldest stone in the whole cemetery. I've always thought that she was very old when she came there. And so, you know, when you look at her stone, you go 1801. My goodness, you know, or whatever. And then she came, they brought her like in a rocker because she was old and they wanted

6:10to move and they, what are we going to do? Leaver? No, they took her. So this old woman who was old at the time, you know, kind of confined to this rocking chair that they just carried her. They carried across the rivers and everything in this rocking chair and took her clear out there. And I think she probably didn't live a lot longer after she got there. Because my God just getting there. Good Lord, right? I can't imagine taking our mom in a trip in the car, let alone. Let's get her rocking chair and sticking that in a covered wagon. Then we got, oh great, we're going to have to carry mom over those rough terrain, you know, getting up provisions for grandma. Here we go. But I think a lot of people did that. They, what are you going to do? Well, we'll take them, you know, in this story when I first read it, whenever I write here a story about an old cemetery, though, I visualize that cemetery. Okay. That's beautiful. Because it's beautiful and it's got those big old trees.

7:11It's very shady and it's just, it's a really, really pretty cemetery. But the one where our dad is buried is a lot of us. It's hot, wind blow and ain't no trees there. It's just like just, you know, close your eyes. I think Western Kansas with tumbleweeds and big open space, that's what it is. Yeah, that's it. So here's a story that says, I've been meaning to send this story in for a while because every time you have a cemetery story, it reminds me of something that happened when I was in high school. I grew up in a small town where there was one cemetery everybody knew about. It wasn't abandoned or hidden out in the middle of nowhere. It was just outside of town. And if you drove past it during the day, there was nothing unusual about it. But once it got dark, nobody wanted to be there. Every older kid seemed to have some story about seeing someone between the graves or hearing things out there at night. I always figured those stories got bigger every time somebody told them.

8:12When I was a junior in high school, a bunch of us were hanging out after football game. Somehow the cemetery came up. A couple of the guys admitted they'd never go in there after dark. They weren't even embarrassed to say it. My friend Noah and I thought they were making way too big a deal out of it because we'd both been through there before during the day, never saw anything that made us think the place was haunted. Before long, one of the guys looked at us and basically said, if we thought everyone else was overreacting, we should have no problem walking through the cemetery at midnight. We didn't go that night because everyone had plans the next day, but we all agreed to meet there the following Saturday. So there were six of us. For them stayed in the cars. No one I were the ones who had to prove there was nothing to be afraid of. The challenge wasn't anything crazy. We just had to walk all the way to the back fence, take a picture to prove we had done it

9:12and come back. When we first walked through the gate, we were laughing because everyone back at the cars kept yelling things at us. That's funny. The farther we walked, the quieter we got. By the time we got near the back, we couldn't hear our friends anymore. The only sounds were our shoes on the gravel path and the wind moving through the trees. When we reached the back fence, we both pulled out our phones, snapped a couple of pictures, we figured somebody would accuse us of turning around early if we didn't have the proof. I had just slipped my phone back into my pocket when I noticed Noah wasn't moving. He was looking off to the left. I looked where he was looking and there was a woman standing near one of the older monuments. She wasn't close enough for us to make out her face, but we could tell she had shoulder lengthed our care, was wearing what looked like a long dark coat. At first I honestly thought she had come to visit someone's grave and then it hit me. It's almost midnight. Why would she be out there?

10:13The longer we stood there, the stranger felt. She never looked around. She never really moved. It was like she was just standing there with her back to us. I remember looking at Noah because I could tell he was thinking the same thing I was thinking. Neither of us wanted to get any closer. We didn't panic or take off running. We just quietly turned around and started walking back toward the front of the cemetery. After we'd gone maybe 20 or 30 yards, I looked back. I could not see her. I stopped walking. Noah turned around too. The spot where she'd been standing was empty. We stood there for a few seconds, expecting her to step out from behind one of the monuments or start walking toward another section of the cemetery, but nothing. By the time we got back to the cars, everybody was asking us if we'd actually made it to the back we said we had, but we also told them we had seen a woman standing there. Most of them did not seem impressed. One guy said she was probably visiting a family member.

11:15Another figure she was never there. We were just full of it. Honestly, those explanations made more sense than anything we were thinking. Then somebody remembered we had taken pictures, right? We pulled out our phones and started flipping through them. Mine looked completely normal. Every picture showed exactly what I'd expected. Very dark. Some headstones trees. The fence. Nothing else. When we looked at Noah's, his first couple of pictures looked normal too, but one of them stopped all of us near the monument where we'd both seen the woman was a faint gray haze. Not shaped like a person. It wasn't a face or anything like that. It was a small patch that looked almost smoky while the rest of the picture was perfectly clear. One of the guys immediately took Noah's phone, wiped the camera lens with a shirt and handed it back. He said probably something was on the lens. Maybe there was. The picture, honestly, never mattered that much to me because I know it doesn't prove

12:17anything. What I've never been able to explain is how Noah and I both noticed the same woman before either of us ever looked at those pictures. I never went back into that cemetery at night again. I don't blame him. The next time I walked through those gates was a few years later for my grandmother's funeral. Standing there in the middle of the afternoon and looked completely normal, there wasn't a single thing about the place that felt strange. But while we were standing there, I couldn't help but look towards the back of the cemetery where we had seen her. I guess I thought maybe I'd see her again, but I didn't. Thanks for reading my story. Thanks for all the hours you guys have kept me company over the years, Tyler. I don't know. They could have, I guess, both seen something. I don't know. I think it's interesting that it wasn't like, hey, do you see a woman standing there? They both just saw a woman standing there. You know, my first thought was the kids set them up.

13:20Oh, yeah. I never even thought about that. Like, you know, as you would, right? If you were going to challenge, dare somebody to do, you know, you would dare them and they, you know, it gave them a day in between to line up somebody to go out there and stand there and a good idea. That's a great idea. Yeah. Okay, but then, but it doesn't explain the haze on the picture. True. I'm just saying. And it doesn't explain how did she disappear, but you know, she could have hidden behind a tree right quick. It said they walk like yards, 20 yards or something. You know, the one thing about the story that kind of surprises me is the other kids were like, no way in hell do I walk through that cemetery. And these other two are like, no problem. They dare them to do it, right? And they do it. And like, I am the worst person to dare or something because I'm going to do it if you dare me, right? I'm just always like, I'll show them.

14:23Now, with that said, if they, if they'd already admitted to it being a creepy place for whatever reason, they maybe, maybe they had done something before and gone through there, maybe they're just creeped out by cemeteries and they wouldn't do it or whatever. But why would they respond like, nah, if they already before then had said, we believe it's creepy. Yeah, but you know, they're high school guys and they're not going to, you come back and go, yeah, we saw something and they'd be like, no, you didn't. You're now you're just, but I just find it odd they wouldn't go. Did you? Because like, I've always been creeped out by this cemetery and they admitted it before. I just don't think they're, it's a weird guys kind of, I guess it just seems like. Yeah, high school guys, they're like, you go do it. Fine, we're going to meet out there and you guys are going to walk over there. They're just setting them up. I believe that your first idea about them putting somebody back there kind of makes them sense. But I could see, it's like, no, it didn't.

15:24You're just making that up now that you took the dare. Of course, you're saying something. You saw something. You didn't see anything. Take it. I could buy that. You know, the fact that they just couldn't do it that night made me think, yeah, you put it off a day just so you could set something up. Yeah, that could be. Yeah, that could be. If it's nighttime and they're walking through like last night was super bright. The moon was so bright. If they're just walking through, even if it's a bright moon night and you're towards the back of the cemetery, they could have put somebody back there who kind of hid behind a stone or behind a tree. That wouldn't be that hard to disappear. Right. That's what I agree to. You could just get down on your hands and knees and crawl, you know, and maybe somebody and then and then perhaps, you know, with the picture in the weird hazy thing could be a finger, but it also could have just been one of those words like, here's a picture.

16:26Do you see that version? And then you and I are looking at the picture going, I don't see that version. You know, it's like, oh my God, see that hazy thing. That's exactly where we saw her. And you know, the other kid could be right. It could have just been something on the lens. It could have been a little hazy over there. You know, I just think I don't know. I mean, people seem to be pretty good at this. The whole thing, I never thought about that. I do find going into a cemetery at midnight to be super creepy period and of discussion. Would I do what they did? Probably not. Maybe, I don't know. Maybe when I was that age, now I'd be like, I ain't got nothing approved anybody. I'm not doing it. I'm not doing it exactly. Why am I staying up to midnight? I would take a dare. You know, when I was in high school, you bet whatever. Yeah. But now I'm like, I'm the same as you. I got nothing approved. I got nothing approved. And it's midnight. You should be in bed.

17:28But the whole thing about them setting it up kind of does make some sense to me. So that maybe could be what the whole story is. They walked back there. The guys knew you're walking all the way back to the back fence. We could stick somebody there. And the other possibility, if we want to stay with not paranormal, is there truly always a woman who walked out there to see her dead husband at midnight? Yes. Could have. You know, she likes to go out there when it's quiet and nobody else is out there. Grief is weird. And maybe at midnight, she feels closer to him. I don't know. Maybe she was just having a bad night. Maybe she was just having a bad night. Yeah. Or, surely was a spirit standing there. I don't know. We'll never know. Nora will Tyler or Noah? Mm hmm. Well, let's go on to this story. This is Bella from South Florida. My story actually takes place when I was much younger about eight or nine years old.

18:33And at that time, we were living in Northwest Arkansas. My family was because I had a lot of family out there. And so we would go and visit for long stretches of time. And my aunt who lived out there was on the board of this beautiful old house from the 1870s, I believe. It was just gorgeous. But they had it restored and they would hold tours and galas and things like that. And so we all got invited to the Christmas Gala and my family did. And I do have to say this house is definitely known for being haunted. But the time that we were there, it wasn't a Halloween tour or anything. It was just the Christmas party for stuffy, old, rich people. So me and my little brother, who was about five and my mom and my dad went to the Christmas Gala. And then afterwards, they were giving tours of the house. And by this time, my little brother was tired and bored. So my dad took him outside to play and my mom and I went on the tour.

19:35And we were walking around looking at all the rooms. I didn't remember noticing anything weird or creepy. And then we walked into the downstairs smoking room, which is where the men of the house would go after dinner to smoke cigars and drink whiskey and talk about mainly things. And according to my mother, we walk into the room and I immediately start crying and saying the man is angry. I have to leave. So I'm very fun for my mom. What I remember seeing and I have to say that I didn't really know it was a ghost at first. It sounds weird. I knew nobody else could see the man that I was seeing but I didn't think he was a ghost. I just don't know what I was thinking. But I saw a tall man with sideburns, you know, the Civil War looking sideburns and kind

20:40of funny looking clothes. I don't know. It was all a long time ago. I don't remember. And he was standing by the fireplace in the room just glaring at me, like flat out. Oh, he was so angry. And I was a very sensitive child not to go through anything but just I would cry anytime I got in trouble or yelled at or did something wrong. And so that's why I started crying because I felt like a grown up was mad at me. I was in trouble. I was somewhere I was not supposed to be. He didn't say anything but that was the feeling I got was I was not supposed to be in there. And so I started crying. My mom took me outside to see my dad and I just waited out there. And that was it for that. I mean, we went back a few other times and I never had any other experiences that strong. But my mom did, which I may call it until you another time. That's about it. I guess looking back, I don't think he was the levelant or anything. I think that's just all it was was he saw this little girl in his men's smoking room and

21:47he was like, what are you doing here? Get out. You're so embarrassing. So, you know, if you feel like using my story, that would be great. So have a great day. Bye. I really like her explanation of that. That he saw a little girl walk in and she shouldn't be in that room. You know, it's like, get over yourself. Well, but you know, if you think about it at that time, you know, kids, they've got a lot of kids. You know, especially, you know, with dads not saying they didn't love their kids, but a lot of times, kids were taken care of by nannies. And if this is a house that they're keeping up to this day, it's probably pretty fancy. So the family had money. It just it's like, what are you doing in this room? This is for men only. You're not, and he probably would give and look like that to a woman who walked in. That's yeah.

22:48And the fact that she's still to this day, remember, so what she saw. Yeah. That it's, you know, just kind of cemented into her brain. She walked in and saw this man being, and the fact she didn't realize it was a ghost. She knew it wasn't right. And maybe he wasn't even really there. But you know, when you're young, you don't immediately think ghost, right? You may, she might not have even known what a ghost was. Yeah, it's just a man who's mad at her. Yeah. I just, I really like her explanation for that. Mm-hmm. That's me. And I hope she does call us back with the stories from the mom who I would like to hear. Yeah, I would like to hear those too. Yeah, I'm always fascinated by these old mansion house stories. I think there's, I love everyone I can get into. If somebody would just let me in their old house, I'm going to go through. Oh my God, there are so many, you know, Kathy and I see him all the time. We're like, man, I wish I could go in there.

23:49I just would like to, there's, because there's a couple of houses where I live, I would just like to go knock on the door and be like, the mind's showing me around. Good week, please. Look at your house. This might be kind of weird, but I'm kind of fascinated by your house. There's just, there's two of them in particular that there's a lot of really old, cool houses in my town, but there's two of them that I'm just fascinated by. You know, in Lawrence, Kansas, they have what they, this old, they called it for years when I went to school there and Carol lived there. The castle T room. And it was on the main street, mass street, and it was this big, limestone building that really looked like kind of a castle. It had some turrets and things on it. And so whoever designed it, designed it with some castle type elements. It kind of was fortressy looking. Now, I'm not sure about the exact date, but I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't their

24:50civil warish or shortly thereafter. Anyway, I just saw a picture that a couple bought it and they're turning it into kind of an event space. I don't know if you can stay there too. But I thought, once again, I look at that and was like, oh my god, what I wouldn't give to go through there. And I wonder what experiences they are having or going to have. I just had to look it up. Yeah, that I forgot about that place. That's really cool. Yeah. But as I looked at that picture, I was like, oh my gosh, that place has got to be super haunted. Oh, don't say. Well, you looked it up. Does it say what year it was built? 1894. Okay. A little later than I thought. But it is a ton of history there. It's fascinating. We've got one here that's they call a castle too. And I have been in that one. Did you feel creepy when you were in bed? Oh, yeah, yeah. To the point.

25:50At that time, it was before they had done renovations. And I went back after they turned it into a bed breakfast. I don't think it's a bed and breakfast right now. I don't know if it's just a single family living in there. But the house was in such bad shape that in the basement, the foundation was literally like taking us a step up. That's how bad the foundation was. So the woman who lived there, she lived in just the main floor of the house in the center of it. She didn't even use that whole floor. So she came out, met us as we were taking the tour. And I asked her, do you think this house is haunted? And she said, oh, absolutely it is. And she was at that time probably in her 80s. 70s, late 70s maybe. But it's just fascinating. It was called Crumb Castle. I'm not sure what they're calling it now. Campbell Castle. I love these old stories about these old houses like this.

26:52And especially these odd ones that have like the castle kind of features on them. But she didn't go into any detail about who she thought was haunting it or anything. No, because there was other people around. I got her to admit what I wanted to hear because I was like, it was like a little bit of confirmation because I was picking up on weird vibes. And I'm like, nobody else really jumped in the conversation. So I was like, okay, well, I'm glad people are saving these places. And the fact that they can live with the fact that you can live with spirits in your house is awesome. So yeah, that was a great story. And if you have a ghost story, share with us. It's very easy to do. Call 8558534802. Write it down. Just go to real-go stories online.com. And you can always become a premium subscriber, no commercials, advance episodes, access to the archive. Good all be yours. Sign up through Apple Podcasts or Patreon.com slash real-go stories.

27:55And for all of us here at Real-Go Stories Online, thank you for listening. And for all of you here at Real-Go Stories Online, thank you for watching.