(eerie music) - [Michael] The touch of icy fingers, a disembodied voice. The echo of footsteps in the dark. At some time or another we
have all felt the presence of something out there,
something just beyond our reach. Something not of this world. Sometimes it watches us, beckons with us, plays with our imagination. These are the things we call hauntings. (eerie music) We are about to explore some
of America's most bizarre hauntings, instances of
spiritual visitations so powerful that scores of people
have been touched by them. We'll hear from some of those
people and we'll see ghostly evidence that may haunt
you as it has them. What we are about to show
you is based on true events, whether you believe in
ghosts or not consider it with an open mind. - Death is the single greatest
unknown, no one has yet died and returned literally
to tell us what it's like. - The fascination itself is
ancient, it is wide spread, it is, one almost thinks its biological. - The way that I know that
there are ghosts just from a personal point of view is
that these poltergeist things happen around me. - The spirit world is
nothing to fool around with and there are powers out there that I would not play with. - [Michael] With that admonition
let us begin our quest for Hauntings Across America
in a place known for it's famous spirits, Hollywood California. (soft piano music) Today the ghosts of
Hollywood's greatest stars play endlessly across our television screens, Gable, Tracy, Niven and so many others. Their images captured
forever on celluloid. Always young, always vital,
forever in the prime of their lives. Other ghosts live here in
the land of dreams as well, restless spirits, some of them well known and others unknown. - Much of Hollywood's
history is about tragic mysterious untimely deaths and there were always ghost stories attached to those kinds of stories. And I just kind of filed
them away until I had my own ghostly encounter at the Chinese
Theater and then I thought I better start writing these things down. The result is Laurie Jacobson's
tour of film land's most haunted places, beginning
fittingly enough with a cemetery. - [Laurie] I think of Westwood
Memorial cemetery really as the cemetery of untimely deaths. The most beautiful women
who died before their time are buried there, Natalie
Wood, Dorothy Stratten, Heather O'Rourke and Dominique
Dunne from Poltergeist and the most famous
resident is Marilyn Monroe. So many people traveled to her grave everyday and the pull of living people can be very strong. Many people have said that
they have felt or seen Marilyn's spirit around her grave. There is a very famous photo of someone with an instamatic camera who was taking a photo of what he thought was the grave and was surprised
when he got the film back to find Marilyn's image in
the corner looking at him. George Reeves, who played
Superman on television, died under very mysterious circumstances. To this day it has been
written off as a suicide but most people do not
believe that it was a suicide. I don't believe that he killed himself, I believe he was murdered. George Reeves's ghost has
been seen for years in his former home, the home changes ownership quite frequently because
people are freaked out. When you see a man standing
in a Superman costume at the top of the stairs holding a gun, similar to the gun I
believe killed George Reeves it can be a pretty frightening experience. There is a home in Benedict
Canyon Jean Harlow lived in with her second husband Paul Bern, who was a producer at MGM. Paul Bern shot and killed
himself in this house in 1932, years later in the mid 60s
the house was bought by Jay Sebring, who was an
international men's hair groomer and the then fiancee of a young actress named Sharon Tate. Sharon was spending the night
in this house one evening when Jay was out of town and much to her horror she was awakened in
the middle of the night by the ghost of Paul Bern
walking into her bedroom, walking across the room,
fiddling with papers and at the desk. She was so frightened,
she slipped out of bed and was running down the
front stairs of the house and there on the steps I believe, she glimpsed her own fate. She saw an apparition
of a person tied up with their throat slit from ear to ear. She told many friends
about what she had seen and two year later when she
died in the exact same fashion they all believed that
she had seen her own fate. The Hollymont house is a
house in Beechwood Canyon, built as far as we can
tell, in the early 20s. My friend Barry Taff, a
renowned parapsychologist, lived there for 10 days, and in his 30 years of experience it was the area of most
sustained phenomena as he puts it that he's ever encountered. - We did witness the first
night there a cupboard, a lower cupboard door in our kitchen fly open and a large frying pan take off and fly across the kitchen. - [Laurie] A young lady
walked into the house, a chair zipped across the
room, pinned her to a wall, held her there. - [Barry] We then proceeded to see light, like blue balls of light,
like St. Elmo's Fire ball lighting about the room. - [Laurie] Spontaneous fires
broke out in the house, things disappeared. - [Barry] The bedroom was ice cold, felt like a refrigerator. Shiver in there, extremely cold. - [Laurie] A priest
came to bless the house. The moment he entered his hat disappeared from off of his head and they later found it on an inaccessible portion of the roof of the house. - And there was also
something that was present, was a foul odor, smelled like
decomposing organic matter. A horrible stench that
we could not trace down. - The ghost of a woman has
been seen in the house, Barry even smelled her perfume. Upon further investigation
Barry found that the house next door was also suffering
some of the same sort of paranormal activity
and they found a tunnel under this house next door
connecting the two homes. In this tunnel they found
the grave of a woman, simply marked Regina 1922. The first date for the house
that we found was 1924. So someone took the time
to bury this woman secretly in this tunnel yet they
took the time to mark it. - The majority of phenomenon
that I've read about and experienced in terms
of my own investigations is very benign. Example we had and sometimes
it goes beyond benign, it's actually friendly. We had a case where
they were finding money, they found thousands of dollars,
this in Van Nuys in 1971, floating down from the ceiling
in large denominations. I said, "What are you worried about? "I'll move in and take up residence." But at the same time it
was throwing glasses around and pinching the woman of the house but it never hurt anybody, it's
mischievous, prank playing. Another case near Paramount
Studios in Hollywood, whatever the phenomenon was, was cleaning up their
apartment when they left, dirty dishes and furniture. They'd come home the place was spotless but then we have the
opposite side of the coin where we had a case in 1989
through 91 in San Pedro where the phenomenon attacked
one of our researchers, a cameraman and almost killed him. (eerie music) - I don't remember being lifted up there, but I was actually hung, I was hung in an attic. - [Michael] The hanging incident involving researcher Jeff Wheatcraft occurred in September of 1989 while Doctor Barry Taff and
his team were investigating paranormal activity in
the home of a San Pedro housewife Jackie Hernandez. - Jeff Wheatcraft was physically
attacked in this attic on September 4, 1989 by an invisible force that
actually pulled him up onto a nail protruding from a rafter beam and actually tried to
strangle him to death. (shout) - [Voiceover] What's wrong? What happened? - [Voiceover] You guys okay? Get down, come on down! - [Barry] We were about to
come down to the crawl space, we heard a yell, a scream,
we turned back 'cause we always keep camera's on
us, fired a couple frames, he's being pulled up over
a rafter with a big nail by a clothes line that's
wrapped around his neck in a bowline's knot or a
bolsen's knot or something, it's a nautical knot, which
I'm not even familiar with. - All of a sudden I feel
this thing around my neck and it's got me hanging, hanging
and it's pulling on my leg. - And it was pulling
him up over the attic. Had we not been there he would
have obviously been hung, his neck would have been snapped. - [Michael] What Dr Taff and his team had no way of knowing was that the hanging would be
just one of many ghostly manifestations they would
document while investigating the Hernandez's home. - I remember Barry Conrad
videotaping constantly, he would walk into my house with a
video camera on his shoulder and he would very rarely put it down. He was outside filming the
house, the exterior of the house and he walked around to the
side and I was behind him and the gate that was on
the side of the house, it was a wooden gate,
it opened all by itself. (creaking) - [Conrad] Is that doing it by itself? - [Jackie] There's no
wind back here is there. - [Conrad] No. - I don't remember seeing
the ball of light but when we played back the video that he took of the gate there was a ball of light that flew by
that he captured on videotape. - These lights I have picked
up several times before in other hauntings and they're
not always visible to the naked eye but when you look
back on the monitor in the studio, when you look back at
your videotapes and you slow them down sometimes
you'll find little like, tracer bullets of light zipping through the
frames and to me that's a big tip off that there's
definitely something supernatural happening in that person's environment. It leads me to want to
investigate it further. - [Barry] And we think these
arc's might be time exposures of the balls of light that were
moving with great rapidity. Be like taking a picture of a star without a moving platform, you get a streak, this
is what we may have got. (eerie music) We don't understand what
the phenomenon wants, we don't know why it's here,
we don't even know what it is. So to sermonize or speculate
on the reason behind it's presence would be kind of, well unprofessional at this point, it would be totally unscientific. All that we know, there's
phenomenon out there and once you rule out all
the prosaic explanations and the normal reasons you're left with something that we as scientists cannot
explain and all the logic won't make it go away. (eerie music) - [Michael] Logic and ghostly
phenomenon don't always seem to go hand in hand but
the more we learn about the spirit world the more logical it seems. Case in point, the
Winchester Mystery House. Since the invention of
the repeater rifle in 1866 thousands, perhaps millions,
of people have been killed by the weapon Oliver Winchester created. It is the souls of
those victims, they say, that designed this mansion
in San Jose California. After the unexpected deaths of her husband and young daughter in 1881 Sarah Winchester inherited millions made from the Winchester Rifle Company. - Mrs Winchester was told by
a medium that the death of her family was caused by the
spirits of all the people killed by the Winchester rifle and
that the only way she could appease them was by building
a house continuously and that as long as she didn't
finish building the spirits wouldn't haunt her. - [Michael] Following this
unusual advice she moved to California, bought a ranch
South of San Francisco and ordered 22 carpenters
to labor around the clock to build onto her new home. - So the whole house was
built to appease the spirits. Well the seance room, which
is in the middle of the house as it stands today, is where
Mrs Winchester went every night to meet with the spirits
and it was these spirits that she would communicate
with and they would direct her as far as her next building project. What to build, where
to build it and so on. The unique part about that room is that as small as the room is there's actually one entrance to the room but there are three exits. The first door is the
one you come through, the second door is a glass door, which if you took a step
out you would fall into a kitchen sink 10 feet below and the third is what
appears to be a cabinet but when you open it
up it actually opens up into another room behind it. (eerie music) - [Michael] What Sarah
Winchester had built was a twisting, turning maze of
bizarre structures designed by amiable ghosts to
avoid vengeful ghosts. - She probably made this
house as confusing as possible so that the spirits wouldn't
be able to find her. After over a century of
investigation scientifically ghosts are not proven and
so I can't say I believe in ghosts because that's the
kind of proof I would need to say I believe in it. On the other hand, on the other hand I can go into a place and I can get scared, I say to myself there's no ghosts here, I know there's no ghosts here. Why do I feel so creepy? (eerie music) - [Michael] New Mexico is known
as the land of enchantment, it is also a land of many spirits, both malevolent and benign. We travel now just north of Santa Fe, where in colonial times, Spanish Conquistadors
followed the Rio Grande River toward it's headwaters in
search of gold and riches. Gold eluded the conquistadors here. but there descendants
harnessed the Rio Grande, irrigated near-by fields and became wealthy from
the bounty of the land. At the foot of Black Mesa
near the town of Alcalde, there once was a large
ranchero, Los Laceros, Part of the first Spanish
land grant in the new world. At it's center was this
grande adobe hacienda. In the 1800s this was the home of the powerful Spanish
governor, Julian Lacero. It was also his court house, jail, and the giant imposing
tree outside his window was his gallows. Today though, the old
hacienda is abandoned. At least by the living, and has become famed
through out the region as a repository for restless spirits. Michael and Suzanne Wallace once came face to face
with the spirits here. That was more than 20 years ago, and now they have returned to
see if they are still around. - [Michael] This is the old hacienda. Oh it was a fine hacienda more many years. Good times and bad times. I remember as a young writer
here in the land of enchantment coming here when this
place was filled with life, and colonial art. The spirits of Los Luceros
date back to the 1840s, when the hacienda was the center of a rich and thriving culture. At the time, the large spanish ranchero had been in the Lucero
family for almost 200 years, and was about to be
inherited by Maria Marta, the governors eldest daughter. - I present Senora, Senor Delanzo, my fiance Marie Denarez. - [Michael] But an Irish
trader from Missouri named Elias Clark had his sights
set on the Lucero fortune. He married Maria Marta in 1850. - How lovely you look my darling. - [Michael] Along with
the successful ranchero, Elias Clark also inherited
the duties of magistrator. Supposedly he ruled with an cruel hand, ruthlessly condemning many men to die on the grounds of Los Luceros. (crying) (speaking foreign language) - [Michael] Elias Clark's marriage was a stormy one as well. Legend has it, it was his temper
that led to the phenomenon we now call The Lady Who Walks the Stairs. - What do you want? - I wanna talk with you. - It is only speculation, but a fight is said to have
started in the upstairs bedroom. At first there were harsh words. Then sudden violence. (glass bursting) The argument spilled into the hall way. There was pushing, angry shoving, Maria Marta fell or was pushed down the narrow wooden staircase. (screaming) It was on the floor below
they say where she died. It is here she has
remained since the 1850s forever walking the stairs, and mourning the children she left behind. It's seen better days you can tell, but it's been here a very long time. And this is where the
presence, where the ghost, where that female spirit
is most often encountered. Likely as not on this staircase. This is where it is said she
perished one fateful night. It was in this room, where we always felt the cold spot. That shaft of cold air, that felt like it came right out a cave, and it shot straight down from the ceiling into this stone floor. The cold spots gone or
it seems to have been, maybe to many window panes
have been broken out. Maybe it lost it's power. Who knows? I still think, that spirit is here, that presence. I can always feel her here, at Los Luceros. Suzanne's encounter with
the Lady of Los Luceros, came in this small adobe house, not far from the main hacienda. - It was a very still night, and I was inside the house working, and there was no wind,
it was very, very still, and this door opened towards the outside. (door squeaking) And then the main door opened going in. And then this door closed, and I could feel the presence
of somebody in the room, but I chose not to see her. I had heard about the ghost, I simply chose not to see
her, I was too frightened. (spooky music) - [Michael] But Suzanne
and I aren't the only ones who've encountered the
spirits at Los Luceros. - Yes there is a haunting down there. - There's definitely spirits in the house. - It's not just the voices
that you hear with your ears, it's the voices you hear inside your head when you walk through the door. - The most spiritual
place I've ever lived, no question about it, we had wonderful experiences here, and there were ghosts. I certainly encountered them. - [Marie] And we did see
the woman on the stairs. I did, several different times, just a fleeting apparition. Seeing that she walked
those stairs frequently. - I feel very strongly
that it's a female entity. At least the ghost that is the strongest, or the spirit that is the strongest is a female. I also sense that there are several males. - The energies that I've felt in here have been male energies. Malevolent criminal type energies. - [Dan] There are spirits
that inhabit the place, and like to make themselves
known on occasion. I was coming down the
stair way from the roof, a large and very heavy door, door way from the roof, came
hurdling down right after me. Barely missed me. - It was amazing, because this trapdoor went flying down the stairs. And it was up here so it would have fallen and bounced down, normally, but it didn't it was thrown down. - [Link] From my understanding this was the territorial
courthouse at one time. A lot of criminals with bad
energies toward other people were in this house. I think that their negativity
is what has predominated, the feelings that I've
gotten about this place. - [Marie] But since there
were a lot of banditos around, and there were probably many deaths, and probably many violent deaths. Another well known story
we heard from the locals, was the judged that paced back and forth in the little room of
from the ground sala, and that if you painted
the floor in that room, in a very short time,
the paint would wear off, in exactly the pattern that he walks in, and of course that's exactly
where the paint is worn off. - When I first came down here a year ago for my father's wedding, they had a kahuna from Hawaii, that's the son of a direct descendant of the kings of Hawaii, and when he was here he
reported to my father, and to his new bride, that he felt a lot of negative energies coming from this house, and that he felt that would interfere with their wedding ceremonies. So he asked their permission
if he could go through and perform an exorcism
in each of the rooms. They had several things happen
while they were in there performing the exorcisms. The doors were slamming, windows were creaking and noises
were coming from upstairs, the sounds of footsteps and such, and by the time he left, he felt very good that he had not so much as gotten rid of all the
spirits but just the ones that were malevolent. - The cold shaft of air maybe gone, but I still think that presence is here. I think I can feel her. I know she walked these halls, all these rooms, came down those stairs. Both in life and perhaps in death. So much longing for what might have been, for children, for years lost, trapped forever in this adobe fortress, that is now crumbling away, and returning to the native soil. - I believe that when one
passes on from this life, and this body, this shell, and goes on it's journey to the next, they are operating at a different speed, or a different level. It's very much like
having a 45 RPM record. We are the 45 RPM record, and they are operating at a speed of 78, and every once in a while
the grooves line up, and the revolutions parallel each other, and that is when you have your encounters. That is when you recognize each other. (upbeat music) - [Michael] From the time
man first learned to fly, airplanes and air pilots have generated their share of ghostly phenomenon. Our next a story is about a
spirit they call, The Commander. A young Navy pilot who
apparently makes his home on the training base where he died. The Olathe Naval Air
Station in eastern Kansas was hastily constructed in 1942. Here many novice pilots were
rushed through flight training and hustled off to fight World War II in the dangerous skies over the Pacific. (plane engines roaring)
(guns firing) During the war, hundreds of cadets earned their wings at Olathe. But by the advent of the Cold War, this base was relegated
to a refueling stop for pilots on long cross country flights. They say one such pilot,
unfamiliar with the field and facing a night
landing and bad weather, is believed to be the spirit that's been haunting a hangar here. (ominous music) - To understand during
the first couple years of operation here a plane
was coming in for a flight at nighttime, the weather was very bad, foggy, and he was in contact
with the GCA ground control. (radio chatter) He unfortunately was turned around, and consequently came
in the wrong direction. The operator kept asking him
if he saw the landing lights and he verified that he had, but he was looking at the
lights on the actual building, rather than the ones on the landing field. (radio chatter) (explosion) He crashed in the southwest corner of the administration building. So he was actually, he
came in this direction to the building and crashed where normally he would've been coming in this direction, and been to the left of the building. At the scene there were several people that were eye witnesses
and one of them said that he saw the pilot
after the plane crashed several seconds later, the pilot
climbed out of the cockpit, and walked about 50 yards around to the other side of the
building and disappeared. When they finally got to the site where the actual pilot,
where the plane had crashed and got to the cockpit they
found the pilot sitting inside. Of course he had passed away. - [Michael] Since the accident
in the early morning hours of January 3rd 1949, people have witnessed strange phenomena inside hangar 21. Happenings they attribute
to the restless spirit of The Commander. - I've heard him up on the
second floor on the balcony. - At first boy it gave my goosebumps, man I wanna tell you
something it really scared me. - There's been too many strange happenings that aren't explainable. (ominous music) - I stood watches on
all of these buildings one time or another and at
different hours of the night and in the day, and consequently I would hear voices, I would hear noises and I would think that there was somebody in the
building and I'm supposed to be on guard with nobody in there so I would go in and I'd look around, and I would search and I
would not find anybody, but I would see things that had changed. Sometimes the door would be unlocked, and sometimes the window'd be open. I knew it was closed when I
inspected an hour earlier, yet I knew that nobody
had been in the building since I'd been on guard. - I was sitting watching
TV about 10:30 at night, and a door underneath
the stairways opened up, and it slammed real hard. (door banging) Went over and looked
underneath the stairway and there's nothing there. - I was sitting here playing cards, and my coffee cup was on my left side and I had a half a cup of coffee. I looked at it and I said well
I don't want that right now, and the coffee cup just
literally turned upside down. If I'd knocked it over it'd've
been laying on its side, not turned upside down. (ominous music) - [Michael] The presence
seems most active after dark, especially during a full moon. When most of the workers in
hangar 21 have left for the day, and the Kansas winds start to pick up. - [Joe] Don't stay in
the hangar at nighttime unless you expect to hear a lot of voices, a lot of sounds, a lot of echoes, and a lot of things that can spook you. (ominous music) (door hinges squealing) - [Michael] The spirit
usually makes itself known to a lone security guard
well into his shift. When moonlight flows
through the panes of glass above the hangar floor. Giving eerie shapes to even
the most ordinary objects. (ominous music) - My first night working
here I come up in here, it was about 12:00 at night, and I thought I heard somebody
walking in the hangar. I didn't see nobody and I
knew all the doors were locked and the only way for somebody to get in is if the windows, if they
broke one of the windows. So I walked around, I didn't see anybody and then over here by
this helicopter over here I heard what seemed like
a little distinct whistle. So I walked over there by the helicopter and I walked around it,
didn't find anything, As I walked back around it I felt, it seemed like the whistle
went right by my ear and I started getting
goosebumps and stuff. Needless to say I need to go outside for a little while and recuperate. - [Michael] Many people
have seen a lone figure walking across the hangar floor. A figure that just simply disappears. (ominous music)
(plane engines roaring) - The many hauntings for example are associated with wartime. First World War, second World War, lot of battlefield areas
are supposed to be haunted. Again it's a matter of
here is a life, cut off. Suddenly cut off, hospitals
aren't usually haunted. Where people go and die of disease, they're not usually haunted. Lot of people die in hospitals, but how many haunted
hospitals do you hear about? Not very many. It's a matter of violence,
a matter of the unnatural and sudden death. - You know when you're driving a car and you come to an abrupt stop? If you're not wearing a seat belt, you can impale yourself
on your steering column, or you can go through the windshield, but if you stop slowly
you stop with the car and if you have belts
on the belt hold you in. Perhaps dying in a traumatic
way, in an unexpected way, is analogous to stopping
abruptly without your belts. You keep going but your
body is ceased, it stopped. Physically terminated, but consciousness keeps going. - [Michael] It is said
the best ghost stories are often Southern ghost stories. Is it true? At least one Southerner we
talked to has theory about that. - I think that ghost stories, grew up, and were perpetuated in the South maybe more because the people in the South have been more settled and they have more old family stories to tell, than a more transient population. I think that these stories
stayed in the South more because the people stayed settled more. (ominous music) - [Michael] We have two
Southern hauntings for you now. The first takes place at
the Myrtles Plantation in Saint Francisville Louisiana. Built in 1796 by General David Bradford, the Myrtles has been called the 13th most haunted house in America, and for a very good reason. - When General Bradford chose this land he chose what was Indian burial ground, and because the burial
ground was destroyed, a lot of people feel that the plantation is cursed for that reason. (ominous music) A total of 10 murders
supposedly took place here, and seven of those people
died of very violent deaths and they are the people who roam the home and the grounds. (ominous music) - [Michael] To help ward off evil spirits, Southerners have developed
their own methods of otherworldly combat. - [Hester] Signs are all
over from the French cross in the entrance doorway,
keyholes being put in upside down and always with covers
because they thought it could keep spirits
out, and there's signs in the ladies rooms especially because they thought
that they needed to put a religious symbol in
to protect the ladies. At the top of the chandelier, there are the faces of nuns to guard the top corners of the room. At the bottom of the
chandelier there are angels to guard the bottom. They believed that spirits
were coming in during the day, they were hiding in the corners and they would come out and
show themselves only at night. - [Michael] It is also
believed that if mirrors are not covered when there's
a death in the house, spirits will be trapped
in the glass forever. They say the souls of a
mother and her two children poisoned in 1817 remain here. - The glass has been changed
at least eight times, but that is the very same frame, and each time a new glass is
placed back into that frame the same type hand prints will reappear. (ominous music) - Since antebellum days, people who lived on plantations had to provide their own entertainment, whether it was musical or
story telling or whatever, and therefore I think these
stories just got started and then were elaborated on and then got blown into real scary ghost stories. - [Michael] That may be true, but the Myrtles seems to be
an especially haunted place. (ominous music) Many specters have been seen
and heard over the years, and three have apparently
been captured on film. - The present owner, Teeta Moss, took a photograph of the back grounds just for insurance reasons. She said it was a quiet Sunday morning, no one was on the grounds,
yet the figure of a lady came out in the photograph
between the two buildings. She asked a friend of hers to do a blowup. After magnifying it a
few times he picked up the measurements of a human. Also on the roof he picked
up two small children. We are thinking that maybe it's Chloe, and maybe it's the children
hiding from her on the roof. Chloe was a mistress of the second owner, Judge Clarke Woodruff, and she was caught eavesdropping on some of their family business. That was not allowed so as punishment he cut off her left ear. It left her a little
upset and a few days later she baked a birthday cake
for his oldest daughter, and she boiled oleander leaves. It let off a liquid similar to arsenic and she baked it in the family's cake. That night is said to have killed the judge's wife Sara and
two of her small children. (ominous music) Chloe was later killed by
an angry mob, and she roams. She's not here to scare anyone, but she likes to tuck our guests in, and that of course upsets
them just a little. - [Michael] With Chloe and
some nine other spirits roaming the grounds,
count on seeing a ghost at the 13th most haunted house in America. - [Hester] They're not
here to harm anyone, they're just not at peace. Then they tend to show
themselves sometime. - I think they're wonderful stories and I believe most of them
but I think they've all been, embellished one time or another. The truest story in the world will be changed and exaggerated in whichever direction you
want it to go in in 100 years. - [Michael] The Waverly mansion rises out of the woods near
West Point Mississippi, and like the Myrtles, this plantation home is also famed for a spirit,
and a tiny one at that. (child babbling)
(ominous music) - [Cindy] All through the
years we just referred to her as Little Girl Lost there again because we think that she is lost and she's looking for her mother. (ominous music) - [Girl] Mommy. - [Michael] The story of Little Girl Lost begins three decades ago. When Cindy Snow, her
father and late mother first moved to Mississippi, to restore an aging plantation house. Over the years, hard work has returned this historic antebellum
home to it's original beauty. And awakened the spirit within. (ominous music) - I was about 12 years old
the first time I saw her, I had just come upstairs to bed, and I glanced across the hallway
to the stairway behind me. The little girl was standing there right at the bottom of the stairs, and she was staring into my room. As though she thought
she could see someone, but she wasn't very sure. So I stood quietly and I
watched her for moment, she stood there for probably
a good two or three minutes, and then she walked up the
stairway out of my sight. - [Girl] Mama. - And Misses Snow, the
present owner's wife, was the first one to
hear the little voice, and she was here alone one day, and decided to come up on the second floor and work in this bedroom. And she said as she crossed the floor, she heard the softest,
sweetest little voice just call out right behind her, "Mama?" - Mama.
- Mama. - [Girl] Mama? - And she turned around to look
and there was no one there. She said it raised every hair on the back of her neck and arms. One day they walked into this bedroom and on the bed on top of the coverlet, it looked like someone
had crawled up there and laid down on the bed, and left the impression of
their body on the bedspread. You could see where the
head rests on the pillow in the shape of the little
arms and legs sometimes, and it's a deep definite imprint. And you can straighten that out, and I promise you it comes right back. It has happened to me and lots of people that have been in the
house at different times. - My parents have seen it come and go, we have seen it be there one minute and the next minute be gone. So one evening several years ago my parents decided to go into the room and just sit there awhile and
watch and see what happened. They went into the room and there was the imprint on the bed, they sat there for hours and talked. And suddenly just before it got dark, the bedspread ruffled a little bit as though someone small were sliding down the side of the high bed, and the imprint just disappeared. - [Michael] Just who is
this Little Girl Lost? Roaming Waverly, calling
out for her mother. - We think she might possibly be a neighbor child during the Civil War, and she was ill and was brought here to be taken care of by the servants here, and we think that she did
pass away here in the house. (ominous music) (child whimpering) - [Girl] Mommy. - Something has happened here. Something has happened in this place that makes a spirit wanna come back, or that gives us, in our own imaginations, the belief that the spirit has come back. Violence, unfinished
business, that sort of thing. I think that's why certain
places tend to be haunted. Most of the most celebrated hauntings here and in anywhere are connected with some sort of an event like that. (ominous music) - [Michael] Ships and
the sea have always been an abundant source of haunts and spirits. - It was a very, very dangerous and a very, very chancey life. Sailors were known to be
very, very superstitious, for very good reason, you never knew what was gonna happen to you. So they tended to look
toward another world. The interest in ghost stories
almost comes naturally, and it comes naturally
out of the isolation. - It's unnatural. - [Michael] Our next
segment carries a warning. Do not believe every ghost story you hear. For years now, a tourist stop in Baltimore's busy inner harbor is said to contain the spirits
of several men killed at sea, but does it? The USS Constellation is
the last true sailing ship built for the US Navy, and the last surviving
vessel from the Civil War, and for years people have
reported seeing ghosts aboard her. - Balderdash. - [Michael] It's believed that
the spirits of three sailors who served here still walk her decks. - Ridiculous. - [Michael] According to legend, a young cabin boy has
been seen scurrying about. - Rubbish. - [Michael] There have been sightings of a ship's gunner said to have been tied to the end of a cannon,
and blown to glory. - Not even authentic
enough to be charming. - [Michael] And the image of her captain, Commodore Thomas Truxtun, ordering the errant gunner to his death. (cannon firing) - If indeed his ghost is here expiating his sins or whatever, he came to the wrong place, because, this is a sloop of war which was built in 1854, Commodore Truxtun was the captain of the
frigate Constellation. He, to my knowledge, never saw this ship. So it's very unlikely that
he would've been the captain and it's even less likely that he would've punished anybody on it. - [Michael] Yet there are
those who swear they've seen apparitions aboard the
old three masted warship. - 240 men lived, worked, and sailed this ship for months upon months. It was virtually a floating community. It would strike me as probably unlikely that a ghost story or two didn't appear. Simply because I think that's probably in the nature of the human psyche. It's part of our natural experience. We all think at some time or another that we've heard a voice in the wind, and we've turned around
and there's no one there. Does that mean that
there was a ghost there? Maybe, maybe not. (wind howling) (ominous music) - [Michael] In our search
for the strangest hauntings across America, we take
you now to New England, just across the Charles River from Boston lies the city of Cambridge Massachusetts. Cambridge is one of our
oldest college towns, and tales of ghosts and
hauntings abound here. In fact, this is the site
of the most bizarre haunting we have encountered. And, as is the case with many stories involving college towns, the
central character is a teacher. - He was a school teacher, and
he had abused his students. His boy students. (ominous music) - [Michael] It all began
in the men's locker room of the downtown family YMCA in 1991. An employee here told Arthur Meyers that some sort of ghost
had been appearing to him in the locker room at night. - [Man] Yeah, it wasn't too bad. - [Arthur] He and a friend
used to go down to this, the men's club to play basketball. And they had seen these things. - Whoa, what is that? - [Arthur] And he didn't know what it was, it made him very, very uneasy, and he was telling me all this stuff. - [Michael] Intrigued
by what they had seen, they called in an independent witness to make sure this wasn't
simply a shared hallucination. - Man I don't know that's weird. I'm gonna go get Gabe. - Okay. (ominous music) Hey guys, come here. - [Michael] They quickly discovered that the eerie vision would gain strength when a third man entered the room. (dramatic music) Others saw the specter as well. Based on their incredible story, Arthur Meyers asked if
he could conduct a seance in the locker room, to
determine if it was haunted, and if so by whom. - To my great surprise they didn't have any objection at all about it. And it turned out that one
of the top executives there was psychic himself he told me. - [Michael] An so with no restrictions, the YMCA allowed our cameras in the room where Meyers and his medium
would encounter the spirit. Since the specter first appeared, this portion of the health
club has been closed. Off limits to patrons of the YMCA. (ominous music) Doctor Erle Meyers, a minister
in the spiritualist church, was asked to contact the entity, and if possible, persuade it to move into the spirit world. (ominous music) - I have to attune
myself to the atmosphere, and I sat for awhile and
just sort of felt the energy, the vibrations, that occurred around me, and then as I moved
back into my inner self, I sensed a presence. I sensed a presence of a tall, thin man. Probably in his 50s. And I felt that I had made
contact with the spirit source. I feel that he probably was
constricted in many ways. That he did not reach out
to the world around him. That he kept himself in
a pretty narrow path. I did feel this sense of
young people around him. - [Arthur] And he was a man
who probably was held there by his homosexuality, he
had a very isolated life. His only friend seemed to be a dog and then of course he had these boys that he had these relationships with, but here he was in this men's, room with men walking around in disabeel I remember one of them saying
this was paradise for him. - [Erle] But he found a home here. The attachment to the young boys, the young men
that used this facility, and he presumed being very frustrated that he could not make
physical contact with them, that he could not make
verbal contact with them. That he was just in a
place of nothingness. (murmuring)
(ominous music) I was asked to come and encourage the spirit to move on to the spirit world. Where I believe life is richer, life is fuller, life is more
meaningful for the spirit. We feel that the spirit can be encouraged to walk to the light, there is a threshold over which they step, and then move into the
spirit side of life. (downbeat music) Join with me, and I will walk with you down this path until we see
the brilliance of white light at the end. I will walk with you, and at the end if you take a step over that threshold, you will be in a world that is
beautiful beyond description, where there is perpetual and loving peace. (gentle music) I'm going to walk with you,
right to the threshold, and once you step over that threshold, right through the light, there will be beautiful
new changes in your life. (gentle downbeat music) (lightening striking) He has gone. Go well my friend. Go well. They always have a feeling
of peace, of contentment, and the most wonderful part is that as I've inquired, here at the YMCA, that I've been told
there has been no further evidences of his presence here. - If there was a simple
way to make a spirit appear whenever we wanted it to then
there would be no question in people's minds that ghosts do exist. From my experience they only show up when they wanna show up. Some are verbal, some aren't. We can't make 'em do what we want to. Not yet anyway. - It means one thing, we're ignorant. As human beings in the latter
part of the 20th century, almost the 21st century now, there's a lot about nature
and reality we don't know. - The least philosophical of us always wondered where he came
from and where he's going. Or she. So ghosts, address that. - Ghosts are not necessarily friendly. I don't care, hey they've got Casper the Friendly Ghost out here, but that's not the usual kind of ghost one knows of running into. - I think people will always be afraid of things that they can't see. And if you see a teapot
traveling across a room with nothing holding it up,
that's going to be scary, but it's not necessarily something that the spirit was doing
to frighten the person. - But ghosts are a message of hope. So nobody wants to disprove it, you know? 'Cause that means when we die we just go on with the same ego, I don't know if that's good news or bad, but that seems to be what happens. - [Michael] What you have just seen is not an account of bizarre stories to be kept under lock and key, but a chronicle of maverick entities, misguided souls, and lost
spirits to be shared with others. Now that you've heard their stories, set out on a search of your own. There are spirits everywhere, and more tales to be told. For Hauntings, I'm Michael Dorn. (electric zapping) (gentle downbeat music)
