Hello Edi, Nick, and all Bizzaro’s,
My name is Cooper Sheldon.
Yes that is my real name
I have an EVP, skinwalker, and other paranormal accounts to tell you, so please pull up a chair and settle in for something… a little different and all the same.
As all personal ghost stories go, please understand that I believe every bit of these events, as they come from friends and family who aren’t big into the paranormal like yours truly.
Experience 1: I hate you.
The story begins on a summer afternoon at my friend Josh’s rural farm a couple miles north of Mexico, NY.
Josh and I were about 13 years old and both interested in the strange and bizarre.
Whereas Josh was slightly goth with long brown hair, a lanky build, and about 5 feet tall,
I was a shorter, curly haired, chubby kid with no fashion sense to speak of.
We’d known each other since first grade and were always goofing off at his farm, as its location provided seclusion and ample space for our games of war and hide and seek.
At the time, the main house and other buildings were approx. 6 years old, with no obvious structures there beforehand.
The other parts of the farm don’t provide much to this story so I won’t go into further detail, other than the distance of all the buildings from the main house.
The main house was about half a mile from any other property, and was prefabricated from cellar to attic.
Standing on a man-made hill overlooking the front lawn, 800 foot dirt driveway, cornfields, and horse pen, the main house was two stories tall with a junk cellar and a small attic.
Josh and his two sisters bed rooms were on the second floor, with his and his little sisters room on one side of a landing, and his older sisters and a bathroom on the other.
I guess you could say the landing looked like a Times New Roman capital ‘I’ or roman number 1.
Josh’s older sister was goth at the time, and kinda scary to my 13 year old self, but in retrospect her appearance wasn’t the scariest part of his older sister.
After this experience I would learn that his sister was practicing black magic right across the landing from Josh’s room.
I am not sure how much I heard from Josh is truth or horror trop addled dreams;
regardless, the events of that night happened, and I get spooked just thinking about it.
His parents were real salt of the earth types, with his mom being part Native American and his father being a long haul trucker.
The last, and maybe most annoying for her age, member of the family was his little sister, who always annoyed us when we tried to goof off around the house or farm.
Added to all this was about 5 peacocks, some dogs, pigs, horses, chickens, and other typical farm animals;
But they lived in other buildings on the property, not the main house.
The afternoon of the event began as normal as could be,
we ran around the farm with wooden swords, explored the creek in the woods behind the main house, and played video games.
At one point we thought it was a good idea to make a video where I was a sasquatch and he was trying to locate me,
that game ended with my chubby ass hightailing it through the woods with Josh pursuing me like one of those police TV shows.
After getting all worked up, his mom ordered some pizza for us and we ended the day with some “Gears of War 2” on his xbox 360.
While video games may have been on the screen, my mind was on doing a ghost hunt.
Putting down the controller I suggested we do a ghost hunt, as by this point it was pitch dark outside.
Josh was enthusiastic about it and even pulled out his aunt’s tape recorder and placed in a new tape for our adventure.
Creeping out of his room, we checked on his little sister, mother, and father, each of which was asleep somewhere downstairs.
The TV room was directly below his big sister’s room, but the TV was off and his little sister was asleep on the couch.
Josh’s big sister was off at college, and left her room pretty much untouched and vacant.
Being the adventurous one, Josh suggested we do the ghost hunt in her room, as she had a reputation for being a little spooky.
On entering the room, I noticed it was filled with a partially empty closet, queen size bed against the wall, and a dresser directly across from the bed.
Additionally, the room had two windows that looked over the front yard, but at that time we couldn’t see anything in the darkness outside.
I found a pink and blue Teddy Bear that had a voice track wired to its hand.
If you pressed its hand it would say, “I love you” three times in the voice of a care bear or some sappy valentines dollar store toy.
We placed the bear and my recorder against the wall under the window; not really thinking much of it after as we didn’t get thrown across the room by some ethereal being.
Josh and I eventually got bored and left to go play some more “Gears of War 2”, completely forgetting about the recorder until we looked at the time and realized it was getting kinda late.
Deciding to go check on it after about 3 hours of recording and with no one awake in the house, we crept across the landing and retrieved the recorder, only pausing to say hello to any spirits present.
On our return to his room we were joking around by saying things along the lines of “I bet we caught the ghost snoring” and “I’ll piss my pants if we caught anything”;
the latter of those statements would soon become blatantly ironic.
I plopped down on my sleeping bag and stared up at him as he searched for his earbuds.
Finding them Josh plugs in and clicked play on the recorder,
A few moments go by and his face drops into a grimace of something between confusion and sudden realization.
I looked on as he freaked out and yelled for him mom and dad, whipping the door open and running downstairs.
Understandably, his parents and younger sister were woken up by the commotion, and were rightly peeved at being jolted by his rather high pitch screeching.
After the whole house was awake, all the light were turned on, and we were all standing in the kitchen, Josh told his parents and younger sister what he heard.
Now, as I said previously, his parents were rather down to earth people but his mother was the more spiritual of the two, leading his father to just roll his eyes and point out that we weren’t even supposed to be up this late.
After telling them the whole story, Josh’s mother calmly had him sit at the kitchen table;
she then told him all she remembered about their old house.
Josh’s family once lived in a single floor house about a two miles west of the Mexico Middle School.
In 2017 the house was falling apart and had one birch tree growing through the front porch and another through the living room.
Seeing it on a bike ride on a summers evening gave me the creeps, and as far as I know it still sits there festering on its foundation.
Going back to the early years of his life, Josh’s family moved into the place when he was only a few years old.
The property was a single house on a hill with a garage under the first floor of the house.
Due to this strange construction, half of the house was actually held up on supports, but it was safe enough that they never had any problems.
Now, this is where it gets a little fuzzy and I cannot accurately tell this part without putting on my skepticism glasses and twisting up my face in confusion.
His mother told Josh and I that in the room that would become his room there were nails sticking out of the floor and a few dried blood splotches scattered about.
Why they wouldn’t just wall up that room or NOPE out of there may have been due to the price or their lack of funds at the time,
who knows.
What I do know is that I would spend countless nights playing the Playstation 1 in that room, always fearing the underside of his bed.
As for the rest of the house, there were always cold spots, but on that seemingly minor fact I should add that it was wood heated and I was always sweating when I went over to visit.
Now, having a few cold spots and the blood on the floor could mean anything.
But… his parents fully believed the house was haunted by a little boy and an older man.
When Josh was about 3-4 he would wake up, shower, brush his teeth, say hi the boy in the mirror, and have breakfast before going to the bus for school.
Sometimes the boy would respond in the fog of the mirror, writing out words such as “ih” or “olleh”.
At first he was confused, but came to realize that these words were written backwards.
Another instance with this boy came from Josh’s father, who remembers seeing the boy staring at him in the mirror or running by the door to the bathroom.
Each time his father thought it was Josh, but it turned out he was at school or over at my house each time.
The last brief story from their old house was when, during the winter, Josh slept in the living room near the wood stove.
During the night, Josh noticed someone come through the living room and start knocking items off the shelves and throwing things about the room.
The figure was tall and dark but too skinny to be his father, and too tall to be his mother.
After its tantrum, the shadow walked through the closed door to their back porch and disappeared.
That night I learned that Josh and his family were magnets for the paranormal and supernatural, or at least more than my family (but we’ll get to that shortly).
After telling us this myriad of stories based in their old house, his mother also informed us that Josh’s older sister was practicing black magic with something called a grimour and Ouija board.
Now alone these two items are not items to be messed with, but together it’s like a beacon for negativity.
All bets were off, something was going to happen eventually, so it might as well have been my chubby ass and his dare devil attitude to bring it about.
His mother ended up burning his older sister’s grimour and Ouija board in the front yard,
but the book didn’t completely burn so they burned it a second time just to get rid of it.
After hearing all of these stories, you better believe I didn’t sleep well that night.
Moreover, Josh got in the habit of putting a salt line at his bedroom doorway for at least a year afterwards.
Comparing my recollection of events to the tapes recording, I found that the major parts go as follows.
Josh is talking, you hear a bang and we leave the room, two people speak, more banging, Josh saying something, and finally some saying hi.
Where the two voices converse I believe the dialogue is:
Older woman: Did you Make It?
Little Girl: I hate you
Josh: So were back…
Little Girl: Hiiii
Now you can believe what you want but that is what I feel was said during the audio recording.
What more, the recorder that Josh used turned up missing after our investigation, but was eventually found burned at the back of his dresser drawer….
I hope that this has tickled your scary tooth for the time being.
Your show has provided me with countless hours of enjoyment and I await stories where Edi calls everything a Skinwalker.
Sometimes Skinwalkers’ can get mixed up with Wendigos’ and Fleshgates’.
From your spooky industrial archaeologist listener from everywhere and nowhere,
Cooper
(STORIES FROM THE BEACH EPISODE)