Tales of the Supernatural in the Delaware Valley

By GREGG KIRK
October 1993, Big Shout Magazine

I was in second grade when my classmates and I used to order 50-cent Scholastic Books out of the back of our Weekly Reader the teacher passed out every Tuesday afternoon. The books were usually no more than 40-pages long, chock full of pictures and printed in large, easy-to-read type.

The roster of reading material itself was pretty standard — stories of sports heroes, daredevils, or great figures in history, but inevitably the books that caught my eye were the “Weird Tales,” “Rear Life Ghost Stories,” or “Strange But True Stories” that somehow found their way in the mix.

Even at the tender age of seven, my friends and I realized this was nothing but cheap, low-brow entertainment at its worst, but that’s exactly what drew us to it.

I’d buy these books by the armload, curl up in a chair on an autumn night and scare the wits out of myself. After reading three or four of them, I noticed that the stories had an annoying amount of regularity to them. If you paged through one of these masterpieces, you were bound to hit a tale of a dismembered hand of an evil man that comes to life; a motorist who picks up a hitchhiker, drives with him for miles, drops him off at a neighboring town, and then finds out by accident that his passenger has been dead for years; or some kind of nautical ghost story about a haunted ship that appears in a foggy harbor on the anniversary of its sinking.

Not once did I think that these things had really happened, but that wouldn’t keep the hairs from raising on my neck and forearms. Little did I know that years later I would meet people who have had experiences that would make my Scholastic Book stories pale in comparison, and ultimately I, too, would have real-life, strange-but-true experiences. What follows are true accounts of encounters friends, acquaintances, and I have had with the supernatural and paranormal in the past few years. The names of the participants have been changed, but the locations and details of their stories are true.

Wanda

Two of my best friends in the world are a married couple who live at one of the Delaware beaches. Last summer while I was visiting them, we went out to eat, and eventually began drinking heavily at the end of the meal. Our conversation turned from the usual drunken chatter to one of those heavy discussions you have in the depths of pure drunkenness, where subjects of God, Death, and the Great Beyond are touched upon with particular delicacy — in between belches and orders for more beer.

Somewhere in the midst of our stupor, my friend Brad made an offhand comment about an experience he had had when he was a teenager. “I’ve never told you my Wanda story!?” he exclaimed when the mention of it drew blank looks from his wife and me. After we both shook our heads, and his wife Cindy slurred, “You never tell me anything,” he unraveled his tale…

When Brad was 14-years old, he hung out with a girl named Wanda in the town where they grew up in Lock Haven, PA. They weren’t a heavy item or anything, but they made out together, smoked cigarettes, and tried to be cool. One day, Brad’s mother drove him into town to run some errands. On his lap was a box of apples that made it impossible for him to raise his arms so that when he and his mother saw Wanda walking alongside the road and drove by her, he couldn’t wave to her. He felt bad because she had waved to him, they had made eye contact, but all he could do was blink at her.

Later that night when they got home, Brad’s family heard fire and police sirens, and eventually someone called to tell them that Wanda had been hitchhiking and had gotten into the car of a high school kid who had been drinking. After driving a few miles down the road, he had careened out of his lane and hit a family who was coming home from their daughter’s wedding.

All the passengers had been killed, but oddly enough Wanda hadn’t died right away. When the ambulances arrived, she had walked from the car under her own power, and the paramedics thought she hadn’t been hurt that badly, so they tended to the family of the wedding party. It was when she leaned up against the car door and sat down that she succumbed to her internal injuries.

Like any kid who experiences the death of someone close to him, the reality of the situation evaded Brad. He went to sleep that night finding it all too difficult to believe, half expecting to see Wanda alive the next day… until something disturbed him in the middle of the night.

Brad’s bedroom was on the first floor, and in his room was a low-rising window that he and his friends used to sneak in and out of when his parents were asleep. It was through this window that, as Brad suddenly awoke, he saw the figure of Wanda (wearing an oversized shirt and pair of jeans) climb through the sill and into his room. She made no motion or effort to communicate with him, but he cried out to her that he had tried to wave to her earlier but his arms had been pinned down. She only stared at him and eventually disappeared. For two more nights, the specter of Wanda repeated this performance, and though Brad pleaded wit her and tried to make her understand, she never replied. While Brad mentioned to us that he thought it was strange Wanda was wearing clothes that were not what she characteristically wore and that while he and his male friends knew about climbing through his window late at night, Wanda had not — he did say Wanda’s ghost appeared so lifelike that it actually looked like a real person, not like the blurry apparitions in the movies.

Close Encounter

My friend Tom lives in Austin, TX, and every few months our paths cross in that city. Last summer while I was visiting him, we decided to make a road trip to Mexico, which is about six hours away from where he lives. We loaded up Tom’s pickup in the morning, pointed it south, and got feverishly bent on the way.

Somewhere outside of Eagle Pass, TX in the blistering heat we made a wrong turn, and Tom stopped the truck. We had a decision to make, he said; we could either go to Nuevo Laredo (which meant four more hours of driving) or drive two hours to the nearest border town — Piedras Negras. Tom explained to me that the latter would probably be a depressed little hole in the ground with squalid restaurants, houses with no plumbing or electricity, and strip bars where the women were rumored to perform various sexual acts on barnyard animals. We thought it over for a minute and then headed straight for Piedras Negras.

On the way, our conversation made a turn for the weird. In a confessional tone, Tom confided that a friend of his had recently had a close encounter of the third kind. Of course I was skeptical, but as Tom continued, I could see by the look on his face that he was dead serious.

Tom said the encounter happened in Iowa, where he and I grew up together. His friend is a marijuana farmer, and he has a large crop hidden somewhere in a field that he visits very early in the morning. It was on one of these trips to maintenance his plants that Tom’s friend was overcome by a strange feeling as he walked the hidden path to his crop. The guy explained to Tom that he felt as if something were trying to persuade him non-verbally not to go down the path.

As he continued, an eerie thing happened. Something began shaking a tree at the guy, as if to scare him off like a spooked animal. Tom’s friend said that that was when he realized whatever it was on the other side of the tree was not human, because a man would never resort to such a strange method to scare off another man.

When Tom’s friend reached for his pistol, all hell broke loose. Something with a long head, approximately six-ft. tall, and vaguely humanoid, sensed what he was doing and leapt backwards more than 30-ft. in the air and scrambled off in the dark.

While Tom’s friend was obviously shaken, he told Tom there was nothing he could do about it. He couldn’t tell he police or any type of authorities because of the risk of revealing the location of his plants. And he wasn’t exactly dying to tell all of his friends, who might think he had been smoking way too much of the stuff he was growing.

Haunted Houses

Over the years, I’ve met several people who have had firsthand experiences with ghosts in the houses they’ve inhabited. A friend of mine claimed she never even believed in ghosts until an encounter she had while meditating in the attic of her father’s farmhouse in Elkton, MD. As she finished her meditation and made to leave, an apparition of a slight black man appeared. Like my friend Brad, she described the ghost as looking very lifelike and not formless or cloudy. The odd thing was that while the apparition had the features of a black man, his skin was very pale, and he communicated to her without moving his lips. She said she did not feel afraid as the specter told her that his name was Jacob, he had been a slave, and his master had strangled him to death.

Another friend of mine had a very different experience with several spirits that inhabited a house in Kutztown, PA. Apparently the former tenant had shot himself in the head with a shotgun a few years before, and his malicious spirit began tormenting my friend and her roommates. Countless bizarre occurrences happened, like the household cat suddenly going crazy and attacking her and her friends, inexplicable noises and voices, and several sightings of the former tenant himself.

The most unsettling events usually occurred when she and her roommates were asleep. On one occasion, my friend’s roommate awoke to witness the specter leaning over and watching her other roommate sleeping. At one time, my friend occupied the room where the tenant had shot himself, and in the middle of the night, she awoke to find the spirit leaning over her. In the room, she said she could hear several voices, one of which uttered, “Let’s fuck with them!”

A third friend of mine had the misfortune of growing up in a house across the street from a graveyard near Media, PA. When she was a little girl, she used to hear voices when she was alone in her room so frequently that whenever she told her parents, they considered seeking psychiatric help for her until they began to hear the voices themselves.

One particularly unusual occurrence happened to her after she bought an old ring at a flea market. That night while sleeping, she was awakened by a disturbance by her jewelry box. Leaning over it and rummaging through her collection was a small woman dressed like a gypsy, with a flowing gown and scarf around her head. When the woman noticed her, she disappeared, and upon inspecting the box, my friend found that the ring she had just bought that day was nowhere to be found.

More Weird Tales

While none of my own experiences can rival those of my friends, the past year has been a strange one for me as well. Last winter, while over at a friend’s house, I had my first experience with a poltergeist. My friend lives in a house in Center City Philly that has seen several hauntings, not the least of which occurred when she was away and her house sitter was locked out on her roof. After yelling to a passerby to call the police, the officers who showed up found that the door she couldn’t budge earlier was not only unlocked but opened easily when they arrived. My friend has also seen the figure of a woman descending her stairs in the reflection of the blank picture tube on her TV, and she has also seen the fringes of her lamp sway in her bedroom when there was do draft apparent.

On the night in question, my friend and I were standing in the entrance to her kitchen and three of her cats were milling around our legs. At one point, one of the cats jumped up on a wood chair in the corner, and seconds later a loud knocking startled all of the cats at once — especially the one in the chair, who darted with the other cats from the kitchen in fear for their lives. At first we thought the rapping had come from outside, but I had been looking in the direction of the chair, which was situated between two windows. The noise had come from that direction, and if anyone had been outside, I would have seen them. Not only that, the knocking sounded like knuckles on solid wood, and there was nothing but glass, wrought iron, and brick on the outside of the house.

My second experience with the paranormal occurred last May at my house in Newark, DE. As I woke up to go to the bathroom at about 5 a.m. one morning, my eyes passed by my window as I lay back in bed. The morning sky was fairly bright — the day was just dawning — therefore there were no stars visible. But as plain as day was a very bright pulsating light that looked to be originating from very far off. I watched the light grow from very dim to the point of disappearing, to beaming brighter than any star I have ever seen. It behaved this way for about 15 minutes and then disappeared altogether.

My first thought was that I had witnessed a dying star. I knew it wasn’t Venus, the Morning Star, because I had seen that many times before and had never watched it pulsate or blaze with such intensity and then disappear. It didn’t seem to be the reflection of any conventional aircraft because the thing remained stationary the entire time. It wasn’t until I happened to see an episode of the TV series Sightings that I became more sure. On this particular episode, they showed video footage of a UFO sighting where the object pulsated in the same slow fashion and then shot out of sight at an impossible speed. The object they showed looked exactly like the thing I saw that morning in May.