Have you ever seen a ghost? (ft. Tom MacDonald)
In the last 6 months Tom and I have only left the house a handful of times and pretty much all of my social interactions have been with the Kardashians. I’m watching more television than ever before…. and my newest obsession? GHOST ADVENTURES.
I love/hate ghosts. For my birthday Tom got me a ghost hunting kit but without being able to actually get out there in the world and try it out, my findings have been pretty slim (aka, null). The house we live in now is just not fucking haunted, and i knew this before I turned on the spirit box because I have three million percent lived in haunted houses before.
I was seventeen and sitting with my back to the wall, talking on the phone to one of my friends, in the living room of the two bedroom apartment my mom rented when she moved back to Canada from Jamaica. This apartment was 50 steps from an infamous abandoned hospital in Edmonton, the Charles Camsell.
Where I lived, right next to the Charles Camsell Hospital.
Every light in the apartment was on, my mom was asleep in her bedroom, and I was completely sober, talking to whoever about whatever 17 year olds talk about in the middle of the night.
Then a shadow that walked through the room.
It wasn’t cast on a wall or the floor, it was quite literally blackness in a fuzzy human form that walked, directly in front of me, out of the wall on the right (my mom’s bedroom) and across the room into the kitchen, where I couldn’t see it anymore.
I searched google images for ANYTHING that looked like what i saw, and this drawing was the closest.
This figure was solid black with edges that became less and less opaque and i could not see through it. As clear as day I saw this figure that stood a little over 6’ tall, from about 10 feet away and if it knew i was there it didn’t acknowledge me, it just walked through the room.
WHAT THE FUCK?
Still, despite this, if someone tells me a story about something paranormal, no matter how much I trust them, i don’t believe it. I’m skeptical by nature and I would never trust a ouija board - however, I would kick someone out for bringing one to my house.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been texting people I trust, and there aren’t many, at random, the same six words. “Have you ever seen a ghost?”
The first to reply was my aunt who replied “Felt for sure” and I called her immediately. We lost her mother, my grandma, just a few months ago, and in her 20s she lost her long-term boyfriend Brett. She told me that for years after Brett was killed, every once in a while, she’d feel breath on her neck and since we lost grandma her electric toothbrush keeps turning on by itself while she’s thinking about her.
The skeptical me wants to write off both of these stories, but honestly I can’t because a couple years ago when Tom and I rented a cheap house in South Central we had something REALLY WEIRD happen.
Sidenote: My dad was staying with us when it happened, who also texted me back…. 🙄
What a dick.
It was two o’clock in the morning and we had just turned off That 70s Show and snuggled into bed. (Tom is the little spoon if anyone is wondering). A few minutes later, the string from the ceiling fan clicked and the light turned on. Tom got up to turn it of and we exchanged a super weird look but filed it under “bad wiring”. A couple minutes later it turned on again.
When the light clicked on FOR THE THIRD TIME Tom jumped up and stood directly under the ceiling fan, puffing out his chest, ready for anything. We froze, waiting, and then he started shouting.
”Something is touching me!”
I told him that there was NO way, that it was just his adrenaline fucking with him.
”NO!” He yelled, turning his chest towards me. Then I saw it.
I could CLEARLY see that his chest was moving… like something invisible was poking him, and we stood there in horror while it happened repeatedly. Every few seconds there was another poke. It happened 4 times in the exact same place.
WHAT THE FUCK?
We laid back in bed, awake for hours just waiting for something else to happen, but nothing did.. and aside from waking up in the morning with the lights on a few times over the next couple weeks, there was no trace of this “ghost” ever again.
Looking back, I’m surprised that we weren’t completely shaken to the core - but I’d literally seen (what i think was) a ghost before and SO. HAS. HE.
I’m going to hand the keyboard over to Tom for a second so he can tell you his story.
Tranquille
Written by Tom MacDonald
Alright, we’re going to have to take a trip WAY back in my time machine for this one…
The year was 2012. Thankfully, the Mayan calendar was wrong and the much publicized “end of the world” never came…but shit still got weird. Really weird.
It all started with a music video shoot in the small, abandoned town of Tranquille in Canada…but it wasn’t until after this whole ordeal that we discovered Tranquille is one of the most haunted places on earth. Let’s start from the beginning…
There was 3 of us. Myself, the music video director and my producer, Olivier. We piled into our car on a Friday afternoon and drove hours into a long-forgotten corner of the pacific northwest - unknowingly embarking one of the most terrifying journey’s of our lives.
Aside from a traffic jam on the highway, it was a rather long and uneventful drive. As we drew closer and closer to Tranquille, things got more and more desolate. The other cars we had shared the road with gradually disappeared. The streetlights gave way to giant pine-trees. The tiny communities dotting the edges of the asphalt were swallowed up as the suffocating Canadian wilderness closed-in all around us. The paved roads turned to gravel and eventually to dirt.
Thats when we reached the iron gates.
Our final destination, Tranquille, had been cut off from the rest of the world for a long time. It was built in the 1900’s - in the middle of nowhere - to home Canadians with Tuberculosis (TB). At the time, TB was incurable and highly infectious (sound familiar?) so they shipped all of the infected to this small town where they could…well, die.
Anyway, we didn’t know any of that. We knew that we had a music video to shoot and an abandoned town would be the perfect backdrop.
So, there we were, in the middle of nowhere. We pulled the car to the side of the dirt “road” and unpacked all of our music videos supplies. Armed with our backpacks, lights and a camera, we cut into the trees to get around the iron gate blocking the road.
After a short hike through the trees, we came over the top of a small hill - and there it was, down in the valley.
Silent. Still. Forgotten.
Schools, houses, convenience stores, libraries, hospitals. Small paint chips peeling off their exteriors and flapping in the wind, clinging to a time a little less lonely.
We had arrived at Tranquille.
We made our way down the hill and crossed the train-tracks that encircled the town. There were no signs of life. No birds, no coyotes, no deer - nothing. Aesthetically, the town was in surprisingly good shape. It seemed like, with the exception of three heavily dilapidated houses, time had spared the city from the deterioration you’d expect.
We made our way towards the three dilapidated houses. They sat all in a row, JUST on the outskirts of town. All of them identical. Same paint. Same windows. Same doors. Each as perfectly the same as the next. Anyway, as we got closer, you could practically hear them groaning from too many lonely years without maintenance. It almost sounded like something might be stirring around inside them…and to be honest, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to find out what that SOMETHING was. Turns out I didn’t have a choice. While I was lost in thought and gripped by an almost tangible apprehension - something emerged from inside the middle house.
Two teenaged kids. We stopped dead in our tracks.
A boy and a girl holding an old camcorder kind-of bounced toward us, across the sun-beaten pavement.
“What are you guys doing here?”, I said.
Their demeanor was strange. Well, not STRANGE…but not fitting of the situation. They both had big smiles and seemed genuinely excited to see us.
The boy spoked first. “Just checking out the town!”, he said.
“See anything weird?”, I asked.
“No, not really. Not yet.”
The girl interjected, “Be careful in the houses. The floor boards are rotting so it’s really dangerous. You could fall through.”
I don’t remember much else about the conversation. The whole interaction lasted maybe 3 minutes and we were back on our way.
We went into the house that our new friends came out of and they weren’t lying - there was a MASSIVE hole in the floor on the second level where it looked like something had fallen through and landed with a bunch of rubble in the living room. Trippy.The more we explored, the weirder it got. In the school, there was 3 inches of dust on the desks. The day’s lessons were still scribbled in chalk on the blackboards. Pencils and erasers were still littered about the work stations. If you picked anything up, you’d leave a perfect imprint of the item in the dust. These things hadn’t been touched in years.
After roaming through half-a-dozen buildings looking for a perfect location, we had made our decision - the sanatorium.
We were walking down the main street, heading back toward the hospital when we noticed something peculiar - a small, white, concrete structure jetting up out of the dirt on the edge of town. We had a long day of shooting ahead of us, but Tranquille felt like a portal to another dimension…and we were captured by it’s mystery. So, naturally, we took off toward the white structure.
It was a brick box about ten feet tall and eight feet across - with one door. It was one of those old steel doors that you’d see in a government institution of some sort - light green, sun-bleached and missing the door knob. I put my fingers in the hole where the handle should have been and jerked the door open.
It was dark. Not the kind of dark that you’re familiar with. It wasn’t “1 A.M. in my house with the lights off” dark. It was pitch fucking blackness. But remember - we’re here to shoot a music video - so, we’ve got lights. We pull one of the lights out and turn it on. There’s NOTHING in this room. There’s no windows. There’s nothing on the walls. There’s no flooring - just plain concrete. It’s as white and blank on the inside as it is on the out…with one exception - a staircase.
I’d be lying If I said we weren’t scared. We were freaked the fuck out. But, the thing about guys is - not one of us will admit to the others that we’re scared. So…we’re terrified but no one wants to say that they’re terrified…and in the greatest display of masterfully fabricated machismo in the history of mankind, we go down the stairs. Yeah, you read that correctly. We’re so deep in denial that we can’t accept being horrified in-front of another man and we decided to venture down into a black hole in an abandoned town in the middle of nowhere.I could barely comprehend what was at the bottom of those stairs.
Medical equipment. Everywhere. Surgeons tables and x-ray machines and wheel-chairs and rolling-beds and…it was just bizarre. Everything untouched for years and covered in dust. There were doorways on each of the three walls. No doors - just doorways. We shined the light through the first doorway - long concrete hall. Then the second doorway - long concrete hall. Then the third doorway - you guessed it - long concrete hall.Still neglecting the sheer terror permeating every cell in our bodies, we somehow decided on one of the doorways, walked through it and began our reluctant trek in to the abyss.
What we found were just more concrete hallways. And more wheel-chairs. And more concrete hallways. And more rolling-beds. And MORE concrete hallways. A FUCKING LABYRINTH OF CONCRETE HALLWAYS.
We decided it was a cool location to shoot a scene for the music video, so, we started filming.
I’m not even exaggerating - we probably only had the camera rolling for thirty seconds before we had to turn it off. Things started getting weird.
I remember saying “Cut the camera off - did you hear that?”
We all stood, quiet and motionless in the ten foot section of hallway that our light would illuminate. Somewhere beyond where out light would reach - way in the darkness - footsteps.
I remember Olivier sort-of laughing the words “No fucking way.”
Frozen with fear, we held our breathe and we listened.
Voices. Distant voices. Echoing through the vast maze of hallways.
“Pack up the camera”, I said, “Lets get the fuck out of here.”As we were packing up to leave, I notice that JUST BARELY out of our light’s reach - there’s a door. A big metal one. I squeeze past Olivier and the director and creep up to the door. I push it open.
It’s the basement of a house.“Shine that light over here.” I say.
Another big metal door 6 feet away. I creep up to it and push it up. It’s another basement of another house. On our way back to the surface we pass more doors and as we pass, I push them open. More basements of more buildings. It became clear to me at this point that this wasn’t a regular town. Something was going on here. Something that required every building in the city to be connected by underground tunnels that all lead to some sort of secret medical lab. We needed to shoot this music video and get the hell out of there.
By the time we found our way out of the tunnels and made it back to the sanatorium across town, it had gotten dark. You know what’s even scarier than a creepy abandon town in the middle of nowhere with an underground mad scientist lab? A creepy abandon town in the middle of nowhere with an underground mad scientist lab in the mother fucking dark, son.
That being said, the next couple hours went by rather smoothly. We got the shots we wanted inside the sanatorium and we filmed in a couple other cool locations. But…THIS IS WHERE THE REALLY HAUNTED SHIT STARTS.
We finish the shoot, pack up the gear, hike up the hill, sneak through the trees, go around the gate and end up back at the car.We load everything into the trunk and the director says “I’m missing one of my lights.”
“So fucking what” I say. “We’re not going back for it now."
“It’s a twelve hundred dollar light.”, says the director.“Well, Im not going back.” I say.
“Im not going back either.” Says Olivier.
“Well, someone has to go back”, says the director, “I need that light. Lets play rock paper scissors for it.”So, we play rock, paper, scissors AND GUESS FUCKING WHAT? I lose. Of course I fucking loose. But I’m STILL not fucking going.
“Well, I don’t give a shit about this stupid fucking game.” I say, “I’m still not going back.”That’s when Olivier had about enough of this situation and says “Fuck it, I’ll go get it. Where’s the light?” The director says he thinks we let it in the sanatorium.
And with that, Olivier turns and walks off into the dark.
“Gimme a fuckin flashlight.” I say to the director.
Olivier isn’t just my producer at this point in time…he’s my best friend. I can’t let him go back by himself. So, I get the flashlight and run to catch up with him.
“Got us a flashlight.” I said, out of breath from the short jog. Olivier didn’t say anything back. He just looked at me and did one of those full-teeth smiles that you can’t help but make before doing something incredibly stupid.Through the forest. Around the fence. Up the hill. Into the valley.
We’re back in Tranquille.
It’s pitch black now and I’m carrying this little rinky-dink-ass flashlight to find our way. We reach the sanatorium.I ask Olivier, “This place is huge, dude. Where do you think we left the light?”
Olivier says, “It’s in the big main room. I saw him put it down there and I knew he didn’t pick it back up. I just don’t fuckin like him so I was going to let him leave it behind.”
Somehow I managed to let out a muffled laugh.We go up the concrete stairs and gently push open the old, creaky, wooden door then go inside. We’re now standing in the hallway that leads to the big common-area type room where the light is supposed to be. We creep down the hallway and reach the main room. I shine the light up on the wall to our left as we enter “Please Burn Me Down” is spray painted in black across the wall above a grand old fireplace.
“There’s the light” says Olivier.
We walk over and Olivier kneels down to pick it up.
“Great” I say, “Lets get the fuck out of here.”
With the light in our possession, we turn and start heading back down the hallway towards the door.Now, what happens next is probably the most horrendous thing that I’ve ever witnessed in my life. I’m sure Olivier would say the same thing. Im actually going to call him today and read this to him just to make sure I haven’t left anything out. Anyway…
The hallways is lined with doors on each side. Each door leads into a small “holding room” of some sort. They’re like little cells with padded walls. Know the ones? Yeah.
Now, Im not exactly sure how to explain this. You know when you feeling like something is watching you? You know when you see something out of the corner of your eye but when you turn to look nothing is there? You know when something passes behind you so quickly that by the time you turn around it’s gone? Alright - that happened. To both of us. At the same time.
Except something was watching us. That thing in the corner of our eye became the only thing we could see. That thing that passed behind us so quickly that we couldn’t see it when we turned around - it was there when we turned around.
In perfect synchronization, all those things happened…and when we peered into the the padded room on our right - there it was.
A shadow. A shadow standing up from the floor. NOT a shadow being cast ON the floor. A shadow standing UP - OFF the floor. Just like a person. Except this wasn’t a person. It was dark and daunting. Featureless. Almost transparent. It was so ridged and so massive and so…it was pure fucking terror.
At the same time, we started to run. We were so scared and it was so dark. We were like two frantic animals running from a predator. Some sort of primal survival instinct had taken over and we were completely hysterical. We were falling all over each other and falling over pieces of wood and falling over ladders and falling over pieces of fallen debris…but somehow, we made it to the door and scrambled out into the abandoned street.But we didn’t stop running. We weren’t even thinking. We were just moving the fuck away from whatever that thing was as fast as we possibly could.
After what seemed like a marathon - we stopped, almost collapsing onto the ground. Gasping for breath and spinning our heads left and right - we tried to orient ourselves.
“Where are we?” I snapped while gasping for breathe.
“I don’t know.” Said Olivier, barely able to speak.
I took by hands off my knees and pointed the flash light back towards where we’d ran from.“We’re lost.” I said, “I don’t know where the fuck we are."
We were so scared and it was so dark and the town is SO big - we’d lost our sense of direction.Olivier gasps, “ I think the car is that way.” And points with one hand.
I turn and point the flashlight in that direction. I take one step and the flashlight dies. It literally flickers once or twice and then…nothing. It’s just gone.I’m not sure if I ever felt so helpless. We cant see ten feet in-front of our faces without that light. We’re lost. And there’s that THING in the sanatorium.
I honestly don’t remember the next thirty minutes. We were racked with fear and running on pure adrenaline…but we found our way out. And this time…when we crossed the traintracks and hiked up the hill, we turned around when we got to the top and looked back down on the town in valley.
And guess what? The lights were in the sanatorium were on.We barreled through the trees, around the gate and over to the car. I remember Olivier opening up the passenger side door and trying to squeeze into the back seat without leaning the front seat forward. I was so scared and wanted to leave so bad that I couldn’t wait. I put my foot on his ass and shoved him into the back seat. I jumped in and slammed the door.
“Drive” I said.
“What happ-“ started the director.
“Fucking drive!” I shouted, “Now!”We made it back home in one piece, mostly unscathed. You know what the craziest part of this whole thing was? Remember those kids I mentioned at the beginning of the story? Well, I started researching Tranquille when we got home. Thats when I found out it was a town for people with Tuberculosis to live out their final days. That’s also when I found out those underground tunnels were to move the bodies of the deceased and sick to the laboratory or the morgue in secret without upsetting the rest of the town.
But the scariest thing I found out? Thats easy. The scariest thing I found out was that ten years prior to my experience in Tranquille, two kids went ghost hunting with a camcorder and fell through the floor in one of the houses, killing them both. A boy and a girl.
Weird.
While Thomas had my computer I received a couple texts back. One from my brother, a total skeptic, who told me his wife used to have an apartment where things would move around to strange places but he’d filed it under “weird” instead of “paranormal”.
I also heard back from Tom’s sister who once upon a time visited the same hospital I used to live next to. Her and her friends had gone there late one night to attempt to break in and check the place out. While they were hyping themselves up in the car they heard a loud bang on the passenger side door, like something had hit it. The car DIED and they had to have a mechanic come help them out at like 3am. Eventually he got it going and the second the car turned back on the radio was playing FULL BLAST. Needless to say, they never step foot in the hospital, but apparently they didn’t have to.
Anyways, I can’t wait to get out there and try out all my cool ghost gadgets.. but until then will you PLEASE leave me YOUR true stories below in the comments and grab your “Hang Over Gang Official Ghost Hunter T-Shirt!”
I love you guys!!!
Thanks for reading!!
-Nova