Please note I do not include names and some specific details to protect the privacy of those people involved.
Newton, Illinois.
It’s a small town in Southern Illinois. Current population is approaching 3,000.
I was 13 years old.
Roller skating was my favorite activity back in those days. Honestly, it still is one of my favorites. There was a small group of friends that traveled – as in made our moms drive us – town to town in search of better rinks than we had at home. We quickly settled on Savoy Skateland near Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.
Jam skating was our favorite. It was called shuffle skating or sometimes “rap” skating. Our little pack was always getting whistled into timeout for being too fast and too dangerous. We had no choice but to leave town!
That’s why it surprises people to learn that we were first exposed to jam skating right there in our more conservative rink.
A guy comes in and rolls slowly out to the middle of the floor. That’s when he mesmerized us all with his spins and footwork. It looked like he was floating from his baggy jeans filling with air as he moved. This was the early 90’s. Calm down.
We had mullets too.
No shame.
Moving on.
Our little pack quickly attached ourselves to the newcomer. He was a transplant from the Chicago area. His family moved south to Newton – about an hour south of Mattoon where we all lived – and he was traveling around looking for rinks. Nobody seemed to like their options near home. This really was a thing in the 90’s.
It didn’t take long for our moms to agree to let the new guy haul us all around skating town to town. It was one of those weekends that I saw my first ghost.
We were staying with our friend / jam skating Obi-Wan at his family home in Newton. They lived in a big old house that was once a local funeral home.
We spent the night eating pizza and listening to music. We begged to know more about talking to girls and learning how to make mix tapes like they did in Chicago. (Hint: B96) There were no ghost stories. It just wasn’t on the radar with all of our excitement.
That doesn’t mean I wasn’t curious. I grew up a few blocks away from the two big cemeteries in town. There are plenty of local legends attached to both of those boneyards. I had been experiencing weird things in our house since we moved into it the summer before I started second grade, but none of that mattered an hour away from home enjoying a weekend away with my best friends.
We all camped out in what must have been a viewing room. It was long and narrow. Perfect for a coffin at one end and a trail of mourners coming through from other.
I woke up sometime in the middle of the night. The whole house was quiet. The room was dark except for the slightly shimmering woman walking down the middle of the room. My jaw must have hit the floor when I realized I could see straight through her as she moved passed me.
I was locked in place. All I could do was watch as she walked to the front of the room where she stopped. She stood there and seemed to lower her head as if looking down at something in front of her. She stayed in that position for maybe 30 seconds before turning to her left and walking through the wall that stood in her way.
I looked at my friends. They’re all sleeping.
I was alone.
I decided it had to be a trick. I looked all over the room for a projector.
Nothing.
The world just showed me things aren’t always so easy to understand.
I didn’t have the words for what happened until many years later. Residual Haunting.
Troy Taylor describes residual hauntings on Prairie Ghosts: “The easiest way to explain this haunting is to compare it to an old film loop, meaning that it is a scene or image that is played over and over again through the years. Many of these locations, where these hauntings take place, experience an event or a series of events, which imprints itself on the atmosphere of a place. This event can suddenly discharge and play itself at various times. The events are not always visual either, they are often replayed as sounds and noises that have no explanation. The famous “phantom footsteps” reported in many haunted places are a perfect example of this.”
I suspect what I witnessed that night was a woman coming to mourn at a funeral. She appeared to look down at what might have been a coffin holding the body of someone she cared about. Perhaps her grief was strong enough to imprint on the environment. Somehow the conditions were right to push play on the scene that evening.
The world has witnessed many events. Why do some replay in the form of residual hauntings?
My current working theory is about the living being a spark plug. If the right kind of person enters a location, the supernatural phenomena gets amped up and energized. Any place could be home to any number of spirits and potential activity. It just takes the right currents of power and influence to let the high strangeness loose. Connor Randall and I dig into these ideas on his episode of the show.
Have you experienced a residual haunting? What happened? Where was it?
Your stories matter.
Stay Weird, my friends!