20 Famous Ghost Stories That Began With Oddly Ordinary Events

In Hydesville, New York, 14-year-old Maggie Fox and her sister, 11-year-old Kate Fox, said a spirit named “Mr. Splitfoot” began rapping in their bedroom in March 1848. Their mother invited local people to hear it, and suddenly people were desperate to speak to the dead. Decades later, at a public meeting in New York, Maggie Fox admitted that the noise had been produced by popping her toes, ankles, and fingers, and a medical panel confirmed she could do it.

Raynham Hall is a stately home in Norfolk, England, and on September 19, 1936, photographer Hubert Provand and his assistant Indre Shira were taking pictures of its staircase for Country Life magazine. Shira said he saw a veiled, glowing shape descending the stairs and told Provand to snap the shutter. The resulting plate, when developed, showed what appeared to be a ghostly figure, which was published in the December issue as “the Brown Lady.” Analysis of the photograph indicates it was probably just a double exposure.

When Sarah Winchester, the widow of William Wirt Winchester, heir to the Winchester rifle fortune, purchased a small farmstead in San Jose, Calif., in 1884, she continued to expand and alter it until it boasted 160 rooms. According to legend, a clairvoyant told her to keep expanding the house to confuse the spirits of those killed by Winchester rifles, but biographer Mary Jo Ignoffo found no reference to ghosts in Sarah’s personal correspondence. Real estate promoters made up the ghost stories to sell the house to tourists after she died.

In Hammersmith, a village close to London, there was talk of a ghost that frightened travelers at night, and they began to organize patrols with guns. One night, an excise man saw someone dressed in white in the middle of the road, shouted at the person but got no reply, and shot it dead. He then discovered the corpse was that of Thomas Millwood, 22, a plasterer going home from work dressed in his white work clothing as he often did. His own mother-in-law had told him that very evening that he looked like the ghost everyone had been talking about. The officer was found guilty of murder.

The SS Watertown was an oil tanker. Two of its sailors died in December 1924, suffocating from toxic gas while they cleaned out one of its cargo tanks. The crew buried their bodies at sea. Shortly thereafter, other members of the crew reported that they were seeing faces in the froth of the sea. In 1925, the captain took some photos of the water, which his boss published in his own magazine as confirmation that the spirits of the two dead sailors had returned. Years later, one researcher studied the image and used forensic techniques to reveal that it had been doctored in the darkroom to turn reflections from the waves into the faces of two men.

In August 1914, during the early stages of World War I, the British and Germans clashed at the Battle of Mons in Belgium. Shortly afterwards, Welsh author Arthur Machen wrote a short story that appeared in a London newspaper. In his story, phantom archers swooped down from heaven to aid British soldiers. Readers believed the story to be a news report of a genuine encounter with angels on the battlefield, and many newspapers and churches reprinted the tale. Machen said he simply made up the story, but the legend lived on as “the Angel of Mons.”

In January 1897, Elva Zona Heaster Shue, 21, died unexpectedly in Greenbrier County, West Virginia. Blacksmith Edward “Trout” Shue, her husband, prevented the doctor from checking her neck, and her cause of death was listed as heart failure. But her mother, Mary Jane Heaster, suspected murder and claimed Zona’s spirit had visited her, explaining that she had a broken neck. She brought the case to the local prosecutor, who ordered an exhumation. During the autopsy, doctors discovered that her windpipe was crushed and her neck was dislocated. Shue was found guilty of murder.

A story that dates back to the 17th century tells of a Dutch captain who made a reckless oath during a storm off South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope and was cursed to sail forever. For centuries, sailors reported seeing his ghost ship hovering just over the horizon. A future king even saw it in 1881. Atmospheric scientists now explain these sightings as a mirage called Fata Morgana, where cold ocean air bends the light from a real, distant ship so it looks like it’s floating.

Richard Parsons, a London landlord, had let some rooms to money-lender William Kent and his partner Fanny Lynes in 1759. Kent had lent Parsons 12 guineas, which he never repaid. Kent sued him to recover the debt. Around that time, Fanny died of smallpox. Then Parsons claimed that Fanny’s ghost was haunting his little girl and telling her that Kent had poisoned Fanny. People came in crowds to see the haunted house and participate in seances until a clever investigator caught the girl hiding a stick under her bed to make the noises. Parsons was convicted of fraud and sentenced to stand in the pillory.

In 1837, a man named “Spring-Heeled Jack” started appearing all over London, jumping over fences and scaring late-night walkers. Then the Lord Mayor of London held a public hearing because he had received letters saying there was a gang of rich young men who made a wager at a tavern. The wager: dress in scary disguises and go around the countryside frightening people. One of these suspects was the Marquess of Waterford, a notorious nobleman known for playing dangerous practical jokes. What began as a story about men wearing strange costumes gradually turned into stories of a fire-breathing demon.

On the Isle of Man, Jim Irving, his wife Margaret, and their 13-year-old daughter Voirrey lived on an isolated farm. They began hearing scratching noises coming from behind the paneling in their house in 1931, assuming that there were rats. Irving began growling and barking at the paneling to scare them out. Soon something began mimicking him back, and a mysterious voice calling itself Gef, a talking mongoose, started coming from inside the walls of the family’s farmhouse, sparking a national press frenzy. Eventually, an investigator claimed Voirrey had been using ventriloquism, and the hair samples submitted for testing turned out to be just regular dog hair.

In Epworth Rectory in Lincolnshire, England, lived the Reverend Samuel Wesley, his wife Susanna, and their young son John Wesley, who would go on to found the Methodist movement. Sometime in December 1716, the family started noticing knocks, groans, and footsteps inside the rectory, which they nicknamed Old Jeffrey. According to Susanna’s letters, the Wesleys first suspected that there were rats in the badly infested floorboards. Soon after Samuel and Susanna had a bitter argument about the king, the noises grew worse. Given that the house was very drafty, some of the sounds could have been produced by the chimneys and made worse by frightened servants and children.

Farmer John Bell of Adams, Tennessee, said that in 1817, he shot at a strange animal in his cornfield. Soon thereafter, members of the Bell family started reporting sounds of thumping and scratching within the walls of their home. The family had been embroiled in a protracted legal battle with a neighboring landowner over land and money issues. Neighbors gossiped that Kate Batts, a neighboring landowner embroiled in the dispute, had cursed the house. Years later, an author released a book stating that future president Andrew Jackson came by and saw the ghost, but there are no contemporary documents that indicate he ever made such a trip.

Gilbert Campbell lived as a weaver in Glenluce, Scotland. In 1654, Campbell refused a beggar named Alexander Agnew some charity, causing him to leave muttering threats. Stones were soon thrown through windows, threads were cut from the looms, knocks were heard around the house, and small fires broke out. Campbell believed Agnew’s curses caused these events. Eventually, Agnew was executed for blasphemy. In 1685, a Glasgow professor published a book with an account of Campbell’s haunted house, saying that investigators of the day thought Campbell’s teenage son may have been the culprit behind the physical manifestations.

Esther Cox was 18 years old, living in Amherst, Nova Scotia, with her older sister Jennie. In September 1878, they heard something under their bed. They first suspected a mouse, but when they pulled out a cardboard patchwork box, it jumped and flipped over on its own. Soon other members of the household reported thumping, moving objects, and messages scratched on the wall. An actor got wind of it and made a bestseller out of it. A modern historian suspects Esther Cox staged the later events to win attention. She had recently been the victim of a physical assault, which some believe may have fueled the disturbances.

Bettiscombe Manor in Dorset, England, was once owned by John Frederick Pinney. Pinney made his fortune from his sugar plantation in Nevis and brought home an enslaved servant who had been living in Jamaica. Legend holds that after the servant died of tuberculosis, he wanted to be buried in Nevis, but Pinney had him buried locally instead. Soon, screams were heard rising from the grave, and it wasn’t until the servant’s skull was taken to the manor that the screaming stopped. A forensic examiner who tested the skull in 1963 determined it actually belonged to a prehistoric European woman.

Aged 19 and a medical student, Rosina Despard reported seeing a tall woman in dark Victorian mourning dress roaming around her family’s house in Cheltenham from 1882, and even strung threads across the halls to try to capture her. Her account was published by the Society for Psychical Research, a group that investigates paranormal claims. Her family believed the figure was the house’s former mistress, and researchers said that feelings of grief and household gossip could explain the sightings.

John Mompesson, a magistrate in Tedworth, England, now called Tidworth, became the subject of one of the most famous poltergeist cases in history. In 1661, he confiscated a drum from a traveling ex-soldier who was using fake papers as part of a scam to beg for money, and stored the drum in his home. Several weeks later, loud drumming noises, along with movements of furniture and scratching noises, began to occur. Mompesson accused the ex-soldier, who had since been jailed on an unrelated charge, of using witchcraft to beat the drum from his prison cell. The story was published by a philosopher in 1681. Today, historians generally consider the noises to be ordinary household tricks or misidentified sounds.

15-year-old Shirley Hitchings lived with her father in Battersea, South London. In January 1956, she reported finding an ornate silver key on her pillow which she didn’t own and which fit no locks in the house. Later that night there were loud thumping sounds from all over the house, causing neighbors and the police to come knocking. The noises continued for years, accompanied by various notes signed by an unknown person who called himself “Donald.” Psychical researchers eventually deduced that the events only occurred in Shirley’s presence and that she must have been responsible for them.

A Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, a US heavy bomber, landed itself in a field outside of Cortenberg, Belgium, on November 23, 1944, with its engines still running. When members of the Royal Air Force boarded the bomber, they discovered that there were unused parachutes and open maps. This led them to speculate that a ghost pilot must have been flying the plane when it landed. What really happened was that after suffering engine damage and low fuel over Germany, the pilot had his crew parachute out over friendly airspace, but first locked in the autopilot and trim settings. The plane continued to fly on its own until it ran out of fuel, at which point it belly-landed in a field. Everyone was fine, and all ten crewmen survived.

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