Tag Archives: Ghosts

An Occurrence on Munger Road

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Munger Road, somewhat famous as being haunted, is in northern Illinois, about 30 miles west of Lake Michigan. There is even a movie titled “Munger Road”, that is based very loosely on some of the scary stories about the road, that are still told around the area.

My family has its own stories about it that we actually experienced, and they occurred before anybody else thought the road was haunted. I shall proceed to recount one of them.

Back around 35 to 40 years ago, back when the area west of Chicago was mainly small towns surrounded by farmer’s fields, my brother Daryl and I (and no, I don’t have another brother Daryl, so let’s keep the Newhart show out of this) would go out to Munger Road, just to feel how creepy it was. Sometimes we would go at night, sometimes during the day. It could be pretty creepy anytime.

One day, I can’t remember if it was in the early spring or the late fall, other than that the farmer’s field on the east side of the road was brown stubble, and the grass in the forest reserve on the west side was not greening up yet, we parked on the side of the road and walked around a bit.

Daryl wandered up a low hill into the farmer’s field while I examined the water in the roadside ditch. I always look in any body of water I am near, for frogs, bugs, water snakes, or anything biologically interesting.

Daryl suddenly yelled, something like “Oh god, they’re killing them!”, or words to that effect. I stopped ditch delving and ran across the road and up the hill. He was on his knees crying, and mumbling about the burning tipis, the dead women, children, and braves he could see. He said he could smell the smoke from the campfires.

I saw nothing, I smelled nothing, but I heard sounds coming from the west side of the road. I went back over there, and clearly heard musket fire and men yelling in French, but just kind of faintly, more like the tail end of echoes.

There is no record of anything of the sort ever happening there. Munger Road is in DuPage county, which was named after the French trapper DuPage, who had his station on the DuPage river, oddly enough. French voyageurs followed the rivers all over Illinois, but Munger Road is a couple of mile from the nearest rivers, so the Frenchies were unlikely to be there.

Illinois is the Frenchified version of the name of the Illiniwek, or Illini tribal confederation. But, much of northeastern Illinois belonged to the Potawatomi tribe, who were not in the Illini confederation. The Potawatomi did not use tipis. They built dome-shaped wigwams, and rectangular lodges with bark covering called longhouses, so no tipis were there to be burnt.

No tipis, no Frenchmen, therefore no massacre, and no ghosts.

In my experience, and intellectual inclinations, there are non-physical entities, not terribly smart entities, that like to play tricks on humans. I’ve brought them up in previous quasi- theories. They are the Good Folk, the Sidh of the Kelts, the Fairies. They pick up thoughts and ideas from your head and use them to play with you.

My siblings and I were just getting into all things Native American back then. The local fairies grabbed that and ran over us with it.

First shared on the Squatcher’s Lounge Podcast:

 

For the reading impaired, an audio version of this quasi theory may be found here:

I Feel Like I’m Going Blind or All About Orbs

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Okay, not really blind, but you try looking at pictures of so-called orbs for half an hour or so, and not get bleary eyed.

Orbs and Sasquatch, orbs and aliens, orbs and ghosts, orbs and nature spirits, orbs, orbs, orbs! You don’t seem them with your eyeballs, but they show up in your pictures. Nobody much reported them showing up in photographs until digital cameras got cheap and abundant.

People, orbs are back scattered light from your digital camera’s flash. They happen especially when the flash is close to the lens, as in cheap digital cameras and your cell phone. The flash bounces off small things floating in the air near your camera’s lens, things like dust particles, tiny water droplets, even small insects with glossy wings.

It doesn’t even have to be light from a camera flash. If you have a light on your video camera, infrared light on your infrared video cam, even ambient light from a fire or passing car, that light can bounce off dust and give you a moving orb.

Technically, the reflected light passes through your camera’s lens and creates what is called an Airy disk, named after George Biddell Airy. Airy wrote the technical analysis of what causes the Airy disk effect back in 1835. They are caused by internal refraction in a lens of light from a point source. If your light source is sufficiently tiny and uniform, you get a point of light in the center of the disk, with several concentric circles of light expanding around it. Airy disks were first observed in early telescopes, when astronomers were looking at individual stars.

How fondly I recall the many hours I spent, using the Airy disk effect to align the lenses in my old catadioptric telescope. You knew you got it right when the star was smack dab in the middle of the Airy disks.

Now, why don’t all those orbs in all those pictures, if the orbs are Airy disks, show a little point of light with rings around it? That’s because dust, bugs, and what all, aren’t perfect little reflectors, aren’t perfect little point sources of light. Also, your cheap camera lens probably sucks and has flaws in it, especially if it’s on your cell phone.

On the other hand, if you see orbs floating around with your eyeballs, and they don’t show up in your pictures, you don’t have Airy disks. What you’ve got is spooks. Run. Run fast.

First shared on the Squatcher’s Lounge Podcast:

For the reading impaired, an audio version of this quasi theory may be found here:

The Junk Room, Part One

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Back in the mid-1960’s, my family lived in a house that we knew was haunted. It was an old farmhouse in the middle of town, built sometime before 1900. There were two floors, a basement, and an attic.

There were five of us siblings. Three of us slept in first floor rooms.

The second floor had two bedrooms, one large, where one of my brothers and I slept, and a very small one, which we called the junk room. There were five us siblings and we never threw out any toys. They were kept in the junk room.

When indoors, we frequently played in the large bedroom. We occasionally heard footsteps in the attic, at night, pacing from one end of the house to the other. We would then rapidly adjourn down the stairs to the living room where our parents would declare us to be, and I quote, “Nuts”. This happened a number of times. We lost count of the total.

One day, we were ordered to clean up the junk room and sort all the toys into new cardboard boxes. I say new boxes, but they were obtained from the alley behind the main street stores. The clean up was accomplished rapidly, which was understandable if you knew our mother. The room was very tidy. Our mother was pleased.

Here’s a side note on the junk room: It was always cooler than the rest of the house, except for the basement. We would not go into the junk room at night, alone. The closet was terrifying. Its door would not stay closed but never swung open while anyone was in the room. The junk room door had a separate lock, on the outside of the door. It appeared to be original to the house. We kids kept that door locked when we were not in that room. We often wondered why that door needed a lock on the outside.

One night a few days later, my older brother and my sister were playing “Sorry” in the large bedroom. They suddenly came screaming down the stairs into the living room claiming that somebody was in the junk room, apparently trashing the room. My dad grabbed a baseball bat and went up the stairs, with the rest of the family a reasonable distance behind.

The junk room door was still locked. He opened it, turned the light on, and declared that, and I quote, “You two kids are full of shit. There’s no one in here and the windows are closed and locked.” He continued, “Weren’t you kids supposed to clean this place up? We got you new boxes.”

The room was trashed. Toys were everywhere, but not broken. The boxes were empty and half ruined. The closet door was ominously open. Our mother did not say a word in our defense. She said she did not believe in ghosts.

A good twenty years later she admitted that she thought the house was haunted, too.

First shared in the Squatcher’s Lounge Podcast:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgSRtIshDfs&ab_channel=JeffreyKelley

For the reading impaired, an audio version of this quasi theory may be found here:

The Junkroom Part 2: The Ghostly Doggie

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Last week I told you about the real haunted house my family lived in for a few years and the small second floor bedroom that my siblings and I kept our horde of toys in. We called that room the junk room, because that’s what it usually looked like. I also mentioned the larger bedroom on the same floor, where my next younger brother and I slept. My bed was at the end of the bedroom away from the door. My brother’s was, obviously, next to the door. The junk room was down a short hallway to the right, maybe fifteen feet away from our bedroom door. The stairs down to the first floor were immediately to the left of our door. The stairs to the basement were under that staircase. The basement door had a hook and loop lock that we always used at night because the basement door to the outside was a classic, old farmhouse, slanted cellar door, that could be easily broken into. Our dad worked nights and my mom feared burglars.

One night, around two in the morning, I was woken by the sound of the junk room door opening, which, as I said last week, we kids kept locked from the outside. I heard the sound of a large dog, German Shepard size or larger, walk from the junk room in the bedroom, its toes tapping heavily as it walked. We had no such pet dog. We had a Toy Manchester Terrier which is a Chihuahua sized little black dog.

This big dog, toes a-tapping, went straight to my brother’s bed and sniffed at him loudly. He did not wake up. I then heard it circling tightly for a few seconds and then lie down. I was petrified, not the least because there was a large, oval rug right where it somehow tapped its toes before laying down.

It lay there for about twenty minutes, then got up and went down the stairs, toes still tapping away. It then went down the basement stairs. The stairs to the second floor were fully carpeted, yet those toes tapped. It went down the basement stairs though the basement door was locked.

A few minutes later I got cautiously out of bed and looked at the junk room door. It was closed and locked. I carefully went down the stairs, woke my mother to see if she’d heard anything like a big dog walking around. She had heard nothing and our little dog was sleeping at her feet, under the blankets. I went to the basement door, unlocked it, turned the lights on, looked down the stairs, saw no dog, turned the lights off, closed the door and locked it. No way in hell was I going down those stairs and check for stray ghostly doggies.

Re-shared on 6/7/2017 in the Squatcher’s Lounge Podcast:

 

For the reading impaired, an audio version of this quasi theory may be found here: