The Things Children See

All little Diane Trisler wanted to do was play. As she stood in her aunt’s yard one afternoon, she noticed someone standing nearby.

“When I was three years old I saw a shadow person,” Trisler said. “It looked curiously at me as I played in the backyard of my aunt’s home.”

Alone in the yard – her family was inside – she approached the shadowy figure; it didn’t like that.

“The entity looked at me and when I acknowledged it, it seemed to have feared me,” Trisler said. “I chased it and said, ‘Wait wait. It’s OK. Who are you? Do you want to play?’ As a little child I did not know yet enough that I should have been scared.”

She chased this figure until it ran between two trees, through a fence and vanished.

“Was this entity from a different dimension or a ghost?” she said. “My mother had an abortion a few years before I was born and the shadow looked like it would have been the age of the older sibling if it had lived on this planet and not had been terminated during my mom’s pregnancy. Could it have been my dead brother or sister? Till this day at the age of 26 I am in utter amazement and awe of such a being.”


Children see more than adults. Invisible friends, ghosts, little people. Children often startle their parents by discussing encounters with someone whose description is similar to a grandparent the child has never met. Is it imagination, or can children tap into a part of the world adults can no longer see?

Bill Bryant was one of those children.

“I saw the Hat Man when I was a kid,” he said. “My brother and I shared the same room. Maybe 30 years later I was talking to my brother about it at my mom’s house. He said he saw the same thing.”

The Hat Man is an often-seen type of shadow person that wears, of all things, a fedora.

“Last fall my sister was telling my mom of seeing the Hat Man,” Bryant said. “(Mom) remembered my story and described him to my sister before she could describe him.”

Is the ability to see the paranormal something we outgrow? Or do children experience frequent paranormal encounters because society has yet to tell them there’s nothing unusual under their beds – or up the stairs.

In the late 1970s, Stefanie Woolsey – then four years old – and her three-year-old sister saw something in their house.

“This particular event we experienced together still haunts us,” Woolsey said.

Woolsey’s family lived in an older, A-framed, red brick house in southern Indiana near the Ohio River. In the upstairs room under the peaked ceiling was the Woolsey children’s playroom.

“Our oldest sister was in kindergarten,” Woolsey said. “When she went to school, my mother encouraged my other sister and I to play upstairs while she cleaned the house.”

In the upstairs room, the girls would open a closet door “that looked like a barn door,” take out their toys and play. But their fun would always be cut short.

“We would play until we disturbed the Soldier Boy,” she said.

A young man, angered by the noise the girls made, would emerge from the closet and gruffly yell, “Get out of here.” The Soldier Boy wore a military uniform with big black boots.

“We were so little, as we turned the corner to the stairs we could only see his big, black boots,” Woolsey said. “My sister and I ran so fast we’d land on our rear-ends and flop down the stairs until we reached the bottom with our hearts almost beating out of our chests.”

Hearing the noise, their mother would step around the corner holding her cleaning supplies and tell them to go back upstairs.

“My sister and I answered, ‘We can’t. The Soldier Boy won’t let us,’” Woolsey said.

This happened almost every day for the year Woolsey’s family lived in that house.

“My sister and I collected our toys and played in the middle of the stairs appeasing our mother and the Soldier Boy,” she said.

Woolsey’s mother never saw the Soldier Boy, nor did she believe them, but she did notice strange things in the house.

“Even though my mother’s an avid cleaner, the house became infested with roaches forcing us to move to a wonderful, white house in the country,” Woolsey said. “The closest neighbor lived a mile away in an old church made into a house with a cemetery in the yard. My sister and I continued to have experiences – but not with the Soldier Boy.”

Can children see into an unknown world? It seems adults should not so easily discredit a child who speaks of a “friend” who plays in their room.

50 Berkeley Square

50 Berkeley Square is one of the most haunted houses in the UK. There are a number of ghosts that are rumored to haunt this gruesome building.

The earliest report of a haunting is the ghost of a little girl who was killed by a sadistic servant in the nursery. She has been seen on the top floor, sobbing and wringing her hands in despair.

In the 1700s, a young woman called Adeline, lived at the house with her evil uncle. One day she tried to escape from him by climbing out a window. She fell to her death and since then, her screaming ghost has been seen hanging from the window ledge many times.

During the 1870s, the building was vacant and neighbors reported hearing screams and loud cries coming from the locked house at night. They also heard the sound of furniture being dragged across the floor, bells ringing and and windows being slammed shut. Even though the house was deserted, furniture and books were thrown out the windows onto street below.

Years later the house was occupied by a Mr. Dupre, who locked his insane brother in a room on the top floor. He fed the insane man through a special opening in the door. This room was said to be the heart of the haunting, and is called the Haunted Room.

In 1850s, a maid was staying in the haunted room overnight. The owners of the house were shaken from their sleep by awful screams coming from her room. They opened the door to find her lying on the bed, her face hideously twisted, her eyes fixed, staring in terror. She went insane and died in hospital the next day, unable to describe what she had seen.

A young man said that he did not believe in ghosts and made a bet that he could spend a night in the haunted room. He arranged for a bell to be rigged up in the room so that he could call for help if he needed it. With his friends sleeping downstairs, he went to bed in the haunted room, holding a gun for protection.

At 2 AM, his friends heard the bell ringing violently. They ran upstairs and heard the sound of a gunshot. As they entered the room, they found the poor young man lying against the wall, his eyes wide and his face contorted in fear. He was dead but there wasn’t a mark on him. The smoking gun was in his hand and there was a bullet hole in the wall.

By 1872 the house had a horrific reputation and nobody would live in it. A man called Lord Lyttleton decided, on a dare, to spend a night in the haunted room. He armed himself with a shotgun and, during the night, fired it at something that jumped out at him from the darkness. When he turned on the light, there was nothing there.

On Christmas Eve, 1887, two sailors named Martin and Blunden, were looking for a place to spend the night. When they came across the empty house in Berkeley Square, they decided to break in and sleep there, unaware of the house’s ghastly reputation.

They chose the room at the top of the house to spend the night. The haunted room.

During the night they heard shuffling footsteps coming up the stairs and a horrific smell entering the room. The door creaked open and some shapeless thing came through the doorway.

Martin managed to rush past it and raced down the stairs to the street, leaving his terrified companion Blunden behind.

He found a policeman and returned to the house just in time to see Blunden jumping out the window, screaming in horror. His body landed on a spiked railing at the front of the house. He was impaled on the spikes and died instantly. Police searched the house but found nothing.

By the 1900s the house was occupied by an elderly couple who acted as caretakers but this couple were never allowed to go into the haunted room. The only key to the room was held by a man who called every six months and spent several hours in the room after having first locked the couple in the basement.

Today, the house is occupied by Maggs Bookshop, and employees working there still report strange happenings. A young woman saw a mass of brown mist, move quickly across the room and then vanish. A cleaning lady felt the presence of a ghost following her around the house. A man was walking upstairs when his glasses were torn off his face and thrown across the room.

Employees are not allowed to go up to the top floor. They say that there’s a police notice hanging on the wall inside the house that was put up in the 1950s. It states that the top floor of the house is not to be used, even for storage.

Paranormal Group Finds Bones Behind Historic Mansion Wall

A historic Brooke County, W. Va., mansion is at the center of a police and paranormal investigation after skeletal remains were found hidden behind a brick wall.

Gene Valentine, the building's owner, told Steubenville news station WTOV that it all started when a paranormal research group came to the Aspen Manor to hunt for ghosts.While there, some members of the Brooke County Paranormal Society said they sensed someone was buried in a basement wall and said they followed the voice to the area."A couple of the psychics that were part of that group got physically sick when they went down there and they couldn't figure out why," said Valentine.


The paranormal group came to the 76,000-square foot mansion in search of spirits, but had no idea they would find skeletal remains."It wasn't what we actually went in looking for," said Kathy Larntz, a member of the group.Larntz said they found a bone on the floor, so she picked it up thinking it was probably an animal bone. She kept digging, and as she did, she found more and more bones.Sheriff Richard Ferguson said the bones had "been chopped up into pieces" and had saw marks on them.The remains were removed from the wall and are being sent to the state medical examiner, who will determine if they are human or animal."They found some questionable bones and I still cannot confirm or deny that they're human," Ferguson said. "They appear to be very old, but still intact, and we have no time frame. We're actually looking back into the history of this area.


"In the meantime, in the former nuns' quarters, Larntz said she, her husband and another investigator made another finding. She said the trio was using electronic voice phenomenon equipment and heard clicking sounds."Nuns would use these clickers when kids would get like really loud (and) wouldn't settle down, they'd start clicking," she said.Valentine said he isn't surprised by the findings."I've had a few psychic friends walk through here and they've had really bad reactions in the house," Valentine said. He said he is restricting access to the mansion until the sheriff's department gets more answers.


The sprawling Aspen Manor mansion was built in 1895 by the Vandergrift family as a boys' getaway that hosted gambling and cockfights.Later, the Catholic community took over and turned it into an assisted living home where nuns and priests once lived. The mansion has since been converted to a bed and breakfast.

(above taken from "WTOV9.COM".

Capela dos Ossos — the Chapel of the Bones

Located next to the Church of St. Francis in the medieval town of Evora, it’s a large room decorated with the bones of more than 5,000 monks, exhumed from local churchyards to be used as building materials way back in the 16th century. As you enter, you pass under this doorway. Its inscription, translated from the Portuguese, means ““We bones here, for yours await.” Nice and creepy.

According to legend, the 16th century Franciscan monk who created the chapel did it not to freak people out or scare them, but to prod visitors into a spirit of quiet contemplation. “Life is fleeting!” the bones are meant to imply. “See?!”

On the other side of the doorway, as you exit, is this cheerful little motif, restored in 1810. The monks who built the chapel got creative with their bones, using them not just to fill wall space, but to create all sorts of decorative patterns. It’s more or less what I imagine a Martha Stewart Halloween special would be like.

Not everyone who visits the chapel is inspired to contemplate the mysteries of death, however, judging from the many graffiti-inscribed skulls that line the walls. Ana Gomes, I hope someone writes on your skull when you’re dead.

As an added bonus, the monks decided to hang two corpses on the wall from a chain — that of a woman and a child. They’ve been there for hundreds of years, and they don’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. No one is sure exactly who the unlucky pair are, but rumor has it they were cursed by a powerful man and were refused burial in local cemeteries.


The strangest part about the Chapel was that it didn’t seem all that creepy. There was something sanitized and touristy about the whole thing, with ropes sectioning off the walls so you couldn’t get too close, and an information kiosk just outside the door.

By Ransom Riggs Mental Floss