From the high desert · 1993–2013

Every ghost story they told Art Bell

Once a year, a late-night radio host turned the phone lines over to the dark. Callers told him what they had seen, heard, and felt. This archive transcribes those broadcasts, splits them into single stories, and maps how the ghost story changed over two decades of American radio.

Browse the stories Explore the patterns

The archive tonight

recordings

1993–2013

55 h

of broadcast audio

853

stories identified

from all 19 recordings

47.3 h

of stories

the rest is openings, breaks, and talk

Draft stage. All 19 broadcasts are transcribed and split into stories. Every story below is an AI draft that no person has checked yet. Summaries describe what callers reported. Scores are editorial judgments, not evidence that anything supernatural happened. Story pages play the story's audio clip. Word-for-word transcripts are not published.

From the switchboard

All 852 stories →

Highest creepiness score

1998·Caller's story·2 min

Dark woman from the attic and phantom table-setting in a childhood home

A caller tells Art Bell about a childhood haunting in their family home. The caller says they and their brother were visited at night by a dark female figure they called the doll stall woman, who came down from the attic through a closet. They later heard table-setting sounds and saw white legs in old-fashioned pajamas moving around the dining table. Then a spirit entered their room and grabbed their legs. The caller says this is the first time they have told anyone about it.

Human figures

Most original story

1994·Caller's story·4 min

Disorientation, a dry river crossing, and a chair-shaped rock in the Wind River Range

A caller who gives the name [name withheld], from Sacramento, describes a 1976 National Outdoor Leadership mountaineering trip in the Wind River Range, Wyoming. [name withheld] says the caller and a camp partner became disoriented in sudden darkness while fetching water. They woke at dawn across the river with dry shoes, sitting 25 feet up a cliff in a rock hollow shaped like a chair. [name withheld] says a guide later told them the spot was a Shoshone burial ground and that they had experienced a “Wind River turnaround.”

Vanishing places, people, and time

Most specific and consistent

1997·Caller's story·4 min

White-haired woman with a white dog beside a desert road

A caller named [name withheld], from Salt Lake, tells Art Bell a story dated to 1981. [name withheld] says they and four friends were driving home from a California graduation trip. On a desolate desert road outside Palm Springs, they saw a white-haired woman in white holding a white dog on a chain. The woman’s dress and hair blew without wind, and her head turned unnaturally far to follow their car. The friends reportedly felt a horrible feeling and still discuss the encounter years later.

Human figures

What callers reported

A story can belong to more than one category. Each bar counts the stories in the processed broadcasts that include that kind of experience. The bars show what people reported, not what caused it.

The recordings

The archive has 19 recordings, one per broadcast, except for 2000 and 2001, which are split into parts. Some are later rebroadcasts. The 2013 recording is Art Bell's Dark Matter on Sirius XM, not Coast to Coast AM. Highlighted bars mark processed recordings.

Art Bell did not host Ghost to Ghost in 2002, 2008, 2009, 2011, or 2012. Broadcast list →

Station identification

About this archive

The source is a community upload to the Internet Archive, Art Bell Ghost To Ghost AM 1993 2013, which gathers 19 recordings with most ads and music cut out. The uploader notes that some edits are imperfect. Software on the project's own computer transcribed each recording. An AI model then split it into stories and rated how sure it was of each split. Any start or end point it was unsure of goes into a queue for a person to check. Nothing is dropped quietly. Openings, breaks, and calls without a story are logged as parts that are not stories (397 so far).

Read How it works to learn how the software transcribes, splits, and scores the stories, and what it can't do.

Topics tracked

15 main categories and a fixed list of recurring details

Years in the source

1993 · 1994 · 1995 · 1996 · 1997 · 1998 · 1999 · 2000 · 2001 · 2003 · 2004 · 2005 · 2006 · 2007 · 2010 · 2013

Recordings

15 with a broadcast date, some more certain than others