Unfinished business
A key in the door and a solid figure in a Reno apartment
A caller the host addresses as [name withheld] tells Art Bell that they had rented a small apartment in Reno for three months when a noise woke them on their couch. They say someone entered with a key, made a phone call about a deal, packed clothes, and took a banana from their refrigerator. They then saw that he had no hands or feet. Police found no one. The next morning the chain lock was on, the windows were locked, and a banana peel was in their trash. The previous tenant's mail stopped arriving. They say the apartment manager identified the man they described as the tenant who had lived there before them.
Child says dead brother is present at a Guam rosary; a stuck cupboard opens
A caller reachable through Reno recounts an event they say happened to them in 1991 or 1992 while living in Guam. At a rosary for a friend's former schoolmate, the dead man's four- or five-year-old sister repeatedly said her brother was present. She finally led the household to his room. There, a sliding cupboard door that two adult men could not move slid open effortlessly for her, revealing a letter the man had written to her. The story ends there. The host thanks the caller and offers his own comments about messages from the dead and children's perception.
Ouija board session in a box canyon and a spirit speaking through a participant
A caller addressed as [name withheld] describes a 1982 Ouija board session in a box canyon with the caller’s friend [name withheld] and their wives. The caller reports that two women got answers. The caller was later told they had been chanting in an altered state. [name withheld] wrote pages in an unfamiliar script, and [name withheld]’s wife spoke in a low voice that the caller took to be a spirit. The caller says the spirit identified itself as an unburied Indian hunting party and that [name withheld] guided the spirits to cross over. The caller says a coworker later reported that the poster-tearing in their son’s room had stopped.
Agnostic caller’s near-death experience and beings they call alien-like
A caller named [name withheld] tells Art Bell that they were clinically dead in their twenties after a heart attack. They say they experienced a light-filled dimension with telepathic beings who refused to let them stay. They report waking in an ambulance and a life afterward of lost looks, career, and money. They remain agnostic. They describe the beings as not angels but something like aliens playing a game.
Weights restacked in a lighthouse exercise room
A caller the host calls [name withheld] in Maryland describes a 1978 visit to the New London Ledge Lighthouse. He was a 20-year-old Navy student in Groton, Connecticut, and the guest of a Coast Guard keeper friend named [name withheld]. Twice during an evening of watching television, the four men present heard loud bumping from the upstairs exercise room. The second time, free weights that had been scattered on the floor were found stacked neatly from largest to smallest. The next day [name withheld] showed him old lighthouse log books with entries about ghostly events. [name withheld] concluded that the dead keeper was still doing his duties. Art Bell closed by treating the lighthouse as haunted.
Attic thumps and old glass negatives in a Hyde Park house
A caller who gives their name as [name withheld], from Grosse Ile, Michigan, describes moving as a five-year-old in 1965 or 1966 into an old wood-frame house in Hyde Park, on Chicago's south side. They say the family heard repeated thumps and footsteps and saw a light in the attic. They say the activity ended after their father packed up boxes of old glass negatives found in the attic and shipped them away. They believe the disturbances were tied to a maid who they think died in an attic fire.
A small limping figure, a 1932 diary, and a drowned boy identified
A caller who identifies herself only by her location tells Art Bell that a small, limping gray figure, a mold smell, a clock chiming thirteen times, and a failing light bulb began recurring in her home at 10 after 11 each night. She links the events to a 1932 child's diary that she says appeared on her kitchen counter. It led her to a boy said to have drowned in the neighboring town. A Catholic priest reportedly told her it was a soul that did not rest. She says that after she showed the boy his death certificate, the events stopped.
A bell heard in the car and a puff of air in the shower after a boyfriend's death
A caller who gives their name as [name withheld] tells Art Bell that a boyfriend was killed about fifteen years earlier. After that, they say, they repeatedly heard a bell-like sound from the passenger side of their car, and a friend also reported hearing it. The caller also says they once felt a puff of air enter their ear in a locked bathroom. The caller puts both down to the dead boyfriend, partly on the advice of a psychic. The host cuts the call off at the top of the hour.
Letter: A girl named [name withheld] in a Trenton attic and a found ring
A letter read on air, signed [quote withheld] describes an event said to have happened several years earlier at an old house in Trenton, New Jersey, that had been moved from Bordentown. The writer's friend's cousin was converting the attic into a daughter's bedroom. The letter reports disturbances during the remodel and says that on visiting the attic the writer saw a young girl of about 14 or 15 who said she had lost her ring and that her room was being taken. The story ends with the girl, reportedly named “[name withheld],” being led to the light. The cousin then produced a ring they said they had found in the kitchen faucets, which the writer says bore the initials “SC.”
A hospital legend of the “Gray Lady” who offers tea to dying patients
A caller the host introduces as “bill” from Texas, who says they are a 67-year-old doctor, tells a story they heard as a medical exchange student at the University of London's Middlesex Hospital in the 1970s. The caller says hospital staff shared a belief that a ghost called the Gray Lady, dressed as an old-style nurse, appeared to patients shortly before they died and offered them tea. The caller reports that staff told of apparently well patients who saw her and then died within 24 hours. The caller passes on the staff's theory that she was a former nurse making amends for a forgotten cup of tea.
A brother's dream phone call from his deceased father, who spent his prayers on the call
A caller who gives their name as [name withheld], in Carson City, passes on a story their brother told them. About six months after their father's sudden death in June 1991, the brother was napping before a graveyard shift. He dreamed that a phone rang in his bedroom, which the caller says has no phone, and that his father was on the line, calling from a casino. The caller reports that the father warned the caller's brother he would die within a year, and then the line went dead before a second, more important message could be given. Two years later the brother was still alive. The caller now reads the episode as a prediction that the brother's old, dependent self would die.
A nursing home elevator reported running by itself and attributed to a resident named [name withheld]
A caller who gives their name as [quote withheld] is a nurse of twenty-three years. [name withheld] says they are on duty at a prison. The caller describes something that they say happened about twenty years earlier, when they were the night supervisor at a nursing home. A second-floor elevator began opening and closing and running up and down around one o’clock in the morning. An aide told the caller it was “[name withheld],” a former resident in a wheelchair who used to ride the elevator all day. The behavior began when [name withheld] died and usually came in the early hours. [name withheld] says they checked the switches and found nothing wrong, and that it continued until about 4:30 a.m. [name withheld] says staff came to “cohabitate with” it and that it is [quote withheld] The host then closes the call with two speculative theories.