The Subspace Channel

[CMK2901]

Occasionally, I sit down around 11pm at night, look up ghost pictures, urban legends, and haunted places, get in bed at about 2am, and can't fall asleep until 5am. Last night was such a night. But it got me thinking about some of my personal haunted experiences, which I thought might be interesting.

Of course, I'm giving my personal guarantee that these are true.

Tabernacle Cemetery

Yes, hard to believe, on Friday, April 13th at about midnight, I was standing outside a van in front of the sign in the link above, almost pissing myself because it's just one of those places where you get the feeling you're being watched. When you look out at the cemetery, you can feel something looking back, and that late at night, the shadows and the moon make you think that maybe something is.

I was there with 4 friends, and we had just pulled over to take a look (though none of us got up the courage to go past the ditch next to the road). We'd heard about the place in a book called "Haunted Wisconsin." Allegedly, people would drive by at night and an older-looking truck would pull out of a forest road and follow them, sometimes for a very long time. So far, not much was happening expect all of us scaring ourselves.

My friend Griffin and I had gotten out and were standing next to the van, and Quinn was in the driver's seat, just sort of peering out the window into the cemetery. It was a pretty secluded place; we hadn't seen another car for about a half hour.

As a set of headlights approached from behind us, we figured we'd scared ourselves enough, and thought we might leave. These headlights turned out to be a truck, which we thought would just pass us by.

It didn't.

The truck had it's brights on, and it slowed down and came to a total stop just a few inches from the back bumper of the van. The van wasn't in the street, it was parked off on the grass, so there was no reason a passing driver couldn't pass us. I could barely see a silhouette of a driver over the blinding headlights, and at this point, I was scared as hell, so I got into the van as quickly as possible. The truck didn't do anything; it just idled behind us.

With some urgency, Quinn tried to start the engine, but the van would not start. He tried several times before it started, and still the truck was behind us, not moving, not honking, not doing anything. The people in the far back were freaking out, because this thing was just a few feet from them.

As we pulled away, the truck followed us, on our bumper for a good fifteen minutes. It only put on the brakes, did a u-turn, and sped off when we pulled into a lit up gas station. Overall, a very interesting night.

Potter's Field

Note: Put "43° 2'55.44"N, 88° 1'29.56"W" into Google Earth to see the area.

Milwaukee has a fenced off area next to a large hospital complex where there now stands an old mental hospital (the Almshouse). Behind it is a small forest in a valley and several sprawling fields. I'm not exactly sure of the details, but the forested area used to have dozens of small stone house with dirt floors where the mentally insane were housed, back when such people were generally considered inferior and not worth the time. In the fields, the dead mentally ill were buried, usually in terrible conditions, with several bodies to a casket, unsanitary conditions, and no markers for the bodies. The city of Milwaukee decided to develop the area, and they've been digging up bodies all over the place.

When I went there (yes, I'm stupid), some construction was starting around the edge of the area. It was about 10pm in 2006 (a pretty warm night, actually) when we took a dirt road past a power station out to the point where the forested area meets the burial fields. We got out and we actually went exploring with one flashlight. If I'd been alone, I would have been mortified; as it stood, I was only terrified.

There are single-file dirt paths running through the trees, sort of on a loose grid. The paths had trees going all around them, and growing over them, so they looked like tunnels. It was pretty light because of the nearby city lights, but inside these paths it was PITCH BLACK. We weathered on. I actually got stuck in the back of the line (there were about 8 of us) with the flashlight in front. I was just waiting to get surprised from behind. This was at about "43° 2'57.91"N, 88° 1'30.57"W", if you're following along with Google Earth.

Along the path, there were a few foundations of old houses still around; one of them even had the iron part of a small bed inside it. Very creepy. A little farther into the wooded area, there is a valley with crumbling stone stairs going down into it on either side. It was never quiet, when there was no sound, you could always hear leaves - falling, crunching, rustling. Of course, I was snapping pictures (not with my camera, but I was taking them), hoping to catch something ghostly. When facing the valley, the camera would pick up "orbs" as they call them; turning the camera even a bit from the valley area, the orbs would disappear. Interesting, but orbs aren't very cool.

At this point, we got split up; Michael, his girlfriend Melissa, and Bryan were lagging behind, I went to get them, and we lost the rest of the group. We did not have the flashlight.

We kept walking, and eventually headed farther south past the valley and houses to a dirt path at "43° 2'51.19"N, 88° 1'24.46"W". In Google Earth, at that exact point, there is a three-way crossroad, with the dirt path going two ways and a short path going into the woods. If you look closely in the wooded area, you can see a wall. These are what I call "The Stairs to Nowhere," and this is where some rather interesting stuff started happening.

These stairs used to go to some sort of building obviously more developed than the tiny dirt-floored houses everywhere else. The set of stairs went up for a few feet, took a left turn, and continued up, stopping in the air. Here, I snapped some pictures. The area was very foreboding because the trees made the path very narrow, and you could only see about a foot into the foliage before it was pitch black. It was, again, one of those uneasy places where you feel you're being watched.

One picture I snapped had some foliage in the background, and I noticed sort of an oddly-shaped rock or something on the ground. When I went back to the spot I took the picture to compare, I couldn't find anything that the item could have been (maybe an animal?). Several other pictures also had a smoky substance in front of lens, but only pictures, I believe, of the "Stairs to Nowhere."

Perhaps the most startling thing was when I realized I could see my breath, and that I could see everyone else's breath. We continued along the path, and it stopped. When we turned back to finally go back to the car, again, our breath was visible only at the crossroad between the dirt road and the stairs. As soon as we had passed that point, it was gone. And it was a fairly warm night (I had a spring jacket on).

Nervous, jumpy, and mystified, we headed back to the cars, where everyone had apparently been waiting for about an hour (they were not happy), and we took off.


So, uh, those are my stories. If anyone's interested, I might be able to get some of those pictures we took.

Anyone else ever have some pretty cool haunted experiences??
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