1- Lizzie, A Little Blonde Ghost Girl
Hello, and welcome, my ghost-story lovers! This is Beyond the Veil Paranormal Tales, and I'm your host, Becca. You can also find us in Podcast form, wherever you get your podcasts, if you’d like me to read these stories to you! Links can be found here!
Join me here as I sit beside the crackling fire, beneath my fuzzy blankets, and listen to real people's spooky stories, told in their own words. Some of these spooky stories may contain adult language. Readers, be advised.
Names of affected parties and some personal details may be changed, to protect the privacy of the storyteller, but you have my word: All stories told here are real, to the best of my knowledge.
So, start your own fire, grab your own blanket, and settle in, as we take a peek at the world that lies... Beyond the Veil.
Tonight is Episode #1: Lizzie, A Little Blonde Ghost Girl
To get us started, for the very first story here, I'd like to tell my one of my own stories. It is from many years ago. We were young, we were stupid, and we did all the wrong things. It spooked me enough I didn't touch the paranormal world again for many years, afterward. So this tale, my Ghost-Story-Lovers, is a cautionary one.
It all happened in Omaha, Nebraska, back in 1999. It was the year my friends and I turned 19, were legally adults in the eyes of Nebraska law, and we could finally sign our own leases. Two friends and I conspired to share a space to save on expenses as we stepped out into the real world. Together, we set about planning our move, where we would move to, what we still needed, and who would buy what for our shared apartment.
*Jessica and I were hanging out one night, at her parents' suburban home, for one of these planning sessions. It was a 2 story home in a nice neighborhood, and we were sitting on the main level, at the table in the dining room, within view of the front door.
I was also meeting her cat, *Oreo, who was going to move in with us. He was a cute little black and white thing, but he spooked easily, I thought. But then, I heard a door upstairs shut and footsteps walk down the hallway, toward the stairs and front door. I waited, watching, expecting to see someone appear there, but no one did.
We sat there in the dining room, frozen. We were alone in the house. Well, I was frozen. Jess was listening for a moment, then she called out, "Grandma?" -but the room remained silent.
I gave her a look at that comment, so she confided in me she had a ghost at her house. It was just her grandmother, who used to live there with them, until she died a few years back. "She still messes with the doors upstairs and walks around, but we never SEE her," Jess said. Then she mentioned having a Ouija board we could use, to talk to her.
I recall being somewhat excited at the idea. I'd read what I could about Spirit Boards, and had never used one before, but was very curious about them. But when we tried it, it was an uneventful session, it didn't last long, and we put it away after hearing just another thump upstairs. I didn't think about it again after that, other than the noises that we'd heard.
Then after a few weeks, I moved into a little apartment complex with both Jessica and our friend *Tiffany. It was our first apartment of our own, no parents involved on leases, and we were thrilled to be free at last!
Our apartment was around 1000 square feet, had 2 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms, plus a den that didn't have a closet. The front door opened into the living room, which opened to our small third-floor balcony. The den was to the right, once you were through the front door, the dining room was to the left of the living room, with the galley-style kitchen just past it. The hallway, past the living room and dining, went to the main bathroom, on the left, behind the kitchen. The second bedroom was directly across the hall from the bath, and the master bedroom with walk-in closet and master bath were at the end of the hallway. Jess took the den, I took the second bedroom, and Tiff took the master bedroom.
Honestly, I'm not sure how long it was before things started to happen there, or before we started to notice them. Maybe a couple weeks in? In any case, we started to notice things around the apartment were not found where we left them, and nobody owned up to moving anything. It was easy to brush off at first, but then bigger things were moving around. Jess joked someone was trying to get our attention.
It started with stuff like keys, and wallets. The hammer, especially, liked to move locations. It would be on the coffee table after hanging up pictures, then it was found on the counter in the kitchen, where we hadn't used it. I didn't think much of it, as we had a lot of people over, at the time. We passed it off as others moving our things, and were just grateful they were still in the apartment.
Then the doors started. The bathrooms, in the master bedroom and in the hallway, both had locking doors. We did use the locks when we were in the bathroom, but we didn't close the doors behind us when we were done.
But we'd come home, and those doors would be closed and locked. We'd open them and go about our evening, go to bed with them open, then we'd wake up in the morning and they'd be closed and locked again. The locks were just those basic press-and-turn types that you could open with anything long and skinny like a toothpick, so we just left toothpicks on the door frames to make it easy to open them, each time it happened.
But with the other things moving around, doors closing and locking on their own, we started to wonder if we had a spirit in the apartment with us. It seemed playful, mostly, or perhaps mischievous. Like, “Haha, locked the door again!” It was the kind of thing a child might find scary or annoying.
So, Jess thought it was a little kid. I felt it was more girl than boy. And then, in my incense smoke that I burned in my bedroom, one night, I saw the face of a little girl with her light-colored hair half up in a big hair clip. It reminded me of an old neighbor I used to have, who lived across the street, when I was a little girl. That just cemented the idea that it was a little girl ghost, and we decided she was just lonely and looking for attention.
Jess said we should name her so she'd be easier to talk about, and gave her the name **Lizzy. She said the spirit could stay with us, but she needed to listen to our rules. Once Lizzy had a name, and permission to be in the apartment, she got stronger. Much stronger. Really fast.
The locking and closing of doors continued, then the toothpicks started disappearing off the edges of the doors. And the bedroom doors were found closed, too. The master bedroom, the only bedroom door with a lock, was locked like the bathroom doors were.
It was a little bit of a pain, but we'd scold Lizzie and carry on. And, to give her credit, she would listen to you if you told her to stop doing something. Like, she'd mess with the clothes in my closet, like she was running her hands through them. Hands together, open wide, then back together again.
I'd check to be sure the air in my room wasn't on, since there was a vent that might have caused trouble there, but the air was never on. I would turn to the movement and tell Lizzie to stop, and the clothes would grow still again. She listened to us, and was pretty harmless. Or, so we thought.
One day, I was in the galley kitchen, realized I needed something from my room, and I went to go get it. I ran down the hall, and right back again, and found all the upper cabinets standing open. I might have left one of them open, but definitely not all of them. And I wasn't gone long enough for my roommates to have done it. “That's enough, Lizzy,” I scolded, and shook my head as I closed them.
After this, the cupboards joined in on the everyday fun. All the doors were closed and locked, and all the cupboards were open, every time we woke for the morning, and every time we came home from work. Mind you, we were broke young kids who were sharing cars as well as home space, so we often left for work together and then returned home together.
It was always the same. It became par for the course, though, and we honestly didn't think much of it. We'd just say, “Hi, Lizzie,” And go about our business. We didn't freak out over it, and it certainly didn't scare us or anything. It was just our weird little ghost girl, acting up.
Then there was one day when we all came home, and the heavy living room furniture had been moved. The first thing we noticed was the orange and green striped armchair. Jess was using it as a coat rack and had piled a few hoodies and coats on the back of it. Her pile of things had been lifted up, and the chair had been flipped over, then the pile of coats was rested on the back of the overturned chair. That was really weird.
And my parents' old 1970's orange-and-cream colored giant-floral-print sofa-sleeper had been dragged to block off the hallway. To do that, you'd need to move the giant wooden box we used as an end table. Both of them were so heavy, it took two of us to move them back into place.
We unblocked the hallway and Jess went to check the kitchen for the cupboards while Tiff and I went to open the hallway doors. When I unlocked the bathroom door in the hall bathroom, I was horrified to see the vanity had been damaged, and a door was missing. It looked like the door had been torn off, hinges and all.
“We might need to call the police,” I said, edgily, and went to my room to find a pocket knife, for what little protection it offered. What I found there made me stop dead in my tracks. There, on my bed, right where I sleep, was the missing vanity door. “Uhhhhh,” I said, no words coming, as I stepped closer to it to examine it. It wasn't just the cabinet door. The missing hinges were there too, and they had chunks of wood from the ruined cabinet, still attached.
Jess appeared in my doorway and upon seeing the vanity door I was staring at, she said flatly, "All I can think is 'Dead as a door'..."
"Not helpful," I snapped at her, finding my words again.
Before she could answer me, Tiffany screamed from the master bedroom, and we both rushed in to see what she was screaming about. She'd gone in her room to change out of her work clothes, and found the mirror on the back of her bedroom door was smashed. There was a clear circular mark in the center of the spiderweb break, the exact width of the hammer we kept finding in weird places.
So we went looking for the hammer. We found it, across the unit, in the dining room, on the table. Someone had picked it up, taken it down the hall, closed the door, smashed the mirror, opened the door, gone through it again, closed it behind them, and then returned the hammer to the dining room.
At that, we called the police. Between the broken vanity, and the mirror, we were done, and feeling really violated. We were sure it was a person who had broken in, though we weren't sure how. Our building had security doors, so you needed a key to get in, or someone to buzz you in. And we were on the third floor with no fire escapes off our balcony, so it was unlikely anybody got in that way.
The police came out and took their report, but nothing had been taken, so it wasn't a robbery. They didn't know what to do besides document the incident and recommend the locks be changed.
We called the apartment complex people, and they sent out a handyman out immediately, to change our locks out for us. We also reported the vandalism to the complex, who took a copy of the police report, and they arranged for us to get a new bathroom vanity within the week.
It all scared us, but not because our ghost was really strong. We didn't think it was the ghost- we thought we had been vandalized! We figured the ghost had done her thing AND someone came in and did the other stuff.
Looking back, I'm not sure if we really believed the story we were telling ourselves, or if we just needed some kind of an explanation so we could sleep that night...
And then, when Tiffany finally went to get into bed, she found some nasty mucousy, clear, ectoplasmic goo between her sheets. Right where she slept. She burst into tears, and called her mother, and went to stay with her parents for the night. She was sick to her stomach, and felt really targeted. I can't say I blame her.
We all kinda switched gears, after that. We'd handled what we could handle, if it was typical mundane-world stuff. But what if it wasn't mundane? The idea grew in my mind and took root. I began to question if we'd had a break-in or if maybe it had been Lizzy after all, but I didn't want to voice my thoughts in the apartment.
Who WAS Lizzy? Had this little girl died violently? I kept getting the feeling like she'd been sick and didn't know she was THAT sick, but I had no reason to believe that feeling. So we went looking for one. We wanted to see if we could find proof of what we were feeling.
We asked questions about the property at the apartment complex's office; if anyone had died there. If a child had died there. The woman in our apartment office was curious but understood why we were asking, after that whole lock-changing incident.
We told her we'd been having weird things happening, and said she only knew of a teen boy who had died in the pool many years ago. He was swimming alone, which they never recommend, and he hit his head, so they thought.
We thanked the apartment lady for her time, and pressed on in our search since that wasn't right. But maybe Lizzy didn't live in our apartment, maybe she just saw us somewhere, liked us, and followed us home.
We went to the small local library and spent hours looking through newspapers on microfiche, back to the time when the apartments were first built, in 1974. We looked at obituaries, and headlines, as we poked around in the Omaha World Herald's old news reels. We found lots of tragedy, but no mention of the death of a little girl who seemed like the right little girl.
I think Jess was looking for a girl named "Lizzie" but I wasn't. I was looking for any little girl who was of the rough right age, between 7 and 11. We were guessing how old she was, based on the face I saw in the incense smoke. We looked off and on, in our spare time, for a week or two, and never found anything. So we struck out again, but the dangerous feeling had passed, so we were all casual about the things happening again.
The furniture didn't move again, but the doors shut and locked and the cabinets stood open like usual. After a while, I realized there was a cold spot in the living room, by the ugly striped chair that had been flipped over. I showed it to my roommates, and they agreed that area of the space was often significantly colder than the rest of the apartment. Not always, but often. Not that we understood what that meant, it was just another piece of the puzzle.
One random Tuesday, I was talking about the cold spot and the moving furniture with people in the break room, at work. One work friend said he and a friend of his were starting a paranormal investigation team and he asked if I would like them to come over and see if they could find any evidence of our haunting. I agreed immediately, and told him what had happened to us so far. He was super interested and excited to have somewhere to try out his new ghost-hunting equipment.
But when they came over, NOTHING happened at all. We didn't feel the cold spot when we tried to, and I realized we'd never seen the doors moving. They'd just be closed after we were gone for a while. We tried leaving the apartment and coming back, to get the doors to trigger, but it didn't work. The guys ended up leaving and not coming back, after such a fruitless effort. I'm not sure they believed us, actually, and I can't say I blame them.
So then we thought maybe our ghost didn't want to talk to just anyone. She only wanted to talk to us, or maybe she'd only talk to girls. We speculated about it for a while, and Tiffany said she wasn't sure what she thought about any of it. Jessica was certain it was a ghost, after her experience with her Grandmother in her parents' house. But I had to admit I was with Tiffany on the issue. I was new to experiencing anything like this, and wasn't sure what to think.
I admitted to the other girls that after our newspaper crawl for information was so ineffective, I was beginning to doubt if "Lizzie" was really a little girl after all... and I wondered if "she" had been responsible for the couch moving, and the broken vanity, and the mirror, and all of that.
The roommates both agreed, but reluctantly. They were both scared. I wasn't scared, I was pissed! If she wanted something from us, she could just say what she wants! We are reasonable and happy to help if we can... But if she wants to hurt us... The idea sank in.
So, angry, I loudly told the apartment that anything that wanted to hurt us was not welcome, and it needed to go away and leave us alone. I was tired of the harassment and ready to move on with other things. Saying it felt right, but I also wasn't sure if it would work.
The apartment was quiet all evening, and I went to bed feeling a little more confident about it. But that night, while I slept, my CD player paused itself. I slept with it on repeat, on whatever disc I had chosen to listen to for the night, to drown out the sounds of the street nearby, and our neighbors, and my roommates.
Now, my musical taste was not the same as either of my roommate's music. We all took turns when playing music in the apartment, you know, for a group, and I didn't recognize any of their music any more than they recognized mine. So I know it wasn't them who paused my music, to be scary...
This matters, because when I un-paused my CD player in the morning, the lyrics that played next said, "I won't fade away." Shit.
I told my roommates what happened, and we got a little more serious about it, trying to figure out how we could get rid of our entity, but none of us knew at all what to do.
I think all we really did was burn some incense, like I always did, and tell her it was time to leave. But I didn't believe in my ability to make her go, and I didn't have the right tools. So the entity stuck around. And she paused my CD player again.
This time, it said, "If I should die, before I wake, then you'll know why." Well, FUCK.
So, I caved. I called my dad. I was raised in a religious household, went to private religious school, hell, I was teaching Sunday School classes for the preschoolers at my Southern Baptist Church.
My dad was an ordained minister who could legally marry people in the state of Nebraska, and he could preach and stuff, but he didn't have a church of his own. He just filled in when people were sick, and occasionally taught at a campground in exchange for an afternoon of borrowing the camp's canoe for a ride around in the camp stream.
But I knew my preacher-Dad would know what to do about our problem. I knew if it was something scary like a demon, he would have power over it, somehow. I knew Preachers are better at this stuff than regular people, I was just sure of it.
I also knew my dad would not like that I'd hid this from him for a couple of months as it unfolded. But I knew he'd come and help us. Right away. And he did. That night he came by, when I was home alone. Jess' cute little kitty, Oreo, followed us around as we wandered the apartment. My dad read aloud from his Bible and used the words as a prayer. He wandered from room to room, repeating the same Bible passage, again and again.
We walked and prayed around the whole unit, then back to the living room and he kept on going, but it didn't seem like anything had happened. It felt like it always did, to me. But then my Dad changed gears, away from the Bible-reading, and in a voice that walked the line between worried and angry, he told the entity it was NOT allowed in this place anymore, and it was to GO and leave us alone.
And then, the room felt like it was growing smaller. Almost claustrophobic. My dad repeated his Bible passage and his command to leave, and the feeling in the apartment became more suffocating, like I couldn't breathe. I didn't know what else to do, if this didn't work, and a panic was beginning to rise in my chest.
And then Jess' little Oreo-kitty hissed at something we couldn't see. And he watched it dart around the room, and leave out the balcony's sliding glass door. The cat sat there staring out that window for a long time, and my dad walked over to that door, and in his ever-lingering southern drawl, he said, "Go on, now. Git!" and he waved forcefully it away. And "git" it did.
It felt much better in the apartment after that, and we never again had issues with the cupboard doors opening, or the bathroom doors closing themselves, locking, or any of that. It all just... stopped.
But, I do have to add, shortly after all this happened, Jess had a really really horrible day. She lost her job, and then, on her way home, she was in a car accident that totaled her car. She was ruined, and had no way to get to a new job, or any way to pay for the wrecked car. Devastated, she bailed on the apartment, and us, and Tiff and I took over her third of the rent.
Now, my husband has long believed Jess was the cause of all the trouble in the first place. He insists she closed and locked the doors, and opened the cupboards, and sat on the vanity door to rip it off. He thinks she was quite possibly “troubled,” or mentally ill, and he thinks it all stopped because she moved out, not because my dad banished a demon who was masquerading as a little blonde girl...
But I was there. I watched that cat watch something we couldn't see. I felt the rooms when things had just happened, or were actively happening. Something was definitely there. And then, it was just... gone.
So at the beginning of this episode, I said this was a cautionary tale, as my roommates and I were young and stupid and did all the wrong things. So let me elaborate, and give you some advice:
First, I know now, if you name a thing, you give it power. Naming **Lizzie was a terrible idea. It was stupid, and it was our first mistake.
Second, don't assume what you're dealing with. Our little blonde ghost girl was NOT a little blonde ghost girl. She appeared innocent, to gain our trust, and to get us to give her permission to come in. I don't know what she was, but a little girl, she was not.
Third, don't give them permission to be there! That's always a bad idea, and once that permission is given, it can be hard to revoke. Not impossible, but hard.
Fourth, own your space. I was iffy on whether I had the power to evict the entity or not. I had the power, I just didn't believe in myself. Stand up for yourself! Take ownership in your home.
Lastly, before I go, I do want to acknowledge we did do one thing right: When we realized it was dangerous and we couldn't handle it on our own, we called for back-up.
And, I was right: a person who has been ordained by a faith group does hold power, of that faith group. Now, that kind of help seems to work best within your own personal faith group, so if you're Catholic, call a priest. If you're Southern Baptist, call your pastor.
If you're not religious at all, you could still call on them, but you may feel more comfortable with a Paranormal Investigation Team, or a Medium or a Psychic who comes with references. If in doubt, search your area and see who is available.
That said, you can sage smudge your own space. I'll go over the specifics of how to do that, walk you through the process, and why I do what I do, next time!
Thank you all so much for joining me! If you have a Paranormal story of your own to share, email me, and I’ll read them here! Send your stories to: BeyondTheVeilParanormalTales@gmail.com
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I think that's it for tonight! Stay cozy by the fire, and keep those blankets toasty! No one will blame you if you can't creep all the way up the stairs to your bed, tonight.
Until next time! This has been Beyond the Veil Paranormal Tales, with Becca. Sleep tight!
*The names in this story have been changed to protect privacy. All other details of the story remain true to fact.**Lizzie's name has also been changed for this story!