Ghosts - vo.rs

La Llorona: The Weeping Woman Who Crossed Centuries

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 10:19:00 +0000

Near the water, after dark, you may hear a woman crying. She wears white, or she wears black; her long hair hangs loose; her face, when she turns it toward you, is sometimes lovely and sometimes a blank of shadow. She is looking for her children, whom she drowned in the river in a fit of grief or rage or madness, and for whom she is condemned to search forever. ¡Ay, mis hijos! — Oh, my children. Do not let her find you near the water. She takes the children she comes across, mistaking them for her own, or simply because they are there, and she pulls them under.

The Stanley Hotel: How a Bad Night's Sleep Wrote a Horror Classic

Sun, 04 Aug 2024 16:07:00 +0000

In late September 1974, a young and not-yet-famous novelist named Stephen King and his wife, Tabitha, drove up into the Rocky Mountains to Estes Park, Colorado, and checked into the Stanley Hotel, a great white Georgian pile perched against the front range with Longs Peak looming behind it. They had picked the place more or less at random on a late-season trip. They could hardly have picked a stranger night for it: the hotel was about to close for the winter, and the Kings arrived on the very last evening of the season, when the building was all but empty. They were, by King’s account, essentially the only guests. They ate dinner in a cavernous, deserted dining room with the chairs already stacked on the other tables and canned orchestral music playing to no one; a single bartender served King in an empty bar. They were given room 217.

The Myrtles Plantation: Counting Ghosts That Multiply in the Telling

Sat, 13 Jul 2024 15:56:00 +0000

The Myrtles Plantation, a handsome antebellum house near St Francisville, Louisiana, is routinely marketed as one of the most haunted homes in America, and the pitch comes with an unusually precise claim attached: that ten murders were committed on the property. The star of its resident mythology is Chloe, an enslaved woman in a green turban who, the story goes, was the mistress of the plantation’s owner, Judge Clark Woodruff. Caught eavesdropping, Woodruff had her ear cut off, which is why she wore the turban. In revenge, or in a bid to make herself indispensable by nursing the family back from an illness she herself induced, Chloe baked a birthday cake laced with oleander leaves. Woodruff’s wife and two of his children ate it and died. The other enslaved people, terrified of reprisal, dragged Chloe out and hanged her, then weighted her body and threw it in the river. Her turbaned figure is said to wander the house still.

Borley Rectory: England's Most Haunted House and Its Faker

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 14:45:00 +0000

Let me put the best case first, honestly and at its full strength, because Borley Rectory deserves that before anyone reaches for the word “fraud.” For more than two decades this gloomy red-brick house on the Essex–Suffolk border was described, in print and on the wireless, as “the most haunted house in England,” and the phrase was not conjured from nothing. There was a genuine, layered, multi-witness body of reported phenomena there, gathered over sixty years and several unconnected families, and if you want to understand why so many sensible people believed in Borley, you have to feel the weight of it before you feel the weight of what undid it.

The Winchester Mystery House: The Widow and Her Endless Stairs

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 13:34:00 +0000

In San Jose, California, there is a rambling Victorian mansion where a staircase climbs seven steps, turns, and descends eleven, arriving nowhere. A door on an upper floor opens onto a straight drop to the garden below. Windows are set into interior walls, looking from one room into another. Corridors narrow and dead-end. For most of a century, the standard explanation for all of this has been a single, irresistible story: that the widow who built the house, Sarah Winchester, heir to the Winchester repeating-rifle fortune, was told by a Boston medium that she was cursed by the spirits of everyone the family’s guns had killed, and that she could keep death at bay only by building continuously, never stopping, confusing the vengeful dead with a maze of rooms that must never be finished.

The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall: The Most Famous Ghost Photo

Fri, 10 May 2024 12:23:00 +0000

On 19 September 1936, a photographer named Captain Hubert Provand and his assistant, Indre Shira, were at Raynham Hall in Norfolk on a commission from Country Life magazine, photographing the great house’s interiors. They had set up on the oak staircase. Provand had his head under the focusing cloth, exposing a plate, when Shira called out that he could see a shape forming on the stairs — a filmy, veiled figure descending towards them. He told Provand to fire the shutter at once. Provand, who had seen nothing with his own eyes, did so, and when the plate was developed there it was: a translucent form in what reads as a bridal or hooded gown, gliding down the staircase of one of England’s older country houses.