Are ghosts real? Or is it the brain playing tricks on us? Not everything unexplained is imaginary. Some things aren’t meant to be understood, only experienced. 

With the weather getting colder, and Halloween just around the corner, the spirits are more lively than ever. There are many different ways to honor the deceased. In Mexico, they celebrate Dia De Los Muertos. Families honor their passed loved ones by gathering and offering respect on altars at home called ofrendas. The dead are celebrated with food and drink. 

Meanwhile, in the western culture, the dead are usually associated with dread. The fall is often a time when horror movies are released in theaters including “The Conjuring: The Last Rites” which came out on Sept. 5. This is the last movie of The Conjuring series, based on the Smurl family. For most of us, the paranormal only happens in the movies. But for some it happens right in front of our eyes.

Albert Lea has some haunted stories. Rumors are passed down through the generations. Some say the courthouse is haunted due to a suicide committed by an inmate. Others believe the Marian Ross Theater is haunted by Minnie (Krominga) Gregson. 

Ghost stories can be a shared community mythology, a scary movie at night or a cultural and or religious belief. Staff and students of Albert Lea High School shared their supernatural experiences that are unexplainable, but they know that it happened. 

Sophomore Peyton Seeger tells a story about her dad, Dirk Seeger, and his haunted childhood house. 

“When my dad was little, he used to live in this house by Dave Syverson,” said Seeger. “One night, he got up to go to the bathroom. He walked out, and there was [a] foggy thing in the hallway.”

Seeger continues the spooky tale. Her dad walked through the entity and it was freezing. Dirk got scared and ran upstairs to his dad, who said that it was a ghost. 

“My grandpa and my dad went downstairs,” said Seeger. “My grandpa started talking to the ghost, and was like, ‘just go away for a little bit’ so [they] can go back to sleep.”

Seeger said the ghost refused the request and began causing more trouble. Every night, the ghost would bang on the cabinets. The family would fight at night with the ghost because he was being too loud. And then in the morning, the table would be set for them like an apology.

Eventually, the family became used to the ghost. Seeger’s grandpa got so comfortable with the spirit that he would have conversations with it. 

It was later revealed that prior to Seeger’s grandpa moving into the house, the previous owner fell on the stairs and died in the basement. It’s as if his physical body left, but his spirits never did and was making it known that he’s still around. 

In Islam, there are no such things as ghosts. There are jinns, which are defined as other living beings that can decide to be good or evil. They don’t believe in the souls of the deceased still roaming the earth. 

Senior, Calleigh Noble, has her own paranormal experience happen to her at her old house in Forest Lake, Minn. 

“One morning I was going downstairs to go get something from our storage room,” Noble said. “I left it open. And then I heard it starting to creak. That door doesn’t creak because it gets stuck in the carpet, so they shut really slow.”

Noble got scared, and turned toward the door. It was a long and narrow room and both her parents were sleeping so she knew they weren’t pushing the door closed. 

“From where I was, I couldn’t see the door to leave,” said Noble. “And [when] I started walking out, it slammed.” 

Not every paranormal activity is meant to be scary; sometimes it’s meant to keep you on your toes. Can we as humans co-exist with these supernatural things, or is something bound to happen? If seeing is believing, how can we believe in ghosts if we’ve never seen them? 

Albert Lea High School custodian, Bob Neely, has many stories about his childhood home and the ghosts that haunt it. He grew up knowing, feeling and even seeing the presence of ghosts. 

Due to his extensive experience with the paranormal, Neely has been told he is a great conductor by a local medium. 

“The house is so old; it was built by the town’s first mayor,” Neely said. His parent’s house was built about 15 years before Albert Lea was an established town. The house is so old that the details of history have been lost. “Ever since I was a kid, I’ve had the light switch turn on and off and someone shouting my name. No one was home though,” Neely said. This is the most common experience he had, and it happened often.

“I remember looking out my window; I saw a big red glowing mask looking at me”, said Neely. “My mom would never look at it, but to this day I remember.” 

Neely mentioned that one time the previous owners came back with cameras to his house when he was child and told his family that they were being haunted by a little girl and an old man. The girl and the man were family members and died of an illness suspected to be Scarlet Fever. One of his brothers used a Ouija board to find out the name of the little girl who haunted the house and is around four or five years old. Neely’s list of paranormal experiences continues. His brothers have been pulled off their beds in the night multiple times and even began refusing to sleep upstairs. As the supernatural occurrences increased, friends and girlfriends would rarely come back to visit the house. And who could blame them after the family dog was attacked.

“Our dog flew through the air, and he is a 110 pound pitbull and he was never quite the same after that,” said Neely but he is quick to explain that his family does not believe the ghosts are harmful or violent spirits. Once the ghosts even saved their lives.

“My [sleeping] dad got hit in the head one time; he woke up, and the house was on fire. There was smoke everywhere and he called the fire department,” Neely said. “If they wouldn’t have hit my dad’s head, the house would have burned down. My dad got the fire put out before the fire department got there.”

Experiencing paranormal activities at a young age seemed to play an influential role in most people’s stories. Just like how we learn a language better at a young age, when we experience those things, they have an impact on us, and we naturally dig deeper into what event occurred to us to understand what happened. 

Neely’s brothers used the Ouija board as a form of communication, in hopes of finally getting answers for the unexplainable reality of their childhood. Meanwhile, others use the Ouija board as a game and think of it as nothing more than entertainment. Sometimes things happen and it no longer feels playful.

Amy White, a paraeducator at Albert Lea High School for 25 years, has her own story of communicating with a man through a Ouija board while she was in high school with friends. Her story starts in a local cemetery at night. They used the board to reach out and someone answered.

“He said his name was Bob. Robert Brown,” said White. “He said he had a pink faded tombstone that was down by the lake and was difficult to read.”

The friends said good-bye to Bob for now and headed toward the lake in search of the tombstone.

“We’re all wandering around, looking for this tombstone, and I happened to be down towards the lake,” White said. “There was a man that was walking alongside the lake. I looked at my friends and I’m like, ‘do you think he’s doing the same thing we are?’ And they’re like, ‘who?’.”

Confused, White turns back toward the lake to point out the stranger who was just walking behind a tree and was now obscured from sight.

“[I’m] like, ‘the guy that’s behind the tree’,” said White but no one in her group saw the man. She knew what she saw and they went to investigate the tree. “We got down there, and there was no guy.” 

Freaked out, White and her friends flee the cemetery and head home. They wanted answers so they could understand what happened. They went back on the Ouija board and contacted Bob again. 

They asked him, ‘Did you appear to anybody?’ 

And it wrote out ‘Yes, Amy’.

When they asked why. He said, ‘To make her believe’. 

“I saw a man, and he was walking down the pathway,” said White. “He stopped and looked at us.”                          

White’s friends had played with the Ouija board before. However, White had never played with one, until that night. She doesn’t know what she believes about that night but she knows what she saw.

The majority of ghost stories that were told to the Ahlahasa staff fell into two categories. They were from the distant past like someone’s childhood. Or the story wasn’t a personal experience that happened to them. We heard many tales about an aunt, friend, or cousin who encountered a ghost. However, there was one story that is still happening to this day. 

Junior Eva Guerra is experiencing the unexplainable. She can see and sense shadows. She can tell if a shadow figure is lurking, taking up space. 

“I can tell if the energy is off in a room,” said Guerra but claims the shadows she sees aren’t harmful. According to her, they’re just there, existing. They haven’t done anything to hurt her, hence why she thinks they’re not harmful, rather just there. 

But that doesn’t mean they don’t impact her environment. Her cats will often start moving their head in the same motion as when someone is petting them. And it’s not just her cats that react to the shadows. Her dogs will start barking into the air, specifically toward the corner of her bedroom. And just like in a horror movie, her house lights flicker on and off. 

“We’ve heard people call our names a lot,” said Guerra. “We hear our mom call our name when she’s not even home.” 

Guerra has cleansed her room many times with water, sage, arrowheads and many others, but they still never go away. The shadows still lurk behind her.

Whether our brains are playing tricks on us, or ghosts are actually real, these stories reveal that the supernatural isn’t just in the movies. Many of the people we spoke with still don’t fully understand what they experienced, but they know one thing: it really happened. Maybe that’s the beautiful chaos of the paranormal. We may not understand it and can only reflect on what happened.