Ghost Stories & Paranormal Encounters

This story is very short and mainly for New Yorkers or anyone who’s heard of Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. Oh, and the story really happened to me and my father.

My dad wanted to take me to Van Cortlandt park as something to do. Tours were open for the Cortlandt house so we decided to go take a short tour. It wasn’t really a “tour”, though, because you just walked around the house by yourself. Anyway even though it was the middle of the day we went in just as three families left, and we were the only two people in there.

We walked around the downstairs just looking at stuff, when three minutes later we heard someone walking around upstairs. My dad had the WTF expression on his face, and apparently so did I. We just decided that someone was still upstairs, and left it at that. Eventually we finished the downstairs and had no where else to go except upstairs, so we started walking upstairs when on a specific spot on the landing it was really, really cold. It was a little chilly downstairs but not that cold, and it was mid spring so it wasn’t the wind or AC. Besides, once you left that one spot the temperature was back to chilly.

Upstairs is when the really freaky stuff happened. Nobody was upstairs, and nobody came downstairs while we were downstairs. Neither of us said anything, but we were freaked out. We just got upstairs when we both heard the door downstairs open and close, and footsteps. I figured that someone forgot something and was coming back for it, or someone else was touring, but the footsteps just kinda faded into nothing, then faded back again. The door opened and closed again, but instead of the “person” leaving, there was another set of footsteps. I asked my dad if he heard that, and he said “Yeah”, then shouted “Hello?” twice to the air, but no one responded. The entire time we were there, we heard people walking around.

While looking at the bedrooms, I noticed a doll on the table, and my dad told me it was the children’s room. My dad pointed something out somewhere else, so I turned to look at it, but when I looked back at the room 5 seconds later, the doll was on the opposite side of the room. Only then did I get the super cold feeling I did on the stairs, and that someone was watching me too closely.

I was immediately done with the house. I didn’t think that the ghost(s) was (were) evil or harmful, but the doll being moved that far told me that whatever was there was powerful, and I didn’t really want to know what else it wanted to do. Maybe we’re the only people to experience these things, and believe me or not, but it happened.

Written by Jessica W., Copyright 2009 TrueGhostTales.com