Ghost Stories & Paranormal Encounters

This account is one of many accounts of my father’s true encounters with the supernatural.  Because I have no supernatural encounters of my own, I find his fascinating. He is always reluctant to share these stories and he really does not like it when I urge him. I have previously posted his stories and I welcome you to check them out if you are interested, all have this note at the heading. Even though he is getting old and somewhat absent minded, he has told me these stories the exact same way every time I bug him enough to tell me and he actually gives in (its rare). My father is an extremely honest and patient person.

My dad had just started working for the company that he presently works for and he had befriended a woman named Jackie. Jackie had just come back from a trip to New Orleans and had pictures to show her co-workers, including my dad. She said that there were a few pictures  in particular that were freaking her out and wanted to know everyone else’ opinion.  The first picture was of her and her sisters in a very old cemetery. It was bright and sunny and they were standing under the shade of a pretty but old tree. They all had smiles on their faces.

The second was of Jackie and her mother and father, posing by the gravestone of one of their deceased family members. At first, all they noticed was that the background, like the tree in the first picture and the gravestones in the second, were kind of fuzzy, like there had been a problem in the developing of the pictures. Other than that, there was nothing strange about the pictures at all. Jackie then brought out a magnifying glass and asked my dad to take a closer look.

My dad was shocked. Examining the strange mist in picture of Jackie and her mom and dad by the gravestone, he said he could see thousands upon thousands of faces. He said they looked like wolves, snarling, clawing, even smiling. The first thought that came to mind was that they were demons, that he was actually staring into the eyes of demons!  He couldn’t believe it. And neither could the others, but Jackie swore that’s how they came back to her from the photofinishing place. (Keep in mind this was in the 1970s, before photoshop or any real advancement in photographical editing technology.)

Everyone shaken, Jackie explained to them that this picture wasn’t that was really creeping her out. She went back to the first picture, the one of her and her sisters in front of a tree in the same cemetery. She handed the magnifying glass to my father again and he hesitantly took it up.

He hovered over the misty areas on the tree and was shocked a second time. The faces were present again, this time, in the bark of the tree and on the leaves. They looked even more evil and he said some looked like they were laughing. Faintly, you could make out the figure of a man, hanging from one of the branches by a noose.  Above the man, among the faces in the bark, you could barely make out the words, “I lost hope.”

Jackie said that while they were there and though they are smiling in the picture, each of them had a strange feeling of depression and foreboding; so much so that they wanted to leave as soon as the photos were taken. They did not even know they all felt the same way until she brought it up while they had dinner later that night.

Sometime later, Jackie would tell my dad that she put the two pictures, along with the others away in a closet in her home. When she went to retrieve them to show to some family members, all were there except for the two. She never found them again!

Written by Desirae, Copyright 2009 TrueGhostTales.com