First let me start off by saying that yes, I am a teenager, but please, please do NOT take this as an excuse to discredit my story. This story is true. It is as true as you sitting at your computer right now reading this. Next I will say I come from a very, very religious household. My mother, especially, is insistent that ghosts do not exist. She has told me that all paranormal activity is due to demonic activity.
I have always been sensitive to "other things". Maybe if my mother had not stifled my sensitivity I would have been a medium. For example, when I was very young, I had a recurring "dream" of a witch in my wall. To this day I remember every detail of the dream. I would be staring at the wall, it would open on to a forest with yellow birds in the trees, and the yellow birds would turn into two yellow eyes. My point of view would "pan back" and I would see this woman dressed in black with yellow eyes laughing at me in a cruel voice. I would always wake up screaming. This dream would happen every Sunday night.
When I was a little older I developed an obsessive fear of my ceiling - where the wall and ceiling joined in the corners of the room. This was about the time when I started to hear the voices. They would whisper my name quickly and quietly. I still hear them. It's not frightening. But I will save the stories of my childhood for another time. Anyway, this is the story of something that happened to me that I cannot explain.
When I was about fourteen my family and me were visiting my grandparents in Phoenix, AZ. My mom decided we needed to go see some ghost towns to better understand history. We went off to Flagstaff and to a ghost town/gold mine called Vulture Rock or Vulture City. That whole place is creepy as heck. I have three younger brothers. My second youngest brother, "Sean", was creeped out like me but my other brothers "Mike" and "Aaron" were not that uncomfortable. We arrived at 9 AM or so and my family and I walked around the town for a while. It's laid out like first you go to the owner's office and then drive down this dirt road to the actual town. Apparently this place was pretty huge in its heyday. I think they mined most of the U.S.'s gold and silver for the mint there. Around WW2 FDR shut it down and all the miners left to fight in the war. No one ever came back.
So we're all walking around the town and the first thing we went to was the original mine shaft. It goes 60 degrees down into the earth for half a mile I think. You can still see mine car tracks. As we started walking towards it I had this feeling like I was walking through water or something really heavy. It was hard to move my legs. I felt both drawn to and repelled by the hole, if you can imagine that. Sean didn't like it either and we decided to leave and go to the "Glory Hole".
This is the site of a really bad accident. See, stealing gold from the mines was punishable by hanging. This particular mine area was carved out of the rock and pillars of stone held it up. Nine guys decided they would sneak back after dark and chip gold ore out of the pillars. Little by little the pillars weakened until one night when the entire mine came crashing down on the miners and their eleven donkeys. No one ever tried to get the bodies back and it's still a crumbled in hole to this day. So Sean and I are standing at the edge of the hole, looking down and I turn to say something to him. His eyes get big as heck and he points with his mouth wide open. I look down and just catch with the corner of my eye this whitish form. And just like that it is gone. We didn't hang around there anymore. It wasn't fog or mist; this is Arizona desert at ten in the morning in the end of November.
Next we went to the actual town itself. Nothing else weird happened until we went to the hanging tree. This is an old ironwood tree that they hung people from. Supposedly 18 men got hung from it as punishment for stealing gold. But I think in reality only a few guys were hanged, and it was for rape or murder. The tree's right across from the sheriff's office. Aaron and I walked under the tree to look at something, I can't remember what, and suddenly Aaron was grabbing his chest and coughing. I asked him what was wrong and he said he couldn't breathe and something was pressing on his chest. I grabbed him and dragged him from under the tree. Keep in mind this is an 8 year old boy and he doesn't make up stuff. Sean and I didn't tell him about the hole, either. We told Mom but she thought we were pulling her leg. She didn't believe us and insisted we see the rest of the town before leaving. The three of us, me, Sean, and Aaron, wanted to get the heck out of Vulture Rock.
Lastly we went to this area where ore was ground up for refining. There was so much junk in there it was crazy. It was a half open building, kind of like a pole barn, with the roof about nine feet up. There were old conveyor belts and buckets and rusty machinery. Up on the roof I heard this board creaking. I didn't pay attention until it struck me that there was no good reason for a board to swing. There was no wind. It was a very still day. I looked up and I see that the board is not just swinging but it would swing, and stop, and swing again, and stop out to the sides; right, freeze, left, freeze. Sean was right under it. He also heard it and looked up. Right as he did, the board literally was yanked from the wall, floated for a split second and hit the ground with way more force than it should have. Sean leaped back right in the nick of time, looking really freaked out. We stared at each other and considered telling Mom, but decided she wouldn't believe us. Not two minutes later I was by the conveyor belt looking at some old tools and I feel this very light tug on my jacket. "Aaron, cut it out," I said, thinking he was playing a prank on me. Aaron popped his head around the corner and goes, "Whad'ya say?" I froze and scanned the room. My parents were outside, Aaron was in front of me, Mike was looking at something off to my left, and Sean was with Aaron. My whole family was in my immediate line of vision. So who yanked on my sweater? And then, again, like a little kid trying to get my attention. Two sharp little tugs. I turned and looked down at my butt, and there right where my jacket hits my butt, my jacket is pulled out. I mean, it was held out like someone was holding it but there's no hand. And then as I'm watching, it pulls again. I screamed bloody murder, ran out of that shed, and stayed with my dad the entire rest of the time.
The funny thing was, when we got home to Florida a week later, I opened up an Arizona Highways magazine and there was an article on Vulture City Gold Mine. It was an article written by a bunch of paranormal explorers and they went in and experienced stuff in the machine shed too. Apparently a little boy had his head lopped off by a conveyor belt in the 10s or 20s. He's supposed to haunt that area. I remembered I had read that issue of the magazine before we left BUT I could not remember anything about the paranormal article until I got home. I know I'd had to have read it, but I didn't remember reading it the first time (still don't). It was the weirdest thing.
Sometimes I wonder if I should have talked to the little boy. Maybe he just wanted a friend. Maybe he didn't like my brother but he liked me. At that time Sean and I were fighting all the time - who knows? One thing is for sure though. I'm not going back to Vulture City to find out.
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