Alex

“I think we’re overthinking it. We’ve got other things to worry about.”

“Oh, you want to tell me more about this place you keep talking about? It’s in Virginia, right?”

“Oh, dude. It’s perfect for us. You know that new setup you were talking about, the one with multiple amps and delay pedals? You could easily do it there. The place is completely empty, so we won’t have to worry about noise complaints, and we can record as long as we want. And since my dad owns the building, he can cut us a sick deal on rent.”

“I mean, that all sounds pretty good to me. What’s the catch?”

“Well, there is one thing I should warn you about before we agree to anything.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“Do you believe in ghosts, Alex?”

I’m a musician. When I moved to New York from Australia in the late 2000s, I was looking for a way to create rich, immersive compositions without relying on large groups of instrumentalists the way I had back home.

My answer came in the form of a setup involving a solo guitar, multiple amplifiers, and a few delay pedals. Without getting too deep into the technical side of it, the delay pedal creates what I like to call a blank audio canvas. It lets you build on small cells of sound in an unplanned and sometimes unpredictable way. It’s a great tool if you’re trying to break out of old habits as a performer.

As you might imagine, this setup wasn’t exactly economical. It usually involved four large guitar amps, a sizable effects pedal board, my guitar, and a trunkload of cables. I performed with that setup a fair amount, but I also wanted to record with it.

The problem was that my New York City apartment was small as hell, and the idea of recording in a professional studio, with dollar signs accumulating by the minute, didn’t exactly lend itself to a relaxed performance. So I started asking around, and eventually my friend Nick came through with an idea. His dad owned an abandoned building in Alexandria, Virginia, and wouldn’t mind if we set up and recorded there for as long as we wanted. We could even camp out in the building to maximize our work time.

But the offer came with a warning.

The building was haunted.

Now, I’m a little skeptical when it comes to ghosts, so I wanted to know what exactly had happened to convince Nick and his dad there was some kind of supernatural presence there. They told me they had heard singing in the stairwell, seen strange visual apparitions, and generally sensed another presence on occasion while in the building alone.

In other words, it was mostly the standard ghost-story kind of stuff that could probably be chalked up to more logical factors—old fixtures, funky wiring, wind outside, that sort of thing. But one incident they reported was a little harder for me to explain away.

Apparently there was a framed photograph of an elderly woman that kept appearing and reappearing in random places on the top floor of the building despite repeated efforts to remove it. Nick’s dad told me he had rented the top floor to several short-term commercial tenants over the years, and every time someone moved out, he would find the photo again while cleaning up for the next tenant.

I asked, “Are you sure the photo was removed each time?”

His answer was pretty convincing. Yes. It always got taken down to the basement at the beginning of each tenancy, yet somehow always found its way back up to the top floor. Every single time.

Obviously, anything could have happened, I thought. The tenants themselves could have easily found the photo and taken it back upstairs. But then why would they do that? And why would every tenant, over the years, do the same thing? It was a little weird.

I asked Nick where we’d be recording, and I’ll fully admit his answer gave me a chill.

The top floor.

We recorded there over several weekends. Each time I was in the space, I embraced the idea of the ghost a little more. I named her Alma and imagined that she had once lived in the building, gotten trapped there somehow, and was looking for a way to communicate.

I kept returning to that idea of the blank canvas created by the delay pedal. If I was using this tool to let go of my learned musical vocabulary, what was appearing in that empty audio space? Was I inviting Alma to step in and speak?

Despite that playful communion with the idea of Alma, I never experienced any specific apparitions or weird noises. But during our last weekend of recording, something genuinely strange happened. I opened a cabinet that I could have sworn I’d opened several times before, and I kid you not, I found myself staring straight at that framed photo.

Alma.

I honestly thought Nick had planted it there as a joke, but he swears up and down he didn’t.

I will say this: I had a great time recording in that building, and I came away with music I still love. I later compiled those tunes into an album and book release I titled For Alma, as a dedication to my imaginary companion.

But was Alma really imaginary?

I still struggle with that question.

Weirdly enough, my favorite track on the album—the one you’re listening to right now—is one I have no recollection of playing whatsoever. To this day, I listen to it with a profound sense of awe and curiosity, and I often find myself wondering whether a better title for the album would have been From Alma.

I later found out that Alma means soul or spirit in Spanish.

Jake

“So this is the barracks where the enlisted troops would have stayed.”

“Jeez. Imagine living crammed shoulder to shoulder with dozens of other guys before bathing was even a thing.”

“Yeah. That would suck.”

“You all right, bud?”

“Huh? Oh—yeah. Yeah. Dad, this is going to sound weird, but I could’ve sworn someone was standing here just now. Like right before we came in.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Right there by the window, wearing a red jacket. I saw his hand and everything.”

“Huh. Are there any soldiers still here that want to come talk to us? Can you make that light flicker?”

“Well, it was worth a shot. Looks like they’re not so shy around you, though, huh?”

“Yeah.”

I consider myself a skeptic. Sure, I believe there are energies and powers at play that we don’t quite understand, but I think ninety percent of paranormal encounters can be chalked up to one reasonable explanation or another. It’s my belief that what I’m about to tell you falls into that other ten percent—the kind that is a little harder to write off as shadows or tricks of the eye.

This happened in the winter of 2012, when I was about fifteen years old. My dad had heard about a big outdoorsman show at Toronto’s Exhibition Place, and the two of us figured it would be a fun way to spend a Saturday afternoon. Neither of us was exactly an avid outdoorsman, but what the hell.

So we drove into the city and hit the event. We were having a good time checking out the RVs, tents, and all kinds of outdoor gear when somebody pulled the fire alarm. I’m not even sure there was an actual fire, but we had to evacuate either way. Just like that, our Saturday plans had gone up in smoke. Pun intended.

While we were trying to figure out what to do next, I asked my dad if he wanted to go check out Old Fort York, which is basically a stone’s throw from Exhibition Place. My dad is the one who got me into history, so it didn’t take much convincing.

I bore enough people with my history rants, so I’ll keep this short. Fort York is basically where the city of Toronto began in the late eighteenth century. Back then, the town of York was controlled by the British and served as the capital of Upper Canada.

During the War of 1812, an American invasion force crossed Lake Ontario in an attempt to capture York. The attack caught the British garrison, the local militia, and their allied Indigenous warriors off guard. The defenders fought well despite being badly outnumbered and outgunned, but the Americans steadily pushed them back toward the walls of Fort York. It was clear York was about to be overrun.

As the British pulled their men and civilians out of town, they left a nasty surprise for the approaching U.S. troops. Just before abandoning the fort, they set fire to the powder magazine. And right as the first Americans were trying to climb up and over the walls, the blast went off. It was said to be the largest man-made explosion up to that point in history, a record that wouldn’t be surpassed until the Halifax explosion more than a hundred years later, in 1917.

The fort and most of the town were leveled, and hundreds of British, Canadian, and American troops were killed. With so many men dead and later buried on the property, Fort York has long been said to be one of—if not the most—haunted places in Toronto.

At the time, I already knew those ghost stories, but it was hard to feel creeped out. You couldn’t have asked for a more beautiful day. The sun was high in the afternoon sky, and a fresh layer of snow blanketed the old walls and buildings. Winter clearly wasn’t peak tourist season, because I think my dad and I were the only visitors there besides two volunteers working the front desk and gift shop.

We bought our tickets and basically had the whole place to ourselves. But it didn’t take long for the weird stuff to start.

We entered the fort and hooked left, making our way toward the north barracks where enlisted men and their families would have bunked. As my dad headed for the door, I peered in through one of the windows. Standing inside the barracks, just off to the side of that window, was a man wearing a red British Army jacket. I didn’t see his face or upper body, but I saw his arm in the red sleeve and a pale white hand, clear as day.

I assumed there was a reenactor in there in full period kit, waiting for somebody to come along so he could tell them about the building and the men who had once lived there. But when I followed my dad through the door and glanced left to where the window was, there was nothing there.

We were alone in the barracks.

At some point my dad noticed I was staring blankly at the window and asked me what was wrong. I told him, flat out, that someone in a British uniform had been standing in that room right before we walked in. My dad believed in the supernatural, so this intrigued him quite a bit. He actually started calling out to any spirits in the room, asking whether they could flicker the lights or move something.

Of course, nothing happened. But I was convinced I might really have seen an honest-to-God ghost.

Surprisingly, I wasn’t all that freaked out. I remember thinking that the experience, as surreal and hair-raising as it was, was actually pretty cool. Like, hey—I just saw the echo of someone who existed more than two hundred years ago.

After that, we carried on with the rest of the tour, checked out the exhibits and fortifications, and eventually called it a day. But in the months and years that followed, I realized there were other things I saw that day that I really shouldn’t have been seeing.

At some point I broke away from my dad to explore the far side of the fort. As I made my way back along the main path toward the front gate, I looked left toward the circular battery. Standing there by himself near the fort wall was a man dressed like a period artillery gunner. Even now I can see him clearly: blue uniform, leaning on a ramrod, looking down at his feet as if something were stuck to his boot.

I was so sure he was a museum volunteer or living historian that I never stopped to ask why he was standing out there all by himself. I just kept walking.

Then I looked in the opposite direction, toward the building known as the officers’ blue barracks. Trudging through the deep snow toward the building was a woman in a bonnet and a gray dress. I distinctly remember the way she lifted the front of her dress so it wouldn’t drag and get soaked.

Look, I was a teenager. The critical-thinking part of my brain probably wasn’t fully formed yet. But in that moment, these people were so vivid, so real, that I just thought they were exactly what they looked like: people.

Years later, I learned that the fort rarely, if ever, hosts historical reenactors during the winter months. My dad and I checked every building on site, and we never once crossed paths with any staff or volunteers in full regalia. And as it turns out, one of the most commonly reported ghost sightings there is a woman in a gray dress seen in and around the officers’ barracks.

Picata

“Hey, Dragage. I managed to snag you one of those pretzels before they sold out at the—dude, are you seeing this?”

“Oh. Where did all these crows come from? It’s like a scene out of a horror movie.”

“Oh man, I have no idea. Must be some kind of bad omen or something.”

“We really shouldn’t look into it too hard or tell the CO about it.”

“Bikota, why are you talking like that? Do you know something about this?”

“Here, have a pretzel. And let’s pretend you never asked me that question.”

This happened in 2003, when I was well into my one year of mandatory military service. It was a perfectly lazy morning, which was great, because I was admittedly a little hung over from the night before.

All was well until the commanding officer noticed I wasn’t doing anything productive at that particular moment and decided to change that. They handed me a wheelbarrow loaded with barrels of leftover food from the barracks mess hall and told me to take it out to the cage, which was basically our dump.

The river navy apparently had a top-secret arrangement with a local farmer who would swing by the cage to collect our scraps and feed them to his pigs. I really did not want to do this. I was hung over, the temperature had plummeted that morning, and a nasty blizzard was starting to blow in.

On top of that, the assignment got in the way of my plan to run over to a nearby bakery that had become famous among us sailors for its weirdly large but delicious pretzels. They sold out quickly, so I wanted to get there as early as possible.

So there I was, pushing this heavy-ass wheelbarrow through deep snow in a blizzard, sick of the whole assignment, my mind full of pretzels, when I finally said, “Screw this,” and took a shortcut.

Instead of going all the way out to the cage, I headed for the big field between our two barracks. There, I opened the barrels and dumped the food scraps straight onto the ground, where they were quickly buried under fresh snow. Satisfied that all evidence of my crime would be covered up, I turned the wheelbarrow around, went back to the barracks, and told my commanding officer it was all done and dusted.

And just like that, I was off to get my pretzel.

So I hauled ass to the bakery and got my prize. But as I was leaving, I got the distinct feeling that I was being watched. I looked up, and perched in a nearby tree was a crow. The thing had one eye, and it was using that single eye to stare directly into my soul. Or at least that’s what it felt like.

As the thing eyed me, I realized something.

The sun was out, and the snow that had fallen that morning had already started to melt.

The same snow I was depending on to hide the food that never made it to the cage.

As I walked back to the barracks, I knew I was in for an ass-chewing. I was basically praying the snow hadn’t melted enough to expose the evidence of my dereliction of duty.

But when I got there, the sight that greeted me was surreal.

Scattered all over the field between the barracks, and circling high overhead, were hundreds of crows, squawking and fighting over the food scraps in the melting snow. It was insane—like something straight out of Edgar Allan Poe or H. P. Lovecraft.

Naturally, it got the attention of some of the other guys, who came out to watch from the edge of the field. I heard them speculating about what could have caused the crows to gather there. Were they picking at the remains of a dead animal? Was it some kind of bad omen?

Meanwhile, there was me, trying to fade into the background like Homer Simpson backing into the bushes.

I alone knew the truth, and the crows had helped me erase every trace of it. I scarfed down my pretzel and went right back to bed to sleep off the rest of my hangover.

Just another day in the Serbian River Navy.

Luke

“Okay. Almost to the top.”

“Hey—hey, bro. Cedar, what are you doing? We’re in a staggered column. You’ve got to move back, man. Get back.”

“What’s up, Cedar? You okay? You hurt? Bro, you need to move back. The instructor’s right there. He’ll see you.”

“Sergeant, who the hell are you talking to?”

“What? Huh? Cedar?”

“What the hell? You all right, Sergeant? What’s going on? Who are you talking to?”

“I could’ve sworn…”

“Never mind. Let’s just keep moving.”

I’ve told this story before, just never inside an actual episode.

It took place in 2013, when I was going through what was then the three-month Basic Reconnaissance Course at Camp Pendleton, California.

In the first phase, they drown you in the pool every day. Most people quit within the first two days. There are ruck runs up to twelve miles with seventy pounds of weight, and then they send you out for land navigation, where more guys break their ankles trying not to get eaten by mountain lions or bitten by rattlesnakes while hunting for grid points.

In the second phase, they take you down to San Diego, to Coronado Island, where you train on the Navy base alongside the Navy SEALs. A couple of guys stepped on stingrays and had to pull the barbs out of their feet. I felt like I drank a quart of diesel swimming in that wastewater-filled bay. Actual harbor seals swim around in that water, and they scare the life out of you when they surface next to you in the dark or try to jump into your boat. It’s just this dark mass, and you have no idea what kind of animal you’re looking at.

I joke with my Navy SEAL friend John about this now, because for all the prestige of BUD/S, the little yellow rubber boats the SEAL candidates carried up and down the beach looked awfully light compared with the black combat rubber raiding craft we used in recon. Ours weighed a ton once you added the engines and fuel bladders. Carrying those things in and out of the water was backbreaking. That said, their pool training looked even worse. John told me there was one point during dive training when he calmly decided that was probably where he was going to die. So we’ll call it even.

The third phase of BRC is where everything comes together for final evaluations. They take you back up to Camp Pendleton for patrol phase. Patrolling means a six-man team moving from insertion point A to objective point B, doing recon work, then extracting without getting caught.

The course ends with a final long patrol movement designed to make your life absolute hell. You carry water jugs, ammo cans, telephone poles, two-hundred-pound medical dummies, all of your original gear, and your rifle across steep hills. The whole time, they’re throwing CS gas on the road in front of you, which makes your throat close up so badly you can barely breathe.

Before that final evolution, though, we ran a series of mission sets for final patrol evaluations: three patrol missions across about six days, all back to back. You’d start in the morning with a mission brief. Then you’d spend the entire day planning—figuring out your insertion point, building your route plan, making a terrain model, briefing the commanders, prepping gear, checking radios, rehearsing.

Sometime between ten at night and midnight, they’d insert you by helicopter, Humvee, or on foot, and you’d patrol all night. You’d move to your hide site, set up your observation post, get your camera gear out, establish radio and security, and start the recon operation. The following evening, after roughly twenty-four hours on site, you’d extract back to home base. By sunrise, you were already being handed the next mission and starting the whole planning cycle all over again.

You did that three times.

So in reality, you went six days without sleep, or at least without any meaningful sleep. In fact, I don’t remember ever being told we were allowed to sleep. My guys were straight-up passing out while cleaning rifles, on radio watch, on security, on observation. I was constantly waking them up.

But as a team leader, I was terrified the entire time of being dropped from the course if I got caught sleeping, or if one of my guys got caught. I think I passed out once in the bathroom during a planning phase—maybe thirty minutes—before my assistant team leader came looking for me and woke me up.

So yeah, I was beyond tired. Every night I was struggling, literally smacking myself in the face and waiting for the sun to come up, because that was the only thing that gave me any kind of second wind.

The weird thing happened on the second mission, around day three or four of the final patrols. It was early morning, and we were patrolling toward our hide site. We were hiking up a steep hill on the north side of the main road on base, moving up a firebreak. As team leader, I was the third person in the formation. In front of me were my point man and my navigator.

Because the firebreak left us exposed with no tree cover, and because we were basically silhouetting ourselves on the ridgeline, we moved in a staggered column—left, right, left, right—spaced about ten meters apart, so one burst from the enemy couldn’t wipe out the whole patrol.

The instructor was up front, observing and grading everything we did. The guy directly behind me was my radio operator, Corporal Cedar. I hope he doesn’t mind me using his real name.

As we were climbing that hill, I glanced back over my right shoulder. We were doing spot checks every few steps to make sure we weren’t losing anyone. Standard procedure. I had my NVGs over my left eye, leaving my right eye uncovered. That’s how night vision works—your brain blends the two images and still leaves your shooting eye free.

When I turned to look behind me, I realized Cedar was suddenly walking right next to me, like he had caught up. He was supposed to be five to ten meters back in formation.

I figured he was just trucking uphill because sometimes, when you’re exhausted and carrying that much weight, you get fed up with the slow pace and just want to get to the top. But we were being watched by an instructor, and I was his team leader, so I had to tell him to move back.

So I said, “Bro, what are you doing? Staggered column. Get back in formation. Move back.”

He kept walking beside me. Didn’t say a word.

I looked forward again, checked the instructor, then looked back at him. At that point I was thinking maybe he was hurt, maybe he was trying to tell me something.

“You okay? What’s up, dude? You’ve got to move back. The instructor’s right there.”

After maybe ten or fifteen seconds of me trying to get his attention, I heard someone behind me say, “Sergeant, who the hell are you talking to?”

I turned fully around, and there was Corporal Cedar, exactly where he was supposed to be, still in formation behind me.

Now I was confused. I’m looking at Cedar behind me, thinking: Then who the hell is the person walking next to me?

This all happened fast. After I saw the real Cedar behind me, I turned back to look at the figure beside me through the green glow of my NVGs, trying to make out his face.

And at that point, he just kind of faded away.

I stopped dead and stared at the place where he had been a second earlier. I moved a little toward the edge of the firebreak and, through my night vision, saw what looked like the outline of a small shrub, maybe a little pine tree, silhouetted with the lights from the base behind it.

The impression it gave me was that the guy had somehow turned into a tree, because after he disappeared, that tree was all that was there.

My brain immediately started trying to rationalize it. Maybe I had mistaken the tree for a person. But that didn’t make sense. Whatever I had seen had been walking beside me for several strides. It had moved with me some distance up that hill. The tree was fixed in one spot.

So there I was, standing there like an idiot, when Cedar finally caught up and whispered, “Sergeant, what’s up? You okay? Who are you talking to?”

I don’t remember exactly what I said. Probably something like, “Never mind. Let’s just go.”

And we kept moving.

I picked up the pace to put some distance between Cedar and me again and reestablish the staggered-column spacing, but I was spooked. I kept looking back over my shoulder to make sure he was still there, still where he was supposed to be, and that he was the only one there. I think he kept asking from behind whether I was okay. Maybe he was worried about me.

Then, maybe a minute later, I looked back again through the greenish glow of the night-vision lens and really focused on Cedar’s face.

And as I stared at it, it changed.

Facial features are already hard enough to make out through night vision, especially in the low light we had that night. But his face changed. It seemed to morph into something I can only describe as demonic. Evil. It was smiling. I think it was baring its teeth at me.

At that point I just looked away, shook my head, and thought, Okay. I’m done with this. Keep moving.

So I shook it off and kept walking.

I was definitely exhausted, deep in that trance people get into when they’re so tired their body just keeps going without them really thinking about it. And I’ve been heavily sleep deprived at other times in my life. I’ve had hallucinations in darkness under those conditions.

But those experiences were different.

Usually I’d see colors—a golden yellow, maybe greens or oranges—swirling patterns, distorted shapes, faces. And I always knew I was hallucinating. I’d think, Wow, what is that? But I knew it wasn’t real. I knew my brain was producing it because of sensory deprivation and exhaustion.

This was not like that.

This is the only time in my life I’ve ever seen a fully three-dimensional person—something that moved, walked, had depth and mass. I don’t remember what he was wearing. I wasn’t paying attention to details like that. All I knew was: person walking next to me.

And it’s the only time I’ve ever spoken to something like that. Spoken to something that apparently wasn’t there, but that my mind was, for those few seconds, treating as completely real. Then it disappeared the moment I realized something was wrong with what I was seeing, like my subconscious snapped back into reality.

And then there’s the part that stuck with me most: someone else saw me talking to it.

Later, when I started doing more general research into the paranormal, I kept coming across stories from Southern California, especially in the desert and the mountains, about encounters with what people often call shadow people or watchers. There are other names for these things, too, and Native legends are often tied to them.

I’ve had a lot of time to think about what happened and compare it to other stories. I don’t think mine is especially remarkable compared with some of the things I’ve heard. But ghosts, apparitions, spirits—whatever you want to call them—usually seem connected to a particular place.

And while Marines do unfortunately die in training, I have absolutely no reason to believe some poor guy died on that hillside off the north side of the road near that firebreak where we were patrolling. Unless maybe he got bitten by a rattlesnake and never made it off the hill, and now haunts the area like some sad lieutenant still trying to find his last grid point during land nav.

Could I be wrong? Sure. It’s not impossible. I just can’t imagine the reason a ghost would be there.

That’s why I don’t go around telling people I saw a ghost. Honestly, I don’t know what I saw. It could have been entirely inside my own imagination.

And that’s the thing I appreciate when I hear stories like this from other people. Unless there’s some known context, most of them never claim to know exactly what they saw. They just describe something that happened to them—something they’ve never been able to fully explain.