On one of the first of Art's yearly Halloween traditions, listeners emailed, faxed, and called in with their best ghost stories. Art shared several accounts where pets seemed to be more attuned to the presence of spirits or unseen entities in the home. This, he suggested, may be due to their being more aware of the natural environment, and less distracted by the kind of things their human owners deal with. A caller named Josh told of when he was a boy delivering newspapers, he had befriended a German shepherd that was on a neighbor's porch. One early morning, he petted the dog, which he hadn't seen in a while. A few days later, he collected payment from the owner and discovered that the dog had been put to sleep several weeks earlier.
Dave in Portland shared a tale of when he and his family lived in an apartment above a store, which was haunted by a variety of poltergeist and ghostly activity. There was a knocking on the window that was two stories above the ground, dishes smashed in the kitchen, Bibles flew open to similar pages, and a visiting dog whimpered in the bathroom and then seemed to step around an invisible object. A caller from Granite City, IL also detailed poltergeist phenomena, including cold spots in the house, and strange smells that could be either foul or sweet.
From Lexington, KY, a caller talked about seeing "chalky white" pilots on the back of a plane. After they seemingly disappeared, he asked the flight attendant, who speculated that there were ghosts of the pilots who had died in a plane crash over the Everglades. A caller in Austin detailed a fascinating and horrified encounter with an inexplicable being in his bedroom closet that appeared "4-dimensional" and seemed to be repelled by the environment around it. Henry told of living in a haunted house for the last 30 years-- an experience which he finds tolerable. Said to be inhabited by six different spirits, he believes three of them are sisters who died in a fire in the home in the early 1900s.