Manhattan's stunning Hotel Walcott has a ghostly past

Hotel Wolcott relies on history, value - and the occasional haunting- to keep guests coming. 

Some guests say they’ve seen children playing; employees have heard a phantom radio.

Every building needs a shepherd, especially magnificent historic ones that may or may not have a couple of friendly ghosts running around.

Hotel Wolcott got lucky. Its shepherd is Scott Erlich, whose family has owned and carefully restored the 1904-built structure since 1975. Designed originally as a hotel by John H. Duncan, the architect of Grant's Tomb, the Wolcott was lost by its original developer, who hit hard financial times - something today's real estate pros know a thing about.

"I am trying to make everything look as original as possible," says Erlich. "Just one look at this building and you know it's special. So many people stayed here over the years. Titanic survivors, important businessmen. Then in the 1950s and '60s, musicians who recorded at Beltone Studios, like Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers and Miles Davis, stayed at the hotel. No rooms are cookie-cutter.

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Haunted building was once a brothel (video)

EL PASO — The Earl Francis Apartments, a quaint historic building in central El Paso was once a hotel built in 1925 with it's name etched in stone.

Joe Nebhan bought the building in 2000 and was told that during prohibition, in the 1920s and 30s, it was also a brothel. Some of his tenants say ghosts or spirits linger.

 "In fact I have never seen anything, I've had occasional reports from my tenants," Nebhan said.

"I had bought the building and just received the keys to enter into the basement and I came into the room where I'm at right now and I stood right over there. It was a hot day, about the middle of September and all of a sudden it got icy cold.I mean I got a chill and I have old buildings around the city and I've never had that happen before."

Nebhan's daughter used to live at the Earl Francis apartments.

"Right after she moved in for several nights in a row, they would close the windows and in the morning when she gets up they were all open," said Nebhan.

Nebhan, a history buff, tried to research the Earl Francis but to no avail, could he find any records.

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Mysterious Lights Filmed Over the Skies of Laredo, TX (video)

"Why are all the good UFOs invisible?" one Gather.com user asked in response to the latest "invisible UFO" report posted to the site.

You might have thought a defining characteristic of a UFO would be visibility. But thanks to zealous alien hunters doggedly scanning the sky with night-vision cameras, a new class of flying objects that only emit infrared light has emerged from the darkness. Are they spies from the great beyond?

"Some people claim to see actual battles between UFOs up in the sky, using night-vision equipment," the ufologist Robert Sheaffer told Life's Little Mysteries. "Those devices magnify faint objects so much that the sky seems to be filled with invisible UFOs. In reality, of course, they are seeing owls, bats, moths, airplanes, satellites, etc." Night-vision optics trade low resolution for high sensitivity, he explained, so that points of light (such as distant satellites) spill out into circles that make the objects appear huge.

However, some of the invisible UFOs out there really are spies of a sort — or whatever else you choose to call military drones.

Surveillance Video Catches Ghost In Louisiana Pizza Shop (video)

Many folks believe in ghosts, but few can say they’ve caught evidence of a haunting on video. Stocky’s Pizza employee Lori Evans says there’s not only a ghost haunting the recently opened Haughton, Louisiana pizzeria, but that it’s far from friendly. And she has some unnerving surveillance camera footage to prove it.

Last Saturday morning, Evans arrived at Stocky’s to find the ice scoop in the middle of the kitchen floor. When the staff left the night before, it was placed on top of the ice machine where it’s normally kept.

The discovery was the proverbial “straw that broke the camel’s back,” Evans tells Kiss Country.

A number of similarly eerie incidents prior to that morning prompted her to scour the surveillance video to see just what was going on. What she discovered will make you shiver.

The following video was recorded on July 14 at a little after 6 a.m. — hours before the arrival of any of the staffers. Nobody was in the pizzeria at the time, confirms Evans.

Car crash awakens pub's ghost claims landlord

AN ORMSKIRK landlady believes a car that crashed into her pub may have awakened a restless ghost.

Linda Roughley, who runs The Plough on Church Street, Ormskirk has experienced several spooky moments since the accident earlier this year.

“Things have definitely started happening since the crash,” said Linda.

“I have seen bottles move and rattle on their own and when I am alone in the pub I have felt a hand on my back and felt a presence at the end of the bar.”

The Grade II listed building suffered thousands of pounds of damage on January 21 this year after a drunk-driver smashed into the pub in the early hours of morning.

Just days later, Linda began to notice not all was as it seems.

Woman's husband visits doctors after death to prove afterlife

LEBANON, TN (WSMV) - When a loved one dies, it's only natural to wonder what comes next, but a Lebanon woman said after he husband died, she got something she never expected.

Faye Aldridge calls it undeniable proof of the afterlife.

When Aldridge's husband, Burke Aldridge, was in the final stages of cancer, he promised to send her a fax from heaven. 

She assumed it was just the morphine talking, but you can imagine how shocked she was when just days after his death he apparently made good on that promise.

"I just believed against all odds that God would heal him," Faye Aldridge said. "Death is not the end."

She is a woman of strong faith. When Burke Aldridge was diagnosed with cancer in 2005, Faye Aldridge said she fully expected God to perform a miracle. 

"I expressed my faith. I covered him in the word of God. I read the Bible to him every day," she said.

But just 21 days later, the 53-year-old man was dead, and the unthinkable began to unfold.

Stramge Vortex found on Saturn's moon Titan.

A NASA spacecraft has spied a vortex swirling in the atmosphere high above the south pole of the Saturn moon Titan, hinting that winter may be coming to the huge body's southern reaches.

NASA's Cassini probe photographed the polar vortex — or mass of swirling gas — during a flyby of Titan on June 27. The vortex appears to complete one full rotation in nine hours, while it takes Titan about 16 days to spin once around its axis.

"The structure inside the vortex is reminiscent of the open cellular convection that is often seen over Earth's oceans," Tony Del Genio, a Cassini team member at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, said in a statement.

"But unlike on Earth, where such layers are just above the surface, this one is at very high altitude, maybe a response of Titan's stratosphere to seasonal cooling as southern winter approaches," he added.

British military releases UFO abduction documents

UFO investigators launched a top-level probe into claims two men were abducted by aliens in the Capital.

The legendary story told by Garry Wood and Colin Wright, who said they were examined by extraterrestrials after their van was ambushed by a flying saucer, is being turned into a film starring Billy Boyd.

But rather than being dismissed at the time as 
Hollywood fantasy, the 1992 incident was taken seriously enough to be investigated by the Ministry of Defence.

Garry, then a 33-year-old ambulance technician from Edinburgh, was driving a car to Tarbrax, South Lanarkshire, accompanied by Colin, 25.

The classified documents – released today – state that Garry “was driving along the A70 when the object dropped a curtain of white light in front of the car”.

The report continued: “His friend blacked out for what seemed like 10-15 seconds. He thought he had died. When he woke up the car was facing the other direction on the wrong side of the road. When he checked his watch he had lost about one hour.”

Ex-CIA agent says Roswell UFO and aliens were real.

It was 65 years ago Sunday that the Roswell Daily Record blasted an infamous headline claiming local military officials had captured a flying saucer on a nearby ranch. And now, a former CIA agent says it really happened.

"It was not a damn weather balloon -- it was what it was billed when people first reported it," said Chase Brandon, a 35-year CIA veteran. "It was a craft that clearly did not come from this planet, it crashed and I don't doubt for a second that the use of the word 'remains' and 'cadavers' was exactly what people were talking about."

Mermaids do not exist, US Government declares

THE United States government has assured its citizens that, much like zombies, mermaids probably do not exist, saying in an official post: "No evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found".

"Mermaids -- those half-human, half-fish sirens of the sea -- are legendary sea creatures," read the online statement from the National Ocean Service (NOS).

 

The agency, charged with responding to natural hazards, received letters inquiring about the existence of the sea maidens after the Discovery Channel's Animal Planet network broadcast "Mermaids: The Body Found" in May.

The show "paints a wildly convincing picture of the existence of mermaids, what they may look like, and why they've stayed hidden ... until now", a Discovery Channel press release says.

Ex-FBI agent claims she saw angels at 9/11 crash site

PITTSBURGH (AP) — A former police officer who retired from the FBI due to post-traumatic stress disorder linked to her role in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terror attacks has written a book about seeing legions of angels guarding the Pennsylvania site where a hijacked airliner crashed.

Lillie Leonardi served as a liaison between law enforcement and the families of the passengers and crew members killed in the United Airlines Flight 93 crash. She arrived on the scene about three hours after the crash.

Although Leonardi's book, "In the Shadow of a Badge: A Spiritual Memoir," centers on her vision of angels, she argues her life has been changed more by what she didn't see that day.

"The biggest thing for me is that that there were no bodies," she said.

Ghostly apparition caught on camera hailed as best evidence

A CAFE owner has called in the ghost-hunters after claiming to have seen a spirit on his security camera.

Chills went down Dan Clifford’s spine when he checked his CCTV and saw what he’s convinced was a ghostly apparition hovering over a table set for two.

He summoned a team of ghost specialists, who said the sighting – said to be a figure of a woman – was the most striking evidence they had come across in almost 10 years.

Dan, 35, said yesterday: “The first time I saw the shadow moving on the camera my heart went nuts. I thought there was an intruder in the shop.

“But when I looked closer I realised it couldn’t be a live human being – I could see right through it.”

The CCTV image was taken in the dead of night after something set off a motion sensor. And Dan claims it’s not the only evidence of ghostly goings-on at his Curiositeaz Vintage Tea Room in Perth.

UFO sighting over Burbank, California

A witness reports UFO activity over Burbank, California on 1 July 2012 according to testimony from the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) witness reporting database that was filed on 2 July 2012 .

The witness described what he or she was doing before his or her UFO sighting.

“My roommate and I were in the car; I was driving us to Fresh n Easy grocery store, heading northwest on Sparks St. in Burbank, CA, approaching the Olive Avenue intersection.”

The witness described the UFO activity.

“Between the trees, we each saw directly ahead hovering just west of the mountain ridge line four extremely bright bluish-white lights resembling field lights, in a row but hovering and with no supporting structure.”