Haunted Speakeasy

Witness: Jim Warfield
Location: Mount Carroll, Illinois
Date of Encounter: July 20, 2001

I have a haunted house that's really haunted, I have been taking people through it for tours for almost 16 years now.

One night last summer there was a group of just two people, a local girl (about 13 years old) and her grandmother, the girl had been through my house numerous times during the summer and loved it, but grandma was very nervous.

Physically, the grandma resembled the actress from the movie "Poltergeist" (the dwarf/psychic). She yelled and screamed and swore at every little thing in the first two rooms of the house, it was hysterical! She would do this, then profusely apologize for the swearing!

By the time I was at the stairs to go to the second floor to continue the tour, I couldn't do it, my knees were so weak, and my stomach felt as if it were inside out from laughing! I had to crawl up the stairs!

When we reached the wine cellar I was at the rear of that room talking and pointing my little flashlight into the corner, as I glanced back at the two females I saw two "orbs" 30 feet away on the trim board on the doorway from the room, one was white, one was bright red/orange — the white one was a little smaller — about the size of a golf ball. The orbs slowly moved in unison up the board maintaining about 12 inches of space between them, the white one, in the lead "jumped" from the board, hovered in mid air over the stairs, then went zipping up the middle of the stairs, turned the corner, and disappeared. The other orb soon followed in the same way and the same pattern.

As this was happening I was flipping my little flashlight around in the corner that I was pointing it into to see if somehow I was creating or influencing these "orbs" at all. I wasn't. That night, the flashlight that I had in my hand for that tour had very weak batteries in it, besides.

About an hour later that night I had another group come in for a tour, it was 12 adults all 35-45 years old. One man had been there before, he was laughing rather boisterously at my routines that I do to entertain people during the tour.

Since he had been here before he was the "brave" volunteer to try out the "Bad Dream" bed first. From the second floor of the house one person at a time is tipped on the bed and they slide rather quickly down a chute to the wine cellar, sometimes traveling a distance of 56 ft in 2 seconds (on fast, dry days, with a certain slide/blanket, if you have the ideal body shape/weight for this to happen).

After all of them took a turn on the slide I went down to the wine cellar to continue the tour. I noticed that the man who was doing all of the wild laughing was very quiet and had shall I say it? ..A "Haunted" look about him?

Over the next 15 minutes as we went through the basement above the wine cellar and the exit tunnels under the yard, he was still the same — a look of resolute, abject worry across his face. As everyone stepped out and I'm holding the exit door open for everyone, I just had to ask him, "Is something wrong?"

"I haven't seen a ghost since I was ten years old!"

"She" appeared for him, "The-Lady-In-White", she's been haunting the wine cellar ever since 1925, that's when they tried to have a "speak-easy" tavern in that underground room, but their business was no good because every so often this "Lady-In-White" would come floating out of the northeast corner and scare everyone away!

The lights that I have in that room are normally set on dim and they will sort of pulse and get a little brighter as you look around the room, he said that when the lights would get a little brighter, he could see her better! She was floating about 4 feet above the floor (the ceiling in this room is 16 feet high) wearing her normal white dress. She has long, straight black hair and a dark complexion, as if she might be part American Indian, she has been said by almost everyone that has seen her to be an attractive woman.

She watched him, then slowly turned her head away from him, then turned her whole body away from him and seemed to walk up a flight of stairs into the stone wall and disappear! (There are no steps there, only solid stone wall) This is when he really got scared, because he still had to make it the rest of the way out of this house, and he felt as if "SHE" was right behind him, every step of the way!

Of all of the incidents of people seeing ghosts and supernatural experiences that I have ever known of, I've never heard of this factor being commonly found or present before, "Laughter", First I was laughing almost uncontrollably, then I saw "Orbs", then an hour later, the same night, this customer was laughing like a loon, then he saw "HER"?

"Activity" here has seemed to really intensify over the last year. The last wild year for this sort of thing was six years ago, why? I don't know?