SPIRIT TALES AND MAGIC
Our host; Dr.G had his first paranormal experience at only eight years old. With over five decades of storytelling, magic and paranormal story collection he is an award winning story teller on a mission to revive firelight and the telling of stories!
SPIRIT TALES AND MAGIC
From Jenny Slate To The White House, We Trace How Ghost Stories Linger And Shape Lives
A masked figure in red slips into a dead‑end alley and vanishes, and that single mystery becomes our doorway into a world of letters under stair runners, midnight music from fireplaces, and furniture that won’t sit still. We trace the strange symmetry across famous homes and our own: Jenny Slate’s sea captain sealed by hidden correspondence; our Woodrow houses and the trunk that named Ruby; Jennifer Aniston’s frankincense cleansing where dishes crack and a medium draws a hard line; and White House lore where the air turns sharp and the past hums like a tuned string.
From Kris and Kylie’s roof‑steps and self‑starting showers to McConaughey’s firm stand with “Madame Blue,” the patterns repeat: objects act like anchors, rooms hold temperature like a mood, and boundaries matter. Ellen DeGeneres describes a turn‑of‑the‑century man that sent her packing—and her mother later confirmed—while a London rental turns dangerous as a shower knob flips itself to scalding and a child is burned. Lea Michele hears a voice sing inside an empty apartment; we hear a grandmother’s song upstairs while watching her walk in from the alley. The question grows sharper: are we haunted by places, people, or artifacts?
Megan Mullally’s belief that Nicole Brown Simpson’s presence lingered on the same property suggests a surprising resolution: understanding. After Nick Offerman witnesses the story in full, the disturbances stop. Then comes New Orleans: a house too active to keep, a table gifted to a notary, night after night of soft banging, and a morning where two chairs are pressed against a couch like a quiet jail. Whether you’re a skeptic tracking repeatable anomalies or a believer reading signs, these accounts point to the same architecture: memory, meaning, and thresholds we choose to keep or cross.
Listen for the chills, stay for the patterns, and decide what you think the unseen wants from us. If the stories sparked one of your own, share it, subscribe for more haunted deep dives, and leave a review so other curious minds can find the show.
Good morning everybody. It's Dr. G at SphereTalesandmagic.com, where you can check podcast and wind up here or tell us your stories or even book us for an event. Several emails requesting that we finish the celebrity ghost stories. So, okay, we're gonna do that. There is uh in fact a ghost story that we're working on. There's uh sighting, let's call it, of a very long-haired gentleman wearing red pants and a red shirt. He has a red mask over his face like the COVID ones that we all used to wear. He's got on a black tobalin and dark sunglasses, and reportedly was skulking around the property last night for about an hour and a half. One of the other businesses in the area. Two people were taking trash out of that business, and one of them saw this guy and one of them didn't. They claimed to have followed him down an alley behind our building, which is you know, it's got the nickname Satan's Alley, and it earned it. They claimed that they had called the police, and the police came the other way to come up the alley. So whoever it was should have been cornered in the alley. And guess what? Nobody's there. The only place that that person could have possibly gone would be in our building. They asked me to do a building sweep this morning. I have not done that. If he's wandering about in here, he will eventually step in front of a camera, which is gonna set off an alarm, and I'm gonna see him, and we won't even talk about the rest of that. So ghost stories. Jenny Slate says that living in a haunted house basically shaped her entire personality. Slate opened up about it in her Netflix stand-up comedy special, Stage Fright, but first talked about the experience on Ellen, and I believe that was in 2014. She told Ellen, I grew up in Massachusetts. I grew up in a genuine haunted house. I knew it was haunted. My parents, when they moved in, they bought it with the furniture in it. The people had died. And I'm getting scared, even trying to tell the story. Then the comedian recounted how her parents pulled up the runner on the stairs only to find a stack of old letters. Those letters had been hidden there apparently for quite some time. The letters were from a man who was not the previous owner's husband, but a sea captain. Slate said that her father ended up actually seeing the sea captain's ghost. My dad went out into the hall, and he looked onto the stairs, and standing there, she says, is the sea captain, looking at him, pleading. Eventually the family burned the letters, and the sea captain never returned. Though they did continue to see other apparitions, apparitions in the house. Now, those of you who are familiar with the podcast will know that I and my siblings grew up on one street in the town we lived in, in three separate houses on that street, Woodrow One, Woodrow Two, and Woodrow Three, and all of them were haunted. In the attic of Woodrow Three, which was the most haunted of the three houses. There was a big trunk that we found. Now the attic was off one of the bedrooms, and the whole upstairs of the house was an afterthought. You could really tell that it was. So you went through this little tiny door, like barely able to get my shoulders through it. And it was the eaves of the house where the roof starts to go down. It's a little attic space. Under the boards, there was a trunk. In the trunk were a lot of letters from someone named Ruby Todd. And that's how the ghost of Woodrow 3 got the name Ruby. It was because of the letters. Those letters were later passed on to a construction worker who pretty much begged us for them. There was an incident at the house. Had to be rebuilt on the inside, and in the process of that, where are these letters? You know, you probably should leave those alone, and then they're from Ruby. I want them. So he convinced other folks that he should have them, and he ended up with them. And uh I've lost contact with him. I don't know how he is. Jennifer Aniston, when she first moved to Los Angeles, she rented an apartment. She says it came with a ghost that just so happened to hate her roommate. All of a sudden things started to, in quotation marks, happen. This dishwasher would start to go, or the coffee maker would start to go, or the stereo would just turn on at full volume. It began to be terrifying. The morning show actress set on the late show with James Corden. Following the advice of a friend, Aniston had someone come over to clear the house. They had frankincense and they put it in a little dish and sort of started saying all these things. And the first corner that she went to, the dish cracked. She recalled when we got to the really thick, thick 1975 kind of ashtray that was sitting on the table, and then that cracked. Then the person cleansing the house asked me to leave. That's when I really believed it. She had to have a talking in quotation marks with the ghost. The ghost hated my roommate. I moved out. I felt terrible about it, but I couldn't couldn't say it doesn't like you. I mean that would be terrible, so instead, we elected just to move out. Jenna Bush, or I guess I should say Jenna Bush, De Hager. That's former first daughter, Jenna Bush, has heard her share of bumps in the night when she lived in the White House. And I thought we did an episode a few seasons back on the ghosts of the White House. About time to revisit and check those out again. Jenna Bush Hager explains on the Kelly Clarkston show that she and her sister, that would be Barbara Bush, were woken up by a phone ringing before hearing 1920s piano music coming out of our fireplace. She reassured the creeped-out Kelly Clarkston that the ghosts were musical, not evil, and came with no harm. The White House has uh has its share of ghost stories. Um pretty sure I can say this. When they when they quote remodeled the situation room, the war room, whatever you're gonna call it, um, they moved it in that old space. Um I'm told I have not been in it since then. But I'm told that when you go into that space, it's so cold, and hair on the back of your neck and the top of your head just stands up, and you can feel the presence just pushing around you. I have no way to know if that's true or not. Sure would like to find out, though. So uh, those of you who are listening to this that can make that happen, uh it's been a few years, so arrange that, would you? Chris Kendall and Kylie Jenner revealed on a Halloween-themed 2018 Vogue video. She and her younger sister, Kylie Jenner, had some creepy experiences in their mom's house. I do believe in ghosts. I don't know if I've ever seen one, but I've experienced some pretty ghostly situations, she said. In the house my mom lives in, Kylie and I would always f hear footsteps on the roof. And of course that happened while nobody was home. Kylie's shower used to turn on all the time by itself. We never knew why. So, yes, I'm convinced that it was some sort of ghost or spirit. Which brings us to Mr. Matthew McConaughey, who is uh a really great guy and right up there on the list of my favorite actors. During an interview with his, I think it was 2009 movie, Ghost of Girlfriends Past, he told a tale of Madame Blue, the not so friendly spirit who lived in his Hollywood home. He says I was not even under the influence and she was there. She wasn't that happy. It didn't seem like she was going to be much fun to hang around or have in my house. So I went ahead and I stood my ground. I opened the door and said, You can move around all you want, but I'm not going anywhere. For weeks after that, everyone who came to the house said the same thing. There's someone down there, down that hall. Somebody's down in your hall. He claimed to have never seen her personally. Brings us to Ellen DeGeneris. Ellen says, I have seen a ghost. It's weird. She was interviewing Melissa McCartney on our talk show. It's a very strange thing. I didn't see anything that disturbed me, and then my mother saw the same thing. I lived in that house, and then I moved because when I saw the ghost, I moved out and I put her in it. And then she saw the ghost as well. It was a man that was in like turn of the century clothes, a long coat, and a hat. Sound familiar. The singer and her family had a terrifying time staying at a haunted rental apartment in London. She says, I was having really crazy dreams and really scary things, and one night my little sister, it sounds crazy to even try and tell you, but she was standing in the shower and all of a sudden I hear her scream. I run in there, and the water had somehow flipped to hot. But it was still, it wasn't like the water had just changed, the knob had actually turned, and she hadn't touched it. It was so hot it was burning her. She was really red. Before I felt this, I thought I had seen a little boy sitting on the sink and watching me take a shower more than once. So I felt really freaked out. The star added that her mom, her aunt, and her ex, that would be, I believe, Liam Hensworth, all had crazy experiences in the flat. After the shower incident, she said that was enough, and we felt forced to find another place to stay. Leah Michelle says, I really, truly had a ghost in an old apartment. It was in New York the actress recalled hearing a burst from upstairs when she was on the bottom floor of the unit, and only I run to check it out and to find it, she says. It was silent with nothing out of place. She added, It's like it's all in my head, and just as I say that, the window flies open right in front of me. And also, weirdly, I would hear someone singing in the par in the apartment. In Woodrow Two, the second haunted house I've lived in. If you've heard the most of the episodes, you'll my aunt Agnes Wagner and my grandmother used to sing back up for some country music stars. Grandma had a great voice, her singing voice was amazing. Uh the church people, the the church that I went to, uh the choir folks were like, it's angelic, but she wouldn't sing in the choir, and I don't know why that is. She never discussed it, and we never pushed her on it. But I'm in Woodrow 2 one day, and it's a two-story house. So you enter from the porch and into the living room. To the left, I had a pool room that I had set up. It was a culmination pool room and kind of a little magic office. In the entry room, if you went and worked your way around the right side, there was a staircase that went upstairs. There was always somebody in the house. And we'll discuss that at a podcast, but straight through that room, past a couple of glass bookshelves, and into an eat-in country kitchen. So I decide I'm going to go into the kitchen and make myself a grilled cheese sandwich. So I go in and begin to do that, and I could hear grandma singing upstairs very softly. I kind of smile, and I thought, that would be good if maybe she's practicing or something, she's actually going to do something with that voice. So I make the grilled cheese and I sit down at the eating kitchen table, which there's a window that looks through a pretty long backyard and into an alley, and I see grandma walking down the alley and into the yard. So I go to the bottom of the stairs. Who's singing? Of course, at that time there was no singing. Like, who's up there? I stand there until she gets into the house saying that. And I did not hear her come in or I would have stopped. She says, Who are you talking to? Nobody's there. Uh, you know, Ava, Patty must be up there, Tommy. No. Why? I said, I thought I heard you singing up there. So we run up the stairs, we checked every room upstairs, and there was this really, really creepy closet that she would not even go by herself anywhere around it. We went in there. She couldn't get in there. You had to go like up on top of a shelf like thing. It was a really weird little hole in the wall. We even checked that. There's nobody there. So that was one of those. Do not mention this to your grandfather. Just don't do it. Then we went on. Megan Milani. She's convinced that her and husband, I believe that was Nick Offerman, once shared a house with a spirit of Nicole Brown Simpson. And of course, you'll recall Nicole Brown was murdered. I believe it was in 1994. It wasn't the same house, but it was on the same property where had once stood the house that O.J. Simpson had rented for Nicole Brown Simpson. She said that on busy tonight, we would have in the house, in one corner of the house, like maybe where the bedroom used to be in the old house, we would have all these sounds and weird things all the time. It would be like that's Nicole, and she's pissed because Nick doesn't get it. According to the Will and Grace Star, the Spirits activity stopped after Offerman watched documentaries in the American Crime Story series that covered Brown Simpson's murder. Ever since then, no more sounds. The actress says, I guess she just needed Nick to understand what had happened. Throughout a lot of research and things that we do, and even before there was the podcast or any of that, several people in the field of parapsychology and psychology and psychics, and don't get me started on that, but they say that, and here we go, you know, according to they, my grandfather used to say, does that come from the book of they say? Anyway, they say that sometimes in a in a haunting, just moving the furniture changes things, or taking a piece of furniture out, or moving one to another floor, you know, something like that. One of the guys I have an NDA with has a house in New Orleans that I don't think he's seen in in a decade. He claims to have witnessed so many paranormal things. It's you know, he would tell you it wasn't even funny. And I can't say who that is or tell any of those stories. I want him about that, by the way, because he has some great stories and I would love to tell them, but I can't. So he claims that it got so bad he ran out of the house one night and he never stepped foot in it again. It sold to someone else. They gave it back to him because they didn't want it. It's currently being rented by someone else. It's on every ghost tour in the in the city. He claims that during the retransitioning of the house, he and several other people had to go in it for just, you know, an hour, papers to sign and things like that. And during that time there were many experiences. And one of the young ladies that was there, I believe, is a notary or something. So I love that that table. Would you like to have it? Yes, I would. So he gives it to her. He arranges to have it moved. And he has to go back one more time when the renters come in with the walkthrough. And he doesn't have to, he could have paid somebody else to do it. So but he wanted to be there. So he's there. He meets them. He felt calm in the house, he said. Wow, maybe they're learning to leave people alone. They meeting the ghosts of the house. I didn't see him for a very long time, and then there was a Halloween convention in Chicago, and at the time I owned half of Halloween, Ohio with my business partner Walt. I don't own any of that anymore. But at the time I did, so I run into him at the convention. He says, Hey, what it come here. And I'm like, okay, where are you eating lunch today? Well, the pizza here is amazing. I had never had Chicago pizza until then. So we might go there, we might go to Morton's. Um, why? He goes, Well, you have a vendor badge as well as a performer badge. Just eat at the backstage buffet. Like, why would I want to do a terrible thing like that? Because I want to tell you something. I'm like, okay, fine. So he tells him about the girl that he gives this table to. About a week after the table's in the house. She keeps hearing like someone is lifting the table and dropping it on the floor, a corner of it, like bang, bang, bang, very softly, but it's table or chair. And she would get up, run out of bed, table's downstairs. She's on a second floor. Nobody's on the third floor. So she's grunting down and nothing. So one night she decides to sleep on this huge couch that she has. She's we could sleep three people on this thing end to end, and you know, you'd never touch the other person. So she decides to sleep on that couch. She hears a little rustling around by the table. She gets up, she looks, she doesn't see anything. So she falls asleep. The next morning when she wakes up, there were two chairs that have been pushed right against the couch. And when she wakes up, she sees the back of the chairs. So the seats of the chairs are facing away from her. She said, I felt like I had been put in some kind of jail, or that I was being detained by the spirit. She had the table destroyed. So what's your ghost story? You know we want to hear it. We're gonna come by tomorrow and finish the couple of celebrity ghost stories that we have left. Cassandra and I will be doing a trunk or treat event. That's my first one of those. Should be interesting. And then we have a private close-up, a little half an hour thing that we have to do. Keep in mind the website. Go there, forward it, share it, like it, follow us, and and again, thank you to everybody that helps us along. We cannot do this without you, and I appreciate you. And you know there is indeed a world unseen. It's a world that exists all around us all the time. And every now and then we catch a glimpse of the dead because they give in. Changed it up on you just a little bit, didn't I? But you know how that goes. We catch a glimpse of it, and the dead give in. And hey, tell a ghost story. Even if it's a haunted table. It's good for ya. Talk tomorrow, my friends.
