Never Have I Had the Urge: To Chase Ghost - When the Paranormal Walks in Your Front Door

In this episode of "Never Have I Had the Urge," Victor Jimenez explores the unknown — and the stories that live just beyond explanation.

"To Chase Ghosts" is a storytelling podcast episode about the paranormal, unexplained experiences, and the enduring fascination with what may exist beyond our understanding. It blends personal encounters with cultural and historical perspectives on ghost stories and supernatural phenomena.

From shadowy figures to unexplained presences, this episode examines why some people feel drawn to seek out the unknown — and why others choose to stay grounded in what can be seen and proven.

Through cinematic storytelling and reflection, this episode explores fear, belief, and the psychology behind paranormal experiences.

Because sometimes the question isn’t whether something is real… it’s why it feels real.

If you’ve ever experienced something you couldn’t explain — this story invites you to step into that space.

📌 Topics include:
– Ghost stories and paranormal experiences  
– Shadow figures and unexplained events  
– Psychology of fear and belief  
– Supernatural phenomena and storytelling  

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🌐 Website: neverhaveihadtheurge.com  

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🎙️More stories coming soon - thanks for listening.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Fear is the oldest emotion we have, but it can actually save your life. If you go back to the beginning of time, to the dawn of man, long before we had TV shows or movies where we could go get our scare on, you'd find us huddled around a fire. We weren't just staying warm, we were pushing back the night. Because even then, we knew that light has limits, but the darkness, well, it's infinite. We grew up, but we didn't outgrow the feeling. We just gave it different names. It started with the monster under the bed, that space between the mattress and the floor where your imagination lived. Then it moved to the Boy Scout campfire, where we sat in a circle, the flickering orange light hitting our faces as we told scary stories that made us dread to walk back to our tents. We've always been fascinated by what we can't see. We want to believe that when the fire goes out, we really are alone. But as I found out, sometimes being alone at night is exactly what you should be afraid of. Welcome everyone, my name is Victor, and this is Never Have I Had the Urge to Chase Ghost. To understand why some of us spend our Saturday nights looking at TV shows like Ghost Hunters, Expedition X, and Paranormal caught on camera, we have to look back at where the ghost stories all began. We didn't invent the ghost story in the Victorian era or on a Hollywood back lot. It's actually part of our DNA. The ancient world was crowded with the dead. In Mesopotamia, 4,000 years ago, the Gadim were the spirits of the deceased who returned if they weren't buried properly, or if the living forgot to feed them. Think about that. The dead literally required the living to survive. If you ignored your ancestors, they didn't just fade away, they became a haunting presence in your home. Then you have the first documented ghost story in history, written by Pliny the Younger in the first century. He wrote about a large haunted house in Athens. It was a place of terror where the sound of clanking chains would ring out in the dead of night. A figure of an old man gaunt and filthy with long hair and rattling shackles on his wrists and feet would appear to anyone brave enough to enter. This wasn't a campfire tale, it was a formal account from a Roman lawyer. Even back then, the rules of the haunting were being established. The restless spirit, the physical manifestation of sound, and the connection to a hidden secret. In that case, a body buried beneath the floorboards. By the Middle Ages, the ghost stories took on a religious weight. Spirits didn't just come back to scare us, they came back from purgatory to ask for prayers or to settle unfinished business. They were a bridge between the world we know and the judgment we feared. Whether it was the Shangxi in China, the hopping ghost of the Xing dynasty, or the Jugo of the Norse mythology who guarded their burial mounds with supernatural strength, every culture on every continent has shared the same fundamental truth. The boundary between life and death is not a wall, it's a veil. And throughout history, that veil has been thinner than we'd like to admit. So how do we go from ancient Roman ghosts with clanking chains to guys walking through abandoned hospitals with $10,000 thermal cameras? It makes you wonder, doesn't it? When did the ghost story stop being something we whispered about and start being something we actively chased? For a lot of us, that shift happened with the 1984 movie Ghostbusters. Sure, it was a comedy, it was fun, it was loud, it was Bill Murray. But underneath the jokes, it did something profound to our collective curiosity. It took the supernatural and made it attainable. It told us that maybe, just maybe, the things that go bump in the night could be measured, they could be trapped, they could be caught. It gave us the Proton Pack fantasy, the idea that we didn't just have to hide under the covers anymore. We could fight back. But after the popcorn was gone and the movie credits rolled, the questions didn't go away, they just got deeper. By the late 90s and early 2000s, something changed again. We saw the birth of the modern ghost hunter phenomenon. Shows like Ghost Hunters and Ghost Adventurers started popping up. And suddenly, everyone was a researcher. We weren't just looking for a scare, we were looking for evidence. We traded the candles for EMF meters and the Ouija boards for digital recorders. But I've often asked myself, why are we so obsessed with the blip on the screen? Is it really about science? Or is it something more human? Are we just trying to prove that there's a phase two to this life? We walk into these dark, decaying buildings, places that have been forgotten by time, and we yell into the silence. Is anyone there hoping to hear something? It's a strange thing, isn't it? That mix of absolute terror and the desperate hope that something will actually answer us back. We want to know the truth, but are we really actually prepared for what the truth might look like or what it might be? I used to think I was. I used to think I had all the answers. But then I had my own encounter, and suddenly the gadgets and the theories didn't matter anymore. Because when the shadow finally stands in front of you, the uncertainty isn't a question anymore, it's a reality. I've spent a lot of time talking about the history of ghosts and the proton-packed fantasies of the movies, but those are just stories we tell until we have a story of our own. My story doesn't start with a gadget or a camera. It starts a long time ago in a small, quiet apartment in Forest Hills, Queens. You'd think you know the boundaries of the world. To this day, I still don't know if what I experienced that night was a dream, sleep paralysis, or if someone or something was actually standing in my doorway. Back then I lived with my mom, my sister, and we had a little dog named Chico. As I grew into an older teenager, I started hanging out at night with friends and running the streets of the city until all hours, especially on weekends. My mom hated it, but I was a guy, and back then that's what a lot of us guys did. I'm sure, like a lot of teenagers around the world, my sister included, sneaking out of your parents' house at night was almost a rite of passage. One Saturday night I snuck out around 10 p.m. after my mom had gone to sleep. My sister didn't come with me that night like she usually did, so I went out alone to meet up with friends. I remember getting home around 3 a.m. on that cold, moonlit February night, just as the snow had gently started falling outside. I opened and shut the downstairs door that led out to the street as quietly as I could. Then slowly started sneaking up the long single flight of stairs to our second floor apartment. I didn't want to alert Chico that I was coming in. If he started barking, wake my mother, and then I'd have to listen to her yelling at me for sneaking out of the house again. I slowly opened the door to our apartment and slid my left arm inside, quietly grabbing the chain of small metallic cowbells my mother had hung for the peakhole on the inside of the door. They were there specifically to make noise. If someone or me opened it. But that night it never rang. I slipped inside without a single sound and quietly laid down right there on the living room couch. I didn't want to walk towards the bedrooms in the back and risk making noise. No sooner had I laid down than I noticed something strange. Through the faint moonlight coming in from the living room windows, I noticed something. The doorknob. It was moving, turning back and forth on its own. That's when it hit me. Someone or something had just opened the door slightly and was peeking in the direction where I was lying on the couch. I tried to jump up, at least I thought I did, or tried to, but I couldn't move. My body wouldn't respond. As the door slowly opened wider, I could see the black shadow of what appeared to be a man standing in the doorway, looking directly at me. Not a face, not details, just an outline. A shadow man. I tried to scream, but nothing came out. I was completely paralyzed, frozen on that couch, and in that moment, something primal kicked in. The kind of fear humans have carried since the beginning of time. That same fear our ancestors must have felt sitting around their fires, staring out into the darkness beyond the light. Because sometimes the scariest thing isn't what you can see, it's what's watching you from the dark. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, the shadow man slowly shut the door as quietly as he had opened it. And just like that, the paralysis broke. I jumped up, screamed, grabbed a glass swan figurine my mother kept on the coffee table and hurled it at the door. The swan shattered. The crash and my scream instantly woke Chico, who came tearing out of my mother's bedroom, barking his head off. My mother and sister followed seconds later, demanding to know what was happening. I told them about the shadow man. They thought I was crazy, dreaming, or that I had been drinking with my friends. But when I insisted, we went to check the door, and it was unlocked. When we opened it and looked down the long flight of stairs, we saw something that made all of us stop cold. The downstairs front door was wide open, and the snow from outside gently falling in, slowly covering the threshold and the floor into the hallway. Which meant someone had opened it and went out that door. Recently, someone who didn't leave footprints in the snow as they left. That's my ghost story. Because whatever opened the door that night had to walk back out into the snow. But there was no evidence of that. After that night in Forest Hills, I couldn't just go back to normal. The world looked different. I found myself looking at old buildings and wondering what was trapped inside the walls. I started looking for people who felt the same way I did. People who weren't just shouting at ghosts, but were actually listening to them. That's how I found my way to the modern researchers. The ones who treat this field with the respect it deserves. And if we're talking about respect and empathy in ghost hunting, we have to talk about kindred spirits. My favorite ghost hunting show. I'll admit it, I have a massive massive amount of respect for Amy Bruni and Adam Berry. There's something about the way they approach a haunting that just resonates with me. She isn't there to provoke or to put on a show for the cameras. She has this calm, investigative soul. When she walks into a house, she's not looking for a demon. She's looking for a person. She's looking for the history, the tragedy, and the human thread that got tangled up between this world and the next. I think that's why I love her and her work so much. It reminds me of my own search. Watching them work, you realize that ghost hunting isn't about the jump scares, it's about the kindred part. It's the idea that we're all connected, living or dead. When Amy sits in a room and speaks softly into the shadows, she's doing what I wish I could have done that night back when I was a kid. She's asking, Who are you? And why are you still here? It makes me wonder about the pioneers of this field. The ones like Chip Coffee, who stepped into the spotlight when people still thought this was all crazy. They paved the way for us to ask these questions out loud. They took the monster to the bed and put it under the microscope. But even with all the gear, all the years of experience, and all the brilliant researchers like Amy leading the way, there are still moments that no equipment can explain. There are still encounters that remind you that no matter how much you think you know, the universe is still holding on to its biggest secrets. And as much as I admire the prose, I realized that my own journey wasn't going to end in a haunted asylum or a famous hotel. It was going to end right back where it started. In the quiet, private corners of my own life. So here I am. Decades have passed since that night in Forest Hills. I'm living in Durham, North Carolina now. And I thought I had processed it all. I thought the urge was just part of my past. And now, as far as ghost hunting shows go, well, I usually just turn them on. The reruns as background noise while sitting up in bed at night on my phone, doom scrolling on TikTok, or writing an episode of Never Have I Had the Urge on my iPad. But even though my Shadow Man experience was a thing of the distant past, a new paranormal experience was about to walk into my life. While on my way to grab some lunch at my niece's restaurant, that's where it started. That's where I met her. A strange, fascinating, well-traveled, intelligent woman originally from Peru. She was walking towards me as I passed. She smiled. I returned the smile when she stopped and said, Excuse me, are you from the area? Yes, I am, I said. Do you know of any good restaurants around here? All of a sudden it felt like winning the lottery. Because how many times in a man's life does a strange, good-looking woman walk up to him and ask him if he knows a good restaurant in the area? I said to her, as a matter of fact, there's one near here. It's called Borico Sol. I'm headed there now. Care to join me for lunch? She looked at me with a smile and a raised eyebrow and exclaimed, My treat? I said, Come on. And with that, we shook hands as we introduced ourselves and walked down the little river walk in the American Tobacco campus towards the restaurant. After a quick introduction to my niece and ordering lunch for the both of us, we sat at a table, and the first words out of her mouth were, I've never had much luck with men. None. Maybe it's because I'm a cold woman with an even colder heart. She said, Most guys don't last three months with me. I said, Wow, what an icebreaker. And we both laughed for a second. I said, Well, you don't have to worry about that with me. I probably won't last two months with you. Which I tried to laugh off as a cheap, awkward joke. And she looked at me with that same one eyebrow raised that had originally drawn me into her. Now it unsettled me a little bit. I wondered, was she just being dramatic? Or was she trying to tell me who she really was? My niece Serena brought over lunch, made quick small talk, while giving me one of her one eyebrow-raised looks as she turned and walked away. She leaned forward, her presence suddenly filling the space between us. Let me tell you a story from when I was a little girl, she said in her thick Peruvian accent, adding a rhythmic, melodic weight to the words. She was the youngest of four, the only girl with three older brothers who usually kept her shielded. But as she leaned in even closer, her voice dropped to a whisper, transporting us both back to 1986. It was a Saturday in Lima, the kind of afternoon where the heat feels like a physical weight on your shoulders. The sun hung white and blinding over the Plaza de Almas, pinning sharp, ink black shadows against the ancient uneven stone tiles. The air was heavy, suffocating swirl, the sweet burnt sugar of roasted peanuts from nearby pushcarts, a thick drift of cold incense bleeding out from the cathedral doors, and the gritty metallic tang of exhaust from the trucks rumbling through the square. Then she paused, her eyes narrowing enough she could still see the glare of the sun reflecting off the stones. She was only eight years old, and the world was about to change. She was walking between her mother and her aunt, holding their hands. To her, the world felt big but safe. The sound of her little leather shoes tapping on the pavement mixed with the low hum of adult conversations above her head. Talk about dinner, sewing thread, ordinary things. Around them, the plaza was alive. Old men sitting on benches, talking or snoozing, pigeons bursting into the air, the fountain in the center spraying water that caught the sunlight light silver. And then suddenly, something changed. The noise of the plaza seemed to drop away. Out from behind one of the old colonial pillars, a man appeared. He didn't walk them so much, walk towards them so much as he emerged from the crowd with purpose. He wore heavy layers of dark alpaca wool that smelled of smoke and mountain herbs. His face was deeply lined, and his eyes were bright and intense against dark, leathery, weathered skin. Before her mother or aunt understood what was happening, the man dropped to his knees in front of the little girl. Hard. The sound echoed across the stones, she said. Then he grabbed her hands. Rough, strong hands pulled her away from her mother. Before they could react. She said the big world suddenly shrank down to two things. The smell of dried sage on his clothes, and the side of his face just inches from her own. Her mother gasped, reaching for her. She could smell his breath as the man began to speak. It wasn't Spanish, it was something older. Something she later believed was Quechua. A strange rhythmic language that sounded more like chanting than speaking. His voice was rough and urgent, almost vibrating in her chest as he stared directly into her eyes. Her aunt shouted at him, Oh yeah, gassing! But no one moved. It was if the moment had frozen in place. Then just as suddenly as it started, the chanting stopped. The silence that followed was heavy, she said. The man slowly released her hands and stood up. He didn't look at her again. Instead, he turned and looked directly at her mother. The air, she said, felt charged, like the moment right before lightning strikes. Then the man pointed his long, crooked finger at her and said in clear Spanish to her mother, Tuija es una bruja, your daughter is a witch. And just like that, he turned and disappeared back into the crowd beneath the shadows of the portals. The sounds of the plaza came rushing back. The fountain, the pigeons, the voices of people walking by, as if nothing happened at all. They hurried home, and her still-frightened mother told her father and her brothers what had happened in the village square. She told them all about the shaman and what he did and what he had said. Their daughter was a witch, or would grow up to be one, and ever since that day her father called her his little witch, and her three brothers teased her, named her Witchie. We finished our lunch, said our goodbyes to my niece and her husband, and stepped outside the restaurant. I noticed the wind had picked up. The lovely afternoon had suddenly turned colder. She thanked me for lunch and for the conversation and asked if she could have my phone number. And suddenly, the wind picked up some more. The following Saturday, she called and asked me for my address and came by and we drove to a nearby lake. The day went fine. We continued talking that week and made another date for dinner in a movie. Dinner was nice that evening. Then instead of a movie, she suggested we just come back to my place instead. We got to my apartment, and as I opened the door, she brushed past me and stepped inside. She stopped without looking at me. She stretched out her arms with her palms up to the ceiling and said out loud, Wow, I can feel your energy in here. Your aura, she said. I laughed and said, Oh, by the way, you're not the only witch around here. I'm a little bit of a warlock myself, I said playfully. She whirled around and pointed at me, saying, I knew it, she yelled. And right at that moment, in my mind, I could hear the theme music from an old TV series I used to watch called The Twilight Zone. For those of you who have never seen the original series or any of the re-releases of the show, think of it as the original Black Mirror. It was a show where the vibes were always slightly off. A series of standalone stories where reality would glitch with a massive plot twist that made you question everything you just saw. That's what I was doing, questioning what I just saw, because even though I was kidding, she wasn't. It felt like I had just stepped into a middle ground between light and shadow, where human nature was the real monster. She walked around my apartment like she was showing it to me for the first time. She walked in and went into my bathroom first, looked around, and next went right into my bedroom, padded my bed, sat down, bounced up and down a couple of times on it, and quickly jumped up without saying a word and crossed into the living room. Then walked back over and sat down at the kitchen island. I asked, Are you done? She smiled and raised that one eyebrow again and said, Phew. Phew! I like your place. She claimed that I had a lot of power and she could feel it now more than when she first met me walking downtown. On the island there was the usual clutter, mail, a puzzle I had been working on, a couple of small plants, a writing pad pens, and three tall gold-flecked painted goblets I've owned for years. And there in a frame I hadn't hung it yet, was an old black and white photo of my mom. Let me show you some photos of where I've been. She flipped through the highlights on her phone, the Great Pyramids, Big Ben, Spain and France. Then she stopped on a photo of herself at the base of St. Vidus Cathedral in Prague. In the bright afternoon sun, you could see tourists casually walking in and out of the massive Gothic cathedral entrance. But tucked away in a dark archway behind her was a shadow that didn't belong. It was an individual in heavy, monk-like brown robes, the hood pulled low over its head, and a mask over the face. It looked like a devil or some sort of demon mask. I said, wait, what is that? Pointing at the photo. She just laughed and called it her spirit guide, who follows her. Then she showed me a photo of her father. A man with a scary scowl that looked like it could pierce through the screen on her phone. And then it happened. She reached out with her index finger and tapped a photo of my mother on the kitchen island. She looked at me in the eye and asked, Is this your mother? Does she protect you? In that exact millisecond, the largest of the gold fleck goblets exploded. It didn't just tip over, it didn't just crack. It disintegrated into thousands of tiny shards. The glass and the gold fleck showering her. It was in her hair, on her lap, on the floor. And yet, me sitting right next to her, not a single piece of glass touched me. We sat there in a shock, heavy silence for just a second. She tried to laugh it off, saying it was my aura, reacting to hers. But I knew better. I felt that same paralyzing cold I had experienced when I had seen the shadow man all those years ago. And just like the cold wind when we when we had stepped out of the restaurant. She told me that her family had called her the witch ever since she was eight years old. After the shaman in that Peruvian town square grabbed her hands on that day and told her mother, Your daughter is a witch, but I cannot say for certain if she will be a good witch or a bad one. I spent the next few days backing away from her. Slowly, deliberately. Something told me to walk away. Don't mess with her. I've been given more than just a sign. So I listened to that inner voice, the one that sounded a lot like my mother. My niece also told me it was a warning. My gut told me it was a boundary. So I leave you with this. I've spent my life looking for cold spots and chasing shadows in the dark, only to find that sometimes the mystery walks right through your front door and sits at your kitchen table. Is there a thread connecting the shadow man in Forest Hills to the woman from Peru? I doubt it. Is my mother still standing in the hallway making sure that things in the dark don't get too close to me? I don't know. But I believe so. I'm still looking for answers, and I think I think I'm just getting started. Now I'm not trying to convince anyone that ghost or even the paranormal is real, and I'm certainly not trying to disprove the existence of ghost or the paranormal either. But like Jason Hawes, Grant Wilson, and Amy Bruni from the original Ghost Hunters television series, each of them had a paranormal encounter when they were young. Something that piqued their curiosity enough to make them want to know if there's something else out there. Is there more to this life than just death? Can the dead sometimes stay behind to let us know that what we think is the end may actually just be the beginning? I don't know, you tell me. Thank you everyone for joining me on this 10th episode of Never Have I Had the Urge to Chase Ghost. And if you have a paranormal or ghost story you'd like to share with me, I'd love to hear it. Send your stories or even show ideas for future Never Have I Had the Urge episodes to Hello at Neverhave I Had The Urge.com. This episode was written and produced by me, your host, Victor Jimenez. Thank you everyone. And until next time, peace out of the micro.