To my terrific parents, whose unconditional support has made me brave

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  INTRODUCTION

  1. “HAVE I DIED?”: 2011 Earthquake and Tsunami, Japan

  2. NO WAY OUT: 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, New York

  3. WHITE DEATH: 1910 Wellington Avalanche, Washington

  4. TORNADO ALLEY: 1908 Albertville Tornado, Alabama

  5. IROQUOIS INFERNO: 1903 Iroquois Theater Fire, Illinois

  6. A HEADLESS HAUNTING: 1900 Scofield Mine, Utah

  7. THE LITTLE GHOSTS OF GALVESTON: 1900 Galveston Flood, Texas

  8. GHOST TRAIN NO. 9: 1891 Bostian Bridge Train Wreck, North Carolina

  9. THE BLOODY PIT: 1860 Hoosac Tunnel, Massachusetts

  10. CHOOSING BLACK DEATH: 1665 Eyam Plague, England

  SOME FINAL THOUGHTS

  FURTHER READING

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SNEAK PEEK

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  Spookiness is the real purpose of the ghost story. It should give you the creeps and disturb your thoughts …

  —Roald Dahl

  Throughout human history, people have believed in ghosts, which are thought to be human spirits that continue to exist after the body has died. One of the earliest recorded ghost sightings was in Rome in the first century AD, at a local bathhouse that was haunted by the angry spirit of a man murdered there.

  And many people still do believe. In a recent survey, nearly 20 percent were convinced that they have seen or been in the presence of a ghost. One out of every five people! If you’ve picked up this book about true hauntings, you probably believe in ghosts as well. Maybe you’ve even seen one yourself.

  But why do ghosts appear? According to psychic research, earthbound spirits are often caused when someone dies unexpectedly. Their death comes as a shock, so they may not know or accept that they are dead. They become stuck either where they died or where they spent their lives. Their presence can be seen, felt, heard—or even smelled! Maybe they make themselves known with footsteps down an empty hall or an odd cold spot in a warm room. Oftentimes ghosts are seen on an anniversary of a tragic event, because that’s when the memory is strongest.

  Ghost hunters have tried to gather evidence of their existence, such as images of spirits in photographs and sounds on audiotape. But the only solid proof we have that ghosts exist is what people have seen or felt in a particular place. That is the basis for many of the stories in this book.

  Deadly Disasters is packed with shocking tragedies, everything from fires and tornadoes to floods and plagues. And because so many people died, the book is also filled with some of the most intensely haunted places on Earth. In this spooky collection, you’ll meet spirits that linger after a hurricane in Texas and a tsunami in Japan, disasters more than a century apart. They haunt deep underground in the Hoosac Tunnel and high up in the mountains of Washington State. What these ghosts have in common is that death caught them by surprise, took their lives without warning, and left their spirits trapped here on Earth, ready for you to discover.

  The history of the Japanese port city of Ishinomaki was fairly uneventful—no big fires, no bombing during World War II, no significant damage from earthquakes. The last major disaster had been a tsunami in 869 AD, which killed more than a thousand people but happened so long ago it feels like ancient history.

  That changed on March 11, 2011. At 2:46 in the afternoon, the ground began to shake. While earthquakes are fairly common in Japan, this one was huge, lasting nearly ten minutes. Warnings went out across the country that a tsunami was coming. Residents were told to leave immediately and get to higher ground. But so many of these warnings had been sent out over the years that people didn’t panic.

  They should have—a wave of death was heading their way.

  Less than a half hour later, Ishinomaki was engulfed by a massive tsunami, which flattened the town. Nearly 6,000 people were killed by the towering wave and 29,000 lost their homes. Those who survived were devastated by the damage and mourned the loss of family, friends, and neighbors.

  As crushed buildings and other debris were removed from the streets and electricity was restored, the taxi services began to get some strange calls. Drivers would pick up passengers, only to have them vanish during the ride.

  In one instance, a driver picked up a woman who asked to go to an area totally destroyed during the tsunami. He told her there was nothing left there to visit. “Have I died?” she asked him. When he turned to look at her, the back seat of his taxi was empty.

  The island of Japan is located above underground plates that shift and collide, causing earthquakes to happen fairly often. However, the one that occurred in 2011 was anything but ordinary. Registered at 9.0 on the Richter scale, which measures the strength of earthquakes, it was the largest in Japan’s history and the fourth largest in recorded history. This massive quake off the east coast was so strong it actually moved the entire country four feet closer to the United States.

  While the quake was terrible, the tsunami that came less than an hour later was worse. More than 120 feet tall in places, the wave swept in from the sea and destroyed everything in its wake for nearly six miles inland.

  The tsunami battered nearly 217 miles of the Pacific coast of Japan, wiping out sources for electricity, gas, and clean water. One reporter said that the wave “was mixed with mud, with ships and cars smashing toward wooden houses, dragging those into rice fields, and basically bashing them into pieces.”

  Ryo Kanouya was inside his house when the tsunami struck. He told National Geographic that he thought he was going to drown when the water reached his ceiling.

  The tsunami bursting into the city of Miyako.

  “The next moment I heard [a] cracking sound made by my home’s destruction … I was drained from my house into the soup of seawater, cars, houses, and everything the tsunami carried. To my surprise, I was able to reach the surface … Luckily a drawer for clothes came floating toward me and I climbed onto it.”

  Ryo and the drawer were being sucked out into the ocean with the receding wave. When he floated by a tree, Ryo held on to the branches. He stayed in the tree until the water went back out and he could climb down.

  “When we entered the disaster area, words failed us,” a man named Shunji told Watchtower magazine about his home in Ishinomaki. “Cars were hanging off electric poles, houses were piled one on top of the other, and the debris was piled up even higher than the houses. On the roof of a car, we saw a dead body, probably a person who was unable to survive the cold night. Another car was upside down and hanging between houses. There was a body inside it.”

  The earthquake and tsunami caused nearly 16,000 deaths and $220 billion in damage in Japan, as well as a nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station. Where were once bustling neighborhoods, there were only piles of smashed houses, stores, schools, and cars. As people began to dig out, bury, and mourn the dead, they found that some weren’t ready for their lives to be over.

  A man rests while digging out the rubble where his house once stood.

  In traditional Japanese culture, ghosts are not uncommon. Some religions believe that when a person dies and their soul leaves the body, certain rituals need to be performed so that it can join its ancestors in the afterlife. If someone dies suddenly or violently or the rituals are not performed, the spirit becomes stuck on Earth. Many of these ghosts are trapped near where they died until they have been given a proper burial.

  After the tsunami, a number of restless spirits were seen in the areas it had hit. Ghosts were spotted in wrecked grocery stores and in the rubble that once was homes. Other spirits were seen running in fear as if from a wave, only to disappear. Ambulances and taxis received phantom calls from areas where no buildings were left standing.

  A Japanese print from an 1812 play that featured the ghost of a murdered woman.

  Some who survived claimed to be approached by people they knew were dead, only to have them vanish into the air. One man saw the eyes of the many dead staring at him from rain puddles. The ghost of an old woman from Onagawa came to one of the recovery centers for tea. Those who saw her said they felt so bad for her that they didn’t tell her she was dead. When she disappeared, she left behind a seat wet with seawater.

  A number of the spirits, furious about their terrible deaths, were said to possess the living. Priests in the Buddhist and Shinto religions were asked to perform exorcisms, which is a ceremony that expels an evil spirit from a living person. Journalist Richard Lloyd Parry detailed how one man who had visited the area devastated by the wave became possessed. He crawled around on all fours making animal noises and rolled on the floor, yelling, “You must die. You must die. Everyone must die. Everything must die and be lost.” His behavior continued to be so strange that his wife brought him to a priest, who helped rid him of the angry spirit.

  Another woman couldn’t escape the spirits all around her, telling a writer, “There are headless ghosts, and some missing hands and legs. Others are completely cut in half. People were killed in so many different ways during the disaster and they were left like that in death too.”

  While crews gradually cleared the devastated areas of debris and the areas began to recover, many of the spirits of the thousands lost in the disaster were never put to rest. They haunt the country still.

  The lights in the Brown Building of Science often shine into the night with New York University students inside working l ate. While there is a small plaque on the building, many who go in and out of its doors every day don’t realize that it is the site of a horrific tragedy—the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911. But they do realize that there’s something creepy about the top floors of the building.

  Years after the fire, a secretary who worked at NYU reported seeing something strange there one night. As she was leaving, a woman staggered past her, looking rather dazed. She was covered in soot from a fire and didn’t respond when asked if she needed help. The secretary followed the woman around a corner, only to find that she had disappeared. Was the woman one of the many victims of that awful blaze?

  When Max Blanck and Isaac Harris’s Triangle Waist Company factory moved into the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the supposedly fireproof Asch Building in 1901, it was considered very safe and modern. Mary Domsky-Abrams, who worked on the ninth floor, later said, “The shop, both on the eighth and ninth floors, was light and airy, and was, more or less, clean, although pieces of cloth from the cutting room were strewn on the floor.” All of that cloth would later prove more dangerous than it seemed.

  Within the first year the company suffered two fires, both happening when no one was in the building. Each time, Blanck and Harris received a huge payment from the insurance companies for their losses. The walls of the building withstood the flames, so the company just rebuilt the interiors after each fire. Some believe that the owners never installed a sprinkler system or other fire safety equipment in the Triangle factory, in case they ever wanted another fire payout from their insurance company. That decision would come back to haunt them, literally.

  By 1911, between five hundred and six hundred people worked on the factory’s sewing lines and cutting floors for twelve hours a day, seven days a week. The workers were mainly immigrant teenage girls. They often didn’t speak English and were paid between $6 and $15 a week, depending on their skill level.

  To ensure that no workers stole from them, Blanck and Harris locked the stairway doors and had all workers use a single elevator, so their bags could be checked upon leaving.

  On March 25, 1911, a small fire started on the eighth floor at around 4:45 p.m. It spread quickly among the scraps of fabric and sewing tables, which were soaked in machine oil. While someone called the tenth floor to warn them, no one alerted the nearly 260 workers on the ninth floor. The fire was now an inferno, and the workers began to fear they might not escape the flames. Rose Indursky, a sixteen-year-old who worked on the ninth floor, later said that when the fire hit, “girls were lying on the floor, fainted, and people were stepping on them. Some of the other girls were trying to climb over the machines. I remember the machinist ran to the window and he smashed it to let the smoke that was choking us go out. Instead, the flames rushed in. I stood at the window; across the street people were hollering ‘don’t jump, don’t jump.’”

  While firefighters arrived at the scene within minutes, they could do little to help. The water from their hoses and their ladders didn’t reach higher than the sixth floor, so they stood there helplessly as women screamed for help from the open windows. A bystander, Frances Perkins, arrived just as desperate people began to panic. “They had been holding [on] until that time, standing in the windowsills, being crowded by others behind them, the fire pressing closer and closer, the smoke closer and closer […] They began to jump. The window was too crowded and they would jump and they hit the sidewalk.” They plummeted from so high that their bodies broke through the firemen’s nets held out to catch them.

  The “fireproof” Asch Building in flames.

  Other ways of escape from the fire were blocked. The stairways were locked and the flimsy fire escape ladder collapsed under the weight of the frantic women scrambling to get away. One of the only ways down was the elevator.

  A worker on the ninth floor, Celia Walker Friedman, later recalled trying to find a way out. “The fire crept closer to us and we were crowded at the elevator door banging and hollering for the elevator. The first time it came up, the girls rushed in and it was crowded in a half a second. The elevator driver struggled with the door and finally closed it and went down with the screaming girls.” Celia didn’t make it down on that trip or the next one. “Just as I came to the door of the elevator, it dropped down right in front of me. I could hear it rush down and I was left standing on the edge trying to hold myself back from falling into the shaft … Behind me the girls were screaming and I could feel them pushing me more and more. I knew that in a few seconds I would be pushed into the shaft and I made a quick decision. Maybe through panic or maybe through instinct I saw the center cable of the elevator in front of me. I jumped and grabbed the cable. That is all I remember.”

  Celia woke in St. Vincent’s Hospital, near death, with a head injury and broken arm and finger. Rescuers had found her at the bottom of the shaft. “I had saved myself by my jumping. Others had fallen down the shaft on top of me and I suppose I was found by the firemen when they were removing the dead … By sliding down the cable I was far enough away from where most of the bodies landed on top of the elevator cage as they fell down the shaft … I had a large searing scar down the middle of my body, burned by the friction of the cable which had cut through my clothing.” She was one of the few who escaped that way. Dozens of people died trying to go down the elevator shaft the way that Celia did.

  Some of the workers were able to scramble down the cramped stairs from the eighth floor. Sylvia Kimeldorf was one of the lucky ones. “Somebody grabbed me and another girl and pushed us through the door and hollered that we should run down and not to stop. I think that the girl right in back of me had her hair singed by flames—that’s how close the fire was to us. I don’t remember how I got down that narrow staircase but I was cold, wet and hysterical. I was screaming all the time,” Sylvia recalled. But her horror wasn’t over. When she got to the bottom, the firemen would not let her out of the building. “The bodies were falling all around us and they were afraid to let us go out because we would be killed by the falling bodies.”

  More than forty people died jumping to avoid the flames. Reporter Charles Willis Thompson later wrote in a letter about the building’s height, “It conveys no picture to the imagination to say that the fire was 100 feet above the street: figures don’t make pictures. But when you stand on the street and almost topple over backward craning your neck to see a place away up in the sky, and realize the way those bodies came hurtling down over the inconceivable distance, it seems more as if it were 100 miles.”

  Police covering up victims who jumped to their deaths.

  Within a half hour, the firemen had put out the flames. In that short time, 146 people had died. The city was stunned. Temporary morgues were set up so that relatives could file past to try to find their loved ones among the dead. Some were so badly burned it was hard to figure out who they were. A few weeks later, a funeral was held for those who could not be identified. More than 80,000 people came to pay their respects.

  Soon after the fire, the building was repaired, including adding a number of safety features. In 1916, New York University moved into the eighth floor. By 1929, they owned the whole building.

  While the building no longer houses a crowded factory, some of the fire victims are said to linger. There’s a mirror on the eighth floor where students have claimed to glimpse the faces of factory workers in their reflections. Others have seen someone falling past the windows of the upper floors out of the corners of their eyes.

  Police lining up victims of the fire in coffins for identification.

  Some claim to smell the occasional waft of smoke and a horrid stench of burning flesh. Doors that were locked unlock on their own, perhaps to save students from the same fate as those long-ago victims.

  Stay alert when you are hiking along Iron Goat Trail on Windy Mountain! There’s little to see along the old railroad tracks in the Cascade Mountains except a few abandoned buildings and the dark entrance of the old Cascade Tunnel. But hikers near Stevens Pass have heard and seen a lot of strange things on that empty mountainside.

 

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