Nerding Day: Real Police Ghost Stories

The year was 2017. The author was a fucking idiot.

REAL POLICE GHOST STORIES - TRUE TALES OF THE PARANORMAL AS TOLD BY COPS AND OTHER LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIALS is a collection of a confused liar's worst guesses to the questions "what do cops do?" and "what counts as a story?"

On the back of the book, Zachery Knowles asks you what you would do if you were a police officer dealing with a ghost girl. Would you "do your job" and shoot her back to life? Or would you "run screaming and never look back?" I'll spoil it right now– it's always the second one. This is not a book about action cops who figured out mothmen are weak to electricity. These are third-hand stories of bored civil servants fleeing from unlikely noises. They're all fake, the bad writer made them up and ghosts aren't real, but incompetence and cowardice seem to be foundational tenets for the author. No matter what spooky situation he throws his characters in, Zachery Knowles' first and only idea is, "what if they left and the end?" You're going to hate it!

As you can see in the introduction, Zachery is operating from the strange place where he thinks his audience, people who have already read so many ghost books they've started buying self-published creepypasta slop, don't believe in ghosts. And he admits some of those random ghost attack survivors aren't very credible. But these stories? They come from people who famously never lie– cops. It's already a great punchline, so I won't step on it. Let's read the first story.

Despite claiming to be pulled from official police "statements" and "archives," this is pretty vague. We're at a morgue near unnamed Illinois trees and our only lead is "maybe there's such a thing as formaldehyde addicts?" I'm not sure what I was expecting with Real Police Ghost Stories, but it was something less stupid than this. Already, if I caught someone believing this story, I would tear their nuts off and say, "I'm putting this sperm back in the chimpanzees."

The two cops respond to the call in the morgue and chase what they still think is an ordinary human woman into a corner. Their expert training kicks in and they promise not to shoot her if she surrenders. Instead, she locks herself in a room. It's sort of thrilling. These poorly trained maniacs are about to execute a local formaldehyde addict! And then the author ruins it with stupid ghost shit:

They go into the room and find her hiding under a sheet on a gurney. "Oh, that's a clever place to hide," says the smart author about his own idea where a lady hides under the one thing in a room, the shape of her body still clearly visible. The keen senses of the officers kick in and they realize something stinks. "But not like stinky armpit, you guys," says the smart author about the bitter rot of undead flesh. And this is where the story ends. It is three pages long and a zombie did a quick lap around the morgue for no reason. I'll be honest, I'm skeptical this happened. So let's approach this like a true paranormal investigator. I'll be asking two important questions for each story:

In order for this story to be true, this woman was either misdiagnosed with dead four days ago, or zombies were once real, but only for several minutes during an unspecified year in rural Illinois. "Plus, I'm sure there are other true reasons why this dead body is on the floor," adds the nude coroner.

I'm not sure the cops were necessary. Sure, guns are great against zombies, but this was the kind of zombie that goes to bed and turns into a normal corpse when you yell at it. Most birds could have handled this.

Again, these are pulled from actual police reports. "I don't remember the exact date, but we were listening to P.M. Dawn and we were somewhere Nebraskaish," said the brave officer who lived through this harrowing tale of the supernatural.

In a town gutted by the loss of industry, a cop is idly patrolling abandoned homes to scare away copper scavengers. Our hero sees a well-looted, empty husk of a house with its door open– unusual. My god, there are no footprints near it– supernaturally unusual.

"I'd better mention those footprints again," thinks the smart author. "The lack of, I should say," he clarifies, terrifying himself. "Aiiiiiiieeeeeeeee" he types, making a mental note to backspace it later. There were no footprints around or near him, not even one footprint. Oh Jesus, I kind of scared myself just now.

The cop wanders through the condemned piece of shit house, noticing with much observation that there were no footprints. He was almost ready to decide this was none of his business, or maybe wind, until he heard giggling. "Time to keep acting like I'm not in a ghost house," the dumbass cop thought.

So it's becoming more and more clear that the house giggles belong to ghost children. Or at least fast, regular children without feet. "Mostly disturbingly though," the cop finds a drawing of himself on a page torn out of a children's book. This hat on a hat, combined with the laughter behind him, makes this officer certain there are real children with real color crayons here. See if you can guess what he does next. Really. Take into account the author's admiration for our brave boys in blue, and truly consider what you know about police procedure. What did this hero cop do when he heard a child giggle behind him?

…

You're goddamn right he pulled his gun. He spun around ready to shoot every last fucking giggler in that dump. Those garbage footless kids opening whatever door they want, drawing little pictures? Not on his watch.

"I told dispatch it was a false alarm, but I'll trust you with the real story of my superstition and cowardice, self-published author, Zachery Knowles," said the cop later, apparently. Get used to this ending, by the way. "I'm n-never going back there," is ghost cop for "the end."

It sounds like a reasonable story, but I keep coming back to one small detail. How did the ghosts draw a picture of a cop without leaving footprints, leaving footprints, or leaving footprints. Sorry to use such frightening language, but something doesn't add up.

Absolutely yes. Maybe I'm the only one brave enough to say this, but police should wander through every open door they find and quickdraw their gun on kid sounds. "Dispatch, it looks like this warrantless search of an empty old house I found was another false alarm. Unrelated, start of a completely new topic, it seems I'm having a slight bodycam malfunction and I lost seven bullets. Hero cop, over and out!!"

You know those houses Finnish immigrants in middle-sized Oregon towns used to have in the early 1900s? Okay, great. This story takes place in one of those.

We haven't seen a lot of character work from author Zachery Knowles yet. So far, all his cops have been stoic, anonymous men of the law. This Finnish immigrant is his first effort at adding a little depth to a character. He gave him exactly two personality traits– racist, and colon cancer. It's the most efficient writing I've ever seen, and I watched myself type "nude coroner" earlier.

So while making a wellness check at the racist's house, yes, the early 20th century Victorian house popular among Finnish Oregonians, great memory!, the man's severed elk head fell over. A wet and red fluid, there's not really a word for it, came leaking out of the animal's neck. The indescribable moisty substance spelled the word "ASUA" and one officer knew enough Finnish to know this meant "stay" or "remain." Or I guess "live" sometimes…

… but the point is, forget about the elk head writing really context-sensitive Finnish words on the wall. These cops were going to get to the bottom of what this red, I guess you'd call it stuff(?) was made of. One cop put his finger in it and held it to his nose. My god, dear fucking sweet lord, this whole time… the watery red substance coming out of the elk's head? Was blood. This changed everything. The police needed to do the -opposite- of whatever this undead deer head was telling them to do. So the officers grabbed the racist's dead body and ran outside with it. JUST IN TIME.

The elk head's message in blood, holy shit I still can't believe it was blood, was a trap. It was trying to trick the cops into staying in the house while it imploded. The author speculates this happened because if you live in a house long enough, it will collapse into you when you die, even if you're racist. Speaking of, that never came up. They don't say what race the police are, but if someone is a 1980s Oregon cop and their grandpa taught them Finnish, you're pretty safe greeting them with the secret White handshake. Psst! It's a regular handshake, but with a sexy little thigh gap.

So it turns out the author was wrong about houses and homeowners dying together because the racist who passed away of colon cancer screamed back to life after his porch collapsed. "This is nuts; I'm not telling anybody about this," said the officers. "Except, of course, unknown self-published horror author Zachery Knowles. Get him on the phone, he spells his name all stupid."

Zachery has no idea how to write an ending. "People still talk about it," he says in a world where you can Google any of these details and find out they don't. "No one will disturb it!" he says in a world where seventy different ghost hunting shows would be fighting to get in this place at all hours of the day. This book is written for such a specific kind of dipshit I'm not sure they exist. They need to love ghosts, but not believe in them or be familiar with ghost media. They need to order so, so many self-published ghost ebooks online, but not have the Internet. They need to fear blood, but not have any idea what it looks like or where an elk stores it in its head.

If there's any truth to the story, I guess I could see putting a racist in a body bag while you trashed his porch. I can't explain a Pacific Northwest elk speaking Finnish, though. Some things will remain a mystery.

Did calling the cops help? No! When they showed up, an old man was very sick. By the time they left he had panicked to death inside a body bag and his house had collapsed! At least on paper, they did a very bad job!

We go now to New Hampshire, where the author explains cold, a brutal killer capable of killing, or even killing the unjacketed. Fear it, reader, this temperature you haven't heard of! It's kind of cute how Zachery will casually write about a zombie lady jogging through a morgue, but spend 200 words on the macabre deadliness of "outside."

So the police get a call about a little girl wandering alone in the cold, and this seems reasonable so far. If I found a lost girl, I'd probably tell the police. But another thing I'd say is, "I have her here, I didn't leave her for dead in the snow, I'm going to make her some soup or something while you get here."

This didn't occur to Zachery, who is fucking explaining how cold works again. Oh, what's this? Huh-durrh, abandoned children can drown in wat– oh, I was going to make fun of Zachery, but I looked it up, and it turns out he's right. Falling in water is terrible for children freezing in the woods.

When the cops found the girl, her eyes got, you know, kind of spooky, and then she vani– hold on. A series of small footprints!? Well, this obviously means she's not a ghost. I checked and double-checked the casefile records for "A Childish Haunting" and ghosts don't leave footprints. I'm starting to think you can't trust the word of ghost authors or police. But if she's not a ghost, this story got way darker. This is a lost kid five men abandoned at the beach.

Well, we know it wasn't a ghost because she left footprints, but four officers saw her disappear from different angles, so that rules out mirrors and stage magic. It's possible she's a kind of allegory for innocence, but I checked the casefile records for "Asua" and this author thinks "allegory" is what a Finnish elk head squirts when it wants ice cream cake.

Calling the cops probably helped more than you might think. Because now the caller shares the burden of this dark secret with four more people. They left her out there. God help them, they left that girl out there to die! "Yes, knowing he wasn't alone when he left me must come as a real… cold comfort." Aaah who the fuck said that!?

We go now to inner city, America, where crime and other drug sex is rampant. And where there's rampant, you'll also find devil.

The police respond to a domestic disturbance at an apartment complex and find seven people praying outside. "Some of the praying people live there," mentions the author, insanely. I'll skip ahead and let you know Zachery is doing a demonic possession thing in this one, because I want to point out how all the characters in his stories have a real respect for the unfolding narrative. The people praying outside didn't tell the cops, "There's a demonic possession going on in there, exactly how you'd expect, exactly like we've all seen in movies." They keep it nice and vague so as not to spoil the twist. You might not think it because I'm spoiling a twist right now, but I appreciate that.

As if no one has seen The Exorcist, the cops listen to a witness describe The Exorcist, and it's so spooky they start to lose it. One of them even gets his rosary beads out! I love this because it's the only example the author gives of the cops "coming unglued," and it's arguably the most reasonable thing you could do in a world where God magic was real. Calling attention to it as if it's crazy is kind of giving away the falseness of the story. It's like saying, "I left the little girl in the lake, we all left the little girl in the lake, and we swore on that cold November night we would say she was a ghost, it's so wild she turned out to be a ghost."

In the end, nothing really happens. They take the scary guy with devil eyes to the hospital, almost shooting him the entire time, then one of them sends God an emergency prayer. If I made this up as a bedtime story, my daughter would tell me, "Where are we? This is a New Hampshire lake; you're fucking drunk."

Did some cops in the inner city get very, very scared and pull their weapons on an unarmed man in need of mental health care and then demonize him? Yeah, probably!

A priest would have been better, but sure, someone had to pull this devil fucker off the ceiling.

This is a weird way to put it, but the author is right– Wyoming does have more outside than other states. Will that somehow translate into horror? Let's find out!

Police arrive at a country home in response to creek screams, and immediately wait into action. "It sounds incredibly strange, like a woman screaming," says Zachery Knowles, subtly hinting to the reader he can't fuck.

This clip doesn't advance the story; it's just good writing. Most authors wouldn't think to hint at ghosts by saying, "The cop smarts had sure for screams the not animal noises, not or a second thing." This book sounds like someone threw a baby toy down the stairs. I've watched racists say more beautiful things during a body bag escape.

The cops can't figure out where the lady's screams are coming from, because as the author mentioned, Wyoming has so much more outside than you'd expect. Anyway, it was getting pretty scary out, so they ran away.

Almost as if he realized "shrugging and leaving forever" wasn't a real conclusion, Zachery Knowles added a little extra spookiness to the ending. "Later, the cops remembered not hearing any frogs," he typed. "So goddamn fucking perfect," he must have said. I have chills.

Did it really happen? I hope not, because if it did, this is a story about two cops driving into the country to stand right next to a woman and listen to her get murdered in the bushes, but not before she could hear them say, "Welp, sounds like she wants us to leave!"

Even if you believe every word of this childlike, useless garbage, all the cops did was make a ghost noisier. It makes you long for earlier in the book when Zachery's stories at least had a mysterious lack of footprints. Oh, god damn it…

… it's another footprint one.

This story takes place in an elementary school on a military base, where MPs hear the mysterious sounds of children! Except instead of finding children, they find a mystery– a single foot-like wet spot. "Probably from a ghost running right through that nearby wall," they decide, stupidly not knowing ghosts don't leave footprints.

Holy shit, did Zachery say "three-hour deep search"!? I was about to write this off as another ordinary wet footprint report that got out of control, but if the authorities did a three-hour deep search and never found an answer, it was definitely supernatural.

Yes! I told you about the three-hour deep search! A child ghost ran through a wall! THE DEAD HAVE FEET AND WALK AMONG US!

No! There is nothing they or anyone can do about these spectre children and their wet feet!

It may have finally occurred to Zachery that the stakes aren't super high in this book. So in the real, totally true case of The Grey Man, he tries to explain this is not one of those stories where someone only hears a creepy sound. This is picturesque California wine country in the mid-eighties, guys. The ghosts out here will end you.

The police get a call from someone about a seven-foot gray-haired man trying to enter his home. The caller is a known drunk, so they figure it's another false Larry Bird sighting. Still, they send a patrol car.

They arrive right as the seven-foot gray-haired man, who now very well could be Larry Bird, is ripping the drunk to shreds. And he's doing it right against the door so the cops can't open it. "Try opening the door anyway," the shrieks of Larry Bird's victim seemed to say. And so the officers, a man and a woman, formed a two cop karate door-bashing brigade.

I love all of this. I love the respectful way the male officer gave his female partner equal time in the door kicking attempts. And I love how the wording implies the Larry Bird monster might be changing the door's molecular structure as he eats his victim. Because "possible molecule powers" is exactly what I would write in a police report if I was making fun of my partner failing to kick open a wooden door. Speaking of making fun, I'm glad Zachery is writing about action karate cops. I was tired of mocking him for writing exclusively about idiot yokels baffled by footprints…

… god damn it. Footprints. Oh well, I guess congratulations to Zachery for not having the cops taste the red wetness for half a page to find out it's blood. He is getting better.

Oh my god, it took those cops so long to kick down the door Larry Bird was able to tie the man up and ritually carve a line around his every organ and nerve ending like a rebooted Batman villain. But isn't Zachery forgetting something? Wasn't there a sadistic, supernatural monster here a minute ago? Let me skip ahead and … no, it's gone. It looks like Zachery forgot about The Grey Man, or it operates by some ancient law and has to leave when you pee on yourself.

Ha ha it took those cops "at least four hours" to kick down the front door? These gentle clowns should do more than retire from law enforcement. They should donate their feet to Procter & Gamble to help develop a more delicate feminine pad. Investigators called four hours of their pathetic kicks "no sign of forced entry". If I made this up as a bedtime story, my daughter would tell me, "Daddy, do police wear socks? Because it sounds like putting on socks would shatter their bitch ass feet."

T-this is the ending!? Zachery!? "The man attacked committed suicide a few years later"!? And what of the officers who let him get carved into a meat map? Well, sometimes, when a night is super duper extra dark, they get a little spooked! Okay, that's everything, Larry Bird is still at large, bye!

Very few things have not happened as much as this real police ghost story didn't happen. And not simply because it's a bunch of unlikely ghoul bullshit. Narratively, it sounds like a butcher having a stroke while he writes poems to Larry Bird's feet.

From their own true, real reports, the cops spent twelve episodes worth of The Office knocking on this man's door with their baby legs while his will to live was carved from him by 3-time NBA Champion, Larry Bird. So no, I don't think they were a big help.

This is a story about a key holder who helps the cops look around an empty office building, only they get a call about how the real key holder is running late and the other key holder may have been a ghost. I think we can just skip to the conclusion.

There it is.

Nope!

Cops can't identify, locate, or fight ghosts! No!

As we saw in the casefile "Asua," Zachery Knowles is the master of describing a character in only two traits. And New Mexico's Bob D is no exception. He was an ear flicker, and lung cancer.

As we know from his ear flicking, Bob was a fun guy. But that was before his wife betrayed his corpse. Soon, and don't be fooled by how alluring I'm going to make this sound, Bob's ghostly fingers and teeth tickled every ear in town.

"I'm having a fine, non-off day," said Bob's uncle one normal day. "But I guess if I had to pick one thing to complain about, it's the invisible being that keeps flicking my ear." While he and his wife wondered what haunting presence could be flicking ears while they grieved the loss of their ear-flicking nephew, Bob's phantom form appeared before them.

"Let's ask Bob's ghost, he always knew a thing or two about ear flicking," they must have thought.

Bob, classic troublemaker even as a ghost, left quietly through the front door without doing anything. While reeling from this prank, his nephew came up with a new idea. "I'M GONNA FUCKIN' SHOOT BOB'S FUCKIN' GHOST."

They never found Bob, and his ghost soon passed away of old age, but on those ear itchy New Mexico nights, the sheriff's deputies say they can still feel Bob D flicking. Come on, that can't b– no, no that's how Zachery wrapped things up.

I'm not sure it matters. When you rise from the grave to flick one last month's worth of ears, are you worth the breath it would take to yawn about you? Suck my ear's dick, Bob D.

The cops were barely involved in this story. The only thing the sheriff's department did was try and fail to kill a guy whose only hobbies were ear molestation and dying. We can't end on this trash. One more real police ghost story!

Hell yes, let's disturb a forbidden monster from the depths of an unnamed city's unnamed construction site! This story begins when a cop and a security guard respond to a light coming on inside an unfinished condo. Soon, more lights come on, then more. So they do what any heroes would do– they run for their lives.

This is spectacular. The big, strong policeman is knocked down by something he could only later describe as a "heavy black shape" but then also later describe as a skunk and then also three cool dogs and then also a fourth kind of dog, this time a cute one, but with more feet than you can see? This is great. It's the kind of supernatural death where you hope it takes rescuers four hours to kick down your door. "Take your time out there, I want to see if it does otters!"

So you've now seen a few of these. I bet you can guess the ending.

You were right! The cowards, one of whom worked there, left terrified and vowed never to return. Seriously, I'm worried a criminal may get hold of this book and find out they can go to any empty building, flip a few light switches, and no cop will ever respond to a call there again.

It sounds like a security guard got his ass kicked by four dogs and a skunk, and then quit. So I guess that seems possible.

Did giving the Many-Faced, Many-Footed Skunk God of The Future Site of Joy Meadow Condominiums a taste for human blood help? Are you listening to yourself!?

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Jim Salter, who left a ghostly set of footprints leading directly out of the precinct.

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