Comedians are the last bastion of honesty in American media. So when they recount terrifying ordeals with the supernatural on “Celebrity Ghost Stories,” you can’t help but listen. Here are seven stories by famous comics that’ll send chills down your spine.
“I get chills thinking about it now.”
As a kid, Christopher McDonald (of “Happy Gilmore” fame) had a brush with the paranormal. One night, when he was sleeping, he was awakened by a pacing sound coming from the hallway. He initially thought it was his father, and he decided to look for himself.
He opened the door and saw a young child standing there, staring at him. McDonald said the child was about seven years old. He made eye contact for almost a minute until the child turned and disappeared into the wall.
McDonald never received an explanation for the encounter.
“How does a body get inside a locked shed?”
Craig Kilborn would often go to his friend Tom’s house in rural Minnesota when he was a kid. Tom lived with his grandfather in a cabin. Outside, there was a shed. Their dog, Ralphie, would bark and growl at the shed and never go near it. The grandfather, too, told the boys to never visit the shed.
One Halloween, Craig and Tom decided to go to the shed at midnight to get some soda pop. When they got inside, the door behind them slammed shut. They opened the fridge for light and a dead rabbit was lying on the floor. They ran the hell out of there.
Two months later, they were asleep when they heard a noise outside. It was the sound of an engine running. When they went to the balcony they saw a riding lawnmower parked outside the shed. When they looked closer, they saw a slim ghostly figure sitting in the driver’s seat. “It seemed supernatural,” Kilborn said.
Two months later, the grandfather asked the boys to get him a soda pop from the shed. They declined. The grandfather agreed to go with them.
They opened the locked shed to see the grandfather’s beloved black lab lying dead inside. There was no possible way Ralphie could’ve gotten in. They also always kept it locked. Devastated, the group went back to the house. The grandfather explained to Tom that his uncle, a man he’d never met, was a violent drunk who would often abuse animals. When he was 21, he hung himself in the shed.
Tom Green studied broadcast journalism at a Canadian college. He received an assignment to write a story about “something interesting.” His idea? To visit the “haunted” local museum and write an article mocking the belief that it was haunted.
He asked the museum if he could spend the night there, and they agreed. He went at midnight and the security guard told him to sleep in a room downstairs. A few hours later, he snuck upstairs to the fourth floor and set up his sleeping bag next to an exhibit.
Green felt like he was being watched. His cocky demeanor faded as he noticed shadows moving in the distance. He also began to hear shouts coming in all directions. Believing it was the security guard, he lay still until something emerged. It was a man … but not the security guard.
He was much taller. He was walking toward him. He was dressed “not of this time period.” He made direct eye contact with Green, who was frozen in fear. Suddenly, the man disappeared.
Green ran home. In the morning, he did research and discovered that the architect of the museum committed suicide by leaping off the building. The architect was the same man he saw.
“My heart jumped to my throat.”
Anna Gasteyer was performing at the historic Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood. One night, she awoke to her infant child crying in her crib. She could hear music coming from somewhere in the suite.
The next day, she heard the music again. It was a piano. She assumed it was her child tinkering with the keys, but when she walked into the piano room, her daughter was simply playing with toys, nowhere near the piano. When she came to the room, the piano stopped.
The next day, she heard the music yet again. She went to the piano room and stood by the door. Watching the keys, she noticed they were moving by themselves. Somebody was playing the piano. Suddenly a cold breeze swept past her and the music stopped.
Terrified, she went to the coat closet so that she could leave. When she opened the door, a young woman in a maid’s outfit was standing there, giggling. They stared at each other for a while until Gasteyer turned her head to check on her daughter. When she turned back, the woman had disappeared.
She later learned the Roosevelt Hotel has an infamous history of supernatural occurrences.
Actor and comedian Chi McBride was bussing across the country to see his children in the late ’80s. He stopped in Memphis on a layover. He decided to go for a walk, with no destination in mind.
It was 5:45 a.m. and the city was ghostly quiet. McBride felt personally as though he was “being pulled” somewhere, as if someone or something was pushing him forward.
There were no sounds in the town until a bus pulled up alongside him and offered him a ride. He got in, and the bus driver drove him to a nearby hotel and let him off. Once there, McBride discovered it was the Lorraine Motel — the same motel Martin Luther King Jr. stayed in the day he was assassinated.
McBride continued to walk aimlessly until he stumbled upon room 306. He peered down and saw blood stains on the cement. Suddenly he couldn’t move. He was paralyzed. He was shaking from the inside, cold. Something had a grip on him.
As he stood frozen, vivid ghostly images began appearing before him. There were images of commotion, of witnesses screaming, of shots fired. Once “it” released its grip on McBride, he left quickly to the bus station.
He saw a stack of newspapers and noticed the date: April 4, 1988. It was the 20th anniversary of King’s assassination.
“Who could be here in the middle of the night?”
Jerry Stiller and his father never had heart-to-heart conversations. His father also never complimented his work. So when Stiller learned of his father’s death in 1997 while he was out in LA, it left something to forever be desired.
One midnight, Stiller was awakened by a sound. He got up and walked to the door, and he could see the shadow of something moving under it. He was only inches from the door when it opened by itself.
He walked into the hallway and saw a spirit. Not human. Suddenly, the spirit changed form and turned into his father. His father walked to him.
“You did good, Jerry,” he said.
The spirit then disappeared. Stiller finally received the reassurance he always wanted.
“I found this broken-down apartment at the same time my life was broken down.”
In the late 1980s Joan Rivers hit a rough patch. Her husband had committed suicide and her comedy career was slow. She decided to move to New York City from Los Angeles to start anew.
Rivers found a Victorian ballroom in an old gray brick building. She thought it was beautiful, and she spent her savings renovating it. But once she moved in, strange things started happening.
It was freezing cold, even on a hot August night. Her dog would refuse to enter the apartment. One evening Rivers came in to discover pornographic drawings on the wall. When she asked the doorman about it, he replied, “I guess Ms. Spencer is back.”
Rivers learned Ms. Spencer was the niece of JP Morgan. She had died eight years prior, after living in the apartment for her whole life. Rivers pleaded to her that she was a recent widow and she spent everything to start a new life.
Once Rivers began putting out flowers and restoring the ballroom, Ms. Spencer took kindly to it and became benevolent. Rivers said Ms. Spencer visited her every night at 3 a.m. on the dime.
