Most ghost hunting stories you see online are fake. I know because I used to make them. My friend Corey and I ran a small ghost hunting channel for two years, and we were not above a little creative editing. But the night we spent at an old county poor farm in Indiana, our recorder caught a voice answering our questions, and the voice was mine. We’d faked a dozen haunting experiences for views. We didn’t fake this one.
Corey and I met at Ball State. After college we both ended up in Muncie with jobs we didn’t love, and in 2021 we started filming ghost investigations on weekends. Abandoned schools, old churches, a closed drive-in. We had about eleven thousand subscribers by 2023. Enough to pay for gas and equipment, barely.
Our main tool was a digital voice recorder. That’s what EVP is. Electronic voice phenomena. You walk around an empty building asking questions out loud, and you leave pauses for answers, and later you play it back and listen for voices you didn’t hear in the room. Ninety-nine percent of it is wind, or your own stomach, or a truck on the highway a mile away.
In September of 2023, we got permission from a farmer to film at an old county poor farm on his land. It was a three-story brick building from the 1880s, where the county used to send people who had nowhere else to go. Old people, sick people, widows, orphans. It closed in the 1950s. Now it was full of pigeons and broken glass.
The First EVP Session
We got there around 9 p.m. Corey drove, as usual. He had a 2011 Ford Ranger with a cracked windshield.
We did the normal stuff. Walked through with flashlights. Filmed the empty rooms. On the second floor, in a long room with iron bed frames still lined up against the walls, we sat on the floor and started an EVP session.
I held the recorder. Corey asked the questions. “Is anyone here with us tonight?” Pause. “What’s your name?” Pause. “Did you live here?” Pause. All the usual stuff.
The room was quiet. It smelled like pigeon droppings and old plaster and wet brick. I didn’t hear anything. We did ten minutes and then went downstairs to eat sandwiches in the truck.
We played it back in the truck with our headphones on.
Corey’s voice. “Is anyone here with us tonight?”
Then a pause. And in the pause, quiet but clear, another voice said, “Just us.”
It was my voice.
Answers I Didn’t Say
I took my headphones off and looked at Corey. He looked at me. He said, “Dude, did you say that?”
I said no. I hadn’t said anything. I’d been holding the recorder and listening. I’d have remembered.
We played it again. It was my voice. Not like my voice. Mine. The same flat Indiana accent, the same little rasp I get when I’m tired.
Corey’s next question. “What’s your name?”
My voice said my name. My first name. Quietly, like I was answering a teacher.
“Did you live here?”
My voice said, “Not yet.”
Corey laughed. That high laugh people do when they’re scared. He said this was the best EVP we’d ever gotten, and it was going to blow up the channel. He said I was messing with him. He said I must have whispered it. I swore I hadn’t.
I told myself he was right. That I’d muttered without thinking. People talk to themselves. I talk to myself all the time.
We kept listening. There were twelve questions in that session. My voice answered five of them.
The last one, Corey had asked, “Is there anything you want to tell us?”
And my voice said, “Don’t let Corey drive.”
The Drive Home
We were done after that. We didn’t go back in. We packed up the gear and it was about 11:30.
Corey got in the driver’s seat. I stood by the passenger door and didn’t get in.
He said, “Come on. It’s a joke. You said it yourself.”
I said I didn’t care. I said let me drive. He argued. He said I was being dramatic. He said it was his truck. He was a little annoyed. I think he was more scared than me, and being annoyed was easier.
In the end he gave me the keys. He sulked in the passenger seat. I drove us home on the county roads at forty miles an hour.
About six miles from the poor farm there’s a sharp curve over a creek, with a narrow concrete bridge. I took it slow. As we came around the curve, my headlights hit something in the middle of the bridge.
A big buck. Lying in the road. Dead, and fresh.
Behind it, the guardrail on the right side of the bridge was torn open. Bent out over the creek. Somebody had hit that deer, gone through the rail, and gone over.
We called 911. The fire department came. There was a car in the creek. The driver was alive. He’d been coming the other way, swerved around the deer, and lost it. He said the deer had been standing right in the middle of the bridge. Just standing there.
Corey drives fast. He always took that curve at fifty. He didn’t say anything for the whole rest of the ride. When I dropped him off, he just said, “Thanks.”
The Last of Our Ghost Hunting Stories
We never posted the video. We stopped the channel a couple of months later. We’re still friends. We don’t talk about that night much.
But I kept the recorder. I don’t know why. It sat in a drawer in my apartment for about a year.
Last October I took it out and put new batteries in. I don’t know why I did that either. It was late. I sat on my bed and hit record and didn’t ask anything. I just let it run in the quiet for five minutes.
Then I played it back.
There was nothing for almost four minutes. Then my voice. Faint, like it was coming from a long way off, or from a big empty room.
It said the name of the county road where the poor farm is. Then it said, “Come back for me.”
I haven’t gone back. I’m not going to.
But I keep thinking about what it said the first time, when Corey asked if it had lived there. It didn’t say no.
It said not yet.
If you want more scary ghost stories for adults, read the lighthouse ghost story about the Gannet Point log, our cemetery ghost stories post about dahlias on a grave, or the trucker scary stories about a CB voice counting down the miles.
What are the ghost hunting stories you can’t explain?
If you’ve ever played back a recording and heard something you didn’t say, you’re not alone. Share your ghost hunting stories, or any paranormal experiences from an abandoned building you’ll never go back to, in the comments below.
How scary was it?
More Scary Ghost Stories
I Heard the Same Argument Upstairs Every Night Until One Night It Talked to Me
Someone Leaves My Father’s Own Dahlias on His Grave Every Week
The Last Entries in the Gannet Point Keeper’s Log
The Ouija Board I Bought at an Estate Sale Kept Spelling a Dead Woman’s Name
Every Time I Hung the Do Not Disturb Sign, Someone Made My Bed
The Disconnected Phone in Our Hall Rang Five Times on Halloween