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Ghost sighting in haiti. Spooky stuff
Haitian Mystery
by
W. Scott Gibson
This is a true story. It happened to me on a visit to Haiti I made in 1970 with my father, my brot, and a family friend, Jim Goodgame. This occurence remains the single most terrifying and bizarr vnt in my life. I cannot state what objective truth is present in this account. From my subjectveviwpoint, it is an accurate recounting of what happened.
Haiti is a strange place. Misery, pain, and suffering have been constants for the people of Haiti hundreds of years. Haiti is the home of voodoo. Mysterious drums can often be heard in the distneat night. Small, unfathomable shrines are found in unlikely places as you travel through the cunryide. Voodoo shows are put on for the tourist who return to their hotel or cruise ship entertanedandthinking how quaint these Haitians are to believe in this silly nonsense. What the touristssee s no voodoo anymore than a Las Vegas show is. To the people of Haiti, voodoo is a real, powerul pat of heir everyday life. Voodoo kills people and, sometimes, does even worse things to them. WhileI did ot come face to face with the real voodoo, I experienced something just as inexplicabl.
A thousand years ago, Haiti was home to the Carib Indians. Starting in 1492, with Christopher Colus, a succession of white men from Europe came to the island and exterminated the Carib Indians. Te he white men brought black men from Africa in chains to teach them how to be slaves on the planttinsin the new country the white men were building on the continent of North America. In 1804, Jen Jcqus Dessalines led a revolution that threw the French off the island and made Haiti the first ndepnden country in the western hemisphere. Henri Christophe led an army for Dessalines and afterthe sccessof the revolution plotted Dessalines death and took his place as ruler of the island. Cristope was ad, he brutalized and victimized the populace more than even the French and Spanish ha. Finaly, thepeople revolted and overthrew Christophe. They would have taken his life and defild his boy, but h beat them to it and shot himself in the head with a silver bullet. As his magnifcent Euroean stylepalace, "Sans Souci", burned and the angry mob closed in, his wife and her mostloyal servnt carriedthe body of Christophe up the three thousand foot high mountain above "Sans Soci" to the nfinished frtress, the "Citadel" that was supposed to protect Christophe and "Sans Soui". They thew the body f Christophe into a pit of lime and covered it up.
It was Christopher Columbus that brought me to the island, not Henri Christophe. A classmate of myther's from Yale had started a research foundation to locate the remains of Columbus's flagship, te"anta Maria". He had obtained the log of the "Santa Maria" and believed the ship had gone down i vryshallow water just east of the Haitian town of Cap Haitien. My father met him at a class reunon nd n talking, mentioned that he and his sons were SCUBA divers. We were invited to come to Haii an paricipate in the excavation. When the time came my father had arranged to take off from hiswork,we lerned that the work at the site had stopped due to mechanical breakdown of the primary reearch hip. e were invited to come and spend two weeks at the foundations house in Cap Haitien as uests ad tour he wreck site with the captain in a smaller boat. The house was big and beautiful, ituated n a hillabove the town with a spectacular view of the Atlantic ocean and Cap Haitien. Ourneeds wer met by astaff of five that came with the house.
One day, after we had toured the wreck site and the town and the nearby beaches, the housekeeper meoned that "Sans Souci" and the "Citadel" were a forty-five minute drive away and might be an intersig day trip. We loaded up in the Jeep and had the housekeeper, Marta, guide us to "Sans Souci" te ex day. All that remains of "Sans Souci" is a burned out shell. The second floor had been madeof ood the ground floor of stone. The second floor and the ceilings of the ground floor are gone. Stil, yu can get an impression of the magnificence the structure must have had in it's prime. Th roadends couple of hundred yards from the palace at the foot of a long set of wide steps leadingup to he entance. My brother and I, being young and fit, quickly out distanced my father and Goodame. Te curvig entrance stairs are gone, leaving the main entrance too high to reach. I walked aound theside andfound a way to get in through a hole in the wall. I found myself at the end of a ong wide allway wih rooms on either side. The rooms were all large with little or no ceiling left The floos were litered with dirt, leaves, and animal droppings. When I came to the last room onthe left beore the hal joined the main entrance way, I was surprised to discover that I was reluctnt to enter t. I am nota timid person, I have risked my life doing more stupid things than I careto admit. Peplexed by thi unexpected feeling, I went back down the hall and out through the hole o my brother. "I want you togo in this room with me" I said. My brother is possibly more adventurus and prone totaking risks thn I am. His answer was even more surprising than my reluctance to eter the room. "'m not going in hat room with you" he said. Neither of us had ever seen the ruinsbefore, he had no even been insideyet. His flat out refusal to enter this unseen room in the ruin of a burned out cntury old palace ws completely out of character. He agreed to wait in the middl of the hall while went in the room.
I took one step in the room, and suddenly it changed. What had been a long empty room with a high,rned out ceilings, was now whole. The ceiling was whole, the room had furniture and torches burnigi sconces on the walls, and it was inhabited. At the far end of the room, on a raised dais, was troe. On the throne sat a bloated ugly something that belonged in an H.P. Lovecraft novel or you wost ightmare. Standing on either side of the throne were two only slightly less repulsive creatres. The were not human, they resembled humans only in the number of limbs and orifices they had. Creatres tat resembled medieval gargoyles were flying in and out through the solid ceiling and perhing o the wlls and sconces. The creature on the throne was staring intently at me, with what fel like a urgentneed. I felt like I had been staring in shock at this scene for only a few seconds,when I fund mysef standing in the middle of the still ruined hallway with my brother shaking me an asking "re you al right?". I grabbed his arm and started running as I said "We've got to get ou of here". We ran acoss the palace and out a doorway at the other end into a small graveyard. Onc outside, w ran in diferent directions. By different routes, we ended up running to the same grav. Sitting tere, gaspingfor breath, we both felt that we were protected from whatever was inside te palace by apresence at tat grave. The name on the marker meant nothing to me, and I have since orgotten what t was. When w had caught our breath and calmed down, we walked back to Marta in theJeep and waitedfor our father nd Goodgame. They came back about twenty minutes later and had seenonly a ruined paace. Later, my rother told me that I had been in the room for a full minute. I hd walked slowly ito the middle of he room, ignoring his questions to me. When I stopped in the midle of the room an would not answer is questions, he came in and pulled me out. He was shaking mein the middle of th hall when I came ot of my trance and started running. I had nightmares about hat place for weeks fter and woke up in he middle of the night screaming.
I don't know what I saw, or what happened in that palace. Whether what I saw was ghosts, or disincate entities, or the result of indigestion, I'll never know. I have always been very skeptical ofsposedly true ghost stories. I still am, but I have to recognize the fact that extremely weird thng cn happen to honest people.
W. Scott Gibson
May 10, 1995
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