- Ruh roh, Raggy.
“And I would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for you meddling kids.” Famous words spoken by people who pretended to be ghosts, only to get caught by a ragtag group of teenagers and a weird talking dog.
As it often goes, though, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. Many times, people around the world (perhaps unaware of the show’s existence) have tried to pull of stunts that could’ve sprung straight out Scooby-Doo.
Usually, they end up not getting away with it. Not because of the mystery-busting gang, though, but regular cops instead.
The Poltergeist of Castel Coldrano
Castel Coldrano is a 15th-century castle, located in Laces, northern Italy, near the Austrian border. In 2005, strange things started happening at the ancient castle.
As night fell, the castle’s door would start suddenly opening or slamming shut. Haunting voices rang out in the hallways, and thing in general went bump in the night.
The ghastly events went on for four months. By the end of it, the castle’s owner — who by that point was starting to lose his mind — pleaded the local police to help him.
The cops, wanting to get to the bottom of the mystery, set up cameras around the castles. Instead of a creepy ghoul, they caught a 42-year-old Polish woman roaming the castle halls at night, pretending to be a ghost.
According to the cops, the woman was the wife of one of the employee’s in the castle. Apparently, she had some undisclosed grievances against her husband’s employer.
Patch-Eye Pete and the Haunted Gold Mine
There’s a lot of gold on the Korean Peninsula. Back in the 1890s, long before the North/South split, an American company called Oriental Consolidated Mining Company, set up a gold mine in northern Korea.
Unfortunately, the employees like to pilfer company property, such as mining supplies and the mined gold. So, boss of the mine — known to history as Patch-Eye Pete — decided to stop the thefts.
Pete, who unsurprisingly wore a glass eye, plucked out his prosthesis and set it on a table at the entrance to the mine. He told the local workers that he could see everything going on in the mine through his eye.
The plan worked — for a while. Pete soon discovered that the miners had placed a cup over the eye to stop it from seeing their crimes.
When he heard that many Koreans believed that there was an ancient guardian spirit living in the mine, Pete got another idea. He acquired a gramophone, a technology unknown to most Koreans at the time.
He recorded himself bellowing ominous warning and left the gramophone running overnight at the bottom of the mine. Lo and behold, the next morning everything that’d been stolen from the mine was mysteriously returned to the office.
As far as we know, Patch-Eye Pete got away with it, too.
The Real Freddy Krueger
In 2015, 47-year-old Englishman David Lamb received a five-year jail sentence for child abuse. The man had tormented his three step-children for year, pretending to be the supernatural child killer Freddy Krueger from the Nightmare on Elm Street movies.
According to his step-children, Lamb would climb up to their house’s attic at night and make scratching noises above their bedroom. When the terrified children came to tell him of the noises, he’d tell them to just get back to bed.
It may have started as a relatively harmless prank, but things soon got more sinister. Lamb trained his pet lizard to bite the kids as they slept and tell them the wounds were actually the work of Freddy.
When he wasn’t pretending to be a movie ghost, Lamb was being generally abusive in other ways. He’d hang the kids by their shirt collars on clothes hooks and lock them in closets while blasting music at them on full volume.
The traumatized children came forward with their accusations only once they were adults. At a trial, the judge found the claims to be true and sent Lamb straight to jail.
The Hungry Ghost
In 2008, a Japanese man the town of Kasuya noticed something strange going on at his house. Over several months, food had begun mysteriously disappearing from his kitchen.
Was he dealing with a ravenous poltergeist, or some other kind of famished ghoul? To find out, the man set up security cameras in his kitchen.
Like in the case of the Italian castle, the cameras didn’t catch a ghost. Instead, they spotted a strange woman entering the kitchen and eating food from the fridge and cabinets.
Naturally, the man immediately called the cops. But when they arrived, they discovered that all the door and windows at the man’s house were shut and locked. Nobody could’ve reasonably been able to get in the house.
So, was it a ghost after all? No. After an exhaustive search, the police found a nervous woman curled up on a mattress in the man’s closet.
The woman, identified as Tatsuko Horikawa, told the police that she was homeless and unemployed. About a year ago, she had found the man had left his front door unlocked, so she’d decided to move in.
In her defense, at least she was a courteous unwelcome guest. While the man was gone, she kept both herself and the closet neat and clean.