Hello and welcome to mini episode 259 of Real Life Ghost Stories.

I have a collection of stories for you today that were emailed in by Christine on January 21st, 2023.

However, Christine put a call out on Facebook and gathered a load of stories from first responders

and put them all into a compilation and sent them over to me. So thank you so much to Christine

and everybody who submitted stories for this little compilation episode. I'm so grateful

and people love first responder stories so let's get into it. First responders love to share

stories. We unwind by talking and sharing the absurd things we experience and mocking the darkness

we deal with regularly. Dark humor becomes a survival skill and a coping mechanism. But some nights

we aren't sharing our funny and ludicrous stories. Sometimes we talk about the things that we couldn't

explain. Almost every first responder has heard either a ghost story from a coworker or experienced

something themselves. Does repeated exposure to death and crisis make someone more open to the

supernatural or is it simply a matter of statistics? After all, if you keep crossing paths with death,

doesn't that increase the odds of seeing something you were never meant to see?

I once had a supervisor who had a reputation for being a tough guy with a big heart.

He told us a story that raised the hair on the back of my neck one day that I will never forget.

In 1981, he was an EMT for a volunteer fire department in a new hamshare farming community.

In this town lived an elderly brother and sister along with an elderly cousin on a sprawling farm.

They were very well liked by the townsfolk and they would offer a plot of their farmland to anyone

for the asking with one simple rule. No matter what they grew, they had to donate one third of their

yield to area food banks. This was just one of the reasons they were so beloved.

As they got older, Mary the sister became frail with osteoporosis and was admitted to a nursing home.

John, her brother, was left to look after the farm. One day the cousin who lived nearby was

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