Creepy electric fireplace instead chills the heart
LOREN BENOIT/Press Post Falls resident Barbara Norgol invited The Press on Tuesday to see the creepy silhouette images of bodies and hands hanging in the flames and shadows of her electric fireplace.
Barbara Norgol purchased her electric fireplace from Wayfair about two years ago and noticed the spooky shadow effect of dangling feet and hands on day one. She invited The Press to see these eerie images on Tuesday after realizing this would make an interesting Halloween story. (LOREN BENOIT/Press)
Barbara Norgol flips through an album filled with pictures from a family trip that seem to have captured transparent spheres that paranormal experts refer to as "spirit orbs" that could be manifestations of spirit energy. Norgol, of Post Falls, invited The Press over for a Halloween story about the super creepy images in her fireplace on Tuesday, and shared some other spooky experiences in the process. (LOREN BENOIT/Press)
POST FALLS — A cryptic message came through the phone line.
"I was referred to you from your front desk about a situation I have in my fireplace," the female voice said. "There are — I don't know what you would call them, but I want to call them ghouls, dead people. I don't know what they are.
"I don't know if this is a unique thing or a creepy thing. Anyway, I was thinking about Halloween and it made me think about it."
Barbara Norgol's indoor electric fireplace is definitely creepy.
She invited The Press on Tuesday to see in person what she perceives as images of bodies and hands in the flames and shadows of the home-warming device.
As the fire flickers, the intermingling of dark and light gives a chilling effect. The shadows dance like silhouettes of bodies dangling from somewhere above, some even wearing long dresses or pants. Other sections look like shadowy hands reaching down into the fire.
"Feet, and then it's like they go up, and then they stay and then hold hands," she said. "I've never seen anything like that in my whole life."
Norgol purchased the fireplace from Wayfair about two years ago and noticed the spooky effect on day one. When it didn't change or go away in a few days, she called to try to return it but couldn't because she'd already discarded the box.
"I asked them, I said, 'Do you guys know what you sent me?' (They said) 'We sent you an electric fireplace,' and I said, 'But there's people inside my flames,'" she said. “I’ll sit here with my rocking chair and I’ll look down at it and I have to turn it off because it drives me nuts. I mean, I don't know if anybody has a fireplace like that."
Creepy coincidence of craftsmanship? Maybe. Communication from the other side? Norgol thinks not.
Norgol has had her share of supernatural sensations and otherworldly encounters all her life, including premonitions. As a teen, she told her mom she felt that her grandmother would die before her grandfather passed when he was really sick.
"Well, she did. She was just completely worn out," Norgol said.
She also always had a dark feeling when she was younger that she would die at 25. It was her younger brother, not her, who passed at that age.
“We’re two years apart," she said. "I never had that feeling again."
Norgol recently spoke with a psychic at a craft fair, "and I don't even believe in these people at all," she said.
"She started talking to me and she looks at me and says to me, 'You know you could be a medium and you don't want to,'" she said. "I looked at my daughter like, 'I don't believe this.'"
Norgol shared other unexplainable eeriness she has experienced — capturing spirit orbs on film, sensing presences in her room at night, knowing things but not knowing how or why.
If this ability is a gift, she'd be happy to return it.
"It comes and goes," she said. "It's weird."
And the shadowy feet dancing in her fireplace, she's gotten used to that. She's just not a huge fan of it on a dark and stormy night.