When the Ghost Screams(32)

On February 29, 1956, a killer was born in Rochester, Michigan, though when nurses peered at the wrinkled newborn, they saw only a baby girl. Aileen Carol Pittman never knew the man who provided half her genes. Her father, child molester Leo Dale Pittman, hung himself in prison in 1969. Aileen’s troubled teenaged mother abandoned her, leaving allegedly abusive grandparents to raise her.

A bad seed planted in poisoned earth, Aileen became a thief, a prostitute, and a murderer. In fact, Aileen Wuronos has been immortalized in books and movies, because she is not the typical female serial killer. Unlike other women killers who most often murder with poison, Aileen shot her seven male victims.

Parts of the blockbuster movie Monster, starring Charlize Theron as the killer, were filmed in the Last Resort bar, Aileen’s hangout. Al Bulling, owner of the bar, played himself in the movie. He thinks that Aileen favored his tavern because of its proximity to a pawnshop where she sold the valuables that she stole from her victims.

Al, who has owned the biker bar south of Daytona Beach, Florida, for two and a half decades, had felt a little sorry for the woman, who usually didn’t have a place to go when the bar closed down for the night. He often let her sleep in a trailer out behind the bar.

Much of Aileen’s saga had centered on the tavern, including her arrest. In January 1991, undercover officers posed as bikers and lured the killer out the front door of the bar, where she was surrounded by police.

Aileen’s execution on October 9, 2002, has not stopped her from visiting the Last Resort. “She’s still here,” Al told me, explaining that she made her presence known moments after her death, when the bar was crowded with reporters who had gathered there to watch news of the execution on TV. A tub of knives suddenly leapt off of a shelf as startled witnesses gasped.

“She always said that she would be back,” said Al.

Bartender Kelley Pleis told me that she, too, has experienced odd things at the bar, such as the quiet afternoon she was alone there. “Business had been slow, so I was reading,” she said. Suddenly, the jukebox turned itself on. “It came on full blast,” she said. “There was no explanation for it.”

Eeriest of all are the breezeless days when the back door suddenly bursts open. As Al watches and waits, the hairs on the back of his arms stand at attention. He knows what is coming. The television suddenly switches channels, and then in the seconds it takes the invisible presence to walk across the room, the front door abruptly opens.

It is as if Aileen Wuornos is walking the path she walked in the days she camped out back.

Whenever the presence bursts through the back door, Al tries to remain nonchalant. As Aileen’s unseen hands change the TV channels, Al asks, “Who pissed you off this time, Aileen?”




Ghosts in the News

Ghostly Hostess


THE GHOST OF RUTH ELLIS has been seen walking through a locked door in Caesars nightclub in Streatham, London, according to the November 4, 2005, edition of the Streatham Guardian.

Ruth was a petite 103 pounds, mother of two, and just twenty-eight years old. She was also a convicted murderer and the last woman to be executed in the United Kingdom. She shot and killed her boyfriend, David Blakely, twenty-five, in the parking lot outside of a pub on Easter Sunday 1955.

Ruth and David had a tumultuous relationship, marked by jealously and abuse. The judicial process was swift, and Ruth was executed three months after an off-duty officer found her standing over David with a smoking gun in her hand. Hanged at Holloway Prison, her body was buried there, but her spirit apparently broke free, returning to a place with more innocent memories.

Her haunting of Caesars has the staff rattled. Club owner Fred Batt told a reporter, “I’ve heard a scream and so have members of my staff. It’s very loud and high-pitched. I shivered the first time I heard it.”

Ruth Ellis worked as a hostess in the building in 1946 when the place was called The Locarno. Today, employees refuse to set foot in the spookier area of the building. Batt told a reporter, “Even I won’t go into the club by myself.”





Locked Inside the Gray


Prisons are another place where killers roam decades after their flesh has turned to dust. Many haunted prisons no longer cage inmates. They have been turned into museums, where tourists wander freely from cell to tiny cell and try to imagine what it must have been like to be locked inside the gray.

The cold steel doors stand open, and the heavy keys are simply interesting relics. Yet those who were once trapped sometimes remain. It is as if they don’t see the way out. Both the guilty and the innocent linger behind the bars of the following prisons and jails.