Cold Hands: My Experience at the Ridges (Athens, Ohio)

Are your hands ALWAYS cold?  Mystery solved! Personally, this is one issue I don't have to deal with, although I do have a fitting story about holding hands with a ghost!  Way back in the spring of 2002, my friend and I went to visit another friend at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.  The entire TOWN of Athens seems to have a spooky past, with plenty of ghost stories associated with the campus itself.  While visiting, we went to check out The Ridges, a former asylum complex that the school had taken over.  A local guy who our friend had met while at school was showing us around the outside of some of the buildings and giving us a little history lesson on the area. When we got to the area where the former children's building was, my two friends decided to stay in the car, while I went up the hill with this local guy to where the building was located.  We were only up there a few minutes when we heard screaming coming from the car, so we started back off down the hill.  As I walked away from the building, I felt something cold touch my hand, causing me to just sort of freeze in place.  I'm thinking this dude is getting a little too handsy, but I look and he's already halfway down the hill, way too far away from me to have touched me.  After I realized that I was alone, I realized that the touch really did feel like a small child slipping his or her hand into my hand.  I took a second to look back at the building, and gently tell whoever or whatever had touched me that I had to go now and that it needed to stay there.

As far as I know, nothing followed me home that evening.  As for the screaming coming from the car---my friends had been trying to operate the micro-cassette recorder I had borrowed from my mom for ghost hunting purposes, lol.  Somehow, the recorder got put into fast-forward mode, and they were startled at the crazed, chipmunk-like voices of one of my mom's meetings being played back! The next morning, my friend and I returned to the area for some day-time photos.  This one is of me on the stairway to the building where the incident occurred. My little visitor who held my hand the night before was nowhere to be found, but I walked away from the experience grateful that I had had the opportunity for such an interaction.

 Anyway, if you suffer from constantly cold hands, just make sure to mention it to your doctor in order to rule out any circulatory or other issues.  Also, this cute lil' graphic comes from In Your Face Cake. You can check them out on Twitter and Instagram for more comics!

BONUS

My experience at the Ridges wasn't the only time in my life where I believe I physically interacted with a ghost!  As I was rushing down the hallway of my mom's house, I think I may have crashed right into (or through) our disembodied roommate!  You can read all about that experience here:  The Day I Walked Through a Ghost