Meshach Taylor

Meshach Taylor appeared on Celebrity Ghost Stories in 2012. He told a story about a creepy man who appeared at his window one night when he was just a little boy and tried to convince him to come outside.

I was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. It’s a place that’s very unique because it’s a very spiritually charged place, so there’s that element of spirits, of ghosts, of the dark side. This is something that happened to me on the dark side

My mother and father were both university professors and when I was 6 years old, we moved into a house on campus. I had a room that looked out onto the side yard. It was a wonderful place to play and it was close to the Levy.

As a child, I spent a lot of time by myself. I would often sit out there on the swing and sing and tell myself stories. My parents were gone a lot during the day and there was a wonderful woman who took care of me. Her name was Margie and she was a creole woman. She practiced voodoo and she believed in it very deeply.

One night, I was asleep and I heard a noise outside my window. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to it. Then, I heard a scratching on the window screen. I looked out the window and I could see the outline of a person, standing there looking in at me.

It was a Creole man. He looked at me and I looked at him. It was just strange.

He said, “I listen to you sing and you have a beautiful voice. I love to hear you sing.”

He spoke very distinctly and deliberately. He told me he lived on the Levy and how people would have bonfire and parties on the Levy. My parents had always warned me not to go down to the Levy because it was very dangerous. Many children had drowned down there. I was getting sleepy and I told him that I was tired.

“I’ll come back later,” he said and I went to sleep.

The next morning, when I woke up, I mentioned to my mother that a man had come by my window during the night and talked to me about the canal. She thought it was just a child’s imagination and she kind of blew it off.

A couple of nights later, I heard the scratching on the window again. This time, the moon was full and I could see the man’s face. His features seemed distorted. I could see that he was damp and I could smell the must from his clothing.

Once again, he talked to me about my singing.

“My friends would love your voice,” he said. “They would love to hear you sing. You should come and sing for them.”

Then he said to me, “Take the hook out of the window and come outside.”

I told him I couldn’t do that because my father would get very upset.

“He won’t care,” the man told me. “Come… Come with me.”

I thought about it for a little while and I said, “No, I can’t do that.”

All of a sudden, his demeanor changed and he kept telling me to open the window. When I wouldn’t open it, he got more intense and started shouting “Open the window!” over and over again. It frightened me and I just pulled the shade and went to sleep.

The next morning, I told Margie what had happened. The color literally drained out of her face. She wanted to know what he said to me, what he tried to get me to do, where he wanted to take me.

When I told her “The Levy”, she got very agitated.

She told my mother and father about it and she said this was not an ordinary man. There is something that is trying to pull this child out of this house

My father didnt believe it but it upset him and he started to get concerned about this.

That night, I went to sleep and sure enough, the man appeared outside my window again.

“Come see my friends,” he said.

“Margie told me not to talk to me anymore,” I said. “You shouldn’t come around here no more.”

He looked at me and tried to convince me, “Open the window, open the window. Open the window.”

“I can’t do that,” I protested.

Then I heard a noise come out of him, something from deep inside, very glutteral and very angry. It terrified me.

That woke my father up. He came out of the house with a flashlight to see who was there and just like that, the man disappeared. All that was left were the wet spots where he had been standing. My father saw the wet spot on the ground and he knew someone had been there.

After that, Margie found out from people in the neighborhood that there had been a guy who was a child molester. he had been molesting kids for years as a school teacher. When people found out what he was doing, they came after him. They chased him. He ran from them and down to the levy. He fell into the water, but he couldn’t swim and he drowned.

For years afterwards, whenever a child drowned in the canal, they said that might have been him… his spirit made that child drown. He might be still around.

The next morning, Margie wanted to do some things to make sure that he didn’t come around again. The first thing she did was scrub down the front steps of the house with lye and water to keep any evil spirits or bad energy from entering the house. Then, she took some white powder and she made a perimeter two or three feet from my window like she was drawing a line in the sand. That was supposed to protect me.

I never saw the man again and my parents never let me leave that window open again. Margie said “There’s more things in this world than you educated people know about.”

I still wonder, if I had gone out that night, whether I would have survived that encounter…