Haunted Places And Ghost Stories Around Lawton, Oklahoma

There are plenty of places around Lawton that have a story attached to them.

Some of those stories are probably just stories. Some have been told so many times that nobody really remembers where they started. And then there are a few where you start digging around and find out that somebody actually wrote the thing down.

I’ve never been much of a believer in ghosts. I tend to look for the normal explanation first, and there usually is one. Old buildings make weird noises. Lights do strange things. Your brain is really good at filling in blanks when it’s dark, and you’re already expecting something creepy.

But Lawton has been around long enough to accumulate a pretty impressive collection of blanks.

And once you start looking into some of the places around here, the stories get pretty damn interesting.

Fort Sill Ghost Stories

I really thought everyone knew all of the Fort Sill ghost stories, but with new boots in and out all the time, it's worth a refresher.

In terms of Oklahoma history, Fort Sill is ancient. It dates back to 1869, so there are more than 150 years of people, buildings, wars, deaths, and weird history packed into a relatively small piece of ground. The Army itself has published stories about supposed hauntings there, and that's really different from reading somebody's random ghost story on Facebook.

One of the strangest stories takes place at the old Cavalry Post Hospital.

In late 1980, a group of people were working a night shift in the basement. They started hearing footsteps on the empty floors above them. Then came voices. They went upstairs to see who was walking around, only to find nobody there.

You can imagine the nervous laughter that goes with a moment like that, but they eventually stopped treating it like a joke.

The footsteps seemed to be getting closer to the room where they were working, and one person described an eerie feeling that whoever or whatever was making all that noise was right outside their door.

As the tale spread, they found out some worrying news...

The room they were working in had once been a morgue.

It got bad enough that they called the military police in to search the building a few different times, and even once, they brought police dogs inside.

They never found anybody or the source of the sounds.

Now, I don't believe in ghosts, but even that would perk the hairs up on my neck.

The Haunted Fort Sill Houses

The old buildings on Fort Sill have plenty of stories too.

The Army once published accounts from people living in the historic Old Post Quadrangle who said they heard voices, footsteps, and even military drum music inside their homes. One resident described seeing what looked like a person in a white shirt and gray or khaki pants walk into the kitchen.

When they checked, there was nobody there.

Another family talked about cold spots that seemed to come and go through the house, along with a basketball that somehow rolled down a hallway after apparently bouncing up the staircase.

That's a 9.5 on my weirdometer.

And then there was the dog. It apparently became so uncomfortable in one house that it would sit at the top of the stairs at night, shaking and growling at something nobody else could see.

Again, these aren't random ghost stories from Fort Sill... These are things the U.S. Army published themselves.

The Patriot Club Is Haunted Too

Straight from the Fort Sill Public Affairs office, The Patriot Club has had its share of unexplained activity.

One former employee described seeing a shadowy figure standing inside the phone booth near the front entrance. The figure appeared to walk toward the glass doors and then passed right through them without the doors opening.

There's also a story from a longtime Patriot Club employee who said he and a coworker were installing an ice machine in the kitchen when one of the workers came back from the bathroom and asked who the guy in uniform was. They knew there was nobody else in the club, and the man described seeing a Soldier in a Confederate uniform standing in the restroom.

Was it a ghost? Meh... Who's to say? Ghosts aren't real, right?

The Haunted Parallel Forest

The Parallel Forest is a completely different kind of creepy, but it shouldn't be.

If you've never been out there, you get it. It's easy to get lost in your imagination, and the deeper you walk in, the more your imagination runs wild.

There are lots of stories about how the Parallel Forest came to be, but here's the fact... It wasn't planted as a Dust Bowl-era experiment to prevent soil erosion. It was literally planted to grow fence posts. As unnatural as it looks, it's still growing exactly as it was planted over 100 years ago. The idea was that dense, evenly spaced planting would produce straight, knot-free posts. Then somebody started attaching ghost stories to it.

The oldest ghost story is that kids had disappeared into the forest. To be fair, that could be a story based on something that happened... But shadows moving through the trees at night? Plausible. The moonlight moves constantly, the trees sway, of course the shadows move. But are there really eyes that are always watching from somewhere in the trees? Chalk it up to park rangers, probably. Even more so today with game cameras and such.

I think it's far more likely that it's a creepy place and it deserves a good ghost story.

Lawton's Old Downtown Ghost Stories

This is the hardest subject to tackle on any sort of ghost story journey. Mostly because downtown Lawton has changed so much over the years that most of the places people talk about today don't even exist anymore.

The old downtown was completely different and a little bit wild.

There were saloons, dance halls, and a ton of other businesses that burned down a long time ago. A veritable SWOK Skid Row.

This was where Lawton got its infamous reputation. There were shootings, murders, drugs, and plenty of other things that happened a lifetime ago. I tell newbies that and they don't believe it. You look at Lawton now, and it's way safer than it was in its heyday... But the ghost stories still stick around.

We talked about our own haunted radio studios in Downtown Lawton. It's quite the tale, yet those who've seen the Gray Lady still swear it happened to them.

Those are my favorite Lawton ghost stories. Which ones have you heard?