Telly Savalas’s Good Samaritan

Telly Savalas

Telly Savalas was an American actor who was known for his tough guy character movie roles. He is remembered however for starring in the 1970s television series Kojack where he played a New York City detective.

He won an Emmy and two Golden Globes for this role. His character Kojack made the catchphrase, “Who loves ya, baby?” popular.

Years before his acting success he experienced what could only be classified as a paranormal encounter. Late one night in 1959, he was driving home to Long Island from a date when his car ran out of gas.

He looked around but everything was closed and deserted. His only option was to walk toward the freeway. From behind him, he heard an odd squeaky high-pitched voice call out—offering him a ride.

He had not heard a car drive up but as he turned, he saw a man in a white suit sitting in a Cadillac. This Good Samaritan then drove him to a gas station. As they returned to his car, Savalas took down the man’s number and address so he could pay him back.

The man told him if he could not reach him he should call a friend of his, a Red Sox baseball player. He gave Savalas this number as well. He then helped fill the car and he even pushed it to help Savalas get it started.

The next day, Savalas read a newspaper report that mentioned the baseball player the man had used as an extra contact, it stated he was dead. Things became eerier when Savalas called the Good Samaritan’s number.

A woman answered. As Savalas told her the reason, he was calling the woman stopped him. She was confused as she told him that her husband had died two years before.

Savalas described the man who had helped him and told her he had given him this number. As he described the man—the white suit he wore—she broke down and mentioned her husband had been buried in his favorite white suit.

Savalas then mentioned the man’s strange high-pitched voice. The wife still crying told him that this made sense for her husband had shot himself in the throat. He had taken his own life.

It appears Telly Savalas encountered a guardian spirit right when he needed one.

I first read this story in a book entitled, True Ghost Stories, by Jason Keeler. It is a quick read and mentions many famous ghost tales. It can be found here.

Waved Down

Truck drivers out on dark roads frequently report seeing unusual sights. The following 1^st person account is one of my favorite guardian spirit stories.

It was a rainy night and I was on a tight schedule as I impatiently made my way through a slow construction zone just west of Detroit, Michigan.

Around 2:00 a.m. I spotted an elderly lady standing by a broken down old car. The rain had saturated her thin coat. I ignored the fact she was desperately waving me down.

Without stopping, I passed where she stood, I justified my action by telling myself there where plenty of other people who had the time to help. But as I wound my way around to the next exit a feeling of regret I still can’t explain gripped me.

I felt compelled to turn off. And to my surprise I found myself steering my rig back around headed once more for the stranded car.

When I pulled up I saw two small heads pop up in the back seat. Then a young man approached my rig. I offered to take him and his family to a gas station so they could get help.

I watched as he gathered up his children and young wife. But where was the elderly lady? As they piled through my passenger door I asked if that was all of them.

They looked at me puzzled. I then asked about the older lady. They didn’t appear to know what I was talking about so I tried once more. Didn’t you see the overweight lady with the snow-white frizzy hair standing out in the rain.

They replied no. The wife asked if I had noticed anything else about her. I told her the lady was tall but stooped over. She then began to cry. It was my turn to be puzzled.

The wife wiped her nose and told me that I had just described her grandmother who had died recently.

She turned to her husband still sniffling. She stated, "I have always heard relatives sometimes return as guardians in times of trouble but I didn’t believe it until now."

This encounter still gives me chills even though it has been over 10 years. For some unknown reason that night I felt compelled to go back.

I guess the wife was right. I encountered a force that was not of this world.

The Guardian Spirit of the Triangle Fire

In March of 1911, a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York City. It lasted eighteen minutes. Within this short period, 146 people perished most were young Jewish and Italian immigrant women. 

Sixty-two of these young women leapt to their deaths preferring this to death by fire.

The Triangle Shirtwaist factory was a typical sweatshop of its day. Some of the workers were as young a 13, and all worked fourteen hour days, six days a week for 6 to 7 dollars a week. 

The companies 500 workers were crowded into three upper floors of the Triangle building. The year before many of the workers had gone on strike for better working conditions. On the day of the fire, the exit doors were locked to keep the workers in and union organizers out.

When the fire started, it leaped from one pile of discarded fabric to the next. Several workers began down the outside fire escape. But less than 20 made it down before it collapsed killing several girls. 

A shipping clerk tried to fight the flames with a fire hose, but the water had no pressure.

Many workers jammed onto the service elevator, but as it made its slow trips, the flames and smoke engulfed the rooms, so more workers jumped into the shaft as the elevator descended. Some managed to grab briefly onto the cables that held it in place, but most fell on top of it. This added weight forced it to snap free and crash to the bottom of the shaft.

Others waited at the windows hoping for a rescue from the fire trucks below. But as the fireman raised their ladders they realized they were too short--they reached only to the sixth floor. They also found the water from their hoses did not reach the entire upper level.

William Shepherd, a UPI reporter, was across the street when flames started licking out of the eighth and ninth floors. It is his account which told the story that evolved into the legend of the guardian spirit. He called his office with a dramatic report that was sent by telegraph operators simultaneously across America.

Shepherd saw, way above him, a young man helping a young woman to the ninth floor windowsill. The young man held her out the window and let her drop. The man reached back into the flames, held a second girl out the window and then a third, letting them fall. 

None of the girls resisted, “as if,” reported Shepherd, “he were helping them into a streetcar instead of into eternity.”

A fourth girl put her arms around the man in the window and kissed him, perhaps impulsively for the first time or for the last. Then he held her out of the window and dropped her 100 feet to the sidewalk below. Shepherd wrote, “I saw his face. He had done his best.”

Those who jumped into the fireman’s nets crashed through them. A witness reported seeing the fireman’s bloodied hands as they tried to hold tight. Sometimes two or three women jumped together, holding hands. 

“The fire alarm was sounded at 4:45 p.m. and at 4:57 p.m. the final worker fell from the ninth floor, onto an iron hook on the sixth floor, where she hung burning and then, about a minute later, with a thud onto the street below.”

It is not known how the fire started, perhaps a lit cigarette, or maybe the oil from the sewing machines lit rags in bins. Afterward, the fire chief said he found skeletons bending over sewing machines. 

The two owners of the factory were bought to trial, but they were acquitted because they had not broken any laws.

As a result of the Triangle Fire laws for fire compensation and child labor were put in place. It also inspired a massive unionization movement in America.

This building is considered haunted today. In my post, Triangle Fire's Haunted Brown Building I share information about this.