Ghost stories, part 1

I know Halloween's coming up... I don't usually post ghost stories, but there are exceptions to every rule. Last summer, Corey emailed me 259 pages' worth of ghost stories from Something Awful. I definitely don't plan on posting them all at once, or even in 18 parts like I did when I got them. But I'll definitely post some semi-regularly, even when Halloween passes. Here's the first part... and I don't feel like censoring the language in some of these. I already went through them for spelling and grammar clean-up. :P


I was in CAP when I was younger (Civil Air Patrol, like Boy Scouts sponsored by the Air Force) and we used an old Barracks as our meeting place. One night, we came to the meeting and the adults lined us all up to tell us about what had happened. Apparently when they arrived, they found a woman who had been raped and stabbed about 15-20 times, then thrown from the 3rd story balcony. We all kinda freaked out and were sent home.

After that, all sorts of weird shit happened at the building. When we stayed overnight, all sorts of shit would happen. Curtains opening and closing on their own. Books and other junk falling off the shelves.

One of the creepiest things were the paintings on the 3rd floor. All the 2nd and 3rd floor rooms were locked and sealed for safety reasons. You could have easily broken a window, but people would notice that. In one of the rooms, there was a painting on both sides of the wall starting to form. There were large windows at the front of all the rooms. Every week, we would go upstairs and check them out, and every week they would get more detailed. Finally, the images became apparent: one was a woman dressed all slutty, and one was the Grim Reaper. The room was still apparently completely sealed.
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I've had those "corner of the eye" sightings here too. My house was built in 1981, on the site of an old Civil War encampment. There are two abandoned cemeteries in the woods in our neighborhood. The stones are barely legible now, and the whole place is covered in brush and in the woods.

One time, I was sitting here at the computer and I saw someone out of the corner of my eye open the door to the room, look in at me, then close the door again. Since I live alone with my dog, I was quite surprised... got up quick and checked it out, but there was no one in the hallway. If they'd gone down the stairs, I would have heard it since the stairway is made of creaky hardwood.

When I was a little kid, I once saw a lady in Colonial-style dress wearing a bonnet. She was sitting on a bench in the woods, knitting something. Actually, my sister was there with me and saw her too.. we were startled and looked at each other.. when we looked back over there, she was gone, along with the bench. I know I didn't dream this up, because I've spoken with my sister about it recently, and she remembers it just as vividly as I do.
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I remember the other thread of this... there was one story that really freaked me out. I can't remember who told it, but it basically went like this - the goon's father, when he was younger, was in an apartment. He was asleep, but suddenly woke up and saw a kid coming out from the ceiling, reaching toward him. It turned out that a kid had been killed in the room above and stuffed in the floor between the ceiling of the room.

On another note, the off-campus dorm I'm in is 13 floors high, and only floors 8-13 are lived in right now. The RAs have to do rounds through the whole building, usually alone. Most of floors 2-7 have no lights on at all on them, but sometimes floors that didn't have lights on will have the lights off the next time through, or lights will suddenly turn on. I've done rounds a few times with one of my friends who is an RA. It's really freaky. As you walk past some doors, they'll creak and make strange knocking noises. And the outside fire escape door on the 5th floor is open every time she comes down there, and only she has the key to the outside. I'd never go down there alone. It has the atmosphere of a horror movie to it. I always think of Halloween, the movie. I can just imagine Michael Myers jumping out of one of the rooms.
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- When I was about 7 or 8, I came home from school and saw my sister in the bathroom. She told me how glad she was to see me because something weird happened, and that she was scared (she was the only one in the house). She showed me how this can of hair spray kept tilting back and forth on the shelf for a few minutes. I thought maybe it was a passing tuck or she bumped the shelf. She said she didn't.

- One night, everyone was in bed. It's about 12:00 and I start hearing the cupboards in the kitchen downstairs banging. I really didn't take much notice of it. This continued though for a while. It was just constant. I tried to bury myself under the covers as I was really scared now. So I am laying there terrified, and all of a sudden I hear my dog start to howl. Now I'll tell you... my dog *never* howls or barks. To this day, I have never heard him howl again. I ran to the landing on the stairs and told him to shut up! I thought, "Well, I am up. Maybe I'll check the cupboards in the kitchen now..." So I went down the stairs rather slowly and made my way to the kitchen. The sound of the banging stopped. I bolted up stairs and just cuddled under my blankets. No more sounds, though.

- One night when I was about 14, I went to bed before everyone else as we had company. Well, I am lying in bed and I start to feel a little bit of a shake. I kind of looked around and thought that was weird. I continued to lay there and felt my bed shake a little harder. This time, I sat up and was looking on either side of my bed to see if someone was there. No one was there. I thought: "Oh, this is just my mind." So I laid back down again and closed my eyes. When I did this, my bed started to shake rather hard. I jumped out of my bed as fast as I could and ran downstairs. Told my parents, but they did not believe me. I stayed up for another 30 minutes and went back to bed. No more shaking.

- My sister used to be pretty wild, like coming home really late at night. Anyways, one day she said how the dog was acting weird. When she comes home, sometimes he'll just be sitting in the living room staring at the wall. She'll call him and he won't look. So she goes over to pet him and he acknowledges her and goes back to being normal. Just thought that was weird too.

- I was lying in bed again. My bed was situated in the corner of the room. So I turned over to go to sleep and my face was looking towards the wall. I then saw a hand make a half-circle motion from under the side of the bed over and disappear under the other side of the bed. Even writing this now, I can picture what I saw very clearly. Gives me goose bumps just thinking about it.
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Every time I go into the downstairs bathroom of my house, I get this bizarre, almost oppressive feeling. I'm prone to paranoia, so I've always tried to ignore it. After a while, the sense of something out of place got stronger... it seemed localized under the utility sink. I was getting this faint vision in my head of a little boy, maybe five years old, with brown hair and a long, red-and-white striped nightie. I figured I was crazy, but tried to avoid the room anyway. Fast forward a few months -- I'm over at my friend's house. Another friend is there, and we're just fooling around with the Ouiji board. We get to talking about ghosts, and I mention the feelings I get in the downstairs bathroom. My friend (the one who's been to my house) pipes in and says that she sometimes dreams she goes down there and there's this little boy hiding under the sink, with the shadow of a man wielding a knife on the wall, but she never sees anything happen.

I asked her to describe the boy and, though I had never told her what he looked like, she described "Brandon," as I had begun to call him, exactly as I always saw him.
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In 1987-88, I worked at a small radio station in Lebanon, TN. WCOR-AM 900, a little 500 watt *powerhouse* on the edge of town, had been on the air since 1947 or so. That was the earliest telegram I had found in the archives. I was, at various times, the morning guy, afternoon, evening drive-time, and late night close-up-the-station guy. I was also the Chief Engineer because I was the only person that knew how to solder. The building was in two sections; a new two-story section where the studio, transmitter, offices, and all that stuff lived; and a squat, one-story section where the old studios were. It was essentially abandoned. No lights, no furniture...

Anyways, one evening I was alone at the station, playing full albums to piss off the GM (General Manager) and generally being lazy. I heard someone walking up the stairs. This was odd, since it was about 10:30 at night, and the only person supposed to be there was me. I went to the front and checked for a car, but mine was the only one there. I called up the stairs, but no one answered. I went up the stairs, but just as I got almost to the top, I caught a severe case of the (willies, heebie-jeebies, severe pussying out syndrome), and ran back to the DJ booth.

The record was almost over, so I went through the motions, changed the song, and sat back again. Then I heard the tromp-tromp-tromp of someone coming back down the stairs. Then I heard the tromp-tromp-tromp of that person coming up the hall towards the booth. I reached around and grabbed a mop handle. As I sat there, the tromp-tromping came through the door, up beside me, around behind me, and out through the door to the transmitter room. I followed this with my head and eyes, and no one was attached to the tromp-tromp-tromp.

Well, as you can imagine, I squealed like a little girl. After this, the spook would come tromping around the radio station at night, but only when I was alone. He'd sometimes stand right in front of the mixing board and watch me do my show. Finally, I looked up one time and said, "Okay, if you're going to hang around, at least let me see you." Well, that was a mistake. The room became unbearably cold, and the air in front of me began to warp like a heat mirage. I squealed again and hollered, "Never mind! No, NO, no, no! Just go away!!!" The spook tromped off back to the old part of the building.

Later that week, I almost jumped over the GM's desk telling him to move me to an earlier timeslot. Everything worked out well, and I moved to the shift before the one late at night. I trained the new guy and let him run the shift by himself for a couple or three weeks. Of course, I never told him about the spook.

After letting him alone, I stayed after my shift to chitty-chat with him about his shift. As we talked, I asked him if anything strange happened during his shift and he replied, "Oh yeah, there's a spirit that comes around at night." I almost shit my pants right there. This kid was a bit insanely religious, and kept calling this spook a demon. While we were talking, the spook tromp-tromp-tromped up the hall into the production room and was looking over my shoulder through the glass. The room got chilly, and I was not happy about it. The kid said, "Just rebuke him in Jesus' name." Well, I'd never thought to do that, so I turned around, looked at the window and said, "Jesus says to get the fuck outta here." The spook tromped back to the old section and left us alone for the night.