Ghost stories, part 5
It's post-Halloween, but I don't care. Here are some more ghost stories. I'll continue posting them in parts, haha. :D
Back when I was knee-high to a grasshopper, my uncle was something of a... free spirit. He changed wives and addresses on a regular basis, and pretty much lived life in the impulse zone. Anyway, he finally finds a wife-of-the-month-club selection he likes, and settles down with her in a shitty little rental house. (Somewhere in Federal Heights, close to the turnpike and about 80th Avenue, best I can recall. Cologoons should know what I'm talking about....)
Anyway, a few weeks after they take possession, weird shit starts going down. Apparently there was something very wrong with the house, like, Poltergeist-style wrong. I've gotten yarns from my parents about some incredibly strange shit that happened at that place in the month they lived there. Apparently, closet doors had a nasty habit of slamming shut and getting stuck for no apparent reason, especially when someone was in the closet. He also had to keep the wall cabinet for his dartboard shut and locked, as apparently something liked to open the cabinet at night, and hurl darts willy-nilly about the basement. He says he found darts embedded in the walls and ceiling down there, despite the doors and windows being closed and locked.
The kicker came about a week before they moved out. Old Unc had stayed up late Saturday, sipping at Grandpappy's cough medicine. He stumbles off to bed, and proceeds to fall into a drunken slumber. He gets woken up by a thump, and sees what he describes as "what I took to be a crackhead prowler," or simply a dark shape with nasty red eyes staring at him from the doorway. He flicks on the lamp, and the shape promptly melts away.
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My dad's brother Jim died. Jim had been staying with my grandparents on and off for various reasons, and after he died, Dad volunteered to help them box up his stuff. So Dad was in the guest room Jim had used, and he was putting something or another into a box. He tells me he had a very sudden strong sense of Jim's presence, and turned around to look out the door into the hallway.
There in the hall was Jim, looking at him. Jim turned the corner and moved on. Dad went to look... nobody was there. The house was otherwise empty.
An interesting not-ghost-related-but-paranormal-and-worth-telling bit, one of my dad's other brothers was mentally handicapped. When I was a wee lad, this other brother, Rich, was going to get a cavity filled. He didn't really understand what was going on and was a bit freaked out. My grandpa took him in the evening to the dentist. My dad, who'd always been close to Rich, was at the same time in a class at night school.
So in the midst of class, things were going well, when suddenly Dad felt an intense pain in his tooth and felt like he'd hit a brick wall, fell out of his chair. He sat back down but his face felt numb. After a little while, he was fine. Can you guess the rest of it? That's right, kids, this happened at roughly the same time as Rich's procedure began. Neat, huh?
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I'm from Topeka, Kansas. This is quite possibly the most boring town with more than a hundred thousand people that exists anywhere. Twenty miles away is Lawrence, home of the University of Kansas. Quite a nice town to be in. The quickest way to get from Topeka to Lawrence is the turnpike, but if you're a cheap bastard, you take the rural highways. There are two of these. If you get on 45th Street headed east out of Topeka, you'll eventually run into Stull, KS. This village is the most frightening place I've ever driven through, including Bob Jones University.
Stull consists almost entirely of a couple houses and a cemetery. The old church in this cemetery is in ruins; no door, no roof. According to local legend, it's also the home of one of the seven entrances to hell.
Apart from this, there are several mini-legends about the church. If you make a cross out of two glass bottles and hurl them at the wall, they will not break. Rain will not fall inside the church, despite the absence of a roof. And, not so much a legend as a fact, if you so much as drive past this cemetery, the locals will follow you, and, perhaps, shoot at you.
This story takes place almost eighteen years ago, in the fall of 1984. My brother was a senior in high school at the time, and a couple of his friends decided they were going to check out the cemetery one night. They invited Todd, and he declined the invitation, as he had to tend bar that night. Yes, my brother started bartending at age 17. Yes, his boss did give him a fake ID.
They told him the story during an art class the next day, as they were doing self-portraits. One of the girls who went attempted the bottle trick. Apparently she didn't do it right, as the bottles broke as they collided with the side of the building. The rest of the scouting party did it correctly, and the bottles remained intact. Katy, the girl whose bottles broke, had seemed distracted all day, but was now oddly entranced by her work. In my brother's words, "She seemed insanely focused and a million miles away at the same time."
When the class eventually ended, she put her sketchbook down, and everyone stared at it. The following image is (obviously) not the original, it's one I made in five minutes with MS Paint, but it gets the point across nicely:
Katy was dead in a car accident within a week.
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When I was five, I remember walking around my uncle's old house, and hearing this voice calling to me from one of the bedrooms. I went in, and followed the voice behind the bed, and saw a small china doll standing behind it. It said hi to me, and asked how I was doing, and started asking questions about me. Then it told me to listen closely, and started in on this barrage of... instructions or something, going on for probably a half-hour. For some reason, I wasn't freaked the fuck out by this little doll standing there and warning / telling me things -- I just stood there and nodded my head, feeling like a little kid does when an adult is telling him something that he knows must be important, but that he doesn't have a clue as to its meaning.
Eventually, my mother called me to go home, so the china doll waved, told me goodbye, and I left. I told my mother about it and she said I must have fallen asleep on that bed and dreamed it, or it was one of my cousins playing a trick on me, but I saw the doll move and speak. I remember the scene like it was yesterday, but I can't for the life of me remember a single thing that the doll told me.
A shadow-figure used to watch over me in the house where I grew up, standing between my bed and the door leading to the kitchen. It would only appear for one week, every year, in August, between 1984 (or at least that's when I first noticed it) and 1991. It never moved, spoke, or anything, just stood there still as a stone, every night, for the week that it would appear. It appeared its last time in 1991, the year I graduated from high school. All other sorts of weird things used to happen in that house (but on too small a scale to be mentioned here), which was on top of a wide hill and -- if I divined correctly -- at the nexus of at least ten intersecting ley lines.
My cousin and I, starting around... 1989, I think, began seeing this black cat in our peripheral vision occasionally, and when we'd turn to get a better look it would run behind something, fast as lightning. My cousin actually caught it watching him one day and said its eyes were bright red. It stalked us for three years, appearing about once a month or so, then stopped until 1996, when we both -- living in different areas and not in communication with each other -- started seeing it again.
My cousin stopped seeing it after a few months, but it kept following me for years, appearing as the cat, then a hawk, sometimes a small round shadow, and eventually settling into one form - the silhouette of a man wearing a hat. This fucker stalked my peripheral vision, usually appearing many times a day, one day out of the month, then started showing himself just once a day, once every few months, and around 1999 he stopped showing up at all. I am glad this happened.
And lastly...
In the summer of 2000, a friend and I were desperately looking for work, and took a job helping this guy tear the rotten drywall and boards out of this old, old, house in the middle of town. As soon as I entered this place, I got my "feeling." I knew something was up. But I needed to get to work, so I ignored it. So after a couple of hours working downstairs, I climb upstairs to toss some scrap wood down to my friend to load on the trailer. After a while, it got hot and we decided to take a break, so I started toward the stairs to go down and grab a bottle of water.
As I reach the stairs and start to turn, I happen to glance at the window opposite on the wall and standing in front of me is this short, cute redhead, maybe between thirteen and sixteen, just happily smiling up at me. I do a doubletake and she's gone, and I think to myself, "Oh crap." Working downstairs again after the break, I'm pulling out drywall, and I keep sensing my friend walking up from behind me, and when I turn around to see what he wants, no one's there. After the fifth time this happened, I stopped working, and said to the room, "All right, chica, I don't got time to play around, I have work to do. Go away." She left me alone after that.
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Okay. So, I know this girl. She's pretty much a loon, but she's a good friend and I believe this story. She told it to me like this:
She, and her family, are like ghost magnets. They just tend to have creepy shit happen to all of them. But one story stands out that she's told me. Now, she's changed houses a lot over the years, but the last house she lived in before this had some serious ghost-y stuff. Specifically, her shed was haunted. Not the rest of the house.. just the shed. Lots of weird crap happening on there. Now, the story. Her dad was in that shed, and, tired of the ghost shit, he announced, "Y'know, I think I'm gonna tear this thing down." About three seconds later, a brick that had been sitting far back on a shelf LAUNCHED itself off the shelf and beaned him in the head.
He didn't tear down the shed.
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When my parents divorced, they each needed new lodging. My mother found an old house (think 18th century), and moved in. It's a lovely house. Spacious, and to think of it now, during the summer, it was always cool inside even with no air conditioning or fans. Walking inside the house, it would get 10-15 degrees colder.
I spent a good deal of time alone in the house, as I lived there from when I turned 15, until I left for college. Many times I'd heard knocks on the walls, or footsteps on the stairs. It was an old house though, and old houses settle. That makes sense. The same thing could be said for the cold. The house was always dark inside, despite its huge windows facing every direction.
I could write off the noises, and the cold. Those seemed fine. There were things I couldn't write off though. Sometimes I'd hear my name. Loudly. As if someone was calling me. If my mother was home, I'd yell: "Yeah, Mom?" and she'd reply with: "What?" The converse also happened. "Jay?" "I didn't say anything."
There would be pressure on my bed at night. I had a cat though, so most of the time I figured it was her. She didn't normally sleep with me, but enjoyed running across my bed. I never though anything of it, until one night when my cat slept with me on the bed. Curled up next to my chest and purring, I was about to doze off, when I felt a pressure on the end of my bed. My cat stood up, stared, and then sprinted out of the room. In an interesting connection, the pressure thing used to happen where I lived before. It started shortly after my father's cat John died. He was around 20 years old, and sort of watched over me as a baby. If I fell down while learning to walk, John would drag someone to find me. Sometimes John would push me over himself. He was bigger than I was then.
Another night, I had finished homework, and I lay down in bed to sleep, when I heard a rhythmic creaking noise. I looked up, grabbed my glasses, and my rocking chair was rocking, fairly hard. Not violently, it rocked smooth and steady, though I couldn't arrest its progress with my hands. Eventually I spoke loudly, "I need to sleep. You're not welcome here at night." I was starting to think it was a ghost by this point in the saga, and I was very careful not to tell it to leave, or that it was scary or unwelcome, as I was afraid it would turn angry.
I finally decided it was a ghost on a spring morning, when I was 17 or so. I had my girlfriend over, and we were doing what teenagers do, playing Scrabble. At any rate, we had just finished, and I was pulling my pants on, when she demanded we leave right away. She didn't have a car, so I had to drive her home. I figured she was late for something, so I dragged a shirt on as I followed her downstairs, and got in my car. The whole time she was telling me to hurry.
We drove for about 5 minutes in silence towards her house, when she asked if I had "seen it."
"Seen what?"
She told me she saw a black male, around 6', walk past my door, look into the room, and then walk through a wall.
That's when I told my experiences to my mother, and she revealed that she too heard footsteps around her bed, and had said numerous times to the presence that she "didn't believe in it."
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Over a year ago, my roommate and I had just moved into a new apartment. She had another month of college left before graduation; I already graduated and moved in early. For the month or so I was there, nothing out of the ordinary happened.
**As a side-note, this apartment was a townhouse that was built in the 1940s.
Anyways, roommate moves in and everything is fine. Then the weirdness starts. Naturally, it only affects my room. It started out as little things: I would walk up the stairs and into my room and see shadows, I would always feel as though someone else was in the room with me, I would wake up in the middle of the night and just have the weirdest sensations of not being alone. Then it progressed to my waking up and hearing whispering in my ear. I would see things out of the corner of my eye as I walked in. They were more than just shadows.
This shit started to freak me out a bit. Then it got worse. I would wake up during the night and actually feel something in the bed with me. It would feel like someone is climbing into the bed with me. I would be kinda delirious from waking up, and assume it was my boyfriend. Yeah, it wasn't. My bed was against the wall and I slept on the outer side. So, this feeling was one of someone getting on the bed, climbing over me, and then getting under the covers next to me. The bed would actually be reacting as if someone was really there (the mattress would dip down, the sheets were moving, etc.) After that happened more than once (at first I thought I was just dreaming, but came to realize that was not true), I began talking to my roommate about it. She didn't believe me.
The next incident is what topped the taco.... I was in bed asleep, and, again, the sensations of someone getting into bed with me were going on. This time, it actually felt like an arm was around me and someone was, quite literally, spooning me in the bed. Got the hell out of Dodge like nobody's business and slept in my roommate's room. Next day, I convinced her to sleep in my room and see if anything happens. She drags her mattress in there and does. Sometime in the night, she wakes up, freaks out, and drags her mattress back into her room. Apparently, she saw some sort of orb light things coming out of the closet. The closet always had weird shit going on with it. The cats hated going in there, avoided it, the door would never close, etc.
We took some pictures of the closet with my digital camera and, sure enough, there were orbs on some of them. For the longest time, I was scared to sleep in that room. Then I moved, and it's fine.
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Part 1
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My first encounter ever with something .. odd .. was when I was camping. I was a total UFO freak at the time, I'm sure many of you went through that phase. Where nothing was cooler than Aliens and OMG LIGHTS IN THE SKY! My Dad and I were camping at this place called the Curn (Kurn?) River in California, it's a good drive east of Bakersfield, I think. Anyway, there are some good places to camp there because it's too far away for all the idiot college students to come get drunk, and the only people there are fishermen pretty much. So I'd spend my days fishing, and usually we'd meet some cool camper who we'd make friends with for the trip.
On this trip, it was a guy named Jeff. Jeff came from LA, owned an SUV before they were all the rage, and was a helluva nice guy. I remember he liked Beavis and Butthead, and since he was over 40, that made him like the coolest guy alive in my book at the time. So I always had a lot to talk to about with Jeff, since he liked UFOs too, and would tell me stories about how Indians used to make cave paintings about them and stuff.
Anyway one night we were sitting up late roasting marshmallows or something around a campfire. My dad had gone to bed early, as he always does, so we were talking about paranormal stuff again. Not ghosts, but UFOs. So the mood late at night around a fire out in the woods was already kinda creepy. Then it just showed up.
I was the first to spot it, I think, it came from around behind my tent. A little, white orb, a tad bit smaller than a volley ball, but kinda fuzzyish and almost with a sort of a diffuse glow to it. I thought it was a squirrel at first, then realized due to the fact that it was floating about 6 inches off the ground that it probably wasn't.
"Jeff," I said.
"Yeah, Undaine?"
"What the hell is that?"
Jeff looked up to see the same thing coming towards us. The grass around us was long, and it was brushing the tops of it, but we could see that it DEFINITELY did not touch the ground. It was heading towards our fire, and consequently, us.
"Uh ... I ... uh ... we should move."
We did. The orb thing passed only a few feet from us in the full glow of the fire. It had no real defined edges, which is why I call it kinda fuzzy and glowing. But it moved very fluently, and made kinda an arc around the fire, and proceeded to take a left up a hill and towards a bush. While it was doing this, we must have been saying: "What is that?" "I don't know" a good 300 times.
We stood there after it went up the hill and into a large (but mostly see through) bush for a few seconds, then, like morons, decided that we had to go find it. We ran around the bush, and onto a road behind it, looking all over..
I don't remember the rest of the night.
This is strange, because I remember everything else perfectly as if it just happened. I woke up in the tent next to my dad at sunup. It freaks the fuck out of me to this day. Jeff went home the next morning, and we never heard from him again, but he did confirm the story with me before he left in front of my Dad, so at least he knows I'm not batshit insane.
Other stuff happens at home (and unfortunately still is), so when I tell my family I've seen something wrong in the house now, they don't laugh at me.
Lucky me.
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Part 2
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My house is old, it's been around since like 1880. We've had a rich family history in this house. We're not buried on an Indian graveyard, no murders have taken place, no one's buried in the walls, nothing that would raise any kind of normal angst you need normally for a ghost to hang around. But, unfortunately, this one doesn't seem to care.
First off I should say it's not so much exclusively my house as it is my "area" that has this problem. My uncle next door used to see it too, and when I was very young (and lived in my uncle's house now) I remember standing in my crib before I could even talk, watching the pretty lights in the room, in the middle of the night while my parents slept.
Anyway, my uncle was the first one to see it. He woke up at 3 AM due to my aunt screaming (she does this, it's a sleep problem) and comforted her like he usually does. Only tonight, she was screaming: "OH GOD, STEVE, THERE'S SOMEONE IN THE ROOM!"
"No honey, there's no one here."
"YES! YES, THERE IS! HE'S RIGHT THERE!" *more screaming*
"No sweetie, I can see everything, everything's fine."
At this point she was satisfied, and went back to sleep. My uncle was about to as well, when he noticed something in his groggy state. It was 3 AM, and he could see the room very clearly. An orange glow was lighting the entire thing. Not emanating from a source, but actually exuding from the walls.
He thought about this for a second, closed his eyes, and reopened them.
Darkness.
His first and final thought that night was "Oh, that's better," before he went back to sleep.
...
The ghost still liked my Uncle though, and the exact same incident repeated itself a few weeks later, with my aunt screaming, and the room lit up at 3 AM once again. This time, instead of going back to sleep, my Uncle (who is a much, much braver man than I) got up and yelled at it and told it to go the hell away and not come back. And with that, poof. Walls went out. Uncle went back to bed, and it hasn't bothered him since.
Because it found someone more responsive to bother. It moved in with MY family. Thank you, Uncle Steve, for the lovely ghost. It's just what my panic attack / weak heart family has always wanted.
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Part 3
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Shortly after my uncle banished it using his balls of pure steel, my mom woke up for absolutely no reason at, you guessed it, 3 AM. She couldn't figure out why she woke up at first, and looked around the room to see if one of the cats was there. The cats (who ALWAYS sleep with my mom) had run away. She thought that was odd, when she noted that she could see the whole room at 3 AM, because it was tinted with an orange glow. She looked around the room for the source, and in the corner of one of the walls, floating high above the ground, was Mister Orb again. She described it like an orb but it had sort of an electricity to it like if you see heat coming off hot pavement.
My mom, being less brave, hid under the covers trying to wake my dad until she fell asleep hours later in a cold sweat.
After that, it liked to do other things.
Stuff will be moved in my house. We don't talk about it, we just put it back in the places it should be and ignore it, or blame the cats for moving the candlestick / chair / refrigerator / whatever. In particular, it likes to knock over plants. When we hear footsteps at night in the attic, we blame the raccoons. Raccoons apparently weigh about 180 pounds and wear men's shoes. The attic, incidentally, is about 4 feet tall and no person in the world could walk like that up there. When the cats stare at things that aren't there, we usually just leave the room. When stuff scrapes against the windows in the guest room when guests are there, or on the glass 10 feet off the ground in the TV room, we tell them that is just from the tree. Note: There is no tree. It turns TVs on. It turns radios on. It closes doors, it knocks shit over in anger when I tell jokes to my parents that I read here.
Heh, that reminds me, about 3 weeks ago I told a string of dead baby jokes to my parents at dinner, and a plate flew off a shelf and crashed to the table. I apologized to the ghost, my parents laughed, and we continued eating.
As of recently, it's taken up the habit of screaming at us in the middle of the night, waking us up and sending us looking for the noise for a few seconds before we all pretend we needed to "just go to the bathroom," so its easier to ignore it and get back to sleep. This has only happened twice, and within the last month.
It has followed me to hotel rooms in Vegas, when it scared the shit out of a friend of mine, and started all the hangers in a closet shaking on their own when the only two people in the room were me and him. He claimed he saw an image of a person that night, which kinda makes me think that it was a different ghost, because all this one ever shows up as is as an orb, or just an orange glow, or both.
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This story involves my mom. One night she was sleeping and suddenly woke up for some reason. She started to hear a whimpering. Thinking "What the hell is that?", she gets up and starts walking around the room to see where the sound is coming from. My mom finally gets to her closet (it was a walk in) and slides the door. When she slid the door, sitting there in the corner of the closet, was an old man crying. I think my mom said she something to him, but there was no answer. I am not sure what happened after that as I don't even think she remembers.
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Story 1. The People
This is a quick one. In October one year at 2 AM, I awoke to sounds. I looked outside my window and saw a group of white clothed and hooded (not KKK) people with torches standing at the end of our property (3 acres) on the gravel road. They were just standing there. I awoke my parents, they saw them, and they ordered us to lock all the doors and get upstairs and lock the door. We watched them for an hour, then they just turned around and walked into the woods. FUCKED UP? YES!
Story 2. The Faces
Upstairs in our house, all the walls and ceilings are covered in swirl spackle designs. Most have been covered up with paneling and tile over the years. In the earlier days, I would wake up in cold sweats after having dreams of demons attacking me. I would open my eyes and look around the room in the moonlight. My eyes would focus on the swirling patterns. Now, I had a great imagination, but I know what's real. I'm always a skeptic. I would often see the patterns changing, forming faces and watching me, their mouths gaping open and closed like screams. I would scream for my mom, but nothing came out. My mom would finally hear me and comfort me. Also, my brother would sleepwalk a lot and sit and the top of the stairs. I would sometimes catch him and ask, "Why are you out here?" His response: "The faces." He attests he remembers nothing of these occasions.
Story 3. The Gateway
This one gets more fucked up every time I visit home, and I will explain why. For years as a kid and especially my high school years, I would see a greenish vaporlike form come between my room and my parents' room. It would come through the wall, hover, then vanish. This happened at least twice a month. As years went by and especially now when I go home, I look at the wall. The spackling is beginning to settle with age and an actual DOORWAY is coming through the wall. It looks like it was covered up years ago. Definitely over 25 years ago, since we moved there.
Story 4. Fred
My dad is a light sleeper. If you wake him up, he stays awake. Well, my dad has many stories (my mom backs up) of him waking up and someone walking up and down the stairs. Loudly. It wakes my dad up. Also, sometimes during the morning, my mom sees a black shape of a man standing in front of her and then he disappears. My mom calls him Frank. My mom spoke to the former owners about this (we are good friends) and they say, "Oh, Fred! Yeah, we've seen him many times."
Story 5. The Tombstone
There is a small, 1800's to early 1900's graveyard down the road. It's in a woods by a marsh. I would sometimes wander around it. Well, when I had my paper route for three years, I would ride by every day. There is a particular stone in the back corner that sort of resembles the Empire State Building. It is broken off at the base and lies two feet away. Every day, for three years, I would pick up that stone and set it on its base. Every day for 3 years, I would repeat. It always was lying two feet away in the same position.
Story 6. The Scariest Shit I've Ever Experienced.
Last year, I visited home with my girlfriend. She stayed the night, we had a little fun, and she left the next day. The following night, as I'm sleeping, I wake up. There is an OLD child's rocking chair in my room with stuffed animals on it. The thing starts ROCKING. I'm freaking out and freeze with fear. I really wish that was it. Next, the stuffed animals start falling out of the chair one at a time. I'm freaking out and stiff as a board paralyzed with fear. So I'm lying there freaking out, and I pull the covers up higher and turn on my side. The chair stops. I start calling for my mom. I couldn't produce words. Remember, I'm 24 years old! So I give up and lie on my side. Suddenly, cold breezes start blowing on my ears. I'm REALLY freaking.
SO I turn on my side and tense completely up. What happened next, I will NEVER forget. I'm laying there and SUDDENLY a voice whispers in my FUCKING EAR. It was unintelligible, but imagine someone talking by breathing in and speaking backwards. I SCREAM AND BOLT OUT OF MY ROOM and jump into my parents' bed! I'm freaking out! My dad is pissed. My mom is trying to calm me down. She assures me it's okay. Finally she says: "Oh, that was probably Frank. We haven't seen him for about six months, and we don't know why." That did NOT help. So I ended up going back into my room and turned on my light and managed to fall asleep about an hour later.
The next day, I was talking to my girlfriend and she reminded me she was on her period. She also informed me that hormonal women are sometimes attributed to waking up sleeping spirits. Um.... She also informed me she's never sleeping over there again. She broke up with me last January, so that's not a problem.
There have been many other small things that have happened. Corner-of-the-eye apparitions, things moving from where they were, etc. We also have an old dirt cellar with steps leading down. Let me tell you, I'm 25 now and I still can't go down there without thinking some fucking zombie is going to reach through the steps and grab my legs. We have holes in the side of our basement walls that lead into small rooms. I explored in there as a kid and found all sorts of animal bones.
Goddamn, my house was fucked up.
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Not sure if this qualifies as a ghost story, but it's definitely paranormal. OK, so about 9 years ago, a friend and I are sitting in my basement watching TV. We hear some noises -- sounded like scratching -- at the window behind us. There was snow on the ground, but we decided to investigate it. Traipsing around outside, we found a set of footprints leading up to the window. Not ordinary footprints, these were cloven-hooves. My friend and I are both Eagle Scouts, and could ID a footprint from a mile away, but we were both aghast at the sight of these things. We looked around a bit, and found something even more disturbing. The footprints began in the middle of an acre of snow, led up to the window, and then vanished.
A little bit fucked up, but then things started to happen. I was big-time into keeping aquariums back in those days, and kept my main tank in the same spot. Every fish I put into that tank disappeared. No, they didn't jump out; no, my parents didn't throw them out. No, they didn't get sucked up by the filter. They just plain disappeared. Whatever I put in that tank vanished within a few weeks. Big fish, too - piranhas, full-sized Oscars, you name it, it vanished. Months later, I investigated the ceiling below where that tank was. It was INVERTED. As in, it looked like someone, or something, had vacuumed the ceiling from within the walls.
We later moved out of that house, and found out that the child of the new owners killed herself in the spot where that fishtank was.
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My experience was absolutely the most horrifying thing I have encountered in my life. This happened between 7th and 8th grade, I was at a Boy Scout summer camp called Camp Baker just outside of Florence, Oregon. The camp itself is situated out on a peninsula that juts out into this big lake and our campsite was one of the sites on the very tip of the peninsula. If you've been to a BS summer camp, you've probably seen the canvas tents we use. They are large and usually have a frame built inside of them, but the biggest problem with them is that they usually don't seal up very well and you can usually see out through cracks, especially through the flaps of the door. One night, I awoke suddenly and it was really quiet out. I rolled over in my sleeping bag and looked at the crack in the door only to be greeted by two extremely red dots. These dots I can only describe as laser pointers. They were bright red, and were in total contrast to the complete darkness of the night. They were definitely some sort of eyes that they were looking in right at us.
When I read these other stories and people describe the sheer terror of seeing something unknown I can totally understand. These "eyes" alone made me freeze, I couldn't move at all. I just lay there for about 15 minutes. Finally it moved to the side of the tent, stayed there for a couple minutes, moved to the back of the tent, stayed there for a couple minutes and then finally moved to the other side of the tent. By this time, I managed to summon enough courage to roll over and after listening for several minutes and not hearing anything, I finally fell back asleep. To this day, every time I think of this, I try to convince my self that it was some animal, but something in my brain tells me that isn't right. It was just those eyes, so piercing and bright… it was totally inhuman and unlike any animal ever encountered. To this day, this memory gives me goosebumps. I guess that isn't totally scary, but at the time I was just floored.
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I really wish my apartment building had stuff going on in it. It was built in 1912, and I'm sure things went on in there. Of course, now it's full of college students, so hey, maybe we scared everything off.
However, I get plenty when I go home to my parents' house. It was built in 1979, and not on any graveyards or anything so far as we know. My parents have been the only owners. No one has died or been horribly disfiguringly injured there. We often hear people walking up and down the stairs, opening and shutting the doors, and moving things around, when all people at home are accounted for and couldn't have been making the noises.
My mother has seen a small, blonde boy in blue overalls running about before. She doesn't recognize him as family. My uncle saw the same boy two days later at his house in Michigan, 400 miles away. He called my mom after this, only to find out that she'd seen him too.
Nobody in my house smokes, but every so often you can smell pipe or cigar smoke, especially in the living room and kitchen. None of our neighbors smoke these either. You can also occasionally smell what I'm told is my great-grandmother's perfume - it's a very distinctive floral that she apparently had custom-mixed. My mother wears Obsession, which smells nothing like it, so it's not residuals from her.
I've been repeatedly tucked in at night by someone who wasn't there. I would be laying in bed awake, waiting for my mom to come give me a kiss goodnight, when I could feel someone come into the room and walk up to my bed. I'd roll over, and wouldn't be able to see anyone.
I've also come home to see my dead relatives sitting on my bed at school, or on the couch in my parents' living room. They laugh when I jump a mile and then try to calmly ask them what's going on. So basically, my dead relatives won't leave my family alone. Not that we'd want them to.
Back when I was knee-high to a grasshopper, my uncle was something of a... free spirit. He changed wives and addresses on a regular basis, and pretty much lived life in the impulse zone. Anyway, he finally finds a wife-of-the-month-club selection he likes, and settles down with her in a shitty little rental house. (Somewhere in Federal Heights, close to the turnpike and about 80th Avenue, best I can recall. Cologoons should know what I'm talking about....)
Anyway, a few weeks after they take possession, weird shit starts going down. Apparently there was something very wrong with the house, like, Poltergeist-style wrong. I've gotten yarns from my parents about some incredibly strange shit that happened at that place in the month they lived there. Apparently, closet doors had a nasty habit of slamming shut and getting stuck for no apparent reason, especially when someone was in the closet. He also had to keep the wall cabinet for his dartboard shut and locked, as apparently something liked to open the cabinet at night, and hurl darts willy-nilly about the basement. He says he found darts embedded in the walls and ceiling down there, despite the doors and windows being closed and locked.
The kicker came about a week before they moved out. Old Unc had stayed up late Saturday, sipping at Grandpappy's cough medicine. He stumbles off to bed, and proceeds to fall into a drunken slumber. He gets woken up by a thump, and sees what he describes as "what I took to be a crackhead prowler," or simply a dark shape with nasty red eyes staring at him from the doorway. He flicks on the lamp, and the shape promptly melts away.
====================
My dad's brother Jim died. Jim had been staying with my grandparents on and off for various reasons, and after he died, Dad volunteered to help them box up his stuff. So Dad was in the guest room Jim had used, and he was putting something or another into a box. He tells me he had a very sudden strong sense of Jim's presence, and turned around to look out the door into the hallway.
There in the hall was Jim, looking at him. Jim turned the corner and moved on. Dad went to look... nobody was there. The house was otherwise empty.
An interesting not-ghost-related-but-paranormal-and-worth-telling bit, one of my dad's other brothers was mentally handicapped. When I was a wee lad, this other brother, Rich, was going to get a cavity filled. He didn't really understand what was going on and was a bit freaked out. My grandpa took him in the evening to the dentist. My dad, who'd always been close to Rich, was at the same time in a class at night school.
So in the midst of class, things were going well, when suddenly Dad felt an intense pain in his tooth and felt like he'd hit a brick wall, fell out of his chair. He sat back down but his face felt numb. After a little while, he was fine. Can you guess the rest of it? That's right, kids, this happened at roughly the same time as Rich's procedure began. Neat, huh?
====================
I'm from Topeka, Kansas. This is quite possibly the most boring town with more than a hundred thousand people that exists anywhere. Twenty miles away is Lawrence, home of the University of Kansas. Quite a nice town to be in. The quickest way to get from Topeka to Lawrence is the turnpike, but if you're a cheap bastard, you take the rural highways. There are two of these. If you get on 45th Street headed east out of Topeka, you'll eventually run into Stull, KS. This village is the most frightening place I've ever driven through, including Bob Jones University.
Stull consists almost entirely of a couple houses and a cemetery. The old church in this cemetery is in ruins; no door, no roof. According to local legend, it's also the home of one of the seven entrances to hell.
Apart from this, there are several mini-legends about the church. If you make a cross out of two glass bottles and hurl them at the wall, they will not break. Rain will not fall inside the church, despite the absence of a roof. And, not so much a legend as a fact, if you so much as drive past this cemetery, the locals will follow you, and, perhaps, shoot at you.
This story takes place almost eighteen years ago, in the fall of 1984. My brother was a senior in high school at the time, and a couple of his friends decided they were going to check out the cemetery one night. They invited Todd, and he declined the invitation, as he had to tend bar that night. Yes, my brother started bartending at age 17. Yes, his boss did give him a fake ID.
They told him the story during an art class the next day, as they were doing self-portraits. One of the girls who went attempted the bottle trick. Apparently she didn't do it right, as the bottles broke as they collided with the side of the building. The rest of the scouting party did it correctly, and the bottles remained intact. Katy, the girl whose bottles broke, had seemed distracted all day, but was now oddly entranced by her work. In my brother's words, "She seemed insanely focused and a million miles away at the same time."
When the class eventually ended, she put her sketchbook down, and everyone stared at it. The following image is (obviously) not the original, it's one I made in five minutes with MS Paint, but it gets the point across nicely:
Katy was dead in a car accident within a week.
========================
When I was five, I remember walking around my uncle's old house, and hearing this voice calling to me from one of the bedrooms. I went in, and followed the voice behind the bed, and saw a small china doll standing behind it. It said hi to me, and asked how I was doing, and started asking questions about me. Then it told me to listen closely, and started in on this barrage of... instructions or something, going on for probably a half-hour. For some reason, I wasn't freaked the fuck out by this little doll standing there and warning / telling me things -- I just stood there and nodded my head, feeling like a little kid does when an adult is telling him something that he knows must be important, but that he doesn't have a clue as to its meaning.
Eventually, my mother called me to go home, so the china doll waved, told me goodbye, and I left. I told my mother about it and she said I must have fallen asleep on that bed and dreamed it, or it was one of my cousins playing a trick on me, but I saw the doll move and speak. I remember the scene like it was yesterday, but I can't for the life of me remember a single thing that the doll told me.
A shadow-figure used to watch over me in the house where I grew up, standing between my bed and the door leading to the kitchen. It would only appear for one week, every year, in August, between 1984 (or at least that's when I first noticed it) and 1991. It never moved, spoke, or anything, just stood there still as a stone, every night, for the week that it would appear. It appeared its last time in 1991, the year I graduated from high school. All other sorts of weird things used to happen in that house (but on too small a scale to be mentioned here), which was on top of a wide hill and -- if I divined correctly -- at the nexus of at least ten intersecting ley lines.
My cousin and I, starting around... 1989, I think, began seeing this black cat in our peripheral vision occasionally, and when we'd turn to get a better look it would run behind something, fast as lightning. My cousin actually caught it watching him one day and said its eyes were bright red. It stalked us for three years, appearing about once a month or so, then stopped until 1996, when we both -- living in different areas and not in communication with each other -- started seeing it again.
My cousin stopped seeing it after a few months, but it kept following me for years, appearing as the cat, then a hawk, sometimes a small round shadow, and eventually settling into one form - the silhouette of a man wearing a hat. This fucker stalked my peripheral vision, usually appearing many times a day, one day out of the month, then started showing himself just once a day, once every few months, and around 1999 he stopped showing up at all. I am glad this happened.
And lastly...
In the summer of 2000, a friend and I were desperately looking for work, and took a job helping this guy tear the rotten drywall and boards out of this old, old, house in the middle of town. As soon as I entered this place, I got my "feeling." I knew something was up. But I needed to get to work, so I ignored it. So after a couple of hours working downstairs, I climb upstairs to toss some scrap wood down to my friend to load on the trailer. After a while, it got hot and we decided to take a break, so I started toward the stairs to go down and grab a bottle of water.
As I reach the stairs and start to turn, I happen to glance at the window opposite on the wall and standing in front of me is this short, cute redhead, maybe between thirteen and sixteen, just happily smiling up at me. I do a doubletake and she's gone, and I think to myself, "Oh crap." Working downstairs again after the break, I'm pulling out drywall, and I keep sensing my friend walking up from behind me, and when I turn around to see what he wants, no one's there. After the fifth time this happened, I stopped working, and said to the room, "All right, chica, I don't got time to play around, I have work to do. Go away." She left me alone after that.
==========================
Okay. So, I know this girl. She's pretty much a loon, but she's a good friend and I believe this story. She told it to me like this:
She, and her family, are like ghost magnets. They just tend to have creepy shit happen to all of them. But one story stands out that she's told me. Now, she's changed houses a lot over the years, but the last house she lived in before this had some serious ghost-y stuff. Specifically, her shed was haunted. Not the rest of the house.. just the shed. Lots of weird crap happening on there. Now, the story. Her dad was in that shed, and, tired of the ghost shit, he announced, "Y'know, I think I'm gonna tear this thing down." About three seconds later, a brick that had been sitting far back on a shelf LAUNCHED itself off the shelf and beaned him in the head.
He didn't tear down the shed.
========================
When my parents divorced, they each needed new lodging. My mother found an old house (think 18th century), and moved in. It's a lovely house. Spacious, and to think of it now, during the summer, it was always cool inside even with no air conditioning or fans. Walking inside the house, it would get 10-15 degrees colder.
I spent a good deal of time alone in the house, as I lived there from when I turned 15, until I left for college. Many times I'd heard knocks on the walls, or footsteps on the stairs. It was an old house though, and old houses settle. That makes sense. The same thing could be said for the cold. The house was always dark inside, despite its huge windows facing every direction.
I could write off the noises, and the cold. Those seemed fine. There were things I couldn't write off though. Sometimes I'd hear my name. Loudly. As if someone was calling me. If my mother was home, I'd yell: "Yeah, Mom?" and she'd reply with: "What?" The converse also happened. "Jay?" "I didn't say anything."
There would be pressure on my bed at night. I had a cat though, so most of the time I figured it was her. She didn't normally sleep with me, but enjoyed running across my bed. I never though anything of it, until one night when my cat slept with me on the bed. Curled up next to my chest and purring, I was about to doze off, when I felt a pressure on the end of my bed. My cat stood up, stared, and then sprinted out of the room. In an interesting connection, the pressure thing used to happen where I lived before. It started shortly after my father's cat John died. He was around 20 years old, and sort of watched over me as a baby. If I fell down while learning to walk, John would drag someone to find me. Sometimes John would push me over himself. He was bigger than I was then.
Another night, I had finished homework, and I lay down in bed to sleep, when I heard a rhythmic creaking noise. I looked up, grabbed my glasses, and my rocking chair was rocking, fairly hard. Not violently, it rocked smooth and steady, though I couldn't arrest its progress with my hands. Eventually I spoke loudly, "I need to sleep. You're not welcome here at night." I was starting to think it was a ghost by this point in the saga, and I was very careful not to tell it to leave, or that it was scary or unwelcome, as I was afraid it would turn angry.
I finally decided it was a ghost on a spring morning, when I was 17 or so. I had my girlfriend over, and we were doing what teenagers do, playing Scrabble. At any rate, we had just finished, and I was pulling my pants on, when she demanded we leave right away. She didn't have a car, so I had to drive her home. I figured she was late for something, so I dragged a shirt on as I followed her downstairs, and got in my car. The whole time she was telling me to hurry.
We drove for about 5 minutes in silence towards her house, when she asked if I had "seen it."
"Seen what?"
She told me she saw a black male, around 6', walk past my door, look into the room, and then walk through a wall.
That's when I told my experiences to my mother, and she revealed that she too heard footsteps around her bed, and had said numerous times to the presence that she "didn't believe in it."
========================
Over a year ago, my roommate and I had just moved into a new apartment. She had another month of college left before graduation; I already graduated and moved in early. For the month or so I was there, nothing out of the ordinary happened.
**As a side-note, this apartment was a townhouse that was built in the 1940s.
Anyways, roommate moves in and everything is fine. Then the weirdness starts. Naturally, it only affects my room. It started out as little things: I would walk up the stairs and into my room and see shadows, I would always feel as though someone else was in the room with me, I would wake up in the middle of the night and just have the weirdest sensations of not being alone. Then it progressed to my waking up and hearing whispering in my ear. I would see things out of the corner of my eye as I walked in. They were more than just shadows.
This shit started to freak me out a bit. Then it got worse. I would wake up during the night and actually feel something in the bed with me. It would feel like someone is climbing into the bed with me. I would be kinda delirious from waking up, and assume it was my boyfriend. Yeah, it wasn't. My bed was against the wall and I slept on the outer side. So, this feeling was one of someone getting on the bed, climbing over me, and then getting under the covers next to me. The bed would actually be reacting as if someone was really there (the mattress would dip down, the sheets were moving, etc.) After that happened more than once (at first I thought I was just dreaming, but came to realize that was not true), I began talking to my roommate about it. She didn't believe me.
The next incident is what topped the taco.... I was in bed asleep, and, again, the sensations of someone getting into bed with me were going on. This time, it actually felt like an arm was around me and someone was, quite literally, spooning me in the bed. Got the hell out of Dodge like nobody's business and slept in my roommate's room. Next day, I convinced her to sleep in my room and see if anything happens. She drags her mattress in there and does. Sometime in the night, she wakes up, freaks out, and drags her mattress back into her room. Apparently, she saw some sort of orb light things coming out of the closet. The closet always had weird shit going on with it. The cats hated going in there, avoided it, the door would never close, etc.
We took some pictures of the closet with my digital camera and, sure enough, there were orbs on some of them. For the longest time, I was scared to sleep in that room. Then I moved, and it's fine.
========================
--
Part 1
--
My first encounter ever with something .. odd .. was when I was camping. I was a total UFO freak at the time, I'm sure many of you went through that phase. Where nothing was cooler than Aliens and OMG LIGHTS IN THE SKY! My Dad and I were camping at this place called the Curn (Kurn?) River in California, it's a good drive east of Bakersfield, I think. Anyway, there are some good places to camp there because it's too far away for all the idiot college students to come get drunk, and the only people there are fishermen pretty much. So I'd spend my days fishing, and usually we'd meet some cool camper who we'd make friends with for the trip.
On this trip, it was a guy named Jeff. Jeff came from LA, owned an SUV before they were all the rage, and was a helluva nice guy. I remember he liked Beavis and Butthead, and since he was over 40, that made him like the coolest guy alive in my book at the time. So I always had a lot to talk to about with Jeff, since he liked UFOs too, and would tell me stories about how Indians used to make cave paintings about them and stuff.
Anyway one night we were sitting up late roasting marshmallows or something around a campfire. My dad had gone to bed early, as he always does, so we were talking about paranormal stuff again. Not ghosts, but UFOs. So the mood late at night around a fire out in the woods was already kinda creepy. Then it just showed up.
I was the first to spot it, I think, it came from around behind my tent. A little, white orb, a tad bit smaller than a volley ball, but kinda fuzzyish and almost with a sort of a diffuse glow to it. I thought it was a squirrel at first, then realized due to the fact that it was floating about 6 inches off the ground that it probably wasn't.
"Jeff," I said.
"Yeah, Undaine?"
"What the hell is that?"
Jeff looked up to see the same thing coming towards us. The grass around us was long, and it was brushing the tops of it, but we could see that it DEFINITELY did not touch the ground. It was heading towards our fire, and consequently, us.
"Uh ... I ... uh ... we should move."
We did. The orb thing passed only a few feet from us in the full glow of the fire. It had no real defined edges, which is why I call it kinda fuzzy and glowing. But it moved very fluently, and made kinda an arc around the fire, and proceeded to take a left up a hill and towards a bush. While it was doing this, we must have been saying: "What is that?" "I don't know" a good 300 times.
We stood there after it went up the hill and into a large (but mostly see through) bush for a few seconds, then, like morons, decided that we had to go find it. We ran around the bush, and onto a road behind it, looking all over..
I don't remember the rest of the night.
This is strange, because I remember everything else perfectly as if it just happened. I woke up in the tent next to my dad at sunup. It freaks the fuck out of me to this day. Jeff went home the next morning, and we never heard from him again, but he did confirm the story with me before he left in front of my Dad, so at least he knows I'm not batshit insane.
Other stuff happens at home (and unfortunately still is), so when I tell my family I've seen something wrong in the house now, they don't laugh at me.
Lucky me.
--
Part 2
--
My house is old, it's been around since like 1880. We've had a rich family history in this house. We're not buried on an Indian graveyard, no murders have taken place, no one's buried in the walls, nothing that would raise any kind of normal angst you need normally for a ghost to hang around. But, unfortunately, this one doesn't seem to care.
First off I should say it's not so much exclusively my house as it is my "area" that has this problem. My uncle next door used to see it too, and when I was very young (and lived in my uncle's house now) I remember standing in my crib before I could even talk, watching the pretty lights in the room, in the middle of the night while my parents slept.
Anyway, my uncle was the first one to see it. He woke up at 3 AM due to my aunt screaming (she does this, it's a sleep problem) and comforted her like he usually does. Only tonight, she was screaming: "OH GOD, STEVE, THERE'S SOMEONE IN THE ROOM!"
"No honey, there's no one here."
"YES! YES, THERE IS! HE'S RIGHT THERE!" *more screaming*
"No sweetie, I can see everything, everything's fine."
At this point she was satisfied, and went back to sleep. My uncle was about to as well, when he noticed something in his groggy state. It was 3 AM, and he could see the room very clearly. An orange glow was lighting the entire thing. Not emanating from a source, but actually exuding from the walls.
He thought about this for a second, closed his eyes, and reopened them.
Darkness.
His first and final thought that night was "Oh, that's better," before he went back to sleep.
...
The ghost still liked my Uncle though, and the exact same incident repeated itself a few weeks later, with my aunt screaming, and the room lit up at 3 AM once again. This time, instead of going back to sleep, my Uncle (who is a much, much braver man than I) got up and yelled at it and told it to go the hell away and not come back. And with that, poof. Walls went out. Uncle went back to bed, and it hasn't bothered him since.
Because it found someone more responsive to bother. It moved in with MY family. Thank you, Uncle Steve, for the lovely ghost. It's just what my panic attack / weak heart family has always wanted.
--
Part 3
--
Shortly after my uncle banished it using his balls of pure steel, my mom woke up for absolutely no reason at, you guessed it, 3 AM. She couldn't figure out why she woke up at first, and looked around the room to see if one of the cats was there. The cats (who ALWAYS sleep with my mom) had run away. She thought that was odd, when she noted that she could see the whole room at 3 AM, because it was tinted with an orange glow. She looked around the room for the source, and in the corner of one of the walls, floating high above the ground, was Mister Orb again. She described it like an orb but it had sort of an electricity to it like if you see heat coming off hot pavement.
My mom, being less brave, hid under the covers trying to wake my dad until she fell asleep hours later in a cold sweat.
After that, it liked to do other things.
Stuff will be moved in my house. We don't talk about it, we just put it back in the places it should be and ignore it, or blame the cats for moving the candlestick / chair / refrigerator / whatever. In particular, it likes to knock over plants. When we hear footsteps at night in the attic, we blame the raccoons. Raccoons apparently weigh about 180 pounds and wear men's shoes. The attic, incidentally, is about 4 feet tall and no person in the world could walk like that up there. When the cats stare at things that aren't there, we usually just leave the room. When stuff scrapes against the windows in the guest room when guests are there, or on the glass 10 feet off the ground in the TV room, we tell them that is just from the tree. Note: There is no tree. It turns TVs on. It turns radios on. It closes doors, it knocks shit over in anger when I tell jokes to my parents that I read here.
Heh, that reminds me, about 3 weeks ago I told a string of dead baby jokes to my parents at dinner, and a plate flew off a shelf and crashed to the table. I apologized to the ghost, my parents laughed, and we continued eating.
As of recently, it's taken up the habit of screaming at us in the middle of the night, waking us up and sending us looking for the noise for a few seconds before we all pretend we needed to "just go to the bathroom," so its easier to ignore it and get back to sleep. This has only happened twice, and within the last month.
It has followed me to hotel rooms in Vegas, when it scared the shit out of a friend of mine, and started all the hangers in a closet shaking on their own when the only two people in the room were me and him. He claimed he saw an image of a person that night, which kinda makes me think that it was a different ghost, because all this one ever shows up as is as an orb, or just an orange glow, or both.
======================
This story involves my mom. One night she was sleeping and suddenly woke up for some reason. She started to hear a whimpering. Thinking "What the hell is that?", she gets up and starts walking around the room to see where the sound is coming from. My mom finally gets to her closet (it was a walk in) and slides the door. When she slid the door, sitting there in the corner of the closet, was an old man crying. I think my mom said she something to him, but there was no answer. I am not sure what happened after that as I don't even think she remembers.
======================
Story 1. The People
This is a quick one. In October one year at 2 AM, I awoke to sounds. I looked outside my window and saw a group of white clothed and hooded (not KKK) people with torches standing at the end of our property (3 acres) on the gravel road. They were just standing there. I awoke my parents, they saw them, and they ordered us to lock all the doors and get upstairs and lock the door. We watched them for an hour, then they just turned around and walked into the woods. FUCKED UP? YES!
Story 2. The Faces
Upstairs in our house, all the walls and ceilings are covered in swirl spackle designs. Most have been covered up with paneling and tile over the years. In the earlier days, I would wake up in cold sweats after having dreams of demons attacking me. I would open my eyes and look around the room in the moonlight. My eyes would focus on the swirling patterns. Now, I had a great imagination, but I know what's real. I'm always a skeptic. I would often see the patterns changing, forming faces and watching me, their mouths gaping open and closed like screams. I would scream for my mom, but nothing came out. My mom would finally hear me and comfort me. Also, my brother would sleepwalk a lot and sit and the top of the stairs. I would sometimes catch him and ask, "Why are you out here?" His response: "The faces." He attests he remembers nothing of these occasions.
Story 3. The Gateway
This one gets more fucked up every time I visit home, and I will explain why. For years as a kid and especially my high school years, I would see a greenish vaporlike form come between my room and my parents' room. It would come through the wall, hover, then vanish. This happened at least twice a month. As years went by and especially now when I go home, I look at the wall. The spackling is beginning to settle with age and an actual DOORWAY is coming through the wall. It looks like it was covered up years ago. Definitely over 25 years ago, since we moved there.
Story 4. Fred
My dad is a light sleeper. If you wake him up, he stays awake. Well, my dad has many stories (my mom backs up) of him waking up and someone walking up and down the stairs. Loudly. It wakes my dad up. Also, sometimes during the morning, my mom sees a black shape of a man standing in front of her and then he disappears. My mom calls him Frank. My mom spoke to the former owners about this (we are good friends) and they say, "Oh, Fred! Yeah, we've seen him many times."
Story 5. The Tombstone
There is a small, 1800's to early 1900's graveyard down the road. It's in a woods by a marsh. I would sometimes wander around it. Well, when I had my paper route for three years, I would ride by every day. There is a particular stone in the back corner that sort of resembles the Empire State Building. It is broken off at the base and lies two feet away. Every day, for three years, I would pick up that stone and set it on its base. Every day for 3 years, I would repeat. It always was lying two feet away in the same position.
Story 6. The Scariest Shit I've Ever Experienced.
Last year, I visited home with my girlfriend. She stayed the night, we had a little fun, and she left the next day. The following night, as I'm sleeping, I wake up. There is an OLD child's rocking chair in my room with stuffed animals on it. The thing starts ROCKING. I'm freaking out and freeze with fear. I really wish that was it. Next, the stuffed animals start falling out of the chair one at a time. I'm freaking out and stiff as a board paralyzed with fear. So I'm lying there freaking out, and I pull the covers up higher and turn on my side. The chair stops. I start calling for my mom. I couldn't produce words. Remember, I'm 24 years old! So I give up and lie on my side. Suddenly, cold breezes start blowing on my ears. I'm REALLY freaking.
SO I turn on my side and tense completely up. What happened next, I will NEVER forget. I'm laying there and SUDDENLY a voice whispers in my FUCKING EAR. It was unintelligible, but imagine someone talking by breathing in and speaking backwards. I SCREAM AND BOLT OUT OF MY ROOM and jump into my parents' bed! I'm freaking out! My dad is pissed. My mom is trying to calm me down. She assures me it's okay. Finally she says: "Oh, that was probably Frank. We haven't seen him for about six months, and we don't know why." That did NOT help. So I ended up going back into my room and turned on my light and managed to fall asleep about an hour later.
The next day, I was talking to my girlfriend and she reminded me she was on her period. She also informed me that hormonal women are sometimes attributed to waking up sleeping spirits. Um.... She also informed me she's never sleeping over there again. She broke up with me last January, so that's not a problem.
There have been many other small things that have happened. Corner-of-the-eye apparitions, things moving from where they were, etc. We also have an old dirt cellar with steps leading down. Let me tell you, I'm 25 now and I still can't go down there without thinking some fucking zombie is going to reach through the steps and grab my legs. We have holes in the side of our basement walls that lead into small rooms. I explored in there as a kid and found all sorts of animal bones.
Goddamn, my house was fucked up.
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Not sure if this qualifies as a ghost story, but it's definitely paranormal. OK, so about 9 years ago, a friend and I are sitting in my basement watching TV. We hear some noises -- sounded like scratching -- at the window behind us. There was snow on the ground, but we decided to investigate it. Traipsing around outside, we found a set of footprints leading up to the window. Not ordinary footprints, these were cloven-hooves. My friend and I are both Eagle Scouts, and could ID a footprint from a mile away, but we were both aghast at the sight of these things. We looked around a bit, and found something even more disturbing. The footprints began in the middle of an acre of snow, led up to the window, and then vanished.
A little bit fucked up, but then things started to happen. I was big-time into keeping aquariums back in those days, and kept my main tank in the same spot. Every fish I put into that tank disappeared. No, they didn't jump out; no, my parents didn't throw them out. No, they didn't get sucked up by the filter. They just plain disappeared. Whatever I put in that tank vanished within a few weeks. Big fish, too - piranhas, full-sized Oscars, you name it, it vanished. Months later, I investigated the ceiling below where that tank was. It was INVERTED. As in, it looked like someone, or something, had vacuumed the ceiling from within the walls.
We later moved out of that house, and found out that the child of the new owners killed herself in the spot where that fishtank was.
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My experience was absolutely the most horrifying thing I have encountered in my life. This happened between 7th and 8th grade, I was at a Boy Scout summer camp called Camp Baker just outside of Florence, Oregon. The camp itself is situated out on a peninsula that juts out into this big lake and our campsite was one of the sites on the very tip of the peninsula. If you've been to a BS summer camp, you've probably seen the canvas tents we use. They are large and usually have a frame built inside of them, but the biggest problem with them is that they usually don't seal up very well and you can usually see out through cracks, especially through the flaps of the door. One night, I awoke suddenly and it was really quiet out. I rolled over in my sleeping bag and looked at the crack in the door only to be greeted by two extremely red dots. These dots I can only describe as laser pointers. They were bright red, and were in total contrast to the complete darkness of the night. They were definitely some sort of eyes that they were looking in right at us.
When I read these other stories and people describe the sheer terror of seeing something unknown I can totally understand. These "eyes" alone made me freeze, I couldn't move at all. I just lay there for about 15 minutes. Finally it moved to the side of the tent, stayed there for a couple minutes, moved to the back of the tent, stayed there for a couple minutes and then finally moved to the other side of the tent. By this time, I managed to summon enough courage to roll over and after listening for several minutes and not hearing anything, I finally fell back asleep. To this day, every time I think of this, I try to convince my self that it was some animal, but something in my brain tells me that isn't right. It was just those eyes, so piercing and bright… it was totally inhuman and unlike any animal ever encountered. To this day, this memory gives me goosebumps. I guess that isn't totally scary, but at the time I was just floored.
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I really wish my apartment building had stuff going on in it. It was built in 1912, and I'm sure things went on in there. Of course, now it's full of college students, so hey, maybe we scared everything off.
However, I get plenty when I go home to my parents' house. It was built in 1979, and not on any graveyards or anything so far as we know. My parents have been the only owners. No one has died or been horribly disfiguringly injured there. We often hear people walking up and down the stairs, opening and shutting the doors, and moving things around, when all people at home are accounted for and couldn't have been making the noises.
My mother has seen a small, blonde boy in blue overalls running about before. She doesn't recognize him as family. My uncle saw the same boy two days later at his house in Michigan, 400 miles away. He called my mom after this, only to find out that she'd seen him too.
Nobody in my house smokes, but every so often you can smell pipe or cigar smoke, especially in the living room and kitchen. None of our neighbors smoke these either. You can also occasionally smell what I'm told is my great-grandmother's perfume - it's a very distinctive floral that she apparently had custom-mixed. My mother wears Obsession, which smells nothing like it, so it's not residuals from her.
I've been repeatedly tucked in at night by someone who wasn't there. I would be laying in bed awake, waiting for my mom to come give me a kiss goodnight, when I could feel someone come into the room and walk up to my bed. I'd roll over, and wouldn't be able to see anyone.
I've also come home to see my dead relatives sitting on my bed at school, or on the couch in my parents' living room. They laugh when I jump a mile and then try to calmly ask them what's going on. So basically, my dead relatives won't leave my family alone. Not that we'd want them to.
Labels: bob, church, corey, death, dreams, family, ghost stories, halloween, jeff, jim, katie, maxed-out tags limit, mom, pictures, rich, school, scrabble, snow, something awful, steve, weird stuff
posted by Flami at 1:13:00 AM
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