Ghost stories, part 7
When I was a kid, I took out the garbage every night. I was a lazy shit, so I always put off taking it out until I was forced to, which was usually around eight at night. The garbage cans were kept in the back corner of the house, which was only accessible by one door. So one night, my asshole brother locked me out of the house by bolting that door. The only other way in was either through the front door, which I couldn't get at due to a padlock on the side gate, or the back patio door.
So I went around the back of the house to get in through that sliding glass patio door. This was rarely locked at that time, so it was a safe bet, and much easier that trying to climb the fence to get over the padlocked gate. However, in order to get there from the place where the trash was, I had to walk along the side of the house.
The side of the house was a pain in the ass during the day, and a terrifying gauntlet at night. It was a pain in the ass because it was full of overgrown shrubs that reminded me of all the pruning, weeding, and general yard work shit I would be doing that weekend. The border of the property had some gnarly-assed shrubs planted along it, and I didn't like them because I was afraid of possums, spiders, etc. That's why it was the gauntlet of terror in the dark. You never knew what was hunched down in the bushes, building a web across the path, or running over your feet in the dark. In any case, as I was walking past these shrubs, one of them started shaking, and there were snuffling noises like some animal was in it.
I froze in place for half a second or so before doing what most 8-year-olds would have done in that situation - I ran like hell. Right after I started running, I heard the animal jump out from the bush onto the concrete walkway behind me, so I started to run even faster. I cannot remember hearing footsteps or anything else behind me, but it was only 10 yards or so to the door so I didn't really have time to focus on the chase, I just didn't want to get bitten by the dog or coyote or whatever that had decided to come after me. I reached the door, snapped it open and flung it shut as quickly as I could while thumbing the lock in place. Made brave by the sheet of glass between me and whatever animal was out there, I turned on the exterior light to see what the hell had jumped out of the bushes. There was nothing out there. So I put my nose to the glass door to really check carefully, searching the shadows under the bushes and trees.
Then something pounded against the glass. Hard. The glass actually bowed in and hit my nose. It was hard enough to make my eyes water. Something was pounding on the door, but nothing was in front of the door. No one threw anything, nobody was out there. The yard was empty. After four or five tremendous blows against the glass, it stopped. My brother (who was in the living room) yelled out, "What are you hitting the door for, moron? I'm trying to watch TV." It took me about 8 years to go out in the yard again alone at night. Nothing weird like that ever happened again. It was a one-time thing. Scary as fuck, though.
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My parents bought a house from a guy about 20 years ago and converted it into a private business (they are in the fur industry). They almost completely remodeled the place, but the apartment upstairs they kept unchanged. In the process of remodelling and adding on to the store, they had to dig up the old septic tank and make room for a new foundation, so a lot of ground was broke. Apparently (I was young at the time), they had to sift and resift the dirt that they turned up because weird shit kept showing up in it. (old car parts, wooden boxes, and A COUPLE OF SMALL LOCKED CHESTS WITH GOLD COINS!! [not a HUGE find, but worth $2k+ at the time], and also the frequent charred remains of a house that burned down there about 50 years ago) Another small point of note is that in the apartment upstairs there were a number of secret compartments in the bottom of closets and built into the side of cabinets in the kitchen (perfect place for hiding stuff!) and what looked like a bullet hole through one of the doors to the upstairs bedrooms.
Well, time went on and my parents at one point had to go out of town on business, so they left me and my brother at the apartment above the new store with a sitter (I was about 8 at the time). Well, I decided to sleep on the couch in the living room; around 2 AM, I heard someone walking up the stairs so I jumped up and looked out the window (the stairs can be clearly seen from the window) but surprisingly enough, there was no one there. (this was summer in Fairbanks, Alaska... it is daylight at 2 AM) So I laid back down, only for this to happen again, and again, and again. Eventually I just decided to watch the stairs until it happened again. AND IT DID! I distinctly heard someone walking up the stairs but there was no one there! Well, this scared the shit out of me, so I scrambled into the bedroom and insisted on sleeping with the babysitter. (boobies!)
When my parents got back, they let me in on the fact that not only did 2 people die in a fire when the old house burned down, but that someone was actually shot to death in the back bedroom (no idea if the bullet hole is from the same incident) about 5 years before they bought the place.
I am convinced it is haunted, and refuse to spend the night there to this day. The hundreds of dead animals just add to the foreboding feeling of death there. It is by far one of the most tangibly evil places to stay I have even encountered.
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I'll open up with scary shit that my family and I have dealt with in the mountains of Stuart, Virginia, which is a damned tiny town just about in the middle of nowhere. My father's family line has held a significant track of land in the mountains for quite some time, and the "farm" (I use this loosely, as I doubt it's ever farmed anything) must be reached after driving a good twenty minutes on gravel on the laughable mockery of road that serves as a driveway. Needless to say, it's secluded.
Certainly, this was a fun place to visit as a kid. Imagine a tiny two-story (second floor was the attic, really) house with a godawful earthen cellar / crawlspace, situated on the very peak of a hill between mountains. On the ridge to the east of the house is a fucking makeshift cemetery with a dozen or so faded, blank, and broken headstones. This contains those whom I mention in the history below.
For a bit of history: back before the Civil War, some rather unsavory folk lived on the land, distant cousins from my father's line. Here, the initial home burned down in the midst of a flash forest fire - while they were still inside. Among this lovable family was a reportedly insane aunt who castrated a drifter on the dining room table. Fun. The land was cleared, house rebuilt, and the space claimed by the next in the family line and his new spouse. Over several years, they attempted to have children three times -- the first two were total miscarriages, and the third died less then a week after birth from illness. Less then six months after that, the mother died, and he moved out again and sold the place.
(Bear with me for not having names and the like, but mostly trying to give you an idea of the fucked-up background this godforsaken place has. I actually took notes the last time I was out there, recollected from my grandmother, but I'm at work at the moment. If someone -is- curious about the background, you'll want to look into the Kirkman family and the Turner family in Stuart VA. Anyways, to the story itself.)
Eventually the land was bought again in the interests of "heritage" (ugh, why'd they have to?) and brought back into the family. For the last six decades, my grandmother's been living there, and about two years ago my father moved back in with her to take over the property and aid her health. He came back a month later after changing his mind. It seems that while he was there, a number of rather disturbing things began to occur --- and it is during his recollection of these things that he related what had happened when he was a boy there.
One night when he was 11, he woke up in the middle of the night at a little after 3 AM. Upon turning to look at his brother, he found him pale and in a cold sweat, shaking uncontrollably. The two of them heard a clatter in the kitchen, and made their way in to find my grandmother sitting at the table, holding a cup of coffee, but shaking so much it was spilling everywhere. Apparently my uncle had woken suddenly and found a face with eyeless sockets inches from his face, staring at him with a low hiss. He was too busy shitting his pants to do anything as it stood up and walked out of the room. My grandmother had heard footsteps from down the hall, and called out to tell the boys to go back to bed. Her room at the time didn't have a door -- just hanging beads -- and walking through them without disturbing them, a silhouetted figure stepped in and began to approach her bed. She cried out "God save me!" and the thing moaned and vanished.
Now recently. According to my grandmother, things have been going on ever since, but she'd grown so used to them that she just didn't care anymore. My father was a different story. Some of the things that he experienced during his month's stay in the summer:
* While typing at the computer, his glass of water lifted up off the desk at his side, floated across the keyboard above his hands, and set down on the other side.
* While reading in bed up in the attic, the latch to the door flipped open, the doorknob turned, and the door swung as far open as it could, with nobody there at all. (This happened all the time.)
* He woke in bed feeling an intense pressure, a weight on his chest -- not chest pains, mind you, but as though there were physically a body laid over top of his own. He could see his breath before him, even though the thermometer had read 86 degrees outside -- and started to feel a crushing sensation in his stomach. He recited a prayer, and suddenly the weight could be felt shifting off him, and there was a pop in the screen of the window with a small spark, like static electricity hit it with great force.
* On several occasions, he's seen a figure staring at him from the doorway in the mirror while brushing his teeth, only to turn around and see nothing there.
* One night, he went into the kitchen to get a glass of water and saw the pale blue figure of my grandfather (he'd died earlier in the year in a drunk driving accident) working on the pipes under the sink. The next day, the house was without water, and took a week to fix it all again (including having to replace the water heater not long after that).
* Every single cat that has ever been taken to the house has always been constantly uneasy, hissing at seemingly nothing, fur bristling and backing into corners, running out of the room at random, etc. Yeah, fun times.
* Every single cat that has been -kept- at the house for long has disappeared, presumably run off after escaping the damn place.
Now, earlier last year my father decided to return, as my grandmother's health was again failing, and his brother had grown so eccentric and loopy that he couldn't be relied upon to tend to her. Last April, he implored me to fly down for emergency family business for a week. (which later turned out to be that he'd been preparing to marry some woman and wanted to see what I thought of her. However, this developed into numerous other things while I was there.)
Right from the getgo, it was going to be fun time city for me, as on the very first evening I awoke at 3:20 AM or so, cold as shit even buried under comforters, to the sound of heavy footsteps thudding up and down the stairs quickly. (the stairs to the attic were on the other side of the wall the head of my bed was against) My grandmother, an old lady who can hardly walk on her own, was the only one in the house at the time.
At any rate, I've rambled on enough for the first post. If anyone would care to hear more, I can follow up with the rest of my horrible week, which was sufficient enough for me to swear never to return there.
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When my best friend was in his teens, he had this sort of angsty goth phase where he was all into witchcraft and demonology. One night, he meditated on an evil force, then went to bed. When he switched off the lights, a black shadow was on the wall across from him, with hollow eyes even darker than the shadow. He yelled at it to go away and a glass jar on his desk flew across the room, smashing right next to his head. His father heard the crash and came into the room, and it disappeared when he turned the lights on. I know he wouldn't lie about something like this, and besides, his father even told me that when he came into the room seconds later, there was a small dent in the wall from where the jar hit, and there was glass on the blankets, meaning he couldn't have smashed it and then gotten under the covers. The next day, he moved his dresser to where the shadow was standing.
Years later after he'd moved out (his father still lives there), we went back to the house to get something, and his old room was still a mess. We cleaned some shit up, and something fell behind the dresser. We moved the dresser and I saw a very faint outline burned into the wall and carpet, of where the thing he described stood.
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My old house was built in the 1800s, and all kinds of weird shit happened there. Every once in a great while, our cat would be let in and out of the house even if the doors were locked and there was no other way he could get in or out. We'd hear footsteps going up the stairs onto the 2nd floor landing at night, and scratching at my mother's bedroom door like a cat, even if the cat was already sleeping in one of our rooms or was outside. I found a black and white portrait of an old man behind a crumbling brick wall in the cellar, and it once blew off my dresser like there was a full force wind in the room even though my room wasn't drafty (I put the picture back after that).
That's not even all of what happened, but the rest of it's pretty minor stuff. In the middle of the woods behind that same house there was an old car whose front end was basically wrapped around a tree. There hasn't been a road there since the 1950s, but the car was built in the 70s. That's not necessarily a big deal... I suppose that someone could've driven through the woods, but several people in the neighborhood have heard weird sounds coming from that direction, and once while walking by it, the tall grass around it started heavily rustling. There was no animal or anything else there.
Behind my friend's house are some woods and beyond that is a golf course of a country club. One time at night, I stayed in the car while my friend just went in to grab something from her house. From far away I saw a white figure with a very dull glow walking toward the golf course. It sort of looked back toward me as it was walking, then walked behind a tree, and I didn't see it at all after that. Needless to say, I stayed in the car.
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I moved into this house with my parents when I was 17. It was pretty old. The first fucked-up thing I noticed about it was the basement. I was old as hell, with a dirt floor and the ceiling hung about 6.5' so it always felt very small and cramped. There was an immediate feeling of dread when you entered. In the several years I lived there, I went down in that basement maybe three times. The further back in the basement you went, the worse that feeling got.
The house was a wreck when we moved in, so my parents were tearing it apart and renovating it. My dad and I were the only ones home this one day. I was sick so I decided to take a nap while my dad went to get some lumber. At some point, I was awoken by a thunderous noise. Like someone slapping a board against the house. There was a shock with it, too. It shook me out of bed. I looked out the window thinking it was my dad doing some work, but when I looked in the driveway, his car and trailer were still gone.
Another night around two in the morning, we were all awoken by every fire alarm in the house going off at once. We thought there was a fire, but it turned out there wasn't. So we reset the alarms and went back to bed. Minutes later, they were all blaring again. We reset them all, went back to bed and then it happened again. We did this several times that night until we were chasing them around the house. We'd shut one down and another would come back on, we'd shut that one off and another would come on. Eventually we took all the batteries out.
There was a barn connected to the house and the loft had yet to be turned into offices. One night, while coming home, I pulled into the driveway and saw someone looking out one of the loft windows at me. When I got out of the car, they weren't there anymore. Investigation with a flashlight and baseball bat turned up nothing.
After the offices were built, my sister was up there using a computer. She heard papers fluttering around in one of the offices. When she checked it out, she found that a stack of papers on the desk had been thrown around the office. They were everywhere.
Every night, around 1:30, you would hear a sound like someone falling down the stairs outside my room. We stood out in the hall one night to hear it and were shocked when the sound definitely seemed to be coming from right in front of us on the stairs.
One night, I was alone in the house. I'd just taken my girlfriend home and I was watching a movie in my parents' room. The house was old, like I said, so it made a lot of distinct noises. You could pick them all out. I heard the rusty old knob on the door that led out to the barn turn. I immediately shut the TV off and froze, straining to hear something else. I quietly made my way to my room, which was over the stairs which led down into the kitchen / dining room. I heard the light switch in the dining room come on. It made a loud pop. The light was also definitely on, I could see it. I grabbed the phone and this punch knife that I kept in my dresser and hid in the closet. It wasn't the manliest thing I could have done, but I was so scared I was stupid. I hid in there for a long time, trying to hear what was going on outside the door. I heard someone come into my room. The floors were wood so you could hear the footsteps. They went through the papers on my desk, I could hear them shuffling the papers around. The desk was right next to the closet, so I was petrified. I was ready to jump out and stab the hell out of whoever was in my room if they opened the door. They didn't though and eventually left the room. After probably an hour of hiding I got out and did a sweep of the house. The door to the barn was open, the light in the kitchen was on. Both of these were out and closed when I came home from my girlfriend's house. Nothing was gone, though. The whole time I was in the closet, I was convinced that someone was robbing the house.
There were other times that I thought that I was alone in the house, then I'd hear a door close or footsteps on the wood floor and I'd think it was my mom or someone. When I looked, though, I was still alone in the house.
Objects would disappear and reappear in weird places. I would lose my keys and find them in the refrigerator.
It was a pretty interesting stay at that house. After a couple of years, though, the really weird stuff stopped happening.
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Years ago, I woke up in the middle of the night and my grandfather was standing in the doorway of my room. It was really strange. My grandfather wasn't dead, and he was visiting. However, he wasn't staying at our house that night. He was staying several miles away. I immediately had a sense of fear, so I looked away. I got the courage to turn back around and look, and I realized that I was just being stupid. The image of my "grandfather" was simply created by my lack of night vision, and a bunch of white paper on my door. So I went back to sleep. Only problem was that when I woke up the next day, there was no white paper anywhere near my door.
I swear by this story.
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The noises started about a month after I moved in. Subtle wouldn't be a good word to describe them. My roommate Erik noticed them first. He'd be home working on his computer in his room at the end of the hall, and he'd hear me walking down the hall to his door. Slow, measured footfalls from boots, echoing on the hardwood floors, coming down the hall from my end of the hallway and stopping right outside his door.
I'm sure you already know - I don't need to point out that he was home alone.
I started hearing sounds as well. Sometimes the boots in the hallway, sometimes doors closing in other parts of the house. Weird as hell, and kinda freaky, but apparently harmless.
Apparently.
Erik asked one of the girls who lived there before us if they'd ever noticed anything strange. She knew immediately what he was hinting at. Okay, so - we have a ghost. Cool. It's like a pet you don't need to feed. Aside from wondering if it's watching you have sex or beat off, there wasn't any real problem with it.
We figured he lived in the Attic. Our landlord (a dubious fellow known only as "Joe") told us that we were never, EVER, to go up into the attic. Ever. We said sure, with every intention of breaking in there right away. But we're lazy, and have short attention spans, so it just never happened. But we figured that if there's a dead body somewhere, it'd likely be in the attic.
A few months later I woke up for work on a Tuesday morning. I felt like shit. I'm used to feeling like shit in the morning, but felt cheated since I hadn't gone out the night before and went to sleep fairly early. My roommates had been gone for the night, I had the whole place to myself, and enjoyed uninterrupted DVD time. It wasn't right - I should feel good. But no.
My throat hurt. Not a "I'm getting sick" kind of hurt, it was just sore and ached. I didn't think anything of it, since I'm very active and usually have a plethora of unexplained aches and pains. I got up, threw on some clothes, took a piss, and headed for work. As the morning went on, my throat hurt more. I stopped by a bathroom to check it out.
The first thing I noticed was the scratches on my face. I had a large gash running diagonally across my nose. Two more long scratches on the left side of my face, and a couple small nicks on my forehead. I don't have nails, I keep them bitten down to the quick. But still, I figured I must have somehow mangled myself in my sleep. Apparently, I was also choking myself, since there were bruises forming on my throat. Mildly disturbed, I posted a thread about how I must subconsciously hate myself, since this was obviously an attempt to end my joyful existence. During the thread, someone jokingly pointed out how it was obviously a ghost attack. I got chills reading that remark, but laughed it off nonetheless.
A friend of mine didn't laugh it off when I tried to explain what happened to my face. She came over with a bundle of sage and burned it in every corner of the house. She instructed us to burn it at least once a month - it supposedly would keep any bad spirits away.
Well, the noises stopped after that, so like all clever people, we forgot to burn the sage.
A couple months later, I got home from work about the same time as my roommate. We went out to the grocery store together (not gay). As we were coming back into the house, we were hit by this unbelievably horrible stench. It smelt like bad Chinese food had been rotting for a week in the sun, possibly with a dead hobo lying nearby. Overpowering. We searched through the house, and could find nothing that could possibly have caused it. We opened the windows, put fans in them facing out. After a couple hours, it had faded completely. Good enough for us.
I went out that night. Erik stayed in.
I got home at about 2 AM. House was dark, but I didn't bother turning any lights on. I walked around the house for a few - putting stuff away, getting a snack, etc. Figured Erik was asleep, since he usually yells some obscenity at me when I get home. After about 5 minutes of me walking around, I hear this rather hesitant voice call my name from behind Erik's door. I answer, and then hear furniture being moved away from in back of the door. Erik is a pale kid, but I could see his veins, he was so white.
What he told me was this: Around midnight, he was on the computer in his room when he hears a scrabbling at his door. My cat Miles does this at times - Kitty Fishing - he'll dive at a door, thrust his paws underneath, and scrabble vainly for any treats. So he gets up and opens the door. No cat. He looks around, and finds Miles asleep under the covers in my room. Odd. Back to the computer, shuts the door again. A few minutes later - same thing, this scratching at his door. But it's higher up than a cat could reach. So he ignores it. The scratching gets more... insistent. He's now hell bent on ignoring it. After a bit, it quiets down, and stops... and then he hears the boots treading down the hall. They stop right outside his door. Then knocks. He calls out my name, but hears no reply other than the knocking which turns into a pounding. BANG BANG BANG! Then silence.
This is the point at which Erik moved his bookshelf in front of his door.
After hearing this, we burned a whole lot of sage throughout the
house. Which once again put an end to the occurrences.
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Not done yet though
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We kept the sage burning routine for a bit. But I wanted to find out what the fuck was in the attic. The more I talked about it here on the forums, the more my curiosity was getting to me. I had to know. The most common sounds were the bootfalls. They always seemed to originate from my closet right outside my room and end at Erik's room, which was at the opposite end of the hallway. My closet isn't really a closet - it's actually the stairway leading to the attic. My landlord had put in a door about 6 steps up, and hung a curtain rod to make a very rudimentary closet. Yeah, suspect.
I had to know what was up there, and I knew I could break through the locks pretty easily. Erik wanted nothing to do with it. I sure as fuck wasn't going up there alone! I enlisted the help of a couple friends. So we picked a Sunday afternoon to do it, planning to start at 1 or 2 PM, so there'd be plenty of light. Of course, my jackass friends didn't come over until 4 PM. It took another hour to get through the lock. We entered the attic at dusk, armed with knives and swords, lots of sage, and an oven mitt. I'm sure I had a reason for the oven mitt.
We were expecting storage. Boxes, furniture, clothing, etc. It would make sense that the landlord wouldn't want us going through someone else's belongings. The possibility of Pirate Booty was tossed around with hope, I must admit. We didn't really expect to find a corpse, although ... well, yes... we did.
This is what we found.
Just a chair. A single chair, sitting directly above Erik's room. Sitting right in front of the big window overlooking the neighborhood. Nice view, really.
It's been unusually quiet since. We burned the sage religiously for months. But even though lately we've been slacking off, we haven't heard a peep. No footfalls, no doors closing, nothing. I think I should feel relieved. But all it's doing is arousing my curiosity even more.
Meh, that's my story. Props if you read through all that - that was far too much typing for me to review.
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My father is a die-hard skeptic: he refuses to possibly acknowledge the existence of ghosts.
Yet he admits to one incident a few months ago, driving down the street in our town called Monk's Walk, which has a reputation for supposed hauntings.
It was night, but the street is well-lit. It's also pretty narrow, so you can't speed down there. Anyway, long story short, he hit something. He swore blind that he did. But when he got immediately out of the car to investigate, he didn't find a single goddamn thing.
I have to believe it's true, because my father just doesn't lie, but these days he refuses to talk about it, and he refuses to believe in the supernatural, so it'd make absolutely no sense for him to make it up. All in all, pretty odd, and a rather common phenomenon too.
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I used to volunteer at St. James' Assisted Living Facility. It was a retirement home for old Catholic people. It was really nice, out in the country, and most of these people had family who visited them all the time.
There was another volunteer there, my age, and she lived in a really old white farmhouse that was practically across the street. We used to hang out at her house, listening to music and eating frozen pizza and shit. Teenage stuff, you know?
Anyway, at night, her house was creepy. I used to keep her company when her mom was out of town on business trips, and at night you could hear the whole house settling and creaking. It sounded remarkably like foot steps and opening and closing doors. Air in the pipes sounded a lot like people whispering. That sort of thing.
But there was never anything definite, until her mom decided to finish the basement. It was an old cellar, dirt-floored, with brick canning shelves and a sink and stove for putting up preserves. Really low ceilinged, but liveable. Her ma had a hole cut in the back of the house, for a door to the basement, and they poured a concrete floor and put carpeting down. They put up walls and bookshelves, and put in comfy furniture and a ping pong table.
And that's when the subtle noises became footsteps and doors and whispers and sometimes sobs, all half-heard. I mean, it was really obvious when you were half-asleep or not paying attention, but if you tried to focus, there was nothing there.
Eventually, they decided to put in a bathroom down in the basement... just a toilet and sink, nothing fancy. That's when they found the hidden room.
The house had been a stop on the Underground Railway. The little room was a hiding place for former slaves heading towards Canada. The man who owned the house used to bundle the slaves (usually women) in his wife's clothing and veils and stuff to disguise their dark skin, stash them in the room, and then somebody else would pick them up at night and take them to safety.
One day, he took a big risk with a very pregnant woman.
She went into labor in the room and died. They buried her in the woods at night... I don't know what happened to the baby.
It was pretty creepy finding all that out. After they found the little room, the weird noises stopped. Well, the supernatural ones, anyway. It was still an old and creaky house.
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Well, just to add something to the thread... it's not much of a story,
but anyway..
There was a really nice old lady who lived downstairs from me when I was young. She gave me a stereo one day, which was nice, since I was thinking about getting one, and it was pretty nice, with good sound and all.
A few months later, I started noticing some weird stuff going on with it, like it would change stations by itself to a station with a good song coming on, and turn itself on when I came into the room. This was an old stereo, with a big switch to turn it on and off, and a heavy, weighted dial. I never worried too much about it, even though I'd see the switch flip and the dial turn. I just told it thanks, since it was doing me a favor. It stopped doing things shortly after the old lady died. I have a suspicion it was just hanging out with me while it kept an eye on her, and once she left, it had no reason to be around anymore. Maybe it was her husband, who knows?
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I just remembered another one I had a while ago. Once again, I typed it up just so you can get the idea:
I had a nightmare once that began with me sitting on the computer, browsing the internet, as I usually do late into the night.
I noticed that something didn't look "right" in my room, something with the lighting. Then I noticed that there was a large standing shadow in the corner which, considering the moonlight was shining in the window across from it, shouldn't have been there. I blinked my eyes a couple times, to clear my vision in case my contacts were fucking with me. I looked back, and the shadow was still standing there, directly across from me, in the corner.
I stared at it for quite some time, unsure how to handle this. It just stood there, defying the natural world by being partly in a patch of moonlight.
I looked back over to my monitor and noticed this message written in all caps:
"CAN YOU MAKE IT TO THE LIGHT SWITCH BEFORE I GRAB YOU?"
That's where the dream cuts out.
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1. When I was 13-14, weird things started happening in my house. Now, when weird things start to happen out of the blue, you kind of have to look for a firestarter. My older sister, apparently having nothing else to do in our shitty little town, had recently travelled out to one of those infamous old abandoned houses with her friends. This house was like it was frozen in time, like the family just up and left it or something (insert shitty story of their demise). A picture of Joe Namath on the kids' wall, papers, clothes, furniture, everything was still there. Just plain creepy. Not only that, but you had to go through a graveyard to get there - all kinds of wonderful scary movie crap that you wouldn't believe unless you saw it for yourself. And it was a very freaky looking house since it hadn't been cared for all of these years. Anyway she, being one of those "cool art school kids," took her artsy black and white pictures and brought those home with her... and maybe something else. Who knows. OOOOH! AAHHH!
So, I blamed the following all on her. One night, after my pansy ass is done watching Avonlea, I turn the TV off and stare at the ceiling. As usual, I lie there staring at nothing, waiting for the sandman. Close my eyes for a few boring minutes. Open them. Stare. Close them again, hoping to suddenly feel the urge to go to sleep. Nothing. Open my eyes.
ENTER THE SANDMAN (dunn dunn dunn). I am now NOT staring at the ceiling, but instead, I am staring at a face. The face is probably a foot and a half away or LESS. It is pale, pale, pale. Stereotypical ghost, I couldn't see through it... but it wasn't like a human face. I blink in horror and see it isn't disappearing. My retinas scream at me in their own special way, "ABORT, ABORT." So I do what any horrible pussy would do. I close my eyes. Being the brave lad I am, I quickly pull the covers up as far as I can, hoping my Bichon Friese Poodle (AVONLEA + POODLE = NOT GAY?) sleeping at the end of my twin bed will FUCKING DO SOMETHING. Instead, he sleeps like the obese ball of white fur he is and I either pass out or manifest some sort of ungodly strength and induce sleep on purpose. We'll pretend the latter happened.
Now I'm scared shitless, but I go and tell all my friends my "cool ghost story." Couple weeks later, I can't sleep again. I'm not looking for the ghost, coz I'm just not thinking about it, but in the back of my mind, I do not want to open my eyes and stare at the ceiling again. I do it anyway. I win the "smart son of a bitch" award. There, floating in front of me is an old face. It was not a horrifying old face, but it looked sort of ANGRY. And that's scary enough. If you are not a very old and decrepit-looking ghost, being angry is just fine. It seemed to fade, but that was no comfort. Sleep was not as quickly induced this time, but I was not going to move. Once again, eyes snapped shut.
Various other freaky shit ensues and others mention seeing the same thing in the house, but being a skeptic, I want proof staring at me a foot and a half away before I believe any of it. Here's where the weird Brady-esque twist comes into play. I could blame it on my sister and her weird ventures into abandoned houses, but about a year later, when I'm moving out of the room, my mom finds my black statue of King Kamehameha behind my bookcase. I lost the statue, coincidentally, about a year back... when Mr. Floating Head took up residence in my humble abode. HMMMM. What's stranger is that the head is broken clean off of the statue.
My mom's family used to live in Hawaii, which is where they got the statue. My grandparents had it lying around in an old shed and were going to toss it, but instead decided to give it to me. Being a kid, I thought it was cool and I promptly sat it on my bookcase where it stayed for years.
So, I hadn't seen it for a long time and kinda wondered where it was, but was too lazy to look and didn't really care. My mom - having heard my horrible tale and brushing them off as "kid bullshit" - superglued the fucking head back on and set the statue back where it was. She said nothing. But I have something to say: DON'T FUCK WITH KAMEHAMEHA, KIDS.
I still can't figure that one out to this day.
2. On a separate, but more shittingly scary than ever note, I was again sleeping in my room. It's interesting that someone else in that past scary ghost thread mentioned this same type of thing happening to them. I must have been 15 or so, coz it was a while after all of the head sightings, but I know I wasn't too old. Anyhow, I am SOUND ASLEEP, lying on my side. I have no fear of ghostly happenings as it's been long since that happened and the sightings stopped. I am obviously thinking of nothing because I am sleeping like a DEAD BABY. Naturally, because I am at peace with the world for once, something has to happen.
I hear the ungodliest shriek I have ever heard, DIRECTLY into my left ear. It is almost inhumane in that the intensity just doesn't seem like it could be coming from someone. It didn't trail off, it didn't do anything but abruptly stop. It scared me so badly I was almost in tears. Shocked, "punch in the nose" tears. I could do nothing but cringe as it shrieked. When it was done, (I had apparently grown some balls over the years) I peeked to see what might have done it and saw nothing. I then continued my routine of cowering in fear like a hebitch.
It is very hard to explain the sound. The closest I can think of is when you have the TV on really loud and the cable goes out and you only see and hear really loud fucking static. A static overtone with just plain good ol' high pitched shrieking. I've never heard anything like it, but can remember exactly what it sounded like if I think about it today. This is far scarier than the face. Somehow.
3. Didn't happen in my house, but: I'm younger, I'm at my friend's house. He swears it's haunted and I don't believe him coz... why would I? One day I'm over there and we're walking past the front door where two large windows are and I say: "Hey, the mailman is coming up to the door, probably has a package." So he opens the door, looks outside. No mailman. "There's no mailman, dude." "Yes, there is... I saw him walking by. Blue shirt, blue shorts, the mailbag and all that. He was walking towards your porch or the other house." So, he walks outside and says "no," and I look too, all the way outside, and there is no mailman between the two houses or in the backyard. "Maybe he was going to someone else's house." "Yeah well, where is his car?" He only bothers answering me because I am visibly stunned that this thing I saw as plain as day suddenly disappeared in front of me. So, by now I'm just confused. More importantly, my friend reminded me, our mailmen don't carry those sacks anymore.
"Oooh. Yeah." That was weird, but not freaky, and I just thought of it as a novelty. It's easy to do that when it's broad daylight. At some later date when I was sleeping over at his house like kids do, his TV comes on. He had apparently grown accustomed to the nightly noises, but I was not. I asked him about it twice and he told me, "It's just the ghost. Go to sleep." I was not interested in finding a blonde mailman watching TV, so I did as I was told.
4. My dad has a short, but cheery story. He is a no-bullshit kinda guy and has only one other kinda-ghost-story to his name, so I took his word. He's at my grandmother's house (his mom) to keep an eye over it since she's in the hospital. No one is home. My father goes into the bathroom, closes the door, does what he has to do. He then emerges from the bathroom to find an old woman lying on the floor reaching towards him, begging for help. He claims that he quickly ran the fuck out, which I find rather humorous. Picture a 50-year-old man jumping over an old woman who is screaming for help and then quickly making his way out of the area. Laughs aplenty. He's not the type of guy to hallucinate or see things, so it's strange. If you are curious as to why he DIDN'T FUCKING HELP, ask yourself that the next time you come out of your bathroom and there is a frighteningly old woman you don't recognize screaming for help on your floor. Much praise to that "DO YOU SHIT WITH THE DOOR OPEN?" thread.
5. And finally, a Ouija board story which is secondhand. Years and years back, my grandmother and her sisters were playing with the ouija board out on some sort of back porch. The Ouija board tells them that one of their children is going to be hurt. Their kids (my dad's siblings and cousins) are inside. The parents don't like this at all and are angry, until a child somehow breaks the sliding glass door behind them and cuts the shit out of their arm. Mr. Ouija was forsaken after that. Rest of the family vouches on the story and no, they aren't highly religious or anti-Ouija, so I trust them on that one. I'm not really interested in breaking out the ouija after the non-sleep fest it brought upon me out of sheer terror the last time I used it anyway... maybe some other day...
Also, I went to that supposedly haunted "Whaley house" in San Diego and didn't see jack shit. What a ripoff. It's funny to watch a group of people stand in one position and just stare at furniture, waiting for something to happen though
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When I was a kid, we used to move from house to house a lot. We ended up living in about half a dozen places. One of them was a house that hadn't been inhabited in about three decades. It was actually a block away from where we already lived... but this new house had an exercise room lined with cedar, a pool, a sauna, fountain drinks, a den, living room and showroom, a full bar setup, two car garage, the whole nine. And, since no one had lived in it since the late 60's, we got it for a steal (read here: 4000+ sq. foot plus a whole shitload of extras for less than $80,000). We moved in right away, and started doing home repair ourselves (re-tiling, painting, yardwork, sodding, etc.) and almost immediately noticed a few things.
1. Things kept moving around, disappearing, and ending up in odd places. (Pens in planters, soap in windowsills, etc.)
2. Slight noises, lights going on and off at different times. (Not flickering, but like on at 10:24 PM and off at 10:32 PM)
3. Random odd occurrences.
Turns out the guy who lived in the house "back in the day" drowned in the pool. He was also a gay alcoholic. You should have seen the red velvet wallpaper. Ohmygod. Anyhoo. Not a big believer in ghost hullabaloo, we all thought it was everyone pranking everyone else at first. That was, until my very large and intimidating dad showed up in the kitchen one morning white as a sheet. He would wake up before all of us and open the blinds, get the paper, etc. That morning, he had gone into the den, and as he passed by the couch, he heard the couch creak / a *yawn* / footsteps / and then saw the vertical blinds covering the sliding door part and swing as if someone had passed through them. There were several like occurrences over the while we lived in this house, but it was like living with Casper. "Larry (ghost's name), stop making noise!" "Larry, it's 2 AM! Shut up!" "Larry, open the door, I forgot my key!" And so on.
Looking back, whether there was a ghost or not, whatever happened to my Dad was enough to make me believe there was something odd going on. Do I believe there are as many ghosts as everyone says? Hell no. But the occasional ghost-like phenomenon? Sure, why not.
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My grandma (and all my mom's side of the family) was from North Carolina. Poor tobacco / cotton farmers. My great-grandparents had sharecropped with another family, the Taylors. Over the years, they had become good friends and even though they no longer shared crops, they still had family reunion-type events over the years.
About 15 years ago, my grandma and her sister were at a family reunion get-together at the Taylor family plantation. Grandma and her sister had gone out to the old tobacco barn to get something being stored out there. The tobacco barn is about 200 feet from the Taylor family cemetery. It's pretty common in the South for older families to just bury their dead on their land.
As they were about to head back, they saw movement out in the graveyard. My grandma says she thought it was a dog. Since no one in the family had a dog, she grabbed a stick to scare it off in case it was feral. It started moving toward them, and they realized it wasn't exactly a dog. About 50 feet from where they were standing was a dog's body. It was drifting about 10 inches or so off the ground. It had the head of a man; bald, with a long red beard which trailed on the ground. It moved closer, and my grandma started swinging with the stick, and the two of them ran back to the main building.
Everyone in the Taylor family is pretty sure this is John Taylor. From all accounts, he was a real bastard. He lived out in a swampy area alone around Dunn (small town south of Fayetteville) in a shack for a long period, and from what I gather the circumstances leading to death were shady. He also had a little black dog. At one point, as my grandpa was out chopping wood at the Taylors' farm, he heard someone laughing and looked up to see John Taylor (no dog body) sitting on the wood pile laughing at him.
My grandpa was once chopping wood in that same area near the tobacco barn, when he heard laughter. There, sitting on top of the woodpile was John Taylor (the full-body version) pointing at him and laughing. My granny drew a picture of the dog ghost, and if I can find it, I'll post it somewhere.
So I went around the back of the house to get in through that sliding glass patio door. This was rarely locked at that time, so it was a safe bet, and much easier that trying to climb the fence to get over the padlocked gate. However, in order to get there from the place where the trash was, I had to walk along the side of the house.
The side of the house was a pain in the ass during the day, and a terrifying gauntlet at night. It was a pain in the ass because it was full of overgrown shrubs that reminded me of all the pruning, weeding, and general yard work shit I would be doing that weekend. The border of the property had some gnarly-assed shrubs planted along it, and I didn't like them because I was afraid of possums, spiders, etc. That's why it was the gauntlet of terror in the dark. You never knew what was hunched down in the bushes, building a web across the path, or running over your feet in the dark. In any case, as I was walking past these shrubs, one of them started shaking, and there were snuffling noises like some animal was in it.
I froze in place for half a second or so before doing what most 8-year-olds would have done in that situation - I ran like hell. Right after I started running, I heard the animal jump out from the bush onto the concrete walkway behind me, so I started to run even faster. I cannot remember hearing footsteps or anything else behind me, but it was only 10 yards or so to the door so I didn't really have time to focus on the chase, I just didn't want to get bitten by the dog or coyote or whatever that had decided to come after me. I reached the door, snapped it open and flung it shut as quickly as I could while thumbing the lock in place. Made brave by the sheet of glass between me and whatever animal was out there, I turned on the exterior light to see what the hell had jumped out of the bushes. There was nothing out there. So I put my nose to the glass door to really check carefully, searching the shadows under the bushes and trees.
Then something pounded against the glass. Hard. The glass actually bowed in and hit my nose. It was hard enough to make my eyes water. Something was pounding on the door, but nothing was in front of the door. No one threw anything, nobody was out there. The yard was empty. After four or five tremendous blows against the glass, it stopped. My brother (who was in the living room) yelled out, "What are you hitting the door for, moron? I'm trying to watch TV." It took me about 8 years to go out in the yard again alone at night. Nothing weird like that ever happened again. It was a one-time thing. Scary as fuck, though.
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My parents bought a house from a guy about 20 years ago and converted it into a private business (they are in the fur industry). They almost completely remodeled the place, but the apartment upstairs they kept unchanged. In the process of remodelling and adding on to the store, they had to dig up the old septic tank and make room for a new foundation, so a lot of ground was broke. Apparently (I was young at the time), they had to sift and resift the dirt that they turned up because weird shit kept showing up in it. (old car parts, wooden boxes, and A COUPLE OF SMALL LOCKED CHESTS WITH GOLD COINS!! [not a HUGE find, but worth $2k+ at the time], and also the frequent charred remains of a house that burned down there about 50 years ago) Another small point of note is that in the apartment upstairs there were a number of secret compartments in the bottom of closets and built into the side of cabinets in the kitchen (perfect place for hiding stuff!) and what looked like a bullet hole through one of the doors to the upstairs bedrooms.
Well, time went on and my parents at one point had to go out of town on business, so they left me and my brother at the apartment above the new store with a sitter (I was about 8 at the time). Well, I decided to sleep on the couch in the living room; around 2 AM, I heard someone walking up the stairs so I jumped up and looked out the window (the stairs can be clearly seen from the window) but surprisingly enough, there was no one there. (this was summer in Fairbanks, Alaska... it is daylight at 2 AM) So I laid back down, only for this to happen again, and again, and again. Eventually I just decided to watch the stairs until it happened again. AND IT DID! I distinctly heard someone walking up the stairs but there was no one there! Well, this scared the shit out of me, so I scrambled into the bedroom and insisted on sleeping with the babysitter. (boobies!)
When my parents got back, they let me in on the fact that not only did 2 people die in a fire when the old house burned down, but that someone was actually shot to death in the back bedroom (no idea if the bullet hole is from the same incident) about 5 years before they bought the place.
I am convinced it is haunted, and refuse to spend the night there to this day. The hundreds of dead animals just add to the foreboding feeling of death there. It is by far one of the most tangibly evil places to stay I have even encountered.
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I'll open up with scary shit that my family and I have dealt with in the mountains of Stuart, Virginia, which is a damned tiny town just about in the middle of nowhere. My father's family line has held a significant track of land in the mountains for quite some time, and the "farm" (I use this loosely, as I doubt it's ever farmed anything) must be reached after driving a good twenty minutes on gravel on the laughable mockery of road that serves as a driveway. Needless to say, it's secluded.
Certainly, this was a fun place to visit as a kid. Imagine a tiny two-story (second floor was the attic, really) house with a godawful earthen cellar / crawlspace, situated on the very peak of a hill between mountains. On the ridge to the east of the house is a fucking makeshift cemetery with a dozen or so faded, blank, and broken headstones. This contains those whom I mention in the history below.
For a bit of history: back before the Civil War, some rather unsavory folk lived on the land, distant cousins from my father's line. Here, the initial home burned down in the midst of a flash forest fire - while they were still inside. Among this lovable family was a reportedly insane aunt who castrated a drifter on the dining room table. Fun. The land was cleared, house rebuilt, and the space claimed by the next in the family line and his new spouse. Over several years, they attempted to have children three times -- the first two were total miscarriages, and the third died less then a week after birth from illness. Less then six months after that, the mother died, and he moved out again and sold the place.
(Bear with me for not having names and the like, but mostly trying to give you an idea of the fucked-up background this godforsaken place has. I actually took notes the last time I was out there, recollected from my grandmother, but I'm at work at the moment. If someone -is- curious about the background, you'll want to look into the Kirkman family and the Turner family in Stuart VA. Anyways, to the story itself.)
Eventually the land was bought again in the interests of "heritage" (ugh, why'd they have to?) and brought back into the family. For the last six decades, my grandmother's been living there, and about two years ago my father moved back in with her to take over the property and aid her health. He came back a month later after changing his mind. It seems that while he was there, a number of rather disturbing things began to occur --- and it is during his recollection of these things that he related what had happened when he was a boy there.
One night when he was 11, he woke up in the middle of the night at a little after 3 AM. Upon turning to look at his brother, he found him pale and in a cold sweat, shaking uncontrollably. The two of them heard a clatter in the kitchen, and made their way in to find my grandmother sitting at the table, holding a cup of coffee, but shaking so much it was spilling everywhere. Apparently my uncle had woken suddenly and found a face with eyeless sockets inches from his face, staring at him with a low hiss. He was too busy shitting his pants to do anything as it stood up and walked out of the room. My grandmother had heard footsteps from down the hall, and called out to tell the boys to go back to bed. Her room at the time didn't have a door -- just hanging beads -- and walking through them without disturbing them, a silhouetted figure stepped in and began to approach her bed. She cried out "God save me!" and the thing moaned and vanished.
Now recently. According to my grandmother, things have been going on ever since, but she'd grown so used to them that she just didn't care anymore. My father was a different story. Some of the things that he experienced during his month's stay in the summer:
* While typing at the computer, his glass of water lifted up off the desk at his side, floated across the keyboard above his hands, and set down on the other side.
* While reading in bed up in the attic, the latch to the door flipped open, the doorknob turned, and the door swung as far open as it could, with nobody there at all. (This happened all the time.)
* He woke in bed feeling an intense pressure, a weight on his chest -- not chest pains, mind you, but as though there were physically a body laid over top of his own. He could see his breath before him, even though the thermometer had read 86 degrees outside -- and started to feel a crushing sensation in his stomach. He recited a prayer, and suddenly the weight could be felt shifting off him, and there was a pop in the screen of the window with a small spark, like static electricity hit it with great force.
* On several occasions, he's seen a figure staring at him from the doorway in the mirror while brushing his teeth, only to turn around and see nothing there.
* One night, he went into the kitchen to get a glass of water and saw the pale blue figure of my grandfather (he'd died earlier in the year in a drunk driving accident) working on the pipes under the sink. The next day, the house was without water, and took a week to fix it all again (including having to replace the water heater not long after that).
* Every single cat that has ever been taken to the house has always been constantly uneasy, hissing at seemingly nothing, fur bristling and backing into corners, running out of the room at random, etc. Yeah, fun times.
* Every single cat that has been -kept- at the house for long has disappeared, presumably run off after escaping the damn place.
Now, earlier last year my father decided to return, as my grandmother's health was again failing, and his brother had grown so eccentric and loopy that he couldn't be relied upon to tend to her. Last April, he implored me to fly down for emergency family business for a week. (which later turned out to be that he'd been preparing to marry some woman and wanted to see what I thought of her. However, this developed into numerous other things while I was there.)
Right from the getgo, it was going to be fun time city for me, as on the very first evening I awoke at 3:20 AM or so, cold as shit even buried under comforters, to the sound of heavy footsteps thudding up and down the stairs quickly. (the stairs to the attic were on the other side of the wall the head of my bed was against) My grandmother, an old lady who can hardly walk on her own, was the only one in the house at the time.
At any rate, I've rambled on enough for the first post. If anyone would care to hear more, I can follow up with the rest of my horrible week, which was sufficient enough for me to swear never to return there.
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When my best friend was in his teens, he had this sort of angsty goth phase where he was all into witchcraft and demonology. One night, he meditated on an evil force, then went to bed. When he switched off the lights, a black shadow was on the wall across from him, with hollow eyes even darker than the shadow. He yelled at it to go away and a glass jar on his desk flew across the room, smashing right next to his head. His father heard the crash and came into the room, and it disappeared when he turned the lights on. I know he wouldn't lie about something like this, and besides, his father even told me that when he came into the room seconds later, there was a small dent in the wall from where the jar hit, and there was glass on the blankets, meaning he couldn't have smashed it and then gotten under the covers. The next day, he moved his dresser to where the shadow was standing.
Years later after he'd moved out (his father still lives there), we went back to the house to get something, and his old room was still a mess. We cleaned some shit up, and something fell behind the dresser. We moved the dresser and I saw a very faint outline burned into the wall and carpet, of where the thing he described stood.
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My old house was built in the 1800s, and all kinds of weird shit happened there. Every once in a great while, our cat would be let in and out of the house even if the doors were locked and there was no other way he could get in or out. We'd hear footsteps going up the stairs onto the 2nd floor landing at night, and scratching at my mother's bedroom door like a cat, even if the cat was already sleeping in one of our rooms or was outside. I found a black and white portrait of an old man behind a crumbling brick wall in the cellar, and it once blew off my dresser like there was a full force wind in the room even though my room wasn't drafty (I put the picture back after that).
That's not even all of what happened, but the rest of it's pretty minor stuff. In the middle of the woods behind that same house there was an old car whose front end was basically wrapped around a tree. There hasn't been a road there since the 1950s, but the car was built in the 70s. That's not necessarily a big deal... I suppose that someone could've driven through the woods, but several people in the neighborhood have heard weird sounds coming from that direction, and once while walking by it, the tall grass around it started heavily rustling. There was no animal or anything else there.
Behind my friend's house are some woods and beyond that is a golf course of a country club. One time at night, I stayed in the car while my friend just went in to grab something from her house. From far away I saw a white figure with a very dull glow walking toward the golf course. It sort of looked back toward me as it was walking, then walked behind a tree, and I didn't see it at all after that. Needless to say, I stayed in the car.
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I moved into this house with my parents when I was 17. It was pretty old. The first fucked-up thing I noticed about it was the basement. I was old as hell, with a dirt floor and the ceiling hung about 6.5' so it always felt very small and cramped. There was an immediate feeling of dread when you entered. In the several years I lived there, I went down in that basement maybe three times. The further back in the basement you went, the worse that feeling got.
The house was a wreck when we moved in, so my parents were tearing it apart and renovating it. My dad and I were the only ones home this one day. I was sick so I decided to take a nap while my dad went to get some lumber. At some point, I was awoken by a thunderous noise. Like someone slapping a board against the house. There was a shock with it, too. It shook me out of bed. I looked out the window thinking it was my dad doing some work, but when I looked in the driveway, his car and trailer were still gone.
Another night around two in the morning, we were all awoken by every fire alarm in the house going off at once. We thought there was a fire, but it turned out there wasn't. So we reset the alarms and went back to bed. Minutes later, they were all blaring again. We reset them all, went back to bed and then it happened again. We did this several times that night until we were chasing them around the house. We'd shut one down and another would come back on, we'd shut that one off and another would come on. Eventually we took all the batteries out.
There was a barn connected to the house and the loft had yet to be turned into offices. One night, while coming home, I pulled into the driveway and saw someone looking out one of the loft windows at me. When I got out of the car, they weren't there anymore. Investigation with a flashlight and baseball bat turned up nothing.
After the offices were built, my sister was up there using a computer. She heard papers fluttering around in one of the offices. When she checked it out, she found that a stack of papers on the desk had been thrown around the office. They were everywhere.
Every night, around 1:30, you would hear a sound like someone falling down the stairs outside my room. We stood out in the hall one night to hear it and were shocked when the sound definitely seemed to be coming from right in front of us on the stairs.
One night, I was alone in the house. I'd just taken my girlfriend home and I was watching a movie in my parents' room. The house was old, like I said, so it made a lot of distinct noises. You could pick them all out. I heard the rusty old knob on the door that led out to the barn turn. I immediately shut the TV off and froze, straining to hear something else. I quietly made my way to my room, which was over the stairs which led down into the kitchen / dining room. I heard the light switch in the dining room come on. It made a loud pop. The light was also definitely on, I could see it. I grabbed the phone and this punch knife that I kept in my dresser and hid in the closet. It wasn't the manliest thing I could have done, but I was so scared I was stupid. I hid in there for a long time, trying to hear what was going on outside the door. I heard someone come into my room. The floors were wood so you could hear the footsteps. They went through the papers on my desk, I could hear them shuffling the papers around. The desk was right next to the closet, so I was petrified. I was ready to jump out and stab the hell out of whoever was in my room if they opened the door. They didn't though and eventually left the room. After probably an hour of hiding I got out and did a sweep of the house. The door to the barn was open, the light in the kitchen was on. Both of these were out and closed when I came home from my girlfriend's house. Nothing was gone, though. The whole time I was in the closet, I was convinced that someone was robbing the house.
There were other times that I thought that I was alone in the house, then I'd hear a door close or footsteps on the wood floor and I'd think it was my mom or someone. When I looked, though, I was still alone in the house.
Objects would disappear and reappear in weird places. I would lose my keys and find them in the refrigerator.
It was a pretty interesting stay at that house. After a couple of years, though, the really weird stuff stopped happening.
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Years ago, I woke up in the middle of the night and my grandfather was standing in the doorway of my room. It was really strange. My grandfather wasn't dead, and he was visiting. However, he wasn't staying at our house that night. He was staying several miles away. I immediately had a sense of fear, so I looked away. I got the courage to turn back around and look, and I realized that I was just being stupid. The image of my "grandfather" was simply created by my lack of night vision, and a bunch of white paper on my door. So I went back to sleep. Only problem was that when I woke up the next day, there was no white paper anywhere near my door.
I swear by this story.
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The noises started about a month after I moved in. Subtle wouldn't be a good word to describe them. My roommate Erik noticed them first. He'd be home working on his computer in his room at the end of the hall, and he'd hear me walking down the hall to his door. Slow, measured footfalls from boots, echoing on the hardwood floors, coming down the hall from my end of the hallway and stopping right outside his door.
I'm sure you already know - I don't need to point out that he was home alone.
I started hearing sounds as well. Sometimes the boots in the hallway, sometimes doors closing in other parts of the house. Weird as hell, and kinda freaky, but apparently harmless.
Apparently.
Erik asked one of the girls who lived there before us if they'd ever noticed anything strange. She knew immediately what he was hinting at. Okay, so - we have a ghost. Cool. It's like a pet you don't need to feed. Aside from wondering if it's watching you have sex or beat off, there wasn't any real problem with it.
We figured he lived in the Attic. Our landlord (a dubious fellow known only as "Joe") told us that we were never, EVER, to go up into the attic. Ever. We said sure, with every intention of breaking in there right away. But we're lazy, and have short attention spans, so it just never happened. But we figured that if there's a dead body somewhere, it'd likely be in the attic.
A few months later I woke up for work on a Tuesday morning. I felt like shit. I'm used to feeling like shit in the morning, but felt cheated since I hadn't gone out the night before and went to sleep fairly early. My roommates had been gone for the night, I had the whole place to myself, and enjoyed uninterrupted DVD time. It wasn't right - I should feel good. But no.
My throat hurt. Not a "I'm getting sick" kind of hurt, it was just sore and ached. I didn't think anything of it, since I'm very active and usually have a plethora of unexplained aches and pains. I got up, threw on some clothes, took a piss, and headed for work. As the morning went on, my throat hurt more. I stopped by a bathroom to check it out.
The first thing I noticed was the scratches on my face. I had a large gash running diagonally across my nose. Two more long scratches on the left side of my face, and a couple small nicks on my forehead. I don't have nails, I keep them bitten down to the quick. But still, I figured I must have somehow mangled myself in my sleep. Apparently, I was also choking myself, since there were bruises forming on my throat. Mildly disturbed, I posted a thread about how I must subconsciously hate myself, since this was obviously an attempt to end my joyful existence. During the thread, someone jokingly pointed out how it was obviously a ghost attack. I got chills reading that remark, but laughed it off nonetheless.
A friend of mine didn't laugh it off when I tried to explain what happened to my face. She came over with a bundle of sage and burned it in every corner of the house. She instructed us to burn it at least once a month - it supposedly would keep any bad spirits away.
Well, the noises stopped after that, so like all clever people, we forgot to burn the sage.
A couple months later, I got home from work about the same time as my roommate. We went out to the grocery store together (not gay). As we were coming back into the house, we were hit by this unbelievably horrible stench. It smelt like bad Chinese food had been rotting for a week in the sun, possibly with a dead hobo lying nearby. Overpowering. We searched through the house, and could find nothing that could possibly have caused it. We opened the windows, put fans in them facing out. After a couple hours, it had faded completely. Good enough for us.
I went out that night. Erik stayed in.
I got home at about 2 AM. House was dark, but I didn't bother turning any lights on. I walked around the house for a few - putting stuff away, getting a snack, etc. Figured Erik was asleep, since he usually yells some obscenity at me when I get home. After about 5 minutes of me walking around, I hear this rather hesitant voice call my name from behind Erik's door. I answer, and then hear furniture being moved away from in back of the door. Erik is a pale kid, but I could see his veins, he was so white.
What he told me was this: Around midnight, he was on the computer in his room when he hears a scrabbling at his door. My cat Miles does this at times - Kitty Fishing - he'll dive at a door, thrust his paws underneath, and scrabble vainly for any treats. So he gets up and opens the door. No cat. He looks around, and finds Miles asleep under the covers in my room. Odd. Back to the computer, shuts the door again. A few minutes later - same thing, this scratching at his door. But it's higher up than a cat could reach. So he ignores it. The scratching gets more... insistent. He's now hell bent on ignoring it. After a bit, it quiets down, and stops... and then he hears the boots treading down the hall. They stop right outside his door. Then knocks. He calls out my name, but hears no reply other than the knocking which turns into a pounding. BANG BANG BANG! Then silence.
This is the point at which Erik moved his bookshelf in front of his door.
After hearing this, we burned a whole lot of sage throughout the
house. Which once again put an end to the occurrences.
----------------------------
Not done yet though
----------------------------
We kept the sage burning routine for a bit. But I wanted to find out what the fuck was in the attic. The more I talked about it here on the forums, the more my curiosity was getting to me. I had to know. The most common sounds were the bootfalls. They always seemed to originate from my closet right outside my room and end at Erik's room, which was at the opposite end of the hallway. My closet isn't really a closet - it's actually the stairway leading to the attic. My landlord had put in a door about 6 steps up, and hung a curtain rod to make a very rudimentary closet. Yeah, suspect.
I had to know what was up there, and I knew I could break through the locks pretty easily. Erik wanted nothing to do with it. I sure as fuck wasn't going up there alone! I enlisted the help of a couple friends. So we picked a Sunday afternoon to do it, planning to start at 1 or 2 PM, so there'd be plenty of light. Of course, my jackass friends didn't come over until 4 PM. It took another hour to get through the lock. We entered the attic at dusk, armed with knives and swords, lots of sage, and an oven mitt. I'm sure I had a reason for the oven mitt.
We were expecting storage. Boxes, furniture, clothing, etc. It would make sense that the landlord wouldn't want us going through someone else's belongings. The possibility of Pirate Booty was tossed around with hope, I must admit. We didn't really expect to find a corpse, although ... well, yes... we did.
This is what we found.
Just a chair. A single chair, sitting directly above Erik's room. Sitting right in front of the big window overlooking the neighborhood. Nice view, really.
It's been unusually quiet since. We burned the sage religiously for months. But even though lately we've been slacking off, we haven't heard a peep. No footfalls, no doors closing, nothing. I think I should feel relieved. But all it's doing is arousing my curiosity even more.
Meh, that's my story. Props if you read through all that - that was far too much typing for me to review.
================
My father is a die-hard skeptic: he refuses to possibly acknowledge the existence of ghosts.
Yet he admits to one incident a few months ago, driving down the street in our town called Monk's Walk, which has a reputation for supposed hauntings.
It was night, but the street is well-lit. It's also pretty narrow, so you can't speed down there. Anyway, long story short, he hit something. He swore blind that he did. But when he got immediately out of the car to investigate, he didn't find a single goddamn thing.
I have to believe it's true, because my father just doesn't lie, but these days he refuses to talk about it, and he refuses to believe in the supernatural, so it'd make absolutely no sense for him to make it up. All in all, pretty odd, and a rather common phenomenon too.
================
I used to volunteer at St. James' Assisted Living Facility. It was a retirement home for old Catholic people. It was really nice, out in the country, and most of these people had family who visited them all the time.
There was another volunteer there, my age, and she lived in a really old white farmhouse that was practically across the street. We used to hang out at her house, listening to music and eating frozen pizza and shit. Teenage stuff, you know?
Anyway, at night, her house was creepy. I used to keep her company when her mom was out of town on business trips, and at night you could hear the whole house settling and creaking. It sounded remarkably like foot steps and opening and closing doors. Air in the pipes sounded a lot like people whispering. That sort of thing.
But there was never anything definite, until her mom decided to finish the basement. It was an old cellar, dirt-floored, with brick canning shelves and a sink and stove for putting up preserves. Really low ceilinged, but liveable. Her ma had a hole cut in the back of the house, for a door to the basement, and they poured a concrete floor and put carpeting down. They put up walls and bookshelves, and put in comfy furniture and a ping pong table.
And that's when the subtle noises became footsteps and doors and whispers and sometimes sobs, all half-heard. I mean, it was really obvious when you were half-asleep or not paying attention, but if you tried to focus, there was nothing there.
Eventually, they decided to put in a bathroom down in the basement... just a toilet and sink, nothing fancy. That's when they found the hidden room.
The house had been a stop on the Underground Railway. The little room was a hiding place for former slaves heading towards Canada. The man who owned the house used to bundle the slaves (usually women) in his wife's clothing and veils and stuff to disguise their dark skin, stash them in the room, and then somebody else would pick them up at night and take them to safety.
One day, he took a big risk with a very pregnant woman.
She went into labor in the room and died. They buried her in the woods at night... I don't know what happened to the baby.
It was pretty creepy finding all that out. After they found the little room, the weird noises stopped. Well, the supernatural ones, anyway. It was still an old and creaky house.
=================
Well, just to add something to the thread... it's not much of a story,
but anyway..
There was a really nice old lady who lived downstairs from me when I was young. She gave me a stereo one day, which was nice, since I was thinking about getting one, and it was pretty nice, with good sound and all.
A few months later, I started noticing some weird stuff going on with it, like it would change stations by itself to a station with a good song coming on, and turn itself on when I came into the room. This was an old stereo, with a big switch to turn it on and off, and a heavy, weighted dial. I never worried too much about it, even though I'd see the switch flip and the dial turn. I just told it thanks, since it was doing me a favor. It stopped doing things shortly after the old lady died. I have a suspicion it was just hanging out with me while it kept an eye on her, and once she left, it had no reason to be around anymore. Maybe it was her husband, who knows?
==================
I just remembered another one I had a while ago. Once again, I typed it up just so you can get the idea:
I had a nightmare once that began with me sitting on the computer, browsing the internet, as I usually do late into the night.
I noticed that something didn't look "right" in my room, something with the lighting. Then I noticed that there was a large standing shadow in the corner which, considering the moonlight was shining in the window across from it, shouldn't have been there. I blinked my eyes a couple times, to clear my vision in case my contacts were fucking with me. I looked back, and the shadow was still standing there, directly across from me, in the corner.
I stared at it for quite some time, unsure how to handle this. It just stood there, defying the natural world by being partly in a patch of moonlight.
I looked back over to my monitor and noticed this message written in all caps:
"CAN YOU MAKE IT TO THE LIGHT SWITCH BEFORE I GRAB YOU?"
That's where the dream cuts out.
==================
1. When I was 13-14, weird things started happening in my house. Now, when weird things start to happen out of the blue, you kind of have to look for a firestarter. My older sister, apparently having nothing else to do in our shitty little town, had recently travelled out to one of those infamous old abandoned houses with her friends. This house was like it was frozen in time, like the family just up and left it or something (insert shitty story of their demise). A picture of Joe Namath on the kids' wall, papers, clothes, furniture, everything was still there. Just plain creepy. Not only that, but you had to go through a graveyard to get there - all kinds of wonderful scary movie crap that you wouldn't believe unless you saw it for yourself. And it was a very freaky looking house since it hadn't been cared for all of these years. Anyway she, being one of those "cool art school kids," took her artsy black and white pictures and brought those home with her... and maybe something else. Who knows. OOOOH! AAHHH!
So, I blamed the following all on her. One night, after my pansy ass is done watching Avonlea, I turn the TV off and stare at the ceiling. As usual, I lie there staring at nothing, waiting for the sandman. Close my eyes for a few boring minutes. Open them. Stare. Close them again, hoping to suddenly feel the urge to go to sleep. Nothing. Open my eyes.
ENTER THE SANDMAN (dunn dunn dunn). I am now NOT staring at the ceiling, but instead, I am staring at a face. The face is probably a foot and a half away or LESS. It is pale, pale, pale. Stereotypical ghost, I couldn't see through it... but it wasn't like a human face. I blink in horror and see it isn't disappearing. My retinas scream at me in their own special way, "ABORT, ABORT." So I do what any horrible pussy would do. I close my eyes. Being the brave lad I am, I quickly pull the covers up as far as I can, hoping my Bichon Friese Poodle (AVONLEA + POODLE = NOT GAY?) sleeping at the end of my twin bed will FUCKING DO SOMETHING. Instead, he sleeps like the obese ball of white fur he is and I either pass out or manifest some sort of ungodly strength and induce sleep on purpose. We'll pretend the latter happened.
Now I'm scared shitless, but I go and tell all my friends my "cool ghost story." Couple weeks later, I can't sleep again. I'm not looking for the ghost, coz I'm just not thinking about it, but in the back of my mind, I do not want to open my eyes and stare at the ceiling again. I do it anyway. I win the "smart son of a bitch" award. There, floating in front of me is an old face. It was not a horrifying old face, but it looked sort of ANGRY. And that's scary enough. If you are not a very old and decrepit-looking ghost, being angry is just fine. It seemed to fade, but that was no comfort. Sleep was not as quickly induced this time, but I was not going to move. Once again, eyes snapped shut.
Various other freaky shit ensues and others mention seeing the same thing in the house, but being a skeptic, I want proof staring at me a foot and a half away before I believe any of it. Here's where the weird Brady-esque twist comes into play. I could blame it on my sister and her weird ventures into abandoned houses, but about a year later, when I'm moving out of the room, my mom finds my black statue of King Kamehameha behind my bookcase. I lost the statue, coincidentally, about a year back... when Mr. Floating Head took up residence in my humble abode. HMMMM. What's stranger is that the head is broken clean off of the statue.
My mom's family used to live in Hawaii, which is where they got the statue. My grandparents had it lying around in an old shed and were going to toss it, but instead decided to give it to me. Being a kid, I thought it was cool and I promptly sat it on my bookcase where it stayed for years.
So, I hadn't seen it for a long time and kinda wondered where it was, but was too lazy to look and didn't really care. My mom - having heard my horrible tale and brushing them off as "kid bullshit" - superglued the fucking head back on and set the statue back where it was. She said nothing. But I have something to say: DON'T FUCK WITH KAMEHAMEHA, KIDS.
I still can't figure that one out to this day.
2. On a separate, but more shittingly scary than ever note, I was again sleeping in my room. It's interesting that someone else in that past scary ghost thread mentioned this same type of thing happening to them. I must have been 15 or so, coz it was a while after all of the head sightings, but I know I wasn't too old. Anyhow, I am SOUND ASLEEP, lying on my side. I have no fear of ghostly happenings as it's been long since that happened and the sightings stopped. I am obviously thinking of nothing because I am sleeping like a DEAD BABY. Naturally, because I am at peace with the world for once, something has to happen.
I hear the ungodliest shriek I have ever heard, DIRECTLY into my left ear. It is almost inhumane in that the intensity just doesn't seem like it could be coming from someone. It didn't trail off, it didn't do anything but abruptly stop. It scared me so badly I was almost in tears. Shocked, "punch in the nose" tears. I could do nothing but cringe as it shrieked. When it was done, (I had apparently grown some balls over the years) I peeked to see what might have done it and saw nothing. I then continued my routine of cowering in fear like a hebitch.
It is very hard to explain the sound. The closest I can think of is when you have the TV on really loud and the cable goes out and you only see and hear really loud fucking static. A static overtone with just plain good ol' high pitched shrieking. I've never heard anything like it, but can remember exactly what it sounded like if I think about it today. This is far scarier than the face. Somehow.
3. Didn't happen in my house, but: I'm younger, I'm at my friend's house. He swears it's haunted and I don't believe him coz... why would I? One day I'm over there and we're walking past the front door where two large windows are and I say: "Hey, the mailman is coming up to the door, probably has a package." So he opens the door, looks outside. No mailman. "There's no mailman, dude." "Yes, there is... I saw him walking by. Blue shirt, blue shorts, the mailbag and all that. He was walking towards your porch or the other house." So, he walks outside and says "no," and I look too, all the way outside, and there is no mailman between the two houses or in the backyard. "Maybe he was going to someone else's house." "Yeah well, where is his car?" He only bothers answering me because I am visibly stunned that this thing I saw as plain as day suddenly disappeared in front of me. So, by now I'm just confused. More importantly, my friend reminded me, our mailmen don't carry those sacks anymore.
"Oooh. Yeah." That was weird, but not freaky, and I just thought of it as a novelty. It's easy to do that when it's broad daylight. At some later date when I was sleeping over at his house like kids do, his TV comes on. He had apparently grown accustomed to the nightly noises, but I was not. I asked him about it twice and he told me, "It's just the ghost. Go to sleep." I was not interested in finding a blonde mailman watching TV, so I did as I was told.
4. My dad has a short, but cheery story. He is a no-bullshit kinda guy and has only one other kinda-ghost-story to his name, so I took his word. He's at my grandmother's house (his mom) to keep an eye over it since she's in the hospital. No one is home. My father goes into the bathroom, closes the door, does what he has to do. He then emerges from the bathroom to find an old woman lying on the floor reaching towards him, begging for help. He claims that he quickly ran the fuck out, which I find rather humorous. Picture a 50-year-old man jumping over an old woman who is screaming for help and then quickly making his way out of the area. Laughs aplenty. He's not the type of guy to hallucinate or see things, so it's strange. If you are curious as to why he DIDN'T FUCKING HELP, ask yourself that the next time you come out of your bathroom and there is a frighteningly old woman you don't recognize screaming for help on your floor. Much praise to that "DO YOU SHIT WITH THE DOOR OPEN?" thread.
5. And finally, a Ouija board story which is secondhand. Years and years back, my grandmother and her sisters were playing with the ouija board out on some sort of back porch. The Ouija board tells them that one of their children is going to be hurt. Their kids (my dad's siblings and cousins) are inside. The parents don't like this at all and are angry, until a child somehow breaks the sliding glass door behind them and cuts the shit out of their arm. Mr. Ouija was forsaken after that. Rest of the family vouches on the story and no, they aren't highly religious or anti-Ouija, so I trust them on that one. I'm not really interested in breaking out the ouija after the non-sleep fest it brought upon me out of sheer terror the last time I used it anyway... maybe some other day...
Also, I went to that supposedly haunted "Whaley house" in San Diego and didn't see jack shit. What a ripoff. It's funny to watch a group of people stand in one position and just stare at furniture, waiting for something to happen though
===================
When I was a kid, we used to move from house to house a lot. We ended up living in about half a dozen places. One of them was a house that hadn't been inhabited in about three decades. It was actually a block away from where we already lived... but this new house had an exercise room lined with cedar, a pool, a sauna, fountain drinks, a den, living room and showroom, a full bar setup, two car garage, the whole nine. And, since no one had lived in it since the late 60's, we got it for a steal (read here: 4000+ sq. foot plus a whole shitload of extras for less than $80,000). We moved in right away, and started doing home repair ourselves (re-tiling, painting, yardwork, sodding, etc.) and almost immediately noticed a few things.
1. Things kept moving around, disappearing, and ending up in odd places. (Pens in planters, soap in windowsills, etc.)
2. Slight noises, lights going on and off at different times. (Not flickering, but like on at 10:24 PM and off at 10:32 PM)
3. Random odd occurrences.
Turns out the guy who lived in the house "back in the day" drowned in the pool. He was also a gay alcoholic. You should have seen the red velvet wallpaper. Ohmygod. Anyhoo. Not a big believer in ghost hullabaloo, we all thought it was everyone pranking everyone else at first. That was, until my very large and intimidating dad showed up in the kitchen one morning white as a sheet. He would wake up before all of us and open the blinds, get the paper, etc. That morning, he had gone into the den, and as he passed by the couch, he heard the couch creak / a *yawn* / footsteps / and then saw the vertical blinds covering the sliding door part and swing as if someone had passed through them. There were several like occurrences over the while we lived in this house, but it was like living with Casper. "Larry (ghost's name), stop making noise!" "Larry, it's 2 AM! Shut up!" "Larry, open the door, I forgot my key!" And so on.
Looking back, whether there was a ghost or not, whatever happened to my Dad was enough to make me believe there was something odd going on. Do I believe there are as many ghosts as everyone says? Hell no. But the occasional ghost-like phenomenon? Sure, why not.
===================
My grandma (and all my mom's side of the family) was from North Carolina. Poor tobacco / cotton farmers. My great-grandparents had sharecropped with another family, the Taylors. Over the years, they had become good friends and even though they no longer shared crops, they still had family reunion-type events over the years.
About 15 years ago, my grandma and her sister were at a family reunion get-together at the Taylor family plantation. Grandma and her sister had gone out to the old tobacco barn to get something being stored out there. The tobacco barn is about 200 feet from the Taylor family cemetery. It's pretty common in the South for older families to just bury their dead on their land.
As they were about to head back, they saw movement out in the graveyard. My grandma says she thought it was a dog. Since no one in the family had a dog, she grabbed a stick to scare it off in case it was feral. It started moving toward them, and they realized it wasn't exactly a dog. About 50 feet from where they were standing was a dog's body. It was drifting about 10 inches or so off the ground. It had the head of a man; bald, with a long red beard which trailed on the ground. It moved closer, and my grandma started swinging with the stick, and the two of them ran back to the main building.
Everyone in the Taylor family is pretty sure this is John Taylor. From all accounts, he was a real bastard. He lived out in a swampy area alone around Dunn (small town south of Fayetteville) in a shack for a long period, and from what I gather the circumstances leading to death were shady. He also had a little black dog. At one point, as my grandpa was out chopping wood at the Taylors' farm, he heard someone laughing and looked up to see John Taylor (no dog body) sitting on the wood pile laughing at him.
My grandpa was once chopping wood in that same area near the tobacco barn, when he heard laughter. There, sitting on top of the woodpile was John Taylor (the full-body version) pointing at him and laughing. My granny drew a picture of the dog ghost, and if I can find it, I'll post it somewhere.
Labels: canada, coinage, computer, corey, death, erik, ghost stories, grandma, halloween, history, james, kids, maxed-out tags limit, restarts, scrabble, sick, sleep, something awful, war, weird stuff
posted by Flami at 9:23:00 PM
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