Ghost stories, part 8

I did an EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon) experiment in my basement and got a little girl saying "Come play with me" and "Who are you?" fucking clear as crystal, on two different mics. The reason I did this experiment was because of something that happened 4 or 5 years before;

My basement is furnished, so it is also my room. I just got a new stereo, so I decided to go to sleep with just the radio on. The band: Skinny Puppy. The album: Too Dark Park. Well, I thought I had heard something, so since there were no lights by me, I went to turn on the TV. I always keep my inhaler and the TV remote by my bedside; neither of which was there. I feel something whiz by my ear. I find the remote and turn the TV on. It’s my inhaler; it was thrown at me. That was the 1st time it happened.

About 3 weeks later, I had a late dinner in my room. I went to sleep with the dishes downstairs. I slept with the TV on at all times since the previous incident. The power went out. I scramble for a light and turned one on only to realize: "Duh, the power's out." Then I notice something across the room. It looks like a heatwave or what the Predator looks like when he's got his cloak on; but this had no definite shape, it was just there. I felt something hit the wall, so I got flat on my mattress and waited for the lights to come back on. They did about 2 minutes later. Now the walls in the basement are concrete, but with a piece of drywall with paneling over it. I found the fork I used that night for dinner stuck into the wall. That was number 2.

About a month later, a friend of mine at the time said she thought she saw something in my mirror in the basement. She's nuts, so I thought she was kidding. I came downstairs and for a split second, like a blink, I saw what looked like a Scottish guy looking out the mirror as if it were like... a door and he was trying to find a way out. I thought I was seeing things and seriously began to question the rightness of the head on my shoulders.

Then the final time I saw them. Asleep in the basement. TV goes to static; cable went out. After a while, my TV turns off when it has a blue screen or static. It did. I woke up because the TV turned off. I look over at the other side of the room to see three of those predator / heatwave shapes... but they are very tiny and have definite shape; they were children playing a game of what looks like four corners or something. I said, "Hello?" and they all stopped playing. I was so fucking beyond scared. They started to come at me when they all molded into that big indefinite shape from the prior sighting. Now, this part is sketchy... so bear with me. It came at me, and instead of feeling scared... I felt warm, calm, and sleepy. I knew I wasn’t going to be hurt. I remember saying, "I won't hurt you" and "You are no reason to be afraid of me or to hurt me." I woke up the next morning for school and haven't seen them since. But that was 5 years before the EVP experiment...

Which means they are probably still in my room but know that I'm not a threat. I did some research on my house and I found out the first owner had a little girl; department of records couldn't tell me if she died there or not. The 3rd owner's husband died in the house, and we are the 4th owners. As much as it scares me sometimes, it's so fascinating. When people come over and hear something and go, "what was that?" I'm just like, "a ghost, I don't know who it is... but they live here too."
====================

I moved into my house in 1991, when my mother married my stepfather (who has since died, but that's another story). His ex-wife before my mother died in the house in 1990 due to cancer. That's the room my mother sleeps in now. He was also a big animal lover, and numerous animals have died in the house, and are now buried in our backyard.

Since we've moved in, I've heard numerous strange noises. Creaking floorboards, knocking in the walls, whispering, scratching coming from the attic, etc. (Our attic has insulation everywhere, including on the floor, because it isn't a real attic, but merely a small storage area.) I hate being alone in the house at night, as does my mother, and my sister did as well, but she's moved out now. If you're sitting quietly, it constantly feels as though someone is with you. Just the other night, I was in the living room, reading, and my cat was lying on the top of the couch behind my head, sleeping. Suddenly, it felt as though someone had come and stood right next to my right ear. (If you put your hand by your right ear, that's how it felt, like someone was blocking my hearing.) Quite unnerving, and I glanced at my cat, and she was staring wide-eyed at the exact spot it felt like someone was standing. Needless to say, I went to bed.

When I'm in my room at night, it feels like someone's watching me, or at least like someone's there. I just bury my head under the covers and wish a quick descent into sleep. The weirdest thing that's happened is the whispering. My house is a tri-level. If someone is in the basement, talking, you can hear it through the vents on the upper floor. Well, one night, I'm lying in bed trying to sleep, and I hear a woman's voice. It sounded muffled, like she was whispering. I figured it was my sister talking on the phone downstairs, but when I checked, she was in her room, sleeping. When I asked my mom and sister if they ever noticed anything strange in the house, my sister said she also heard the whispering. Totally creepy.

Anyone who comes to my house and stays the night feels quite unnerved. Most people don't like it there. I know I don't. It wouldn't be any big deal, but when I felt that tugging on my hair as I was trying to sleep one night, I kind of freaked out. Also, my mom had woken up in the middle of the night, and she felt like someone crawled into bed behind her. She thought it was her cat, since the cat usually sleeps with her. The cat was on the floor sleeping, though. My mom just shut her eyes, and went back to bed.

Let's see. What else has happened? When my stepfather was still alive, my mom was doing the dishes and she felt a hand on her shoulder. She turned around expecting to see my SF, but no one was there. She said she didn't feel threatened, but she didn't like it anyway.

The week my stepfather died, my sister said she woke up one night and saw him in the hallway, waving. She slept with her door closed after that. She also said she saw green lights in the very downstairs part of our house. The room where the cats have their food dishes and litter box is one of the scariest rooms in the house. Our dog wouldn't go in there. He refused, even though we tried to force him sometimes. The cats never seem to have a problem with it, though, but I just think that's because they have to go in or they'll starve to death.

I was reading one day on my bed. I had my back to the doorway and was facing the wall. I felt something jump up on the bed (the bed shook), and I turned around expecting to see my cat. Nothing was there. I checked under the bed, nothing. All the cats (we have three) were in the living room, asleep. I know several cats have died in my room, so that creeped me out.

My room has completely changed since this happened, but I'll try to explain so you understand. There is a small window in my room which was just put in a few years ago. Before that, there was just solid wall. Anyway, I was sitting in bed, watching TV, when I heard knocking in the wall. The kind of knocking you'd expect to hear on your front door. I put my ear to the wall, and there was definitely a knocking noise directly where my ear was. My room is on the second floor, and the spot where the noise was emanating could only be reached from the outside by a ladder because it's pretty far up. Since it was late at night, I doubt someone was on a ladder, knocking on the side of the house. It stopped a couple of minutes later and I haven't heard anything like that since, especially since there's a small window there now, and my bed is not in that spot anymore. Also, the scratching I hear coming from the attic is really odd. It usually only happens when I feel a presence very heavily in my room. Makes for a hard night of sleep.
==============

When I was a kid, we lived in a fairly large house in the middle of Fort Collins. Nothing particularly weird happened in the house until my 7th birthday. On that day, I had a dream of a little girl who died of some strange illness. In the dream, I was walking through this strange-looking hallway with a creepy floral pattern wallpaper. Anyway, I eventually turn into a room, and there is a bunch of people and a priest standing over a bed with a small girl lying in the bed. Everyone is crying and sobbing and the priest is reading some stuff out of the Bible he had in his hands. I walked up to the side of the bed and looked at the girl, and then at the man that was standing next to me. I looked up at his face and he stared back at me and screamed, "WHY GOD?! WHY DID YOU MAKE HER SICK?!" That scene has stuck in my mind so vividly that I could draw every feature on that man's face to this day.

Anyway, after I had the dream, strange things started happening. Chairs would move around (not get stacked into a pyramid like Poltergeist), doors would open and close, and we would hear giggling. Things like that. A few times, we would come home and every single cabinet door in the house would be wide open with all of the contents of the cabinets pushed up to the front and stacked in perfect columns (labels out, mind you). Now seeing that was pretty damn creepy when I was a kid.

Also, one night while I was having a particularly hard time sleeping, I opened my eyes to see a small girl (the same girl from my dream) dressed in a white gown standing at the foot of my bed, smiling at me. I closed my eyes and quickly re-opened them to see if the girl had gone away, but this time she was extending her arm to me with something in her hand. At this point I had no idea what to do, so I did what any 7-year-old would do; I quickly pulled the sheets over my head and curled up into a ball. I laid there for a second thinking that I was just having a really fucked-up dream. But then I felt the bed compact as if someone had sat on it. At this point, I'm shitting myself. I'm not sure why I thought it was a good idea to rip the covers off of me and quickly stand up, but I did anyway.

The small girl had moved around to the side of my bed and was just sitting there smiling at me. She reached into a pocket of her gown and pulled out a small trinket that looked like a small horse. She looked up at me and mouthed something, but I couldn't hear her. She extended her hand and offered the small horse to me. I just stood there, in my pajamas, in the middle of the bed, completely dumbfounded. Right as I was about to reach to get the horse from the little girl, the light flicked on in my room, promptly causing the little girl to look towards the door, then back at me.

My dad had turned on the light and was looking at me strangely, then he noticed the little girl. His exact words were: "What the hell is going on in here?!?! Who the hell are you, and why are you in my son's room?" After he finished his little outburst, the girl got up from my bed, smiled at me, and put the horse back in her pocket. I can't really describe what happened next, but she kind of half-disappeared, half-blended into the wall. Anyway, it creeped both my dad and me out, and we spent the next week sneaking around the house together trying to see her again.

After the little bed incident, the little girl would start taking our stuff. Her favorite thing to do was to take the remote to the TV and hide it in the closet of my parents' room. Another of the girl's favorite things to do was to take my toy trucks and send them rolling across the floor for hours. When we tried to take the trucks away and put them somewhere else, the trucks would promptly be back at scooting along the floor.

That's my little ghost story. We never saw the little girl again, nor did we ever find out who she is or what the little horse was.
==============

I have a cousin named Josh who's about 14 years younger than I am. His father is a manager for an insurance company. Part of my uncle's work involved moving into new territories and setting up new branch offices. Because of this, they tended to move around a lot. When Josh was a baby, his family was renting an old farmhouse in rural Maryland. (Harford County, in case any locals are wondering) They rented the house from an old lady whose husband had recently passed away. One of the things that the landlady said to my aunt and uncle when they moved in was how happy her husband would have been to see my cousins playing on the farm. Apparently, he had really loved kids, and was sad that all his grandchildren were fully grown.

I'm not sure exactly how old Josh was at the time, but as a frame of reference, he was just learning to talk, he still slept in a crib, and was still a pretty wobbly walker. (I'd guess that would place him at about 2) Anyway, one day my aunt and uncle woke up in the morning and found Josh crawling around on the floor in his bedroom. He wasn't injured in any way and was generally content to be playing with his toys, so they just laughed and wondered how he got out.

The next day, it happened again. It still seemed physically impossible for him to be able to climb out of the crib, as he could barely even walk on his own. After that, the family started calling him Houdini, and my aunt and uncle decided to get him a new crib because they were afraid of him hurting himself when making these daring escapes. The next night after obtaining the new crib, Josh escaped again, and wandered into my aunt and uncle's bedroom.

At this point they were really upset, mostly because they were worried that he would hurt himself, so they asked him how he was getting out of the crib. He wasn't a very good speaker yet, but he said something that scared the living shit out of both of them. He said: "The old man picks me up and we play together." They came to stay with us until the lease ran out on the farmhouse.
==============

It happened a couple years ago, when I still lived with my mom. The owner of that house before my mom was an old lady, who, by the accounts of our neighbors, was very nice. Well, she died. And guess in whose room? Yup.

There were countless times when I would be alone and just feel uneasy, but I guess that's just how most people get when they're alone in the dark. However, there was one instance in particular...

I was asleep in bed, nothing out of the ordinary. I close and lock my door every night, and I know for a fact that my windows were always locked, 24/7. Well, I woke up one night, as I do a couple times a night, and there, standing before me, was a vivid, white, translucent figure. I was so tired and void of energy that I didn't even have it in me to be afraid. I tried to lie and tell myself it was my brother, and I even went so far as to fling my arm at it in an attempt to shoo him. Nothing. My arm went right through it. As I said, though; I was dead tired. I fell asleep, thinking little of it.

It wasn't until this past Halloween that I actually let the experience dawn on me. I went to go see the midnight showing of The Ring with my friends Tim and Sam, and on the way back from the theater, we had a helluva time exchanging ghost stories. At this point in time, I remembered my own tale, and finally let it all sink in. For years, I had been sleeping in the same spot as this woman had before she passed.

God, I keep getting the chills uncontrollably.
==============

A friend of mine from high school moved into an apartment in Fargo, ND shortly after we graduated. The apartment had a dismal past. A couple years prior to her moving in, a previous tenant had killed himself in the bathtub. Allegedly, his body sat for about a week before somebody finally found him. The landlord warned her that people had claimed that the place was haunted, but this just excited Kim more and she and her roommate moved in.

Not long after they moved in, weird shit started happening. On several occasions, they'd come home and find their furniture rearranged throughout the apartment. Sometimes it'd happen while they were in another room. They'd each had experiences they'd hear some bumping in one room, and when they opened the door to look, chairs would be tipped over, the couch moved with its pillows on the other side of the room, the TV off its stand, etc. Though they never saw a ghost.

The coup-de-grâce, so to speak, came when her roommate took a picture of her sister in front of a window. When the picture was developed, the result was quite shocking. Instead of the roommate's sister and the apartment, there was a black background with about thirteen dots forming an outline over approximately where the sister would have been standing. Above her head were several more dots forming a cross-like pattern. Now, maybe there is some kind of explanation as to how this trick of photography occurred (and yes, I DID see the photograph), but nobody we spoke to could figure it out. Kim even took the picture to a professional photographer in town, and he was baffled. Needless to say, Kim and her roommate were scared shitless. Neither one would stay in the apartment without the other out of fear, and by the end of the week, they were out of there.

The landlord kept a copy of the photograph as proof of what goes on in that apartment. As far as I know, he's still got the damn thing, and I believe Kim's ex-roommate still has hers.
==============

I love ghost stories. This reminded me of something that happened to my ex-husband.

His father had a spooky apartment in which all our friends, when we spent time there, would see and hear little strange things and get feelings that things weren't quite right.

A couple years before, my husband was sleeping and suddenly awoke to a couple of "things" standing in his room which he described to me as a lot like the predators from the movie did while cloaked. Of course, he immediately freaked out and tried to run, but found he couldn't move.

Eventually this feeling passed and he jumped out of bed and ran to the kitchen to grab a knife (why, I don't know). Turning back, he saw about four of the creatures blocking windows and doors, they all looked hostile and ready for combat - one was in an alert crouching position, I remember. He says he swiped the knife at one of them several times, and of course nothing happened. Can't quite remember what happened next, I think he ran out the back door and escaped.

I was never sure whether to dismiss it as a dream, night terrors, or overactive imagination, but years after we were talking to someone who we found had lived in the same complex, and had also experienced creepy shit. There were a bunch of old mines, tunnels, etc. around... being an old mining town, it was theorised that THAT had something to do with it. All I know is the house had a creepy feel. Don't know if the stories are true, but they're kinda cool.
============

So, I'm Indian. I was born in the US, but my parents are from India. I've only visited India once, and that was when I was five. Two years ago, my dad decided to go back to India on a spiritual journey. Before he went, he mysteriously asked my brother, sister, and me to put our right thumbprints on a blank piece of paper. He said it was for insurance purposes. I didn't think much of it.

Last July, I noticed that he was wearing a strange necklace. It had a small canister on it. I asked him what was in the canister, and he said it was the story of his past and present lives that he wrote down from an audio tape. My dad apparently went to this sacred village in India. In this village, there are people who claim to keep track of the writings of Shiva. Shiva supposedly wrote down the lives of every person that has ever existed. You give them a picture of your thumbprint, and the keepers of these scrolls will correctly identify you and tell you what has been written about you.

This is the crazy part. They actually read off very specific statements about my entire family. On my dad's part of the scroll, it stated that he would marry the daughter of Marjorie. My maternal grandmother's name is Marjorie. On my brother's scroll, it stated that he would become acquainted with a woman from South America. My brother is currently dating someone from Brazil. (I ask you how an ancient Indian scroll knew about that!) On my sister's scroll, it said that she would correct the mistakes that she has made in a past life. She apparently abandoned her daughter to further her career as a medical doctor. Although I can't say the daughter part is true, my sister is currently pursuing an MD degree at Duke University. My dad said that my part of the scroll stated I would become a famous researcher. I don't know if that will happen yet, although I am thinking of going into research as a physician.

The keepers of these scrolls apparently will give you the parchment if you are the only name mentioned on them. If you aren't, they read out the information and you can tape what they are saying (there is actually a translator present in the room who translates as the scroll keepers speak). Although my dad prodded the people with money, they refused to speak of our future lives, because "it messes up the karmic forces." My dad has kept all of these tapes, and he claims he won't let us hear or see them until most of the information on them has come true. That way, he knows we aren't being influenced by them.

I'm still freaked out by the fact that they correctly identified us from our thumbprints. I definitely don't ever want to see or hear these tapes.

Seriously, I'm not making this stuff up, and if you really want to know the place where these scrolls are kept, I'll ask my dad again.
===========

Haven't had time to read all the stories (probably for the 3rd time), but I thought I'd just post my tidbit before I go to bed. In December, I went on a trip to visit my parents in Africa and go travelling. I was in England over New Years for a few days before and after. While I was there, I stayed in my cousin's flat which is in Fulham, just off Fulham Broadway. It was obviously an old house split into two apartments, one upstairs one down... and within each apartment, they had been split into two bedrooms, a bathroom and a main room. My cousins' place was the apartment up the stairs. Anyway, I was staying in the bedroom furthest away from anything at the end of the hall.

I was there for about four nights in total, I think. Nothing happened on the first or second night that I can remember, or realised at the time. But on the third night, I remember being semi-awake, in that state where you could fall asleep within a second, but you still know what's going on. Kinda like when your alarm clock goes off. Anyway, I remember hearing tiny feet running up and down the hallway, the steps were close together, which is why I assumed they belonged to a child. Along with the rapidness of the steps, they weren't heavy either. They kept running back and forth, constantly, for a good 30 minutes before I fell back asleep. I didn't think anything of it because, hey, I didn't know what the people below were like. But when I woke up in the morning, I remembered that the steps were right outside my door. Along with that, I had looked at the door and seen it was shut, and that there was no light shining through the gap at the bottom which I had thought was weird. No one else was up, and there were feet running up the hall. Interesting.

So by the time it had come to fall asleep on the last night I was to be there, I had forgotten about my realisations that morning and had just fallen asleep. Sure enough, at about 2 AM, I awoke to the sound of little feet up and down the hall. I started getting annoyed (and slightly scared), as I was wondering if ghosts would like us haunting them at all hours of the morning. So after about 5 minutes of me just lying there, my tension building as I listened to these children's footsteps, they stopped. Next thing I know, the footsteps are inside my room, running around my bed. So I did the most manly thing possible, I cowered under the covers in fear of the supernatural. One of the earlier posts in this thread was talking about falling asleep despite shit like this going on around you, and I know how they felt because I fell asleep despite what was going on. I have no idea how I did it, but I just remember the steps in my room being the last thing I heard before waking up the next morning. Luckily I was out of there that day, otherwise I don't know what I would've done.
==============

I worked at a psych hospital here in New Hampshire for a year. It was one of the worst jobs I've ever had, but it provided me with some pretty fucked-up stories to tell. As you might imagine, places like psychiatric hospitals are pretty turbulent places. I was hired, despite my lack of psych training, because I was big and a little bit intimidating. They needed people like me on the Adult and Adolescent units because these were very violent times. It was 1999, 9 months before Y2K and only a few weeks before Columbine, so the lunatics were coming out of the woodwork. We had apocalypse freaks, people who swore they had psychic powers and the government was trying to kill them... we had a Columbine wannabe admitted once or twice a week. They were also some of the roughest, most violent patients that the hospital had ever hosted. So they needed people like me to sort of keep the peace and take the violent people down so nurses would stop getting hurt.

The kids liked me, so the hospital director put me on the Adolescent Unit a lot. The Adolescent Unit turned out to be home to a shitload of spooks. I experienced a couple of them. After lights out, each hallway (boys' hall and girls' hall) was watched over by a counselor. I was sitting in a chair in the boys' hall. My job was to make sure no one was up and moving around, and that people were going to sleep. If I heard anyone talking, I was to shut them up. You can tell where this is going... I'm flipping through my book when I hear voices in one of the rooms. It's just muffled, but I have to get up and check it out anyway. I start to get nervous when I hear the voices coming from an empty room.

It was a quiet week on the unit, and only half of the boys' bedrooms were occupied. I open the door, expecting to find a couple of kids in there, since I heard two voices, but find an entirely empty room. The talking continued right up until the point when I opened the door. As soon as it opened, the talking stopped. I close the door, go back to my chair, chilled right down to the bone. That was pretty creepy. I hear more talking, but decide that it can't be from that room, so I start going room to room. Everyone is out like a light. The talking is still coming from that room. After my shift was over, I went out for a beer with the nurses and other counselors and told them about it. This was some sort of initiation for me, I guess. They talked about how everyone has had some sort of weird experience on the unit. It's like a rite of passage.

I heard stories about the quiet room in the girls' hall. Sometimes girls in the neighboring bedroom hear screaming and pounding on the walls... when there's no one in the quiet room. I was told about the figure of a man that can be seen (and I did see him) walking in the halls on the Adult Unit. You always catch him out of the corner of your eye, but when you turn to look at him fully, there's no one there.

The head nurse told me about a child on the Adolescent Unit seeing someone hanging by a belt in their bathroom. The staff checked it out and calmed the hysterical kid, but found nothing. The kicker? A kid hung himself by a belt from the shower curtain rod a year prior. For this reason, breakaway curtain rods were now installed in each room, and no one was allowed to wear belts.

A massive bloodstain was found on the floor of a girl's bedroom once by a counselor doing checks in the halls. She ran to get the staff, thinking someone bled to death on the floor. They all ran down to the room in rubber gloves, and everyone saw the stain. The girls occupying the room should have been in the gymnasium, and some of the staff went to find them. Like they should have been, both girls were in the gym, perfectly fine. When the nurses went back to the room, the stain was completely gone.
============

Is this a ghostly encounter? Perhaps. Or perhaps it's a concrete indicator of the awful tricks fear can play on the mind. It's rather long, in any case.

When I was three, my grandfather sold my dad his house, since he and my grandmother were moving to a condominium. The basement was somewhat finished, so my dad completed the job with a bedroom and a bathroom, along with a section that had the laundry, laundry tubs, furnace, and some cabinets. My brother, who is 11 years older than me, and I shared that bedroom. When I was seven, my brother went off to the Air Force, so I got the bedroom to myself. Like any kid in that sort of situation, I missed my brother, but was terribly excited about my new domain. That excitement didn't last long.

My nights morphed immediately into an undeniable hell. Some of this so-called hell was likely initiated by common childhood fear; for example, for hours after my bedtime, I'd sneak upstairs and peer around the corner, confirming that my parents hadn't packed their bags and left me in the house to rot among the apparent evil I was experiencing nightly. Things like this (thinking your parents are going to leave you alone) were explainable. Others weren't. I would often lie awake in bed and see a swoosh of colors above and around me, and eventually I'd feel as though I was a tiny object in a massive room. Along with this feeling came a dreadful feeling of helplessness, and I was always paralyzed, fearful to move, fearful to think, fearful to do anything. Accompanying this were sounds beyond my closed door that were always the same -- they sounded like a block of wood scraping against the concrete floor. This happened almost *every* night.

When I think back on it now, I probably looked like Danny did in The Shining when he'd see things and shake. Others here talk of the reflex-like behavior of retreating beneath the sheets; I was never able to move out of pure fear. If I moved, this whole thing would somehow *get* me. Perhaps the most odd sensation I remember throughout these visions and feelings was one of me holding a small football (despite the fact I felt I was approximately the size of a football itself). It was always the football.

This continued for months, but I was afraid to tell my parents. After all, I didn't want to lose my basement domain (my older sister had the bedroom on the second floor, right next to my parents, and I certainly didn't want that). So I trudged on through the terrifying nights, until it got even worse.

The only windows in the basement were glass block, which let only a ghastly sunlight in during daytime and absolutely nothing in terms of moonlight at night. This, of course, gave you the feeling that you were in that basement for good, and that you were *in the ground*. One night, I was startled to wake to the sound of something incredibly massive striking that glass block -- once. I'm not talking about someone kicking it, or someone striking it with a rock. It sounded like a massive body ran full-force into the window, a sickening thud that would have killed anything or anyone. I didn't hear anything else that night, and, of course, when I checked outside the next morning, nothing was there, nor was there any sign of anything hitting the window or otherwise disturbing the premises.

In the middle of the night a few weeks later, I woke to my mother's cries. There I was, sitting on the stairs leading not to the first floor, but to the second floor, a half-cleaned puddle of vomit at my feet. My mother was crying and cleaning, asking why I didn't tell her I was "sick." At this point I told her about everything that was happening, and the next day, they promptly switched the bedrooms of my sister and me. Nothing of the sort ever happened to her.

When I was a cocky teenager years later, I moved back down to the basement. I remember purposely walking the hall between the bedroom and laundry area the first night, telling whatever the hell was down there that I'd kick its fucking ass if it even thought of pulling that shit again. Lucky for the blathering idiot, nothing else happened.

When I was a senior in college, that same goddamn feeling came back one night, but this time I wasn't afraid of it. I encouraged it and tried to figure out what the hell it was. There I was, a tiny being in a cavernous room, vulnerable to everything around me. And yes, the football was there. It was extremely intense, but I still can't explain it. Either whatever is in the ground around that basement stayed with me, or I fucked myself up permanently through pure fear. Who knows?
===============

I've had weird stuff happen to me in this apartment I live in (my
girlfriend moreso than I). For example:

I was lying on the couch one night watching TV when my woman came out of the shower and asked me if I had gone in and used the bathroom. Apparently the clothes she had set, neatly folded, on top of the toilet lid somehow were sitting on the floor in front of the toilet. Neatly folded.

Another night, I was laying on the couch watching TV (yes, I do quite a bit of that, it seems) while she was in the shower and I could see into our bedroom when the closet light went out. Didn't bother me... figured we'd blown a fuse or lightbulb, it happens. So as she walks out of the shower, I'm in the middle of saying "Hey honey, do we have any more lightbulbs?" as the closet light comes back on. I hate that closet. More on why in a moment.

We've both heard sounds and stuff. I was taking a dump once and heard someone knock on the bathroom door. Knowing full well that I was the only one here and that the doors were locked, I said: "Wait your turn." What can I say, Even Satan himself shall not impose upon the peacefulness of a man's sanctum sanctorum.

My girlfriend has occasionally felt hands lightly touching her shoulders, gone out into the kitchen and found all the window blinds opened, and has often felt like someone in the living room was watching her as she slept. Her niece came over one day and, pointing at an empty wall, declared "Baby!" We assumed that there must be the spirit of a child here since then, also since most of the strange stuff seems mischievous in nature.
================

My house is almost 100 years old and at least two people have died in it.

All through my childhood, there were noises that came from upstairs. I lived upstairs, but during the day, I stayed downstairs with my grandmother. There were constantly noises of people walking or someone going up and down the creaky staircase. No huge thing, the house just always felt creepy, especially at night.

First major encounter with the unknown... when my grandfather was in the hospital for the last time, the house was usually empty in the evenings. My older brother moved in with us and he stayed upstairs and the only other living thing in the house was my grandmother's dog, Nicky. One night, after visiting my grandfather, going out to eat and then hitting the grocery store, we come home. It was around 9 PM and my brother was upstairs. As I headed onto the porch with a load of groceries, I heard an extremely loud bang, as if someone were throwing incredibly large things around inside the house. I was dumbfounded and stood there for a few seconds, the bang was that loud. My brother comes full speed downstairs and looks a bit shocked to see us on the porch... he's pale as a ghost. He asked if we had made the noise... we thought it was him. Nope. We cautiously head into the house. Quiet. Except, as we get towards the kitchen, we hear glass break.

Upon entering the kitchen, we see that Nicky is up on a shelf of the buffet cabinet at least three feet off the ground. Nicky was a short dog, and incredibly overweight: she couldn't even jump onto the couch, and had difficulty making it up and down stairs. There is no possible way she could've gotten there by herself. To make matters worse, she was behind a glass cake stand... even if she had made it up there with stilts, she couldn't have gotten past the stand. The broken glass was from where a figurine on top the cabinet fell off. Nicky was so scared that she went into one of her seizures in the cabinet. We were all freaked out. My grandfather also died in the house after being released from the hospital about a week later.


2----

Around 1997-ish, my brother gave me his answering machine. It was one of those digital things, no tape. I wanted to see how long it could record for, so I just started talking to it, and I finished with a sentence like "And Grendel (my cat) wants to say hello too!" Upon playing it back, right after I finished saying that, where silence should be, there was a very deliberate and very noticeable child's voice whispering "Hi!" I freaked. I called everyone who was in the house at the time to come and hear it. They all heard it and thought I was playing a joke on them, I couldn't even reproduce the exact sound as it was on the machine as it truly sounded like a kid. I unplugged the machine and hid it somewhere.


3----

98-ish. My grandmother was spending a week up in Georgia with her sisters, which meant that the downstairs was empty. Well, kinda. Nicky had died a few years ago, and we had three cats by that time. Daisy was a very temperamental female that couldn't tolerate my two males, so she lived downstairs.

One evening after a gutbuster session of Mexican food, we were all pretty stuffed. My older brother had claimed the upstairs bathroom as his shit cathedral, and that meant I had to go downstairs. I had always been scared of downstairs at night. It was creepy-looking... dark-panelled walls lined the long hallway to the bathroom, and the only light they ever kept on was this dim lamp that had an amber shade, so the light was pale yellow. To compound the fear, my grandfather had died down there in '94. Well, my bowels were going to be released somewhere, and it had to be soon. As I slowly took the creaky stairs down, and opened the first floor door, I was met by a blast of cold air. Nothing spooky about that, it was always cooler down there. I went to the bathroom and made with the shitting. Mid-blast, I hear a scratching at the bathroom door and the door handle rattles a bit. I didn't think much of it. Mr. Bean and Grendel, my cats, did that constantly if I didn't let them in with me.

More scratching and rattling, and I just say: "Daisy, go away, I can't get up now!" and the noise stopped. I finished and all that, and I opened the door and headed back down the hall to go upstairs. "This ain't so bad!" I thought to myself. And then I see her. Daisy was on my grandmother's bed, dead asleep. She's a light sleeper unless she settles down for the night, and then she's like a hibernating bear. She couldn't have been at the door as it takes her about an hour of light sleeping to go heavy. Fuck. I start trotting down the hallway and then it hits me... Daisy was also declawed as a kitten. Shitfuck. I run. Faster and harder than you've ever seen a fat hill giant run before.

And to this day, I will not go downstairs at night, alone. Luckily, my newest cat, Nick Cave, is so spooky on his own that he seems to ward off bad mojo, and he is always at my side. Walking with me, like he was a seeing-eye-cat for the netherworld. I can go anywhere with him and feel fine. But, I still dread heading downstairs at night. That long hallway is like something out of every old horror movie made, it's long and there are doors along it and at night, you just know either something is waiting in a room or a speedy demon will fly down the hall to claim you. I hate it.

So, those are some of my experiences.
===============

My old house was built in the early 1900's: it was old and was those
type of houses whose roof is a triangle (in other words, pointy). There were three small circular windows surrounding our living room window on the second floor, which was a small square window covered with a lot of drapes. The first floor had a big window completely draped in curtains also, but it was to the side... next to a very old-style door. It looked like those houses where you find old women living in there with 800 cats.

Anyways, my grandparents lived on the first floor for most of the day. My grandma slept on the first floor in her room. My grandpa slept in the basement in his own room, and my uncle slept in a room nearby in the basement. My parents, my sister, and I slept on the second floor in what was pretty much an attic made to look like a house.

We always had weird stuff going on in that house. My family is religious but really is not open to ghosts and stuff, as we are close-minded about that stuff. We apparently were haunted by a shadow ghost. There's no way to describe him except that it was a large black shadow and its head looked similar to a head with horns, but the horns were draped with a tablecloth or something.

My family always had weird experiences with this shadow. My uncle slept in his room in the basement, which was nicely made. You had to go through a large room, which also acted like a hallway to reach his room. Then you entered our old-style kitchen to the right, and my grandpa's room's door was there. Anyways, in the middle of the night he's sleeping, and he said he just woke up for some reason and shot up... which is pretty unusual, considering my uncle is nearly very laid-back. He said he saw this black shadowed figure. He was terrified, and the thing was just peeking in his room with its weird draped horn shadowy style. He then said it just left after a while.

A few weeks later, he was sleeping on the first floor this time for some reason. It was a room down a long hallway from my grandma's room, next to a large dining room reminiscent of 1800's dining rooms. He said one night he was sleeping, and again he had this feeling to wake up. He saw the black shadow again staring at him, and this was no real optical illusion since the background from where the shadow was was white wall. He said he was staring at it for 5 seconds, but for some reason just shot up and decided to chase it. He said when he got up, it left and went into the dining room. After that, he had no real meetings with it.

Funny thing about this thing is, when my uncle told me and my sister about this my sister freaked out and said SHE ALSO saw this thing many years back. she described it to him and it matched his description.

Before I was born, my sister had our room completely to herself, and she was about 5. My mom and dad said goodnight to her and closed the door to her room. It was kind of light in her room, considering the moonlight. She said she saw a tall black shadow with the same description approach her bed and look at her. She said at first she believed it was our dad, but after a while, it didn't say anything and was staring at her. She was terrified, but after a while it just *LEFT* without any door or anything.

*******Other unusual occurrences

My uncle would sleep in his room in the basement and would claim my grandfather would scream to himself in his sleep every night. It scared him because my grandfather does not do this. In our current home the past few years, I have never heard him scream, he sleeps like a log.

We also had a dog about 2 or 3 years old living in the basement in a section that was near the laundry room. He claimed in the night she would often give a quick bark, the kind our dog would give if she heard something but didn't see anything. My mother would sleep alone in our house because my father worked nights and came home pretty late. One night she claimed she felt something touch her foot... she thought it was my dad, but nobody was next to her and my dad had not come home yet.

Every afternoon during our summer break when we had school off, my sister and me would go downstairs to my grandparents and eat lunch. My grandma would often ask, "Why did you guys move all those chairs at 3 AM?! I couldn't get any sleep!" Our kitchen is above hers, but what's unusual was that my dad was not home (he is usually the culprit), and my family was asleep. Nobody could get into our home because we locked the door, so that was another weird story.

I would always feel terrified in that house. I do not feel it here, but there I could not stay in a room by myself for more than 10 seconds. I always felt that someone was watching me. Me and my sister had bunk beds, and I slept on the top. Late one night, I woke up and for some odd reason stared at my TV. I saw this weird shadow standing next to it, but then vanish. My TV is only about 3 to 4 feet tall, so that was freaky. I was sweating with the covers over my head, and my hair was standing on end. Another instance, one night my mom asked me to get something from her room. We were in our dining room which acted as a hallway to her room. I took 3 steps to her room which was dark, and stopped in my tracks. In her dark room (I swear this) I saw this floating white disfigurement and it didn't leave once I blinked. It wasn't transparent, but acted like a mist just floating around in a tightly packed area. At that point, I shot the lights on.
==============

Here's a few tidbits for any Penn State goons out there. I used to work as a security guard on campus, and I can tell you firsthand that those old buildings are damn creepy at night in the summer when no one's there.

The first concerns the towers (Pinchot, Tener, Brumbaugh, and Sproul Halls) in the East residence halls on campus. Back in the day, a student doing an engineering project of some sort fell to his death from Pinchot hall. Now, when it rains, the portion of sidewalk that he hit gets a puddle in the shape of a person. Check it out if you like. It's around the Pinchot south stairwell exit. Should be the only door on the south side of the building. This is the only thing I've seen for myself, although I question the story behind it.

Next is the North Halls. The Beam Business Admin building is reportedly haunted. Ever notice that it looks just like the residence buildings in the North Halls? That's because it used to be another residence hall until some kid committed suicide there. After that, people supposedly had so many freaky occurrences that they stopped putting people in that hall and converted it to office space.

Most Penn Staters have probably passed President Atherton's grave in front of Schwab Auditorium. If you look across the street you'll see Old Botany. Atherton's wife supposedly looks down at Atherton's grave from the little top floor window.

That's all I can remember right now. Are these bullshit? Probably. There were really only two places that REALLY creeped me out there. The West Halls are pretty bad when no one is there. There's also the tunnels that connect all the East Hall's dorms and the boiler room. Basically, if you go into the basement of any East Halls dorm, there's a door that leads into the service tunnels. These are unlit for the most part, and you couldn't pay me enough to get me to go down there alone. Very creepy place.
=============

This actually happened last week. I was sitting in my computer room, which has 2 computers and 3 TVs, when all of a sudden I felt the wind hit the back of my neck. There are 3 windows in the room and they are all directly in front of me. I figured that the wind must have travelled around the room and come back at me, so I reached up to close the windows, but alas, they were already closed. Thoroughly freaked out, I looked over at the nearest TV, thinking that some Dynasty Warriors 3 would calm me down, and i saw my reflection in the TV. But it wasn't me as I am now, it was definitely me, but older. I am 15 and in the TV, I looked about 65. My skin was wrinkled and sagging, my eyes were droopy and tired-looking, and my arms were frail... well, more frail than they are right now.

As I stared at my reflection, I swear it smiled at me before turning back into me. I looked over at the X-Box TV, and I saw a reflection of me again, but this time it looked as though I had been bleeding out of my eyes. I nearly screamed, but when I blinked, my reflection was normal again. I looked at the third TV (Yes, I have a lot of fucking TVs in this room) and my reflection looked burned. Like I had been in a fire or something. This one continued to look this way until I looked away. I reached out to turn on the PS2 TV, and it shocked me.

Needless to say, that scared the shit out of me... I screamed and actually peed a little. I went to my room to change my pants because they now contained my urine, and as I returned to my computer room, all 3 computer chairs were spinning. Once again, I needed to change my pants and I slept sitting up with my sword samurai-style that night.
=============

I lived in Ohio until I was seven. The following incidents only occurred in my room, span back as far as I can remember, and stopped forever the second we moved out of this house.

Incident #1: (The Wind Lady)

The very first incident that I can remember occurred on a very windy night. I awoke in the dead of night to the sound of a woman's voice that seemed to be carried by, or melded somehow with the wind. She simply counted to ten, then said my name, and repeated over and over again until morning. I was too paralyzed with fear to move or cry out. I had to lie there for longer than I care to remember. Remember that through all of this, I am younger than seven years old.


Incidents #2-who knows: (Ghostly Figures In My Room)

I saw countless numbers of translucent figures in my room at night. They moved about and interacted with each other, yet they were completely noiseless. They ignored solid objects such as walls and furniture, and seemed to acknowledge non-existent objects, that I could not see. They also wore "Old Timey Clothes," as I described at the time. They would go about their business, usually in a slightly decelerated time, never seeming to realize that I was there.

The things I saw are too numerous to relate. The magnitude of witnessing such things is indescribable. Every single appearance drove me mad with terror. I never ever got used to it.


Incident #3: (The Knocking Ghost and The Babysitter)

One night, we had a babysitter. I was too afraid to sleep in my room (which was not unusual, but enhanced by the absence of my parents), so the babysitter allowed me to sleep in my older sister's room. (She is six years my senior)

At some point in the middle of the night, my sister and I awoke to the sound of INCREDIBLY loud and desperately rapid knocking from INSIDE THE CLOSET. "BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!" We instantly began screaming bloody murder. The babysitter rushed in, was witness to the macabre knocking, and began to scream at the top of her lungs. (She was 18). We all continued to scream for the next 30 seconds until the knocking finally stopped.

The babysitter was sobbing uncontrollably, but was able to grab us and place us behind her. After a few attempts at yelling out to whoever was in the closet, she finally mustered up enough courage to run as fast as she could towards the closet door, open it, then run away and scream.

The climax of this incident is not insanely disturbing, as our cat shot out of the closet when the door was opened. It is plausible to believe that the cat may have been up on a high shelf, backed up to the door, and was hitting the door with its leg during a manic scratching fit. While this may be the explanation, the knocking was insanely loud, and this incident introduces the relationship between my room and my sister's, which will be important later.


Incident #4: (The Living Easter Corpse)

This is by far the worst of what happened in that house.

One night my parents allowed me to sleep on the floor of my sister's room in a sleeping bag, which again was not uncommon for obvious reasons.

In the middle of the night, I awoke for some unknown reason. I was facing away from the door. I thought I heard a voice, so I turned over to face the door. (Remember that the door to my sister's room is parallel to the door to my room)

When I turned over, I saw translucent figure standing just outside of my room, between my sister's door and my own.

It was a corpse. He was rotting. He was wearing tattered decaying clothing. In his left hand, he held an Easter basket. The Easter basket contained bloody human parts. In his right hand, he held a bloody axe. He was looking at me.

Then he spoke. "I've come for you, Tommy."

I began screaming uncontrollably until my mother ran into the hallway. When she appeared, she actually ran right through the figure, causing him to spontaneously disappear. She could not see him.


We soon moved away from Ohio, and I never ever saw or heard anything ever again. My family never talked what happened. I was terrified of the dark for many years. I would apparently cry and say that the "Skulls" may come back. Over the years, I was encouraged to forget what had happened, and to never talk about it again.

One night when I was in high school, I came home very late to find my mother awake in the living room. She wanted to talk about the old house from Ohio, and what occurred there. My mother became more serious than I had ever seen her. She told me several things that chilled me. How frightened she had been of my room and how she and my father had gone over the incidents again and again, grappling with the impossibility of what I would describe.

She then tearfully apologized to me. Before we purchased that house, the previous owners made a point to tell my parents that the room I lived in should be used as a playroom or for storage. They said that their four daughters all slept in my sister's room because they refused to sleep in mine.

The previous owners said that they would not tell my parents why their four daughters refused, despite the fact that both rooms were only 12x12... they only insisted that under no circumstances should a child sleep in that room.

My parents didn't believe them.
============

My House.

It's been in my family since my great-grandfather bought it in the 1920s. It has 13 rooms, is divided into 2 apartments. There are 9 exterior doors, including one that inexplicably goes out of the attic into... nowhere. A door on the second story of the house that is just up in the air... no stairs, no balcony. No one can tell me why they built it. (Though it was added on by my crazy uncle who is probably alcoholic, was in 'Nam, and drove my aunt [father's sister] to kill herself. So that could be a partial explanation). I live in the larger downstairs. I think 2 or 3 people have died here, in my bedroom of all places!

When I first moved in, my grandmother lived here, and so did an old guy who rented from us upstairs. Then she went into a nursing home (then died). The old dude moved out. My brothers lived here while they were in college, but now I'm alone again.

At first I lived in the back, in a 2-room added wing that had a living room and a bedroom. At times, it was two bedrooms, but I decked it out as a living room again. For years I lived here and had no evidence of ghosts. None. I slept with the bedroom door wide open, walked around the house at night in the dark (the bathroom is about 90 miles away), etc. The only thing odd was that under a capped-off pipe in the corner, there would be a loud banging sound. It would only occur at night. Just out of nowhere, a banging or clicking. Very loud, and I couldn't explain it.

I ended up switching the two rooms, due to the fact that the windows were so poorly sealed ice formed on the inside of the one not over the heater... fucking cold as hell. A few years into living there though, I started to have the sleep paralysis, after I switched rooms. I would get unreasoning fears. But I never saw anything.

Most of the rooms were unused. When my younger brother moved in, he fixed up one bedroom, so we took the other and made it into a game room... pool table, liquor cabinet, etc. When my youngest brother came in, the dining room was converted to the game room, and he made the game room back into a bedroom. He did a lot to fix it up (as well as the kitchen, main living room, and bathroom). It's now the nicest bedroom in the house.

My younger brother went a bit... mad. He got into drugs -- pot, heroin, and has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and depression and tried to off himself a couple of times. He now lives with my parents. I don't know how much of this is his illness, but he's into some weird shit. I partially believe in the supernatural. He goes all the way. Reads a lot of Carlos Castenada, meditates, practices lucid dreaming, out of body and transference, etc. He claims he's seen demons' ghosts and talked to them. One of his friends, who's also been a druggie and is also mentally ill, stayed here and said she saw the ghost of an old man sitting on the couch in the living room, and she won't ever come here again. (unfortunately though, they still do from time to time to smoke up and probably steal my shit)

The youngest brother, who is normally quite sane and, well, normal, also felt fears, and didn't like to be in the house alone and kept a loaded BB gun under his bed.

I slept in the living room a lot, mostly because the back bedroom was still cold and leaked. I would get even more unreasonable feelings of dread and fear, and took to leaving the lights on.

When the youngest brother moved out, I moved into the nice bedroom. Things have gotten worse. I now must leave all the lights on in the entire house all night. I sleep with my doors tightly shut, and with music blaring (usually from my internet radio station, because I have this odd feeling that there's no way I can be haunted if Punk Rock Girl or The Go-Gos are blasting... that'd be pretty surreal). I am afraid that something is going to walk by the door of a room or through it, or that something horrible will leap out at me. When I leave the house in the dark or early in the dark morning, I get the dreadful feeling that if I turn around, someone / something will be standing there in the game room doorway, looking at me, or something will get me just before I shut the door. I get creeped out looking into the empty upstairs windows at night. At night, I don't like to walk by mirrors... I get afraid I'll see someone / something behind me in the reflection. Every so often, I'll hear odd noises or things dropping.

There's no one upstairs, and there are no radiators up there, but all day long, I hear water being turned on and off up there... moving through pipes. Totally fine when the old guy was there, but it continued after he left. I heard it just now. This goes on all day and night.

Outside, sometimes I'll get this creepy feeling and I could hear a loud humming. It wasn't from the streetlight, or any construction or anything. It was all around, it went on at around 11-12 PM. I'd hear it from even farther from the house. It sounded a bit like a car running, but there were no cars running on the street. I haven't heard it in a while.

At night, I'll feel my bed shaking. Very slight, like a vibration. The whole house shakes when trucks go by, because we're near a major tractor trailer freight route, but this will occur when there's nothing there. I can't sleep with my back to the bedroom door.

I went into the unused upstairs a few days ago for the first time in months. I had the vague plan of trying to go onto the porch roof to shovel snow, because I'm afraid of heights, and ladders = NO. I also just wanted to generally check up on things, make sure there were no leaks, mice, etc. I had lost the keys. I looked everywhere. I tried all my keys. I think I gave them to my youngest brother to copy, who is now in Florida in college. When my younger brother was in the hospital after his latest suicidal thoughts, I grabbed his keys and tried them. Nothing. I got some from my dad. I got into the lower door, and walked up the stairs. I was reminded of a creepy dream I've had about a 3rd floor that doesn't exist and stairs I just can't go up due to terror. I got to the top and was breathing heavily, afraid of what I'd see. The door was locked.

I thought I'd left it open, but maybe one of my brothers had been up there. I was never so scared as when I stood on the dark landing, looking at that door with a sense of foreboding, trying keys. None worked. I go downstairs, into the back room where I left the ones I took from my brother to try those. I spot two keys in a bin with paperclips and assorted junk on the desk. I REALLY thought I'd looked there before. They were my lost keys to both locks. OMG. I went back up the stairs. In broad daylight, I was afraid. No one was around... if anything happened, the neighbors probably didn't even see me go in.

I open the door, terrified of what is on the other side. I see... nothing. The upstairs is fine. The stored furniture, magazines, stuff, okay. No leaks. No mouse activity. The upstairs creeps me out in general though. I've thought about moving in and opening up the house back into one unit from two apartments, but the paint is coming off the walls, they've settled at funhouse angles, and I think I'd go nuts if I slept in one of those bedrooms. I went out onto the roof, but the snow was solid ice, and I kept hugging the side of the house because I got the unreasoning fear something would push me off the edge (which was 5 feet away, for Chrissakes). I quickly went back in.

Understand, I've never SEEN anything. But I get more and more creeped out. It pisses me off, because if it was true, then the ghost is most likely a family member. They ought to be fucking grateful I keep the house in the family and take care of it. Why would they want to hurt someone they love or the kid of someone they love? Otherwise, it's some asshole who owned the house in the 25 years or so before my family moved in. Fuck you, we've been here longer!

The vibe here is just totally different from when I'd visit as a kid... we'd come up on vacation for a week, or during the summer, my mom and brothers and I would stay here a month or two. It's different from when I first moved in. I never thought of it before, but my younger brother (the crazy one) was VERY normal and intelligent before... now he's regressed into a childlike state, can't hold a job, suicidal. Coincidence?

One day I'm afraid I really am going to see something, and if I do; if I don't go mad immediately, I won't be able to live here anymore.