Ghost stories, part 10

I've had only two ghost, uh, contacts in my life. I'm still not sure if it was my active imagination or not.

When I was younger, I used to visit my aunt and uncle who live in the New York country. Close to Corning, only about 10 minutes away from the PA border.

My uncle had built the house himself after moving out of the crowded North Jersey city. It's on a very nice 75-acre piece of land. I have done much exploring, and there is a very old rock foundation of a house, along with old rock walls around the entire countryside.

The house is new, but I guess the land is old in terms of previous inhabitants. All of the neighbors are either Amish or vacationers that live there certain times of the year for game hunting.

The house is very large for two people - two stories, 3 large bedrooms, living room, dining room, kitchen, 2 full bathrooms plus a half bathroom.

Now onto my aunt and uncle themselves. Uncle Ray, a Vietnam Vet, no longer works. He loves to collect old things at yard sales and sell them on EBay. Mostly things dating from the early 20th century. My aunt also collects things, so this makes for a house packed full of odd tools, dolls, farm equipment, etc. My uncle has also found many odd things around the property, as there is a large gully that people try to dump garbage in. This gully produced a very, very scary looking doll. It looked somewhat like a voodoo doll, only a few inches tall.

He, of course, hung it on the chandelier at the top of the stairway leading to the bedrooms. Any time I left my room to go downstairs, I would see this doll. Oh well, at least it was suspended there, it could never get down.

The next year I visit, the doll is gone. I do not notice that it is gone. However, one night, as I am lying on my back in bed, I hear footsteps above me. Footsteps of a very, tiny biped. It was clearly not a squirrel or something. Two tiny feet running up and down the attic. They sounded as if they had wooden shoes on.

The running went on for about 5 minutes, and suddenly stopped when I got out of bed to alarm my aunt and uncle. Oh well, time to go back to bed. The next morning I tell them about the running, and my uncle says it was most likely a squirrel. I then think of the doll that hung at the top of the staircase. He said he put it in the attic. I hate dolls.

Two nights later. I am again waiting to fall asleep, when I hear footsteps. However, they are not above me, nor are they small footsteps. This time, they are on the small roofed ledge outside of my window (about 10x10' or so). It sounds like someone wearing large boots, taking heavy, slow steps in circles on the small ledge. The sound shakes my bedroom. I lie there, paralyzed with fear, waiting for this thing to burst through my window and kill me. It continues to stomp around, I attempt to reason with myself and say it must be the neighbor's turkeys that have flown up onto the ledge (they do quite a lot). Turkeys don't wear fucking boots.

After what seemed like an eternity, I quickly jump out of bed, hit the lights, and face the window. The stomping stops. I hear a loud thud on the ground below. I see my reflection in the glare of the window. I move closer to the window, not exactly sure of what just jumped to the ground. Nothing. The ledge is empty. I lean to the side to inspect the ground below me. I don't see anything running away from the house.

It took me hours to get back to sleep. I never told my aunt and uncle about the stomping.

Not sure if those stories will spook anybody else, but I still get chills thinking about it.
==================

We had just moved in to the aforementioned house near the cemetery. We hadn't even moved all of our furniture in yet... it was our third night in the building and I didn't have a bed yet. My father and I had been crawling through the attic that day attempting to get rid of some of the really old stuff that just kind of stayed with the house.

Amongst a great deal of garbage, we found some really old woodcarvings. They looked like they had been made by skilled hands, but not necessarily by a skilled artist, just someone who knew how to whittle. They were three wooden soldiers, we guessed from the early 1900's by their uniforms. American, well carved, and slightly weather faded. They lacked date or identifying information. I took them as historic oddities... I collect toys and action figures so they fit in with my collection at the time. I put them up on my desk, curled up on the floor afterwards, and fell asleep. The next morning, they were between me and the door. I was up before anyone (I usually woke up before everyone else in the family, save my father). I just figured that my asshole brother had moved them there to freak me out and put them back on my desk. I was also tired of not having a bed, so I woke his ass up and made him help me get more of the furniture out of the moving van, now that we had room in the attic for the boxes we had foolishly piled into the van in front of some of the beds.

When we got back into the bedroom, the statues had changed facing. I had faced them out, towards the window, and they were watching the door. I kicked my brother in the leg for being an ass, and he punched me in the stomach for kicking him. A brawl ensued, and then my mother put us in the corner. About 1/2 a minute later, my mom yells at me for taking toys into the corner. I say I don't have any, and then notice that the soldiers are around me. I tell her that my brother must have put them there, so he gets another minute.

Long story short, my brother stays the night at a friend’s house that night. My sister hasn't slept in the house yet, because she's staying at our uncle's and watching his kids while he works because his wife is visiting her family in another town. My mother and father would not move the soldiers. So when they are missing when I go to bed, I get pissed at my brother, figuring he'd taken them. That's when I hear the laughing. Somewhere in my bedroom, a young man is giggling. I hear it distinctly, but it echoes off of the walls and I can't find the location. I check the closet, nothing there, then I check outside and there's nothing there. Something taps my shoulder...

I whirl around, and standing behind me is an apparition of a young man. He couldn't have been older than 8, young and in old-fashioned clothes (I'd guess early 1900's). He asks me if he can have his soldiers back in a clear voice, and I promptly faint.

I wake up, and hear his voice again. It has an ethereal quality, like he's yelling at me from the end of a chasm. He again asks if he can have his soldiers back, and I stutter out a yes. That would be the last time I would see the soldiers, but not the boy. He'd play with my toys well after I stopped playing with action figures and just collected them. For a while it freaked me out, but eventually I got used to him; it was actually kind of comforting to know that he was around after a while. He was a very polite and well-mannered ghost: I'm sure he unlocked the back door on several occasions.

This is also the occurence that I am the least sure about; it is quite possible that I lost the soldiers, or my brother took them to his friend's house and destroyed them, and then I hallucinated or dreamt the rest. Then I just blamed "the ghost" any time I couldn't find one of my action figures; it kept me out of many a fight with my older brother, I'm sure. But it just seems too coincidental that whenever I forgot my key, the back door would be unlocked.
=================

In college, I lived in the oldest dorm on campus. It actually used to be the governor's mansion before it was turned into an all girls dorm. Everyone who lived there would tell you it was haunted whether they had any supernatural experiences or not.

There were ghosts who inhabited the place but could not be seen, and one special ghost who would show herself to different people on occasion. There was also a tunnel leading from a door in the basement to the catacombs under the campus. Lots of stories surrounding both the door and the catacombs.

My door story: I actually hated the basement of this house / dorm. Every time I would go down the stairs it felt like someone was behind me and when I would look there would be no one there. I used to run up and down the stairs as quickly as I could just to get away from the feeling.

One night with my now ex-boyfriend, we were going down to the basement because that was where the only male bathroom was in the entire building. We walked down the set of stairs that was on the same side as the door to the catacombs. This door was always locked and actually had deadbolts installed from both sides. It was also linked to campus security so that if it was opened, it would sound an alarm in the building and notify the police / security to come check on it. I had regularly passed this door during the day and at night and always felt CREEPED out by it. Several people, including me, had heard noises from the other side of the door such as scratching and banging. We had heard of murders and ritual sacrifices that had taken place in the catacombs, so when screams were also heard from the other side of the door by everyone who was in the dorm one night, we all tried to avoid it if possible.

Well, as we got to the bottom of the stairs we started getting nervous. Both of us felt our skin crawl for no reason we knew until we saw the door. It was open and no alarms were going off. An open door isn't usually scary, but this door was different. Even though there were lights in the hallway, there was no light penetrating the open doorway. We couldn't see anything past the door but absolute darkness. We both just kind of looked at each other and knew that both of us felt the cold and emanating darkness, and decided to book it back upstairs and call security. The cold followed us up the stairs and was even noticeable in my dorm room which was the first dorm room directly above that door though two floors up.

Security called the Head RA of the dorm and had her let them in and we all went downstairs to look at the door. No one wanted to go in there, so they quickly locked the door from our side and apologized profusely for the lack of Security response to the door being opened. They were quite perplexed that it didn't show up on their monitors as being opened, but were happy to lock it back up for us.

Ever since that incident, my room had the weirdest stuff happen around it. Strange sounds, weird shift in temperatures, and my roommate who was Wiccan even tried to kill herself in the room.

As to the ghost sightings: I never saw the ghosts but I saw some of their after-effects. Working in dorm / conference services one summer, we had a conference for musicians on campus. A lot of them (male and female) were housed in my dorm. I guess the ghosts didn't like having males living in the dorm, because they wouldn't let any of them sleep. The morning after the first night, all the men asked if conference services would stop working in the dorm during the night moving furniture on the 3rd floor. Well, none of us worked at night! We just told them that we would look into it and let it go at that. A bunch of us then went up to the 3rd floor and opened the rooms above those of the male guests on the 2nd floor. The furniture in those rooms had been moved around and piled on top of each other. We straightened the rooms and left. The next afternoon, we got complaints from the musicians again that someone had gone into their rooms and moved their instruments around. We notified Security, but everyone who had keys to that dorm had been working at one of the other dorms setting up for a conference coming in soon.

All that week, it was one complaint after another until all the musicians decided they didn't want to stay there and we had to move them to another dorm.

Ghost sightings during the school year: Everyone who saw the ghost described the same or similar image: a woman in a light-colored gown walking through the hallways. Sometimes you could see her feet; other times, you could see her just from the waist up. The descriptions always matched the picture of this woman that was hung in the piano / ball room area on the first floor. No one knew who she was, but all who saw her was convinced she was checking up on those who lived there like she was watching over everyone. I had one friend who stole Holy Water from her church to bless her dorm room since she had seen the ghost so many times. My Wiccan roommate saw her and talked to other ghosts. She would even burn sage in our room at times to try and communicate with the dead. I don't know what made her finally decide to try to kill herself in our room. Was glad I wasn't the one who found her though. I don't think I could have stayed in that room afterwards.

We would never tell the new residents that the place was haunted until they told us of something weird they saw or heard. After we told them the place was haunted and that even a Head RA had once killed herself in the dorm in the 80s, they would really get freaked out.

I won't even go into the dreams I had in this place or the creepy sounds or the weird happenings in the sleeping porches. Maybe at another time.
=================

Tales from the Graveyard, Episode 1: (If Lucas can hop around, so can I)

I had been going to this graveyard after school regularly for about a week at this point. I just hung out there during the day after my classes before my mother would get home. This would be my first, and probably most interesting, night visit.

I had found on that day, while examining the headstones of the newer section, that there was a break in the chain link fence near one of the mini-rivers that ran through the cemetery. I decided to go back there that night to check the place out in the dark. My equipment consisted of a flashlight and a box of donuts. White powder and chocolate, to be precise...

I arrived at the cemetery at around 11:15. This is when I found out that they had two guards on staff until midnight, when one of them went home. I would later find out that the second guard usually stayed until around 12:30, and sometimes as late as 1, but on this fateful night, I only had to camp out near the chainlink fence in a back alley for 45 minutes before I saw one of the flashlights sweeping the grounds turn off and a car go down the road. I snuck in through the fence and decided that I'd take the river around a little bit, and try to get to one of the large statuesque tombstones. I knew that one was only a couple of yards in.

I got there no problem. The statue was that of a cherub holding a water pitcher, and there was some semi-poetic inscription about the death of the young underneath. The grave was that of a 6-year-old girl, if I remember correctly. Anyway, I touched the marker, and figured that nothing exciting was going to happen. I also noticed that the guard left was still patrolling, so I decided it would be in my best interest to get back in the river and go home. I was a little hungry, though, so I took out one of the powdered donuts to eat.

Just as I finished, I heard a youngish voice behind my shoulder ask: "Can I have one?" I had never been so frightened in my life. I whirled around, only to see that the security guard, whom I will call Pat, apparently had never had her voice crack. I gave her my last donut, and she asked me how I got in. I told her, and she asked me why.

I replied that I was just curious as to whether or not I'd see a ghost. She told me that all kinds of creepy things happened in the cemetery, although they were usually in the older area. She then told me to go home, back the way I'd came, and that she'd ignore seeing me since I didn't have any type of tools to defile any part of the cemetery. I crawled back down in to the little river area, and that's when I heard the second voice. This one was older, and a little more masculine. I turned around, and in the ravine I clearly saw... absolutely nothing.

I was baffled. Pat had told me that we were the only two people there, and the new voice had definitely been male. I didn't have much time to think, however, because I distinctly heard the voice again. From beneath me. I looked in to the water, and saw another face reflected back at me. I whirled around, and saw no one. I looked back in the water, and the face was still there.

It just kind of smiled at me, and I realized that the clothes were terribly out of date. I began to sweat, and one of the beads ran from my forehead and hit the water. The ripples erased the face, but I remembered what I had seen and heard. I decided that it was too interesting, and that I'd have to come back. But that's another story.
================

Anyways, a couple of my friends along with some other people that aren't that important, decided it'd be funny to go wander about my old high school one night at around 2 in the morning. Of course, after graduating high school the only sane reason a person could have for returning to said school is of course, vandalism. And their little outing soon turned into one of urinating on the building.

However, no sooner had they decided to do this than a cop decided to patrol the parking lot of the school. Now, needless to say having a cop spot you and your buddies pissing on a building isn't the greatest way to spend an evening. So they had to wrap it up real quick and go hide. Now, there's a bunch of portables at my retardedly huge prison of a high school, so it's a great place to hide. Well, normally. A couple of minutes after they go hide in the veritable maze that is the portable cluster, they hear this grating noise like someone was dragging a large metal object across the ground.

There was some construction happening to the school at that point, but no form of machinery sounds like someone dragging a heavy shovel along the ground. Curiosity got the better of them, so they first went off to find out what the hell it was. However, because they weren't complete idiots (or maybe because they were) they all decided to grab some decidedly B-grade zombie movie type weapon. So now a group of high-strung teenage vandals with rocks and pretend ninja powers are patrolling the school grounds trying to find the source of this bizarre noise. Everywhere they went they could hear the noise, like it was following them, but they never found what was making it. And this school is really big, so if you could hear it on all sides of the school it was probably following you, or you were following it. Eventually though, they caught sight of their missing unimportant group member driving into the parking lot, so they decided to call it quits on their ghost hunt and got the hell out of there.
================

This doesn't make for a very exciting story, but when we were about 17, my friends and I used to go out to this old cemetery out in the middle of nowhere to hang out, at like 2 AM. One night, a friend and I were standing in the middle of the cemetery looking out across the newer section when we saw a red floating ball. We both ran like hell back to the car. It could have just been swamp gas or whatever, but it was still scary as fuck at the time. There were a few creepy things about this cemetery. For one thing, there was this really tall monument, maybe 15 feet high. On top of it was a statue. For some reason the statue was missing a hand. It didn't look broken off or weathered away or anything. It looked like it was cleanly severed. There was also this weird rusted box sticking out of the ground. We shined a flashlight down inside of it and it looked like there was a human bone of some sort inside. Also, there was this really creepy headstone with a picture of a guy and his dog carved on it. I've always had the strongest feeling that they both died in some sort of jeep accident, though I've never been able to figure out why.

There was another cemetery about a mile away that we also goofed out at in the middle of the night. This cemetery was just as creepy as the other one. It was far older. There was a pine tree in the corner with a plaque under it saying a revolutionary war soldier was buried there. There were lots of extremely weathered tombstones, including some tombstones for infants that were never even named. There was also a REALLY freaky looking tree there. It had a huge branch growing out the side at a 90 degree angle, and growing out of it was another tree. If you stood on the other side of the cemetery and looked at it, it looked like two evergreen trees standing side by side, except the second one seemed to be growing out of thin air.

The first time I noticed this, it was like 3 AM. It had my scratching my head for a few minutes until I went over to investigate with a flashlight. There was also a really weird monument there. I have no idea what it was when it was first made, but all that remained of it was a single razor-sharp spike sitting on a pedestal. You could literally impale yourself on this thing if you tripped and fell. The weird thing is that the spike was always WAY colder than the temperature outside. In the middle of July, you could put your hand on this spike and it felt like it had just come out of a freezer.

But anyway, I'm getting away from my story. One night we were all there fucking around, and I jokingly suggested we have a séance. There were about six people there and we all sat down in a circle and started linking our hands. Right as the last set of hands linked together, we heard a horrible moan come from the woods at the edge of the cemetery. Needless to say, we got the fuck out of there and went home.

And now for my third and final story. When I was 12, I got a golden retriever pup who we named Shelby. Unfortunately when she was about six months old, we had just gotten her out of the bathtub when she started having violent seizures. We rushed her to the vet, but there was nothing they could do. By morning, she had died. The weird thing is, after she died, every now and then I'd hear the sound of her running downstairs from the attic. Even though I knew it was just Shelby, I never had the courage to go investigate. After about a year, the noises stopped and I never heard them again. I guess she went on to doggy heaven or wherever. It broke my heart when she died and we've never owned a dog since. Probably never will.
==============

Tales from the Graveyard episode 2: The Gunslinger

This was probably the scariest brush with the supernatural I had while in the cemetery near my former home. It was, of course, late at night during the first winter I lived in the house. It was the foggiest night I can remember, I could see my hand in front of my face. I had to feel my way to the damaged section of chain link fence to sneak in to the cemetery through, and then feel my way along the "river." This was only a month after the face in the water incident, and the second time I had dared to come back at night. Nothing had happened during the previous encounter, so I had shaken the idea of this place being haunted from my head...

I had come here on a dare. Being a new kid in the neighborhood, the other boys decided it would be great to make me sneak in to the cemetery during the night and grab an item (a red ribbon, in this case) that they had tied around one of the monuments in the center area of the graveyard. I, of course, didn't consider this to be that big a deal, having already spent a good deal of time there in the wee hours of the morning, unknown to them. Unfortunately, the night in question featured fog the likes of which I was never going to navigate successfully.

After about 20 minutes, I came to where I figured the central area had to be, and climbed out of the waterway on to a small hilly area. I normally took great care to not actually step on any of the graves themselves, which you could usually see as a slight rise in the ground level; on this night, I had no chance since I couldn't see the ground where I was walking let alone what lay in front of it. The one chance I had was looking for dark shapes in the distance and hoping they were trees.

I found a tree within a few minutes, but it was the wrong one. I began to follow the dark outlines in the distance, with no clue as to which direction I was headed or where I was going. I had begun to shuffle across the ground, for fear that I might accidentally step into one of the waterways and hurt myself. It was at this time that I heard a male voice from behind me, in a classic drawl, state: "Ain't you a little far from home, boy?"

I turned on both my heels, half expecting some redneck security guard to have somehow spotted me. Instead, I saw the black outline of a man a few feet from my face. It wasn't as if a person was off in the fog where I couldn't see clearly... it was more like I was watching a shadow on a wall connected to no solid image. It was more fluid than a person should be, and seemed to waver with the fog. I walked a few steps forward, but never got any closer to the figure, which never seemed itself to move. It just hovered in place. The silhouette was of a man, wearing a bowler on his head with a gunbelt at his side.

The shadow talked to me again saying "Head on home, you don't want ta be here much longer. It's gonna be a long, hard night if ya stay here. Home's that-a-way" and the shadow of the man pointed in the distance, in a direction. The shadow had taken on depth, it was a three dimensional shadow falling on a bank of fog. It seemed friendly enough, but kept telling me to head home. Of everything I would see in that place, it seemed least like it understood that it was dead and buried. I could here a sense of urgency in the voice, a desire for me to go home and be safe; but nothing came of that night. I tried to follow his directions, and got lost several more times. It must have taken me about an hour and a half to escape the cemetery that night, after I eventually found the right waterway and followed it to the fence. I didn't find my usual exit, I just climbed the damned thing.

I never felt in danger that night. Normally, after a warning such as I had received, I would have felt like I was being watched or followed; but it didn't happen. Although it took me forever to find my way out (and at first I had felt like I needed to leave quickly lest some catastrophe befall me), nothing else of note happened. The worst part was I never received a repeat appearance. Everything else I saw, aside from the first story I told in here, happened at least twice. I recognized the faces in the water or the voices in the wind when they reoccurred, always in the same style and near the same place. I never could figure out exactly where this one happened, however. I didn't think to check the names on the headstones where I saw the shadow, I had felt that I needed to leave too much. Nor could I repeat my stumbling direction, I hadn't been able to tell my heading in the fog. Perhaps the worst part, though, was that I would never come to understand why this thing had felt it so important that I leave for my own safety.

Worse for me at the time was that I never found the damn ribbon; truth be told, to this day I think that the person who was supposed to hide it chickened out and figured that I'd never actually go into the cemetery anyway.
=============

I remember when my Grandpa had terminal cancer when I was about 12 years old.... apparently, my family knew he was close to the end, because they were staying in my grandparents' house (as was I)... I was still kind of a kid, so I suppose they were protecting me from the truth, as my cousin (who was 13) and I thought for sure that he was going to pull through.

My grandpa and I had a unique relationship, as my Mom had me when she was 15 years old and I never had a father, to me he was always kind of my father figure. One night, my cousin and I went to sleep (we had two beds in the guest room).... now, normally I slept like a rock at that point in time (I'm 22 now and can hardly sleep nowadays), but for some odd reason, we both woke up at the same time in the middle of the night.... I still remember the time on the clock... 1:34 AM.... we both kind of looked at each other and laughed, as it was kind of weird that we both woke up at the exact same time like that..... we both went back to sleep.

The next morning, when we both got up and went upstairs for breakfast, we were told that my Grandpa had passed away that night. Later on, I found out the time. 1:34 AM.
==============

My Grandmother and the Devil worshipper.

It all started when my mom and her brothers and sisters where kids. Over the course of years, my Grandmom and Grandpa where deeply religious. If this was DAoC, they would be Friars or Clerics or even Paladins. Anyhow, there was a devil worshipper husband and wife down the street from my grandparents' house. The following stories are the ones that I remember. I do not believe these are in chronological order.


1) My mom and the twins.

My grandparents were both helping out at the church, and my mom being the only one who had time on her hands, had to stay home to watch the youngest kids (Jan and Nan, twins). After a bit, she hears something outside the front room window. She pulls open the blinds to find the Devil worshipper crouched, peering in. He is apparently startled and runs off. My mom just shook the accident off, and went on with watching the twins. Then the phone rings.

It is my oldest uncle (John, named after Grandpa). He tells my mom to lock all the windows, and she does. A few minutes later she hears sirens blaring down the street, as my uncle John and police cars pull up to the house.

While my uncle was coming home, he seen the devil worshipper creeping around the house. Back then they didn't worry much about crime, so everything was pretty much unlocked. He was tugging slightly on windows, probably to see which ones opened with the most ease.

Back to the police. My uncle dashes the hell out of the police car and after the devil worshipper, with the police closely after him. My uncle is not the kind you wanted to fuck with. He was in the army, crew cut, well built (not gay), and strong as hell. He tackles the devil worshipper, pinning him to the ground. The cops then handcuff him and whiz him away in the cars.

It turns out that my uncle and the police got their just in time. The devil worshipper was slipping in a window as they pulled up. He went away to jail for who knows how long.


2) My Grandma and the old woman.

Much like a post in this, my grandma was startled by an old beaten woman laying on the ground.

My grandma was in the kitchen, when she heard the front door burst open, then be slammed shut and locked. She bursts into the front room to see an old women laying, blood-soaked, in the middle of the floor. The old lady tells her to "lock the back door." So my grandma runs to it, and just as the 1st screen door was being opened, she locked the 2nd heavy wood one. The looked through the window, and there he was, knife in hand, the devil worshipper.

This, being after the story with my mom, meant that when the police arrived, they arrested him. Then they checked his house.

In the attic was the circle with a star in it, drawn in blood. Candles, and finally, the bones of his baby and son (who my mom grew to like before he got killed by his dad, which is a whole other story). They had been getting complaints about this guy for a longggg time. Now they had him. Sentenced him and his wife to life in prison, where they either rot today or are dead.
================

About two years ago, my mother was involved with PTK, the honor society at the local college, which she teaches at. They were doing a clean-up at the park next to my house, and I was helping out. When they started to work on cleaning up the creek, I decided I'd put some boots on so as to not mess up my shoes. I went across the street and back home, walking to my room and pulling on boots.

Then, from the basement, I hear a voice shout something like my name. Out of instinct, I reply. Then it kicks in. I'm the only person home. An instant later, I feel as if something rushed towards me, and the ground beneath me shakes like someone hit the basement ceiling. I bolted out of the house, my mind racing.

What makes it even better is that nothing could've done that. There's about ten inches of clearance between the ceiling of the basement and the floor of my room. Greeeeeeeeeat. And now, on with the show.

Just to put forward reasons to doubt this stuff, my friend and I are pretty decent sized druggies, and he's about half-burnt. We had done some coke cut with perc about five hours earlier, but that wears off in no time.

We were hanging out in my room, messing around with AOL chat rooms since I had both PCs in the house in here. Finally, we decided to just say "fuck it" and chill. We crashed on my bed with the blacklight and some Godspeed You Black Emperor! (Lift Your Skinny Fists) on and I jokingly said we should try to creep each other out. My friend Trevor said it was a bad idea, because he's had some bad acid experiences in the past and isn't a fan of the creepout thing.

A little background on Trevor. He's 15, and spent most of 14 doing every drug he could get his hands on. He's about 5'8", squat, and pretty fucking built. I've never seen him scared in my entire life. Well, until last night.

After a while of just chilling, me trying to sleep, we start feeling a presence in the room. My house is pretty much assuredly haunted, so I'm used to it. But this time, the presence wasn't the kind one I normally felt. It was sinister. We were seeing shit, which is pretty easy to do when there's just a black light on in a cluttered room, but then strange shit started to happen. We'd have these bizarre visions when we'd close our eyes about a tall figure in a black robe, and cold chills were running rampant every few minutes.

I've got a hole kicked in my wall that's a couple inches deep. Beyond it is a blackboard, then the brick wall that's the outside of my house. Out of masochism most likely, I glanced at the hole and saw what looked like a poorly defined face in very blurry TV static. I told Trevor to look, and asked what he saw. It was the exact same thing. Each time we looked, it became more defined, turning into a skull, and then an alien like figure.

I'm getting chills right now, because the hole is behind me. I wanted to sleep tonight. Fuck. I really don't wanna go on, but I haven't hit the money shot yet.

Finally, I lay my head down and close my eyes, trying to forget everything and just finally get to sleep. Trevor, of course, keeps reminding me that there's no way in hell I'm going to sleep, and I laughingly agree. And then... it happens.

His voice loses all inflection and he says, "Jayce... I think I should tell you what's in the hole right now..."

"Why?"

"It sort of concerns you."

"Is it looking at me?"

"No... it's reaching for you..."

I freeze. For half an hour, my body had been locked into fight or flight. We'd been wanting to turn the light on, but were frozen. Rabbit in headlights. Then, my instincts kicked in. In a split second, I was off the bed (I'm a big guy, and nowhere near in shape. The cord for my light is about six feet from the ground. My "bed" is just a mattress and a box spring laying on the floor. It was a big jump) and pulling the cord.

I looked at Trevor. His face was full of relief, but completely white.

"What did you see?"

"Claws... reaching for you..."

Again, as I'm writing, the fear is taking hold. It's 4:32 AM, and I don't think I'm going to sleep tonight either. Maybe when it's light out. Maybe.

We sit down and start breathing sighs of relief, as if we'd beaten it. Then, Trevor's arms goosebumped and he shivered, jumping a little. Earlier in the night, we had a candle lit so it wouldn't be too dark, and we re-lit it. My fan was on medium speed, but the flame wasn't moving at all.

You know, until I asked it a question.

"Is there an entity here?"

The flame nodded towards me. I looked to Trevor, and he looked to me.

"More than one?"

It nodded again.

We kept asking it questions from about 5:30 AM until 8. What we learned was that the flame was controlled by a weak ghost, the woman that used to live in the house. It wasn't the claw. The claw was something larger, an entity that she didn't like. The dark entity, supposedly, is going to become a recurring thing in our lives. After one question, Trevor's nose burst into blood out of nowhere, and began bleeding like no nosebleed I've seen before. It went on for ten minutes before finally stopping, and we made it back to the room.

We asked if we should turn out the lights, and we did. Something began to form in the hole, like a large figure, far in the distance, and we instantly got them back on.

We walked to the park beside my house, and directly in line with where the hole in my wall is, was a tree. The tree was one that branched into three from the base. It looked exactly like the three claws.

On one was a face. A mixture of a Tiki Mask and Richard D. James' face in a spectrograph analyzer from track 2 on Windowlicker. As soon as we found that, the sense of dread in the area left, and we were left only with an internal fear.

We got home, walked onto the deck outside my room, and put our ears to the wall. We heard a deep evil laugh. We heard talking. When we got into the room, the smell of sulfur would come and go, very heavily.

We are very fucking scared.

Addendum:

Later on, before Trevor had to get back to his house, he was playing songs where the titles finished his sentence.

"Hey, Jayce..." *plays We Die Young"*

The lyrics:

Scary's on the wall.
Scary's on his way.

This isn't going to end very well, is it?
================

It was Easter Sunday in 1983, and we were visiting my grandparents in Griswold, Connecticut. I was 11 and my sister, being six years younger, was a precocious five-year-old. We were walking down the road with my older cousin, who was in his late teens, picking some of the daffodils on the side of the road to put in a vase for Nana. Cute kids stuff, and justification for all of the chocolate she had just loaded us down with.

As we walked along the road, we saw a little blue Toyota up ahead, just sitting on the side of the road. It either had broken down or someone must have been at the house across the street. As we walked by, a thin man with dark-rimmed glasses strode out of the woods and made his way up towards the car, and being the polite children we were, we all nodded and wished him a happy Easter. He smiled, nodded as he wished us the same, and he got into his car and drove away.

If we had only followed the daffodils a little deeper into the woods, we would have found the bodies of two teenage girls. One was gutted from the throat to her belly button, and had been filled with the smooth slate rocks that one finds in the woods around Griswold. The other was tied to a tree nearby, a bloody broom handle near her naked body. She had been forced to watch as her friend was raped and gutted like a fish, before she too was violated by the broom handle until she bled to death.

The man who wished us Happy Easter was Michael Ross, a serial killer who killed young girls indiscriminately in the early eighties in Connecticut.

Happy Easter.

http://www.angelfire.com/oh/yodaspage/ross.html

==============

Tales from the Graveyard: Episode 3: Black Dog

One of the most interesting events in the graveyard, and easily the most endearing, occurred 3 or 4 months after moving in to the house. Whenever a new burial was scheduled to take place, they would start excavating the grave site a few days in advance. The burial was going to be Sunday, so it seemed that I had a Friday and Saturday night to look at the gaping hole of earth that will one day welcome us all.

Friday night, nothing unusual happened. The hole was about 4 feet deep at the time, unfinished. It was a breathtaking sight, seeing an open grave in the darkest hours of the night. The hole opened like some demonic maw, gaping and ready to feast upon the bodies of the dead. It was a place of some discomfort, and I didn't hang out for very long that night. Over Saturday, they finished the digging of the hole (which I'd assume to be about 6 feet deep, maybe more in present day?). That night, when I went back to the hole, I got a completely different feeling.

Sitting by the earth's open wound was a black lab. It moved away from me as I moved closer, but always kept its eyes on the future grave. Eventually, I sat down and dangled my legs down in to the hole and just looked at the dog. We began a staring contest that would last for 3 hours, I would later discover. This dog looked normal, although it blended in incredibly well with the night. It was a cold night, and I couldn't help but feel sorry for the poor creature.

It didn't seem to be suffering from any discomfort, however, and after what seemed like untold ages it shambled back over to the grave sight and lay down at the end opposite me. I could feel the tension in the air, like we were both of us waiting for a momentous event that was yet to come. I wondered what a dog would be doing here in the cemetery, so late at night. I remembered reading that dogs seemed to sense events such as earthquakes happening before humans did, and that in horror stories animals more keenly recognized the presence of the supernatural. I thought that this would explain why none of the other strays had entered the cemetery, why I never saw any animals here in the prior three months, but then why would this dog be here, sitting at an open grave, waiting for something inevitable?

Tired, cold, and hungry, I got up to leave. I looked back as I left the cemetery through my friend the hole in the fence, and the dog was still there as I flashed the beam of my flashlight upon its head. I shrugged, walked home, made a sandwich, and went to bed.

The next day, a little after 1, the funeral began. I wondered who was being buried and I was curious about his connection to the dog, so on the pretense of visiting a neighboring headstone (chosen 6 down in hopes that no one at this funeral would be connected) I went to observe. I saw the crying family, and knew that this man had been loved. As I placed some flowers I'd picked from our bushes on the chosen gravesite, however, I heard a comment that reminded me of my previous ordeal. A man, probably related to the deceased, said that he remembered the dead man's love more than anything else.

He remembered him taking in a mutt off the street, a black lab that everyone else though was worthless, and cared for it until it died. The two had apparently been inseparable, and it did not surprise him that the deceased had followed his beloved pet so quickly into the afterlife. Apparently the man had never been married and was survived only be his brothers and their families. I asked about the dog, and gave a general description. When they asked me why, I said that I'd been there yesterday (I said I'd been visiting the grave during the day) that I had noticed a black lab sitting at the open grave as if in anticipation, and that this had struck me because I lived nearby and I'd never seen an animal in the graveyard before.

Sure enough, the general descriptions matched. I checked the grave itself, looking where the dog had lain the night before. I saw neither tracks nor imprint of the laying dog, and that night saw no repeat of the animal. It seems that an old man had made a friend from a stray, and that sometimes friendships live longer than we do.
==============

Okay, heck of a way to make a first post (resurrecting an old thread and all), but I read this thread while I was waiting for the check to clear, and have been itching to add my own story.

First, the set-up: My great-grandfather built a small fishing resort (pretty much a bunch of cabins near several good fishing streams) in Long Pine, Nebraska. A great many family reunions happened there, while it was still "in the family" on the property, which was owned by my great-uncle until he passed away.

There was a field that was either on the property, or right next door to the property. When the grass was allowed to grow long and was generally unkept, it was swarming with grasshoppers. We'd go over there and whack them with flyswatters, then use them as fishing bait later.

Also, there was a gate-like structure (no gate involved; more of a frame for one) separating it from the rest of the property

Now, the story: During one of the last trips to the resort, I noted a sort of... heavy sensation in the air around the field. I thought myself somewhat clairvoyant at the time (I was about twenty at the time, and very wet-behind-the-ears), and hung around the place, pondering over the presence I felt there even when we weren't hunting for bait.

After the first day, I started feeling a femininity to the presence, and started catching myself having some fairly erotic daydreams about a brunette woman in a white dress. I was just writing it off as my hormones going into overdrive, and let it rest, even though it seemed to come and go with my being in the field. As the week went on, I started wandering about, and found myself on the far end. I heard the sound of children laughing, but didn't really see anything. I also saw a rustic-looking log cabin with clothes drying on a line between the trees at the end of the field. I felt something urging me forward, but something else holding me back. I figured if I felt any trepidations about it, I should really just hang back.

On the last day that I was there, being as intrigued by the sensual feelings I had there, and the experience with viewing the cabin, I returned, and had the usual experiences; erotic daydreams, hearing children laughing, seeing the cabin, not going toward it, etc. On the way out, as I walked through the gate-like structure, I was suddenly met with resistance. It was like I was walking through some fairly sturdy plastic wrap. I heard a very distinct, female voice in my head plead: "Please, don't go!" I pushed forward, now pretty much frightened out of my mind, and broke free. Then, well, we left to visit other family members on the vacation we were on.

About a year later, we returned for another family reunion. The field was mowed, the presence apparently gone. What gave me a real shiver was the fact that the scene with the rustic-looking log cabin was gone, along with the sounds of children laughing that accompanied it. In its place was what was really there; the road up to the resort, which continued up past and to what was apparently a logging operation. There was some fairly steady traffic on that road. If I'd walked too far forward toward that cabin, I probably would have been hit by a car.
=============

Tales from the Graveyard: Episode 8

As you may have noticed, the stories get scarier as they go along. These are not in chronological order, but the order of the fear factor that I remember... so this story would be, chronologically, the last time I actually entered the cemetery at night. It was also the scariest event that I remember taking place; although anything worse I probably would have repressed. (yes, I know that I'm skipping 6 & 7, but those two are related and I'll get back to them) I was moving the next day, and I wasn't going to drive 10 miles to come hang out in a fricking graveyard. Also, I was 16, and in all honesty had better things to do now that I had a car. So this trip was kind of my goodbye to the old place.

I was kind of wandering the place, and the guards had stopped patrolling about an hour before. I stayed away from the main building, but that's okay because none of the older graves were near there anyway. I was, as per the usual, avoiding the place that the old hedges had once been. After about 30 minutes of walking around, I got tired and sat down on a bench along the path. That's when the crying started.

It sounded like a little girl was in tears, spouting the words "I'm lost" between sobs. I jumped up and started looking around, thinking that I wasn't alone. I had run into enough people over the years in the cemetery to realize that while I was a strange one, I wasn't alone in exploring burial sites after dark. I thought it was possible that one of the local 8- or 9-year-olds had decided to check out the cemetery at night, possibly as a bet. So I stood up, and started looking for the source.

It was in vain; I couldn't see anyone. But I could still hear the sobs. The problem was that I couldn't track them down; everytime I got where I thought I heard them from, they started again from somewhere else. So, naturally, I called out "Is anyone there?" only to be met with the sobs from a deeper part of the cemetery.

A normal person would have turned back, either afraid or realizing that nothing was to be gained by this. A normal person may have realized that this was an infinitely fucked up situation, and that escape was the only logical situation. Unfortunately, I had been a weird little boy who had grown into an extremely weird young adult. So, like any wannabe hero, I tried, hopelessly, for what seemed like hours, to find the origin of the voice.

As I neared the middle of the graveyard, the voice became louder and more incessant. That's also when the tugging started. Have you spent a great deal of time around children? If so, you know what it's like when someone half your height decides that they really want your attention when you really don't want to give it to them. My shirt began to move, as if pulled towards the ground. Light, at first barely noticeable, but harder and with more urgency as time wore on. This was, needless to say, very freaky considering the fact that no one was there. I, however, managed somehow to convince myself that I wasn't a coward at heart and fought the urge to run. Not just the urge, but the desire, as if some unseen will was screaming in my mind that it would be a good idea to get out there. But I decided to try to figure out what was going on.

This was also the first, and only, time that a manifestation had actually physically "touched" me. Technically, all it did was grab my shirt, but that was more than any other ghost had really done. Others had been able to do things like move toys, or open fences, or even mess with the fog or my vision, but this ghost touched ME. This should have set off warning bells, but it didn't. When the tugging started, rather than run off into the embrace and safety of the night outside of the cemetery, I stopped moving, and looked for whoever was tugging me. Of course, no one was there, but the voice had taken on urgency.

"I'm lost," it continued to say. So I responded this time: "That's okay, I'm here. Help me find you." It was ready, and answered back: "You're lost too." I had to think about exactly where I was, but with a quick scan (thank God there wasn't any fog that night) I knew exactly where I was. So I replied: "No, I'm not. I know exactly where I am. Where are you trying to get?"

The voice, again, directly answered me, which was also weird. I was used to ghosts answering cryptically, or ignoring any evidence to the contrary of what they're saying. She, however, respondedL "I'm TRYING to get YOU lost TOO! I don't WANT YOU TO LEAVE!" And this time, I recognized the voice. I had been avoiding her part of the cemetery, and I suddenly realized that in tracking the voice, I had wound up almost on top of where the bushes had been. Stupid obnoxious whiny little whelps. This time, there was no way I could convince myself that I wasn't scared. I was. I said, out loud (which was also stupid, but she probably knew what I was thinking, anyway) "Fuck this, I'm out." and I started to move away.

But something had my shirt. I couldn't walk away, I couldn't run... I tried, but she held my shirt. And then, I realized that I could see her. It was kind of like looking through a perfectly clear prism, you can't see it, but you can tell that something’s there because of the way that the light distorts. Then, imagine the prism slowly gaining sustenance, it goes from being clear to opaque, and you can see it. I clearly saw a ten- or eleven-year-old girl, about 3 feet tall, with no skin on her face, with yellowed teeth and eyes, and a bony claw of a right arm holding on to my shirt.

I may have been weird, but I wasn't stupid. I didn't yell, I didn't scream, and most importantly, I didn't faint. Instead, I sucked in my breath, and decided to jump down and backwards, while pushing my arms forward... I literally managed to jump out of my shirt. Then I ran. Probably faster than I ever have before, all the while hearing the whine of the girl: "I WASN'T DONE PLAYIN' YET! COME BACK!" I hate that... thing, and if they bury me in that cemetery, first thing I'm gonna do is strangle that undead bitch. But that night, I sprinted, I probably covered a half mile in under 3 minutes, hit the fence running, and climbed it, over the top, down the other side, and took the other quarter mile to my home in under 2 more minutes. That may not sound too impressive to some of you runners out there, but I'm a big, fairly large nerd. 6'3", 260 lbs. I don't run fast, unless I'm sprinting over a fairly short distance.

I never went back to the cemetery. Part of it is because I moved, and because I don't actually know any of the people buried there. That's probably why I never went back in the daylight. But somewhere, in the dark recesses of my mind, lurks the thought that if I go back again at night, I may not make it out. I can still clearly see the horrible visage of the faceless girl, and sometimes I can even feel the claws grasping at my shirt. She has found refuge in my nightmares, and I can't get the image, or the voice, out of my head. And that is just my mind trying to cope with its existence. I have faced most of my fears, but I don't think I would go back into that graveyard alone and at night for anything on this earth.
=============

I guess it's my turn. My father bought a house back in 1990. I have no idea about any previous owners or exactly how old the house is, but I'm not sure that it's the house that is haunted, I think it's the whole neighborhood. The scary shit only seems to happen when there is an argument or somebody disturbs the peace in the area.

All the bedrooms in the house we bought are upstairs. My brother had the bedroom next to the stairs, and my parents and I had the rooms on the other side of a small walkway with a bench. At nights, you could hear footsteps go down the stairs sometimes, which nobody found too odd at first because there is a bathroom at the bottom of the stairs that my brother would use regularly. One night, though, my mother and I were awake at the bench next to the stairs (the "honey, your father and I are going to separate" speech was happening), when we heard steps go down the stairs. When we look over at the bench, we see a shadow walking down the stairs. No actual form to it. WTF commences. The next night, my mother and brother witness this as well. This is fucking GREAT... a fucking ghost has decided it likes doing stairmaster exercises in our fucking house...

A couple months later I woke up in my bed scared nearly to death, for no reason that I could tell. Until I look across the room and see a person wearing overalls with long matted hair hanging from the banister that goes across the top of my room. I don't remember screaming, but apparently I did because next thing I know my brother and mother are in the room. In the movies this is where the ghost disappears... leaving me looking like a dumbass; not so in real life. The ghost continues to swing back and forth for a good 30 seconds. I spent the rest of the week sleeping(or trying) in my parents' room before I was convinced the coast was clear.

After that, shit started happening all over the house. The lights would turn themselves on randomly in various parts of the house, you could hear people running upstairs when you were downstairs while nobody was up there, and our cats would only go upstairs if you picked them up and brought them up, then they would claw you and run back down. During the whole first year of living there, I would have recurring nightmares of a party going on downstairs, and when I turned around there was a person walking out the door laughing, then when I turned back to the party, everybody was on the floor dead.

Across the street at my friend Charlie's house, shit would regularly happen too. There was an attic upstairs that was accessed through a ironing board which folded down from the wall. When Charlie, his older brother, me, and my older brother decided to go into the attic... we had to pry rusted nails out of the ironing board to force it open. Inside... we found just a bunch of stuff you could expect to find in any attic, boxes, a couple mattresses, a table, and some sheets. It was all at the far end of the room, which also had a old dusty window that looked out into the neighborhood. After exploring some, we decided it was just a bunch of crap and went downstairs to play some Contra. When we went back to take the stuff out of the attic, everything was piled up against the entrance. We finally pushed and pulled stuff out until we got back into the attic. There were footprints all over the floor where the stuff had been. Fuck that place, we nailed it shut again. Two days later, his dog disappeared. We found it starved to death in the attic when the smell finally started showing up. The nails we had put in the ironing board were still there. Fuck all that shit, Silent Bob.

I still go up to the house every once in a while to visit the old man, and that thing still walks down the steps every couple of nights.