Ghost stories, part 12
Heh, the first place I ever lived on my own had a ghost and a bunch of cockroaches. I moved to a different place within 2 weeks of moving in. One afternoon, my roommate just freaked out and ran out of the apartment, leaving me home alone. I laughed at her for being a dumbass. Later, there were a bunch of banging noises coming from the kitchen, so I went to investigate. I was standing in the kitchen, looking at the pots and pans, and could HEAR them being banged on... but could see nothing. Well, that was a bit creepy, but not horrifying. I called my boyfriend and laughed about it. Later in the evening, I was getting ready for bed, and this swirly light thing floated around in the living room. That kinda freaked me out, but when I looked again, it was gone. I told myself that it was just my imagination. As I walked to the bathroom, I felt like I was being followed. Nobody was there. I got to the bathroom, and began brushing my teeth in front of the sink. I felt like whatever it was had followed me into the bathroom. I looked up into the mirror and saw the top half of a man just floating behind me.
I whipped my head around, and it was still there for a second. I totally freaked. I ran out of the bathroom, and I guess I was going to flee into the street or something (I was panicked, I was in my very early 20's and was a dumbass) when a flash of lightning and huge clap of thunder fueled my panic even more. I wasn't going to run outside in the storm, so I called my boyfriend and spouted gibberish. I didn't want to hang up the phone, so I made him call around the city to find my roommate on his second phone line. He finally located her, and in a short while, she and some frat guy showed up. I guess he was going to beat the shit out of the guy, but when they found out it was a ghost, my roommate refused to spend the night in our apartment. I wasn't going to sleep there alone. The frat guy generously offered for us all to sleep in his room for the night, so we did. He probably got a bunch of high-fives from his frat brothers the next morning after we left.
==============
Well, as some of you know, I do tarot. A few months ago, I was locked up in a hotel with some co-workers on a business trip and doing readings for them. Later at dinner, someone mentions to the group that I was doing readings (the VP of the company was sitting there, so I was sorta mortified, but I digress). Someone asks, "Oh, is that like Ouiji boards?" I replied, "No, I would never use one of those," then I went on to explain why I think one's okay and the other is not. We had a discussion about it. As we were talking, a glass broke across the table. We laughed at the guy drenched in water, and thought nothing of it.
Later that night, the guy comes up to me and says: "Can I talk to you, please?" all seriously. He says: "Do you remember what I said when my glass broke?" then explains it broke right after he said to me: "You can't use Ouiji boards because if there is something undesired following you, it can come through." Then he goes on to tell me, "That's when the glass broke. Did you see me stuck in my chair afterwards? Something moved in front of me and kept me down in the chair, and it came from you." I'm like: "Uh, okay." I do tarot and all, but as far as I know, nothing is following me, and I've never really had any ghost experiences.
Later that night, I'm sleeping in the hotel room. I was woken up by what I think is someone knocking on an adjacent room door. I slowly wake up and realize it's my room. I just try to go back to sleep (I figured it was my co-workers trying to get me to come back to the bar). It slowly gets louder and more rhythmic like BANG.. BANG... BANG... and now I'm pissed and a bit worried. I get up, and the door is banging so hard, I can see light through the crack... and it's hitting that brass doorstopper thing they have for security measures in hotels. I look through the peephole and there's fucking no one there. Then the door bangs right again in my face. I slam it shut and start to run away. Then it bangs again just to be an asshole.
I ended up getting about 2 hours of sleep waiting for the evil ghostie thing to come back, but thankfully it left me the hell alone.
============
The town I grew up in was pretty small, and had a ton of old buildings. One in particular was a small live theater place. It had used to be a beer stillery, and rumor had it that a woman was murdered there. Well, my friend's mom directs a ton of plays there and told us a bunch of stories of people seeing shit. Most descriptions of the ghost is of a young woman wearing Victorian garb clothes. Well, of course this sparked my friend's and my interests. We have always been into the whole ghost hunting thing and all that paranormal stuff. After a little bit of an investigation of the building and prep time, we finally got around to taking a look ourselves. It was past midnight, and we had two cameras with us.
The changing room was a separate building just outside and we set one up in there and kept one with us in the main room. We sat around for an hour or so with nothing happening. Then I heard what sounded like shoes scraping on rock. My friend had told me that there was a small tunnel / cave connected to the building also, and that was where the sound was most likely coming from. Taking our camera, I was taping the cave entrance for a little bit, and all of a sudden, the piano in the corner of the room started playing. Now, one of the owners of the theater has had this experience also: it gave me chills then, and now I basically shat myself. We picked up our shit and ran as fast out of there as possible. We left the camera in the dressing room to pick up the next day. Unfortunately, neither camera caught anything visible, but the tape recorder had captured the piano and whispering, and of course our shouts of: "Let's get the fuck out of here!" We plan to go back, but this time with more people, and hopefully not get the shit scared out of us.
Also on a side note, two summers ago my friends and I took a road trip and on the stop was Alton, IL. This town was supposed to be the most haunted place in America. I think there was a special on Discovery Channel or something. We went and visited two places, a café and the old broken-down mansion (name escapes me for the moment). It was the middle of the afternoon pretty much, and we were only going to be there for an hour or so, so nothing happened. All we did was talk to a few people and browsed the bookstore owned by Troy Taylor, who writes a bunch of ghost hunting books and runs a ghost hunting society there. All in all, it was a pretty cool place.
==============
The sealed, séance room at the old farmhouse
My grandmother's house is a restored and remodeled farmhouse. The foundation, and most of the downstairs, is unchanged from when the original house was built around 150 years ago. All of the materials, the lumber, iron nails, thick door frames, are all the same. For a better mental picture of the house, the downstairs is very similar to the house in the 1990 Return of the Living Dead. The difference is the hidden basement, and the previously sealed room.
Without going into boring detail, a hidden basement was discovered at my grandparents' house about 40 years ago, and there was a strangely shaped room down there. No one knew what the room was for, until a local psychic looked at the room and immediately told my grandparents to stay away from it, and to move the antique furniture out of the room.
The psychic, or as the town called her, "witch," left the house in a panic repeatedly mumbling "bad people," and "cursed." My grandparents didn't do as she said, and only moved out the furniture when my father and mother bought a house.
Family and friends always thought the old witch was just a crazy woman, until the problems started. Now, no relative on either side of the family will accept the furniture, and some can't even bring themselves to look at it when they're at my parents house.
No one goes in the basement. No one can figure out why the basement has smelled like rotting meat ever since the furniture was moved. There has never been an explanation why the door to the basement will unlock itself, and open. The fresh flowers Grandma used to arrange downstairs will always wilt in a day, and everyone who has stayed and been in the bathroom has heard at least once someone knock on the basement door and quietly ask, "Hello?"
Like my parents' house... except not as worse. This is the background story before the serious stuff.
The deathbed / The silent mirror.
The worst part of the furniture that was moved was an old wooden bed that was painted in a faded, pea soup green, and the matching mirror cabinet. Everyone hated these pieces of furniture after the move.
The bed frame had a huge, plain headboard, and there were pillars in the four corners of the bed that ended in a dull, arrowhead shape. Because of the design of the bed, the mattress would rest just below a thick frame that connected all the pillars. When you laid down in the sunken bed surrounded by its high, wooden walls, you always felt like the bed was swallowing you. About 150 years ago, an unknown relative of the family built this bed, and no parts had been changed since. Every time you rolled on the bed, it would creak loudly, moaning under the stress it has had to endure over the decades.
The matching mirror was huge and flawless despite its age, and the ornate frame for the piece showed no signs of wear. The mirror was attached above cabinets, so an average-sized man could only see his reflection above his waist. In the room that had both pieces, the mirror faced the bed. The headboard of the bed faced the door, and the mirror was on the same side as the door. If you wanted to see your reflection in the mirror, you had to walk into the room and stand in front of the bed.
The reason the bed is called the deathbed is because family members would always sleep on the bed when they were extremely sick, or going to die. Almost all of my dad's family had died on that bed, and by coincidence, a few of my mother's family passed away as well there. My first experience with the deathbed was when I was a child, and I had a bad case of strep throat. I had to sleep on the bed.
I had fallen asleep as soon as my head touched the pillow, but my fever was too strong, and I woke up in pain around midnight. As I lay in the bed, struggling against the pain and facing the wall on the left side of the bed, I heard the bed creak. Not only did I hear the bed creak, but I could feel it move.
I lay motionless until the creak happened again, and I felt someone roll over closer to me. Thinking it may be my mother who might have come in to keep an eye on me since I was sick, I rolled over to see if she was asleep. Someone else was there.
A woman, probably in her thirties, was facing me. She was staring right at me with her eyes and mouth wide open. She looked like she was going to start crying and wail out in pain, but she just stared. Surrounding her eyes and mouth were dark blue circles, and her straight black hair was thrown covered part of her face. Her cheeks were sunk in, and her mouth kept dropping more and more open like the sorrow was becoming too much. I turned away to try and grab a hold of the side bed and pull myself out, and when I looked back, she was no longer there. I crawled back into the bed, put the sheets over my head, and didn't move for the rest of the night.
I told my mother what I saw in the morning, and she didn't seem too concerned until I mentioned how sad and hurt the woman looked. My mother, who was sitting at the kitchen table with me, stood up, went to the bedroom where my father was getting ready for work, and starting talking to him. I couldn't make out what she was saying, but he came out soon after and said: "Don't go in that room again, and you're not to sleep in there again... I don't care how sick you are." I asked if it was because of the woman and he said yes, and then I asked if I was going to be in trouble. He said: "Your great-aunt is dead. She won't bother you, and she was a nice woman."
She is the only young woman to die on the bed. She died of some type of asphyxiation that the farmland doctors couldn't figure out. Apparently she stopped getting enough oxygen being pumped in her blood, and she died being virtually paralyzed and unable to call out for hours.
The good poltergeist stuff is coming up; this is the calm stuff.
More deathbed / mirror
Although this particular mirror (there are three total) never conjured the big problems like the other mirrors, it did something strange always. The room with the bed and mirror had blinds that keep all the light out of the room when closed, and at night, there was no light at all. The room was always pitch black except the mirror, which would glow. It wouldn't project light or illuminate anything, but it would glow brightly despite no light being directed to it at all. If you went to look in the mirror, you could see a clear reflection of yourself, but NOTHING else in the room. It was like you existed in a void.
Deathbed silent man
My first encounter with the silent man was about two years after the dead woman on the bed. It was during the day, and I was looking through the mirror cabinet drawers for an old stapler. I found the stapler, and I was looking at it to see if it needed staples (or if it would work), I heard a man clearly say: "Hi."
He didn't say it in a friendly tone, but more of "I see you" sort of tone. What's worse is that I looked up into the mirror, and I was alone in the room. I moved as quickly out of the room as I could, and as I did, I heard the same voice (but in a growling, angry tone) say: "Get back here."
I didn't, but whatever it was, was now angry... and people started to take notice.
Since the room with the bed was at the end of the end of the hall, you could look right in to the living room from the doorway. Also, you could always see me leave my room since. I remember the first time I left my room and froze in fear as I looked into the doorway of the death bed room. There was something like a man, translucent, crouched down like a panther ready to pounce. I stared into the top of the head of the "man" (because the figure was looking down), until I gathered enough courage to run for the living room where my parents were. As I took off, so did it, and it jabbed me in the small of my back, knocking me down. Over the period of a year, this happened a few more times, and I have scars on my lower back the size of fingertips. There are no fingerprints, but there are unusual and consistent ovalish scars.
Also, since my parents' room was right next door to the deathbed room, the door to my parents' room would slam shut. It would only slam shut when someone was trying to enter or leave the room, sometimes hitting one of my parents in the face with the door. My mother was pissed one day that the doors would do that, and I said it was the ghost in the deathbed room. She said she knew, and she and my father could hear something laughing through the walls sometimes.
She closed and bolted the door shut until we moved. Occasionally, you would hear something knock lightly on the door and ask "Hello" very quietly. When we moved, my parents had the bed and mirror destroyed to take care of the problem. Unfortunately, we then decided to keep the old music boxes and the buried mirrors.
On a kinda side note: No one had ever experienced anything bad with the bed, or anything with the angry male ghost until it was moved into the séance room in the farm house basement. People don't go down there anymore because something else also knocks lightly on the closed basement door and asks "hello."
The big stories about the old music boxes and the two mirrors are
next. First, the old music boxes.
I hated these fuckin' things since the first time I saw them. They were about 100 years old, ceramic (mostly), highly decorated with sky and clouds type themes, and the music that came out of them was perfect. All three of them, the two clouds and soaring ballerina (the top had a ballerina that would twirl when the box was wound), were in perfect condition. They just didn't seem right. The people had left these boxes and everything else their daughter had behind. They were angry with her because she committed suicide, and didn't want a reminder of such a bad child. Wow, what a happy family.
We stored everything she used to have in the attic except the boxes (my mom loved them), and we didn't take down this mirror thing she had in her room. Instead of a full-length mirror, she took mirror squares and glued them almost next to each other on a part of the wall. It was like a broken, full-length mirror that faced the bed. Luckily, I got the room with the horrible mirror.
One day, the dog was chasing one of our cats around, bumps into the dresser that had the music boxes on them, and all the boxes fall to the floor and break. There were only two people that were upset that happened: my mother and the daughter.
We were there only one month after that, and it was a nightmare. Our dog suddenly developed over 50 ulcers in her stomach and died in three days. Even though there was no smoke, you and everyone around you would start choking and coughing. Air would rush so strongly by your ears sometimes that you couldn't hear the world around you. People would start sleepwalking (the only time ever in this house during this period) and leave the house. You would always wake up outside like it was an eviction of a supernatural kind. Then there was her mirror.
She looked very similar to the girl in The Ring (no drowning symptoms, evil whitish eyes, or any of that stuff, but she wore a white nightdress and has long, dark hair). I remember being in bed and looking at the mirrors, when I saw her for the first time. It was like the mirrors were really one big, broken window, and she was looking through. Just her upper body, because she was like peering around through the mirrors at me, and she was angry. Sometimes she would look scared or worried, but most of the time it was pure anger. I hid everytime I saw something like that, except when I was leaving the room. Sometimes I would be walking out and I would look at the mirror at an angle, and I could see her kinda like hiding behind the wall so you couldn't see her if you looked directly at the mirror.
She apparently appeared in some other mirrors in the house, but I didn't see them. New tenants moved in after us, and then quickly moved away. The house had been abandoned for a few years and was recently torn down.
Next are the antique mirrors that used to be buried. (Why my mother and father wanted them, I have no idea.)
More about the deathbed I forgot
Just about everyone that knows the deathbed room remembers the mumbling voices. If you left my room at about 1 AM, or noon (which is odd), you could hear about 10 people "talking," but it was more like a whole bunch of mumbling voices. If you got to about two steps from the doorway to the room, they would stop, but not all at once. It was like someone said: "everybody quiet," and not everybody did right away.
I had a sleepover, and one of my friends got up to use the bathroom at night. He said when he was coming back that he heard the mumbling in the room that I told him about a while ago. However, he didn't go up to the door, but stood there and tried to listen to what's going on (the angry male ghost hadn't appeared yet, so there was no reason to be scared). Eventually, the voices quickly died down and he left about 5 seconds after it was quiet. As he started to walk to my room, the door to the deathbed room closed very slowly, and he says he heard something like a giggle. When he made it to my room, he was so scared he was crying.
I would rather have the deathbed than this mirror. Sure, I don't live at home anymore, but the fact that it exists bothers me. It's called the blood mirror because the seal used to keep the back of the mirror to the frame is blood. Blood isn't like glue, so we were able to crack the frame off easily (we were going to save the frame and replace the mirror around the first week we had it, but we put everything back together). One of my mother's relatives (the first woman to kill herself) used to do this with cabinet seals and stuff, so we weren't shocked when it happened, but we were spooked.
She tried to put her blood in everything because she was some type of witch, and she was trying to live forever or something. I know that's going to raise questions, but we don't really know because there aren't any records of her anymore or any solid information or basis really in witchcraft. She was probably just plain nuts.
Here's a diagram of the upstairs where the mirror is. It will be important later.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Brother's Room | Bathroom |
Parents' Room
| |
| |
|--------------------D------------------------------|
D D
-----------------| Hallway
|
Blood Mirror D |
Room |--------------------------------D------| |
| Metal frame mirror room | Stairs
|
| | |
| |
|
----------------------------------------------------------
It's crude, but there you go. It's all upstairs.
Ghost stairs
There are three types of ghosts on the stairs. The first is the casual walker, who will walk at a calm pace. Even if you stare at the stairs, whatever it is will keep walking. This doesn't happen too often anymore, but it was really cool when it did.
The second is the clumsy runner. Someone just takes off and kinda trips and stumbles on the stairs on the way up. It's like a kid running. Very rare to happen.
Both all reach the landing on the second floor and walk towards the blood mirror room, past the metal mirror room. That's how I connect the stairwalkers, but I could be wrong.
The third is horrible.
I was asleep one night and I woke up to a loud thud downstairs. I listened as whatever it was ran full speed to the stairs, up the stairs, down the hall, and slammed into the door with the blood mirror in it and kept slamming... where I was sleeping. I started shaking because I just woke up and it sounded like some madman was in the house coming for me and I wasn't ready. My dad comes out of his room and yells, "What the fuck are you doing at..." and trails off. No one was there in the hallway.
The knocker
The knocker comes in two varieties. The knocking with the deathbed room is more of someone making a fist, sticking out his or her index finger, and gently rapping on the door. The first knocker with the mirror is nothing like that. It's more of a full fist, all four knuckles rapping on the door. This one comes once in a while and just knocks on the blood mirror door for about two minutes, sometimes during the day.
"Knock, knock, knock" (quickly, but gently)
Me: "Yeah, what?"
"Knock, knock, knock"
Me: "Yeah?"
"Knock, knock, knock"
Me: "What?!" (I go to answer the door)
I open the door and there's only dead silence.
The second knocker is a full-fist pounding that shakes the door. This has happened twice.
The first time was 10 seconds of beating on the door at 2 in the morning. I go to the door because I think it's an emergency, and no one is there.
The second time, I heard the pounding and didn't get up (this was about six months later). Every ten seconds something would pound on the door and pause for about one minute. Then I heard the doorknob wiggle. Scratching on the door. The doorknob shaking slightly. Then BAM!! One big hit smacks the door and I hear something run downstairs and into the kitchen, where there is no more noise.
Scratching.
Scratching has been heard on many separate occasions, from either inside the closet or from behind the mirror. I would have to say from behind the closet is scarier to me because I saw the movie House when I was young, and if you've seen that movie you know that a certain part can leave an impression on a kid.
The scratching is very light, and not in one spot. The scratching will go from low in the closet to high like something trying to figure a way out. If you've seen the original Haunting, there is a scene when something is trying to get into a door and it sounds just like this. The pounding on the door wasn't similar, but the scratching is dead on.
Behind the mirror, you hear scratching sometimes, only around 1 or five in the morning. Sometimes there is a tapping sound, but mostly scratching.
I got more, but I got to take a break for a sec if that's ok.
Why I hate the blood mirror.
Sure, it attracts things that knock on the door and run up the stairs. Yeah, there's scratching and tapping from the closet and mirror. When you look at it though, it's just noise. The blood mirror, however, is more than just noise.
It could be any day, at any time, with any one in the room, and then it attacks. Since the mirror has no way to directly hurt you, it makes you hurt yourself. I have been quietly watching TV or talking to friends that are in the same room with me and the blood mirror, and you can feel it come alive.
The room temperature will drop 40, 50, 60 degrees within minutes so you can see your breath. You can't concentrate or focus on what you were doing. Your eyes can't focus on one point, and you're unaware of what your body is doing. All you can really hear is your heart pounding at a rhythmic pace. Suddenly you, and anyone else around, is in a haze... a trance.
When you regain focus, you realize you're bleeding.
The most common thing people will do is scratch themselves with their fingers on their left hand on their right arm or upper chest. Without thinking, people will dig huge gashes into their bodies with just their fingers and not know it. Every time, they will look at the mirror when they realize what they just did.
It doesn't happen often, but when it does, it's truly frightening. The best example I have is when I brought my now ex-girlfriend to show her the room because I had told her about all the ghosts in my house. When we walked in, I said: "Here's my old room, and there's the mirror."
And as soon as I said that and pointed to the mirror, the temperature began to drop drastically. I went over to some shelves to see how much of my stuff my little brother had taken since I had left, and I took my eyes off her. When I looked back at her, she was staring at a wall, with a desperately sorrowful face, and digging into her right arm. I grabbed her, and as I did, I must have woke her up out of her trance. She looked scared until she saw the cuts in her arm and screamed. She was out of the house before I could leave the room. As soon as she left, the room instantly got warmer. It wanted her... something about her she liked.
The blood mirror still stands today behind an old dresser. My mother always gets crippling arthritic pain whenever she goes to take down the mirror and get rid of it. The pain is so bad she can't even grip silverware... until she decides to do something else. I moved the dresser drawer to hide the mirror, to bury it, so it won't bother anyone else. Some day the dresser drawer will be moved and the mirror will reflect the light of day again, and I know it will be even angrier than it was before I hid it. I pity the person that inherits it then. Thank God for eBay.
Sorry for the crappy joke. Anyways, I need to clarify some earlier stuff I wrote about so I'll do that in another post if you want me too. Also, I've got some other stories, some of which are my friends if you want them. Thanks for all the support so far.
In regards to the séance room in the basement:
Furniture from upstairs was moved downstairs, and into the séance room accidentally. The furniture was later moved out when my parents bought a house, and put the deathbed and mirror into the third bedroom for guests. I have no idea why they would want to use the family deathbed for a guest bed, but I guess it was free.
If you want a mental picture of the basement, here it is. The basement is a simple rectangle, maybe 20 feet long, and 15 feet wide. Then there is a séance room, I forget the specs but it's built for "Satanic" type rituals, attached to the basement walls. The séance room is right by the steps up to the basement door. The basement door was hidden on a wall in the huge downstairs bathroom. The mirror faces the basement door, so you could be looking in the mirror and hear the knocking behind you.
Whatever it is in the basement "talked" to me three times in one day. The first time, it knocked and asked hello. The second time, it knocked and asked hello, but a bit more worried than before. The third time, it just angrily "breathed" out at me. If you exhale lightly at first and then exhale strongly and quickly at the end, you can kinda get the idea of what I heard.
As for why my parents keep these things, I have no idea. My parents are addicted to anything that has been passed down through the family, and their house is now loaded with stuff from both sides. My mother hates the mirrors, but she only wants to take them down and not throw them away because they've been in the family. It's a weird mix of stuff from both sides of my parents' families. My father has old, ratty stuff like the old deathbed, and my mother has expensive stuff from when her family was rich and lived in a mansion. It's like we have stuff from Night of the Living Dead, and The Haunting all in one place.
My mother has the family opals, which are exquisite pieces of jewelry that only women in the family can wear, not because of tradition, but of some type of super bad luck. She also has these 80+ year old ruby glasses. The glasses aren't made of rubies, but they are a beautiful blood red and flawless. When she inherited them about 10 years ago, she said she had to put them in a sturdy china cabinet or they'd fall and break. That's because every other day you can hear someone run through the dining room and to the china hutch, where the glasses are.
My dad has this old trunk from Ireland that has the creepiest lamp (that used to be kept in the séance room too) in it, pictures of my Indian (native American) relatives that we no longer know who they are, and some sentimental news clippings from a cousin of ours in Ireland who was with the IRA, but was really a child killer. No one wants this stuff... the trunk used to be in the basement next to the séance room, and it's ugly to boot, but it's old and has stuff from the family.
They just won't get rid of stuff that's old and has been in the family. Destroying the deathbed was kinda hard for my dad to do, but WE STILL HAVE PARTS FROM THE MIRROR. All of it is ugly, everyone knows the pieces are cursed or at least haunted, and we don't need any of the pieces at all, but they still keep them. I mean Christ, those opals, once put on, cannot be taken off until right before the coffin closes, and you are to be buried in the ground. If you take them off the body earlier, or accept them as a gift while the original wearer is still alive, you will go mad. Apparently that's not enough to call the pieces cursed since it has only happened TWICE in the past 40 years. It also happens 100% of the time too, but that doesn't matter.
I'll take as many pictures as possible while I'm there. It's like sentimental pieces from a haunted mansion all over the place.
About why there are things happening in the basement to our house, I don't know. There are things everywhere in the house, and the basement is no exception. I'll do an outline of the house, and when I get a Chicago ghost hunt going, we'll stop by my house for a quick tour.
Basement:
Only thing here is the shadow man and the swinging boxing bag. The shadow man has only been seen twice, and has "charged" everytime he knows you're looking. He doesn't come straight at you, but follows the walls around.
The swinging punching bag was really fun. It happened about every other time anyone was downstairs, and it was really cool. I had a 110-pound leather punching bag attached to the ceiling of the basement. Really simple construction: just a swivel hitch bolted into the ceiling, and a three chains attached to the hitch. You would be sitting downstairs, watching TV or talking to friends, and the chain would start to creak. For a while we thought vibrations somehow moved the bag, until two of us saw how it started. The bag would be perfectly still, then it would move about a foot in one direction, and then swing back. It was creepy because you knew something was moving that bag.
Ground floor:
All you get are the occasional runner, the night light painting, and I guess orbs. Once in a while you see a quick flash of light like a firefly, usually in the spring or fall.
Upstairs:
This is where the mirrors are and the knocking. Sometimes you hear mumbling, something moving papers (and always fucking up the system you have), lots of motion in the mirrors (bathroom and metal frame), and one of our dogs growling at something in the hallway briefly. If you have cat in your room, the cat will wake up sometimes and just stare at the door for a good five minutes, and then sometimes go under the bed. The upstairs is where the fun is.
Oh, and I should mention that our new dog won't go into the dinning room where most of our inherited stuff is. He'll whine and cry if he looks in there, won't come if you're offering him tasty hamburger, and will fight you if you carry him in there. He gets over it, and then one night you hear the china cabinet move in the dinning room, and he freaks out.
Until this thread, I never really thought about all the fucked-up stuff we have in our house. I knew we had some bad things, but I just realized how much we have there.
------------------------------------------
Shawnatrip came out of the closet to say:
I have a question, how exactly did they destroy the deathbed? Did they cut it up or bury it? Did they burn it? If they cut it up and took it to the dump or something similar, it would be interesting to see if anyone grabbed pieces of it for scrap wood and what exactly happened to them afterward.
JESUS CHRIST@#%$#@!1 After, reading all these stories, my sister / father / someone JUST knocked on my window super hard. I must have jumped about 3 feet.
------------------------------------------
I was at my grandparents' (non-evil basement, pro evil mirror) house when they got rid of it. My parents don't talk about it anymore, but my dad was kinda bragging back when it did happen.
From what I can gather, my dad decided that the bed had to be destroyed because no one would take it. Then my parents, who were downstairs, heard stopping in the room, something shaking the door violently, and the bolt in the door lock breaking.
Something was stomping up and down the hallway upstairs, going in and out of rooms, knocking things over, and making "noises." My mom got hysterical and then my dad charged upstairs and ripped the bed frame apart with his hands. He then threw the pieces out the bedroom window, ran downstairs, went outside, grabbed the barbeque lighter fluid by the grill, and started a fire with the pieces. No more bed problem after that.
He mentioned once that in the hallway and deathbed room it was cold and very windy, and the silent mirror had been cracked. We still have the dresser part to the mirror, but the mirror is gone.
They refuse to talk about it at all anymore, but I remember my dad bragging about that with the family way back when.
But the knocking from my grandparents' basement is still there. It's more of a feminine voice, but I can't say it's a woman because the voice is still too faint to make out.
Edit: If it matters at all, he told the story right after my grandpa told a story about a scarecrow on the farm that would always move its head to look at you when you looked away. He was scared at first until his father said, "Hey, that's a good scarecrow. It's working like it's supposed to, kid." He wasn't afraid of it after that.
===========
Ok, I'll try my hand at this. Everyone has head of the "blue baby," right? It's along the same lines as Candyman or Bloody Mary. You stand in front of a mirror with cradling your arms as if you are holding a baby. You move your arms back and forth as if you were rocking a baby to sleep. Then you say "blue baby" three times while looking in the mirror. What is supposed to happen is that you see a blue outline of a baby in your arms.
What really happened was we gathered around the mirror. One girl, Sandy, stood in front of the mirror and did as she was supposed to. As she said the last word, a faint blue outline formed in her arms. We could not see it "in" her arms, we could only see the reflection of it in the mirror. It had no real look to it. No face, no body, just a light blue blob. That was kinda cool, kinda freaky. And Sandy just stood there as if nothing had happened, looking around. Then, of course, it got really bad.
Behind her... a darker image formed, not slowly like the baby did, but just suddenly there. It was a dark, somehow angry, blue. It was just past her shoulder looking over at the "baby." We could see her face; her hair; her arms as she started to reach for Sandy. We freaked. I grabbed her arms and pulled her to the door, "dropping" the baby. The ghost woman went after that, and they both disappeared. We all got out of the bathroom. The rest of us are freaking out and Sandy is pissed. "WTF is wrong with you guys?! What the hell was that about?" She hadn't seen anything.
===========
I've never told this story to anyone in full detail before, mainly because it creeps me the fuck out to remember it. I've written about it once here, but I left out a lot of the details. Here's the whole thing.
One of my ex-girlfriends was a fucking nutjob who couldn't go more than five minutes without telling an outrageous lie. She also enjoyed going to graveyards really late at night and taking pictures; she especially enjoyed having her picture taken while she posed on various gravestones and statues and whatnot.
It was fucking creepy as hell, really, but a couple of weeks after we started dating, she talked me into going to a graveyard with her. It would be fun, she said, and we wouldn't get caught. She knew of the perfect secluded graveyard that was a good twenty minutes from civilization of any sort, and the local cops knew her. Looking back on it, they'd probably all fucked her at one point, but that's not the point of the story. She was dressed in leather, she looked fucking hot, and she was begging me to take pictures of her.
"Okay," I said. Vaguely creepy, but I can handle graveyards. There's a graveyard in my apartment complex and I've never really had a problem with it. One of my friends has, though, but that's a story for another time.
We drive out to the cemetery around midnight. "Hey," I think to myself, "there aren't any cars anywhere near here." I figure it can't be a good sign that we drive for twenty minutes, the last ten of which involve not seeing a single car. Whatever, though. My girlfriend wants to do this, so by God, I'm going to do it.
We get to the cemetery; it's a small cemetery attached to a small church. We hop the small locked gate and start walking through tombstones...
And I immediately want to leave.
I tried to shrug the feeling off, but I couldn't do it; every step I took made me nervous. I couldn't explain it, really; I vaguely believed in ghosts at the time, but didn't really think of them as being scary. At this cemetery, though, I felt like I was being watched. I looked around as Heather wrapped herself around a statue, scanning the darkness for other people. I didn't see any. Still, though, I couldn't shake the feeling that someone was watching us. Watching me.
"Take my picture with this one," Heather called out.
"No," I said. I looked toward the car, the car which seemed too far away now. I wanted to run to it, to run and jump in and drive away as fast as I could without looking back. I felt seriously in danger, and the last thing I wanted to do was take a goddamned picture. "I don't like this place."
"Stop being a fucking pussy," she said. "Take my fucking picture."
I did. I took a dozen pictures of her in various poses in various areas, all the while feeling more and more like someone was watching me. It was the middle of summer and despite the late hour, it was still pretty hot, at least in the mid-eighties. Heather made her way toward the back of the cemetery, away from the meager lights and into the darkness. She wanted me to follow her into the darkness, into an area where I couldn't see a damned thing.
I followed. She wrapped herself around another statue and told me to take her picture. I did.
As I took the picture, though, I felt a cold chill around my legs. It spread quickly upward, making me shiver. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end and I swear to God that I felt someone behind me. No, more than one person. There was no breeze that night, no source of cold air. The feeling of danger was intensifying to the point that I was shaking, my heart beating rapidly. I started to turn around, to instinctively look behind me.
That's when I heard the whispering.
I stared at Heather; she was posturing herself for another picture. It wasn't her. The whispering was coming from behind me anyway, and I heard it again. The camera went straight into the pocket as I grabbed Heather's arm. "We're getting the fuck out of here," I growled, "and I don't give a fuck if you think I'm a pussy."
"What the hell is wrong with you?" she yelled. "It's just a fucking cemetery." I started to answer her, but I felt the cold chill again. I'm a fat bastard who never runs, but I ran this night. I ran and jumped the gate without looking back, dragging an annoyed Heather all the way. I unlocked her door and started the car, and her door was barely shut before we were peeling out of the gravel parking lot. I pushed my shitty little car up to eighty and didn't slow down until we were at least two miles away.
We got the pictures developed the next day. There were no unexplainable oddities in any of the pictures... the ones that turned out, anyway. Out of a dozen pictures that were taken, only four showed up. The rest came out completely black. It made no sense, really, as it was an Advantix camera and the film was never exposed. Every other picture on the roll turned out fine - pictures taken elsewhere at different times. The flash never failed that night.
I have a friend who's had experiences with ghosts before, and I was telling her of my experience a few months later. She stopped me mid-story and asked me which church it was - was it such and such a church? Yes, I said. It was. She knew of the church, and her face paled as I told her the rest of my story. She nodded all the way; she knew exactly what I was talking about.
She'd gone to that church our senior year of high school with one of her friends, a guy who'd had experiences with ghosts. The second they set foot in the cemetery, they felt like they were in danger. Ken, however, felt that the danger was much more intense than she did. Ken, as she explained it, felt that there were multiple spirits there who wanted to hurt him. They both heard whispering, and they both left as quickly as possible.
I never went to another graveyard with my girlfriend.
=============
This reminds me, somehow, of my frat house. The house I lived in had this painting that, as I'm told (I never saw it), was absolutely terrifying to look at. The picture was stolen a few years ago, and shortly thereafter people started saying the house was haunted (this was before I went to school there -- my older brother might've been living there around the time it started, but I'm not sure).
Anyway, I lived in one of the main-floor rooms the first year I lived there, and had seen nothing, heard nothing that might be a ghost. You know, I basically dismissed it all as nothing more than rumor. Unfortunately, I've always been terrified of the supernatural: aliens, ghosts, whatever else can't be explained.
But, I had heard stories about people being downstairs in the house (with nobody else in the house), and hearing footsteps above them, or coming down the stairs. One of my friends said that he'd actually seen the ghost, and described him as, basically, a freaky-looking skeleton.
I lived in an upstairs room last fall, the one that was supposedly the "worst-haunted." Multiple times in the first week that I was there, when nobody else was, I was sure I heard / saw / felt things that weren't there. I can't really explain it, except for one experience when I was hanging out with about five people, and we were all chatting up in my room, and I swore I heard the front door slam (easy explanation in hindsight), so I went downstairs and checked to see if anyone was in the house, which turned up negative.
I was freaked out at that point, though, because I'd had an uneasy feeling that whole day, for whatever reason. My two best friends admitted that they had both started getting worried about the time I mentioned that I heard the door slam (sympathy pains?). So we all took off for the night. I spent the night in a buddy's room, and went back in the morning.
The weirdest thing I remember happening, though, is when I brought myself to believe that my ghost was actually friendly. There were MANY nights when I went to be completely trashed with the fan set on "high." When I woke up in my room (locked doors, closed window), the fan was set on "night." So it was then that I decided that my ghost was dedicated to looking out for me, and not harming me.
P.S.: I post this message for those of you who are all getting the shivers and who don't want to go to bed. Ghosts aren't all bad, as I've been told.
=========
I only have a few minor tales, but I might as well share while I'm sitting here in ass-clenching terror.
In college, the dorms I was stuck in used to be a hospital. A friend of mine lived on the sixth floor, which was allegedly the mental ward.
I didn't really buy into it until he asked me calmly to "come and check out" his room. We walked in, and I saw nothing amiss. He pointed up and I nearly shit my pants.
Handprints, all over the ceiling. Not in blood or anything, thank God, but the mark a sweaty hand leaves on shiny, fresh paint. By the end of the semester, his ceiling was a mass of creepy handprints. Eek.
I am also convinced that there is a ghost in my old room (now my sister's), and it hated me. There were many occasions of things falling of shelves near me, even to the extreme of a large decorative lightbulb nearly smashing on my head. I had lots of nightmares in that room, too.
Of course, my sister has no problems. The stupid ghost LIKES her.
I whipped my head around, and it was still there for a second. I totally freaked. I ran out of the bathroom, and I guess I was going to flee into the street or something (I was panicked, I was in my very early 20's and was a dumbass) when a flash of lightning and huge clap of thunder fueled my panic even more. I wasn't going to run outside in the storm, so I called my boyfriend and spouted gibberish. I didn't want to hang up the phone, so I made him call around the city to find my roommate on his second phone line. He finally located her, and in a short while, she and some frat guy showed up. I guess he was going to beat the shit out of the guy, but when they found out it was a ghost, my roommate refused to spend the night in our apartment. I wasn't going to sleep there alone. The frat guy generously offered for us all to sleep in his room for the night, so we did. He probably got a bunch of high-fives from his frat brothers the next morning after we left.
==============
Well, as some of you know, I do tarot. A few months ago, I was locked up in a hotel with some co-workers on a business trip and doing readings for them. Later at dinner, someone mentions to the group that I was doing readings (the VP of the company was sitting there, so I was sorta mortified, but I digress). Someone asks, "Oh, is that like Ouiji boards?" I replied, "No, I would never use one of those," then I went on to explain why I think one's okay and the other is not. We had a discussion about it. As we were talking, a glass broke across the table. We laughed at the guy drenched in water, and thought nothing of it.
Later that night, the guy comes up to me and says: "Can I talk to you, please?" all seriously. He says: "Do you remember what I said when my glass broke?" then explains it broke right after he said to me: "You can't use Ouiji boards because if there is something undesired following you, it can come through." Then he goes on to tell me, "That's when the glass broke. Did you see me stuck in my chair afterwards? Something moved in front of me and kept me down in the chair, and it came from you." I'm like: "Uh, okay." I do tarot and all, but as far as I know, nothing is following me, and I've never really had any ghost experiences.
Later that night, I'm sleeping in the hotel room. I was woken up by what I think is someone knocking on an adjacent room door. I slowly wake up and realize it's my room. I just try to go back to sleep (I figured it was my co-workers trying to get me to come back to the bar). It slowly gets louder and more rhythmic like BANG.. BANG... BANG... and now I'm pissed and a bit worried. I get up, and the door is banging so hard, I can see light through the crack... and it's hitting that brass doorstopper thing they have for security measures in hotels. I look through the peephole and there's fucking no one there. Then the door bangs right again in my face. I slam it shut and start to run away. Then it bangs again just to be an asshole.
I ended up getting about 2 hours of sleep waiting for the evil ghostie thing to come back, but thankfully it left me the hell alone.
============
The town I grew up in was pretty small, and had a ton of old buildings. One in particular was a small live theater place. It had used to be a beer stillery, and rumor had it that a woman was murdered there. Well, my friend's mom directs a ton of plays there and told us a bunch of stories of people seeing shit. Most descriptions of the ghost is of a young woman wearing Victorian garb clothes. Well, of course this sparked my friend's and my interests. We have always been into the whole ghost hunting thing and all that paranormal stuff. After a little bit of an investigation of the building and prep time, we finally got around to taking a look ourselves. It was past midnight, and we had two cameras with us.
The changing room was a separate building just outside and we set one up in there and kept one with us in the main room. We sat around for an hour or so with nothing happening. Then I heard what sounded like shoes scraping on rock. My friend had told me that there was a small tunnel / cave connected to the building also, and that was where the sound was most likely coming from. Taking our camera, I was taping the cave entrance for a little bit, and all of a sudden, the piano in the corner of the room started playing. Now, one of the owners of the theater has had this experience also: it gave me chills then, and now I basically shat myself. We picked up our shit and ran as fast out of there as possible. We left the camera in the dressing room to pick up the next day. Unfortunately, neither camera caught anything visible, but the tape recorder had captured the piano and whispering, and of course our shouts of: "Let's get the fuck out of here!" We plan to go back, but this time with more people, and hopefully not get the shit scared out of us.
Also on a side note, two summers ago my friends and I took a road trip and on the stop was Alton, IL. This town was supposed to be the most haunted place in America. I think there was a special on Discovery Channel or something. We went and visited two places, a café and the old broken-down mansion (name escapes me for the moment). It was the middle of the afternoon pretty much, and we were only going to be there for an hour or so, so nothing happened. All we did was talk to a few people and browsed the bookstore owned by Troy Taylor, who writes a bunch of ghost hunting books and runs a ghost hunting society there. All in all, it was a pretty cool place.
==============
The sealed, séance room at the old farmhouse
My grandmother's house is a restored and remodeled farmhouse. The foundation, and most of the downstairs, is unchanged from when the original house was built around 150 years ago. All of the materials, the lumber, iron nails, thick door frames, are all the same. For a better mental picture of the house, the downstairs is very similar to the house in the 1990 Return of the Living Dead. The difference is the hidden basement, and the previously sealed room.
Without going into boring detail, a hidden basement was discovered at my grandparents' house about 40 years ago, and there was a strangely shaped room down there. No one knew what the room was for, until a local psychic looked at the room and immediately told my grandparents to stay away from it, and to move the antique furniture out of the room.
The psychic, or as the town called her, "witch," left the house in a panic repeatedly mumbling "bad people," and "cursed." My grandparents didn't do as she said, and only moved out the furniture when my father and mother bought a house.
Family and friends always thought the old witch was just a crazy woman, until the problems started. Now, no relative on either side of the family will accept the furniture, and some can't even bring themselves to look at it when they're at my parents house.
No one goes in the basement. No one can figure out why the basement has smelled like rotting meat ever since the furniture was moved. There has never been an explanation why the door to the basement will unlock itself, and open. The fresh flowers Grandma used to arrange downstairs will always wilt in a day, and everyone who has stayed and been in the bathroom has heard at least once someone knock on the basement door and quietly ask, "Hello?"
Like my parents' house... except not as worse. This is the background story before the serious stuff.
The deathbed / The silent mirror.
The worst part of the furniture that was moved was an old wooden bed that was painted in a faded, pea soup green, and the matching mirror cabinet. Everyone hated these pieces of furniture after the move.
The bed frame had a huge, plain headboard, and there were pillars in the four corners of the bed that ended in a dull, arrowhead shape. Because of the design of the bed, the mattress would rest just below a thick frame that connected all the pillars. When you laid down in the sunken bed surrounded by its high, wooden walls, you always felt like the bed was swallowing you. About 150 years ago, an unknown relative of the family built this bed, and no parts had been changed since. Every time you rolled on the bed, it would creak loudly, moaning under the stress it has had to endure over the decades.
The matching mirror was huge and flawless despite its age, and the ornate frame for the piece showed no signs of wear. The mirror was attached above cabinets, so an average-sized man could only see his reflection above his waist. In the room that had both pieces, the mirror faced the bed. The headboard of the bed faced the door, and the mirror was on the same side as the door. If you wanted to see your reflection in the mirror, you had to walk into the room and stand in front of the bed.
The reason the bed is called the deathbed is because family members would always sleep on the bed when they were extremely sick, or going to die. Almost all of my dad's family had died on that bed, and by coincidence, a few of my mother's family passed away as well there. My first experience with the deathbed was when I was a child, and I had a bad case of strep throat. I had to sleep on the bed.
I had fallen asleep as soon as my head touched the pillow, but my fever was too strong, and I woke up in pain around midnight. As I lay in the bed, struggling against the pain and facing the wall on the left side of the bed, I heard the bed creak. Not only did I hear the bed creak, but I could feel it move.
I lay motionless until the creak happened again, and I felt someone roll over closer to me. Thinking it may be my mother who might have come in to keep an eye on me since I was sick, I rolled over to see if she was asleep. Someone else was there.
A woman, probably in her thirties, was facing me. She was staring right at me with her eyes and mouth wide open. She looked like she was going to start crying and wail out in pain, but she just stared. Surrounding her eyes and mouth were dark blue circles, and her straight black hair was thrown covered part of her face. Her cheeks were sunk in, and her mouth kept dropping more and more open like the sorrow was becoming too much. I turned away to try and grab a hold of the side bed and pull myself out, and when I looked back, she was no longer there. I crawled back into the bed, put the sheets over my head, and didn't move for the rest of the night.
I told my mother what I saw in the morning, and she didn't seem too concerned until I mentioned how sad and hurt the woman looked. My mother, who was sitting at the kitchen table with me, stood up, went to the bedroom where my father was getting ready for work, and starting talking to him. I couldn't make out what she was saying, but he came out soon after and said: "Don't go in that room again, and you're not to sleep in there again... I don't care how sick you are." I asked if it was because of the woman and he said yes, and then I asked if I was going to be in trouble. He said: "Your great-aunt is dead. She won't bother you, and she was a nice woman."
She is the only young woman to die on the bed. She died of some type of asphyxiation that the farmland doctors couldn't figure out. Apparently she stopped getting enough oxygen being pumped in her blood, and she died being virtually paralyzed and unable to call out for hours.
The good poltergeist stuff is coming up; this is the calm stuff.
More deathbed / mirror
Although this particular mirror (there are three total) never conjured the big problems like the other mirrors, it did something strange always. The room with the bed and mirror had blinds that keep all the light out of the room when closed, and at night, there was no light at all. The room was always pitch black except the mirror, which would glow. It wouldn't project light or illuminate anything, but it would glow brightly despite no light being directed to it at all. If you went to look in the mirror, you could see a clear reflection of yourself, but NOTHING else in the room. It was like you existed in a void.
Deathbed silent man
My first encounter with the silent man was about two years after the dead woman on the bed. It was during the day, and I was looking through the mirror cabinet drawers for an old stapler. I found the stapler, and I was looking at it to see if it needed staples (or if it would work), I heard a man clearly say: "Hi."
He didn't say it in a friendly tone, but more of "I see you" sort of tone. What's worse is that I looked up into the mirror, and I was alone in the room. I moved as quickly out of the room as I could, and as I did, I heard the same voice (but in a growling, angry tone) say: "Get back here."
I didn't, but whatever it was, was now angry... and people started to take notice.
Since the room with the bed was at the end of the end of the hall, you could look right in to the living room from the doorway. Also, you could always see me leave my room since. I remember the first time I left my room and froze in fear as I looked into the doorway of the death bed room. There was something like a man, translucent, crouched down like a panther ready to pounce. I stared into the top of the head of the "man" (because the figure was looking down), until I gathered enough courage to run for the living room where my parents were. As I took off, so did it, and it jabbed me in the small of my back, knocking me down. Over the period of a year, this happened a few more times, and I have scars on my lower back the size of fingertips. There are no fingerprints, but there are unusual and consistent ovalish scars.
Also, since my parents' room was right next door to the deathbed room, the door to my parents' room would slam shut. It would only slam shut when someone was trying to enter or leave the room, sometimes hitting one of my parents in the face with the door. My mother was pissed one day that the doors would do that, and I said it was the ghost in the deathbed room. She said she knew, and she and my father could hear something laughing through the walls sometimes.
She closed and bolted the door shut until we moved. Occasionally, you would hear something knock lightly on the door and ask "Hello" very quietly. When we moved, my parents had the bed and mirror destroyed to take care of the problem. Unfortunately, we then decided to keep the old music boxes and the buried mirrors.
On a kinda side note: No one had ever experienced anything bad with the bed, or anything with the angry male ghost until it was moved into the séance room in the farm house basement. People don't go down there anymore because something else also knocks lightly on the closed basement door and asks "hello."
The big stories about the old music boxes and the two mirrors are
next. First, the old music boxes.
I hated these fuckin' things since the first time I saw them. They were about 100 years old, ceramic (mostly), highly decorated with sky and clouds type themes, and the music that came out of them was perfect. All three of them, the two clouds and soaring ballerina (the top had a ballerina that would twirl when the box was wound), were in perfect condition. They just didn't seem right. The people had left these boxes and everything else their daughter had behind. They were angry with her because she committed suicide, and didn't want a reminder of such a bad child. Wow, what a happy family.
We stored everything she used to have in the attic except the boxes (my mom loved them), and we didn't take down this mirror thing she had in her room. Instead of a full-length mirror, she took mirror squares and glued them almost next to each other on a part of the wall. It was like a broken, full-length mirror that faced the bed. Luckily, I got the room with the horrible mirror.
One day, the dog was chasing one of our cats around, bumps into the dresser that had the music boxes on them, and all the boxes fall to the floor and break. There were only two people that were upset that happened: my mother and the daughter.
We were there only one month after that, and it was a nightmare. Our dog suddenly developed over 50 ulcers in her stomach and died in three days. Even though there was no smoke, you and everyone around you would start choking and coughing. Air would rush so strongly by your ears sometimes that you couldn't hear the world around you. People would start sleepwalking (the only time ever in this house during this period) and leave the house. You would always wake up outside like it was an eviction of a supernatural kind. Then there was her mirror.
She looked very similar to the girl in The Ring (no drowning symptoms, evil whitish eyes, or any of that stuff, but she wore a white nightdress and has long, dark hair). I remember being in bed and looking at the mirrors, when I saw her for the first time. It was like the mirrors were really one big, broken window, and she was looking through. Just her upper body, because she was like peering around through the mirrors at me, and she was angry. Sometimes she would look scared or worried, but most of the time it was pure anger. I hid everytime I saw something like that, except when I was leaving the room. Sometimes I would be walking out and I would look at the mirror at an angle, and I could see her kinda like hiding behind the wall so you couldn't see her if you looked directly at the mirror.
She apparently appeared in some other mirrors in the house, but I didn't see them. New tenants moved in after us, and then quickly moved away. The house had been abandoned for a few years and was recently torn down.
Next are the antique mirrors that used to be buried. (Why my mother and father wanted them, I have no idea.)
More about the deathbed I forgot
Just about everyone that knows the deathbed room remembers the mumbling voices. If you left my room at about 1 AM, or noon (which is odd), you could hear about 10 people "talking," but it was more like a whole bunch of mumbling voices. If you got to about two steps from the doorway to the room, they would stop, but not all at once. It was like someone said: "everybody quiet," and not everybody did right away.
I had a sleepover, and one of my friends got up to use the bathroom at night. He said when he was coming back that he heard the mumbling in the room that I told him about a while ago. However, he didn't go up to the door, but stood there and tried to listen to what's going on (the angry male ghost hadn't appeared yet, so there was no reason to be scared). Eventually, the voices quickly died down and he left about 5 seconds after it was quiet. As he started to walk to my room, the door to the deathbed room closed very slowly, and he says he heard something like a giggle. When he made it to my room, he was so scared he was crying.
I would rather have the deathbed than this mirror. Sure, I don't live at home anymore, but the fact that it exists bothers me. It's called the blood mirror because the seal used to keep the back of the mirror to the frame is blood. Blood isn't like glue, so we were able to crack the frame off easily (we were going to save the frame and replace the mirror around the first week we had it, but we put everything back together). One of my mother's relatives (the first woman to kill herself) used to do this with cabinet seals and stuff, so we weren't shocked when it happened, but we were spooked.
She tried to put her blood in everything because she was some type of witch, and she was trying to live forever or something. I know that's going to raise questions, but we don't really know because there aren't any records of her anymore or any solid information or basis really in witchcraft. She was probably just plain nuts.
Here's a diagram of the upstairs where the mirror is. It will be important later.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Brother's Room | Bathroom |
Parents' Room
| |
| |
|--------------------D------------------------------|
D D
-----------------| Hallway
|
Blood Mirror D |
Room |--------------------------------D------| |
| Metal frame mirror room | Stairs
|
| | |
| |
|
----------------------------------------------------------
It's crude, but there you go. It's all upstairs.
Ghost stairs
There are three types of ghosts on the stairs. The first is the casual walker, who will walk at a calm pace. Even if you stare at the stairs, whatever it is will keep walking. This doesn't happen too often anymore, but it was really cool when it did.
The second is the clumsy runner. Someone just takes off and kinda trips and stumbles on the stairs on the way up. It's like a kid running. Very rare to happen.
Both all reach the landing on the second floor and walk towards the blood mirror room, past the metal mirror room. That's how I connect the stairwalkers, but I could be wrong.
The third is horrible.
I was asleep one night and I woke up to a loud thud downstairs. I listened as whatever it was ran full speed to the stairs, up the stairs, down the hall, and slammed into the door with the blood mirror in it and kept slamming... where I was sleeping. I started shaking because I just woke up and it sounded like some madman was in the house coming for me and I wasn't ready. My dad comes out of his room and yells, "What the fuck are you doing at..." and trails off. No one was there in the hallway.
The knocker
The knocker comes in two varieties. The knocking with the deathbed room is more of someone making a fist, sticking out his or her index finger, and gently rapping on the door. The first knocker with the mirror is nothing like that. It's more of a full fist, all four knuckles rapping on the door. This one comes once in a while and just knocks on the blood mirror door for about two minutes, sometimes during the day.
"Knock, knock, knock" (quickly, but gently)
Me: "Yeah, what?"
"Knock, knock, knock"
Me: "Yeah?"
"Knock, knock, knock"
Me: "What?!" (I go to answer the door)
I open the door and there's only dead silence.
The second knocker is a full-fist pounding that shakes the door. This has happened twice.
The first time was 10 seconds of beating on the door at 2 in the morning. I go to the door because I think it's an emergency, and no one is there.
The second time, I heard the pounding and didn't get up (this was about six months later). Every ten seconds something would pound on the door and pause for about one minute. Then I heard the doorknob wiggle. Scratching on the door. The doorknob shaking slightly. Then BAM!! One big hit smacks the door and I hear something run downstairs and into the kitchen, where there is no more noise.
Scratching.
Scratching has been heard on many separate occasions, from either inside the closet or from behind the mirror. I would have to say from behind the closet is scarier to me because I saw the movie House when I was young, and if you've seen that movie you know that a certain part can leave an impression on a kid.
The scratching is very light, and not in one spot. The scratching will go from low in the closet to high like something trying to figure a way out. If you've seen the original Haunting, there is a scene when something is trying to get into a door and it sounds just like this. The pounding on the door wasn't similar, but the scratching is dead on.
Behind the mirror, you hear scratching sometimes, only around 1 or five in the morning. Sometimes there is a tapping sound, but mostly scratching.
I got more, but I got to take a break for a sec if that's ok.
Why I hate the blood mirror.
Sure, it attracts things that knock on the door and run up the stairs. Yeah, there's scratching and tapping from the closet and mirror. When you look at it though, it's just noise. The blood mirror, however, is more than just noise.
It could be any day, at any time, with any one in the room, and then it attacks. Since the mirror has no way to directly hurt you, it makes you hurt yourself. I have been quietly watching TV or talking to friends that are in the same room with me and the blood mirror, and you can feel it come alive.
The room temperature will drop 40, 50, 60 degrees within minutes so you can see your breath. You can't concentrate or focus on what you were doing. Your eyes can't focus on one point, and you're unaware of what your body is doing. All you can really hear is your heart pounding at a rhythmic pace. Suddenly you, and anyone else around, is in a haze... a trance.
When you regain focus, you realize you're bleeding.
The most common thing people will do is scratch themselves with their fingers on their left hand on their right arm or upper chest. Without thinking, people will dig huge gashes into their bodies with just their fingers and not know it. Every time, they will look at the mirror when they realize what they just did.
It doesn't happen often, but when it does, it's truly frightening. The best example I have is when I brought my now ex-girlfriend to show her the room because I had told her about all the ghosts in my house. When we walked in, I said: "Here's my old room, and there's the mirror."
And as soon as I said that and pointed to the mirror, the temperature began to drop drastically. I went over to some shelves to see how much of my stuff my little brother had taken since I had left, and I took my eyes off her. When I looked back at her, she was staring at a wall, with a desperately sorrowful face, and digging into her right arm. I grabbed her, and as I did, I must have woke her up out of her trance. She looked scared until she saw the cuts in her arm and screamed. She was out of the house before I could leave the room. As soon as she left, the room instantly got warmer. It wanted her... something about her she liked.
The blood mirror still stands today behind an old dresser. My mother always gets crippling arthritic pain whenever she goes to take down the mirror and get rid of it. The pain is so bad she can't even grip silverware... until she decides to do something else. I moved the dresser drawer to hide the mirror, to bury it, so it won't bother anyone else. Some day the dresser drawer will be moved and the mirror will reflect the light of day again, and I know it will be even angrier than it was before I hid it. I pity the person that inherits it then. Thank God for eBay.
Sorry for the crappy joke. Anyways, I need to clarify some earlier stuff I wrote about so I'll do that in another post if you want me too. Also, I've got some other stories, some of which are my friends if you want them. Thanks for all the support so far.
In regards to the séance room in the basement:
Furniture from upstairs was moved downstairs, and into the séance room accidentally. The furniture was later moved out when my parents bought a house, and put the deathbed and mirror into the third bedroom for guests. I have no idea why they would want to use the family deathbed for a guest bed, but I guess it was free.
If you want a mental picture of the basement, here it is. The basement is a simple rectangle, maybe 20 feet long, and 15 feet wide. Then there is a séance room, I forget the specs but it's built for "Satanic" type rituals, attached to the basement walls. The séance room is right by the steps up to the basement door. The basement door was hidden on a wall in the huge downstairs bathroom. The mirror faces the basement door, so you could be looking in the mirror and hear the knocking behind you.
Whatever it is in the basement "talked" to me three times in one day. The first time, it knocked and asked hello. The second time, it knocked and asked hello, but a bit more worried than before. The third time, it just angrily "breathed" out at me. If you exhale lightly at first and then exhale strongly and quickly at the end, you can kinda get the idea of what I heard.
As for why my parents keep these things, I have no idea. My parents are addicted to anything that has been passed down through the family, and their house is now loaded with stuff from both sides. My mother hates the mirrors, but she only wants to take them down and not throw them away because they've been in the family. It's a weird mix of stuff from both sides of my parents' families. My father has old, ratty stuff like the old deathbed, and my mother has expensive stuff from when her family was rich and lived in a mansion. It's like we have stuff from Night of the Living Dead, and The Haunting all in one place.
My mother has the family opals, which are exquisite pieces of jewelry that only women in the family can wear, not because of tradition, but of some type of super bad luck. She also has these 80+ year old ruby glasses. The glasses aren't made of rubies, but they are a beautiful blood red and flawless. When she inherited them about 10 years ago, she said she had to put them in a sturdy china cabinet or they'd fall and break. That's because every other day you can hear someone run through the dining room and to the china hutch, where the glasses are.
My dad has this old trunk from Ireland that has the creepiest lamp (that used to be kept in the séance room too) in it, pictures of my Indian (native American) relatives that we no longer know who they are, and some sentimental news clippings from a cousin of ours in Ireland who was with the IRA, but was really a child killer. No one wants this stuff... the trunk used to be in the basement next to the séance room, and it's ugly to boot, but it's old and has stuff from the family.
They just won't get rid of stuff that's old and has been in the family. Destroying the deathbed was kinda hard for my dad to do, but WE STILL HAVE PARTS FROM THE MIRROR. All of it is ugly, everyone knows the pieces are cursed or at least haunted, and we don't need any of the pieces at all, but they still keep them. I mean Christ, those opals, once put on, cannot be taken off until right before the coffin closes, and you are to be buried in the ground. If you take them off the body earlier, or accept them as a gift while the original wearer is still alive, you will go mad. Apparently that's not enough to call the pieces cursed since it has only happened TWICE in the past 40 years. It also happens 100% of the time too, but that doesn't matter.
I'll take as many pictures as possible while I'm there. It's like sentimental pieces from a haunted mansion all over the place.
About why there are things happening in the basement to our house, I don't know. There are things everywhere in the house, and the basement is no exception. I'll do an outline of the house, and when I get a Chicago ghost hunt going, we'll stop by my house for a quick tour.
Basement:
Only thing here is the shadow man and the swinging boxing bag. The shadow man has only been seen twice, and has "charged" everytime he knows you're looking. He doesn't come straight at you, but follows the walls around.
The swinging punching bag was really fun. It happened about every other time anyone was downstairs, and it was really cool. I had a 110-pound leather punching bag attached to the ceiling of the basement. Really simple construction: just a swivel hitch bolted into the ceiling, and a three chains attached to the hitch. You would be sitting downstairs, watching TV or talking to friends, and the chain would start to creak. For a while we thought vibrations somehow moved the bag, until two of us saw how it started. The bag would be perfectly still, then it would move about a foot in one direction, and then swing back. It was creepy because you knew something was moving that bag.
Ground floor:
All you get are the occasional runner, the night light painting, and I guess orbs. Once in a while you see a quick flash of light like a firefly, usually in the spring or fall.
Upstairs:
This is where the mirrors are and the knocking. Sometimes you hear mumbling, something moving papers (and always fucking up the system you have), lots of motion in the mirrors (bathroom and metal frame), and one of our dogs growling at something in the hallway briefly. If you have cat in your room, the cat will wake up sometimes and just stare at the door for a good five minutes, and then sometimes go under the bed. The upstairs is where the fun is.
Oh, and I should mention that our new dog won't go into the dinning room where most of our inherited stuff is. He'll whine and cry if he looks in there, won't come if you're offering him tasty hamburger, and will fight you if you carry him in there. He gets over it, and then one night you hear the china cabinet move in the dinning room, and he freaks out.
Until this thread, I never really thought about all the fucked-up stuff we have in our house. I knew we had some bad things, but I just realized how much we have there.
------------------------------------------
Shawnatrip came out of the closet to say:
I have a question, how exactly did they destroy the deathbed? Did they cut it up or bury it? Did they burn it? If they cut it up and took it to the dump or something similar, it would be interesting to see if anyone grabbed pieces of it for scrap wood and what exactly happened to them afterward.
JESUS CHRIST@#%$#@!1 After, reading all these stories, my sister / father / someone JUST knocked on my window super hard. I must have jumped about 3 feet.
------------------------------------------
I was at my grandparents' (non-evil basement, pro evil mirror) house when they got rid of it. My parents don't talk about it anymore, but my dad was kinda bragging back when it did happen.
From what I can gather, my dad decided that the bed had to be destroyed because no one would take it. Then my parents, who were downstairs, heard stopping in the room, something shaking the door violently, and the bolt in the door lock breaking.
Something was stomping up and down the hallway upstairs, going in and out of rooms, knocking things over, and making "noises." My mom got hysterical and then my dad charged upstairs and ripped the bed frame apart with his hands. He then threw the pieces out the bedroom window, ran downstairs, went outside, grabbed the barbeque lighter fluid by the grill, and started a fire with the pieces. No more bed problem after that.
He mentioned once that in the hallway and deathbed room it was cold and very windy, and the silent mirror had been cracked. We still have the dresser part to the mirror, but the mirror is gone.
They refuse to talk about it at all anymore, but I remember my dad bragging about that with the family way back when.
But the knocking from my grandparents' basement is still there. It's more of a feminine voice, but I can't say it's a woman because the voice is still too faint to make out.
Edit: If it matters at all, he told the story right after my grandpa told a story about a scarecrow on the farm that would always move its head to look at you when you looked away. He was scared at first until his father said, "Hey, that's a good scarecrow. It's working like it's supposed to, kid." He wasn't afraid of it after that.
===========
Ok, I'll try my hand at this. Everyone has head of the "blue baby," right? It's along the same lines as Candyman or Bloody Mary. You stand in front of a mirror with cradling your arms as if you are holding a baby. You move your arms back and forth as if you were rocking a baby to sleep. Then you say "blue baby" three times while looking in the mirror. What is supposed to happen is that you see a blue outline of a baby in your arms.
What really happened was we gathered around the mirror. One girl, Sandy, stood in front of the mirror and did as she was supposed to. As she said the last word, a faint blue outline formed in her arms. We could not see it "in" her arms, we could only see the reflection of it in the mirror. It had no real look to it. No face, no body, just a light blue blob. That was kinda cool, kinda freaky. And Sandy just stood there as if nothing had happened, looking around. Then, of course, it got really bad.
Behind her... a darker image formed, not slowly like the baby did, but just suddenly there. It was a dark, somehow angry, blue. It was just past her shoulder looking over at the "baby." We could see her face; her hair; her arms as she started to reach for Sandy. We freaked. I grabbed her arms and pulled her to the door, "dropping" the baby. The ghost woman went after that, and they both disappeared. We all got out of the bathroom. The rest of us are freaking out and Sandy is pissed. "WTF is wrong with you guys?! What the hell was that about?" She hadn't seen anything.
===========
I've never told this story to anyone in full detail before, mainly because it creeps me the fuck out to remember it. I've written about it once here, but I left out a lot of the details. Here's the whole thing.
One of my ex-girlfriends was a fucking nutjob who couldn't go more than five minutes without telling an outrageous lie. She also enjoyed going to graveyards really late at night and taking pictures; she especially enjoyed having her picture taken while she posed on various gravestones and statues and whatnot.
It was fucking creepy as hell, really, but a couple of weeks after we started dating, she talked me into going to a graveyard with her. It would be fun, she said, and we wouldn't get caught. She knew of the perfect secluded graveyard that was a good twenty minutes from civilization of any sort, and the local cops knew her. Looking back on it, they'd probably all fucked her at one point, but that's not the point of the story. She was dressed in leather, she looked fucking hot, and she was begging me to take pictures of her.
"Okay," I said. Vaguely creepy, but I can handle graveyards. There's a graveyard in my apartment complex and I've never really had a problem with it. One of my friends has, though, but that's a story for another time.
We drive out to the cemetery around midnight. "Hey," I think to myself, "there aren't any cars anywhere near here." I figure it can't be a good sign that we drive for twenty minutes, the last ten of which involve not seeing a single car. Whatever, though. My girlfriend wants to do this, so by God, I'm going to do it.
We get to the cemetery; it's a small cemetery attached to a small church. We hop the small locked gate and start walking through tombstones...
And I immediately want to leave.
I tried to shrug the feeling off, but I couldn't do it; every step I took made me nervous. I couldn't explain it, really; I vaguely believed in ghosts at the time, but didn't really think of them as being scary. At this cemetery, though, I felt like I was being watched. I looked around as Heather wrapped herself around a statue, scanning the darkness for other people. I didn't see any. Still, though, I couldn't shake the feeling that someone was watching us. Watching me.
"Take my picture with this one," Heather called out.
"No," I said. I looked toward the car, the car which seemed too far away now. I wanted to run to it, to run and jump in and drive away as fast as I could without looking back. I felt seriously in danger, and the last thing I wanted to do was take a goddamned picture. "I don't like this place."
"Stop being a fucking pussy," she said. "Take my fucking picture."
I did. I took a dozen pictures of her in various poses in various areas, all the while feeling more and more like someone was watching me. It was the middle of summer and despite the late hour, it was still pretty hot, at least in the mid-eighties. Heather made her way toward the back of the cemetery, away from the meager lights and into the darkness. She wanted me to follow her into the darkness, into an area where I couldn't see a damned thing.
I followed. She wrapped herself around another statue and told me to take her picture. I did.
As I took the picture, though, I felt a cold chill around my legs. It spread quickly upward, making me shiver. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end and I swear to God that I felt someone behind me. No, more than one person. There was no breeze that night, no source of cold air. The feeling of danger was intensifying to the point that I was shaking, my heart beating rapidly. I started to turn around, to instinctively look behind me.
That's when I heard the whispering.
I stared at Heather; she was posturing herself for another picture. It wasn't her. The whispering was coming from behind me anyway, and I heard it again. The camera went straight into the pocket as I grabbed Heather's arm. "We're getting the fuck out of here," I growled, "and I don't give a fuck if you think I'm a pussy."
"What the hell is wrong with you?" she yelled. "It's just a fucking cemetery." I started to answer her, but I felt the cold chill again. I'm a fat bastard who never runs, but I ran this night. I ran and jumped the gate without looking back, dragging an annoyed Heather all the way. I unlocked her door and started the car, and her door was barely shut before we were peeling out of the gravel parking lot. I pushed my shitty little car up to eighty and didn't slow down until we were at least two miles away.
We got the pictures developed the next day. There were no unexplainable oddities in any of the pictures... the ones that turned out, anyway. Out of a dozen pictures that were taken, only four showed up. The rest came out completely black. It made no sense, really, as it was an Advantix camera and the film was never exposed. Every other picture on the roll turned out fine - pictures taken elsewhere at different times. The flash never failed that night.
I have a friend who's had experiences with ghosts before, and I was telling her of my experience a few months later. She stopped me mid-story and asked me which church it was - was it such and such a church? Yes, I said. It was. She knew of the church, and her face paled as I told her the rest of my story. She nodded all the way; she knew exactly what I was talking about.
She'd gone to that church our senior year of high school with one of her friends, a guy who'd had experiences with ghosts. The second they set foot in the cemetery, they felt like they were in danger. Ken, however, felt that the danger was much more intense than she did. Ken, as she explained it, felt that there were multiple spirits there who wanted to hurt him. They both heard whispering, and they both left as quickly as possible.
I never went to another graveyard with my girlfriend.
=============
This reminds me, somehow, of my frat house. The house I lived in had this painting that, as I'm told (I never saw it), was absolutely terrifying to look at. The picture was stolen a few years ago, and shortly thereafter people started saying the house was haunted (this was before I went to school there -- my older brother might've been living there around the time it started, but I'm not sure).
Anyway, I lived in one of the main-floor rooms the first year I lived there, and had seen nothing, heard nothing that might be a ghost. You know, I basically dismissed it all as nothing more than rumor. Unfortunately, I've always been terrified of the supernatural: aliens, ghosts, whatever else can't be explained.
But, I had heard stories about people being downstairs in the house (with nobody else in the house), and hearing footsteps above them, or coming down the stairs. One of my friends said that he'd actually seen the ghost, and described him as, basically, a freaky-looking skeleton.
I lived in an upstairs room last fall, the one that was supposedly the "worst-haunted." Multiple times in the first week that I was there, when nobody else was, I was sure I heard / saw / felt things that weren't there. I can't really explain it, except for one experience when I was hanging out with about five people, and we were all chatting up in my room, and I swore I heard the front door slam (easy explanation in hindsight), so I went downstairs and checked to see if anyone was in the house, which turned up negative.
I was freaked out at that point, though, because I'd had an uneasy feeling that whole day, for whatever reason. My two best friends admitted that they had both started getting worried about the time I mentioned that I heard the door slam (sympathy pains?). So we all took off for the night. I spent the night in a buddy's room, and went back in the morning.
The weirdest thing I remember happening, though, is when I brought myself to believe that my ghost was actually friendly. There were MANY nights when I went to be completely trashed with the fan set on "high." When I woke up in my room (locked doors, closed window), the fan was set on "night." So it was then that I decided that my ghost was dedicated to looking out for me, and not harming me.
P.S.: I post this message for those of you who are all getting the shivers and who don't want to go to bed. Ghosts aren't all bad, as I've been told.
=========
I only have a few minor tales, but I might as well share while I'm sitting here in ass-clenching terror.
In college, the dorms I was stuck in used to be a hospital. A friend of mine lived on the sixth floor, which was allegedly the mental ward.
I didn't really buy into it until he asked me calmly to "come and check out" his room. We walked in, and I saw nothing amiss. He pointed up and I nearly shit my pants.
Handprints, all over the ceiling. Not in blood or anything, thank God, but the mark a sweaty hand leaves on shiny, fresh paint. By the end of the semester, his ceiling was a mass of creepy handprints. Eek.
I am also convinced that there is a ghost in my old room (now my sister's), and it hated me. There were many occasions of things falling of shelves near me, even to the extreme of a large decorative lightbulb nearly smashing on my head. I had lots of nightmares in that room, too.
Of course, my sister has no problems. The stupid ghost LIKES her.
Labels: alcoholic drinks, books, cards, corey, death, friends, ghost stories, grandma, halloween, mary, maxed-out tags limit, movies, music, phone calls, ruby, shiny, sleep, something awful, water, weird stuff
posted by Flami at 3:38:00 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home