Ghost stories, part 14
Okay, since I decided to read a good majority of these, I guess I will contribute. I'm sorry about the length, but I just can't cut down or shorten this story without losing the feeling.
I have 2 stories to tell. One has happened in my neighbor's house when I slept over, and the other has happened in, yes, it's cliché, but my grandmother's house. Both of these stories involved me getting minor injuries, but only one is from a ghost, or so I believe. You can say you don't believe me or that they are not true, but I know what I saw, and I will never forget it.
Neighbor's ghost
Okay, now this was the first time that I have ever believed that what I saw was truly a ghost. It started off with me deciding to sleep over at my neighbor's house. I'm gonna pull a trick from the god of this thread, and draw you a picture of what the upstairs of my neighbor's house looks like.
code:
__________ _____________
X | ________ | |
X | | Marky's | | |
| | room | | Brian's |
| | | | Room |
|_________|_________|____________________|____________|_____________
| |
|
Parents' | long, scary hallway |
|
Room | |
guest |
| ___________________________________ |
room |
| | | | | |
|
|_________| | bath | |stairs
|_____________|
| |_room_| | |
_________| | |
X = videos
Okay, now I can begin the story.
It was a summer's day and I decided to sleep over at my neighbor's house, with their consent of course, and wake up early and go to an amusement park with them. Their house was right next to mine, and it was a very little walk to get there. I walked in, and we all had dinner. Their house is a 3-story house, with a very large, plain basement that was so scary even my neighbors wouldn't go in there except for when the mom had to do laundry. Before this family moved in, we had around 6 different families move in there, and then move out, and no one on our block could figure out why. This family had been there for over a year, so we figured they would stay.
The night started out peacefully enough: we played some Nintendo 64 (shows that it was around 5 years ago, I think) and then we watched some cable. The parents decided to go up to bed, and we continued to watch TV. After a while, there was nothing on, so we decided to go and get some videos and watch them. Since the parents already went up to bed, it was going to be difficult: as the diagram shows, the videos were in their room.
We did odd man out to see who had to go: there were 5 of us (me, the two neighbor boys, Marky and Brian, and our other friends, Jack and Matt), so it took a while, but eventually I threw a 2, and everyone else threw a 1. So I slowly creeped up the stairs. Now as you can see, I labeled the hall as dark and scary, because it really is. It is very long, which makes it even more scary. so I got to the door, and slowly opened it, making sure I made no noise.
Here's where the proverbial shit hit the fan!
So I sneak into the room, and grab the movies (Killer Clowns from Outer Space and Spaceballs) and I slowly start to leave. I close the door behind me, and continue to walk the long hallway. I make it past Marky's room, then past the bathroom, then when I come up on Brian's room, and am about to turn the corner to go down the stairs, I hear the parents' door open and Brian's mom softly say: "Hey, come here?" The question mark is there, because it sounded like a question, not a yell or a statement. I turned around, expecting to see Brian's big fat mom (not being mean, but I need to let you know what she looks like) with her hand out, forcing me to give back the tape, and then get a lecture on sneaking around and going to sleep. But I was surprised at what I actually saw.
When i turned around, there was a lady looking at me... if that's what you call it, since I couldn't see any eyes, just blackness. She appeared similar to the ghost in the Ghostbusters library scene: it was just standing there, gazing at me, and I couldn't tell if it was glowing or not, but it was giving off that white semi-transparent look. I couldn't move, I was paralyzed with fear, or maybe the ghost made it so I couldn't move. I could see myself running down the stairs, but I just couldn't follow through.
The ghost continued to look at me, then, the ghost slowly came towards me in what seemed like slow motion. The strange part was, the feet were not moving. It was moving in a walking fashion, meaning how a person walks, I could see steps, but the feet were not moving... it wasn't floating like I would've imagined it should have. Then, it just stopped.
Now it did what was considered the scariest scene in The Ring, right at the end of the movie when the girl comes out of the TV, and just moves forward at you. I cant explain how it was, but I will try. Imagine you are taking a movie of someone walking towards you, and it has 40 scenes. When you play it back, you get rid of scenes 15-25, so the pictures just switches from the person walking far back, to the person being really close and still moving, but in my case, she wasn't still moving, just kinda being there.
That was the scariest thing I have ever seen, and will ever see: I can't imagine anything worse. It was right around Marky's door, then suddenly it was about 5 feet from me. But now I was able to move, just not of my own free will.
When the ghost just appeared there, I don't know if it was a reflex or not, but I jumped back. If you remember where I was standing, right by the stairs, jumping back wasn't the greatest move you should do by stairs. I fell down them, and from there on out, it was just a blackout. Now I say that jumping back wasn't the smartest thing to do, but I guess it couldn't have been worse that what could have happened, but I will happily never know.
So it ended with me sitting at the bottom of the stairs, and my 4 friends next to me. I didn't know how to explain what I saw, so I just didn't. For some reason when I fell, the parents never woke up, but that is okay, I guess. And lo and behold, I never slept over at their house again until about a year later, and then I refused to go upstairs after dark.
I will write about the other story at my grandmother's house soon. Not trying to hype it or anything and make you wait, but I just have to go and eat dinner... where I live, it's that time. But that story is far worse than this one, but I am still a little unsure of it. But this one is where the ghost harmed me, I think.
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Age 6 or so.
The house I lived in was a split-level. I lived on the first floor, and my room was at the end of the hallway off which all the other bedrooms and the bathroom branched off. At the other end of the hallway is a living room. With my door open, I could look from my bed down the hallway into the living room. I rarely slept with the door closed, as the room was too dark, and with it open, I got some light from the night lights in the bathroom.
I had a poster of Lassie on my wall: its eyes would follow me, and sometimes it would appear to be snarling.
Sometimes, with the lights out, I'd see a network of faint "tubes" in space around me, forming a cocoon, like I was inside a sac, or something. Through these tubes would flow faint see-through cells, purple outlines with yellow-orange nuclei. Maybe it was a vague memory of the womb... Of course, in the webcomics that presaged the release of the Matrix, there was one where a character had a eerily similar "dream" of being contained in such a network. It sent a chill down my spine.
One night, my parents were out, and I was put to bed early by the babysitter. She was downstairs watching TV. Lying awake in my bed, on my side, looking down the hall, I saw a puff of smoke in the living room, hovering above the carpet. The puff formed into a ring, and then into a vertical column that solidified into a humanlike form wearing a grey gown / hood / cloak. Inside the hood, there was no face, only a smoky solid blackness. It then disappeared the same way it formed. I screamed, and after much cajoling, the babysitter put me back to bed.
Age 10 or so.
I was playing "ghosts in the graveyard" (tag played at night) with my sister and cousins at my grandma's cabin on the shore of Ozark Lake in Missouri. At night the place was dark, with pitch-black shadows cast by the one outdoor light, a 60-watt bulb strung on a wire from the cabin to a nearby tree. At the time, Grandpa had 2 boats, and between them, it could be pitch black. Perfect place for hiding. I hid between them, crouching low watching people sneaking around, hiding or seeking. I was probably gonna win. Then I felt the urge to turn around. Backlit by the light from a nearby cabin, I saw it. It was 8 feet tall at least, covered in shaggy fur, and muscular. I could not see much else, as it was backlit. I ran screaming for the cabin, and it ran the opposite way. I was "tagged" but didn't care: it took me a good minute to catch my breath and say what I saw. The adults passed it off as a overactive imagination. Years later, I would learn the Ozarks have been home to reports of a Bigfoot-like creature.
1999
Spring break in London. Me and my sister went to London as a graduation present over spring break. She was graduating from college, me from grad school. We took several walking tours of London, most of which are lead by actors from the Royal Shakespeare company trying to earn a few extra quid. Great stuff. The last tour we took we took was a ghost tour, looking at all the supposedly haunted places in London. The last stop was a pint at a haunted tavern that used to be a gin house (bar where they served gin, gussied up with fancy paintings to make poor blokes feel rich for a little while). There was a bullet hole in one painting from some drunken ball that took place in the 1800s, and the place was supposedly "haunted."
After a couple pints, I went to use the loo. Everyone laughs, as the bathrooms seem to be a popular spot for the spirit to prank guests at a vulnerable time. Walking downstairs, there is a short hallway, steps behind it, locked door in front of the storage room, men's room on the left, women's room on the right. The door in front of me had a one-inch gap underneath, and no light was shining through, so it was obviously vacant. But I did hear the sound of a bottle spinning on a hard surface, the sound it'd make spinning round on a stone or concrete floor. Playful spirit, or nosy rat? Hmm...
I go into the men's room, use the urinal, and walk over to the sink. As soon as I start washing my hands, the hand drier besides the sink turns on! It's one of those types you wave your hand under to start. It turns off just as I finish. Thinking my elbows may have set it off, I waggle them around a bit. My elbows or my jacket don't reach enough to ever have a chance of setting it off.
I shrug, and begin to rub my hands underneath the drier, but it refuses to start. I wave them around underneath it like a fool, it doesn't start. Holding my hands underneath, I crack a wry smile and say "Ha Ha, very funny!" As soon as those words left my lips, the drier starts up, and I finish drying my hands.
I walk back upstairs, and tell my fellow tourists about my encounter with the tavern's mischievous poltergeist.
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The last years of the deathbed.
My first stories happened in our first house in Georgia. I should have said that my parents destroyed the bed after we moved out of our second house and our of Georgia. My dad didn't want to get rid of it yet, so we kept it a little bit longer.
Our second house in Georgia could be classified as a mansion. It was a huge three-story building (elevated basement), that needed two staircases because of the length of the house.
The upstairs:
code:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bathroom | Bathroom | |
|
-----d---| | Deathbed room | Laundry
|Stairs
Parents'
d--------d----|d--------------------------------dd---------------
room |
| Hallway
| |-------d----------------------------------|
| | |
Large gaming room
|Stairs| My room
|
----------
-------------------------------------------------------------------
That's kinda to scale, but it works for the story. Instead of multiple rooms, my parents wanted larger rooms.
Every time that I left my room, I would be staring into the closed door of the deathbed room. The animals wouldn't come upstairs, and since the family room was under my parents' room downstairs, there was virtually no noise upstairs. I would play Nintendo in the gaming room for hours, but when I turned off the system, it was quiet like a cemetery upstairs.
Everything was fine for a month or two, and then it started again.
I was leaving my room to go downstairs for dinner, and I heard a light knocking. I turned around to see if a cat was stuck somewhere, or I had bumped something, or whatever, and there was nothing but stillness. Then the light knocking again from the closed deathbed room. Then I heard it again: "Hello?"
I ran downstairs and told my mother what had happened. She said just to keep the door closed and everything would be okay. So we kept the door closed, but the knocking didn't stop. Every day I would open my door to that damn room, and I never knew if something was going to happen.
I would be down in the game room, selecting what I was going to play next, and I could hear knocking all the way down that long hallway. The diagram doesn't do the hallway justice, because it was long, and had no windows so it was always dark. During the day, there would be a nightlight going in the hallway to try and cut down on the shadows. All the way down that long hallway, you could hear something tapping with its fingertips and whispering.
The worst event was when I was leaving my room to go to the bathroom at night, and I heard the rapping on the door. I paused, but kept moving, and then froze when it spoke. In that same voice that spoke to me back in the other house, I heard: "I'm sorry."
I didn't care, and I went about my business very quickly. I had heard whatever it was say hello, hi, and moan in the room, but nothing like this. It sounded so sad, but I knew what was behind that door. If I let that thing out again, it could come into my room at any time.
I could always hear someone pacing in that room, sometimes rolling on the bed, sometimes adjusting the mirror on its squeaky frame. Whatever it was would play with the shades, opening and closing them. If you looked at the bedroom window every day, you would notice that the blinds would have moved, even if no one went in the room.
My mom asked me what I was doing in that room one day even though I know how dangerous it could be, and I told her I wasn't in there. She had seen someone in the window while she was in the backyard with the dog, and she thought it was me. Apparently, it was watching her from inside the house. It makes me wonder if that thing would look at me from through the keyhole.
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The Crackhouse Ghost
A friend of mine lived in a house so shitty, that people had stopped using it as a crackhouse and moved on to something better. It was a horrible old house. He repeatedly reported to me that some really fucky stuff was happening, like steps up and down the stairs, strange hot / cold feelings, and other such things. It was haunted, of course.
So I went to go spend the night.
We spent a lot of the night out and about, and returned to the house late that evening. We got in, sat down, watched some television, and played some Playstation. It was all good. I figured he was probably exaggerating the reports of crazy-ass shit, and just enjoyed myself.
He asked me to go downstairs and check and see if his mother's car was here yet. I said all right. I went downstairs to check, didn't see it, and started up the stairs again.
As I moved up the stairs, I started to feel something really really scary behind me. It was terrifying me, and I didn't know WTF it could be. I started to run up the stairs and kept feeling a pain in my arms as I ran my fat ass breathless away from whatever demon spawn was chasing me.
I charged into his apartment, slammed the door, and ran into his room to get to safety. As I went into the room, though, I tripped and fell into the wall in front of me. Because the house was so shitty, I broke a hole into the wall.
After saying "Oh shit," explaining what happened, and calming down, we looked at the hole a bit. There was a space between the wall and the backing of the wall that was about 2 feet wide, and it had a lot of broken glass and various other crap in it. It was also really, really cold.
We looked at it a while, tried to stick our hands in there (it was really cold, so we stopped doing this), and tried to take a look in while not actually sticking our heads in, as the cold and the stair-ghost had sort of given us the impression this wouldn't be a good idea.
As we were lying on the couch and bed (I was on the couch) talking, later on, out of no where the most horrible howling noise you could imagine, like a static-y wailing, started coming from behind the broken wall. There an extreme drop in the temperature. Then there was banging. From all over, the walls, the floor, the ceiling.
BANG... BANG.. BANG.. BANG! BANGBANG! BANGBANGBANG!
It got faster and faster, and I heard my friend scream and I felt a horrible pain in my left arm. We then got the fuck up ASAP and ran down the stairs and outside, and waited the rest of the night, outside, for his mother to get back. No one else seemed to have heard a thing.
The next day they moved out (they were being evicted anyway), and I never saw the place again.
On my left arm, however, there was a large, painful red marking all the way up it, with the most redness at my hand. I went to the doctor later that week and was told that it was different levels of minor burns, and asked how it happened. I said something about a stove and left.
I still have the marks to this day, and on cold days it gets redder than any other time. On hot days, it's almost invisible. My doctor has said he doesn't know exactly why the temperature affects it, but that it's just a form of scarring from the burns, and that it will probably go away in my lifetime.
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I've lived in my house all my life with my mum (dad, brother, and sisters all moved out). It's a council house and was only built about 19 years ago, so sadly it doesn't have a highly exciting past going back hundreds of years. Anyway:
When I was about six years old, I'd just got into bed and my mum had turned the lights off, I turned over off my side onto my back so I was looking up to the ceiling. As I did this, hovering right above my bed was a human form who looked what I could only explain as a older version of how I'd expect my dad to look in about 20 years time (so he'd be about 60). I was so frightened, I couldn't even scream or move, and could only lay there in absolute terror until I somehow managed to drift off to sleep.
The freaky thing is a few years ago when I was about 15, I noticed a picture at my nan's place in her bedroom. Yup, you guessed it, the guy in the picture looked exactly how I remembered the ghost I saw above my bed. Turned out he was my granddad who I'd never met as he died before I was born.
The other spooky thing that happens in my house is that whenever there is nobody downstairs and we're all upstairs, you can hear the kitchen drawers opening and shutting repeatedly and glasses moving across the kitchen side. Closest I've came to seeing this happening is leaving stuff on the side in a certain position and the next morning it's all moved.
Thankfully, all my family (apart from my brother) agrees the house is haunted.
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My great-grandfather, Paul Plaschke, was an oil painter and cartoonists, and is a rather collectible artist around the Ohio River valley area. One of his paintings that my uncle has is a self-portrait of himself, with a paintbrush in the hand behind his back and a pipe in his front hand.
I was looking at it in detail one day and my uncle asked me if I saw the faces, and I told him no. After adjusting some lighting in the room he had me stand back and look at it for a few minutes, then it hit me all at once. The glare from the light reflecting off the painting, if you look at it just right... there are 3 faces floating in the painting, with amazing detail. I mean, it's not like there are 3 circles - you can make out details like eyes, glasses, nose, mouth, neckline, etc.
I told him that that’s pretty freaky, and he told me how he used to have it hanging up in his bedroom, and looked up at it from bed one night and saw that. He moved it out of his room that same night.
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Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario isn't known for ghost sightings, but there is at least one spot that I'll never go back to. I was reluctant to post (or even write) this story for fear it would somehow piss off the respective dead and make them haunt my ass... but that's just silly... right?
My uncle was a sturdy, hard-workin'-sundried-faced, square-dancin' farmer whose hundred-plus-acre farm sprawls against a river called the Conestoga just outside of town. As a kid, I lived way up in Buttfuck County, in northern Ontario, but occasionally the family would cram into the doughty little Acadian and go visit his family for a while. It was always loads of fun.
The pair of them never had or wanted kids, but they were almost like grandparents in the way they doted on us. There'd always be sugardough cookies by the plateload, and we had free reign to play over the entire range. My uncle, after a hard day of "farmin'", would finish the day with a good brisk walk around the borders of his little kingdom. When I was down there, I would tag along, as he always had interesting stories to share.
One day, on such a journey, we stopped at the corner where the river was crossed by the road:
You may have noticed, as I did, that alongside the bridge are the ruins of another bridge. And if you have ever ventured along the Conestoga or the nearby Grand River, you'd notice a whole buttload of ruined and fallen spans. I remember asking him that day why they tore down the old bridge and built a new one. He sighed as he deftly wrapped a new cigarette, seemingly as if he was deciding to spare me the mental burden of a heavy memory. This is his story (HEAVILY paraphrased and mixed with research I did later, because I don't remember the words he said, just the events):
[Backstory: The original bridge was intended for horse-and-buggy traffic in the late 1880s, but like almost all major bridges in the area, was built strong enough for a pony train in case rail service was required. (sidenote: It wasn't unusual for road and rail traffic to share a single bridge in those zany days. However, with the ambling slowness of walking, the common sense of horses, and the rigid path of trains, there was seen to be no need for a sturdy railing along the bridge. So a frail token one was made of wood, as if to say, "hey, don't fall into the river, okay?" Car traffic made building that sort of railings illegal later on, but there was no government order to upgrade existing railings, due to the immense cost involved.] Anyway, on to the story:
One afternoon in the 1960s [I don't remember the year], I was working the fields with one of my field hands, Elias [sic], near that bridge. I heard the elementary school bus rumble past, as it always did five days a week, driven by a cheery man in a starchy uniform, dispensing children wide-eyed with fresh, golden knowledge they would soon forget. We thought little of this minor bustling that day... until the bus began to cross the bridge. I wasn't watching, but from afar I heard the pebbly sound of rubber sliding on gravel. I raised my head to see the bus, and my face fell watching its wheels lock and the vehicle sliding askew along the span.
The road was paved, but always full of gravel. Driving on it was slippery, as if one was walking on ball bearings. God help you if you had to dodge any obstacle at any great speed, because once your wheels locked, your car would go anywhere it damn well pleased. To this day I have no idea WHY the driver lost control; but he lost it with wild abandon across that bridge. The bus began to yaw clockwise, dust blowing up thick behind him. Then it hit the thin little rail and broke through it like a knife through butter, wooden shards flying in violent discard. I heard the engine roar loud as the bus flipped and fell, mixed in with the high-pitched shrills of the panicking children inside.
Elias and I ran like the wind to that bridge, our hearts thumping in fear, prayers rushing in mixed fragments through our heads. When we got there, the scene was worse than what we could imagine... the bus was upside-down on the opposite bank.
[Besides puny bridges, back then the school buses had no real crash protection, just like most anything coming out of Detroit at the time. Nowadays, reinforced cages keep bus roofs rigid in the case of a rollover, but a 1960s-vintage bus that fell onto its roof would collapse in on itself like aluminum foil.]
And that's exactly what happened at the Conestoga River. It was ghastly. The engine was still running with an eerily placid note. The marking lights that weren't smashed were still illuminated. From within the bus, we could hear muted screams and cries and murmurs from trapped children.
"We got to get them out!" Elias exclaimed, voicing my exact thoughts. Easier said than done, though, since the windows had crushed closed when the bus landed. Both doors were stuck. Their windows were on the top half only, and they too were closed down. There wasn't even any way to look inside the bus.
"We'll get you out. Hang tight!" I called to the children. There was no sign that they heard me, as the wailings did not change to acknowledge us. At this point, more hands and farmers were rushing in. We started discussing how we would get them all out. Not an easy task: back then, there was no jaws of life, and you can forget about cordless power tools. Soon a police car joined the fray, then two, and then about five. We all looked expectantly at the officers for a solution, but they were just as baffled at this can of sardines.
It was then that someone in the crowd yelled, "Aw, hell, why don't we just put our hacksaws through the floorboards?" So we all rushed home for our saws, came back and took turns cutting into the floor. It was hard work. The heat was intense, the cutting was slow, but we were driven on by the unrelenting cries from the inside. Someone remarked sardonically how the bus was built like an eggshell sitting on jailhouse steel. We battered on the flooring to shed some light inside, but the darkness swallowed all.
It wasn't until dusk that we finally got a hole complete enough to punch open. At this point, it was a police officer that was doing the sawing. He hammered at the battered metal to pry it open, then he shone a flashlight inside. The cries suddenly stopped. We breathed a little easier, thinking the kids were assuaged by the hope of rescue.
"Jesus Christ!" cursed the officer, an expression of shock on his face. I jumped on the bus and peered in with him. They were all dead. There was no sign of movement. Only bodies sprawled everywhere. Some were little more than clothes filled with bloody pulp. A couple of broken bodies were under the hole, as if they had crawled there, still alive to await the escape that would not save them in time.
It didn't take long for the police and paramedics to declare all occupants dead. The parents began wailing and trying to get a glimpse into the hole, rebuffed by police, the scene being too gruesome for a loving parent to see. The intact dead were removed one at a time, but the police would have to wait for an industrial saw and a crane from Toronto to properly clean and dispose of the bus. I went back to bed before this all was finished. I couldn't sleep. I still heard the childrens' shrieks, moans and sobbing coming from the crash site all night long.
[The next week, Waterloo County passed a new edict to rebuild all of the old non-conforming bridges to a very strict standard. The next month, Ontario legislature passed a bill to only buy buses built with roll-cages. For the next year or two, it bought all of its buses from Europe because Detroit was so reluctant to produce safer buses. Ontario's own bus companies mobilized to build its own safe buses. Two companies became very successful and now sell buses worldwide.]
Zoom to 1999...
This was the first year I started to address my pasty-nerdy-fatty syndrome by going on long walks on random paths every day after work. I had just graduated university, and was living not too far from my uncle's farm. So, it wasn't too long before I decided to check out the crash site, see if I could see the bus' imprint, or find some shattered souvenirs of that awful day.
This was the end of a long and tiring Wednesday at work. We were just getting a new release out the door, and last-minute bugs kept popping up, as usual. It wasn't until 8 at night that I finally arrived at the farm. Nobody was home but the chickens, so I just went straight over to where my uncle pointed me so many years before.
It was dusk. The sky was a dimming orange, but the ground was silhouetted black against it. The crickets had started their nightly chorus and the night breeze had rolled in. I crossed the "new and improved" concrete-clad bridge. I looked at the broken remnants of the old bridge and replayed how the story must have played out in my mind. The bus sliding out of control, breaking through the barrier, rolling and landing right about... there. Ground Zero was black with darkness, as was all the landscape around it. No obvious crater, or scorching, or whatever the hell I was looking for.
I jumped down the bank to my morbid destination. The sky was dulling from the inevitable night. No problem for me; I had my trusty police-issue skull-cracking steel flashlight with me. I clicked it on and began scouting the area. After a few minutes of scouting around and brushing spider webs I started to get disappointed - I couldn't find any evidence of the accident. Not a dent, not a piece of scrapped metal, not even a bent twig. It looked as if nothing had EVER happened here at all, and I was beginning to doubt my uncle's story just a teeny bit. Just then, I saw a shimmering glint of reflected light in the soil - maybe a shattered piece of mirror, or maybe a glass chip. Not much, but it was something.
As I moved to check it, my flashlight just blacked out. Dead. Not too surprising, since the switch was a little flaky. Click click. No light. Click click click. Click? Damn. I let my eyes adjust to the fading daylight, hoping they alone could take up the search. I went one step, and felt as if I'd walked with my entire body into a spider web. As my hands swept to brush it off, I looked at the tree line, and what I saw stopped me cold.
Barely perceptively, embedded into about 5-8 of the trunks were what looked like children's faces. They looked carved, except more alive.
Their expressions were blank and unmoving. Their eyes were empty, but I'm sure as hell they were staring directly into mine. I locked my gaze in the void between two faces, my mind urgently trying to reason away the images. It didn't help. I felt every eye boring into my skull.
It wasn't over. In the very periphery of my vision, I saw a very rough, wispy apparition of a young girl, about a foot from my left arm. I felt more spider webs on that arm as she formed. I didn't dare focus on it. I was afraid it would just confirm her existence. I wanted to be anywhere but there. My legs were utterly locked. She looked at me... a bit inquisitively, I guess. But just as I began to feel a little less threatened, she threw her head back and screamed bloody murder. Except the sound that came out wasn't a scream, but more silent, and like radio static. Her mouth grew wide, and her head began to slough to the ground. From her mouth, another head, same girl, grew out. It too screamed, sloughed, and a third head formed. After the third incarnation had opened its mouth, the entire body melted down to the ground. It was gone, but I could still sense it there. It was puddling away on the ground.
After that, my heart was racing fast, thumping in my ear. I was trembling with agonizing fear. I started to move my head in the hope that this was over. It wasn't. The faces had now vanished from the trunks, but a new one had appeared. It was of a man, middle-aged, chubby and with wide cheeks. Even though I couldn't see it, I knew he wore a uniform. The frozen expression on his face was pure, murderous rage, a face so used to smiling and laughing now contorted into seething, hollow-eyed hatred. I whined, then turned to run, having gained enough sense to get moving. The man's face remained. His black stare burned into my back.
I didn't turn back. I ran all the way to my car. Across the bridge it felt like I was flying through spider web after spider web. The crickets were silent. The remote wouldn't unlock the door, maybe because I kept fumbling at it. My shivering hand plunged the key in and unlocked the car. I jumped in. I started the car and peeled out of there. However fast I drove, it wasn't enough. I kept the ceiling light on, but I didn't dare look out my side window, because I had a vague sense that someone was looking in, and I sure as hell didn't want to confirm the presence.
I'm just lucky I didn't get into an accident. I got home, kept the lights on, and stayed awake much of the night. Since then, the scar of the encounter has faded. Though I'm sure as hell never going back to that spot again.
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Scene: My previous residence, which was this house one of my roommate's bosses had for rent. His father and mother had lived there forever, but the mother had died years ago and the father died about a year or two before we moved in.
The first thing we noticed after moving in was that the master bedroom had a lock on the outside. That's right, the OUTSIDE. Somebody was locked in the bedroom.. for their safety, or the other people's safety? Luckily, I didn't get that room.
Anyway, things started off slowly. Doors would be open when I knew I had closed them. The lighting would go on and off without notice, despite no known electrical issues with the house. But then it started happening. The hauntings. It would always happen between 2 AM and 3 AM.
The first time, I thought I was just hearing things. I had my music on loud, and was in the basement and heard a few faint steps and a door open. I went upstairs and saw that a door that had previously been closed was wide open. No one else was in the house.
About a month later, I'm once again doing laundry in the basement. This time I had just walked in the door, so there was NO NOISE at all in the house. All of a sudden, while in the basement in near complete darkness, I hear four LOUD footsteps leading to the computer room, then a doorknob turning, followed by a creaking sound. I ran upstairs and didn't see anyone. (thankfully) But there was somebody (or some spirit) at the house.
It would always happen when only one person was home... my roommate mentioned an encounter they had had before I experienced it myself. He came around a few more times too. I gotta tell ya: I'm glad I don't live there anymore. It's obvious somebody didn't want us to be there.
==============
I have seen an old woman on two occasions just staring at me smiling. My dog noticed as well and barked, evoking no response from the woman. As soon as I blinked, she was gone. Lights in my bedroom have been turned on as well as the radio dial moving on its own. I have also been locked out of my house several times. This is especially strange because of the fact that I left through my sliding glass door, which must be unlocked in order to get out. When I tried to get back in, I found it had been locked, which is fairly impossible with no one else in the house.
The strangest of these ghostly happenings was when I was trying desperately to find a cup of sugar to use on my beloved Rice Krispies (can't stand them without sugar). I looked everywhere in a panic until I heard a creak behind me, as though someone else was in the kitchen, sneaking up behind me on the hardwood floor. At this, I whipped around, expecting to find my sister or mom. Instead I turned around just in time to catch a glimpse of the sugar about two feet in front of me just below eye level, hovering for a split second and then falling. Even if it wasn't hovering, I still can't explain it falling from nowhere.
The only time I was ever truly scared by this ghost was in fourth grade when I had metal bunk beds. I would lay on the bottom bed at night, attempting to sleep when I would hear faint tapping on the metal beams from the top bunk. It sound exactly like a woman tapping her nails against it, as a woman with a manicure will do when she is bored or anxious. At that point I was shivering under my Spidey blankets, praying for morning.
===============
I had just gotten a dog and was honored with the task of walking it at night since it was extremely hyperactive and spent the previous 3 nights barking at the mystical darkness outside. So I'd been walking him... it's only like 9 PM, so it's not terribly uncommon to see other people outside. Anyway, I am walking towards this one guy with a coat. I'm kinda of an anti-social person, so I don't really make eye contact instantly with people. I notice that his dog seemed a little... well, unhealthy. It was rather bony and seemed like it was dying right then and there. I look up to mention something about it right as I was walking past him. I tilt my head to the right and say "hey..." and notice that the guy doesn't have a fucking face. I turn around all the way and he's completely vanished. So I quickly ran home and let the dog sleep in my room to get him to shut up.
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My experiences aren't as vivid or gruesome as most of these. A lot of it seems to come from my own head (literally noises coming from my head). It started when I was very young, basically as long as I remember. They became very intense when I turned 12 or 13. That was about the time I became a born-again Christian. Most of the things I would keep to myself for fear of sounding weird. It got so bad that I was begging my sister to let me sleep in her room, even on the floor. If she refused, I would not sleep. I would turn on every light in my room and write prayers in my journal for hours and hours. I would then ritualistically burn these journals. My grandmother noticed my weird behavior, so I let her in on some of the things that had been happening. She looked so crushed. Apparently, almost all the women that grew up in my house (4 aunties, my grandma, me and my sister) had the same "dream." Only mine went beyond dreams.
She told me that she believed that it was because I was being tested and that I would have to deal with it alone. I would have the paralysis combined with aural invasions, every night. She did let me sleep with my lights on and would check on me throughout the night to make sure I wasn't crushed to death. I told my sister what was going on and she laughed at me, until that night I was laying on the floor my her bedside. I heard her gasp sharply and the room became ice cold. I jumped up and took one look at her and knew it was happening to her: she looked like she was trying to scream, eyes wide unfocused and watering, mouth gaping, but only a low croaking noise coming out of her. I ran and woke my grandmother: she held my sister and whispered: "In the name of Jesus Christ, I rebuke you."
Whatever it is / was released her, and she looked at me and cried and said she was sorry for not believing me. We slept together after that and checked each other to make sure that we were okay. The weird thing is if I explain to anyone really specifically what actually occurs, it promptly happens to them. I have lost friends this way, and now I refuse to elaborate the experiences in great detail. It still happens occasionally, but I give up on "fighting" whatever it is. The sad part is that I really really thought it would stop when I moved out of the house, but it follows me. Everywhere.
==============
This happened just a few months ago. I'll start off by describing the area. I live just outside a small town in Alabama called Chelsea. The subdivision I live in is alongside a highway that leads to Chelsea. When you go off the highway into Chelsea, there's a small strip mall on one side of the road. My friend's brother works at a Subway (the restaurant) in this strip mall. Once you pass this strip mall, the rest of Chelsea is basically a giant forest with the occasional subdivision.
One day my friend, Dillon, stopped by on his way to pick his brother up from Subway and asked if I wanted to go along with him. I was up for the ride, so we walked out to his car and drove off. We got to Subway and his brother told us that he still had a few minutes before he got off work, so Dillon and I decided to go on a drive through Chelsea.
It was common for us to drive aimlessly through Chelsea at night, as we never really had anything better to do. We had never seen anything unusual while doing this, but this night was different. It had just gotten really dark out and I slipped Pink Floyd's Meddle into the CD player. The music is the kicker though, the timing couldn't have been any more perfect. The opening track, One of these Days, was finishing its buildup. If you've never heard the song, after its buildup, right before it goes into a crazy jam, you hear the lyrics "I'm going to cut you up into little pieces!" in a really deep scary-sounding voice. We passed a graveyard right at this point of the song. I was looking down at a CD case or something and looked up to see what I can only describe as a large, white misty bedsheet hovering over our car. It crossed over the top of our car from the other side of the road and off into the cemetery.
I honestly thought that I was seeing things. I looked over at Dillon, and he calmly reached into the back of the car and pulled out a baseball bat and handed it to me. "DID YOU SEE THAT?!" I yelled at him. His face was pale white and his eyes were watering. "Yeah..." he said. He flew back to Subway without stopping for anything. All I could say was "HOLY SHIT, WE JUST SAW A FUCKING GHOST, THAT'S AWESOME!" He refused to talk about it until we got back to Subway. When we got back, I convinced him somehow to drive past the graveyard again.
This time, nothing happened... but I saw something I never noticed before. On the other side of the road is about the creepiest looking old, abandoned church I've ever seen. Next to it is what looks like a long wooden table sitting under a large tree. Yep, this is what people would stand on before being hanged. The rope would be put around their neck and I guess they would be pushed off of the thing. The path that this thing took was from the tree, across the road, and into the graveyard. For a few nights afterwards, we'd drive past the graveyard to "go see the ghost" but nothing ever happened and now whenever we pass it, we don't really say anything.
Dillon and I swear what we saw was a ghost. He has had tons of experiences with ghosts before and I'm considering buying him an account just so he can post some stories in this thread. I'll never forget the look on his face though, I've never seen him so terrified.
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It was a few days before Halloween (Yes, very very cliché I know) and at a local bar, there was a fancy dress Halloween party. Me, my best friend Kiran, and two others (Amy and Kate) had decided to go, knowing it would be shitty, but it was a night out at least. We got to the venue and were disappointed to see that there really wasn't a high turn out, and out of boredom Kate piped up: "Why don't we do a Ouiji board?" Now, I do not like ghosts at all: it's more the feeling they give me... that cold dead, numbness... and I certainly didn't want to sit at the back of a bar doing a Ouiji board. Everyone but me wanted to do it, I caved in to the peer pressure and grabbed a napkin... pulling my eyeliner from my bag, I drew a crude representation of what I believed a Ouiji board looked like... after all, I had never had any experience with one of these things.
We sat in a circle and decided upon what we were going to do. Putting our fingers upon the upturned glass tumbler, I told everyone to relax and to close their eyes and to imagine their energy flowing into the tumbler, but at the same time blocking any energy coming back to them. Considering I had never done one of these before, I felt like a natural leader, the commands flowing easily from my mouth. Everyone followed me. I then asked if there was any spirit that wished to communicate with us, there was nothing at first. I asked again, and the glass moved to a crudely written "yes." I was shaken, I had never expected it to work... in a way, I was hoping that it would fail and I could just say: "Okay, fun's over... let's go." But little did I know things were about to get far worse...
So, we had our spirit, and by now we had established a firm enough connection to it that we could sit there with our eyes open and just ask it questions and receive answers. Now, the tumbler was moving... but it was impossible for us to be pushing it. We were all sitting on an edge of the table and for us to push the tumbler would require the cooperation of a minimum of two people. Also, the speed the tumbler was moving at was impossible for us to reproduce due to the friction against the tablecloth and napkin. So what would we ask it? I didn't really want to provoke anything bad, so I asked its name. "Amy," it responded. The Amy at the table suddenly looked very shaken and she wanted us to stop. I was a bit confused, so I asked if it knew someone at the table, the tumbler slid alarmingly across the table and was drawing perfect circles in front of Amy. Suddenly Kiran collapsed, so I told everyone to take their fingers off the tumbler and I instructed the spirit to leave. Kiran was shaking violently: she said she felt as if she was being punched and held down in the chair, and she could barely move and looked very very pale. I asked her if she had visualised a "shield" blocking out a spirit from taking her energy forcefully... she said no. We decided that maybe if we got her some food, she'd feel better... so I asked Kate to get her something from the buffet...
Kate turned to me, and, my God, I have never seen such a horrific expression in human eyes. WHOEVER was there it was NOT her... this was not Kate I was facing! "Kate... that's not you, is it?" I asked. She stared at me and didn't say a word. Some children belonging to a loud family on the other side of the room were chasing each other, and they came running towards us. They saw Kate and stood there horrified, wanting to scream... I'm sure they saw something there that we couldn't see.
After getting Kiran some food, I told them all that the spirit or whatever it was hadn't gone and was sitting in Kate's body. We all resumed the session and I called on the spirit again.
"Who are you?"
"Amy."
"How old are you?"
"12."
"How would you describe your feelings right now?"
"F.. U... N"
"Are you willing to give us Kate back?"
"Yes."
"And leave Kiran alone?"
"... Yes."
"Before I let you free... tell me who you are."
"Soul." Before the glass again slid to Amy and circled.
"Thank you... this has been a pleasant experience, but you must leave now."
The spirit left, this time for sure. Kiran was still feeling drained, and Amy was horribly shaken, we decided to go home.
Oh, but if only the strangeness was to stop there!
I was staying over at Kiran's that night and we decided to sit in her dad's temple room... I was asking Kiran to name the various Sikh gods on the wall. The conversation turned to many things, including the Ouiji board that we had done that night. We were in there four hours before we fell asleep. I had a tranquil dream, I was floating above the sea and there was a huge volcanic island in the distance, I kept seeing and hearing the names of the gods that we had been talking about. The next morning when I awoke, Kiran said to me: "I had the most peaceful dream... I saw this island in the sea, and all my gods were there and I was praying to them." I nodded, then she told me she had woken up suddenly in the night and saw a mass of white smoky energy floating above me. I don't really know what it was and we didn't discuss it. Later that evening, Kate phoned Kiran up and said she had been feeling weird all night and that she kept hearing a conversation in her head, she recited it and it turned out she recited what me and Kiran were talking about in the temple room despite the fact Kate was in another house many miles away.
Amy still refuses to talk about it to this day... we all think she knows what it was that came up that night, and we believe it was her soul that stepped in to possibly protect us from something bad coming up, but as far as scary things that have happened to me go... that was pretty tame.
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My friend and I got the idea of trying to get whoever it was to set up a "Haunted House" for us to go through. (This was around sixth grade for me. - Changed from the original post because thinking back, this was actually sixth and seventh mostly.) Basically, we would set out things like yarn and stuffed animals, and ask out loud for the good ghost or whatever it was to set up something interesting for us. Then we'd leave for an hour. Once the hour was up, we'd slowly walk through it with the lights out. Sometimes I would go through with my friend... other times, I would go through alone.
Various things happened as I would walk through the room in the darkness. Stuffed animals would lightly hit me in the back as if someone had thrown them from behind me or "run" across my feet as I walked. Now, I always ended the walkthrough by lying down on the bed and seeing if anything else would happen. One time at the end by myself, as my head rested on a pillow, one of the stuffed animals was pulled UNDER the pillow, from one side to the other.
The closet door also opened by itself one time when I approached it as I was playing the game alone. (The walkthrough also involved going into the closet for a few seconds as well, as it was a pretty big closet.) Normally my closet freaked me out anyway, but I went in this time because there was never a feeling of malice in this "game."
When my friend was walking through with me once, the radio across the room turned on by itself to some sort of Christian station. It hadn't been set to the station before. After the "Haunted House" was over, I checked the radio and no alarm was set for it to come on like it did. I know on the times my friend went through with me that she was absolutely not behind anything that went on. Even if she had tried to fake some things, her position wouldn't allow the trick to work. (Like once she was in front of me, and the stuffed animal hit me squarely in the middle of the back.)
Other times... we'd see orbs of light flashing across the room, or things were rearranged when we turned on the light at the end.
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I don't think I (or anyone else) could possibly top anything Taco has said, but I had a creepy experience tonight.
I live on Staten Island and there are a few places here that are supposedly haunted, one of which is the old Seaview Hospital buildings. Seaview is still open, right across the street. But on the other side, completely fenced in are several buildings (I'm guessing about 6, I might be wrong) that are now closed off, most of which are completely identical. I've been there a few times during the day just checking it out, and it is kinda creepy during the day. Around 11 PM, me and three friends decided (in part because of this very thread) to go check out Seaview. The history of Seaview isn't really scary... it was a hospital mainly for TB a while back. It closed maybe twenty, thirty years ago. But a lot of people died there, and since then it has been a place for homeless people, junkies, and "Satan-worshippers" to hang out in. The best way to describe exactly what this place looks like is probably the hospital in the Silent Hill games, only with a lot of graffiti. That kind of brings the atmosphere down a little because you know the place has quite a few visitors. But walking around there tonight definitely scared us enough.
EDIT: The front door is right on the bottom of the diagram, where the two side wings meet the back wing. There’s sort of a foyer next to the staircase, and the front door opens out from that foyer.
Armed with three flashlights and a camera, we snuck through a hole in the fence and found ourselves on the road that leads from each building to the next. We went into the first building we came upon and walked into the back door. A staircase was immediately in front of us, slightly to the left was a patient wing, and to our sides were patient wings. Those are definitely creepy. Its a long, wide hallway with dividers about 6 feet up from the ground every 8 feet or so, separating the individual patient areas. Occasionally, you'll find the remains of a bed or a wheelchair. For anyone who's played Silent Hill 3 and knows that scene with the wheelchair on its side, we saw something identical to that tonight. As we walked past a wheelchair turned on its side, the wheel on top was spinning slowly. As soon as we passed, it stopped turning. Scared the crap out of us.
Every now and then, there will be a wall with a doorway leading to the next hallway. Most of them are simple hinged doors, but we happened to come upon huge, steel sliding doors. They were open about 2 feet, wide enough for us to fit through. My three friends walked though first, one at a time. As soon as I was about to walk through, the doors slammed shut, almost catching my arm. These things were ridiculously heavy and hard to open, so I'd imagine it could have broken my arm if I didn't pull away fast enough. But we managed to open them, I slipped through the door as fast as I could, and we continued on.
At the end of the hall, there was another staircase and the front door. There are four stories, each one the same until you get to the fourth. The two patient wings on the left and right are there, but the one going down the center isn't. Instead, a door opens up to the roof. We were on the first floor, so we headed up the stairs to the fourth floor so we could check out the roof. Now, this whole time we had been hearing strange noises and thinking we might have seen something, but this is in the middle of the woods so I'm sure raccoons or squirrels hang out in places like this.
JUST SO YOU KNOW: The next part has something kind of nasty in it... I guess I just wanna cover my ass in case anyone takes offense, so I put it in spoiler tags.
But as I shone my flashlight at the top of the steps on the fourth floor, I saw a dog. It was dead, and had probably been there for months. At first I didn't realize it was dead because its leash was still on it, and tied to the banister on the stairs. But as we got closer, we could see that it was dead and practically mummified. It had no eyes, its skin was pulled tight over its body, and the smell was terrible. We could see holes where insects had probably dug through it. Its head was dangling off the edge of the stair and turned in a really grotesque way. This didn't really scare us, it was just really sad to think someone tied a dog to a banister on the top floor of an abandoned building and left it there to die. I had been snapping pictures the whole time, and I guess on impulse I took one of the dog (I know it was kind of a gross thing to do, I mean, it's a dead dog, but something about the way it looked was so odd that I felt compelled to).
As I took the picture and the flash went off, me and my friend Mike both noticed a figure walk past the doorway on the left. This wasn't like a shadow from the flash, because after the flash was gone it continued to walk past the doorway. It was a big black figure, kind of blurry, and it moved in a sort of stop and go animation, like it didn't take regular steps. It was like watching an old silent movie, the way the motion was jerky and didn't flow. Me and Mike told the other two what we had seen, and we all ran down the stairs, out the front door, and straight to the hole in the fence.
Not anything super scary, but I'm definitely not sleeping tonight. I'm hopefully getting the pictures developed tomorrow, so I'll put some up. It's a very creepy place.
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My Catholic priest has told us a few stories of the supernatural when we had religious education classes, and he is definately not the kind of guy who would lie about anything.
He is Italian, and had relatives that still lived in the countryside. Apparently, there is an old game kinda like the Ouija board, but not with the range of the Q&A. Essentially, you take a circular table, get 4-8 people to lay their hands upon it, and ask it questions. The table would move up or down depending upon the answer.
Now, my priest said it works, and he said for us never to do it because it's dealing with spirits, kinda like a Ouija board, so it makes sense. But what he said was that he was inside the house while his cousins, and some friends were playing this game outside. It gets dark, so they go inside for dinner... and after dinner, everyone is just chatting at the table and having dessert... I think. Well, the mother there (his aunt, I believe) told the kids (15+ were their ages, not young kids, but not really adults) to bring the table back inside so that it wasn't left outside overnight. Well, the kids get angry at having to do the work, but head off to do it anyways. About a minute later, they come back into the room, yelling. Now, he was about 26 at this time (he's in his 50s now), so he runs outside to check on what's going on.
Out in the fields, the table is just kinda floating around, about a foot off the ground, and glowing green. Not insanely bright, but bright enough to notice in the dusk conditions. So of course the priest whips out his Bible and crucifix and starts yelling at the table about Jeebus and how God hates it. Meanwhile, he is constantly walking towards it. He said he got to about 10 feet from the table, and as he yelled something about Jeebus commanding the spirit to return to hell, the table kinda rushed him, but fell on its side about a foot from him. He told the kids to get axes, and after using holy water on it, they cut up the table and burnt it. He said that it burnt like a normal wood fire does for maybe 10 minutes, then started being tinted green. Nothing else happened, but he took the ashes and spread them onto the field, and liberally applied holy water.
I have 2 stories to tell. One has happened in my neighbor's house when I slept over, and the other has happened in, yes, it's cliché, but my grandmother's house. Both of these stories involved me getting minor injuries, but only one is from a ghost, or so I believe. You can say you don't believe me or that they are not true, but I know what I saw, and I will never forget it.
Neighbor's ghost
Okay, now this was the first time that I have ever believed that what I saw was truly a ghost. It started off with me deciding to sleep over at my neighbor's house. I'm gonna pull a trick from the god of this thread, and draw you a picture of what the upstairs of my neighbor's house looks like.
code:
__________ _____________
X | ________ | |
X | | Marky's | | |
| | room | | Brian's |
| | | | Room |
|_________|_________|____________________|____________|_____________
| |
|
Parents' | long, scary hallway |
|
Room | |
guest |
| ___________________________________ |
room |
| | | | | |
|
|_________| | bath | |stairs
|_____________|
| |_room_| | |
_________| | |
X = videos
Okay, now I can begin the story.
It was a summer's day and I decided to sleep over at my neighbor's house, with their consent of course, and wake up early and go to an amusement park with them. Their house was right next to mine, and it was a very little walk to get there. I walked in, and we all had dinner. Their house is a 3-story house, with a very large, plain basement that was so scary even my neighbors wouldn't go in there except for when the mom had to do laundry. Before this family moved in, we had around 6 different families move in there, and then move out, and no one on our block could figure out why. This family had been there for over a year, so we figured they would stay.
The night started out peacefully enough: we played some Nintendo 64 (shows that it was around 5 years ago, I think) and then we watched some cable. The parents decided to go up to bed, and we continued to watch TV. After a while, there was nothing on, so we decided to go and get some videos and watch them. Since the parents already went up to bed, it was going to be difficult: as the diagram shows, the videos were in their room.
We did odd man out to see who had to go: there were 5 of us (me, the two neighbor boys, Marky and Brian, and our other friends, Jack and Matt), so it took a while, but eventually I threw a 2, and everyone else threw a 1. So I slowly creeped up the stairs. Now as you can see, I labeled the hall as dark and scary, because it really is. It is very long, which makes it even more scary. so I got to the door, and slowly opened it, making sure I made no noise.
Here's where the proverbial shit hit the fan!
So I sneak into the room, and grab the movies (Killer Clowns from Outer Space and Spaceballs) and I slowly start to leave. I close the door behind me, and continue to walk the long hallway. I make it past Marky's room, then past the bathroom, then when I come up on Brian's room, and am about to turn the corner to go down the stairs, I hear the parents' door open and Brian's mom softly say: "Hey, come here?" The question mark is there, because it sounded like a question, not a yell or a statement. I turned around, expecting to see Brian's big fat mom (not being mean, but I need to let you know what she looks like) with her hand out, forcing me to give back the tape, and then get a lecture on sneaking around and going to sleep. But I was surprised at what I actually saw.
When i turned around, there was a lady looking at me... if that's what you call it, since I couldn't see any eyes, just blackness. She appeared similar to the ghost in the Ghostbusters library scene: it was just standing there, gazing at me, and I couldn't tell if it was glowing or not, but it was giving off that white semi-transparent look. I couldn't move, I was paralyzed with fear, or maybe the ghost made it so I couldn't move. I could see myself running down the stairs, but I just couldn't follow through.
The ghost continued to look at me, then, the ghost slowly came towards me in what seemed like slow motion. The strange part was, the feet were not moving. It was moving in a walking fashion, meaning how a person walks, I could see steps, but the feet were not moving... it wasn't floating like I would've imagined it should have. Then, it just stopped.
Now it did what was considered the scariest scene in The Ring, right at the end of the movie when the girl comes out of the TV, and just moves forward at you. I cant explain how it was, but I will try. Imagine you are taking a movie of someone walking towards you, and it has 40 scenes. When you play it back, you get rid of scenes 15-25, so the pictures just switches from the person walking far back, to the person being really close and still moving, but in my case, she wasn't still moving, just kinda being there.
That was the scariest thing I have ever seen, and will ever see: I can't imagine anything worse. It was right around Marky's door, then suddenly it was about 5 feet from me. But now I was able to move, just not of my own free will.
When the ghost just appeared there, I don't know if it was a reflex or not, but I jumped back. If you remember where I was standing, right by the stairs, jumping back wasn't the greatest move you should do by stairs. I fell down them, and from there on out, it was just a blackout. Now I say that jumping back wasn't the smartest thing to do, but I guess it couldn't have been worse that what could have happened, but I will happily never know.
So it ended with me sitting at the bottom of the stairs, and my 4 friends next to me. I didn't know how to explain what I saw, so I just didn't. For some reason when I fell, the parents never woke up, but that is okay, I guess. And lo and behold, I never slept over at their house again until about a year later, and then I refused to go upstairs after dark.
I will write about the other story at my grandmother's house soon. Not trying to hype it or anything and make you wait, but I just have to go and eat dinner... where I live, it's that time. But that story is far worse than this one, but I am still a little unsure of it. But this one is where the ghost harmed me, I think.
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Age 6 or so.
The house I lived in was a split-level. I lived on the first floor, and my room was at the end of the hallway off which all the other bedrooms and the bathroom branched off. At the other end of the hallway is a living room. With my door open, I could look from my bed down the hallway into the living room. I rarely slept with the door closed, as the room was too dark, and with it open, I got some light from the night lights in the bathroom.
I had a poster of Lassie on my wall: its eyes would follow me, and sometimes it would appear to be snarling.
Sometimes, with the lights out, I'd see a network of faint "tubes" in space around me, forming a cocoon, like I was inside a sac, or something. Through these tubes would flow faint see-through cells, purple outlines with yellow-orange nuclei. Maybe it was a vague memory of the womb... Of course, in the webcomics that presaged the release of the Matrix, there was one where a character had a eerily similar "dream" of being contained in such a network. It sent a chill down my spine.
One night, my parents were out, and I was put to bed early by the babysitter. She was downstairs watching TV. Lying awake in my bed, on my side, looking down the hall, I saw a puff of smoke in the living room, hovering above the carpet. The puff formed into a ring, and then into a vertical column that solidified into a humanlike form wearing a grey gown / hood / cloak. Inside the hood, there was no face, only a smoky solid blackness. It then disappeared the same way it formed. I screamed, and after much cajoling, the babysitter put me back to bed.
Age 10 or so.
I was playing "ghosts in the graveyard" (tag played at night) with my sister and cousins at my grandma's cabin on the shore of Ozark Lake in Missouri. At night the place was dark, with pitch-black shadows cast by the one outdoor light, a 60-watt bulb strung on a wire from the cabin to a nearby tree. At the time, Grandpa had 2 boats, and between them, it could be pitch black. Perfect place for hiding. I hid between them, crouching low watching people sneaking around, hiding or seeking. I was probably gonna win. Then I felt the urge to turn around. Backlit by the light from a nearby cabin, I saw it. It was 8 feet tall at least, covered in shaggy fur, and muscular. I could not see much else, as it was backlit. I ran screaming for the cabin, and it ran the opposite way. I was "tagged" but didn't care: it took me a good minute to catch my breath and say what I saw. The adults passed it off as a overactive imagination. Years later, I would learn the Ozarks have been home to reports of a Bigfoot-like creature.
1999
Spring break in London. Me and my sister went to London as a graduation present over spring break. She was graduating from college, me from grad school. We took several walking tours of London, most of which are lead by actors from the Royal Shakespeare company trying to earn a few extra quid. Great stuff. The last tour we took we took was a ghost tour, looking at all the supposedly haunted places in London. The last stop was a pint at a haunted tavern that used to be a gin house (bar where they served gin, gussied up with fancy paintings to make poor blokes feel rich for a little while). There was a bullet hole in one painting from some drunken ball that took place in the 1800s, and the place was supposedly "haunted."
After a couple pints, I went to use the loo. Everyone laughs, as the bathrooms seem to be a popular spot for the spirit to prank guests at a vulnerable time. Walking downstairs, there is a short hallway, steps behind it, locked door in front of the storage room, men's room on the left, women's room on the right. The door in front of me had a one-inch gap underneath, and no light was shining through, so it was obviously vacant. But I did hear the sound of a bottle spinning on a hard surface, the sound it'd make spinning round on a stone or concrete floor. Playful spirit, or nosy rat? Hmm...
I go into the men's room, use the urinal, and walk over to the sink. As soon as I start washing my hands, the hand drier besides the sink turns on! It's one of those types you wave your hand under to start. It turns off just as I finish. Thinking my elbows may have set it off, I waggle them around a bit. My elbows or my jacket don't reach enough to ever have a chance of setting it off.
I shrug, and begin to rub my hands underneath the drier, but it refuses to start. I wave them around underneath it like a fool, it doesn't start. Holding my hands underneath, I crack a wry smile and say "Ha Ha, very funny!" As soon as those words left my lips, the drier starts up, and I finish drying my hands.
I walk back upstairs, and tell my fellow tourists about my encounter with the tavern's mischievous poltergeist.
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The last years of the deathbed.
My first stories happened in our first house in Georgia. I should have said that my parents destroyed the bed after we moved out of our second house and our of Georgia. My dad didn't want to get rid of it yet, so we kept it a little bit longer.
Our second house in Georgia could be classified as a mansion. It was a huge three-story building (elevated basement), that needed two staircases because of the length of the house.
The upstairs:
code:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bathroom | Bathroom | |
|
-----d---| | Deathbed room | Laundry
|Stairs
Parents'
d--------d----|d--------------------------------dd---------------
room |
| Hallway
| |-------d----------------------------------|
| | |
Large gaming room
|Stairs| My room
|
----------
-------------------------------------------------------------------
That's kinda to scale, but it works for the story. Instead of multiple rooms, my parents wanted larger rooms.
Every time that I left my room, I would be staring into the closed door of the deathbed room. The animals wouldn't come upstairs, and since the family room was under my parents' room downstairs, there was virtually no noise upstairs. I would play Nintendo in the gaming room for hours, but when I turned off the system, it was quiet like a cemetery upstairs.
Everything was fine for a month or two, and then it started again.
I was leaving my room to go downstairs for dinner, and I heard a light knocking. I turned around to see if a cat was stuck somewhere, or I had bumped something, or whatever, and there was nothing but stillness. Then the light knocking again from the closed deathbed room. Then I heard it again: "Hello?"
I ran downstairs and told my mother what had happened. She said just to keep the door closed and everything would be okay. So we kept the door closed, but the knocking didn't stop. Every day I would open my door to that damn room, and I never knew if something was going to happen.
I would be down in the game room, selecting what I was going to play next, and I could hear knocking all the way down that long hallway. The diagram doesn't do the hallway justice, because it was long, and had no windows so it was always dark. During the day, there would be a nightlight going in the hallway to try and cut down on the shadows. All the way down that long hallway, you could hear something tapping with its fingertips and whispering.
The worst event was when I was leaving my room to go to the bathroom at night, and I heard the rapping on the door. I paused, but kept moving, and then froze when it spoke. In that same voice that spoke to me back in the other house, I heard: "I'm sorry."
I didn't care, and I went about my business very quickly. I had heard whatever it was say hello, hi, and moan in the room, but nothing like this. It sounded so sad, but I knew what was behind that door. If I let that thing out again, it could come into my room at any time.
I could always hear someone pacing in that room, sometimes rolling on the bed, sometimes adjusting the mirror on its squeaky frame. Whatever it was would play with the shades, opening and closing them. If you looked at the bedroom window every day, you would notice that the blinds would have moved, even if no one went in the room.
My mom asked me what I was doing in that room one day even though I know how dangerous it could be, and I told her I wasn't in there. She had seen someone in the window while she was in the backyard with the dog, and she thought it was me. Apparently, it was watching her from inside the house. It makes me wonder if that thing would look at me from through the keyhole.
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The Crackhouse Ghost
A friend of mine lived in a house so shitty, that people had stopped using it as a crackhouse and moved on to something better. It was a horrible old house. He repeatedly reported to me that some really fucky stuff was happening, like steps up and down the stairs, strange hot / cold feelings, and other such things. It was haunted, of course.
So I went to go spend the night.
We spent a lot of the night out and about, and returned to the house late that evening. We got in, sat down, watched some television, and played some Playstation. It was all good. I figured he was probably exaggerating the reports of crazy-ass shit, and just enjoyed myself.
He asked me to go downstairs and check and see if his mother's car was here yet. I said all right. I went downstairs to check, didn't see it, and started up the stairs again.
As I moved up the stairs, I started to feel something really really scary behind me. It was terrifying me, and I didn't know WTF it could be. I started to run up the stairs and kept feeling a pain in my arms as I ran my fat ass breathless away from whatever demon spawn was chasing me.
I charged into his apartment, slammed the door, and ran into his room to get to safety. As I went into the room, though, I tripped and fell into the wall in front of me. Because the house was so shitty, I broke a hole into the wall.
After saying "Oh shit," explaining what happened, and calming down, we looked at the hole a bit. There was a space between the wall and the backing of the wall that was about 2 feet wide, and it had a lot of broken glass and various other crap in it. It was also really, really cold.
We looked at it a while, tried to stick our hands in there (it was really cold, so we stopped doing this), and tried to take a look in while not actually sticking our heads in, as the cold and the stair-ghost had sort of given us the impression this wouldn't be a good idea.
As we were lying on the couch and bed (I was on the couch) talking, later on, out of no where the most horrible howling noise you could imagine, like a static-y wailing, started coming from behind the broken wall. There an extreme drop in the temperature. Then there was banging. From all over, the walls, the floor, the ceiling.
BANG... BANG.. BANG.. BANG! BANGBANG! BANGBANGBANG!
It got faster and faster, and I heard my friend scream and I felt a horrible pain in my left arm. We then got the fuck up ASAP and ran down the stairs and outside, and waited the rest of the night, outside, for his mother to get back. No one else seemed to have heard a thing.
The next day they moved out (they were being evicted anyway), and I never saw the place again.
On my left arm, however, there was a large, painful red marking all the way up it, with the most redness at my hand. I went to the doctor later that week and was told that it was different levels of minor burns, and asked how it happened. I said something about a stove and left.
I still have the marks to this day, and on cold days it gets redder than any other time. On hot days, it's almost invisible. My doctor has said he doesn't know exactly why the temperature affects it, but that it's just a form of scarring from the burns, and that it will probably go away in my lifetime.
==============
I've lived in my house all my life with my mum (dad, brother, and sisters all moved out). It's a council house and was only built about 19 years ago, so sadly it doesn't have a highly exciting past going back hundreds of years. Anyway:
When I was about six years old, I'd just got into bed and my mum had turned the lights off, I turned over off my side onto my back so I was looking up to the ceiling. As I did this, hovering right above my bed was a human form who looked what I could only explain as a older version of how I'd expect my dad to look in about 20 years time (so he'd be about 60). I was so frightened, I couldn't even scream or move, and could only lay there in absolute terror until I somehow managed to drift off to sleep.
The freaky thing is a few years ago when I was about 15, I noticed a picture at my nan's place in her bedroom. Yup, you guessed it, the guy in the picture looked exactly how I remembered the ghost I saw above my bed. Turned out he was my granddad who I'd never met as he died before I was born.
The other spooky thing that happens in my house is that whenever there is nobody downstairs and we're all upstairs, you can hear the kitchen drawers opening and shutting repeatedly and glasses moving across the kitchen side. Closest I've came to seeing this happening is leaving stuff on the side in a certain position and the next morning it's all moved.
Thankfully, all my family (apart from my brother) agrees the house is haunted.
===============
My great-grandfather, Paul Plaschke, was an oil painter and cartoonists, and is a rather collectible artist around the Ohio River valley area. One of his paintings that my uncle has is a self-portrait of himself, with a paintbrush in the hand behind his back and a pipe in his front hand.
I was looking at it in detail one day and my uncle asked me if I saw the faces, and I told him no. After adjusting some lighting in the room he had me stand back and look at it for a few minutes, then it hit me all at once. The glare from the light reflecting off the painting, if you look at it just right... there are 3 faces floating in the painting, with amazing detail. I mean, it's not like there are 3 circles - you can make out details like eyes, glasses, nose, mouth, neckline, etc.
I told him that that’s pretty freaky, and he told me how he used to have it hanging up in his bedroom, and looked up at it from bed one night and saw that. He moved it out of his room that same night.
==============
Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario isn't known for ghost sightings, but there is at least one spot that I'll never go back to. I was reluctant to post (or even write) this story for fear it would somehow piss off the respective dead and make them haunt my ass... but that's just silly... right?
My uncle was a sturdy, hard-workin'-sundried-faced, square-dancin' farmer whose hundred-plus-acre farm sprawls against a river called the Conestoga just outside of town. As a kid, I lived way up in Buttfuck County, in northern Ontario, but occasionally the family would cram into the doughty little Acadian and go visit his family for a while. It was always loads of fun.
The pair of them never had or wanted kids, but they were almost like grandparents in the way they doted on us. There'd always be sugardough cookies by the plateload, and we had free reign to play over the entire range. My uncle, after a hard day of "farmin'", would finish the day with a good brisk walk around the borders of his little kingdom. When I was down there, I would tag along, as he always had interesting stories to share.
One day, on such a journey, we stopped at the corner where the river was crossed by the road:
You may have noticed, as I did, that alongside the bridge are the ruins of another bridge. And if you have ever ventured along the Conestoga or the nearby Grand River, you'd notice a whole buttload of ruined and fallen spans. I remember asking him that day why they tore down the old bridge and built a new one. He sighed as he deftly wrapped a new cigarette, seemingly as if he was deciding to spare me the mental burden of a heavy memory. This is his story (HEAVILY paraphrased and mixed with research I did later, because I don't remember the words he said, just the events):
[Backstory: The original bridge was intended for horse-and-buggy traffic in the late 1880s, but like almost all major bridges in the area, was built strong enough for a pony train in case rail service was required. (sidenote: It wasn't unusual for road and rail traffic to share a single bridge in those zany days. However, with the ambling slowness of walking, the common sense of horses, and the rigid path of trains, there was seen to be no need for a sturdy railing along the bridge. So a frail token one was made of wood, as if to say, "hey, don't fall into the river, okay?" Car traffic made building that sort of railings illegal later on, but there was no government order to upgrade existing railings, due to the immense cost involved.] Anyway, on to the story:
One afternoon in the 1960s [I don't remember the year], I was working the fields with one of my field hands, Elias [sic], near that bridge. I heard the elementary school bus rumble past, as it always did five days a week, driven by a cheery man in a starchy uniform, dispensing children wide-eyed with fresh, golden knowledge they would soon forget. We thought little of this minor bustling that day... until the bus began to cross the bridge. I wasn't watching, but from afar I heard the pebbly sound of rubber sliding on gravel. I raised my head to see the bus, and my face fell watching its wheels lock and the vehicle sliding askew along the span.
The road was paved, but always full of gravel. Driving on it was slippery, as if one was walking on ball bearings. God help you if you had to dodge any obstacle at any great speed, because once your wheels locked, your car would go anywhere it damn well pleased. To this day I have no idea WHY the driver lost control; but he lost it with wild abandon across that bridge. The bus began to yaw clockwise, dust blowing up thick behind him. Then it hit the thin little rail and broke through it like a knife through butter, wooden shards flying in violent discard. I heard the engine roar loud as the bus flipped and fell, mixed in with the high-pitched shrills of the panicking children inside.
Elias and I ran like the wind to that bridge, our hearts thumping in fear, prayers rushing in mixed fragments through our heads. When we got there, the scene was worse than what we could imagine... the bus was upside-down on the opposite bank.
[Besides puny bridges, back then the school buses had no real crash protection, just like most anything coming out of Detroit at the time. Nowadays, reinforced cages keep bus roofs rigid in the case of a rollover, but a 1960s-vintage bus that fell onto its roof would collapse in on itself like aluminum foil.]
And that's exactly what happened at the Conestoga River. It was ghastly. The engine was still running with an eerily placid note. The marking lights that weren't smashed were still illuminated. From within the bus, we could hear muted screams and cries and murmurs from trapped children.
"We got to get them out!" Elias exclaimed, voicing my exact thoughts. Easier said than done, though, since the windows had crushed closed when the bus landed. Both doors were stuck. Their windows were on the top half only, and they too were closed down. There wasn't even any way to look inside the bus.
"We'll get you out. Hang tight!" I called to the children. There was no sign that they heard me, as the wailings did not change to acknowledge us. At this point, more hands and farmers were rushing in. We started discussing how we would get them all out. Not an easy task: back then, there was no jaws of life, and you can forget about cordless power tools. Soon a police car joined the fray, then two, and then about five. We all looked expectantly at the officers for a solution, but they were just as baffled at this can of sardines.
It was then that someone in the crowd yelled, "Aw, hell, why don't we just put our hacksaws through the floorboards?" So we all rushed home for our saws, came back and took turns cutting into the floor. It was hard work. The heat was intense, the cutting was slow, but we were driven on by the unrelenting cries from the inside. Someone remarked sardonically how the bus was built like an eggshell sitting on jailhouse steel. We battered on the flooring to shed some light inside, but the darkness swallowed all.
It wasn't until dusk that we finally got a hole complete enough to punch open. At this point, it was a police officer that was doing the sawing. He hammered at the battered metal to pry it open, then he shone a flashlight inside. The cries suddenly stopped. We breathed a little easier, thinking the kids were assuaged by the hope of rescue.
"Jesus Christ!" cursed the officer, an expression of shock on his face. I jumped on the bus and peered in with him. They were all dead. There was no sign of movement. Only bodies sprawled everywhere. Some were little more than clothes filled with bloody pulp. A couple of broken bodies were under the hole, as if they had crawled there, still alive to await the escape that would not save them in time.
It didn't take long for the police and paramedics to declare all occupants dead. The parents began wailing and trying to get a glimpse into the hole, rebuffed by police, the scene being too gruesome for a loving parent to see. The intact dead were removed one at a time, but the police would have to wait for an industrial saw and a crane from Toronto to properly clean and dispose of the bus. I went back to bed before this all was finished. I couldn't sleep. I still heard the childrens' shrieks, moans and sobbing coming from the crash site all night long.
[The next week, Waterloo County passed a new edict to rebuild all of the old non-conforming bridges to a very strict standard. The next month, Ontario legislature passed a bill to only buy buses built with roll-cages. For the next year or two, it bought all of its buses from Europe because Detroit was so reluctant to produce safer buses. Ontario's own bus companies mobilized to build its own safe buses. Two companies became very successful and now sell buses worldwide.]
Zoom to 1999...
This was the first year I started to address my pasty-nerdy-fatty syndrome by going on long walks on random paths every day after work. I had just graduated university, and was living not too far from my uncle's farm. So, it wasn't too long before I decided to check out the crash site, see if I could see the bus' imprint, or find some shattered souvenirs of that awful day.
This was the end of a long and tiring Wednesday at work. We were just getting a new release out the door, and last-minute bugs kept popping up, as usual. It wasn't until 8 at night that I finally arrived at the farm. Nobody was home but the chickens, so I just went straight over to where my uncle pointed me so many years before.
It was dusk. The sky was a dimming orange, but the ground was silhouetted black against it. The crickets had started their nightly chorus and the night breeze had rolled in. I crossed the "new and improved" concrete-clad bridge. I looked at the broken remnants of the old bridge and replayed how the story must have played out in my mind. The bus sliding out of control, breaking through the barrier, rolling and landing right about... there. Ground Zero was black with darkness, as was all the landscape around it. No obvious crater, or scorching, or whatever the hell I was looking for.
I jumped down the bank to my morbid destination. The sky was dulling from the inevitable night. No problem for me; I had my trusty police-issue skull-cracking steel flashlight with me. I clicked it on and began scouting the area. After a few minutes of scouting around and brushing spider webs I started to get disappointed - I couldn't find any evidence of the accident. Not a dent, not a piece of scrapped metal, not even a bent twig. It looked as if nothing had EVER happened here at all, and I was beginning to doubt my uncle's story just a teeny bit. Just then, I saw a shimmering glint of reflected light in the soil - maybe a shattered piece of mirror, or maybe a glass chip. Not much, but it was something.
As I moved to check it, my flashlight just blacked out. Dead. Not too surprising, since the switch was a little flaky. Click click. No light. Click click click. Click? Damn. I let my eyes adjust to the fading daylight, hoping they alone could take up the search. I went one step, and felt as if I'd walked with my entire body into a spider web. As my hands swept to brush it off, I looked at the tree line, and what I saw stopped me cold.
Barely perceptively, embedded into about 5-8 of the trunks were what looked like children's faces. They looked carved, except more alive.
Their expressions were blank and unmoving. Their eyes were empty, but I'm sure as hell they were staring directly into mine. I locked my gaze in the void between two faces, my mind urgently trying to reason away the images. It didn't help. I felt every eye boring into my skull.
It wasn't over. In the very periphery of my vision, I saw a very rough, wispy apparition of a young girl, about a foot from my left arm. I felt more spider webs on that arm as she formed. I didn't dare focus on it. I was afraid it would just confirm her existence. I wanted to be anywhere but there. My legs were utterly locked. She looked at me... a bit inquisitively, I guess. But just as I began to feel a little less threatened, she threw her head back and screamed bloody murder. Except the sound that came out wasn't a scream, but more silent, and like radio static. Her mouth grew wide, and her head began to slough to the ground. From her mouth, another head, same girl, grew out. It too screamed, sloughed, and a third head formed. After the third incarnation had opened its mouth, the entire body melted down to the ground. It was gone, but I could still sense it there. It was puddling away on the ground.
After that, my heart was racing fast, thumping in my ear. I was trembling with agonizing fear. I started to move my head in the hope that this was over. It wasn't. The faces had now vanished from the trunks, but a new one had appeared. It was of a man, middle-aged, chubby and with wide cheeks. Even though I couldn't see it, I knew he wore a uniform. The frozen expression on his face was pure, murderous rage, a face so used to smiling and laughing now contorted into seething, hollow-eyed hatred. I whined, then turned to run, having gained enough sense to get moving. The man's face remained. His black stare burned into my back.
I didn't turn back. I ran all the way to my car. Across the bridge it felt like I was flying through spider web after spider web. The crickets were silent. The remote wouldn't unlock the door, maybe because I kept fumbling at it. My shivering hand plunged the key in and unlocked the car. I jumped in. I started the car and peeled out of there. However fast I drove, it wasn't enough. I kept the ceiling light on, but I didn't dare look out my side window, because I had a vague sense that someone was looking in, and I sure as hell didn't want to confirm the presence.
I'm just lucky I didn't get into an accident. I got home, kept the lights on, and stayed awake much of the night. Since then, the scar of the encounter has faded. Though I'm sure as hell never going back to that spot again.
================
Scene: My previous residence, which was this house one of my roommate's bosses had for rent. His father and mother had lived there forever, but the mother had died years ago and the father died about a year or two before we moved in.
The first thing we noticed after moving in was that the master bedroom had a lock on the outside. That's right, the OUTSIDE. Somebody was locked in the bedroom.. for their safety, or the other people's safety? Luckily, I didn't get that room.
Anyway, things started off slowly. Doors would be open when I knew I had closed them. The lighting would go on and off without notice, despite no known electrical issues with the house. But then it started happening. The hauntings. It would always happen between 2 AM and 3 AM.
The first time, I thought I was just hearing things. I had my music on loud, and was in the basement and heard a few faint steps and a door open. I went upstairs and saw that a door that had previously been closed was wide open. No one else was in the house.
About a month later, I'm once again doing laundry in the basement. This time I had just walked in the door, so there was NO NOISE at all in the house. All of a sudden, while in the basement in near complete darkness, I hear four LOUD footsteps leading to the computer room, then a doorknob turning, followed by a creaking sound. I ran upstairs and didn't see anyone. (thankfully) But there was somebody (or some spirit) at the house.
It would always happen when only one person was home... my roommate mentioned an encounter they had had before I experienced it myself. He came around a few more times too. I gotta tell ya: I'm glad I don't live there anymore. It's obvious somebody didn't want us to be there.
==============
I have seen an old woman on two occasions just staring at me smiling. My dog noticed as well and barked, evoking no response from the woman. As soon as I blinked, she was gone. Lights in my bedroom have been turned on as well as the radio dial moving on its own. I have also been locked out of my house several times. This is especially strange because of the fact that I left through my sliding glass door, which must be unlocked in order to get out. When I tried to get back in, I found it had been locked, which is fairly impossible with no one else in the house.
The strangest of these ghostly happenings was when I was trying desperately to find a cup of sugar to use on my beloved Rice Krispies (can't stand them without sugar). I looked everywhere in a panic until I heard a creak behind me, as though someone else was in the kitchen, sneaking up behind me on the hardwood floor. At this, I whipped around, expecting to find my sister or mom. Instead I turned around just in time to catch a glimpse of the sugar about two feet in front of me just below eye level, hovering for a split second and then falling. Even if it wasn't hovering, I still can't explain it falling from nowhere.
The only time I was ever truly scared by this ghost was in fourth grade when I had metal bunk beds. I would lay on the bottom bed at night, attempting to sleep when I would hear faint tapping on the metal beams from the top bunk. It sound exactly like a woman tapping her nails against it, as a woman with a manicure will do when she is bored or anxious. At that point I was shivering under my Spidey blankets, praying for morning.
===============
I had just gotten a dog and was honored with the task of walking it at night since it was extremely hyperactive and spent the previous 3 nights barking at the mystical darkness outside. So I'd been walking him... it's only like 9 PM, so it's not terribly uncommon to see other people outside. Anyway, I am walking towards this one guy with a coat. I'm kinda of an anti-social person, so I don't really make eye contact instantly with people. I notice that his dog seemed a little... well, unhealthy. It was rather bony and seemed like it was dying right then and there. I look up to mention something about it right as I was walking past him. I tilt my head to the right and say "hey..." and notice that the guy doesn't have a fucking face. I turn around all the way and he's completely vanished. So I quickly ran home and let the dog sleep in my room to get him to shut up.
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My experiences aren't as vivid or gruesome as most of these. A lot of it seems to come from my own head (literally noises coming from my head). It started when I was very young, basically as long as I remember. They became very intense when I turned 12 or 13. That was about the time I became a born-again Christian. Most of the things I would keep to myself for fear of sounding weird. It got so bad that I was begging my sister to let me sleep in her room, even on the floor. If she refused, I would not sleep. I would turn on every light in my room and write prayers in my journal for hours and hours. I would then ritualistically burn these journals. My grandmother noticed my weird behavior, so I let her in on some of the things that had been happening. She looked so crushed. Apparently, almost all the women that grew up in my house (4 aunties, my grandma, me and my sister) had the same "dream." Only mine went beyond dreams.
She told me that she believed that it was because I was being tested and that I would have to deal with it alone. I would have the paralysis combined with aural invasions, every night. She did let me sleep with my lights on and would check on me throughout the night to make sure I wasn't crushed to death. I told my sister what was going on and she laughed at me, until that night I was laying on the floor my her bedside. I heard her gasp sharply and the room became ice cold. I jumped up and took one look at her and knew it was happening to her: she looked like she was trying to scream, eyes wide unfocused and watering, mouth gaping, but only a low croaking noise coming out of her. I ran and woke my grandmother: she held my sister and whispered: "In the name of Jesus Christ, I rebuke you."
Whatever it is / was released her, and she looked at me and cried and said she was sorry for not believing me. We slept together after that and checked each other to make sure that we were okay. The weird thing is if I explain to anyone really specifically what actually occurs, it promptly happens to them. I have lost friends this way, and now I refuse to elaborate the experiences in great detail. It still happens occasionally, but I give up on "fighting" whatever it is. The sad part is that I really really thought it would stop when I moved out of the house, but it follows me. Everywhere.
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This happened just a few months ago. I'll start off by describing the area. I live just outside a small town in Alabama called Chelsea. The subdivision I live in is alongside a highway that leads to Chelsea. When you go off the highway into Chelsea, there's a small strip mall on one side of the road. My friend's brother works at a Subway (the restaurant) in this strip mall. Once you pass this strip mall, the rest of Chelsea is basically a giant forest with the occasional subdivision.
One day my friend, Dillon, stopped by on his way to pick his brother up from Subway and asked if I wanted to go along with him. I was up for the ride, so we walked out to his car and drove off. We got to Subway and his brother told us that he still had a few minutes before he got off work, so Dillon and I decided to go on a drive through Chelsea.
It was common for us to drive aimlessly through Chelsea at night, as we never really had anything better to do. We had never seen anything unusual while doing this, but this night was different. It had just gotten really dark out and I slipped Pink Floyd's Meddle into the CD player. The music is the kicker though, the timing couldn't have been any more perfect. The opening track, One of these Days, was finishing its buildup. If you've never heard the song, after its buildup, right before it goes into a crazy jam, you hear the lyrics "I'm going to cut you up into little pieces!" in a really deep scary-sounding voice. We passed a graveyard right at this point of the song. I was looking down at a CD case or something and looked up to see what I can only describe as a large, white misty bedsheet hovering over our car. It crossed over the top of our car from the other side of the road and off into the cemetery.
I honestly thought that I was seeing things. I looked over at Dillon, and he calmly reached into the back of the car and pulled out a baseball bat and handed it to me. "DID YOU SEE THAT?!" I yelled at him. His face was pale white and his eyes were watering. "Yeah..." he said. He flew back to Subway without stopping for anything. All I could say was "HOLY SHIT, WE JUST SAW A FUCKING GHOST, THAT'S AWESOME!" He refused to talk about it until we got back to Subway. When we got back, I convinced him somehow to drive past the graveyard again.
This time, nothing happened... but I saw something I never noticed before. On the other side of the road is about the creepiest looking old, abandoned church I've ever seen. Next to it is what looks like a long wooden table sitting under a large tree. Yep, this is what people would stand on before being hanged. The rope would be put around their neck and I guess they would be pushed off of the thing. The path that this thing took was from the tree, across the road, and into the graveyard. For a few nights afterwards, we'd drive past the graveyard to "go see the ghost" but nothing ever happened and now whenever we pass it, we don't really say anything.
Dillon and I swear what we saw was a ghost. He has had tons of experiences with ghosts before and I'm considering buying him an account just so he can post some stories in this thread. I'll never forget the look on his face though, I've never seen him so terrified.
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It was a few days before Halloween (Yes, very very cliché I know) and at a local bar, there was a fancy dress Halloween party. Me, my best friend Kiran, and two others (Amy and Kate) had decided to go, knowing it would be shitty, but it was a night out at least. We got to the venue and were disappointed to see that there really wasn't a high turn out, and out of boredom Kate piped up: "Why don't we do a Ouiji board?" Now, I do not like ghosts at all: it's more the feeling they give me... that cold dead, numbness... and I certainly didn't want to sit at the back of a bar doing a Ouiji board. Everyone but me wanted to do it, I caved in to the peer pressure and grabbed a napkin... pulling my eyeliner from my bag, I drew a crude representation of what I believed a Ouiji board looked like... after all, I had never had any experience with one of these things.
We sat in a circle and decided upon what we were going to do. Putting our fingers upon the upturned glass tumbler, I told everyone to relax and to close their eyes and to imagine their energy flowing into the tumbler, but at the same time blocking any energy coming back to them. Considering I had never done one of these before, I felt like a natural leader, the commands flowing easily from my mouth. Everyone followed me. I then asked if there was any spirit that wished to communicate with us, there was nothing at first. I asked again, and the glass moved to a crudely written "yes." I was shaken, I had never expected it to work... in a way, I was hoping that it would fail and I could just say: "Okay, fun's over... let's go." But little did I know things were about to get far worse...
So, we had our spirit, and by now we had established a firm enough connection to it that we could sit there with our eyes open and just ask it questions and receive answers. Now, the tumbler was moving... but it was impossible for us to be pushing it. We were all sitting on an edge of the table and for us to push the tumbler would require the cooperation of a minimum of two people. Also, the speed the tumbler was moving at was impossible for us to reproduce due to the friction against the tablecloth and napkin. So what would we ask it? I didn't really want to provoke anything bad, so I asked its name. "Amy," it responded. The Amy at the table suddenly looked very shaken and she wanted us to stop. I was a bit confused, so I asked if it knew someone at the table, the tumbler slid alarmingly across the table and was drawing perfect circles in front of Amy. Suddenly Kiran collapsed, so I told everyone to take their fingers off the tumbler and I instructed the spirit to leave. Kiran was shaking violently: she said she felt as if she was being punched and held down in the chair, and she could barely move and looked very very pale. I asked her if she had visualised a "shield" blocking out a spirit from taking her energy forcefully... she said no. We decided that maybe if we got her some food, she'd feel better... so I asked Kate to get her something from the buffet...
Kate turned to me, and, my God, I have never seen such a horrific expression in human eyes. WHOEVER was there it was NOT her... this was not Kate I was facing! "Kate... that's not you, is it?" I asked. She stared at me and didn't say a word. Some children belonging to a loud family on the other side of the room were chasing each other, and they came running towards us. They saw Kate and stood there horrified, wanting to scream... I'm sure they saw something there that we couldn't see.
After getting Kiran some food, I told them all that the spirit or whatever it was hadn't gone and was sitting in Kate's body. We all resumed the session and I called on the spirit again.
"Who are you?"
"Amy."
"How old are you?"
"12."
"How would you describe your feelings right now?"
"F.. U... N"
"Are you willing to give us Kate back?"
"Yes."
"And leave Kiran alone?"
"... Yes."
"Before I let you free... tell me who you are."
"Soul." Before the glass again slid to Amy and circled.
"Thank you... this has been a pleasant experience, but you must leave now."
The spirit left, this time for sure. Kiran was still feeling drained, and Amy was horribly shaken, we decided to go home.
Oh, but if only the strangeness was to stop there!
I was staying over at Kiran's that night and we decided to sit in her dad's temple room... I was asking Kiran to name the various Sikh gods on the wall. The conversation turned to many things, including the Ouiji board that we had done that night. We were in there four hours before we fell asleep. I had a tranquil dream, I was floating above the sea and there was a huge volcanic island in the distance, I kept seeing and hearing the names of the gods that we had been talking about. The next morning when I awoke, Kiran said to me: "I had the most peaceful dream... I saw this island in the sea, and all my gods were there and I was praying to them." I nodded, then she told me she had woken up suddenly in the night and saw a mass of white smoky energy floating above me. I don't really know what it was and we didn't discuss it. Later that evening, Kate phoned Kiran up and said she had been feeling weird all night and that she kept hearing a conversation in her head, she recited it and it turned out she recited what me and Kiran were talking about in the temple room despite the fact Kate was in another house many miles away.
Amy still refuses to talk about it to this day... we all think she knows what it was that came up that night, and we believe it was her soul that stepped in to possibly protect us from something bad coming up, but as far as scary things that have happened to me go... that was pretty tame.
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My friend and I got the idea of trying to get whoever it was to set up a "Haunted House" for us to go through. (This was around sixth grade for me. - Changed from the original post because thinking back, this was actually sixth and seventh mostly.) Basically, we would set out things like yarn and stuffed animals, and ask out loud for the good ghost or whatever it was to set up something interesting for us. Then we'd leave for an hour. Once the hour was up, we'd slowly walk through it with the lights out. Sometimes I would go through with my friend... other times, I would go through alone.
Various things happened as I would walk through the room in the darkness. Stuffed animals would lightly hit me in the back as if someone had thrown them from behind me or "run" across my feet as I walked. Now, I always ended the walkthrough by lying down on the bed and seeing if anything else would happen. One time at the end by myself, as my head rested on a pillow, one of the stuffed animals was pulled UNDER the pillow, from one side to the other.
The closet door also opened by itself one time when I approached it as I was playing the game alone. (The walkthrough also involved going into the closet for a few seconds as well, as it was a pretty big closet.) Normally my closet freaked me out anyway, but I went in this time because there was never a feeling of malice in this "game."
When my friend was walking through with me once, the radio across the room turned on by itself to some sort of Christian station. It hadn't been set to the station before. After the "Haunted House" was over, I checked the radio and no alarm was set for it to come on like it did. I know on the times my friend went through with me that she was absolutely not behind anything that went on. Even if she had tried to fake some things, her position wouldn't allow the trick to work. (Like once she was in front of me, and the stuffed animal hit me squarely in the middle of the back.)
Other times... we'd see orbs of light flashing across the room, or things were rearranged when we turned on the light at the end.
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I don't think I (or anyone else) could possibly top anything Taco has said, but I had a creepy experience tonight.
I live on Staten Island and there are a few places here that are supposedly haunted, one of which is the old Seaview Hospital buildings. Seaview is still open, right across the street. But on the other side, completely fenced in are several buildings (I'm guessing about 6, I might be wrong) that are now closed off, most of which are completely identical. I've been there a few times during the day just checking it out, and it is kinda creepy during the day. Around 11 PM, me and three friends decided (in part because of this very thread) to go check out Seaview. The history of Seaview isn't really scary... it was a hospital mainly for TB a while back. It closed maybe twenty, thirty years ago. But a lot of people died there, and since then it has been a place for homeless people, junkies, and "Satan-worshippers" to hang out in. The best way to describe exactly what this place looks like is probably the hospital in the Silent Hill games, only with a lot of graffiti. That kind of brings the atmosphere down a little because you know the place has quite a few visitors. But walking around there tonight definitely scared us enough.
EDIT: The front door is right on the bottom of the diagram, where the two side wings meet the back wing. There’s sort of a foyer next to the staircase, and the front door opens out from that foyer.
Armed with three flashlights and a camera, we snuck through a hole in the fence and found ourselves on the road that leads from each building to the next. We went into the first building we came upon and walked into the back door. A staircase was immediately in front of us, slightly to the left was a patient wing, and to our sides were patient wings. Those are definitely creepy. Its a long, wide hallway with dividers about 6 feet up from the ground every 8 feet or so, separating the individual patient areas. Occasionally, you'll find the remains of a bed or a wheelchair. For anyone who's played Silent Hill 3 and knows that scene with the wheelchair on its side, we saw something identical to that tonight. As we walked past a wheelchair turned on its side, the wheel on top was spinning slowly. As soon as we passed, it stopped turning. Scared the crap out of us.
Every now and then, there will be a wall with a doorway leading to the next hallway. Most of them are simple hinged doors, but we happened to come upon huge, steel sliding doors. They were open about 2 feet, wide enough for us to fit through. My three friends walked though first, one at a time. As soon as I was about to walk through, the doors slammed shut, almost catching my arm. These things were ridiculously heavy and hard to open, so I'd imagine it could have broken my arm if I didn't pull away fast enough. But we managed to open them, I slipped through the door as fast as I could, and we continued on.
At the end of the hall, there was another staircase and the front door. There are four stories, each one the same until you get to the fourth. The two patient wings on the left and right are there, but the one going down the center isn't. Instead, a door opens up to the roof. We were on the first floor, so we headed up the stairs to the fourth floor so we could check out the roof. Now, this whole time we had been hearing strange noises and thinking we might have seen something, but this is in the middle of the woods so I'm sure raccoons or squirrels hang out in places like this.
JUST SO YOU KNOW: The next part has something kind of nasty in it... I guess I just wanna cover my ass in case anyone takes offense, so I put it in spoiler tags.
But as I shone my flashlight at the top of the steps on the fourth floor, I saw a dog. It was dead, and had probably been there for months. At first I didn't realize it was dead because its leash was still on it, and tied to the banister on the stairs. But as we got closer, we could see that it was dead and practically mummified. It had no eyes, its skin was pulled tight over its body, and the smell was terrible. We could see holes where insects had probably dug through it. Its head was dangling off the edge of the stair and turned in a really grotesque way. This didn't really scare us, it was just really sad to think someone tied a dog to a banister on the top floor of an abandoned building and left it there to die. I had been snapping pictures the whole time, and I guess on impulse I took one of the dog (I know it was kind of a gross thing to do, I mean, it's a dead dog, but something about the way it looked was so odd that I felt compelled to).
As I took the picture and the flash went off, me and my friend Mike both noticed a figure walk past the doorway on the left. This wasn't like a shadow from the flash, because after the flash was gone it continued to walk past the doorway. It was a big black figure, kind of blurry, and it moved in a sort of stop and go animation, like it didn't take regular steps. It was like watching an old silent movie, the way the motion was jerky and didn't flow. Me and Mike told the other two what we had seen, and we all ran down the stairs, out the front door, and straight to the hole in the fence.
Not anything super scary, but I'm definitely not sleeping tonight. I'm hopefully getting the pictures developed tomorrow, so I'll put some up. It's a very creepy place.
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My Catholic priest has told us a few stories of the supernatural when we had religious education classes, and he is definately not the kind of guy who would lie about anything.
He is Italian, and had relatives that still lived in the countryside. Apparently, there is an old game kinda like the Ouija board, but not with the range of the Q&A. Essentially, you take a circular table, get 4-8 people to lay their hands upon it, and ask it questions. The table would move up or down depending upon the answer.
Now, my priest said it works, and he said for us never to do it because it's dealing with spirits, kinda like a Ouija board, so it makes sense. But what he said was that he was inside the house while his cousins, and some friends were playing this game outside. It gets dark, so they go inside for dinner... and after dinner, everyone is just chatting at the table and having dessert... I think. Well, the mother there (his aunt, I believe) told the kids (15+ were their ages, not young kids, but not really adults) to bring the table back inside so that it wasn't left outside overnight. Well, the kids get angry at having to do the work, but head off to do it anyways. About a minute later, they come back into the room, yelling. Now, he was about 26 at this time (he's in his 50s now), so he runs outside to check on what's going on.
Out in the fields, the table is just kinda floating around, about a foot off the ground, and glowing green. Not insanely bright, but bright enough to notice in the dusk conditions. So of course the priest whips out his Bible and crucifix and starts yelling at the table about Jeebus and how God hates it. Meanwhile, he is constantly walking towards it. He said he got to about 10 feet from the table, and as he yelled something about Jeebus commanding the spirit to return to hell, the table kinda rushed him, but fell on its side about a foot from him. He told the kids to get axes, and after using holy water on it, they cut up the table and burnt it. He said that it burnt like a normal wood fire does for maybe 10 minutes, then started being tinted green. Nothing else happened, but he took the ashes and spread them onto the field, and liberally applied holy water.
Labels: amy, brian, computer, corey, death, dreams, friends, ghost stories, golden, halloween, laundry, lyrics, matt, maxed-out tags limit, music, paul, something awful, videos, walkthroughs, weird stuff
posted by Flami at 2:05:00 PM
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