Ghost stories, part 15
My parents got divorced when I was like 8 years old. My mom, who before that time had just been a housewife, suddenly found herself needing to make a living. She was getting quite a big bit of cash from my dad, who was fairly wealthy. With that money, she started going to a college for alternative knowledge. The college was called Paracelsus and was in Utah. She has always been a very sensitive person... she and a few of her older friends had always claimed to have psychic feelings going on. At this college, she learned all sorts of things about alchemy, and the paranormal. She was always making up tinctures and collecting herbs for different things. She did this before she and my dad separated, and my father always claimed she was trying to poison him. Every day of the week, we would get a couple drops of a certain alchemical formula in our juice at breakfast. During this time at this college, she met a few more people like her who thought and believed in the same things she did. I was fine with all this. It was normal... I was ten and thought everyone believed in these things like she did.
My mom's best friend from childhood was one of these psychics. They both grew up in Port Huron, MI: my mom's friend (who I called Aunt Judy coz she was around all the time) lived there still, while my ma had moved to Parker, CO with my dad. My Aunt Judy, as I called her, seemed to know when tragedies happened. When that horrible plane crash in Detroit happened in the 70s, she phoned my mom 5 minutes after it happened... before it had hit the news or anything... sobbing uncontrollably.
Okay, that's the background... I was raised in a family where this sort of thing was normal.... it was no big deal for me at all. So Aunt Judy comes to stay at my house one time... I believe I was in 10th grade. She stayed in my room and I slept out in the loft. I was way into the supernatural at that time, and totally loved Iron Maiden. My room was completely covered in IM posters. I collected them and thought IM was the best thing ever. Above my bed was the poster from Seventh Son of a Seventh Son and the song The Prophet. It depicted Eddy sitting at a desk, with all sorts of mystical devices on it... a cool poster I got from my sister. I had a waterbed back then. As she slept in it the first night, she woke up at one point frozen to the bed unable to move anything but her head. The water was roiling below her causing her body to writhe. She, being the psychic she was, knew this was something paranormal... she lay there still while the bed went crazy under her. After a few seconds, my bedroom door opened and a young Indian girl walked in. The bed stopped shaking and the girl walked to the side of the bed. She looked up at that prophet poster and pointed at it. She didn't speak a word, but my aunt got the feeling that she didn't like the poster. After she did that, the little girl slowly walked out of the room. My aunt related this story to us the next morning.
Me being accustomed to this sort of talk just took the poster down and put up the poster for Stranger in a Strange Land instead. What my aunt didn't know, and what I didn't know for a few more years, is that my great-grandmother was a full blooded Cherokee. My aunt said that she got the feeling that this ghost was there to protect me and help me out in life.
That little ghost girl has followed me wherever I go. When I move, she moves with me... when I go on vacation, she goes with me. There have been countless times that she has shown herself or made herself heard, most recently in the house I'm at now. I had a friend over one night, and we were sitting in my family room watching a movie. All of a sudden, there was the sound of a young girl giggling from my kitchen. My friend's eyes grew huge and she turned and asked me if I heard the sound. Being used to it, I told her it was my ghost. She sings sometimes, and used to tease and pet my dog when I had one. She will whisper stuff to people, turn on lights, and basically have fun. From what I can tell, she is frozen as a little girl. She likes to run and play.... she hangs out and laughs at things, but she is a tad shy.
Also just last night, she felt the need to move my bedstand table out into the middle of my room. Went to bed with it in the normal spot. Woke up in the middle of the night with it about 4 feet from my bed. Alarm clock lying on the floor, because the cord was too short to reach that far. I live alone, so no one else is moving furniture on me in the middle of the night.
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I used to live in the Colorado Springs area and got heavily into the whole "OMG GHOSTHUNTING" thing when I was about fifteen after the strange happenings in my own house (posted in a previous ghost thread, but I can't remember which). Colorado has no shortage of reputed haunted houses / caves / what-have-you, but being that we were just a group of kids with only one car amongst the five of us, we really didn't get to do much actual hunting and usually limited our "investigations" to the local cemetery or our own houses where we continually turned up nothing.
Anyway, getting to the story... the four of us had all left a party prematurely one night because one of the people we had given a ride to wasn't feeling very well. After dropping her off at her house, the driver of the car asks us, since the night was still young, if we would like to go up to Gold Camp Road. Gold Camp Road is a narrow dirt road with a sheer dropoff down the side of the mountain in the Cheyenne Canyon / Helen Hunt Falls area. There are three tunnels carved right into the rock on this road and each, ominously, with its number on a plaque written in large red font and posted at the top.
The local rumors / legends state that something bad always happens on this road and an average of five people die on it every year. Some say that a miner was killed when one of the tunnels collapsed and that his ghost wanders all three tunnels looking depressed. Others say that a busful of elementary school kids crashed up there and all passengers and the driver died. There are some that will tell you that when the light is just right, once a month, there will appear to be the shadow of a man hanging from the ceiling of Tunnel One. Still others claim that the tunnels are a popular place to drop bodies after a murder.
As the driver explained all of this to us, we all collectively agreed that it was bullshit and, in saying so, decided: "Sure, let's go up to the haunted road in the dark in the middle of nowhere and not tell anybody where we're headed." Our decision made, we roared off into the night in all of our dumbassed adolescent glory.
About forty minutes later, we were driving on this supposedly-haunted road and making our way carefully up the twisting path to the tunnels. Our original plan had been to park a short distance away and walk through all three tunnels armed with the flashlight in the back seat. Upon getting up there, however, we couldn't find a place to pull over. It is then decided that we will park in Tunnel Three and sit there for a few minutes to see if anything weird happens.
As we slowly pulled into the desired tunnel, my worry became less that we would see a ghost and more than an oncoming car would not see us sitting in our odd parking location and plow into us. This worry only intensified as the driver killed the engine and turned off his lights, making us virtually invisible.
We sat in silence for a couple minutes, the quiet only interrupted by an occasional nervous cough or someone fidgeting. I finally had had enough.
"Look, at least turn on the headlights. Someone's going to smash right into us like this."
"It's night time. There's nobody on these roads at night. Stop being a pussy."
About thirty seconds later, we could hear a car in the distance and I repeated my request, not so kindly this time, for the driver to turn on the goddamned headlights so we could be seen. This time, he grudgingly decided to listen to me and reached out, flipping on his headlights.
Immediately after the lights came on, there were three loud bangs on the hood of the car like someone was smacking it with an open palm. In the yellow glare of the headlights, we could see small clouds of dust rising from the blanket of dirt we'd accumulated on the car driving up the road.
Everybody in the car panicked. One of my female friends shrieked right in my ear as the driver gunned the engine and roared forward, nearly sideswiping a van that had been on its way into our tunnel.
So here we are.... four teens scared shitless, doing at least sixty on a narrow mountain dirt road with sharp turns. Looking back on it, I'm amazed we didn't kill ourselves. The driver keeps going until he feels we're a safe distance away and then pulls over to get himself together. He is shaking badly and the rest of us are not much better. It is then decided one of us should get out of the car and look at the hood to see if there are any marks where it was hit. Nobody wants to go, of course, and after some hasty debate, the driver is finally elected to get out and see. We watch him check the hood, and note that he doesn't seem to see anything odd as he decides to make a complete walk-around of the car.
When he gets back to the driver's side door, he climbs in in silence and proceeds to sit still for a long moment. He will not answer any of us when we ask him what's wrong. He then starts the car again and turns us around to go back the way we came. We drove hastily, though not recklessly, back through the tunnels and down the road where, eventually, we stopped at a Chevron station. Not a word had been spoken all the way down the mountain until he said to us, "Get out and look at the car."
The three of us unloaded out of the back seat and did what we were told. All over the sides of the car in the dust were faint handprints. All looked to be about the size of childrens' hands. A larger print was on the back left doorhandle of the car and looked like whoever had made it had grabbed onto the handle and then trailed their fingers in the dust all the way to the bottom of the frame. Oddly, up front where we'd seen the dust flying off when it had been knocked on in the tunnel, there was no mark at all.
At any rate, it makes for an interesting story to tell at parties... or in threads like this. Our interest in ghost-hunting, needless to say, quickly dwindled after this incident. I've remained very interested in the paranormal, but the idea of actually attempting to seek it out no longer appeals to me. To those of you who investigate haunted places as a hobby, you are far braver men than I.
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As previously mentioned, me and a few friends were always intrigued with paranormal activity. With mostly miserable failures, we had nearly given up. Then my friend John starts talking to me about Stull, Kansas. We did a bit of research trying to figure out the horror stories of what had happened there to freak people out so much. The most common story we came across is that some chick was hung from this bigass tree about a hundred years ago. There was also all this stuff about "OMG GATEWAY (no, not the computers) TO HELLZ!!" Interesting fact though, Urge Overkill did an EP in 1996 called Stull and it has some rather interesting lyrics that talk about the place. So anyways, about four of us go there armed with flashlights set out in our crusade. Now the main layout is just a normal cemetery with a stone church up at the top of a hill. The stone church is the supposed cause of all the crazy shit so we decided to check it out. We didn't really notice anything paranormal at first, other than our paranoia that the landowners might... ya know... shoot us.
Then it started to get chilly up there, but hey, it was fall... that happens. Then there were some scraping sounds like someone was taking a nail or piece of broken glass to the side of the stone walls. It kept getting louder and my friend John just turns pale and frozen. He finally gains composure to talk and says he saw someone peeking in the window at us. So whether it be ghost or landlord... we want to get the fuck out of this place ASAP. We make like an A-Train back to the car completely clearing the chain link fence. Now, we all recall for being there at least an hour to an hour and a half just sitting around. We get back to the car, we had been there for roughly 8 minutes....
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5 years ago or so, we bought a house and a big property which we used to share with the rest of the family. The house dates back a long time ago, and has a lot of history. When we started fixing it up, one of the old planks had 1733 written on it, but my father says the place is a lot older.
The thing is that a long time ago we had a witch in the family. I'm not sure if she lived in the house, or moved out after a while, but at least she lived around there. (I've heard something about a cave in the woods) While she healed some people, she also cursed others. People claimed that her curses actually killed some of the livestock right after she said it would. This caused people to get mad, and she was burned to death. Actually, she was the last witch in this county that was burned to death. After this, many have claimed to have seen her ghost. Many that still live around there to this date have seen her. Among them is an old man in his 80s or 90s that helps out around the "farm." He, like many others, has seen her walking around the house in a yellow dress. One time, he saw her walking up the road, and he thought it was some woman he knew. He tried to catch up, and he called her, but when he got close she disappeared.
I don't think or care much about it, but it's a bit creepy when you're sleeping in that old house, and you hear sounds. Or when you have to go outside and down to the basement in the night, since it's in the middle of the woods, and it's completely dark outside.
Here's what I found doing a search for her name on Google:
BARBRO JØRGENSDATTER BJELLAND
Born appx. 1555, charged with witchcraft in 1623, daughter of Jørgen Øgreid in Hetland.
People were afraid of her. The "sheriff" in Hetland parish once said: "I'd rather walk 100 miles than collect the taxes from her, because she always curses people."
Peder Grøsfjeld testified that once he collected some of the taxes, he immediately lost 5 cows after she had sworn and promised that this would happen.
In the court records, we can find her confession, which she was supposed to present on January 19th, 1623 in the morning, "voluntary and untormented." She claimed she could heal people and beast with 5 different verses that the scribe didn't include in his manuscript. She said she had learned this from a woman called Steinvor Herredsvela.
She also blamed Siri Rapstad, Magle Grøtfjeld, Siri Grøssereid, Endre Eie, Gitlaug Eie, Ommund Rapstad's daughter Mette Stene and Jon Årstad for dealing in witchcraft, but the peasants shouted that none of these people ever were known to do this, but instead it was all in Barbro's imagination. Furthermore, Mette Stene had been dead at least 20 years.
She further claimed that she could see the devil, and ghosts sitting at her table. When asked how she saw this, she explained how. She went to the church, and gathered some water that was dripping from its roof. When she washed her face in this, she immediately could see them seated wearing red hoods. When she wanted to get rid of them, she washed herself in mass wine instead.
She was condemned to death by burning, and the sentence was executed in 1623. She had a son that had been in jail, but had managed to escape. She was also charged with using her powers to help him break out of his chains, and escape from prison.
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1) One of the walls in my room has a dark spot. We've painted the room four times or more, but this one spot is always a shade darker than everywhere else. Back when I was little, my bed was on that wall, and the dark spot was about seven inches above the bed, a little past halfway towards where my pillow was. One night when I was six or so, I was lying in bed thinking about things kids think about, when I turned over and right there in that spot something was moving. The best way to describe it is to point to the loading screens in Silent Hill 3. For a second, I thought it turned into a face, but the features kept shifting. I very calmly got up, got in my parents' bed, and refused to sleep in my room again for like two years. Yes, I was a pansy as a kid. Nothing ever happened in that spot again for the next decade I slept there. I attribute this to overactive imagination.
I have a similar experience. There is a spot on the wall above the fireplace where we put up a wooden and bronze crucifix. For some reason, the cross would always fall down. Most of the time, it would be on the floor when we came home or we were in another room we would hear it fall. Once though, I saw it fall off the wall... it didn't just fall though, it sort of popped off the wall, like something gave it a little kick. It was put up pretty securely, but it never wanted to stay up until we put a mirror across from it. The fucked-up thing was that the reflection of the cross was inverted. That gave me the creeps: nothing else was weird in the mirror except the cross. How do you explain that? All the kids in the family hated that reflection because it was so wrong and we would run a bit fast while passing it. Most of the time, we just avoided looking at it. My cousin broke the mirror because he said he saw something "bad" in it, but would never say what it was. (he was 4 at the time, and is 20 now) We took down the mirror and the cross promptly went down as well. My grandma gave up on leaving it up.
One night, I was sitting wide awake in the living room on a couch directly across from the spot. I was just reading and doing some homework when I felt someone in the room. I raised my head expecting to see my grandmother or my sister, since both were home at the time... instead, I saw the spot above the fireplace pulsing. I wasn't tired or anything like that so I blinked, rubbed my eyes and kept looking. The spot looked sort of elastic and like a mass was trying to break through, it extended out enough that it knocked some ceramic figurines off the mantle onto the hearth. My grandmother walked in because of the noise of the ceramic shattering and the spot retreated, but writhed madly for a few seconds with both of us watching. My grandmother just went over to the fireplace and cleaned up the broken ceramic. She called my dad over to board up the fireplace and told my sister and me to sleep in her room that night, but offered no other explanation.
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Me and a friend had gone to the nearby canal. To get there, we had to walk down this long estate and under a bridge that was about 2 and a half houses long. We were walking home and it was a fine, calm cloudless night. The kind where the moon acts like a mirror for the sun and everything is bathed in a nice blue light, Really pretty. So we need to know the time as it was getting late. Being young, we didn't have a watch between us, but luckily a jogger was coming through the tunnel, reaching the midway point as I point out that maybe we can get the time off him. We were still a good distance from the tunnel and I point out this large antenna to the side of the road to my friend. As we look back, the jogger was gone. This guy was wearing a white vest and shorts and was in his mid forties from what we could see *thinning hair* But now he was gone. He couldn't have turned back and ran off in the other direction, because not only would we have seen him, but we were only distracted for a second or two.
Another time in my old house, I decided to sleep the wrong way round in my bed for some reason so I could see the door easily and the cabinet that usually blocked my view was by my feet. I woke up pretty late for a child, and saw a figure in white by my door... the door wasn't open so I could safely say it wasn't my mother popping in to say goodnight. This freaked me out because I always felt uneasy in that house anyway. To counter any more ghost attacks I put a line of salt above my doorframe.
Again as a child, maybe aged 6 this time. I was on a swing in my grandmother's house having a great old time, going really high and fast. I closed my eyes as I swung back and opened them on the way down. But to my utter horror, there was a dog running towards me, I prepared for the impact, but none came. I leapt of the swing anyway and spun around to see what had happened and there was nothing there. It seemed my uncle's dead dog Shep wanted to play... FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE!!!!
The worst incident was again in my grandmother's house. I was in the guest room with a ton of blankets on me, but I was still pretty chilly. I hugged the blankets close and brought my knees up to my chest and got right into the corner when I started to hear this scratching noise. It started off slowly, then built up pace and started to get more frantic. My young mind raced for explanations and I thought of rats... yeah rats, must be. So I glance over my shoulder and there was a kinda light up by the ceiling. I buried my head under the covers, and then a baby started to scream and cry. I mean, this baby sounded like it was being torn in half. I didn't move an inch that night. Despite how much my limbs ached and despite how I was asphyxiating under the covers, I dared not move. Turns out my auntie has seen this white glow too. She attributed it to her dead sister.
And on a nice note: after my grandfather died, he came back to say goodbye to my mother and her sisters the night after he passed. He came in and stroked their hair like he used to do when they were younger.
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Ask any of the older people in my fraternity house, and almost everyone has had some kind of paranormal encounter here. Our house is going on about 85 years old, and I will share a couple quick stories with you guys. As an interesting side note, my late grandfather lived in this same house when he was in college here.
Story #1: One of my pledge brothers, Brad, was moving some stuff down to the laundry room downstairs. (Our house is 3 stories + basement) Now, we've always kind of joked around that the boiler room (heats our house in the winter) is the scariest fucking place in the house to be in at night (especially when a coffin used to be down there, in storage from some brother that used it for a photography class prop). Anyway, you have to walk through the boiler room to get to the laundry room. Now, Brad isn't one to make stuff up, and when he tries to prank people, he fails miserably because he's not funny and a horrible actor. I see him walk upstairs scared shitless, so we ask him what's wrong. He said when he was down in the laundry room, he felt a presence and the dryer door slammed shut, even though he was alone and not near the dryer door.
Story #2: House lore has it that this one room on the 2nd floor called The Home is pretty damn haunted. Several of its past residents that I've talked to have been sitting in bed there at night and seen a male figure appear out of the door and walk across the room and disappear into the far wall.
Story #3: This and the next story involve my experiences. As a pledge, one of my duties was to deliver school newspapers to the house once a week. This one particular morning was really cold, so I figured I'd turn newspaper delivery into part of a morning jog. So I don my sweatpants and warmup jacket, run out at like 5:30 AM to get some newspapers and proceed into the back door by the kitchen in the basement to start by placing some in the dining room for the brotherhood to read over breakfast. Maybe this would make the story a bit more interesting, since everyone else seems to be drawing ASCII maps, I dunno:
code:
| | | |
| | "Bum Room" |stairs|
| ---------------- dd| ----- |------------|
| Dining room dd Kitchen | | |
| | | |--------dd |
| | dd |laundry d boiler room |
dd-----------| | dd | room |-------------|
stairwell to main floor| door to outside
Okay... so anyway, I walk in the back door and have to walk through the kitchen to get to the dining room... big deal, okay, whatever. Again, it is 5:30 AM and there is not a person even close to being awake in the entire house.
As I'm about halfway through the kitchen, it sounds like every single pot and pan we have in there (there are tons) are being banged on at top volume for about 5 seconds. I say 5 seconds because that's about how long it took me from when I heard it, to throw a pile of newspapers on the dining room table, and make it to the top of the back stairs on the bottom side of the dining room. I was scared shitless, but wasn't really all that surprised because of all of the stories I had heard.
Story #4: This isn't ghosts so much as psychic / paranormal or maybe just a strange coincidence. A little backstory about me: I have very sensitive ears for the smallest volume / frequency change. This has practical applications such as work I do in recording studios and other audio production. So I'm sitting over at one of my friends' houses a few blocks away from the fraternity house with one of my friends from out of town. It was probably about 9 PM or so, yet even though I normally never turn into bed before 1-2 AM, for some reason on this night I had a weird feeling and felt like I needed to go home for some reason. I told my friend that I was feeling pretty tired and that we should probably head back. He said something to the effect of "let’s stay a little longer," and for some reason I pretty much said: "No, we need to go now."
I couldn't believe I said that, as I'm known to be a party animal that is always up for entertaining people socially, especially when they come in from out of town to hang out with me. He reluctantly agreed and we drove back. I keyed into my room and was putting my stuff away and heard a strange noise, very faint. I asked my friend Chris if he heard it too, and he said no.
I went off to investigate nonetheless, and after a minute or so, I figured out it was coming from the floor above me. The room next door to where the sound was coming from was slightly ajar, and there were some people just hanging out in there. Right about this time, what the sound was next door to them was registered with me. I asked the people in the room, "Do you know the fire alarm is going off in the room next door?" and when they said "What?" I was like "oh shit" and tried the door; it was locked, so I went to go find one of the 2 guys with a master key.
Luckily, the Vice President was in his room, and I told him the alarm was going off in Sean's room and that we need to key-in right fucking now. On hearing this, the VP who is good friends with Sean says: "Oh shit, incense" Apparently, Sean likes to leave incense burning while he leaves the house. We haul ass up stairs and key into his room, and thick, black smoke immediately starts billowing out. The vice president isn't able to see or do very much due to the smoke, but again probably luckily for me, I have allergies sometimes to the point where I can't smell anything, and the smoke wasn't bothering my eyes much more than making them tear up some, so I was able to see that an incense stick had apparently burnt down into an ashtray full of little wooden incense sticks. By the time we got in the room, his telephone was smoldering and seemed about ready to burst into flames at any minute.
His phone was sitting on an old couch, which was right next to another old couch. We immediately pulled the couches away from the wall, and got water to put out the sources of heat. I gave Sean a really long lecture when he got back after that. I just find it really odd that I had such a sense that I had to go back to the house, and that I could hear the alarm from a floor below, yet the people right next door to it couldn't hear it.
The best / scariest story though is pretty involved and I don't feel like typing it out right now, but I will soon. It involves Halloween, a Ouija board and the netherworldly ghosts that reside on our property: some good, and some VERY BAD.
I don't get scared very easily, but after that night I vowed never to be in even so much the same room as a ouija board being used again. So did pretty much everyone else that was involved that night.
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I just remembered an experience my friend Steve had at my old house. Steve was a smoker, and although he was 16 at the time, my mother could care less so long as he didn't light up in the house. So poor Steve was always forced to smoke outside beneath the carport. The carport fits two vehicles and is just a large shed basically that connects to the house, but not a part of the house. Maybe I could just call it a garage, but the family called it a carport, so carport it shall be.
One night when Steve stepped out, he propped himself against the trunk of my mother's Buick and had himself a smoke. At some point, a man came into view walking back and forth across the edge of the road in front of our house. This normally wouldn't be such a strange occurrence if we didn't happen to live 15 miles from civilization in any direction and the road was a private one.
The figure looked "pissed" according to Steve. It paced back in forth about 30 feet each way and gave no indication that it was "OMG SPIRIT OF THE DAMNED." In fact, Steve said you could hear the leaves crunching beneath this guy's feet. Each time it paced by, it would glance at Steve as if it were angry with him, but wasn't certain what to do about it. Steve, of course being the tough guy, threw his arms out, stuck out his chest and let out a nice hearty "WHAT'S UP?!" to the man.
This is where some token black girl sitting on the sidelines to this scene would say "OH NO, HE JUS' DIDN'T." At the time he did this, the thing changed direction and launched itself at him like it were fired from a cannon: he said the body was a blur and sometimes seemed to be covered in dark places that were opaque but had no detail to them, just like staring into darkness that swallows all light around it. However, the face was perfectly visible and it was changing. Its tongue was violently whipping around in its gaping maul. Worse of all, he said the jaw looked as if it unhinged and dropped 4 or 5 inches further than any human could manage, and as it charged him, it let out an unearthly scream. He said it was inhuman, it sounded like electronic distortion, but was definitely a scream.
As it reached the edge of the carport, it vanished, but he said the screaming only got closer and the entire carport began to shake. At this point, he blacked out. My sister and I heard him screaming, but never this thing he told us about. He was lying against the plywood wall facing away from us huddled in a ball, and his neck had some old wire wrapped around it and twisted together at the ends as if it were choking him.
I took the wire off and asked him what his problem was. I didn't mean to be angry with him and I wasn't really, but I was scared and shaken and he has a reputation for playing jokes. Not this time though, he was red in the face and tears were streaming from his eyes. I'd never seen Steve cry until then, and he demanded we take him home. He finally told me years later what had taken place, but I had a pretty good idea that it was the same thing we had been living with in that house for a few years.
I would have terrifying sleep paralysis episodes in that house, but after leaving, everything mellowed out and I've been all right since.
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When my mom was in high school, she lived in this little town in Kansas (Emporia, for anyone interested). There wasn't much to do there, so she and her friends would drive around to try to find some fun. They liked to go down this dirt road that went past a burned-out farmhouse with a large, twisted stump in the front yard. The stump was commonly known as the Nun, because it looked like a silhouette of a nun in her full habit, with her hands folded in prayer.
One night they were driving around, and one of my mom's friends said, "Let's go past the Nun!" So they start down the road, with the headlights off to scare themselves even more.
They pass the Nun. Everything seems normal. They drive to the end of the road and turn around. This time, as they approach the Nun, the car starts to feel like it's hovering - they can't feel the gravel under the wheels anymore. The driver tries to turn the wheel, but the car doesn't react.
Then they notice the Nun.
Usually, the Nun is about 30 feet back off the road, close to the house. Now, the Nun was standing about 10 feet from the road. Her hands were no longer folded. She now had one arm raised, and it appeared she had a knife in her hand.
Everyone screamed. Time seemed to slow down as they passed the Nun, and there was no sound other than their screaming.
Then it stopped. They felt the road again. Without looking back, they tore off for the main road, and never went past the Nun again.
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Here's a nightmare I had:
I sleep on a bed that has a solid headboard, and a slotted footboard. This might not seem important now, but it may have saved my life.
There was nothing unordinary about that night. The stars were out, the moon was bright, and I was exhausted after another carefree summer day. I put my watch on the nightstand, pull back the comforter, and laid myself down for a night of pleasant dreams. I pulled the comforter up to my chin, and adjusted myself in the sheets that covered the bed below me. The cardinal red had a nice contrast with the navy blue bed sheets that draped over the bed and onto the floor.
As I just about slip into deep sleep, my bed quickly shakes violently. My eyes pop open and I sit up in bed, thinking that maybe there was a structural defect with the bed and it was going to collapse. After minute after minute of pure silence, I rest my head back down on my pillow, and sleep deeply until the next morning.
As I wake up, I feel my body ache all over. It was if all the energy I had stored up in the night for the activities of the day had been drained. My feet were particularly sore, and I hobbled out of the room.
The whole day was a bust as I had no energy to do anything. This night I struggled to keep myself awake until 9 where I found myself in the bedroom, placing my watch on the nightstand as always. Before I fell asleep, I checked the bed for any structural problems, and found none; yet the same shake happened right after I got into bed. I was too tired to get up and check, and I slept like the dead.
I hurt more than ever. This morning, the pain was worse than before. I am pale when I see my reflection in the mirror, and I can do nothing more than crawl. Strangely, I nap for most of the day despite my long sleep, and I ingest more than a heroic amount of chicken noodle soup.
Due to my restful day, I find myself back in my bedroom at the late hour of 11, and confused as to why the bed shakes. Perhaps it has something to do with my strange illness or sleep deprivation, but regardless I check the bed frame everywhere, and even under it.
I am awoke by the bed shaking again, and this time I plan to see what it is. As I turn to get out, the bed shakes again.
But it's different than before.
Every time the bed shakes, about once every three seconds, there is some sort of snarl from under the bed. It's like something is violently jerking the bed, and growling with its nose. Since the left side of the bed is next to the wall, I decide to jump out to the right and see what it is; also so I can have room to dodge if something is there.
I grab a yardstick from the closet, and raise the sheets to see what is snarling and moving.
The head of this think snapped to face me and moaned as soon as I lifted the sheets. It looked like it had the head of a deformed child, no more than 8 months old with broken, sharp teeth. The lips were black and thin, just like its eyes, and the nose wasn't fully formed yet. The neck continued into the small, slug-like body which had no legs or any discernable parts. What is was looked more like a worm with a deformed, hideous face. While it had no legs, it had something like arms, which what was shaking the bed.
Easily four times the length of the whole body were something like arms that went to both the headboard, and foot of the bed. There were no elbows or wrists or anything that suggested bones, but just long, thinnish appendages from the body of the worm. The right arm of the thing was what was rocking the bed, and apparently some of the thin fingers had become stuck in the wood, right above where I usually rested my head.
When I noticed that, I looked down to the footboard, which wasn't solid, and three sharp fingers had protruded through the slats enough to reach my feet. I quickly looked back at the face of the slowly writhing worm child, the whole body fading in between ghostly translucence and a sicking yellow, and recoiled when the broken child arched its head and moaned at me. As I did this, I noticed the bottom of my left foot, and got in closer to see if what I saw was true. I had never looked at the bottom of my feet since there was more of an aching in the whole foot rather than pain, but now I could see several puncture wounds all over the soles of my feet. The wounds were covered in a hardened, yellowish secretion, and I watched as the skin around the wounds began to necrofy and then I woke up.
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My dad has some slightly more believable ghost stories than my mom does, because my mom is freaking insane.
When my dad was a kid, he lived in an old farmhouse in Belleville, IL. It was definitely haunted, but the ghost was not unfriendly. They nicknamed him Harry Bacon.
Most of the time, Harry Bacon manifested himself as a mumbling voice. There were three voices in all, two male and one female, and they could be heard but never quite understood, as though they were speaking another language very quietly.
Occasionally Harry would hide things, or you'd hear him walking up the stairs. My grandfather was in the living room one day and heard someone come in the back door, go up the stairs, and walk around the attic (where my dad's bedroom was) for a while. Then the footsteps stopped. After a while, Grandpa, thinking my dad had come home from playing with his friends, went upstairs to see what he was up to. No one was there.
One Thanksgiving, all the men were gathered in the living room talking, while all the women were gathered in the kitchen getting dinner. A roller blind on a window across the room from everyone slowly started to unroll itself, and then WHAP! jerked itself off the window completely and fell on the floor. Someone remarked that they should have invited Harry Bacon to dinner, and apologized to him. There were no further outbursts.
The only time Harry scared anyone was one late afternoon when everyone was getting ready to go out. My grandparents had a tall brass bed with at least a foot and a half of clearance underneath. My grandmother has always been a fastidious housekeeper, and nothing was under the bed, not even dust. One of the cats had been sleeping in the room; it suddenly hissed and tore out of the room like its tail was on fire. My grandparents went into the bedroom to investigate. There was nothing in there. So my grandfather grabbed the other cat and tossed it into the room. It looked around, confused, because it wasn't used to being sent into empty rooms. Then it saw it. The cat stared under the bed, arched its back, puffed its tail, and hissed loudly. Then it ran out of the room.
My grandparents still couldn't see anything under the bed, but they were getting concerned. So they called the family dog, Herman, a fearless Spitz mix who took it as his solemn duty to protect the family from every and any source of harm. This dog was known to catch wasps in his mouth, drowning them so they didn't sting. He took on packs of neighborhood dogs, sending dogs twice his size flying and yelping. Literally nothing scared Herman.
Grandpa pointed under the bed. "Get it, Herman!"
Herman came charging in, ready to kill.
He stopped dead, staring under the bed and bristling. His tail went between his legs, and he backed out of the room.
Everyone decided maybe it was a good idea to get out of the house for a while.
When they came home, everything was fine. To this day, no one knows what was under that bed.
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It all starts way back in the day. I was maybe 7 or 8, and my bedroom was in the basement (not any fucking more). I was lying in bed one night. The door was NOT open. The window was NOT open, my bed was in the corner and I was lying facing the wall with the window. All of a sudden, I feel a breeze against my back. It doesn't faze me too much as I don't realize that there's no one for a breeze to come from, but it continues stronger and stronger until it actually blows the blankets from my feet and uncovers most of me. I am absolutely frozen in fear and can't even turn over to flick the light on. I lie there in the exact same position until morning, without the warmth of my blankets.
The VERY NEXT NIGHT, I build enough courage to go to bed, but of course I leave the fucking lamp on this time and wrap up in the blankets so nothing can take them off. I'm lying there, still completely awake, facing the wall, when I feel something pass down through me, ceiling to floor. Imagine a thin wall of compressed warmth moving through you. Now take away the warm. Yeah, that about describes it (took me a couple of years to come up with a good description). It moves down through me over and over again, at the same interval, but stronger and stronger each time, and every time I can feel myself get colder and colder. I could even feel someone standing by my bed. When it finally stopped, I felt like a skeleton, just so cold. I didn't move or sleep for the rest of that night.
I didn't tell my family or friends for a long time afterwards, but I'll always remember my father's comment the next day, noting how pale I was: "You look like you've seen a ghost." Jesus.
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I haven't really had many unexplained experiences, but I did have a dream about a haunted apartment the other night. In it, I'd moved cities and started a new job. I'd gotten some dingy basement apartment, just a combo bedroom / living room and kitchen, with a bathroom. There was an oddly shaped wall where some excessively heavy piping must have run through. Then, I began losing sleep. I started hearing knocking sounds and hairs on the back of my neck would stand up on end. I started training myself to go to sleep with the horrible sensation I wasn't alone.
One night, lying in bed, there was a loud knock. I thought to myself: "Relax, it's just the piping, the ducts expand and contract while heating the complex. If it were a real ghost, the knocking would happen multiple ti--" *wham* *wham* *wham* *wham* *WHAM*! Massive quantities of adrenaline enter my system. Somehow, I get back to sleep.
A day or two later, my girlfriend comes over. We were watching TV, but eventually got to making out (see? this is how I know it's not real). A palpable sense of dread overcame me. Lights in the room dimmed, the walls seemed to shrink inwards. A dark, brownish figure started rapidly flickering in and out in place of my girlfriend. A rushing sound filled my head, like leathery wings flapping. I was staring into the sunken, completely black eye pits of a horribly emaciated, melted looking corpse. It had deep cuts across its face. Its skin was a mottled brown and yellow. And wet. Horribly wet. It was lying on top of me.
It had my lower lip in its mouth. It bit down. It twisted its head around, tearing skin. I felt blood surge up. It stopped and sat up, staring at me wildly and panting. Finally, it reached down, grabbed me with both arms around my neck. It heaved me up to its face and screamed: "LOOK IN THE FUCKING WALL!"
I kicked it away from me, but it had already disappeared. My girlfriend was quite upset with me for throwing her off the couch, and stormed off. I get a sledgehammer and approach the wall with the ductwork behind it. The wall gradually fades and I see the outline of a human form behind it, struggling with bonds. I hit the wall with the sledgehammer. Instantly the image disappears, the wall crumbles, and the corpse I previously saw comes piling out into my arms.
I run away shrieking and get the police, and that's pretty much it for scary parts. The rest of the dream involved a biplane, throwing knives, Jackie Chan, and a dual-wielded katana fest with some crazy chick who was mad I stole a bag of powder.
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My mother's side of the family has always been able to see / interact with ghosts. Most all the encounters were with friendly spirits... All but one. A few of the good guys;
I'll start from the earliest one I've heard. (This is back when my Grandmother Haydee was a teenager) She used to live in a pretty house with a big front yard in Puerto Rico with her folks. In the yard, there was a big tree. It was there way before the house was built. There was a window in the kitchen that was above the sink. From there, you could see the tree easily. One night while my grandmother was washing some dishes, she glanced up to the tree and there she saw a little girl with a white dress. It seemed like the little girl had a light underneath her dress, because she glowed. My grandmother Haydee stopped washing the dishes and called her mother, and a few minutes later they both walked out into the yard, towards the little girl.
All the girl did was smile and say "Vamos a jugar?" ("Are we going to play?") then with a giggle, she disappeared. She was seen a few more times, always happy and sitting at the tree.
Ghosts are very common in my family, My mother got into Metaphysics and "out of body" stuff, she became so sensitive that she could actually see / interact with ghosts. Even at places that weren't haunted.
My parents had gotten divorced, and we had to move to Puerto Rico. There, we lived in my grandfather's house. I had a lot of good times with him, but anyway.
My grandfather died one week after Father's Day, in 1997. A week after the funeral, while my brother and I slept, my mother was awoken by a gentle shaking on her shoulder, When she looked up, she saw my grandfather: they talked for a few hours and said their goodbyes, then he disappeared.
On September 8th (3 days before the attacks in 2001), my grandmother Haydee died. She was eaten up with cancer that the doctors never found in their tests. One day after the funeral, my mom decided to save some money and stay in my grandmother Haydee's apartment, She slept on my grandmothers bed that night and was awoken by a shake on the bed. It was an angry shake... someone was pissed. My mother got scared and she slept on the couch. The next night, she saw Haydee. She was angry, she kept mumbling that she wasn't ready to be dead yet, she had so many things left to do. She wouldn't talk to my mother, she just paced the apartment, mumbling..
The Bad Guy.
When I was maybe 8 or 9, we had moved into a house in Hollywood, Florida. The rent was cheap and the location was good. We hadn't even finished unpacking when it happened....
My dad snored loudly, so loud that on the 2nd night there, my mom decided to go sleep in the living room. She quickly fell asleep and was awoken by an angry scream. She opened her eyes and saw a lady, dressed as a maid holding a cinder block over her head, ready to crush my mother's skull. Her eyes were full of hate and her mouth was in some sort of evil sneer. She swung the cinder block down, and my mother moved her arms up to block the blow, and looked away. As she did, she saw a little boy screaming in agony running from the sofa... his head was smashed.
We moved out the next day.
Luckily, I haven't run into any ghosts, yet. My mom keeps telling me to get ready coz it's a "family curse." My mom sees them, my grandmother saw them, my great-grandmother sees them, the same as her mother. Oddly, I'm the first guy in the family that may or may not get the "curse." I can't say I'm happy to hear that.
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These are all really good stories! Reading some of them sort of makes me feel like I've encountered weird shit before, but was either too young or too clueless to take it to be paranormal. The only thing I can really remember is that I was once watching TV or something (whatever it is that kids do) downstairs in my old home while my mother was upstairs in her room. I suddenly and very clearly heard someone shout my name. It sounded like my mother, but it was coming more from the direction of the staircase than it was from my mother's room. I haven't had any ghostly experiences lately, mainly because I masturbate too much.
The women on my mother's side of the family have a knack for being pseudo-psychic. They don't give out winning lottery numbers (dammit) but they all have some sort of story to tell. My mother, for example, lost her mother to cancer before I was born. I really wish I could have met her. On the night that my grandma died, though, my mother felt a kiss on her cheek as she slept. It woke her up. It was about 4 AM and my father was still soundly asleep next to her. She passed it off as nothing and went back to sleep. The next morning, my grandfather called my mother to let her know that my grandmother had died. My mother asked the time it happened, and was told that my grandmother had passed at about 4 that morning. (Cue the "DUNN DUNN DUNNN" sound here)
My grandmother (the one who died above) also shared in this ability. The one story I've heard about her (or it may have been my mother, who the fuck knows) is that after her Aunt / Mother / Whatever, I forget, died, she fell into a deep depression regarding the death. One day, she was sitting in said Aunt's / Mother's / Whatever's house in their living room. Suddenly, the figure of dead person X (A / M / W) appeared in front of my Grandmother, angrily shaking her finger in the way that a mother might scold her child. This person knew that my Grandma was really sad over their death, and wanted otherwise.
My older sister is no exception to this stupid inheritance my family has (I want to see dead people, dammit!). When she was a child, she would tell my mother about a nice lady named "Mary" who would often come to visit her. My mother asked my sister to describe Mary, and to almost the most minute detail, described my dead Grannie Mary (see? See? There's a definite pattern developing surrounding my grandmother!).
My mom's best friend from childhood was one of these psychics. They both grew up in Port Huron, MI: my mom's friend (who I called Aunt Judy coz she was around all the time) lived there still, while my ma had moved to Parker, CO with my dad. My Aunt Judy, as I called her, seemed to know when tragedies happened. When that horrible plane crash in Detroit happened in the 70s, she phoned my mom 5 minutes after it happened... before it had hit the news or anything... sobbing uncontrollably.
Okay, that's the background... I was raised in a family where this sort of thing was normal.... it was no big deal for me at all. So Aunt Judy comes to stay at my house one time... I believe I was in 10th grade. She stayed in my room and I slept out in the loft. I was way into the supernatural at that time, and totally loved Iron Maiden. My room was completely covered in IM posters. I collected them and thought IM was the best thing ever. Above my bed was the poster from Seventh Son of a Seventh Son and the song The Prophet. It depicted Eddy sitting at a desk, with all sorts of mystical devices on it... a cool poster I got from my sister. I had a waterbed back then. As she slept in it the first night, she woke up at one point frozen to the bed unable to move anything but her head. The water was roiling below her causing her body to writhe. She, being the psychic she was, knew this was something paranormal... she lay there still while the bed went crazy under her. After a few seconds, my bedroom door opened and a young Indian girl walked in. The bed stopped shaking and the girl walked to the side of the bed. She looked up at that prophet poster and pointed at it. She didn't speak a word, but my aunt got the feeling that she didn't like the poster. After she did that, the little girl slowly walked out of the room. My aunt related this story to us the next morning.
Me being accustomed to this sort of talk just took the poster down and put up the poster for Stranger in a Strange Land instead. What my aunt didn't know, and what I didn't know for a few more years, is that my great-grandmother was a full blooded Cherokee. My aunt said that she got the feeling that this ghost was there to protect me and help me out in life.
That little ghost girl has followed me wherever I go. When I move, she moves with me... when I go on vacation, she goes with me. There have been countless times that she has shown herself or made herself heard, most recently in the house I'm at now. I had a friend over one night, and we were sitting in my family room watching a movie. All of a sudden, there was the sound of a young girl giggling from my kitchen. My friend's eyes grew huge and she turned and asked me if I heard the sound. Being used to it, I told her it was my ghost. She sings sometimes, and used to tease and pet my dog when I had one. She will whisper stuff to people, turn on lights, and basically have fun. From what I can tell, she is frozen as a little girl. She likes to run and play.... she hangs out and laughs at things, but she is a tad shy.
Also just last night, she felt the need to move my bedstand table out into the middle of my room. Went to bed with it in the normal spot. Woke up in the middle of the night with it about 4 feet from my bed. Alarm clock lying on the floor, because the cord was too short to reach that far. I live alone, so no one else is moving furniture on me in the middle of the night.
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I used to live in the Colorado Springs area and got heavily into the whole "OMG GHOSTHUNTING" thing when I was about fifteen after the strange happenings in my own house (posted in a previous ghost thread, but I can't remember which). Colorado has no shortage of reputed haunted houses / caves / what-have-you, but being that we were just a group of kids with only one car amongst the five of us, we really didn't get to do much actual hunting and usually limited our "investigations" to the local cemetery or our own houses where we continually turned up nothing.
Anyway, getting to the story... the four of us had all left a party prematurely one night because one of the people we had given a ride to wasn't feeling very well. After dropping her off at her house, the driver of the car asks us, since the night was still young, if we would like to go up to Gold Camp Road. Gold Camp Road is a narrow dirt road with a sheer dropoff down the side of the mountain in the Cheyenne Canyon / Helen Hunt Falls area. There are three tunnels carved right into the rock on this road and each, ominously, with its number on a plaque written in large red font and posted at the top.
The local rumors / legends state that something bad always happens on this road and an average of five people die on it every year. Some say that a miner was killed when one of the tunnels collapsed and that his ghost wanders all three tunnels looking depressed. Others say that a busful of elementary school kids crashed up there and all passengers and the driver died. There are some that will tell you that when the light is just right, once a month, there will appear to be the shadow of a man hanging from the ceiling of Tunnel One. Still others claim that the tunnels are a popular place to drop bodies after a murder.
As the driver explained all of this to us, we all collectively agreed that it was bullshit and, in saying so, decided: "Sure, let's go up to the haunted road in the dark in the middle of nowhere and not tell anybody where we're headed." Our decision made, we roared off into the night in all of our dumbassed adolescent glory.
About forty minutes later, we were driving on this supposedly-haunted road and making our way carefully up the twisting path to the tunnels. Our original plan had been to park a short distance away and walk through all three tunnels armed with the flashlight in the back seat. Upon getting up there, however, we couldn't find a place to pull over. It is then decided that we will park in Tunnel Three and sit there for a few minutes to see if anything weird happens.
As we slowly pulled into the desired tunnel, my worry became less that we would see a ghost and more than an oncoming car would not see us sitting in our odd parking location and plow into us. This worry only intensified as the driver killed the engine and turned off his lights, making us virtually invisible.
We sat in silence for a couple minutes, the quiet only interrupted by an occasional nervous cough or someone fidgeting. I finally had had enough.
"Look, at least turn on the headlights. Someone's going to smash right into us like this."
"It's night time. There's nobody on these roads at night. Stop being a pussy."
About thirty seconds later, we could hear a car in the distance and I repeated my request, not so kindly this time, for the driver to turn on the goddamned headlights so we could be seen. This time, he grudgingly decided to listen to me and reached out, flipping on his headlights.
Immediately after the lights came on, there were three loud bangs on the hood of the car like someone was smacking it with an open palm. In the yellow glare of the headlights, we could see small clouds of dust rising from the blanket of dirt we'd accumulated on the car driving up the road.
Everybody in the car panicked. One of my female friends shrieked right in my ear as the driver gunned the engine and roared forward, nearly sideswiping a van that had been on its way into our tunnel.
So here we are.... four teens scared shitless, doing at least sixty on a narrow mountain dirt road with sharp turns. Looking back on it, I'm amazed we didn't kill ourselves. The driver keeps going until he feels we're a safe distance away and then pulls over to get himself together. He is shaking badly and the rest of us are not much better. It is then decided one of us should get out of the car and look at the hood to see if there are any marks where it was hit. Nobody wants to go, of course, and after some hasty debate, the driver is finally elected to get out and see. We watch him check the hood, and note that he doesn't seem to see anything odd as he decides to make a complete walk-around of the car.
When he gets back to the driver's side door, he climbs in in silence and proceeds to sit still for a long moment. He will not answer any of us when we ask him what's wrong. He then starts the car again and turns us around to go back the way we came. We drove hastily, though not recklessly, back through the tunnels and down the road where, eventually, we stopped at a Chevron station. Not a word had been spoken all the way down the mountain until he said to us, "Get out and look at the car."
The three of us unloaded out of the back seat and did what we were told. All over the sides of the car in the dust were faint handprints. All looked to be about the size of childrens' hands. A larger print was on the back left doorhandle of the car and looked like whoever had made it had grabbed onto the handle and then trailed their fingers in the dust all the way to the bottom of the frame. Oddly, up front where we'd seen the dust flying off when it had been knocked on in the tunnel, there was no mark at all.
At any rate, it makes for an interesting story to tell at parties... or in threads like this. Our interest in ghost-hunting, needless to say, quickly dwindled after this incident. I've remained very interested in the paranormal, but the idea of actually attempting to seek it out no longer appeals to me. To those of you who investigate haunted places as a hobby, you are far braver men than I.
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As previously mentioned, me and a few friends were always intrigued with paranormal activity. With mostly miserable failures, we had nearly given up. Then my friend John starts talking to me about Stull, Kansas. We did a bit of research trying to figure out the horror stories of what had happened there to freak people out so much. The most common story we came across is that some chick was hung from this bigass tree about a hundred years ago. There was also all this stuff about "OMG GATEWAY (no, not the computers) TO HELLZ!!" Interesting fact though, Urge Overkill did an EP in 1996 called Stull and it has some rather interesting lyrics that talk about the place. So anyways, about four of us go there armed with flashlights set out in our crusade. Now the main layout is just a normal cemetery with a stone church up at the top of a hill. The stone church is the supposed cause of all the crazy shit so we decided to check it out. We didn't really notice anything paranormal at first, other than our paranoia that the landowners might... ya know... shoot us.
Then it started to get chilly up there, but hey, it was fall... that happens. Then there were some scraping sounds like someone was taking a nail or piece of broken glass to the side of the stone walls. It kept getting louder and my friend John just turns pale and frozen. He finally gains composure to talk and says he saw someone peeking in the window at us. So whether it be ghost or landlord... we want to get the fuck out of this place ASAP. We make like an A-Train back to the car completely clearing the chain link fence. Now, we all recall for being there at least an hour to an hour and a half just sitting around. We get back to the car, we had been there for roughly 8 minutes....
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5 years ago or so, we bought a house and a big property which we used to share with the rest of the family. The house dates back a long time ago, and has a lot of history. When we started fixing it up, one of the old planks had 1733 written on it, but my father says the place is a lot older.
The thing is that a long time ago we had a witch in the family. I'm not sure if she lived in the house, or moved out after a while, but at least she lived around there. (I've heard something about a cave in the woods) While she healed some people, she also cursed others. People claimed that her curses actually killed some of the livestock right after she said it would. This caused people to get mad, and she was burned to death. Actually, she was the last witch in this county that was burned to death. After this, many have claimed to have seen her ghost. Many that still live around there to this date have seen her. Among them is an old man in his 80s or 90s that helps out around the "farm." He, like many others, has seen her walking around the house in a yellow dress. One time, he saw her walking up the road, and he thought it was some woman he knew. He tried to catch up, and he called her, but when he got close she disappeared.
I don't think or care much about it, but it's a bit creepy when you're sleeping in that old house, and you hear sounds. Or when you have to go outside and down to the basement in the night, since it's in the middle of the woods, and it's completely dark outside.
Here's what I found doing a search for her name on Google:
BARBRO JØRGENSDATTER BJELLAND
Born appx. 1555, charged with witchcraft in 1623, daughter of Jørgen Øgreid in Hetland.
People were afraid of her. The "sheriff" in Hetland parish once said: "I'd rather walk 100 miles than collect the taxes from her, because she always curses people."
Peder Grøsfjeld testified that once he collected some of the taxes, he immediately lost 5 cows after she had sworn and promised that this would happen.
In the court records, we can find her confession, which she was supposed to present on January 19th, 1623 in the morning, "voluntary and untormented." She claimed she could heal people and beast with 5 different verses that the scribe didn't include in his manuscript. She said she had learned this from a woman called Steinvor Herredsvela.
She also blamed Siri Rapstad, Magle Grøtfjeld, Siri Grøssereid, Endre Eie, Gitlaug Eie, Ommund Rapstad's daughter Mette Stene and Jon Årstad for dealing in witchcraft, but the peasants shouted that none of these people ever were known to do this, but instead it was all in Barbro's imagination. Furthermore, Mette Stene had been dead at least 20 years.
She further claimed that she could see the devil, and ghosts sitting at her table. When asked how she saw this, she explained how. She went to the church, and gathered some water that was dripping from its roof. When she washed her face in this, she immediately could see them seated wearing red hoods. When she wanted to get rid of them, she washed herself in mass wine instead.
She was condemned to death by burning, and the sentence was executed in 1623. She had a son that had been in jail, but had managed to escape. She was also charged with using her powers to help him break out of his chains, and escape from prison.
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1) One of the walls in my room has a dark spot. We've painted the room four times or more, but this one spot is always a shade darker than everywhere else. Back when I was little, my bed was on that wall, and the dark spot was about seven inches above the bed, a little past halfway towards where my pillow was. One night when I was six or so, I was lying in bed thinking about things kids think about, when I turned over and right there in that spot something was moving. The best way to describe it is to point to the loading screens in Silent Hill 3. For a second, I thought it turned into a face, but the features kept shifting. I very calmly got up, got in my parents' bed, and refused to sleep in my room again for like two years. Yes, I was a pansy as a kid. Nothing ever happened in that spot again for the next decade I slept there. I attribute this to overactive imagination.
I have a similar experience. There is a spot on the wall above the fireplace where we put up a wooden and bronze crucifix. For some reason, the cross would always fall down. Most of the time, it would be on the floor when we came home or we were in another room we would hear it fall. Once though, I saw it fall off the wall... it didn't just fall though, it sort of popped off the wall, like something gave it a little kick. It was put up pretty securely, but it never wanted to stay up until we put a mirror across from it. The fucked-up thing was that the reflection of the cross was inverted. That gave me the creeps: nothing else was weird in the mirror except the cross. How do you explain that? All the kids in the family hated that reflection because it was so wrong and we would run a bit fast while passing it. Most of the time, we just avoided looking at it. My cousin broke the mirror because he said he saw something "bad" in it, but would never say what it was. (he was 4 at the time, and is 20 now) We took down the mirror and the cross promptly went down as well. My grandma gave up on leaving it up.
One night, I was sitting wide awake in the living room on a couch directly across from the spot. I was just reading and doing some homework when I felt someone in the room. I raised my head expecting to see my grandmother or my sister, since both were home at the time... instead, I saw the spot above the fireplace pulsing. I wasn't tired or anything like that so I blinked, rubbed my eyes and kept looking. The spot looked sort of elastic and like a mass was trying to break through, it extended out enough that it knocked some ceramic figurines off the mantle onto the hearth. My grandmother walked in because of the noise of the ceramic shattering and the spot retreated, but writhed madly for a few seconds with both of us watching. My grandmother just went over to the fireplace and cleaned up the broken ceramic. She called my dad over to board up the fireplace and told my sister and me to sleep in her room that night, but offered no other explanation.
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Me and a friend had gone to the nearby canal. To get there, we had to walk down this long estate and under a bridge that was about 2 and a half houses long. We were walking home and it was a fine, calm cloudless night. The kind where the moon acts like a mirror for the sun and everything is bathed in a nice blue light, Really pretty. So we need to know the time as it was getting late. Being young, we didn't have a watch between us, but luckily a jogger was coming through the tunnel, reaching the midway point as I point out that maybe we can get the time off him. We were still a good distance from the tunnel and I point out this large antenna to the side of the road to my friend. As we look back, the jogger was gone. This guy was wearing a white vest and shorts and was in his mid forties from what we could see *thinning hair* But now he was gone. He couldn't have turned back and ran off in the other direction, because not only would we have seen him, but we were only distracted for a second or two.
Another time in my old house, I decided to sleep the wrong way round in my bed for some reason so I could see the door easily and the cabinet that usually blocked my view was by my feet. I woke up pretty late for a child, and saw a figure in white by my door... the door wasn't open so I could safely say it wasn't my mother popping in to say goodnight. This freaked me out because I always felt uneasy in that house anyway. To counter any more ghost attacks I put a line of salt above my doorframe.
Again as a child, maybe aged 6 this time. I was on a swing in my grandmother's house having a great old time, going really high and fast. I closed my eyes as I swung back and opened them on the way down. But to my utter horror, there was a dog running towards me, I prepared for the impact, but none came. I leapt of the swing anyway and spun around to see what had happened and there was nothing there. It seemed my uncle's dead dog Shep wanted to play... FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE!!!!
The worst incident was again in my grandmother's house. I was in the guest room with a ton of blankets on me, but I was still pretty chilly. I hugged the blankets close and brought my knees up to my chest and got right into the corner when I started to hear this scratching noise. It started off slowly, then built up pace and started to get more frantic. My young mind raced for explanations and I thought of rats... yeah rats, must be. So I glance over my shoulder and there was a kinda light up by the ceiling. I buried my head under the covers, and then a baby started to scream and cry. I mean, this baby sounded like it was being torn in half. I didn't move an inch that night. Despite how much my limbs ached and despite how I was asphyxiating under the covers, I dared not move. Turns out my auntie has seen this white glow too. She attributed it to her dead sister.
And on a nice note: after my grandfather died, he came back to say goodbye to my mother and her sisters the night after he passed. He came in and stroked their hair like he used to do when they were younger.
=============
Ask any of the older people in my fraternity house, and almost everyone has had some kind of paranormal encounter here. Our house is going on about 85 years old, and I will share a couple quick stories with you guys. As an interesting side note, my late grandfather lived in this same house when he was in college here.
Story #1: One of my pledge brothers, Brad, was moving some stuff down to the laundry room downstairs. (Our house is 3 stories + basement) Now, we've always kind of joked around that the boiler room (heats our house in the winter) is the scariest fucking place in the house to be in at night (especially when a coffin used to be down there, in storage from some brother that used it for a photography class prop). Anyway, you have to walk through the boiler room to get to the laundry room. Now, Brad isn't one to make stuff up, and when he tries to prank people, he fails miserably because he's not funny and a horrible actor. I see him walk upstairs scared shitless, so we ask him what's wrong. He said when he was down in the laundry room, he felt a presence and the dryer door slammed shut, even though he was alone and not near the dryer door.
Story #2: House lore has it that this one room on the 2nd floor called The Home is pretty damn haunted. Several of its past residents that I've talked to have been sitting in bed there at night and seen a male figure appear out of the door and walk across the room and disappear into the far wall.
Story #3: This and the next story involve my experiences. As a pledge, one of my duties was to deliver school newspapers to the house once a week. This one particular morning was really cold, so I figured I'd turn newspaper delivery into part of a morning jog. So I don my sweatpants and warmup jacket, run out at like 5:30 AM to get some newspapers and proceed into the back door by the kitchen in the basement to start by placing some in the dining room for the brotherhood to read over breakfast. Maybe this would make the story a bit more interesting, since everyone else seems to be drawing ASCII maps, I dunno:
code:
| | | |
| | "Bum Room" |stairs|
| ---------------- dd| ----- |------------|
| Dining room dd Kitchen | | |
| | | |--------dd |
| | dd |laundry d boiler room |
dd-----------| | dd | room |-------------|
stairwell to main floor| door to outside
Okay... so anyway, I walk in the back door and have to walk through the kitchen to get to the dining room... big deal, okay, whatever. Again, it is 5:30 AM and there is not a person even close to being awake in the entire house.
As I'm about halfway through the kitchen, it sounds like every single pot and pan we have in there (there are tons) are being banged on at top volume for about 5 seconds. I say 5 seconds because that's about how long it took me from when I heard it, to throw a pile of newspapers on the dining room table, and make it to the top of the back stairs on the bottom side of the dining room. I was scared shitless, but wasn't really all that surprised because of all of the stories I had heard.
Story #4: This isn't ghosts so much as psychic / paranormal or maybe just a strange coincidence. A little backstory about me: I have very sensitive ears for the smallest volume / frequency change. This has practical applications such as work I do in recording studios and other audio production. So I'm sitting over at one of my friends' houses a few blocks away from the fraternity house with one of my friends from out of town. It was probably about 9 PM or so, yet even though I normally never turn into bed before 1-2 AM, for some reason on this night I had a weird feeling and felt like I needed to go home for some reason. I told my friend that I was feeling pretty tired and that we should probably head back. He said something to the effect of "let’s stay a little longer," and for some reason I pretty much said: "No, we need to go now."
I couldn't believe I said that, as I'm known to be a party animal that is always up for entertaining people socially, especially when they come in from out of town to hang out with me. He reluctantly agreed and we drove back. I keyed into my room and was putting my stuff away and heard a strange noise, very faint. I asked my friend Chris if he heard it too, and he said no.
I went off to investigate nonetheless, and after a minute or so, I figured out it was coming from the floor above me. The room next door to where the sound was coming from was slightly ajar, and there were some people just hanging out in there. Right about this time, what the sound was next door to them was registered with me. I asked the people in the room, "Do you know the fire alarm is going off in the room next door?" and when they said "What?" I was like "oh shit" and tried the door; it was locked, so I went to go find one of the 2 guys with a master key.
Luckily, the Vice President was in his room, and I told him the alarm was going off in Sean's room and that we need to key-in right fucking now. On hearing this, the VP who is good friends with Sean says: "Oh shit, incense" Apparently, Sean likes to leave incense burning while he leaves the house. We haul ass up stairs and key into his room, and thick, black smoke immediately starts billowing out. The vice president isn't able to see or do very much due to the smoke, but again probably luckily for me, I have allergies sometimes to the point where I can't smell anything, and the smoke wasn't bothering my eyes much more than making them tear up some, so I was able to see that an incense stick had apparently burnt down into an ashtray full of little wooden incense sticks. By the time we got in the room, his telephone was smoldering and seemed about ready to burst into flames at any minute.
His phone was sitting on an old couch, which was right next to another old couch. We immediately pulled the couches away from the wall, and got water to put out the sources of heat. I gave Sean a really long lecture when he got back after that. I just find it really odd that I had such a sense that I had to go back to the house, and that I could hear the alarm from a floor below, yet the people right next door to it couldn't hear it.
The best / scariest story though is pretty involved and I don't feel like typing it out right now, but I will soon. It involves Halloween, a Ouija board and the netherworldly ghosts that reside on our property: some good, and some VERY BAD.
I don't get scared very easily, but after that night I vowed never to be in even so much the same room as a ouija board being used again. So did pretty much everyone else that was involved that night.
==========
I just remembered an experience my friend Steve had at my old house. Steve was a smoker, and although he was 16 at the time, my mother could care less so long as he didn't light up in the house. So poor Steve was always forced to smoke outside beneath the carport. The carport fits two vehicles and is just a large shed basically that connects to the house, but not a part of the house. Maybe I could just call it a garage, but the family called it a carport, so carport it shall be.
One night when Steve stepped out, he propped himself against the trunk of my mother's Buick and had himself a smoke. At some point, a man came into view walking back and forth across the edge of the road in front of our house. This normally wouldn't be such a strange occurrence if we didn't happen to live 15 miles from civilization in any direction and the road was a private one.
The figure looked "pissed" according to Steve. It paced back in forth about 30 feet each way and gave no indication that it was "OMG SPIRIT OF THE DAMNED." In fact, Steve said you could hear the leaves crunching beneath this guy's feet. Each time it paced by, it would glance at Steve as if it were angry with him, but wasn't certain what to do about it. Steve, of course being the tough guy, threw his arms out, stuck out his chest and let out a nice hearty "WHAT'S UP?!" to the man.
This is where some token black girl sitting on the sidelines to this scene would say "OH NO, HE JUS' DIDN'T." At the time he did this, the thing changed direction and launched itself at him like it were fired from a cannon: he said the body was a blur and sometimes seemed to be covered in dark places that were opaque but had no detail to them, just like staring into darkness that swallows all light around it. However, the face was perfectly visible and it was changing. Its tongue was violently whipping around in its gaping maul. Worse of all, he said the jaw looked as if it unhinged and dropped 4 or 5 inches further than any human could manage, and as it charged him, it let out an unearthly scream. He said it was inhuman, it sounded like electronic distortion, but was definitely a scream.
As it reached the edge of the carport, it vanished, but he said the screaming only got closer and the entire carport began to shake. At this point, he blacked out. My sister and I heard him screaming, but never this thing he told us about. He was lying against the plywood wall facing away from us huddled in a ball, and his neck had some old wire wrapped around it and twisted together at the ends as if it were choking him.
I took the wire off and asked him what his problem was. I didn't mean to be angry with him and I wasn't really, but I was scared and shaken and he has a reputation for playing jokes. Not this time though, he was red in the face and tears were streaming from his eyes. I'd never seen Steve cry until then, and he demanded we take him home. He finally told me years later what had taken place, but I had a pretty good idea that it was the same thing we had been living with in that house for a few years.
I would have terrifying sleep paralysis episodes in that house, but after leaving, everything mellowed out and I've been all right since.
==========
When my mom was in high school, she lived in this little town in Kansas (Emporia, for anyone interested). There wasn't much to do there, so she and her friends would drive around to try to find some fun. They liked to go down this dirt road that went past a burned-out farmhouse with a large, twisted stump in the front yard. The stump was commonly known as the Nun, because it looked like a silhouette of a nun in her full habit, with her hands folded in prayer.
One night they were driving around, and one of my mom's friends said, "Let's go past the Nun!" So they start down the road, with the headlights off to scare themselves even more.
They pass the Nun. Everything seems normal. They drive to the end of the road and turn around. This time, as they approach the Nun, the car starts to feel like it's hovering - they can't feel the gravel under the wheels anymore. The driver tries to turn the wheel, but the car doesn't react.
Then they notice the Nun.
Usually, the Nun is about 30 feet back off the road, close to the house. Now, the Nun was standing about 10 feet from the road. Her hands were no longer folded. She now had one arm raised, and it appeared she had a knife in her hand.
Everyone screamed. Time seemed to slow down as they passed the Nun, and there was no sound other than their screaming.
Then it stopped. They felt the road again. Without looking back, they tore off for the main road, and never went past the Nun again.
===========
Here's a nightmare I had:
I sleep on a bed that has a solid headboard, and a slotted footboard. This might not seem important now, but it may have saved my life.
There was nothing unordinary about that night. The stars were out, the moon was bright, and I was exhausted after another carefree summer day. I put my watch on the nightstand, pull back the comforter, and laid myself down for a night of pleasant dreams. I pulled the comforter up to my chin, and adjusted myself in the sheets that covered the bed below me. The cardinal red had a nice contrast with the navy blue bed sheets that draped over the bed and onto the floor.
As I just about slip into deep sleep, my bed quickly shakes violently. My eyes pop open and I sit up in bed, thinking that maybe there was a structural defect with the bed and it was going to collapse. After minute after minute of pure silence, I rest my head back down on my pillow, and sleep deeply until the next morning.
As I wake up, I feel my body ache all over. It was if all the energy I had stored up in the night for the activities of the day had been drained. My feet were particularly sore, and I hobbled out of the room.
The whole day was a bust as I had no energy to do anything. This night I struggled to keep myself awake until 9 where I found myself in the bedroom, placing my watch on the nightstand as always. Before I fell asleep, I checked the bed for any structural problems, and found none; yet the same shake happened right after I got into bed. I was too tired to get up and check, and I slept like the dead.
I hurt more than ever. This morning, the pain was worse than before. I am pale when I see my reflection in the mirror, and I can do nothing more than crawl. Strangely, I nap for most of the day despite my long sleep, and I ingest more than a heroic amount of chicken noodle soup.
Due to my restful day, I find myself back in my bedroom at the late hour of 11, and confused as to why the bed shakes. Perhaps it has something to do with my strange illness or sleep deprivation, but regardless I check the bed frame everywhere, and even under it.
I am awoke by the bed shaking again, and this time I plan to see what it is. As I turn to get out, the bed shakes again.
But it's different than before.
Every time the bed shakes, about once every three seconds, there is some sort of snarl from under the bed. It's like something is violently jerking the bed, and growling with its nose. Since the left side of the bed is next to the wall, I decide to jump out to the right and see what it is; also so I can have room to dodge if something is there.
I grab a yardstick from the closet, and raise the sheets to see what is snarling and moving.
The head of this think snapped to face me and moaned as soon as I lifted the sheets. It looked like it had the head of a deformed child, no more than 8 months old with broken, sharp teeth. The lips were black and thin, just like its eyes, and the nose wasn't fully formed yet. The neck continued into the small, slug-like body which had no legs or any discernable parts. What is was looked more like a worm with a deformed, hideous face. While it had no legs, it had something like arms, which what was shaking the bed.
Easily four times the length of the whole body were something like arms that went to both the headboard, and foot of the bed. There were no elbows or wrists or anything that suggested bones, but just long, thinnish appendages from the body of the worm. The right arm of the thing was what was rocking the bed, and apparently some of the thin fingers had become stuck in the wood, right above where I usually rested my head.
When I noticed that, I looked down to the footboard, which wasn't solid, and three sharp fingers had protruded through the slats enough to reach my feet. I quickly looked back at the face of the slowly writhing worm child, the whole body fading in between ghostly translucence and a sicking yellow, and recoiled when the broken child arched its head and moaned at me. As I did this, I noticed the bottom of my left foot, and got in closer to see if what I saw was true. I had never looked at the bottom of my feet since there was more of an aching in the whole foot rather than pain, but now I could see several puncture wounds all over the soles of my feet. The wounds were covered in a hardened, yellowish secretion, and I watched as the skin around the wounds began to necrofy and then I woke up.
==============
My dad has some slightly more believable ghost stories than my mom does, because my mom is freaking insane.
When my dad was a kid, he lived in an old farmhouse in Belleville, IL. It was definitely haunted, but the ghost was not unfriendly. They nicknamed him Harry Bacon.
Most of the time, Harry Bacon manifested himself as a mumbling voice. There were three voices in all, two male and one female, and they could be heard but never quite understood, as though they were speaking another language very quietly.
Occasionally Harry would hide things, or you'd hear him walking up the stairs. My grandfather was in the living room one day and heard someone come in the back door, go up the stairs, and walk around the attic (where my dad's bedroom was) for a while. Then the footsteps stopped. After a while, Grandpa, thinking my dad had come home from playing with his friends, went upstairs to see what he was up to. No one was there.
One Thanksgiving, all the men were gathered in the living room talking, while all the women were gathered in the kitchen getting dinner. A roller blind on a window across the room from everyone slowly started to unroll itself, and then WHAP! jerked itself off the window completely and fell on the floor. Someone remarked that they should have invited Harry Bacon to dinner, and apologized to him. There were no further outbursts.
The only time Harry scared anyone was one late afternoon when everyone was getting ready to go out. My grandparents had a tall brass bed with at least a foot and a half of clearance underneath. My grandmother has always been a fastidious housekeeper, and nothing was under the bed, not even dust. One of the cats had been sleeping in the room; it suddenly hissed and tore out of the room like its tail was on fire. My grandparents went into the bedroom to investigate. There was nothing in there. So my grandfather grabbed the other cat and tossed it into the room. It looked around, confused, because it wasn't used to being sent into empty rooms. Then it saw it. The cat stared under the bed, arched its back, puffed its tail, and hissed loudly. Then it ran out of the room.
My grandparents still couldn't see anything under the bed, but they were getting concerned. So they called the family dog, Herman, a fearless Spitz mix who took it as his solemn duty to protect the family from every and any source of harm. This dog was known to catch wasps in his mouth, drowning them so they didn't sting. He took on packs of neighborhood dogs, sending dogs twice his size flying and yelping. Literally nothing scared Herman.
Grandpa pointed under the bed. "Get it, Herman!"
Herman came charging in, ready to kill.
He stopped dead, staring under the bed and bristling. His tail went between his legs, and he backed out of the room.
Everyone decided maybe it was a good idea to get out of the house for a while.
When they came home, everything was fine. To this day, no one knows what was under that bed.
==============
It all starts way back in the day. I was maybe 7 or 8, and my bedroom was in the basement (not any fucking more). I was lying in bed one night. The door was NOT open. The window was NOT open, my bed was in the corner and I was lying facing the wall with the window. All of a sudden, I feel a breeze against my back. It doesn't faze me too much as I don't realize that there's no one for a breeze to come from, but it continues stronger and stronger until it actually blows the blankets from my feet and uncovers most of me. I am absolutely frozen in fear and can't even turn over to flick the light on. I lie there in the exact same position until morning, without the warmth of my blankets.
The VERY NEXT NIGHT, I build enough courage to go to bed, but of course I leave the fucking lamp on this time and wrap up in the blankets so nothing can take them off. I'm lying there, still completely awake, facing the wall, when I feel something pass down through me, ceiling to floor. Imagine a thin wall of compressed warmth moving through you. Now take away the warm. Yeah, that about describes it (took me a couple of years to come up with a good description). It moves down through me over and over again, at the same interval, but stronger and stronger each time, and every time I can feel myself get colder and colder. I could even feel someone standing by my bed. When it finally stopped, I felt like a skeleton, just so cold. I didn't move or sleep for the rest of that night.
I didn't tell my family or friends for a long time afterwards, but I'll always remember my father's comment the next day, noting how pale I was: "You look like you've seen a ghost." Jesus.
==============
I haven't really had many unexplained experiences, but I did have a dream about a haunted apartment the other night. In it, I'd moved cities and started a new job. I'd gotten some dingy basement apartment, just a combo bedroom / living room and kitchen, with a bathroom. There was an oddly shaped wall where some excessively heavy piping must have run through. Then, I began losing sleep. I started hearing knocking sounds and hairs on the back of my neck would stand up on end. I started training myself to go to sleep with the horrible sensation I wasn't alone.
One night, lying in bed, there was a loud knock. I thought to myself: "Relax, it's just the piping, the ducts expand and contract while heating the complex. If it were a real ghost, the knocking would happen multiple ti--" *wham* *wham* *wham* *wham* *WHAM*! Massive quantities of adrenaline enter my system. Somehow, I get back to sleep.
A day or two later, my girlfriend comes over. We were watching TV, but eventually got to making out (see? this is how I know it's not real). A palpable sense of dread overcame me. Lights in the room dimmed, the walls seemed to shrink inwards. A dark, brownish figure started rapidly flickering in and out in place of my girlfriend. A rushing sound filled my head, like leathery wings flapping. I was staring into the sunken, completely black eye pits of a horribly emaciated, melted looking corpse. It had deep cuts across its face. Its skin was a mottled brown and yellow. And wet. Horribly wet. It was lying on top of me.
It had my lower lip in its mouth. It bit down. It twisted its head around, tearing skin. I felt blood surge up. It stopped and sat up, staring at me wildly and panting. Finally, it reached down, grabbed me with both arms around my neck. It heaved me up to its face and screamed: "LOOK IN THE FUCKING WALL!"
I kicked it away from me, but it had already disappeared. My girlfriend was quite upset with me for throwing her off the couch, and stormed off. I get a sledgehammer and approach the wall with the ductwork behind it. The wall gradually fades and I see the outline of a human form behind it, struggling with bonds. I hit the wall with the sledgehammer. Instantly the image disappears, the wall crumbles, and the corpse I previously saw comes piling out into my arms.
I run away shrieking and get the police, and that's pretty much it for scary parts. The rest of the dream involved a biplane, throwing knives, Jackie Chan, and a dual-wielded katana fest with some crazy chick who was mad I stole a bag of powder.
==============
My mother's side of the family has always been able to see / interact with ghosts. Most all the encounters were with friendly spirits... All but one. A few of the good guys;
I'll start from the earliest one I've heard. (This is back when my Grandmother Haydee was a teenager) She used to live in a pretty house with a big front yard in Puerto Rico with her folks. In the yard, there was a big tree. It was there way before the house was built. There was a window in the kitchen that was above the sink. From there, you could see the tree easily. One night while my grandmother was washing some dishes, she glanced up to the tree and there she saw a little girl with a white dress. It seemed like the little girl had a light underneath her dress, because she glowed. My grandmother Haydee stopped washing the dishes and called her mother, and a few minutes later they both walked out into the yard, towards the little girl.
All the girl did was smile and say "Vamos a jugar?" ("Are we going to play?") then with a giggle, she disappeared. She was seen a few more times, always happy and sitting at the tree.
Ghosts are very common in my family, My mother got into Metaphysics and "out of body" stuff, she became so sensitive that she could actually see / interact with ghosts. Even at places that weren't haunted.
My parents had gotten divorced, and we had to move to Puerto Rico. There, we lived in my grandfather's house. I had a lot of good times with him, but anyway.
My grandfather died one week after Father's Day, in 1997. A week after the funeral, while my brother and I slept, my mother was awoken by a gentle shaking on her shoulder, When she looked up, she saw my grandfather: they talked for a few hours and said their goodbyes, then he disappeared.
On September 8th (3 days before the attacks in 2001), my grandmother Haydee died. She was eaten up with cancer that the doctors never found in their tests. One day after the funeral, my mom decided to save some money and stay in my grandmother Haydee's apartment, She slept on my grandmothers bed that night and was awoken by a shake on the bed. It was an angry shake... someone was pissed. My mother got scared and she slept on the couch. The next night, she saw Haydee. She was angry, she kept mumbling that she wasn't ready to be dead yet, she had so many things left to do. She wouldn't talk to my mother, she just paced the apartment, mumbling..
The Bad Guy.
When I was maybe 8 or 9, we had moved into a house in Hollywood, Florida. The rent was cheap and the location was good. We hadn't even finished unpacking when it happened....
My dad snored loudly, so loud that on the 2nd night there, my mom decided to go sleep in the living room. She quickly fell asleep and was awoken by an angry scream. She opened her eyes and saw a lady, dressed as a maid holding a cinder block over her head, ready to crush my mother's skull. Her eyes were full of hate and her mouth was in some sort of evil sneer. She swung the cinder block down, and my mother moved her arms up to block the blow, and looked away. As she did, she saw a little boy screaming in agony running from the sofa... his head was smashed.
We moved out the next day.
Luckily, I haven't run into any ghosts, yet. My mom keeps telling me to get ready coz it's a "family curse." My mom sees them, my grandmother saw them, my great-grandmother sees them, the same as her mother. Oddly, I'm the first guy in the family that may or may not get the "curse." I can't say I'm happy to hear that.
=============
These are all really good stories! Reading some of them sort of makes me feel like I've encountered weird shit before, but was either too young or too clueless to take it to be paranormal. The only thing I can really remember is that I was once watching TV or something (whatever it is that kids do) downstairs in my old home while my mother was upstairs in her room. I suddenly and very clearly heard someone shout my name. It sounded like my mother, but it was coming more from the direction of the staircase than it was from my mother's room. I haven't had any ghostly experiences lately, mainly because I masturbate too much.
The women on my mother's side of the family have a knack for being pseudo-psychic. They don't give out winning lottery numbers (dammit) but they all have some sort of story to tell. My mother, for example, lost her mother to cancer before I was born. I really wish I could have met her. On the night that my grandma died, though, my mother felt a kiss on her cheek as she slept. It woke her up. It was about 4 AM and my father was still soundly asleep next to her. She passed it off as nothing and went back to sleep. The next morning, my grandfather called my mother to let her know that my grandmother had died. My mother asked the time it happened, and was told that my grandmother had passed at about 4 that morning. (Cue the "DUNN DUNN DUNNN" sound here)
My grandmother (the one who died above) also shared in this ability. The one story I've heard about her (or it may have been my mother, who the fuck knows) is that after her Aunt / Mother / Whatever, I forget, died, she fell into a deep depression regarding the death. One day, she was sitting in said Aunt's / Mother's / Whatever's house in their living room. Suddenly, the figure of dead person X (A / M / W) appeared in front of my Grandmother, angrily shaking her finger in the way that a mother might scold her child. This person knew that my Grandma was really sad over their death, and wanted otherwise.
My older sister is no exception to this stupid inheritance my family has (I want to see dead people, dammit!). When she was a child, she would tell my mother about a nice lady named "Mary" who would often come to visit her. My mother asked my sister to describe Mary, and to almost the most minute detail, described my dead Grannie Mary (see? See? There's a definite pattern developing surrounding my grandmother!).
Labels: alcoholic drinks, breakfast, chris, computer, corey, death, dreams, friends, ghost stories, google, halloween, helen, jackie, laundry, lyrics, mary, maxed-out tags limit, school, something awful, steve
posted by Flami at 3:46:00 PM
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