Ghost stories, part 16
So far nothing paranormal has happened to me before, but my colleague has stories out the wazoo. Apparently, she possesses a third eye: A penchant for seeing the supernatural. According to her, it skips a generation, and only manifests at around age 16. Her grandmother had it, now it's her turn to.
So, Vanessa (my colleague) and her boyfriend were driving up to a resort in Malaysia (Genting, I think). They were supposed to meet their friends there for a holiday getaway, and she went separately with her boyfriend (whose name escapes me at the moment).
Some time into the journey, she notices that they seem to be going in circles. Pointing this out to her bf, she sees the same road sign, directing them left, but as they round the bend they come up to the same one again. And again. And so it goes for at least half an hour. At this, they're majorly freaked out, but nothing seems to be happening so far. Until finally, the car died.
Stuck in the middle of the road, on a winding mountain pass, miles away from any sign of civilization. Neither of them know jack about fixing cars, their cell phones couldn't go through, they were stuck with nothing to do and nothing to do about it. A young girl (about 20+) comes up to them out of the woods, and sees the predicament they're in. She offers to help them, as long as they'll just sit tight in the car and not go anywhere. So while she's fixing the car, the hood of the car is up, and they can't see anything that she's doing. Finally, they hear: "Okay, that should do it. Start the car."
The hood drops down. And no one's there. Vanessa and her boyfriend turn to look at each other, look back at the road, scream "FUCK!" and gun the engine. They never stopped till they reached the resort a short while later.
When they get there, though, they see their friends there, some are crying, and others look worried. According to them, they'd been missing for an hour, and all attempts to contact them couldn't go through. Vanessa and her boyfriend check the clocks in the car, their watches, ALL timepieces - they were all one hour behind. It was as if they didn't exist for an hour.
Vanessa tells me that the way she looks at it, the ghost knew that their car would break down on the way there, and as payment for fixing it, took away one hour of their life.
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Asian ghost stories, hmm... I have one of those, I posted it about a year or so ago.
My best friend's (Kiran from my other story) family is cursed. Once upon a time many many years ago in India a woman who practiced black magic got involved with this family, an argument over something trivial and meaningless caused this "witch" to cast a curse on every newborn in the family. The curse was that a black ghost or Cacodemon as I think they're known as would be present at every birth within this family and every child would die at the hands of it.
Before Kiran was born, her father had suffered two major heart attacks for no reason: he was young and healthy. After that, her mother became clinically depressed. Soon, she became pregnant with a boy. When the boy was born, he had many many physical conditions and was almost stillborn... he died a year later, dead in his cradle: half his body was black, half was white. This was part of the curse, and the family knew it. They soon moved into an old house in Somerset. The mother became pregnant again with Kiran. When Kiran was born, the mother called a Christian priest to be with her at the birth, despite the parents being Sikh and Hindu. Kiran was born almost at the cost of the mother's life... it was a very awkward birth, and the priest said he saw a black figure plunging his fist into the heart of the mother.
Kiran survived, thankfully, but the black figure wanted her dead and was not going to stop until she was. As Kiran grew up, she would walk through the house and see blood seep through the floorboards. Her father became ill again with heart disease: he collapsed, and after that, blood would permanently mark the floor. They soon moved away after every family member became progressively ill with unexplainable diseases.
Fast forward many years later to when I met her in college. I'm not sure how the conversation came about, but she told me that at night she would see someone look through her bedroom window: it was a black figure with red eyes, but it couldn't enter the house. This is the thing about Asian curses: the ghosts can't enter somewhere with electricity, so Kiran was technically safe. One night, she was at home by herself and she heard a knock on her window... she ignored it. With another knock, she fixated her gaze on the window: she saw a white hand scratching and sliding down the window. Running over to the window, she flung it open to see nobody there. There were no trees near the house, either, so it wasn't branches scraping the glass. She decided to go downstairs and wait for her parents to return home. Now, at this time she had several statues of Buddha in her front room, and according to her... when she went downstairs, the eyes of one of the statues was glowing and all of the windows in the house were being rattled, knocked, and scratched. She went and hid and fell asleep whilst unexplainable creakings and whispers haunted the hallways...
I was intrigued by her story, but scared for her at the same time. I wanted her to get rid of this thing, mainly because I was scared to stay at her house for fear of seeing something. Every time I had stayed at her house, I'd be extremely sick the next day with breathing troubles which would only subside when I got back to my own house. The thought of this curse plaguing my friend stuck in my mind for many months, and in December I became extremely ill... it felt like I had been dragged into the whole situation. There was no explanation for my illness either... I had the symptoms of diabetes and insomnia but my blood tests came back clear. But I was so ill that I found I was more "tuned in" to scary shit happening.
One night, I lay in bed and I concentrated hard on trying to "see" this thing that had latched onto Kiran. I tried for about 30 minutes, then I felt a sudden rush of pain. I saw a dark figure behind my window... everything started rattling and shaking, and I could hear whispers of someone trapped within it. I had to stop... I was terrified of what was going to happen. I fell asleep and had a strange dream where I was looking out my window to a clear blue sky: a black figure, flowing like ink, travelled along the sky and formed the shape of a scythe. I woke up shaken and with the urge that I had to phone Kiran straight away. I told her I had seen the thing in my dream and it had given me a "message" for her. After telling her that I saw a scythe, she revealed she had had her tarot done the night before and the scythe card (don't ask me what card it is... I wouldn't know) came up three times. I just took it as a coincidence, but was still shaken.
About a week later, I had another dream... except it felt lucid. I was in Kiran's house looking out her window, and I saw that evil thing again. But inside was the face of a boy, who reached out to me because he as scared... I tried to pull him back to me, but couldn't. Kiran confronted me that day at college and said: "This morning.. I swear I saw you at my window." I told her about the dream and that I saw the face of a boy. Now at this time I wasn't aware of her dead brother, but we both realised that he was being used by the curse as an energy source, I guess. The way to get rid of it was to set her brother free, but time was running out. I was becoming sicker by the day and wasn't able to communicate with Kiran, and the cursed ghost was getting angrier and angrier...
Over the coming weeks, Kiran would tell me that the ghost's form was changing, that a huge domed shadow would fall on her wall at night, as if the ghost was now solid. She was soon going to South America and wanted it to be gone by then since she would be unprotected against it. One night as she lay in bed, she saw something on her desk: a small figure was shouting at her, and it looked like a goblin of some sort, but more grotesque. Pits for eyes, large sharp teeth, and rotting scales for skin. She wanted to fight it, but couldn't move. She went to sleep and saw it still in a dream: in her dream, she attacked it with one of her training staffs she keeps by the side of the bed. She woke up the next morning to find all her training weapons thrown across the floor: they're hidden beneath her mattress, so there was no way anyone else had used them.
I decided to tell my dad about what was going on as he is pretty knowledgeable about these things: he gave me specific instructions about what to do. Of course, all the responsibility was on me now... I had to get rid of it because nobody else could. I had to do this ritual type thing which is designed to protect someone: it's not so much the words you use to invoke it, but the intent, and my intent was to stop all this nasty shit happening to Kiran before something bad DID happen.
I stood in the front room with an orange highlighter and a stack of printed notes with Latin translations on for the incantations. I felt like a complete dick having to do a bunch of weird stances and learning a load of symbols, but if it worked, then I'd be happy. I began in something called "Horse stance" which I believe is used in some martial arts... and it HURTS. Supposedly, it's good for getting a decent flow of energy. Personally, I think it was only good for making God laugh at me. I did the ritual once... however, after realising that whatever I was invoking probably wouldn't be impressed at my two-minute pauses to read the notes, I did it again for good measure. I have to say I felt really drained afterwards. I told Kiran I had done my best, and hopefully it worked.
After 2 days, the shadow gradually faded to nothing and whatever was there had gone. But her dead brother remained to watch over her: he was free now to either go to where he belonged, or stay behind and watch over his sister in peace, and I guess that's what he chose to do. I have to say I haven't been ill from staying there ever since and I'm definitely not as scared as I was to be in her house.
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Last year, my younger sister who was 19 (Jackie) at the time and I (Adam / 22) visited our older sister, 29 (Tracy), where she lives in the garden district of New Orleans. We figured we'd have a grand time of it just drinking, partying, and staying up till the crack of dawn five days in a row. On the second night there, Tracy starts telling us about some ghostly experiences some of her friends have had in New Orleans and runs the idea by of us possibly going ghost hunting late that night. She had a voice activated recorder with her, just for the experience, so Jackie and I decided that it might be fun. Around 2 AM, we decided to start our trek towards a local cemetery and we actually arrived at our destination in about 15 minutes' time, just walking. Along the walk, Jackie and I both noticed that our older sister was dressed in a long skirt and we're thinking: "Shit, I hope she doesn't try to chicken out of this by saying something lame about not wanting to chance ripping her skirt while climbing over the gate to get in," since we knew this is pretty much how Tracy thinks. Sure enough, by the time we reached the gates, Tracy had chickened out and used her skirt as an excuse to get out of going in. Jackie and I still decided that it might be fun, so we were going to have a go at it. Jackie's one of the smaller people on the planet, so she slid right through the gates, whereas I had to climb over them. This is going to sound cheesy, as in something right out of a B movie, but as the second Tracy passed the recorder through the bars, it stopped working. She went off on a stroll to see if she could figure out what was wrong, but in the meantime, Jackie and I set off to our left and down a row at the cemetery. For those of you that have never been to a New Orleans cemetery, all of the graves are above ground since the water table is only 6 feet or so below the surface in most areas there. Therefore, a lot of the graves are more elaborately-decorated tombs more than anything else. To get back to the story though, it was dead silent outside, save for the sound of our two sets of footsteps.
We stopped for a moment to get a better look at the nearby grave with a Celtic cross on top that had an eagle perched on it. Even in the dark, it looked pretty cool, but then we decided to keep moving. No sooner than taking that first step away, it sounded like a 3rd set of footsteps had joined us about 6 feet to our right, along with the sound of something like gaudy jewelry jingling. We stopped for a moment, and the footsteps stopped with us, and then kept on walking, only to be joined by the footsteps again. Jackie and I both looked at each other and started running towards the entrance. Again, she slipped through the bars and I leapt up onto a trash can, then over the gate, ninja-rolled, got up and joined Jackie in pursuit of our older sister. As soon as we found her, we informed her of what we'd heard, and she informed us of the fact that she'd gotten the recorder to start working. Jackie was still a bit shaken and wasn't at all up for going back in, but me being the big ol' dumbass of the group decided that since the recorder was working, it might just be worth a shot.
After a quick cigarette, I grabbed the recorder and worked my way over the gate once more. This time, I decided that it might just be safer to go to the right. So that's where my trek led me and I happened upon a little garden. I went in, stood around awhile, and closed my eyes for a bit. After, oh, I'd say 20 seconds worth of standing there, I felt a small jolt in my left hand as the recorder started moving. I looked at it, and sure enough, the red light had gone on to show that it was in the process of recording something, though as far as I was concerned, it was completely silent all around me because after seeing that this thing was recording, all I could do was sit there and hold my breath. That was when IT hit me. I don't know how IT can properly be described, but it was like a sourness and blackness in the air. I know most people talk about chills or feeling something cold, but this was definitely something hot that hit me. Soon I was surrounded by a chaotic feeling of despair, sadness, hatred, and regret. It quickly washed over me, the recorder still recording this entire time, and I was paralyzed and completely useless to do anything about this. I know I can't accurately describe what this felt like in words, but I've never been this horrified in my entire life, and could do nothing but stand there and pray that I was able to breathe again sometime soon.
Eventually all my senses came to me, and I jolted towards the exit... with this hot, stagnant feeling following closely behind. I made it to the trashcan, leapt up on top of it again (though much less deftly this time) and fell thigh first on a spike, and then head first over the gate, and out. I didn't receive any permanent damage, just a bunch of bruising from the incident. As soon as I could, I got up and rejoined my sisters. Though I was happy to see them, they looked visibly shaken to see me. Apparently I was completely white when I caught up with them, and that's when I realized that my whole body was drenched in sweat. We finally made it to my sister's apartment and I sat down at the steps to have another cigarette, watching a small puddle form at my feet from the sweat dripping off my face. After I took a shower, we decided to listen to that night's recordings, but unfortunately Tracy, in her process of fixing the recorder, had switched sides on the tape so the recorder was trying to record for over a minute on that white piece of leading tape. Sure, we had nothing to listen to, but I can't say that I wasn't happy for that blunder.
The next morning, we decided to make our way down to that same cemetery in the daylight. It was much less frightening then, with people milling about taking pictures and bringing fresh flowers to their deceased. Eventually, Jackie and I found the grave I mentioned earlier and it was inhabited by a woman who died in the late 1800s at the age of 45. After that, we moved on over to the other side of the cemetery to check out the garden I was in. I was kind of shocked to see that it wasn't just a garden, but a small set of plots as well with a plaque that read, "The Garden of Orphans." Every grave there was filled by a child under the age of five that had died around the turn of the century, and that's pretty much my story from last summer.
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The area I'm in right now is a hotbed of activity. Colonial battlefields and the like.
I've shared a house with another goon named Lunix King for about a year now. We have two ghosts: the old man and the old lady. There's actually a picture of the old lady floating around somewhere. I haven't actually seen them yet, but everyone else fucking has. Other than creeping me out when I do laundry and talking to our friend's little girl, the old lady doesn't do much.
The old man, however is a different story. We hear shit all the time. Everyone will be in the living room, cats included, and somebody out in the kitchen will move the beer bottles around. The cats go nuts when this happens. You can actually hear them clink as they get set down. We come out from the living room, and the bottles are nicely arranged. Three of my friends have seen the old man.
Fellow goon Battle Pope was staying over one night and had crashed in Lunix King's bed, as my roommate was passed out in front of his computer. At like 6 AM, I woke up just feeling weird all over, hair standing up on my arms and the back of my neck. It was right about the same time that Battle Pope woke up and saw somebody in the doorway. He said that an old, bald man dressed in black leering over him, just staring at him. Battle Pope had to sit up to get a better look, and when he did, the guy was gone. Nobody in the house matches that description, and everybody who was there was in bed long before that.
A few weeks later, an old friend of mine came over for a while and we were up in my room talking when she saw somebody walk past my door. Which is impossible... unless of course, they walked through the wall that's right there. And a few weeks after that, we were all sitting around the dining room table when my buddy Pat saw some dude in a flannel shirt standing in the kitchen doorway, by the thermostat. He kept telling us about it, and every time we turned, the guy wasn't there. The thermostat kept going lower and lower, though.
I've still never seen one of them, but I've felt their presence. The old man likes to hang out on the stairs or in the kitchen, just a pocket of really cold air in a house that's normally overly hot.
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When I lived at home (read: with parents), there was a lot of time when my father wasn't around. He had to go on a lot of business trips (sells GPS equipment for a Swiss company), so he was gone a lot. He worried about us, so we'd talk to him on the phone every day he was away. Dad really loves us - a few years ago, his screaming-awake Vietnam nightmares were replaced with his family being killed, screaming-awake nightmares. A couple of times a year, Dad would have to go overseas - to Switzerland, to Singapore, to Belgium. It was during one of this trips that I saw the ghost in the house for the first time.
A few years ago, back when we only had one computer in the den (finished room in the basement, a TV room, really), it was caddy-cornered opposite the staircase leading into the basement. If you were sitting at the computer (which I obviously did a lot of), your back faced the stairs, and you couldn't see the majority of the room. The laundry room was also down there, and my mother would occasionally come down while I was typing away. We'd chat idly for a few moments - I'd not even have to turn around.
I was sitting at the computer one late afternoon, and I heard my mother coming down the stairs. "Hey," I said, as I was chatting to random folk. Nothing. That's rude, I thought. So I said, more loudly: "Hey!" Still nothing. I figured my mum was standing behind me, silent with anger at something one of us kids had done, so I turned around to tell her I hadn't done anything, but it wasn't my mother at the base of the stairs. It was a man. He was wearing jeans and a white, V-neck t-shirt (like an undershirt a lot of men wear). He was translucent, but faded from view below the knees and above the neck - for the most part. I could just barely tell that he was wearing shoes (brown loafers, from the looks of it), and could just barely tell that he had brown hair - features were incredibly hard to define.
Naturally, I did a double take and let out a yelp. He didn't disappear straight away - over a couple of seconds, he just seemed to disappear - the staircase was dark and it looked almost as if he was floating backwards, fading into the stairs. I could tell he was looking at me, but I didn't sense danger. I was scared, and told whoever I was chatting with what had just happened.
A few months later, I was going to the washroom on the main floor of our house. The washroom door and my parents' bedroom door are at a right angle, so you passed the bedroom door on your left as you were about to enter the washroom at the end of the hallway. As I was going in, I looked in my parents' room and saw my dad lying on my parents' bed. I didn't think anything of it, until I was washing my hands. I was looking at myself in the mirror, and recalled what my dad was wearing - brown shoes, jeans, and the white t-shirt. Simultaneously, I remembered the ghost - and that my dad was out of town. I whipped out of the washroom and into the bedroom, and yelled "What the fuck?" at whoever was on the bed. There the ghost was, lying straight as an arrow, arms flat by his sides. He was looking straight up, and seemed to sink into the mattress and disappear.
I brought it up when my mum got home from work a couple of hours later. It was nighttime, and it was pretty fucking freaky being home alone, waiting for my mother. She was curious as to why every single light in the house was on. I wasn't sure what to think - I'd seen the ghost before, so it couldn't mean that Dad was dead. He didn't call that night, as it was the middle of the night in Switzerland.
A couple of us in the family have seen the ghost since - only when my father was overseas. And, upon further confirmation with Dad, only when he was asleep. We think that he misses us and worries about us so much that he has to check up on us in some way, even when he can't do it in person. I hope this positive ghost story makes people feel a little less like sleeping with the lights on...
IN REPLY:
Yeah, this sounds a lot like astral projection to me. The only time I managed projection was after just falling asleep, from a dream. William Shatner was in the dream and he was telling people to jump for a portal that was on my bedroom wall at the count of three. I did.
I missed and landed on the floor. This part was no longer a dream - it was fucking real. There I was, sitting in my astral body, on the damn floor. It wasn't dream-like in the least, it was just as vivid and real as waking life. I made the mistake of glancing towards the bed and saw my body still lying there, curled up asleep and looking somewhat lifeless. I freaked out and tried to scream (nothing came out), and ended up right back in my body. It wasn't hard for me to get back out of body right after that, but everytime I did I heard noises like someone was knocking at my window, and it freaked me out enough that I gave up completely.
I found out later that those kinds of sounds are pretty normal in projection. You just have to learn to block them out or move past them. I didn't know that at the time, though, and figured some nasty spirit or something was waiting outside my window for me. Anyway, that was my one and only experience with conscious astral projection. Your dad seems to be doing this in his sleep, so he might not remember it at all. As for conscious astral projection, when people ask me if what they've experienced was an astral projection, I tell them that if there's any doubt in their mind that it wasn't a projection, they're right.
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I've got several stories, mostly silly little small things, along with a couple bizarro ones. A couple of them may or may not be "ghost" stories, but they are sure as fuck scary stories. I'll start off easy.
I once heard a light knocking / scraping sound on my bedroom door at my parents' house. It sounded almost exactly like a cat wanting in, but somehow off. I opened the door expecting to see one of my 6 cats, but instead saw nothing... I felt a gust of cool air, and heard a feminine voice whisper "thank you."
Sitting on my porch with a friend at about 3 AM, we heard a bizarre noise coming from the forest in our backyard. It sounded like chewing. We leaned out over the porch and looked and the sound continued. It sounded like a zombie walking from Resident Evil, but much faster. I yelled out, "WHAT THE FUCK?!" and was greeted by at least 6 pairs of small yellow eyes looking back at me from maybe 15 feet away. They turned away after about 5 seconds, and the sound resumed.
There is a storm sewer by my parents' house called the Batcave. We have explored it probably close to 40 times: sometimes really freaky shit happens; other times, you can spend hours down there and nothing will happen. There is some very bizarre backward counting graffiti that starts as numbers, switches to Roman numerals, goes back to numbers, and after reaching 0, says: "Welcome to hell." You will see shadows, get cold chills, hear whispers, and occasionally hear heavy steel pipes rolling around. We have never really seen or heard anything very concrete, though.
The only truly bizarre, terrifying, and unexplainable event I have experienced was at an old friend's house. His dad had recently been laid off, and they sold their fairly nice house to move to a cheaper one. It was 2 blocks away from a power plant, and the plant made an eerie shrieking / grinding noise rhythmically every 15 minutes or so. We were up in his room at about 2 AM playing Playstation 1 / trading cards when we hear yelling and gunfire outside. This was sort of the ghetto, so we thought it might be a gangbang or something. We look out and there is a man on his porch pointing a handgun into the street at nothing. Then Danny noticed a vague shape out in the street. I don't know if it took our eyes a second to adjust, but it looked to me like the thing has just appeared right then, as if it materialized. I first saw the back of it, then the front, then the head, each time thinking I was looking at the entire creature. It had a very distinct canine appearance to it, but was at least half as long as the cars parked on the street and was absolutely pitch fucking black. We yelled at the guy, "What the fuck is that?!" and he completely ignored us.
The creature, however, jerked its head around and stared directly at us. That's when we realized its eyes were blood red. Then it made a noise which there is absolutely no description for. It sounded like a dog howling, but much deeper, and in a tone that just implied pure fucking evil. It sounded like it was in pain, and very angry. It made this sound for about 10 full seconds before we shut the window, locked everything, and ran into his parents' room to sleep on the floor. We were 12 or 13 at the time. The next day we examined the street... and there was no blood and no gunshot shells. We never got the nerve to knock on the guy's door.
Ghost, mutated dog from the power plant, who fucking knows. But it sucked.
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Well, this year started off with a bang. Literally. I was coming home from band practice and as I pulled up the street, I noticed flames shooting out of a house. All I could think to myself was: "Christ, knowing my family's luck, it's bound to be our house." So I spoke to the police officer at the end of the street and sure enough, it was my house. What to do now? Well, we were basically left with the clothes we had on and we had to find a place to stay until the insurance company could get a rental house. I stayed with a friend, my sister stayed with another friend, and my mom stayed with her sister.
A couple of weeks later, we were set up with a house and truthfully, I didn't care what it was like so long as it was a place to stay. The first couple of nights weren't too bad at all here, but after nearly a week of staying here, it finally clicked that something just wasn't right. Jackie and I both confronted each other on the fact that you'd just see something out of the corner of your eye much more often than usual here. At first, we attributed it to being in a new house. It wasn't just a couple times a day that you'd see things, but more like 20-25 times a day that you'd just catch a glimpse of something. We told our mom about it for the hell of it, and surprisingly she just refused to comment on it, though we know she's probably experienced it or something worse as she's spending less and less time here and more time at her sister's house. We actually thought this was pretty cool since we're two kids around the age of 20 with a big house to ourselves for most of the week.
By the second week of living here, even more things started to happen. I was on my way out through the front door one day and as I was about to pass the staircase, caught a shadow walking down it. Not just for a second, or two, but I watched him descend the entire staircase. He wasn't hazy, or fuzzy like most shadows are, but pitch black and well-defined. It was impossible to see through him, even in the daylight and you could tell it was the body of a man about 6 feet in height, that was fairly sharply dressed in some sort of suit. As he got to the end of the staircase, he paused, looked over his shoulder at me, nodded, walked a few more steps, turned a corner and just disappeared. Needless to say, I wasn't too happy with my new finding. I've only seen him a couple of times since, though it's always the same ol' thing and he'll turn his head and nod even if there isn't someone standing there. As I mentioned earlier, the stuff I'm going to talk about really isn't all that scary since the ghosts here are completely benign and haven't done anything at all to really scare the hell out of us.
Within 24 hours of that occurence, my sister and I were both awakened by the sound of the TV going on downstairs at an incredible volume. I figured it was her down there being a retard and she figured it was me doing the same, so we both came out of our bedrooms to bitch at the other and that's when we found out that no one else was in the house, and the TV just decided that it was better off on.
I also have a ghost that decides to knock, or speak at my door occasionally. The knocks usually happen around noon everyday, so I'm out of the house... and if I'm not, it's a good wake-up call. The first time it happened, it sounded like a good, loud one knuckle rap on the door. I just thought someone really wanted me awake but alas, I was the only one in the house. That was still early in our stay here and I was pretty weirded out by it... it turned into one of those situations that can best be described as, "go back to sleep and hope everything is better when you wake up."
If the ghost isn't knocking at my door, it's speaking at my door... and on one occasion, even coming into my room. It's a female ghost, with a female voice... I've usually got a fan on in my room, so that just distorts the voice even more. Sadly enough, it's been over 7 months since we've moved into this rental house and I still fall for the voice all the time, thinking it's my sister at the door trying to tell me something. Well, occasionally it IS my sister at the door telling me I've got a phone call or something, but usually it's the ghost just mumbling something in a fairly ethereal voice. I'm sure it'd be spookier if I could tell you what it was saying, but I've still yet to translate any of the gibberish. On the one occasion that the ghost came into the room, I had just laid my head down for a nap. My door was closed and none of the cats were in the room, but something sat down on the bed next to me, swiveled itself and laid down. There was definitely something there as the entire mattress shifted with the weight of something that must've weighed at least 100 pounds. I turned around and there was nothing there, but something was leaving a vague imprint on the bed.
So I just turned back around, and laid there with my eyes wide open, praying to God that I wasn't about to die and hoping that this ghost wasn't about ready to try and communicate with me or touch me. I don't really know how to describe it any better than this but trust me, it's really a pretty terrible feeling when there's physical evidence that something else is in your bed but you cannot see it at all. Anyway, after about two hours, the ghost sat up and got up off the bed, and I ran from my room and took a nap on the downstairs couch.
There are also groups of ghosts that walk around chatting to each other. They only do this in the upstairs, but fairly rarely. Unfortunately, it only ever happens at night and usually on my sister's end of the house so whenever that's happening, it's another sleeping pill night to help combat the noise. Occasionally, one of the group will fall down and create a big dull meaty sound, which is always exciting. It'll keep you on your toes but again, after months of it happening, it becomes more of a minor nuisance than anything else.
Now these are the usual occurrences that tend to happen 1 or 2 times a week. They don't bother us anymore, but I can tell you that I was scared shitless last night while reading this thread and having the ghost occasionally mumble at my door. I actually stayed up until after 7 AM when it was light outside before I even dared go to sleep. There's one last bit to the story, and though it isn't all that scary, it's just plain weird. At times, when I'm walking by the family room downstairs, there'll be a black panther made of shadows standing in there looking in my directions with blank black eyes. It's not your most ordinary panther as it's about 5 feet at the shoulder, and a full 7 feet tall with head. All it does is look at me from time to time, and then just disappears. I've heard stories and all and I don't much believe in this kind of thing but do you think that this could just be some sort of spirit animal of mine or what?
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As I was saying a bit earlier, I lost a parent to diabetes. My dad ended up losing both legs, his kidneys, part of his stomach and small intestine, as well as most of his sight due to neuropathy caused by the disease. He spent most of his last 5 years alive in the hospital, on his death bed. He actually received his last rites 6 times in this period, but every single time he'd somehow make a miraculous recovery and end up coming home at least for a little while.
Now a jump to the future! After a few weeks of staying in this haunted home, which I mentioned in my last post, my mom decided it was time to see a priest. My mom never told him much about this house at all. Just that she'd experienced a couple things and that they didn't make her feel comfortable. My sister and I aren't religious at all, and being non-religious, this was boring the shit out of us. Eventually he gave us all prayers to St. Michael the Archangel and rosaries to take home with us. It was only after this that he started mentioning priests in the area that were experts with the paranormal and some priests that were exorcists and experts in consecrating the ground in areas. Needless to say, my interest was piqued from this point forward.
We never got to talking about much else to deal with exorcisms, because at this point my mom started to sob a little bit and related a story to all of us. Back when my dad was dying, priests would sometime come to visit him in the house. We just figured that it was like a personal mass or something but apparently it was a bit different than that. Apparently the priests, Father Nick Zukowski (in case anyone out there has him at their parish now) in particular, were coming over to give my father blessings because he'd been seeing a number of angels and the angel of death was nearly present with my father at all times. Not present in a metaphorical sense, but in a physical sense is what I'm talking about. Apparently he'd speak with my father occasionally, saying that he was watching over him and ready to take him as soon as my father decided that he couldn't hold on any longer. THIS WAS FOR 5 FREAKING YEARS!!!!!!!!
I knew none of this was happening at the time because I was still a little kid, and my mom and dad didn't want to scare me. My mom said my dad described him as a very large black hooded figured with a set of massive, brilliant white wings, and Father Nick described him the same way on occasion. My mom also related the fact that she never saw the angel, but that she had witnessed my dad and Father Nick have a conversation with the angel of death in my dad's bedroom. After telling the priest we were visiting this, the priest said that it was nothing to worry about and that this happens to many people. In fact... most priests he knows, including himself, have seen the angel of death around people that are getting their last rites but that few, if any, admit to it to keep things sacred and so that they don't scare people.
Jackie and I really didn't know what to say after we'd heard this. We had no idea for over a decade that any of this had ever happened, so we were REALLY stunned to find out that it had. Take this story for what it's worth. I know it sounds a little bit fantastic and I didn't experience any of it firsthand... but with all the stuff I've seen in my life, I personally believe my mom.
==============
By the way, I had a dream last night where I was falling asleep next to some girl. There wasn't much before that, so I don't know who she was or why. I closed my eyes and went to sleep, and woke up a few hours later. I was lying on my back, looking straight up when I opened my eyes, but could feel the girl right next to me, closer than she had been earlier. I turned my head and found myself about 2 inches from her face - her eyes were black and wide open, her mouth was wide open as well, and her skin was pasty and white. Before I could figure out what to do, she started screaming this horrible scream right in my face, and she grabbed me with her hands and wrapped her legs around mine such that I was incapable of moving. Her fingernails pressed into my biceps, and she began shaking me while unblinkingly gazing at me. She started thrashing like a cat being held down, I screamed, and that scream woke me up. WTF.
==============
This story happened to me and 3 of my friends about 8 years ago, around the ages of 14 or 15. I had to wait until daylight to write this coz it still seems creepy to me.
A friend of mine became interested in Ouija boards and we proceeded out of boredom to experiment with one, not knowing what we were really messing with...
Now I've heard many people tell me how they don't believe these things work or that they are bullshit (Yes, I've seen the Penn and Teller episode about these). I'm not saying that Ouija boards are "OMG PORTALS TO THE SPIRIT WORLD" or maybe my friend's house was just haunted in the first place... I don't know. But that summer in his house, under low light in his basement, I saw things that I to this day display vividly in my mind.
First we started with trying to use it in the light; this did not work well at all. We discovered that you needed to be somewhere mostly dark with very little light, hence the basement.
We move to a small dark room in the basement and crack the door a little to let some light in. We all sit around the board on the floor and place our hands on the planchette and quietly stare at it. One of us would ask a question, and to our surprise, the planchette began to move. We argue and accuse each other of moving it, but we all deny it... we all agree that we are indeed not moving it. We continue on asking it questions, until suddenly 2 books from the shelf behind us decide to fall to the floor. We freak out and quickly run up the basement stairs.
We became even more curious and interested after this, we were convinced that something moved those books and we wanted to see it happen again, so a friend of mine decided that we should just ask it to show us something.
We get started and again have it working; my friend then decides to ask it this question: "Show us a sign that you are here."
The planchette would quickly move to spell out Y O U R E D E A D
oh shit.
This then begins the image that will stay with me forever.
My friend had his Genesis games (in the plastic cases) neatly aligned on the top shelf above the TV in that room. They suddenly began to stagger off the shelf one at a time to the ground, almost fluidlike, very slowly. This freaks us out and we all book it for the basement stairs... as we are running, we run past a stack of cassettes that are suddenly smashed like someone swung at them with their hand.
We make it upstairs and are completely freaked out, but at the same time, are like: "Holy shit, that was cool!"
His mom was home and asked us what the hell was going on: we told her, and she wanted us to show her. Again, they tried it... and it spelled out W A T C H O U T
Suddenly the games rose up all at once and spun around the room and it sounded almost like there was wind in the room. His mom felt someone tap her shoulder. I thought she was going to have a heart attack, she was so scared. She was completely freaked and disallowed us from using it again in their house.
After that, we continued to use it for the next few weeks (even though his mom forbid it) and we found out some other interesting things about using the board: it even claimed that "SATAN LIVES IN YOUR BASEMENT!" But we eventually get bored and I haven't really messed with one since. I still see these friends quite often and still bring it up once in a while... and we all agree on what we saw, and agree that it was just a really fucked-up experience.
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I had a friend in high school, Barrett, whose basement was haunted. Both through talking to him and by visiting a few times, I got some pretty interesting occurrences.
Firstly, walking down the stairs always, and I mean always, caused a certain sense of foreboding. I asked him about it after my first visit, and he said it was just something that was there, and you had to get used to.
Also, there were a few visual phenomena that went on there. Barrett claims that, once, he saw a female foot sticking out of the curtain that separated the laundry room from the rest of the main basement room (his bedroom was also down there), with the hint of a frilly white dress. He knew there were no women in the house; mom was at work and sister was away to college. He blinked, and it was gone.
His father started to go up the stairs, leaving the basement, when he was confronted by a large, snarling black dog with red, rather evil-looking eyes. He says that he stared at it, blinked, and it was gone.
There were a few other odd phenomena that would happen down there. There was a sense of being watched, especially when writing something or playing on his computer. Apparently these spirits were pretty big tech geeks or something. Also, we held a Halloween party down there one year. Figured we'd watch Critters 3, have a few laughs, send whoever had the best costume out on a 16-year-old trick-or-treating (or perhaps bag-snatching, if he / she was up for it) candy run, whatever. We were all just sort-of hanging around, and we hear this voice: "Baaarrreeeet. Baaaarrrreeet" Whatever it was, it was saying his name. There was nobody else in the house, but it sounds like it's coming from the ventilation system. Really spooky, although most of us just shrugged it off and enjoyed the party.
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Just before I was conceived, my parents bought a house about a block away from my grandparents so that in case something bad happened to my grandfather, who was sick, my parents would be there to help. A year later, I was conceived, and mere months later, my grandfather died in his sleep of a heart attack. When I was two years old, my parents decided that it was time to move out of the crappy college student house they had rented for the three years of their marriage, and leave behind all the misplaced hopes in keeping my grandfather alive.
They shopped around as all people do when buying a house, and after a few months, they decided to bring me along with them to see how their wonderful son would enjoy the houses. They finally decided on one when they saw me playing with my little matchbox cars in the kitchen window, I seemed happy there, they liked the neighborhood, and at the price, it was a steal.
The only problem was the attic. While looking at the house, my parents had felt strange in the attic, as if there was someone there besides them and the realtor, some sort of presence. They inquired about this, and the realtor, either not knowing, or realizing that she would have a sale on her hands if she didn't mention it, said she knew of nothing strange that may have happened there. Overjoyed, my parents bought the house, and around a year later, my sister was born.
Now, one of the peculiarities of the house was the fact that in the basement, way off back by the furnace, was a small stall that had been installed as a shower. Apparently the previous owner had worked outside, and when he came home, he would be covered in mud. The man's wife, understandably, had hated him tracking the mud through her immaculate house, and they had the shower installed so that whenever he came in, he would be clean.
I'm not entirely sure when I remember things happening, but I know I was fairly young. You'd be sleeping in bed nice and peacefully, and suddenly be awoken with a horrible feeling of something being terribly, terribly wrong. A few moments after waking up, the footsteps would start.
Part of understanding this story, is knowing the layout of the upstairs. It looked much like this:
code:
__________________________________________________________
| | |
|
| sister's room | bathroom | parents' room
|
| | |
|
back |______________________ | __________ |
|
yard |______________________ | |
|
| | | hallway |
|
| | | |
|
| play | my room | |
|
| room | | |
|
|______| | |
|
| | | |
|
| | | _____|
|
| | | down |attic|
|
|______|________________|______|stair|_____________________|
Imagine, if you will, being a simple five-year-old, already petrified by the dark, and being forced to see your surroundings by whatever moonlight would filter in to your window between the cramped houses in the city. Imagine laying there and being woken up by footsteps, knowing full well that your parents were in bed across the hall, and that your sister was too young to even walk and was still in her crib anyway.
The footsteps would seem to start around where the stairs started on the first floor. They would continue up the stairs, sometimes loud, sometimes at the edge of hearing. After they would reach the top of the stairs, they would then pass through the doorway to the attic, and continue up those stairs. Then the would stomp across the attic floor, passing over the hallway and my sister's room, to finally rest somewhere between my room and the playroom. They would do this many times a night, and nearly every night. It's amazing what people can get used to.
As time went on, I would begin to realize that all those slight sounds at the edge of hearing that you would normally write off and simple city noise, were actually voices. Rarely could they be understood, but in many situations, a whispering would seem to come from mere inches away from your ear, almost as if someone were trying to scream at you and yet whisper at the same time.
Of course, as any smart five-year-old would, I had told my parents about this. And, of course, just like any smart parent, they completely ignored it as the over-active imagination of a child. The steps never went over their room, and their door was always closed with their air conditioning blowing, why should they hear anything?
But somewhere in the back of their minds, they remembered how they felt going up into that attic the first time. They felt the dread as they would go up there themselves now to take something out or to store some old piece of furniture we no longer needed, but they'd just ignore it as stupid childhood fears rising anew in this 60-odd year-old house.
As my sister got older, I was encouraged with the knowledge that it wasn't just me, that I wasn't just some stupid kid scared of the dark and the sounds of an old house settling. She too heard the footsteps, she too felt the feeling of dread whenever we went into the attic (which was rare). It was around this time that I started going into the basement more, as my dad had just constructed a massive train board, the train board of train boards, an O-Scale Mecca in our very basement.
Sometimes while down there alone, we'd hear him call up to us as if in answer to some unvoiced question. While down there myself in the broad daylight, there would be some sort of shadow in the corner, a shadow that was vaguely man-shaped and would move from the corner to the late-installed shower. I know my dad saw something down there around this time, because we had the exorcist (my dad's personal friends with him) over and they dedicated the house to the Sacred Heart. Looking back on it, I think they knew something was up and didn't want to frighten their children, already scared of the old house. And the footsteps stopped for a while.
Years went by, and the only sounds we'd hear were what was CLEARLY the house settling, the floorboards in the attic expanding and contracting, the old shingles of the house groaning with the change in air-pressure. And then they started again, one horrible night.
I had a friend from down the street over to spend the night, and we had spent much of the day playing the NES in my play room, having a good ol' time. As we settled down to sleep, we talked about whatever it is young boys of that age talked about (probably about how nasty and disgusting such and such a girl was, refusing to admit that we had a crush on them), and I flipped off the light to my room and closed the door. The saved-up light from the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling had just faded, and my parents had just gone to bed, when we heard the loud crash downstairs.
Not thinking anything of it, since it had been so long since the footsteps had stopped, I cracked open my door to see what the hell my parents were doing, ready to ask them as soon as they reached the top of the stairs, since hey, I could hear them coming up.
The footsteps reached the top, and rounded the corner to head up to the attic. There was clearly nothing there, but I heard heavy breathing, as if it had been an effort to climb that far. I slowly closed the door, frightened out of my wits, but not wanting to say anything to my friend, lest he taunt me. I settled into the bed clearly disturbed, when he sat up and said "What?" as if I had just called him. I informed him that I had said nothing, and he just mumbled, "Oh," as he lay back down.
It was then that we heard an even louder crash, almost a bang, from the attic right above my room. Throwing caution to the wind, we surged out of my room into my parents' room, where they were clearly having sex. Interrupted, they calmed us down, said it was our imagination or the people down the street, and sent us back to my room, where we remained awake until the sun rose. The footsteps had come back, and this time, they weren't leaving.
Now that the footsteps had returned, whatever causing them invigorated by the chilling fear in the poor ten-year-olds present, the voices also returned. The whispering would start again, mostly in the upstairs hall or living room, and oftentimes during the day.
The whispering increased, and it wasn't content to just remain a slight thing heard in such a way that you could think you were mistaken, oh no... it wanted to be heard this time.
My sister was upstairs in her room, playing with Barbies or something, my parents were in the living room watching TV, and I was in the downstairs toilet taking a refreshing shit. Suddenly, an ear-splitting scream erupted from above, and I heard my dad's trademark fat-man stomp up the stairs, for once in an actual hurry. I came out of the bathroom and into the living room where my mom still was, as she waited for my dad to come back down, clearly afraid that something had happened to my sister.
After a few minutes, my dad came down the stairs looking slightly confused, and simply said, "She didn't scream." Apparently, she hadn't heard anything either.
From then on, you would hear someone calling your name, as if across a vast distance, whenever the presence decided that the house was too quiet and that its residents were too comfortable.
Shortly after this incident, my parents had saved up a decent amount of money, and decided it was time to renovate the house, in their ever-inherent wisdom, deciding to finish off the attic and make it into a family room.
Upon completion, the now more modern house seemed to have settled down, the strange happenings seemed to have been wrestled out of the house by modern conveniences having no place for the supernatural, but they would be back for one final hurrah before we moved, leaving the house and whatever things were in it, to the next person that decided to live there.
It was right before my parents decided it was time we moved, and I was around thirteen or fourteen when they came back. The attic had been finished off nicely, brightened immensely by the gray carpet, white walls, and skylights. My parents had decided to keep some storage area intact, and off to both sides were small doors that opened into crawl spaces for storage. Resting against the wall to one of them, was a futon, and right over my sister's room was the TV, sitting on a large desk. My parents had also installed a two-way intercom so that they could call us from downstairs for dinner, rather than trying to scream up to people thirty feet above and with five feet of wood and piping between. The carpet turned slightly brown near the window overlooking my neighbor's driveway, but my parents just blamed a shoddy ability at drinking soda.
One night I realized the footsteps had come back, and not sure whether they had been back for a while, or if they were simply the house settling (I'm thirteen, I'm invincible! Stupid little kid fears are for fags and queers! That rhymed!), I simply ignored it. The next morning, I heard someone calling my name again, and knew in the back of my mind that it was back.
That evening, my sister had her friend from down the street over, different house and family from my friend. They were up in the new family room playing Super Nintendo, and I was in my playroom on my brand new Compaq, surfing the wonderful interweb brought to me by a friend and AOL ©. As I was listening to whatever shitty music I listened to at the time (actually probably not all that shitty, I think the Presidents of the USA had their first CD out by then), I heard a loud smash come from above, followed shortly after by another many feet away.
I charged up the stairs ready to give my sister hell for breaking something of mine, and found the TV on top of one of my Atari 2600 controllers, about fifteen feet away from where it normally was. My sister and her friend just sat on the futon petrified. According to them, the TV had simply flown across the room as if thrown, and based on the fact that they were only 8 or 9, I was inclined to believe that they hadn't tried to pick it up and carry it. The doors to both crawlspaces were wide open, and a strange static noise was coming from the intercom. As I bent down to use my thirteen-year-old muscles to the max to put the TV back, I heard, much like the name calling from a great distance, a low and mirthless laughter. I put the TV back, closed the doors, and went back to my room.
We moved out of the house two years later, the footsteps and name-calling continuing to the bitter end, and haven't heard anything from the new occupants about any strange occurrences. Our new house is devoid of anything strange, and is just as sterile and empty as most suburban homes.
What bothers me the most about this, however, is the fact that my parents were so bothered by what they felt when in the attic, that they asked the neighbors on either side of us, both groups having lived there since they married back in the '50s. It turns out that two owners prior, the one who had had the shower installed, had killed himself in the attic, near the window overlooking my neighbor's driveway. He had grown tired of living, sick of his wife's nagging, and had taken a single chair from the kitchen up, placed a shotgun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.
My parents neglected to tell me this till I overheard them talking about it to my grandmother this year. It's been almost seven years since we moved. Thanks, mom and dad... thanks for everything.
So, Vanessa (my colleague) and her boyfriend were driving up to a resort in Malaysia (Genting, I think). They were supposed to meet their friends there for a holiday getaway, and she went separately with her boyfriend (whose name escapes me at the moment).
Some time into the journey, she notices that they seem to be going in circles. Pointing this out to her bf, she sees the same road sign, directing them left, but as they round the bend they come up to the same one again. And again. And so it goes for at least half an hour. At this, they're majorly freaked out, but nothing seems to be happening so far. Until finally, the car died.
Stuck in the middle of the road, on a winding mountain pass, miles away from any sign of civilization. Neither of them know jack about fixing cars, their cell phones couldn't go through, they were stuck with nothing to do and nothing to do about it. A young girl (about 20+) comes up to them out of the woods, and sees the predicament they're in. She offers to help them, as long as they'll just sit tight in the car and not go anywhere. So while she's fixing the car, the hood of the car is up, and they can't see anything that she's doing. Finally, they hear: "Okay, that should do it. Start the car."
The hood drops down. And no one's there. Vanessa and her boyfriend turn to look at each other, look back at the road, scream "FUCK!" and gun the engine. They never stopped till they reached the resort a short while later.
When they get there, though, they see their friends there, some are crying, and others look worried. According to them, they'd been missing for an hour, and all attempts to contact them couldn't go through. Vanessa and her boyfriend check the clocks in the car, their watches, ALL timepieces - they were all one hour behind. It was as if they didn't exist for an hour.
Vanessa tells me that the way she looks at it, the ghost knew that their car would break down on the way there, and as payment for fixing it, took away one hour of their life.
============
Asian ghost stories, hmm... I have one of those, I posted it about a year or so ago.
My best friend's (Kiran from my other story) family is cursed. Once upon a time many many years ago in India a woman who practiced black magic got involved with this family, an argument over something trivial and meaningless caused this "witch" to cast a curse on every newborn in the family. The curse was that a black ghost or Cacodemon as I think they're known as would be present at every birth within this family and every child would die at the hands of it.
Before Kiran was born, her father had suffered two major heart attacks for no reason: he was young and healthy. After that, her mother became clinically depressed. Soon, she became pregnant with a boy. When the boy was born, he had many many physical conditions and was almost stillborn... he died a year later, dead in his cradle: half his body was black, half was white. This was part of the curse, and the family knew it. They soon moved into an old house in Somerset. The mother became pregnant again with Kiran. When Kiran was born, the mother called a Christian priest to be with her at the birth, despite the parents being Sikh and Hindu. Kiran was born almost at the cost of the mother's life... it was a very awkward birth, and the priest said he saw a black figure plunging his fist into the heart of the mother.
Kiran survived, thankfully, but the black figure wanted her dead and was not going to stop until she was. As Kiran grew up, she would walk through the house and see blood seep through the floorboards. Her father became ill again with heart disease: he collapsed, and after that, blood would permanently mark the floor. They soon moved away after every family member became progressively ill with unexplainable diseases.
Fast forward many years later to when I met her in college. I'm not sure how the conversation came about, but she told me that at night she would see someone look through her bedroom window: it was a black figure with red eyes, but it couldn't enter the house. This is the thing about Asian curses: the ghosts can't enter somewhere with electricity, so Kiran was technically safe. One night, she was at home by herself and she heard a knock on her window... she ignored it. With another knock, she fixated her gaze on the window: she saw a white hand scratching and sliding down the window. Running over to the window, she flung it open to see nobody there. There were no trees near the house, either, so it wasn't branches scraping the glass. She decided to go downstairs and wait for her parents to return home. Now, at this time she had several statues of Buddha in her front room, and according to her... when she went downstairs, the eyes of one of the statues was glowing and all of the windows in the house were being rattled, knocked, and scratched. She went and hid and fell asleep whilst unexplainable creakings and whispers haunted the hallways...
I was intrigued by her story, but scared for her at the same time. I wanted her to get rid of this thing, mainly because I was scared to stay at her house for fear of seeing something. Every time I had stayed at her house, I'd be extremely sick the next day with breathing troubles which would only subside when I got back to my own house. The thought of this curse plaguing my friend stuck in my mind for many months, and in December I became extremely ill... it felt like I had been dragged into the whole situation. There was no explanation for my illness either... I had the symptoms of diabetes and insomnia but my blood tests came back clear. But I was so ill that I found I was more "tuned in" to scary shit happening.
One night, I lay in bed and I concentrated hard on trying to "see" this thing that had latched onto Kiran. I tried for about 30 minutes, then I felt a sudden rush of pain. I saw a dark figure behind my window... everything started rattling and shaking, and I could hear whispers of someone trapped within it. I had to stop... I was terrified of what was going to happen. I fell asleep and had a strange dream where I was looking out my window to a clear blue sky: a black figure, flowing like ink, travelled along the sky and formed the shape of a scythe. I woke up shaken and with the urge that I had to phone Kiran straight away. I told her I had seen the thing in my dream and it had given me a "message" for her. After telling her that I saw a scythe, she revealed she had had her tarot done the night before and the scythe card (don't ask me what card it is... I wouldn't know) came up three times. I just took it as a coincidence, but was still shaken.
About a week later, I had another dream... except it felt lucid. I was in Kiran's house looking out her window, and I saw that evil thing again. But inside was the face of a boy, who reached out to me because he as scared... I tried to pull him back to me, but couldn't. Kiran confronted me that day at college and said: "This morning.. I swear I saw you at my window." I told her about the dream and that I saw the face of a boy. Now at this time I wasn't aware of her dead brother, but we both realised that he was being used by the curse as an energy source, I guess. The way to get rid of it was to set her brother free, but time was running out. I was becoming sicker by the day and wasn't able to communicate with Kiran, and the cursed ghost was getting angrier and angrier...
Over the coming weeks, Kiran would tell me that the ghost's form was changing, that a huge domed shadow would fall on her wall at night, as if the ghost was now solid. She was soon going to South America and wanted it to be gone by then since she would be unprotected against it. One night as she lay in bed, she saw something on her desk: a small figure was shouting at her, and it looked like a goblin of some sort, but more grotesque. Pits for eyes, large sharp teeth, and rotting scales for skin. She wanted to fight it, but couldn't move. She went to sleep and saw it still in a dream: in her dream, she attacked it with one of her training staffs she keeps by the side of the bed. She woke up the next morning to find all her training weapons thrown across the floor: they're hidden beneath her mattress, so there was no way anyone else had used them.
I decided to tell my dad about what was going on as he is pretty knowledgeable about these things: he gave me specific instructions about what to do. Of course, all the responsibility was on me now... I had to get rid of it because nobody else could. I had to do this ritual type thing which is designed to protect someone: it's not so much the words you use to invoke it, but the intent, and my intent was to stop all this nasty shit happening to Kiran before something bad DID happen.
I stood in the front room with an orange highlighter and a stack of printed notes with Latin translations on for the incantations. I felt like a complete dick having to do a bunch of weird stances and learning a load of symbols, but if it worked, then I'd be happy. I began in something called "Horse stance" which I believe is used in some martial arts... and it HURTS. Supposedly, it's good for getting a decent flow of energy. Personally, I think it was only good for making God laugh at me. I did the ritual once... however, after realising that whatever I was invoking probably wouldn't be impressed at my two-minute pauses to read the notes, I did it again for good measure. I have to say I felt really drained afterwards. I told Kiran I had done my best, and hopefully it worked.
After 2 days, the shadow gradually faded to nothing and whatever was there had gone. But her dead brother remained to watch over her: he was free now to either go to where he belonged, or stay behind and watch over his sister in peace, and I guess that's what he chose to do. I have to say I haven't been ill from staying there ever since and I'm definitely not as scared as I was to be in her house.
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Last year, my younger sister who was 19 (Jackie) at the time and I (Adam / 22) visited our older sister, 29 (Tracy), where she lives in the garden district of New Orleans. We figured we'd have a grand time of it just drinking, partying, and staying up till the crack of dawn five days in a row. On the second night there, Tracy starts telling us about some ghostly experiences some of her friends have had in New Orleans and runs the idea by of us possibly going ghost hunting late that night. She had a voice activated recorder with her, just for the experience, so Jackie and I decided that it might be fun. Around 2 AM, we decided to start our trek towards a local cemetery and we actually arrived at our destination in about 15 minutes' time, just walking. Along the walk, Jackie and I both noticed that our older sister was dressed in a long skirt and we're thinking: "Shit, I hope she doesn't try to chicken out of this by saying something lame about not wanting to chance ripping her skirt while climbing over the gate to get in," since we knew this is pretty much how Tracy thinks. Sure enough, by the time we reached the gates, Tracy had chickened out and used her skirt as an excuse to get out of going in. Jackie and I still decided that it might be fun, so we were going to have a go at it. Jackie's one of the smaller people on the planet, so she slid right through the gates, whereas I had to climb over them. This is going to sound cheesy, as in something right out of a B movie, but as the second Tracy passed the recorder through the bars, it stopped working. She went off on a stroll to see if she could figure out what was wrong, but in the meantime, Jackie and I set off to our left and down a row at the cemetery. For those of you that have never been to a New Orleans cemetery, all of the graves are above ground since the water table is only 6 feet or so below the surface in most areas there. Therefore, a lot of the graves are more elaborately-decorated tombs more than anything else. To get back to the story though, it was dead silent outside, save for the sound of our two sets of footsteps.
We stopped for a moment to get a better look at the nearby grave with a Celtic cross on top that had an eagle perched on it. Even in the dark, it looked pretty cool, but then we decided to keep moving. No sooner than taking that first step away, it sounded like a 3rd set of footsteps had joined us about 6 feet to our right, along with the sound of something like gaudy jewelry jingling. We stopped for a moment, and the footsteps stopped with us, and then kept on walking, only to be joined by the footsteps again. Jackie and I both looked at each other and started running towards the entrance. Again, she slipped through the bars and I leapt up onto a trash can, then over the gate, ninja-rolled, got up and joined Jackie in pursuit of our older sister. As soon as we found her, we informed her of what we'd heard, and she informed us of the fact that she'd gotten the recorder to start working. Jackie was still a bit shaken and wasn't at all up for going back in, but me being the big ol' dumbass of the group decided that since the recorder was working, it might just be worth a shot.
After a quick cigarette, I grabbed the recorder and worked my way over the gate once more. This time, I decided that it might just be safer to go to the right. So that's where my trek led me and I happened upon a little garden. I went in, stood around awhile, and closed my eyes for a bit. After, oh, I'd say 20 seconds worth of standing there, I felt a small jolt in my left hand as the recorder started moving. I looked at it, and sure enough, the red light had gone on to show that it was in the process of recording something, though as far as I was concerned, it was completely silent all around me because after seeing that this thing was recording, all I could do was sit there and hold my breath. That was when IT hit me. I don't know how IT can properly be described, but it was like a sourness and blackness in the air. I know most people talk about chills or feeling something cold, but this was definitely something hot that hit me. Soon I was surrounded by a chaotic feeling of despair, sadness, hatred, and regret. It quickly washed over me, the recorder still recording this entire time, and I was paralyzed and completely useless to do anything about this. I know I can't accurately describe what this felt like in words, but I've never been this horrified in my entire life, and could do nothing but stand there and pray that I was able to breathe again sometime soon.
Eventually all my senses came to me, and I jolted towards the exit... with this hot, stagnant feeling following closely behind. I made it to the trashcan, leapt up on top of it again (though much less deftly this time) and fell thigh first on a spike, and then head first over the gate, and out. I didn't receive any permanent damage, just a bunch of bruising from the incident. As soon as I could, I got up and rejoined my sisters. Though I was happy to see them, they looked visibly shaken to see me. Apparently I was completely white when I caught up with them, and that's when I realized that my whole body was drenched in sweat. We finally made it to my sister's apartment and I sat down at the steps to have another cigarette, watching a small puddle form at my feet from the sweat dripping off my face. After I took a shower, we decided to listen to that night's recordings, but unfortunately Tracy, in her process of fixing the recorder, had switched sides on the tape so the recorder was trying to record for over a minute on that white piece of leading tape. Sure, we had nothing to listen to, but I can't say that I wasn't happy for that blunder.
The next morning, we decided to make our way down to that same cemetery in the daylight. It was much less frightening then, with people milling about taking pictures and bringing fresh flowers to their deceased. Eventually, Jackie and I found the grave I mentioned earlier and it was inhabited by a woman who died in the late 1800s at the age of 45. After that, we moved on over to the other side of the cemetery to check out the garden I was in. I was kind of shocked to see that it wasn't just a garden, but a small set of plots as well with a plaque that read, "The Garden of Orphans." Every grave there was filled by a child under the age of five that had died around the turn of the century, and that's pretty much my story from last summer.
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The area I'm in right now is a hotbed of activity. Colonial battlefields and the like.
I've shared a house with another goon named Lunix King for about a year now. We have two ghosts: the old man and the old lady. There's actually a picture of the old lady floating around somewhere. I haven't actually seen them yet, but everyone else fucking has. Other than creeping me out when I do laundry and talking to our friend's little girl, the old lady doesn't do much.
The old man, however is a different story. We hear shit all the time. Everyone will be in the living room, cats included, and somebody out in the kitchen will move the beer bottles around. The cats go nuts when this happens. You can actually hear them clink as they get set down. We come out from the living room, and the bottles are nicely arranged. Three of my friends have seen the old man.
Fellow goon Battle Pope was staying over one night and had crashed in Lunix King's bed, as my roommate was passed out in front of his computer. At like 6 AM, I woke up just feeling weird all over, hair standing up on my arms and the back of my neck. It was right about the same time that Battle Pope woke up and saw somebody in the doorway. He said that an old, bald man dressed in black leering over him, just staring at him. Battle Pope had to sit up to get a better look, and when he did, the guy was gone. Nobody in the house matches that description, and everybody who was there was in bed long before that.
A few weeks later, an old friend of mine came over for a while and we were up in my room talking when she saw somebody walk past my door. Which is impossible... unless of course, they walked through the wall that's right there. And a few weeks after that, we were all sitting around the dining room table when my buddy Pat saw some dude in a flannel shirt standing in the kitchen doorway, by the thermostat. He kept telling us about it, and every time we turned, the guy wasn't there. The thermostat kept going lower and lower, though.
I've still never seen one of them, but I've felt their presence. The old man likes to hang out on the stairs or in the kitchen, just a pocket of really cold air in a house that's normally overly hot.
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When I lived at home (read: with parents), there was a lot of time when my father wasn't around. He had to go on a lot of business trips (sells GPS equipment for a Swiss company), so he was gone a lot. He worried about us, so we'd talk to him on the phone every day he was away. Dad really loves us - a few years ago, his screaming-awake Vietnam nightmares were replaced with his family being killed, screaming-awake nightmares. A couple of times a year, Dad would have to go overseas - to Switzerland, to Singapore, to Belgium. It was during one of this trips that I saw the ghost in the house for the first time.
A few years ago, back when we only had one computer in the den (finished room in the basement, a TV room, really), it was caddy-cornered opposite the staircase leading into the basement. If you were sitting at the computer (which I obviously did a lot of), your back faced the stairs, and you couldn't see the majority of the room. The laundry room was also down there, and my mother would occasionally come down while I was typing away. We'd chat idly for a few moments - I'd not even have to turn around.
I was sitting at the computer one late afternoon, and I heard my mother coming down the stairs. "Hey," I said, as I was chatting to random folk. Nothing. That's rude, I thought. So I said, more loudly: "Hey!" Still nothing. I figured my mum was standing behind me, silent with anger at something one of us kids had done, so I turned around to tell her I hadn't done anything, but it wasn't my mother at the base of the stairs. It was a man. He was wearing jeans and a white, V-neck t-shirt (like an undershirt a lot of men wear). He was translucent, but faded from view below the knees and above the neck - for the most part. I could just barely tell that he was wearing shoes (brown loafers, from the looks of it), and could just barely tell that he had brown hair - features were incredibly hard to define.
Naturally, I did a double take and let out a yelp. He didn't disappear straight away - over a couple of seconds, he just seemed to disappear - the staircase was dark and it looked almost as if he was floating backwards, fading into the stairs. I could tell he was looking at me, but I didn't sense danger. I was scared, and told whoever I was chatting with what had just happened.
A few months later, I was going to the washroom on the main floor of our house. The washroom door and my parents' bedroom door are at a right angle, so you passed the bedroom door on your left as you were about to enter the washroom at the end of the hallway. As I was going in, I looked in my parents' room and saw my dad lying on my parents' bed. I didn't think anything of it, until I was washing my hands. I was looking at myself in the mirror, and recalled what my dad was wearing - brown shoes, jeans, and the white t-shirt. Simultaneously, I remembered the ghost - and that my dad was out of town. I whipped out of the washroom and into the bedroom, and yelled "What the fuck?" at whoever was on the bed. There the ghost was, lying straight as an arrow, arms flat by his sides. He was looking straight up, and seemed to sink into the mattress and disappear.
I brought it up when my mum got home from work a couple of hours later. It was nighttime, and it was pretty fucking freaky being home alone, waiting for my mother. She was curious as to why every single light in the house was on. I wasn't sure what to think - I'd seen the ghost before, so it couldn't mean that Dad was dead. He didn't call that night, as it was the middle of the night in Switzerland.
A couple of us in the family have seen the ghost since - only when my father was overseas. And, upon further confirmation with Dad, only when he was asleep. We think that he misses us and worries about us so much that he has to check up on us in some way, even when he can't do it in person. I hope this positive ghost story makes people feel a little less like sleeping with the lights on...
IN REPLY:
Yeah, this sounds a lot like astral projection to me. The only time I managed projection was after just falling asleep, from a dream. William Shatner was in the dream and he was telling people to jump for a portal that was on my bedroom wall at the count of three. I did.
I missed and landed on the floor. This part was no longer a dream - it was fucking real. There I was, sitting in my astral body, on the damn floor. It wasn't dream-like in the least, it was just as vivid and real as waking life. I made the mistake of glancing towards the bed and saw my body still lying there, curled up asleep and looking somewhat lifeless. I freaked out and tried to scream (nothing came out), and ended up right back in my body. It wasn't hard for me to get back out of body right after that, but everytime I did I heard noises like someone was knocking at my window, and it freaked me out enough that I gave up completely.
I found out later that those kinds of sounds are pretty normal in projection. You just have to learn to block them out or move past them. I didn't know that at the time, though, and figured some nasty spirit or something was waiting outside my window for me. Anyway, that was my one and only experience with conscious astral projection. Your dad seems to be doing this in his sleep, so he might not remember it at all. As for conscious astral projection, when people ask me if what they've experienced was an astral projection, I tell them that if there's any doubt in their mind that it wasn't a projection, they're right.
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I've got several stories, mostly silly little small things, along with a couple bizarro ones. A couple of them may or may not be "ghost" stories, but they are sure as fuck scary stories. I'll start off easy.
I once heard a light knocking / scraping sound on my bedroom door at my parents' house. It sounded almost exactly like a cat wanting in, but somehow off. I opened the door expecting to see one of my 6 cats, but instead saw nothing... I felt a gust of cool air, and heard a feminine voice whisper "thank you."
Sitting on my porch with a friend at about 3 AM, we heard a bizarre noise coming from the forest in our backyard. It sounded like chewing. We leaned out over the porch and looked and the sound continued. It sounded like a zombie walking from Resident Evil, but much faster. I yelled out, "WHAT THE FUCK?!" and was greeted by at least 6 pairs of small yellow eyes looking back at me from maybe 15 feet away. They turned away after about 5 seconds, and the sound resumed.
There is a storm sewer by my parents' house called the Batcave. We have explored it probably close to 40 times: sometimes really freaky shit happens; other times, you can spend hours down there and nothing will happen. There is some very bizarre backward counting graffiti that starts as numbers, switches to Roman numerals, goes back to numbers, and after reaching 0, says: "Welcome to hell." You will see shadows, get cold chills, hear whispers, and occasionally hear heavy steel pipes rolling around. We have never really seen or heard anything very concrete, though.
The only truly bizarre, terrifying, and unexplainable event I have experienced was at an old friend's house. His dad had recently been laid off, and they sold their fairly nice house to move to a cheaper one. It was 2 blocks away from a power plant, and the plant made an eerie shrieking / grinding noise rhythmically every 15 minutes or so. We were up in his room at about 2 AM playing Playstation 1 / trading cards when we hear yelling and gunfire outside. This was sort of the ghetto, so we thought it might be a gangbang or something. We look out and there is a man on his porch pointing a handgun into the street at nothing. Then Danny noticed a vague shape out in the street. I don't know if it took our eyes a second to adjust, but it looked to me like the thing has just appeared right then, as if it materialized. I first saw the back of it, then the front, then the head, each time thinking I was looking at the entire creature. It had a very distinct canine appearance to it, but was at least half as long as the cars parked on the street and was absolutely pitch fucking black. We yelled at the guy, "What the fuck is that?!" and he completely ignored us.
The creature, however, jerked its head around and stared directly at us. That's when we realized its eyes were blood red. Then it made a noise which there is absolutely no description for. It sounded like a dog howling, but much deeper, and in a tone that just implied pure fucking evil. It sounded like it was in pain, and very angry. It made this sound for about 10 full seconds before we shut the window, locked everything, and ran into his parents' room to sleep on the floor. We were 12 or 13 at the time. The next day we examined the street... and there was no blood and no gunshot shells. We never got the nerve to knock on the guy's door.
Ghost, mutated dog from the power plant, who fucking knows. But it sucked.
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Well, this year started off with a bang. Literally. I was coming home from band practice and as I pulled up the street, I noticed flames shooting out of a house. All I could think to myself was: "Christ, knowing my family's luck, it's bound to be our house." So I spoke to the police officer at the end of the street and sure enough, it was my house. What to do now? Well, we were basically left with the clothes we had on and we had to find a place to stay until the insurance company could get a rental house. I stayed with a friend, my sister stayed with another friend, and my mom stayed with her sister.
A couple of weeks later, we were set up with a house and truthfully, I didn't care what it was like so long as it was a place to stay. The first couple of nights weren't too bad at all here, but after nearly a week of staying here, it finally clicked that something just wasn't right. Jackie and I both confronted each other on the fact that you'd just see something out of the corner of your eye much more often than usual here. At first, we attributed it to being in a new house. It wasn't just a couple times a day that you'd see things, but more like 20-25 times a day that you'd just catch a glimpse of something. We told our mom about it for the hell of it, and surprisingly she just refused to comment on it, though we know she's probably experienced it or something worse as she's spending less and less time here and more time at her sister's house. We actually thought this was pretty cool since we're two kids around the age of 20 with a big house to ourselves for most of the week.
By the second week of living here, even more things started to happen. I was on my way out through the front door one day and as I was about to pass the staircase, caught a shadow walking down it. Not just for a second, or two, but I watched him descend the entire staircase. He wasn't hazy, or fuzzy like most shadows are, but pitch black and well-defined. It was impossible to see through him, even in the daylight and you could tell it was the body of a man about 6 feet in height, that was fairly sharply dressed in some sort of suit. As he got to the end of the staircase, he paused, looked over his shoulder at me, nodded, walked a few more steps, turned a corner and just disappeared. Needless to say, I wasn't too happy with my new finding. I've only seen him a couple of times since, though it's always the same ol' thing and he'll turn his head and nod even if there isn't someone standing there. As I mentioned earlier, the stuff I'm going to talk about really isn't all that scary since the ghosts here are completely benign and haven't done anything at all to really scare the hell out of us.
Within 24 hours of that occurence, my sister and I were both awakened by the sound of the TV going on downstairs at an incredible volume. I figured it was her down there being a retard and she figured it was me doing the same, so we both came out of our bedrooms to bitch at the other and that's when we found out that no one else was in the house, and the TV just decided that it was better off on.
I also have a ghost that decides to knock, or speak at my door occasionally. The knocks usually happen around noon everyday, so I'm out of the house... and if I'm not, it's a good wake-up call. The first time it happened, it sounded like a good, loud one knuckle rap on the door. I just thought someone really wanted me awake but alas, I was the only one in the house. That was still early in our stay here and I was pretty weirded out by it... it turned into one of those situations that can best be described as, "go back to sleep and hope everything is better when you wake up."
If the ghost isn't knocking at my door, it's speaking at my door... and on one occasion, even coming into my room. It's a female ghost, with a female voice... I've usually got a fan on in my room, so that just distorts the voice even more. Sadly enough, it's been over 7 months since we've moved into this rental house and I still fall for the voice all the time, thinking it's my sister at the door trying to tell me something. Well, occasionally it IS my sister at the door telling me I've got a phone call or something, but usually it's the ghost just mumbling something in a fairly ethereal voice. I'm sure it'd be spookier if I could tell you what it was saying, but I've still yet to translate any of the gibberish. On the one occasion that the ghost came into the room, I had just laid my head down for a nap. My door was closed and none of the cats were in the room, but something sat down on the bed next to me, swiveled itself and laid down. There was definitely something there as the entire mattress shifted with the weight of something that must've weighed at least 100 pounds. I turned around and there was nothing there, but something was leaving a vague imprint on the bed.
So I just turned back around, and laid there with my eyes wide open, praying to God that I wasn't about to die and hoping that this ghost wasn't about ready to try and communicate with me or touch me. I don't really know how to describe it any better than this but trust me, it's really a pretty terrible feeling when there's physical evidence that something else is in your bed but you cannot see it at all. Anyway, after about two hours, the ghost sat up and got up off the bed, and I ran from my room and took a nap on the downstairs couch.
There are also groups of ghosts that walk around chatting to each other. They only do this in the upstairs, but fairly rarely. Unfortunately, it only ever happens at night and usually on my sister's end of the house so whenever that's happening, it's another sleeping pill night to help combat the noise. Occasionally, one of the group will fall down and create a big dull meaty sound, which is always exciting. It'll keep you on your toes but again, after months of it happening, it becomes more of a minor nuisance than anything else.
Now these are the usual occurrences that tend to happen 1 or 2 times a week. They don't bother us anymore, but I can tell you that I was scared shitless last night while reading this thread and having the ghost occasionally mumble at my door. I actually stayed up until after 7 AM when it was light outside before I even dared go to sleep. There's one last bit to the story, and though it isn't all that scary, it's just plain weird. At times, when I'm walking by the family room downstairs, there'll be a black panther made of shadows standing in there looking in my directions with blank black eyes. It's not your most ordinary panther as it's about 5 feet at the shoulder, and a full 7 feet tall with head. All it does is look at me from time to time, and then just disappears. I've heard stories and all and I don't much believe in this kind of thing but do you think that this could just be some sort of spirit animal of mine or what?
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As I was saying a bit earlier, I lost a parent to diabetes. My dad ended up losing both legs, his kidneys, part of his stomach and small intestine, as well as most of his sight due to neuropathy caused by the disease. He spent most of his last 5 years alive in the hospital, on his death bed. He actually received his last rites 6 times in this period, but every single time he'd somehow make a miraculous recovery and end up coming home at least for a little while.
Now a jump to the future! After a few weeks of staying in this haunted home, which I mentioned in my last post, my mom decided it was time to see a priest. My mom never told him much about this house at all. Just that she'd experienced a couple things and that they didn't make her feel comfortable. My sister and I aren't religious at all, and being non-religious, this was boring the shit out of us. Eventually he gave us all prayers to St. Michael the Archangel and rosaries to take home with us. It was only after this that he started mentioning priests in the area that were experts with the paranormal and some priests that were exorcists and experts in consecrating the ground in areas. Needless to say, my interest was piqued from this point forward.
We never got to talking about much else to deal with exorcisms, because at this point my mom started to sob a little bit and related a story to all of us. Back when my dad was dying, priests would sometime come to visit him in the house. We just figured that it was like a personal mass or something but apparently it was a bit different than that. Apparently the priests, Father Nick Zukowski (in case anyone out there has him at their parish now) in particular, were coming over to give my father blessings because he'd been seeing a number of angels and the angel of death was nearly present with my father at all times. Not present in a metaphorical sense, but in a physical sense is what I'm talking about. Apparently he'd speak with my father occasionally, saying that he was watching over him and ready to take him as soon as my father decided that he couldn't hold on any longer. THIS WAS FOR 5 FREAKING YEARS!!!!!!!!
I knew none of this was happening at the time because I was still a little kid, and my mom and dad didn't want to scare me. My mom said my dad described him as a very large black hooded figured with a set of massive, brilliant white wings, and Father Nick described him the same way on occasion. My mom also related the fact that she never saw the angel, but that she had witnessed my dad and Father Nick have a conversation with the angel of death in my dad's bedroom. After telling the priest we were visiting this, the priest said that it was nothing to worry about and that this happens to many people. In fact... most priests he knows, including himself, have seen the angel of death around people that are getting their last rites but that few, if any, admit to it to keep things sacred and so that they don't scare people.
Jackie and I really didn't know what to say after we'd heard this. We had no idea for over a decade that any of this had ever happened, so we were REALLY stunned to find out that it had. Take this story for what it's worth. I know it sounds a little bit fantastic and I didn't experience any of it firsthand... but with all the stuff I've seen in my life, I personally believe my mom.
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By the way, I had a dream last night where I was falling asleep next to some girl. There wasn't much before that, so I don't know who she was or why. I closed my eyes and went to sleep, and woke up a few hours later. I was lying on my back, looking straight up when I opened my eyes, but could feel the girl right next to me, closer than she had been earlier. I turned my head and found myself about 2 inches from her face - her eyes were black and wide open, her mouth was wide open as well, and her skin was pasty and white. Before I could figure out what to do, she started screaming this horrible scream right in my face, and she grabbed me with her hands and wrapped her legs around mine such that I was incapable of moving. Her fingernails pressed into my biceps, and she began shaking me while unblinkingly gazing at me. She started thrashing like a cat being held down, I screamed, and that scream woke me up. WTF.
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This story happened to me and 3 of my friends about 8 years ago, around the ages of 14 or 15. I had to wait until daylight to write this coz it still seems creepy to me.
A friend of mine became interested in Ouija boards and we proceeded out of boredom to experiment with one, not knowing what we were really messing with...
Now I've heard many people tell me how they don't believe these things work or that they are bullshit (Yes, I've seen the Penn and Teller episode about these). I'm not saying that Ouija boards are "OMG PORTALS TO THE SPIRIT WORLD" or maybe my friend's house was just haunted in the first place... I don't know. But that summer in his house, under low light in his basement, I saw things that I to this day display vividly in my mind.
First we started with trying to use it in the light; this did not work well at all. We discovered that you needed to be somewhere mostly dark with very little light, hence the basement.
We move to a small dark room in the basement and crack the door a little to let some light in. We all sit around the board on the floor and place our hands on the planchette and quietly stare at it. One of us would ask a question, and to our surprise, the planchette began to move. We argue and accuse each other of moving it, but we all deny it... we all agree that we are indeed not moving it. We continue on asking it questions, until suddenly 2 books from the shelf behind us decide to fall to the floor. We freak out and quickly run up the basement stairs.
We became even more curious and interested after this, we were convinced that something moved those books and we wanted to see it happen again, so a friend of mine decided that we should just ask it to show us something.
We get started and again have it working; my friend then decides to ask it this question: "Show us a sign that you are here."
The planchette would quickly move to spell out Y O U R E D E A D
oh shit.
This then begins the image that will stay with me forever.
My friend had his Genesis games (in the plastic cases) neatly aligned on the top shelf above the TV in that room. They suddenly began to stagger off the shelf one at a time to the ground, almost fluidlike, very slowly. This freaks us out and we all book it for the basement stairs... as we are running, we run past a stack of cassettes that are suddenly smashed like someone swung at them with their hand.
We make it upstairs and are completely freaked out, but at the same time, are like: "Holy shit, that was cool!"
His mom was home and asked us what the hell was going on: we told her, and she wanted us to show her. Again, they tried it... and it spelled out W A T C H O U T
Suddenly the games rose up all at once and spun around the room and it sounded almost like there was wind in the room. His mom felt someone tap her shoulder. I thought she was going to have a heart attack, she was so scared. She was completely freaked and disallowed us from using it again in their house.
After that, we continued to use it for the next few weeks (even though his mom forbid it) and we found out some other interesting things about using the board: it even claimed that "SATAN LIVES IN YOUR BASEMENT!" But we eventually get bored and I haven't really messed with one since. I still see these friends quite often and still bring it up once in a while... and we all agree on what we saw, and agree that it was just a really fucked-up experience.
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I had a friend in high school, Barrett, whose basement was haunted. Both through talking to him and by visiting a few times, I got some pretty interesting occurrences.
Firstly, walking down the stairs always, and I mean always, caused a certain sense of foreboding. I asked him about it after my first visit, and he said it was just something that was there, and you had to get used to.
Also, there were a few visual phenomena that went on there. Barrett claims that, once, he saw a female foot sticking out of the curtain that separated the laundry room from the rest of the main basement room (his bedroom was also down there), with the hint of a frilly white dress. He knew there were no women in the house; mom was at work and sister was away to college. He blinked, and it was gone.
His father started to go up the stairs, leaving the basement, when he was confronted by a large, snarling black dog with red, rather evil-looking eyes. He says that he stared at it, blinked, and it was gone.
There were a few other odd phenomena that would happen down there. There was a sense of being watched, especially when writing something or playing on his computer. Apparently these spirits were pretty big tech geeks or something. Also, we held a Halloween party down there one year. Figured we'd watch Critters 3, have a few laughs, send whoever had the best costume out on a 16-year-old trick-or-treating (or perhaps bag-snatching, if he / she was up for it) candy run, whatever. We were all just sort-of hanging around, and we hear this voice: "Baaarrreeeet. Baaaarrrreeet" Whatever it was, it was saying his name. There was nobody else in the house, but it sounds like it's coming from the ventilation system. Really spooky, although most of us just shrugged it off and enjoyed the party.
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Just before I was conceived, my parents bought a house about a block away from my grandparents so that in case something bad happened to my grandfather, who was sick, my parents would be there to help. A year later, I was conceived, and mere months later, my grandfather died in his sleep of a heart attack. When I was two years old, my parents decided that it was time to move out of the crappy college student house they had rented for the three years of their marriage, and leave behind all the misplaced hopes in keeping my grandfather alive.
They shopped around as all people do when buying a house, and after a few months, they decided to bring me along with them to see how their wonderful son would enjoy the houses. They finally decided on one when they saw me playing with my little matchbox cars in the kitchen window, I seemed happy there, they liked the neighborhood, and at the price, it was a steal.
The only problem was the attic. While looking at the house, my parents had felt strange in the attic, as if there was someone there besides them and the realtor, some sort of presence. They inquired about this, and the realtor, either not knowing, or realizing that she would have a sale on her hands if she didn't mention it, said she knew of nothing strange that may have happened there. Overjoyed, my parents bought the house, and around a year later, my sister was born.
Now, one of the peculiarities of the house was the fact that in the basement, way off back by the furnace, was a small stall that had been installed as a shower. Apparently the previous owner had worked outside, and when he came home, he would be covered in mud. The man's wife, understandably, had hated him tracking the mud through her immaculate house, and they had the shower installed so that whenever he came in, he would be clean.
I'm not entirely sure when I remember things happening, but I know I was fairly young. You'd be sleeping in bed nice and peacefully, and suddenly be awoken with a horrible feeling of something being terribly, terribly wrong. A few moments after waking up, the footsteps would start.
Part of understanding this story, is knowing the layout of the upstairs. It looked much like this:
code:
__________________________________________________________
| | |
|
| sister's room | bathroom | parents' room
|
| | |
|
back |______________________ | __________ |
|
yard |______________________ | |
|
| | | hallway |
|
| | | |
|
| play | my room | |
|
| room | | |
|
|______| | |
|
| | | |
|
| | | _____|
|
| | | down |attic|
|
|______|________________|______|stair|_____________________|
Imagine, if you will, being a simple five-year-old, already petrified by the dark, and being forced to see your surroundings by whatever moonlight would filter in to your window between the cramped houses in the city. Imagine laying there and being woken up by footsteps, knowing full well that your parents were in bed across the hall, and that your sister was too young to even walk and was still in her crib anyway.
The footsteps would seem to start around where the stairs started on the first floor. They would continue up the stairs, sometimes loud, sometimes at the edge of hearing. After they would reach the top of the stairs, they would then pass through the doorway to the attic, and continue up those stairs. Then the would stomp across the attic floor, passing over the hallway and my sister's room, to finally rest somewhere between my room and the playroom. They would do this many times a night, and nearly every night. It's amazing what people can get used to.
As time went on, I would begin to realize that all those slight sounds at the edge of hearing that you would normally write off and simple city noise, were actually voices. Rarely could they be understood, but in many situations, a whispering would seem to come from mere inches away from your ear, almost as if someone were trying to scream at you and yet whisper at the same time.
Of course, as any smart five-year-old would, I had told my parents about this. And, of course, just like any smart parent, they completely ignored it as the over-active imagination of a child. The steps never went over their room, and their door was always closed with their air conditioning blowing, why should they hear anything?
But somewhere in the back of their minds, they remembered how they felt going up into that attic the first time. They felt the dread as they would go up there themselves now to take something out or to store some old piece of furniture we no longer needed, but they'd just ignore it as stupid childhood fears rising anew in this 60-odd year-old house.
As my sister got older, I was encouraged with the knowledge that it wasn't just me, that I wasn't just some stupid kid scared of the dark and the sounds of an old house settling. She too heard the footsteps, she too felt the feeling of dread whenever we went into the attic (which was rare). It was around this time that I started going into the basement more, as my dad had just constructed a massive train board, the train board of train boards, an O-Scale Mecca in our very basement.
Sometimes while down there alone, we'd hear him call up to us as if in answer to some unvoiced question. While down there myself in the broad daylight, there would be some sort of shadow in the corner, a shadow that was vaguely man-shaped and would move from the corner to the late-installed shower. I know my dad saw something down there around this time, because we had the exorcist (my dad's personal friends with him) over and they dedicated the house to the Sacred Heart. Looking back on it, I think they knew something was up and didn't want to frighten their children, already scared of the old house. And the footsteps stopped for a while.
Years went by, and the only sounds we'd hear were what was CLEARLY the house settling, the floorboards in the attic expanding and contracting, the old shingles of the house groaning with the change in air-pressure. And then they started again, one horrible night.
I had a friend from down the street over to spend the night, and we had spent much of the day playing the NES in my play room, having a good ol' time. As we settled down to sleep, we talked about whatever it is young boys of that age talked about (probably about how nasty and disgusting such and such a girl was, refusing to admit that we had a crush on them), and I flipped off the light to my room and closed the door. The saved-up light from the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling had just faded, and my parents had just gone to bed, when we heard the loud crash downstairs.
Not thinking anything of it, since it had been so long since the footsteps had stopped, I cracked open my door to see what the hell my parents were doing, ready to ask them as soon as they reached the top of the stairs, since hey, I could hear them coming up.
The footsteps reached the top, and rounded the corner to head up to the attic. There was clearly nothing there, but I heard heavy breathing, as if it had been an effort to climb that far. I slowly closed the door, frightened out of my wits, but not wanting to say anything to my friend, lest he taunt me. I settled into the bed clearly disturbed, when he sat up and said "What?" as if I had just called him. I informed him that I had said nothing, and he just mumbled, "Oh," as he lay back down.
It was then that we heard an even louder crash, almost a bang, from the attic right above my room. Throwing caution to the wind, we surged out of my room into my parents' room, where they were clearly having sex. Interrupted, they calmed us down, said it was our imagination or the people down the street, and sent us back to my room, where we remained awake until the sun rose. The footsteps had come back, and this time, they weren't leaving.
Now that the footsteps had returned, whatever causing them invigorated by the chilling fear in the poor ten-year-olds present, the voices also returned. The whispering would start again, mostly in the upstairs hall or living room, and oftentimes during the day.
The whispering increased, and it wasn't content to just remain a slight thing heard in such a way that you could think you were mistaken, oh no... it wanted to be heard this time.
My sister was upstairs in her room, playing with Barbies or something, my parents were in the living room watching TV, and I was in the downstairs toilet taking a refreshing shit. Suddenly, an ear-splitting scream erupted from above, and I heard my dad's trademark fat-man stomp up the stairs, for once in an actual hurry. I came out of the bathroom and into the living room where my mom still was, as she waited for my dad to come back down, clearly afraid that something had happened to my sister.
After a few minutes, my dad came down the stairs looking slightly confused, and simply said, "She didn't scream." Apparently, she hadn't heard anything either.
From then on, you would hear someone calling your name, as if across a vast distance, whenever the presence decided that the house was too quiet and that its residents were too comfortable.
Shortly after this incident, my parents had saved up a decent amount of money, and decided it was time to renovate the house, in their ever-inherent wisdom, deciding to finish off the attic and make it into a family room.
Upon completion, the now more modern house seemed to have settled down, the strange happenings seemed to have been wrestled out of the house by modern conveniences having no place for the supernatural, but they would be back for one final hurrah before we moved, leaving the house and whatever things were in it, to the next person that decided to live there.
It was right before my parents decided it was time we moved, and I was around thirteen or fourteen when they came back. The attic had been finished off nicely, brightened immensely by the gray carpet, white walls, and skylights. My parents had decided to keep some storage area intact, and off to both sides were small doors that opened into crawl spaces for storage. Resting against the wall to one of them, was a futon, and right over my sister's room was the TV, sitting on a large desk. My parents had also installed a two-way intercom so that they could call us from downstairs for dinner, rather than trying to scream up to people thirty feet above and with five feet of wood and piping between. The carpet turned slightly brown near the window overlooking my neighbor's driveway, but my parents just blamed a shoddy ability at drinking soda.
One night I realized the footsteps had come back, and not sure whether they had been back for a while, or if they were simply the house settling (I'm thirteen, I'm invincible! Stupid little kid fears are for fags and queers! That rhymed!), I simply ignored it. The next morning, I heard someone calling my name again, and knew in the back of my mind that it was back.
That evening, my sister had her friend from down the street over, different house and family from my friend. They were up in the new family room playing Super Nintendo, and I was in my playroom on my brand new Compaq, surfing the wonderful interweb brought to me by a friend and AOL ©. As I was listening to whatever shitty music I listened to at the time (actually probably not all that shitty, I think the Presidents of the USA had their first CD out by then), I heard a loud smash come from above, followed shortly after by another many feet away.
I charged up the stairs ready to give my sister hell for breaking something of mine, and found the TV on top of one of my Atari 2600 controllers, about fifteen feet away from where it normally was. My sister and her friend just sat on the futon petrified. According to them, the TV had simply flown across the room as if thrown, and based on the fact that they were only 8 or 9, I was inclined to believe that they hadn't tried to pick it up and carry it. The doors to both crawlspaces were wide open, and a strange static noise was coming from the intercom. As I bent down to use my thirteen-year-old muscles to the max to put the TV back, I heard, much like the name calling from a great distance, a low and mirthless laughter. I put the TV back, closed the doors, and went back to my room.
We moved out of the house two years later, the footsteps and name-calling continuing to the bitter end, and haven't heard anything from the new occupants about any strange occurrences. Our new house is devoid of anything strange, and is just as sterile and empty as most suburban homes.
What bothers me the most about this, however, is the fact that my parents were so bothered by what they felt when in the attic, that they asked the neighbors on either side of us, both groups having lived there since they married back in the '50s. It turns out that two owners prior, the one who had had the shower installed, had killed himself in the attic, near the window overlooking my neighbor's driveway. He had grown tired of living, sick of his wife's nagging, and had taken a single chair from the kitchen up, placed a shotgun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.
My parents neglected to tell me this till I overheard them talking about it to my grandmother this year. It's been almost seven years since we moved. Thanks, mom and dad... thanks for everything.
Labels: adam, computer, corey, danny, death, ghost stories, grandma, halloween, holidays, india, jackie, laundry, maxed-out tags limit, michael, pat, something awful, tracy, us, vanessa, weird stuff
posted by Flami at 11:47:00 PM
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