Part the First: The high school I went to was built in the early 60's, and is on the edge of the city I live in. There are two other schools nearby, and a grass airstrip across the road. The closest house is about 1/2 mile down the road in any direction. This becomes important later on. I am a theatre guy and I work backstage (read: I am not an actor). Many times, I was the only techie on a special event, or I was in charge of the tech areas of whatever show. As such, it fell to me to turn the lights off for the director and make sure all the doors were locked and the various equipment (light board, sound board, etc.) was off or at least on power-save mode. The theater originally had a movie projector in a cramped room now mostly used for storage which we called the spot room. This room was at the back of the auditorium, and had one small hatch on the centerline of the back wall almost at the level of the ceiling. This hatch was kept closed during shows because some of the heating equipment was located in the spot room, and it could get pretty noisy some nights. So one night, I was finishing up turning lights out, and I was walking across the stage to turn off the houselights when I notice the spot room is lit up and the hatch is opened. I thought it was probably a janitor, so I called for the director to call up maintenance and see if anyone is working on the heating stuff in the spot room.
The director reminds me that the building engineer had come into the booth to tell us he and his people were leaving and that we would have to remember not to leave the theater because the alarm would go off. So my friend Jon and I walked up to the spot room and I turned all the lights off and lock the door. We are standing on the stage talking to the director about a problem with the dimmer racks when he mentions that we were supposed to turn the spot room lights off. I said we had and Jon verified it. Just then every light (the work lights, not the stage lighting) in the beams area above the audience turns on and then off and then back on. Jon and I race up the stairs to the beams thinking that someone snuck up there and is trying to screw with us. I stand at the door and Jon goes in to look around. He says that someone must have left the roof hatch open (it was the middle of December and we opened it to let the hot air escape from the beams) because it's "cold as ice." I remind him that we didn't have it open that night because of the snow, and he says he can't see anyone. We turn off the lights, I lock the door, and we go back downstairs. Meanwhile, the director had gone up to the spot room and come back to the stage. We quickly walk out and I lock the door behind us.
Part the second: While doing a tech rehearsal for a musical in the same theatre, I was in the booth running the light board. In this theatre, we used a cordless headset system sold by Radio Shack. These things were utter crap and literally ate 9 volts. This particular day, I had just gotten everyone's headsets fixed, and everyone now had a battery that was brand new. In the middle of calling the show, the stage manager cut out completely. I called and called, and she didn't answer. Finally, I just stuck my head out the booth and shouted to her that she was off-air. She was sitting up in the spot room and called down that she could hear us just fine and I immediately went upstairs to check her headset. The thing worked fine once I got up there and I traded her headsets and we went on with rehearsal. At dinner time, we let the actors go out to the lobby area where a couple of parents had brought pizzas. The rest of the tech crew and I stayed behind in the theatre and worked on some of the scene change cues.
During the change we worked on first, we had to have one person in the beams in order to change some focus on the lights while we tweaked the scenery. My friend Joe volunteered, and he climbed up there and we started work. Not five minutes after I went dark to start working on the problem, all the work lights in the beams started turning on and off. I yelled a few well-chosen remarks, and Joe replied that he wasn't doing it and whoever else was up here running around back in the beams could cut it out. I did a quick head count and no one was missing. I sent my ALD out to the lobby and he counted the actors and radioed me they were all there. At this point, I got really pissed off and shouted for the director to come out and get whoever was messing around in the beams. He came out of his office and we went up to the beams and started searching around. We never found anybody, and I figured they must have gone up to the grid or out through the spot room. We checked with the stage manager who was sitting in the spot room and she hadn't seen anyone. The rest of the night over the headsets, we kept hearing footsteps and the same thing happened every time someone had to be in the beams at night.
That's just two of many stories involving the theatre at my high school. When I graduated in 2000, it was still going on and by all accounts, getting worse. If there's any interest, I'll post about the night my teacher chased a girl through the theatre that no one else had seen and who faded into the back wall of the beams.
===========
I ended up living with my mother again due to a lack of funds after a live-in girlfriend and I broke up. A couple of months after I had moved back in, my mother got a call from my aunt that my grandfather had died (we live in Ca., they live in Mass.). I'd like to point out right here that I was always close to my grandparents, and I still hate the fact that I've never been able to get back to Mass. to even so much as visit their graves (hell, I'm still poor). ANYWAY, my mother flew back to help with funeral arrangements, etc., while I sat around the house depressed. The house had a somewhat odd design with a pair of balconies that overlooked the living room / dining room area, and I was downstairs watching TV and doing my best not to completely lose it. For some reason, I got the feeling that someone was watching me, but the living room / dining room area had a LOT of windows, so I didn't think too much about it (I also didn't want to look out the windows because I'm a big chickenshit, but that's beside the point). For some reason, I looked up at one of the balconies though, and there was my grandfather. He wasn't doing anything but standing there looking at me. This was only for a few seconds though, as someone pulled up in the driveway, and the headlights caught my attention. When I looked back to the balcony, he was gone. Occasionally, I still get the feeling that both he and my grandmother "check up" on me. I don't know how to explain it, I just get the feeling occasionally that they're nearby, and my mother has said that she feels it too every once in a while, and she swears that she's seen him more than once.
===========
Back Story:
I had a friend when I was 10 or so who lived in an old schoolhouse which had supposedly (i.e. I never saw concrete evidence) caught on fire and killed a lot of children in the early 1900's. It was definitely haunted. Every night I spent there, I saw things I couldn't explain. Ceiling fans would stop slowly and start spinning the opposite way for no apparent reason. Lights would go on and off, giggles could be heard, etc. Friendly ghosts, by any standards, which were rarely scary.
The only thing the ghosts ever did that freaked me out: one night, I was sleeping on his floor when a basketball rolled under his bed and started dribbling underneath his bed... which was completely impossible, considering the ball BARELY fit underneath the bed. My friend and his parents could all communicate with the ghosts through something similar to telepathy on occasion. The ghosts had never appeared, and they had no clue what they looked like. They only heard sounds and saw things.
The Main Story:
One day, my mother and I were on our way home from the grocery store when my mother got the feeling she was being followed. My mother tends to be completely paranoid, so I was kind of used to it. Sure enough, we were being followed by a green car. We lived in a lower-middle class rural area, so it was odd to have cars follow us very far outside of town.
We didn't recognize the car, so Mom drove past our driveway and went to my friend's house instead, as his dad had guns like crazy. This schoolhouse had its own horribly graveled road (oddly enough, Schoolhouse Road) that bridged the road I lived on with another road. No one had a reason to travel on the road, so we KNEW someone was following us after they started turning down the road. The car hesitated, turned around, and left.
From this point on, I only heard what happened from my mom, who heard it from my friend's mom.
About a week later, my friend's mom was home alone at about 10 at night. My friend was staying the night at my house, and her husband worked late nights. The ghosts had told her something was wrong. Unsure what was wrong, she looked out her window. Sure enough, the green car was sitting at the end of her driveway. She turned on the porch lights, and the car quickly sped away.
Five minutes later. she got the same feeling. She looked outside and there was the green car again. Burglars, she suspected. She turned on the light and the car sped off again.
Another 5 minutes later, she got the feeling again. Her husband would be home soon, so she was just going to try to protect herself until he got home. She grabbed a shotgun, headed for the door and turned on the light. She pointed the shotgun out of the door and the car left, and never came back.
I suppose you could say the ghosts saved her life and indirectly, mine.
==========
I was always terrified of being alone in our first house. Granted, I was young; we moved out when I was 10 or 11, but even in the daytime, I felt extremely scared of going upstairs if no one was up there. The attic and basement were absolutely no-fly zones... I'd never go there alone and was even uncomfortable accompanied by others. I don't remember any specific sightings or odd things though. I chalked up my fear due to being exposed to movies like
Poltergeist /
Exorcist when very young (stupid parents), but I don't recall a time before seeing those movies that I wasn't similarly fearful in that house.
After we moved out, I became friends with the new owner's son. After a few years, he admitted to me one day that he felt creeped out in the house, and claimed to have heard a voice calling him when no one was home. I shrugged it off at the time.
My aunt lived with my grandmother just a block away from us. My grandmother and grandfather both died in that house, I'm fairly sure, and my aunt suffered a stroke there as well but died in the hospital. So you'd think something interesting would happen to me when we moved there, but alas, I felt no fear in that older house, even with the deaths and overall creakiness that comes with a 50-year-old structure with odd cubbyholes and winding staircases. Nothing at all happened to me there, but my mom and dad had a story each that I feel can be explained away logically, but who knows. I'll share them anyway.
1. When my father was very young, his mother would wake him up in the mornings by grabbing his foot and shaking it. Well, he was in his late 40's when my aunt died, and my grandmother (his mom) had died about 3 years earlier. While he was cleaning out the house for us to move there, he slept in the attic on my grandfather's old bed. It was a King-sized bed with a very hard mattress and ugly 70's brown sheets. The first night there (and the first night he slept in that house for decades), he inadvertently forgot to set an alarm clock for work, but he awoke to what felt like someone shaking his leg. When he woke up, startled, he says his foot was still just a bit in motion. It was the exact time he needed to get up.
2. My mother said once she woke up, and she felt as if someone was lying on top of her. She felt the pressure all over her body, and felt it move like a person. No one was in the room with her (my parents didn't get along). I'm pretty sure she was sleeping in my aunt's bed at the time.
For a person with an extreme fear yet fascination of the paranormal (this thread and the other 3 scared the crap out of me, but I read them), I have yet to have any type of real experience with it.
============
The night was calm, almost uncomfortably calm. L (my gf) and I decided to go for a late night drive out to Cape Spear, the most easterly point in North America. There's some cool stuff out there, like big cannons and an old abandoned concrete armory which runs through a pitch black tunnel underground. Stuff leftover from war days, basically.
We walked through the armory with only a small flashlight, which was extremely freaky, but nothing out of the ordinary happened. Then, of course, the flashlight died. It came back on in a minute or so, and we hurried out and decided to head home.
While driving back the long dark road, I think I see an animal on the road. In fact, I'm sure I saw something, but then it was close enough to see clearly in the headlights, and nothing was there? And then out of nowhere, I see 4 legs running, then disappearing, then running, then disappearing, hitting the side of the road and disappearing completely. All I could see were legs, and even they weren't very visible, despite being right in front of the headlights. I look out my window and there is definitely no animal around.
L sees the whole thing as well, but convinces herself that she imagined it. When she saw me look out the window, she was JUST about to say: "I thought I saw an animal," thinking I was wondering why she slowed. Before she got it out though, I exclaimed: "THAT ANIMAL JUST DISAPPEARED."
We were both thoroughly spooked because whatever it was it obviously was NOT solid. To make things worse, about a minute later, a REALLY heavy fog fell, and we could barely see.
============
My grandfather lived across the street from me my whole life. He had this bigass 3-story brick house. It was sort of old and musty because he didn't really keep it up after my grandmother died. (Before I was born) I have to throw this in now, but it will be clear why I have later in the story: My Grandfather was the BIGGEST ATLANTA BRAVES FAN EVER. I used to watch Braves games with him all the time as a little boy.
Anyway, I left town for college. In 1995 (my second year of college), he was stricken with pancreatic cancer and died in his house while I was in Florida at school. Anyway, to make a long story short, my mom had to sell his house. A nice couple with 2 young children bought it as a fixer-upper. They have done a fabulous job, btw.
Anyway, whenever I was home from school, I would make it a point to go over and chat with them for awhile, and look at what progress they had made fixing it up. I would joke about how creepy it used to look and how it was so much better. Whenever I talked with the husband, I always got the feeling that he wanted to ask me about something, but was hesitant.
Anyway, one Christmas Eve, I was over there talking to the husband... he had been drinking beer and offered me one. His wife and kids were out of town at her parents' house for Christmas. (husband and in-laws don't get along AT ALL) I start to get the feeling that he wants to tell me something, but is holding back. Finally, I ask him about it. This is what he said:
"Man, you're going to think I'm nuts... but I think your grandfather's house is haunted."
I asked him to explain why. He said that a lot of times when his wife and kids are out of town, he will leave the TV in the den on when he is around the house painting, hanging drywall, etc. for some background noise. He explained that he almost always turns the channel to the weather channel because he is an amateur meteorologist. He told me that sometimes, every now and then, he will walk into the den to grab his drink or sit down for a bit and the TV won't be on the weather channel anymore. He wouldn't think anything of it normally, he told me, because sometimes TVs do weird shit. But what he had noticed is that the TV is INVARIABLY switched to TBS. (the Superstation) And that INVARIABLY there is only one kind of program on.
An Atlanta Braves baseball game.
==============
I hiked Massey Draw. I hiked it alone, with friends, with family. Hundreds of times, in all seasons. Massey Draw is a relatively short (~7 miles) well-maintained trail in Littleton, Colorado. It can be found in the neighborhood of Ken Caryl, which resides just behind the front range of the CO Rockies. The trail, despite its short length, is surprisingly difficult. I would estimate the rise to be about 1200 feet from the bottom. It's accessed by hiking up a fairly wide trail for about a mile, which then branches off to the right and to the left. To the right, the wider trail continues, fairly level, until it reaches the Manor House trail. To the left is Massey Draw, a single track, steep trail that curves up and around the back of the mountain. It also eventually connects with a branch of the Manor House.
I would most frequently hike this trail with my friend Jon. Now, Jon is a solid character, and not one to make anything up just for the hell of it. He's currently majoring in Electrical Engineering, at the Colorado School of Mines. Jon and I would bring food and water for about 2 hours of hiking, although we normally finished the trail much faster than that. Besides common sense, Jon also has a well-off family, so money for better hiking shoes, poles, and other assorted gear was never a problem. We spent hours downtown at the REI flagship store, thinking about what we would buy if we were "real" expeditioneers.
We hiked in the snow. Camped in it, too. There's something viscerally pleasing about that thin line between insane cold, and the warmth of your mummy bag (a full body 0-degree sleeping bag). It's how we got the edge during the winter, without spending a fortune on lift tickets. We actually had several successful snow-hikes, and one very successful campout before we decided to make it up Massey in the dark and sleep near the top. After our first successful camping trip, Jon decided that slipping around on the ice with a 75-pound pack wasn't the most efficient way of doing things, so he invested in a pair of crampons. For those who are fortunate enough to live in warmer climes: crampons are attachments for your boot, and consist of large metal "spikes" that prevent you from slipping on ice. They are basically a necessity when doing any sort of hiking during the winter, especially at night. I wish I had known this rule before we headed out that day.
Jon took point up the lead-in trail. I carried the pack and followed behind. We started our ascent at roughly 6:45 PM, and were expecting to make it to the top of the Draw at 8:45, latest. There was about 1 and a half feet of fresh powder on the ground, but it didn't hinder us in the slightest. Full of piss and vinegar, we marched on like good little soldiers in the 10-degree winter wonderland. This was a good idea. We were prepared for anything:
* Tent
* Food for 3 days
* Extra water
* 0-degree mummy bags
* Sunglasses
* Cell phones
* First aid
* Emergency rations (Powerbar, Clif)
* Solid boots
* Warm, warm clothing
And Jon had his crampons attached to the back of my pack, clinking along as I walked and helping me establish a rhythm. If you've ever done any serious amount of hiking, you'd know the importance of maintaining a steady cadence. Knowing the trail, your limits, and the needs of your body make this a second-nature practice. You'll pass a landmark and take a drink of water, take in the scenery, and know exactly how far you need to go before it will be time to take a break. We knew all of these things as we set out on the left fork: the fork that would take us deep into the heart of Massey Draw.
Jon and I had, on past hikes, remarked on how starting up the Draw was like entering a different world. The trail itself is basically a deep ravine in the side of the mountain, with a mid-sized stream running down the middle of the whole thing. There are 4 stream crossings over the course of the hike, all near the top. "Time out of time," was how I aptly described Massey Draw on a particularly nice hike, during a beautifully lush and mercifully cool summer's day. Jon had always shared this opinion, but I could tell there was something he wasn't telling me about his true opinion of the trail. See, you get to know a mountain. Not just the trail, but the vibe, the essence of the wilderness around you. It's directly linked to instinct and the will to survive, of course. Even a trail like Massey Draw, which began in a sprawling suburban community, could have a powerful enough "vibe" to impart the sense of stepping out of time. I remember Jon telling me once why he was afraid of certain parts of the trail. Since it doesn't really apply to the story, I won't go into incredible detail, but the basic idea is that he was going up alone and saw and heard a very odd thing on a certain point in the trail.
The part of the trail that was now covered in a light dusting of pine needles and snowfall. We passed over it and I think we might have briefly recalled the events of his previous excursion, but decided that discretion was the better part of valor and quit talking about it. One of the first things you'll notice on Massey Draw is the silence. This is amplified during the winter, and snow on the ground will swallow words and sentences whole. It's advisable to be looking directly at whomever you're speaking with. After making it about halfway up the trail, we decided to take a short break before tackling the harder section of the trail - the top half.
The top half is harder for two reasons; one is the steep grade of the ascent, the other is that there are 4 sections of the trail that are situated right above small cliffs of about 10 feet. This was not the time to be without crampons, as I discovered. We were making good time up, when we came across the first of many odd events that would take place that night. If you've never seen an ice waterfall, let me describe it to you: you can hear the water rushing underneath the thick later of ice. Not just flat, roller rink ice, but wild and untamed river ice. Ice that's 2 feet thick in one section and 2 inches in the next, and wants you to climb on over and figure out which is which. Of course, Jon, being the braver and better equipped of the two of us, decides he wants to try to climb up the thing using his crampons. Well, to make a long story short, he didn't make it up. Even a 6-foot icefall can be threatening when it's getting dark and your partner doesn't really dig the idea of packing your broken-legged ass down the mountain in the middle of a storm.
See, this is just about where the paranoia starts to set in.
A good hiker, besides maintaining a steady rhythm, will make interesting conversation with his partner. I suppose it's another one of those unwritten rules; after all, you are taking a serious risk doing anything outdoors in the middle of winter, and trust in your partner is invaluable. So, we talked about the weather, the girlfriends, and the hike itself. Anything to keep the blood pumping and the minds working. But mostly we talked about the hike. What if one of us broke a leg? It was starting to snow, so cell phone reception would be an unlikely prospect unless at the top of the pass. Could the remaining partner build some sort of crude sled, or would it be smarter to bunker the injured member down in the tent and hike back for help? Of course, the trouble with hiking back alone is that if you fell and hurt yourself, your partner would be SOL until someone found you. Laying in sub-degree temperatures with a broken leg and only 3 days of food and water within reach is not a very pleasing mental image, is it? I could go on for quite a while as to what we conversed about during the second half, but I won't. What I want to get across is that, whether we said it out loud or not, things were going in the wrong direction.
Perhaps, before I go to bed for the night, I will return briefly to the subject of intuition and instinct. I would define instinct as "the ability to know something's out of place before it enters your field of reaction." On a more base level: Oh, FUCK. It's never subtle, and it's almost never the harbinger of a pleasant experience.
==============
Massey Draw, pt. 2
Instinctually, we knew something was going terribly wrong. The normal sounds you would hear in the middle of a snow storm were just... not there. Ice cracking, trees in the wind, all of them suddenly sounded distant and cold.
Of course, we got lost.
We wandered for what seemed like hours, trying to follow the stream to the top of the trail, trying to recognize familiar landmarks. Failing. It got to the point where we were crossing our own footprints every 4 feet or so. Eventually, we had a lead. At the top of the trail, the narrow single-track opens up into a wide expanse on top of the mountain. The entire area encompasses about 2 square miles, and is covered in thick brush, about 4-5 feet high. And there it was, the instantly recognizable trail, a double-track going straight into the brush. It is the only trail on the mountain.
Just for fun, let me give you a quick run down on the 2nd half of the
trail:
* Landmark 1: low cliff on the left side, can be crossed over the top
or under
* 2: stream crossing #1
* 3: large rock on the left
* 4: stream crossing #2
* 5: larger rock on the right
* 6: stream crossing #3
* 7: stream crossing #4
* 8: small Aspen grove at top of ravine, double-track trail continues
to the right
* 9: double-track through bush, several medium-sized rocks in middle
of trail
Throughout the entire trail are BRIGHT ORANGE trailmarkers, NAILED TO THE TREES.
We saw none of these, even though we were using the halogen headlamps and actively searching for them. It's now about 9 PM, and paranoia has turned to fear. The darkness around us seems overwhelming as we go back over the same tracks again and again. The double-track we found up top was a dead end. Images of the
Blair Witch Project spring to mind, but are quickly replaced by real fear. We are losing track of time. Jon and I make the call to go back down. This is the part where I dearly wished I had crampons, as I slipped and slid about halfway down the trail. We made pretty good time, considering the snowfall had increased significantly.
We made it down. We tried to explain away our confusion, tried to write it off to being lost in the dark. That didn't happen, so we called it a night. Jon went back 2 days later with Kate.
Kate was also a reliable gal. She was a little bit flighty (think the English Major type), but could provide an objective view of the events that had happened up to that point. They arrived at the lead-in trail, and saw something a bit unexpected: the footprints of two people in the snow. Why unexpected? Perhaps I should clarify, this trail was part of the neighborhood, literally in some people's back yard. It was high-use. Nevertheless, Jon and Kate pushed on up the trail. During the 1st half of Massey: two pair of footprints, still just Jon and I. During the 2nd half, well, things were not so clear.
Or perhaps they were, and that was what was so terrifying. Bright orange markers every 15 feet or so. Landmarks, exactly where they could be expected. And footprints everywhere, hundreds of them. They crossed over each other, came to dead ends, went up slopes that were absurdly far away from the trail. And eventually, all these footprints converged on one point. The double-track.
Jon could barely keep his composure as he related these next words to me, later on that evening.
"We got to the top of the trail, where it opens up, and we could just see your footprints and mine again. So we followed them. We followed them right up until they stopped and turned around. Jeff, they stopped RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE TRAIL. There was a fucking SIGN POST not 10 feet away from where we just stopped, turned around, and walked into the fucking brush!"
Needless to say, neither one of us has been back since.
=============
My childhood friend Kim lived in Kingsbury, about 2 miles from where I lived. Her house was across the street and down a little side street from our church, and in the summer I'd spend most Sunday nights over there. (Keep in mind, this is in the middle of nowhere) There was this grey brick building next to her house and we never really knew what it was, but we were curious. So one Sunday afternoon, we decided to check it out. The doors were chained shut but not tightly and we could open them enough to squeeze through. Inside was an oldass desk and a LOT of dust. We looked around and noticed a book on a podium in the upstairs room. Upon opening it, we saw it was a Bible and inside it was the freemasons symbol. I knew what it was because my great-uncle was one and wore his pin sometimes. On the floor, scattered about, were what I call levels but were more like metal rulers, a compass, and pencils and shit like that. Nothing happened, but it was scary: a bright, sunny Sunday afternoon and this place was graveyard-quiet and musty and dirty. We ended up getting the hell out of there and spending the rest of the afternoon watching cartoons to forget about it.
=============
My aunt and uncle live out in the country in a tiny village of 60-70 people. I spent a lot of time there as a kid. Well, one day I was cleaning stuff up there and their giant-ass old stereo clicks on, volume full blast, on an 80's rock station. Several things are wrong here. The most obvious is "Why the fuck did the stereo turn on?" Next was that the residents of the house were hardcore gospel and slow country fans. They would not leave the radio set to rock. And the final thing is that the volume control was a large round knob that had hard stops to keep you from turning it too far. And it was rolled all the way to full. I forgot about this until a week or so ago when I was talking to my mother about weird stuff that's happened. She mentioned that not only did the stereo turn itself on but the air conditioner, television, and assorted electrical devices did too. With every re-occurrence.
I asked her if it still happened, as I'm now home for the weekend so I could investigate. "No, it's all stopped now. They locked the door to the guest room and put a padlock on it."
Stop. Right. There. That room gave me nightmares as a kid. I refused to go in there. It was always cold, even in mid-summer. Everything was old and well-used. And right dead center in the room was a statue of The Virgin Mary with a snake at her feet. And all her fingers and toes are broken off.
"Now something bangs on the door every few nights."
FLAMING POGOSTICK JESUS NO. I was a brave (dumb) kid, but that room gave me the screaming heebie jeebies. My uncle actually mentioned the banging, so it's not being made up. He's a really aggressive skeptic.
===============
KILLED BY A GHOST
1) Chicago, Illinois: People have reported driving along the back roads around abandoned parts of the city and seeing houses that seem out of place. Essentially, these places just don't have broken windows and peeling paint (they have also been described as old-timey). Once in a while, a car will die near one of these places, and the driver will go in and the house will fade out or pull some other disappearing act.
You’re probably saying: "Well, how the hell do we know this if the person in the car just vanished?" Well, unfortunately most stories are from bums and other riffraff). Not too reliable until you consider that these people probably don't share notes much, and this has been going on for some time. Also, once in a while 2 or 3 people are in the car and only one goes in.
Maybe it's just a good excuse to make someone disappear, but if that's the case, it's been an excuse for about half a century.
2) London, England: I used to have the address of the place memorized, but that was a while ago. Anyone, or any group, that spent the night there would be found dead the next morning. I think this started after the police killed several suspected robbers / murderers in the sewers under the place. It was apparently connected to the big tunnels via a WWII era tunnel built for taking shelter during raids.
Anyway, the bodies were not recovered because they got lost in a swift current of filth and, hey, who wants to chase down the bodies of horrible people like that in a sewer? The residents died soon thereafter, but they all died due to massive shock brought on by something traumatic. Three unrelated people in different "flats." Next, the owner was staying the night while finishing up some business on the property (obviously the personal effects of 3 people needed to be gotten the heck out of there). The owner was dead the next morning just like the 3 residents (same cause).
The cops noticed, and 3 (possibly as many as 5) particularly brave policemen decided to stake the place out thinking that maybe they hadn't killed all the guys in the sewer. The guy(s) on the top floor get woken up by screaming down below and rush to investigate. First, they get hit by the stench. It was described as being worse than the actual sewer. Then, on the ground floor they meet up with the guy who screamed, and he basically dies of pure fear before he gets a chance to tell the other cop(s) what is so damn scary that it kills people. All the while, the stench is getting worse. As the remaining cop(s) is inching to the basement stairs, something covered in sewer filth that has four arms and a vaguely human head with hair, but with four eyes, comes up at them / him.
I don't know if there were three or five cops, but I know that only one made it, and he had to take a few weeks off because he was in the hospital for a while. Later on, he gave the description without any problem, but could not account for the intense fear he felt. People living in the building adjacent to the evil one also reported randomly feeling an overwhelming terror coming from the building when their backs were facing it.
Those are the only two fatal examples I can think of. Like I said, they were for school reports and I had multiple sources for these stories, but I wouldn't know first hand.
==============
Our house was new, and built for us, so I don't know of any reason it would be haunted. No one died in it, or anything, though an electrician fried himself to death under the neighbors house when it was built.
Regardless, here's the tales.
The first one happened when I was about 14 or 15, and trying to get a singing voice rocking through the puberty-induced voice deepening that had happened a bit ago. Didn't work too well for a while, but hey, I was a trooper, and now I can sing decently well again. I practiced mostly to The Beatles: my brother and I are big fans and we harmonize quite well. Well, I was singing along with Paul McCartney's tune
Another Girl, and got to the line "
And so I'm tellin' you, this time you'd better stop."
Being a dork with dreams of being a musician (which haven't faded, just taken a more realistic back-seat to college), I was practicing a bit of showmanship, and pointed at the stereo and really belted the word "stop." The fucking thing just shut off. I don't mean the CD skipped, or stopped, or anything... the whole stereo powered off. Freaked me out, and I just shut off the PA, and fucked off downstairs to get a cold beverage and be freaked out.
The second was when my TV decided that it damn well wanted to watch
Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. I was up late at night, reading a book, and saw that
RotLA was coming on. Now, while I love Indy, I'd seen that one quite recently at a friend's house on his big-screen, so our little monaural 23" boob tube wasn't going to sully that experience for me. I got up and turned off the TV (no remote), sat back down, and picked up the book. Just as I was scanning the page for where I was, the TV turned back on.
Ooooookay. So once again, I turn it back off, and start walking back to read more, when click! It's back on. I decide "fuck it, I can read with
Indiana Jones in the background," so I do. Ended up reading throughout the entire flick. Weirdly enough, as soon as the credits roll, and finish, the TV shuts itself off. Remember, no remote, and it was a decently new set, the buttons didn't stick or anything. Once again, I decided that the room I was in was NOT the room to be in for me, and went up to my room to continue reading.
================
I've thought I've had the odd ghostly encounter over the years, but generally I dismiss them.
The first one that comes to mind was about a week after my grandfather died. He died about two days before I received some exam results, and I was a little sad that he didn't know my grades, since he'd been looking forward to hearing them, and that I never got to hear him congratulating me (he was possibly the most encouraging person I'd ever met). Anyway...
I suffer from sleep paralysis on a fairly regular basis. At first, it used to completely scare the crap out of me - now I'm fairly used to it, and I just wait it out.
The horrible thing with sleep paralysis is that it is exactly as its name suggests - you are completely paralysed. I find that I am able to bend my elbows and knees, but that isn't much use because it always feels like my shoulders, hands, feet, head, neck, and hips are nailed to the bed. And it hurts a lot. This means I can't look around the room at all.
It was during one of these attacks that I have a vague memory of being just able to see my grandfather sitting on the end of my bed laughing and smiling. He'd be talking about how I really should have put a little bit more effort into my maths exam, though I did very well anyway.
An old folktale to explain sleep paralysis was about a succubus coming and sitting on you (sometimes actually trying to have intercourse with you). I've felt like this sometimes during these attacks, and just on the edge of hearing, I pick up faint sounds of a woman breathing deep and moaning gently. No, this isn't as erotic as it might sound - imagine having sex when you feel like you've got daggers shoved through every joint in your body and can't move your mouth to scream.
Anyway, the only "ghost" story I have, as opposed to freaky sleep incidents, is the old manor house round the corner from me. Years ago, it was a privately-owned manor in which a number of deaths occurred. The first, most publicised, was of a woman who fell off an upstairs balcony into the pool, snapped her neck, and drowned. Quite a few people have reported sightings of a ghost of this woman - who apparently is very angry and vengeful. There were a few others, but my story concerns a lesser-known one I heard from a girl I was seeing at the time.
The manor is now owned by the hotel next door, who rent it out as conference rooms and banquet halls for parties. It's actually a rather beautiful building and is internally decorated with coats of arms, suits of armour, and weapons left by the family who previously owned it. This girl's mother was having her retirement party in this building (she worked for the hotel, so it was extremely cheap), and of course I was invited. Being the eternal skeptic that I am known as, I scoffed when she told me about another death: the young boy of the family who occupied the manor in the 50s. He had been bouncing a ball in his bedroom (now one of the conference rooms) in the dark one night when he accidentally bounced it out of the door. In the dark, he chased after the ball, only to step on it at the top of the stairs, sending him flying. He was dead by the time he hit the bottom of the stairs.
Now, the ghost of this boy is famous for being mischievous. Knocking on the door when conferences and meetings are taking place in what was probably his bedroom, bouncing his ball down the stairs (so people hear a bouncing "thud, thud, thud" which gradually gets faster as the ball reaches the bottom, like a ball does), and generally playing silly pranks are his forte. Despite several glasses of champagne, I still wasn't going to believe this rubbish!
That is, until I went to the bathroom. It would appear the junk food I had been eating all day had caught up with me and I needed to evacuate my colon, something I hate doing in public anyway. So I sit in a cubicle in the toilets, which are upstairs, and the room seems really silent. I can't hear the party going on downstairs. The door opens, and I still can't hear the party. I hear a man humming to himself and then using the urinal. He washes his hands, the door opens again, and he leaves. I'm just about finished now, when I hear the door open again. I can hear the party now. The door closes and I hear nothing more. Can't hear anyone in the room at all. "Must just be someone going into the wrong door," I think to myself. Then just as I am about to reach for the toilet paper... BAM!
The roll pops out of the holder, about a foot into the air like someone had struck it from below. Stunned, I don't even think to catch it. It hits the floor and rolls away.
Shit. I'm sitting here with a dirty butt and the toilet paper has run away. Oh well, there's nobody in here. I'll just open the cubicle door and go grab it. Just outside the cubicle, it had began to unravel itself, so the first few sheets would've been just out of reach if I had put my hand under the door. It has rolled all the way across the bathroom (which is really quite large, I hasten to add). But that's not the freaky part. It had changed direction once almost to the wall on the far side. So there was a large /\ which points to the window. I grab a roll from a different stall instead, and clean myself up. Looking out the window, I can see the swimming pool where the woman died.
I was white as a sheet when I went and told my girlfriend about it.
edit: I should add that I'm pretty sure it would've been the ghost of the little boy that did this, since he's the one reputed for being a poltergeist. The woman just menaces and frightens people. I was getting the impression that the boy and the woman didn't like each other very much, and that's why he was pointing out at the pool.
===========
1. I met Jim and Nate when I was in the 7th grade. The three of us were soon best friends and always hanging out over at Jim's house. We used to stay up as late as we could, watching Skinamax and shit like that. When we were in 9th grade, during finals week, Jim's parents went on vacation. So of course, Nate and I came over to stay the night. We'd been overnight there a lot of times, and every now and then had heard weird things, but nothing out of the ordinary for a house full of people.
It's like two in the morning and we'd just finished watching
Batman Returns on tape. Upstairs, we hear talking coming from Jim's parents' bedroom. Jim's dad works the real early shift at one of the local skin mills, and thinking he'd left the alarm set on the clock radio, we head upstairs to turn if off. The talking stopped when we opened the door. The clock was on, but turns out it wasn't set to go off for like another half hour or so.
This creeped us out a little and we go back down to the living room, which has two couches and a love seat set in a U-Shape with the TV closing the U. I normally ended up sleeping on the love seat, as I was the shortest. We're just kinda hanging out, and watching softcore porn on HBO when we hear the talking again and people walking around upstairs. We go upstairs (this time with baseball bats) thinking somebody must be in the house. There's nobody in Jim's mom and dad's room, his sister's room (she was off at college), or his room. But the door to the attic, which is normally locked and shut, is wide open. Now, it's the middle of June and it's been hot for the last few weeks. His attic is usually stifling and just unbearably hot.
We went up those stairs into the middle of fucking winter. It had to be -30 in there. We were all shivering and we could see our breath in front of us. As we stood there, it got warmer... but the windows (one on either end of the attic) were both frosted over and the ice on them was slow to melt away.
I should mention that at this point, I didn't believe in spookies and ghosties... and I thought my two best buddies were pulling something on me. I laughed it all off and after exploring the whole attic for ghosts (I was looking for the fans and dry ice they'd obviously been using to cool the place down with), I led them back downstairs and we all fell asleep.
I had a dream that night that somebody was shaking me really really hard. I pulled myself out of the dream and woke up suspended in the air above the stairs to the second floor. All the lights in the house, and every electrical thing like radios, TVs, and the police scanner went nuts. This started inhuman shrieking, and Jim and Nate both woke up screaming and saw me hanging there over the stairs like a puppet.
I fell. The shrieking stopped, all the lights went out, and everything went dead except the stereo in Jim's parents' room, which was playing some old big band music. (Fucked up because it was set to PYX 106, the local Hard Rock station.) I called my dad and made him come pick us up. Nate went home and Jim spent the next week at my place. I never stayed there after dark again.
--
2. Things to know: Ever since I called the supposed spirit of a Druid a prick and told him to fuck off, OUIJA boards won't work for me. When I was sixteen or so, I used to hang out with a bunch of "mystical people," hence the contacting of the Druid that I told to fuck off. These mystic friends of mine insist that I have some enormous power that I'd yet to tap into. Bullshit if you ask me, but then again, I was raised in a very strict Christian household and taught not to believe in such Devilry. Whatever. On with the story.
When I was 19, I was seeing this girl named Andi. I was at work one day in late July when I just started to feel like absolute shit. Light-headed, extreme nausea, and sudden pains in my chest. I left early and went home. No sooner was I in the door when the phone rings. It's my buddy Tony. He's at our friend Sara's graduation party and they've used an OUIJA board to contact somebody who claimed to me be from a past life. (I don't think this is possible as it would be my spirit talking to them, and shouldn't I be aware of that?) Whatever it was, it was answering all kinds of personal questions about me from Andi and getting them right. And she wasn't touching the board.
Tony said I had to come see this, and so I drove over. The closer I got to Sarah's house, the worse my stomach feels and more my chest hurts. I pulled up to her house and just walked on inside. As I crossed the threshold of the doorway, something about the house just seemed wrong to me. I'd been there many times before and never felt anything like it. It just felt horribly wrong. That was when I heard Andi scream and a slamming noise started banging through the house. Everyone else started screaming.
I ran to Sarah's room which was at the back of the house. Have you ever driven down a road in the middle of the day, when there's like a canopy of trees over it? It's like driving through a tunnel? All dark, even though it's daylight? That's what Sarah's room looked like from the outside. I could tell the lights were on, but it just screamed of darkness. Andi was getting pushed up against the wall over and over again by an invisible hand. I ran into the room, and the darkness just seemed to melt away from me.
I don't know why I did what I did, or how I knew it would work, but I grabbed the indicator thing (can somebody tell me what it's called?) which was moving on its own, and wrestled it to goodbye. Then I flipped the board over. I heard what sounded like a mirror breaking and the creepiest fucking voice screaming "NO!" Andi stopped hitting the wall and just ran over to me and buried her face in my chest. My stomach felt fine, my light-headedness was gone, and the pains in my chest weren't there either.
Apparently what had happened was the thing they contacted asked Andi to touch the indicator so it could talk to her past self. As soon as she touched it, it started moving on its own and she hit the wall. That was right before I got there. Nobody else heard the mirror break or the voice screaming. Later that night, when Andi was feeling better, she told me to burn the board and I did.
I called up one of my old mystic friends the next day and she told me that what I had done was repel the evil spirit that was hurting my girlfriend, and by flipping the board, I had banished it temporarily. She said that because I was able to do all this, it's proof of these "powers" I have. I think she smoked a little too much weed, but I can't deny that any of it ever happened, nor any of the other weird shit that happens around my town and always seems to involve me and a select few of my friends.
Labels: alcoholic drinks, blair, corey, death, dreams, family, ghost stories, halloween, jeff, kim, mary, maxed-out tags limit, mom, paul, restarts, school, snow, something awful, tony, weird stuff
