October 08, 2004

• We had a thread about ghosts develop into one of these storytelling sessions a while back. I'd link it, but it's elsewhere at the moment. (and no, I'm not yelling double post on you.) It's too bad we can't see that thread right now, because there was a story that scared me quite a bit about a little boy appearing at night. IIRC, it was from Dizzy.
• I may have told this here before, but I don't think so. My own is pretty mundane -- when I was five, my parents bought and completely refurbished an old two-story house (the attic was so huge that we actually turned it into a third-story room). The previous owner was an old lady named Mrs. Osburn, who died of very old age in the house. After we moved in, there were some bizarre goings-on. We'd come down in the morning and find the dining room furniture rearranged or all the cabinet doors open. The dishwasher would suddenly kick on by itself, even after several repair calls and, finally, replacement. Whenever it would happen, Dad would say, "Looks like Mrs. Osburn's around," and we'd giggle. Oh, and there was that killer clown in the basement.
• No ghost stories from me. I guess that's a good thing, as I read one too many Victorian ghost stories when I was a kid.
• My only supernatural experience was in my last apartment. Soon after moving in, I was startled a few times by the sensation that something was walking on the bed at night. After a number of nights like this I asked my fiance if he was feeling the same thing. He confirmed that not only did he feel it walk on the bed, but that he could feel it curl up and get comfortable behind his knees. He could also report that it didn't do it as much when I was there, but that when I left the room he would immediately feel its presence again. We named the unseen creature "Ghost Kitty". Even I have to admit that I kind of miss it now that we live somewhere else. On the other hand, my brother has resigned himself to the fact that he's sensitive to ghostly presences because he's seen and heard some really weird things. Unfortunately, he derives no pleasure from it.
• My only superantural experience involved something I called the Holy Spirit, and I don't remember a thing from it. I remember before and after, and that's it. It still scares the living shit out of me - I hate not being in control of myself. And the Holy Spirit is supposed to be a comforter. Hah!
• I am sorry to say that I have never had a ghostly experience (I kinda want to!) but... when I was 12 we moved into a different house. from the beginning my aunt was adamant that there was something wrong with the place. my parents lived there for 10 years, (I moved out at 19) during that decade we were all plagued by ongoing difficulties and bad luck (even me after I moved out) that did not begin to resolve until they left. I have always had an "active imagination" and vivid dreams and nightmares. some that I had there still stand out though. particularly dreams in which I would leave the house, say, to check the mailbox, and look towards the house from outside and see or sense some other presence, not a family member, but something "scary". I cannot convey how disturbing these dreams were. dreams of being shot and killed, dreams of giant tornados coming up the road, dreams of nuclear destruction, you name it.... I cant recall a period of my life since where I have been plagued by such regular occurence of horrible nightmares...
• An old girlfriend had a number of ghost stories. Once she told me a tale of being in northern Michigan (think: very rural and woodsy), parked alongside a lake in a dirt clearing or parking lot. She and her high school boyfriend were making out, but stopped because they felt somehow weird. When they looked at the exit to the parking lot/clearing, they saw what looked like a number of ghostly Native Americans holding hands there as if to block their exit. Of course, she ended up in A.A. Did her drinking cause her visions, or vice versa?
• The only supernatural thing that ever happened to me was when my cat died. I was probably 12 or 13, and I was playing alone in my room, just before bedtime. I heard brakes screech outside, and suddenly I knew, beyond any doubt, that my cat had been hit by that car. I was sure of it, even though we lived on a busy street, and I'd heard screeching brakes a hundred times before. I changed out of my pajamas and into some clothes, and went out to the living room. A short while later, someone knocked at the door. Sure enough, some lady had my poor, broken Snowball in a cardboard box. I said goodbye, and after that, I think my father probably put my cat out of her misery. It's weird, but what stands out in my memory, even more than seeing her in that box, is the way I'd immediately known what happened to her, even though I couldn't have. I'm the skeptical type, but there has never been any doubt in my mind that this happened to me. Even my parents noticed that I'd come out of my room before the lady had come by with the box.
• When I was five I woke up in the middle of the night and saw two ghosts standing at the foot of my bed. They looked pretty much how you think of ghosts--indistinct, pale forms, but clear enough to see clothing and facial features. Both were female. One was an adult and the other was a little girl about the age I was at the time. They were holding hands, and they were wearing bonnets and aprons. At the time I thought they looked like maids. I closed my eyes, covered my face with the blanket and counted to ten. When I looked back up, they were still there, so I ran out and spent the night in my parents' room. I never mentioned it again until a few years ago. When I did, my parents started talking about all kinds of freaky things they had experienced in that house. The radio would turn off and on by itself, doors would open or close. There was one room that always made them feel nervous, so it was only used for storage. I don't remember being aware of any of that when I was a kid, and it was unsettling to hear about it all later. So maybe I really did see what I thought I did.
• When I was much younger, I believed in ghosts, (and sasquatch, UFOs, etc.) but then became a hard core skeptic. A few years ago, my grandfather died, and I went to England with my mother for the funeral, and to stay with my grandmother for a few days. While we were there, one of my cousins had a fight with his girlfriend, and committed suicide. The next day, (or the day after), It was late morning, and I was standing in the bedroom getting dressed. I was facing a large mirror which reflected the entire room, the door was closed, and I was listening to some soft music on the radio. It was the Gloria Estefan song which the chorus was "I didn't mean to say good-bye", or something similar. I then realized that I hadn't turned the radio on, and it hadn't been on when I came into the room. The radio in question was my grundig shortwave travel radio. I could set it to off, radio, or alarm, in that order. If it was set on one, it didn't slip to another setting. I was in the habit of waking up to the alarm, and shutting it off when I got up. When I shut it off, it was off. But at that moment it wasn't. Creeped out, I wandered back to it. The switch was on radio. I found out later that day that Gloria Estefan was one of his favourite singers. And the radio has never done anything funny like that again. (OT - Happy Thanksgiving to other Canadians out there)
• The old house I grew up in was haunted, at 3 AM every morning classical piano music could be heard from the attic. The attic was empty according to my Dad, I never was brave enough to investigate. On Halloween night 1999, my daughter went to my son's gravesite(died in April 1999), to place a jack-o-lantern at his grave. Halloween was the boy's favcorite night of the year. She took two pictures, one witht he headlights shining on the headstone and one without. The one without shows a white glowing substance, that appears liquid, dripping down the headstone. Needless to say I found it very disturbing.
• Not "ghosts" (or whatever), but interesting dreams for me. About 12 years ago, I learned that a good friend of my mother's, who was also my 5th grade teacher, was dying from AIDS. I didn't have any contact with him, and my mom rarely told me things about him. I had two dreams about him. In the first, my mom had gone to visit him while in the hospital. His hair had turned white and he was very nasty and mean to her. I called her and told hr about this the next morning, and she told me that she had just visited him, his hair had turned mostly white, and his cognitive functioning was really bad, leading to his being mean and spiteful. The second dream I had was about 2 months later, and in it he was dressed in a beautiful sweater, looking healthy and happy. He told me that everything was fine. My mother called me the next morning to tell me he had died that night.
• Lived in several places that were haunted. In the One house I used to find little things that weren't mine, things would be moved, I'd hear someone moving around upstairs in the attic and once and awhile I would have someone (was positive it was a tall, thin man) who would stand in my doorway to my bedroom. The nightmares (relating to this "ghost") I would get were so frightening that in one instance I couldn't look at the ceiling when I woke up in the morning for months afterwards. I found out a few years later that other people who had lived in that house had said they noticed weird goings on there. In another place I lived in I shared the house with others, the mobile above the babies crib would move on its own from time to time. My friend one day asked me rather hesitantly whether I had noticed anything (think we were both worried the other would think were not "right in the head"). She was relieved to find out she wasn't the only one noticing. There were a few friends who visited who had noticed as well. When I was a teen I took some "paranormal" classes. I found out I had quite the knack for picking up images (not even that - just words would pop into my head - hard to explain) from objects. I remember holding a ring and telling the women who gave it to me that there was a colourful bird, a lot of sadness and a child. The women told me she had a budgie when she was a small child and it had died and her parents never let her get another pet. Creeped me out. (There's more instances but for the sake of brevity edited it out) I'm a skeptic for the most part and I still question my own experiences. In my case I always tried finding a reasonable explanation for it rather than a supernatural one. I'm still looking for a scientific one. OT - Happy Dead Turkey Day to you too Northern Exposed and all the other canucks reading this :)
• One of the houses I lived in as a kid was haunted; you could hear someone walking up and down the hallway at night. My uncle used to live in an old house where bootleggers had a shootout with the police in the 20s or 30s. Then, right before my uncle and his roommates moved in (in the early 70s), the police had another shootout with gangsters there. My mom and uncle both said you could hear people walking around upstairs when no one was there, or walking on the wrap-around front porch endlessly. One night, one of my uncle's roommates was about to go to bed, and just as he laid down, all the books came flying off of his bookshelf and banged into the opposite wall. He moved out the next day. Funnily enough, my mom's *other* brother married a woman who said that, when she was in high school, it was a big deal to run inside the same house (now vacant) and stay for 5-10 minutes. She was horrified when she found out my uncle lived there for several months!
• There can´t be a real ghost in the picture. I exorcised the place myself.
• Ooops, Wrong Thread :-)
• Well, I've never seen anything which seemed contrary to the laws of nature - at least not when I haven't been ill or tripping - but I did have a rather disturbing experience with a clairvoyant when I was much younger. I was about 18 and had become rather interested in the workings of the human mind as they related to what people called the supernatural. My mother and grandmother were both profoundly superstitious and made occasional visits to a psychic. They would return from these visits in a state somewhere between shock and pseudo-religious ecstasy and babble in wonderment about how "Irene" had told them things about themselves and their lives that she could not possibly have known by any normal means. I decided to go myself. I secretly dug the phone number out of my mother's diary. I told no-one and I gave a false name when I made the appointment. I was (and still am) a pretty hardline sceptic. Even at that age it had become clear to me that need, fear, gullibility and misperception lay behind much, if not all, of humanity's fondness for gods, ghosties and so on. Also, I had a huge interest in magic (of the sad, lounge-suited legerdemain variety; not Crowley and Tolkien) and had made quite a study of the tricks of charlatan "psychics". I knew what to arm myself against, what to expect, what to avoid doing. I was a pretty dab hand at "cold reading" myself. I was anticipating a lot of apparently innocent but subtly leading questions. I knocked. This very, very ordinary looking old lady answered, said hello, invited me in. I sat. She made tea. She asked me to shuffle a pack of cards. Not Tarot, just common-or-garden playing cards. The house was decorated like my grandmother's: plain, poor, peeling wallpaper, nasty old furniture. No crystal balls, no runes, none of the usual fol-de-rol. It was just a little old lady's house. She asked me to deal some cards in a certain pattern. I think I'd placed no more than four down on the table when she suddenly cocked her head as if someone had spoken; laughed, looked me in the eye for the first time and said, "They've just told me who you are! You're Ivy's grandson!" Ivy was my grandmother's name. For perhaps the first time in my life I literally felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise. She did some other impressive stuff on that visit which, in the interests of relative brevity, I won't detail here. Suffice to say that "they" were allegedly "spirit guides". We all have them, apparently. Irene could talk to them. Mine had told her who I was. Of course I analysed this carefully. I absolutely grilled my grandmother and mother about what they'd ever told Irene about me. Hardly a thing, they said. Ivy said she'd only mentioned that she had x grandchildren; mum said she'd told Irene she had one son but had never described me physically, never shown her a picture or anything like that. My conclusion? There's stuff the human mind can do we don't yet understand. I do not rule out the possibilty of some sort of trickery, but this woman seemed so ordinary, so straight, so simple. I went over precisely what I'd said to her prior to the revelation. It had been virtually nothing... "hello...yes, white no sugar please.... OK." It really was quite creepily realistic, the way she seemed to be listening to someone... something... before making statements. I believe that she actually was hearing voices in her head. Do I believe they were what she claimed? No. I believe she, had some mental hypersensitivity, some sort of highly-tuned, hair-trigger acuity of perception that most of us lack. I do This seems the most reasonable explanation to me. Am I talking about telepathy? Possibly. Possibly not. I do know this was the creepiest experience of my life and it puzzles and interests me to this day.
• I do know this was the creepiest experience of my life Excellent story!
• I used to be a phone psychic, for about 8 months in '93. I worked graveyard shift, which was nice since there wasn't alot of calls to handle. (I should point out that we recieved calls from all over the US, and Canada, too. I had a great call from a guy in Vancouver, but that's another story for another time.) So one night I get this call from this guy. He tells me: "Dude, I don't need a reading or anything. I just need to talk to somebody. I've been awake for the last 8 days. Not because of drugs, but just because I've just been curious my whole life what would happen? So now that I know, I have to tell somebody. I'm scared to tell any of this to anyone who knows me, because I know they won't believe me, and it might get me locked up. But you don't really know me personally, and you probably hear weirder shit than this every day." He then proceeds to tell me of the events of the last week. The hallucinations started about the 3rd or 4th day. They weren't much at first. Little movements out of the corner of his eye. Slight auras around people. Sometimes there'd be a loud throbbing bass sound. By the 8th day, the hallucinations were massive. People that weren't there, wearing lab coats. Glowing chords coming from people head's. There was alot more crazy shit, but I lost track of it all, it was so far out there. He kept telling me his story until the computer cut off the call (To prevent lawsuit's from people who fail to hang up the phone properly, the computer is designed to hang up after twenty minutes. Then they usually call back, and pay that extra charge for the first minute...). Anyways, he didn't call back, and I never heard from him again. But a year later, Stephen King came out with a book called Insomnia. The main character had insomnia until he started hallucinating, and he saw the same shit my caller talked about! The men with lab coats, the chords, etc... There were some differences, but still... Do I believe that my caller was really Stephen King, trying out a new story idea? I'm not sure. I did tell the caller his story was awesome, and I kept encouraging him. And not only do I have really bad taste, but the job is pretty damn boring between calls. Everyone seems to hate this book; it's largely considered one of King's biggest bombs. I suppose it could've been a freak coincidence, but I like to think that maybe, just maybe, I might be the guy responsible for one of Stephen King's biggest turds. 0_o
• Mr. Knickerbocker: And this makes you proud? ;) /hates Kingfilter
• A thought that hit me after reading Decani's story: You mention how ordinary everything about the encounter seemed, and I have noticed this myself in similar situations. We expect to be overwhelmed by a transcendent moment, but what really shakes us is how normal it feels. An affirmation that the miraculous hides in the everyday? And if so, then think about all those other boring banal underwhelming facts of our existence. A realization: the miraculous and transcendent is hiding within them as well. This is why I like a good 'ghost' story.
• This is a fine thread, and sadly soon to fall off the front page. The fact it is October gives me hope it eill not die when it does.
• =will Outlaw laptops with wee keys!
• Hmmm, Bees, is this laptop of yours state-of-the-art or something? Because mine has ctrl, alt, del, end, tab, etc.--basically all the standard ones--but it doesn't have the wee keys. Wadda they do, anyhow? mine needs an eject button that will get me outta the chair
• The keys are ALL of 'em too small for my oaf-er-groan, spatulate fingertips, BlueHorse. I often end up hitting two keys, sometimes three instead of one on the thing. So sometimes I take some very unexpected side trips, so to speak, into functions I haven't been introduced to. It keeps things lively for me.
• BlueHorse: Yeah, it's my claim to fame :)
• Love the stories, just want to keep this on the sidebar. More please! Anybody ever seen Bigfoot? ;)
• Hey, what's it take to get this thing back on teh sidebar?
• I was going to write this earlier, but it's a long one. Along the lines of Decani's, actually: ahem Most of the believabble psychic/ghost stories I have involve my mother. She's one of those who dreams babies when someone's pregnant, sees silent figures watching at the foot of the bed, hears voices, you know. Most of these things occurred before I was born, so I've only heard the stories, never witnessed any of the unusual events firsthand, but hey, you've got to believe your mother, right? But this one time... And this is a little goofy- In the summer of 1997 I returned to Seabrook, the little shrimping town outside of Houston where I grew up, to live with my mother for a semester while waiting out my academic suspension. I had a job and more money than I really knew what to do with and I was bored. So I started thinking about things to buy, decided on something, and then began making a plan. One morning, I'm sitting out on the front porch, drinking coffee with my mother, and she starts telling me about this strange dream she'd had the night before. She had dreamt that a little animal was on the very porch we were sitting on. It had a spiky back and she realized it was a hedgehog. It seemed friendly and she was curious about it. What are hedgehogs like? she wondered. Could you pet them, what did they eat, did they make good pets? And as she tells this story, my jaw drops. I just stare at her. What's wrong? she asks. I tell her. See, what I'd decided to do with my surplus income was buy a pet. And the pet I'd decided on was a hedgehog. But here's the thing, I had taken great pains to hide this fact from her, since it really was an impractical thing for me to do seeing as how I was going to be living in a no-pet dorm in the near future, and had not discussed this course of action with her or anyone else. And, here's the kicker, I had made up my mind that that very day I would go out and buy the animal(which I did.) There you have it. My scary psychic mother story. And like Decani said, it was so completely normal, every day and, well, goofy, that it completely caught me off guard. I mean, in the movies people's psychic visions kick in to warn them of an earthquake or a loved one's death or satan being born as a blank eyed manniken or something truly dramatic. Here, my mother's spiritual guides or extra-sensory perceptions or whatever saw fit to warn her that I was going to buy a hedgehog. More on heaven and earth indeed.
• And where is that hedgehog today? *looks sternly at Nickdanger*
• I have stories from two places. The first is the farm my sister rented out in Vernon, NJ. It used to be a vast estate, which is now split up into two bed and breakfasts, a farm, a church, and several houses. But the original barn, a couple hundred years old, still stands on the property my sister was living on. The deal was, she could rent the property for $800 a month as is, and if she needed the stalls or horse rings fixed, she did them herself. She agreed and moved her two horses in, and set to work getting the place in running order. She and two others were working on rebuilding the stalls under the barn, when they heard heavy footsteps overhead. Upon investigation, they found no one. They returned to work and sure enough, more footsteps. Instead of rushing up they listened, and heard the steps cross the barn to the corner, climb the ladder (which she said she knew for a fact was missing most of it's rungs), and then there was a sound of something heavy dropping and rope pulled tight. They all stood frozen and sure enough, the sound faded and the foot steps started again. Upon investigation, there was no one in the barn overhead, and no one in its rafters. Curious she asked one of the neighbors from the area, and at about the time the family started selling off bits of the estate, the head of the house hold hung himself in the barn in shame over losing most of the property to strangers. The second story from there is how each night at dusk a young man calls out from the hay door in the barn loft, "Ma? What did you say? Maaa!?" The story behind the voice is the son of one of the owners was helping throw down bales into the ring below, when he thought he heard his mother call out to him. He leaned out of the door, overbalanced, and fell to his death. But each night he calls out to ask what she was saying. I'll write up the third story in a new post, as this one is getting kind of long.
• The third story is from the apartment I rent now. It's in a nice section of homes in Morris County, New Jersey -and at one point, used to be one big two story house that was split into two apartments. The current owner did the splitting, but never lived here himself. He doesn't know the history either, and the neighbors don't remember much about the previous family. So figuring out who is in the house has proved fruitless. There's three bedrooms, one very small, and we turned that into a nursery for my son while I was pregnant. My computer desk is on the wall that begins the hall way, and I can see the door to that room. I was IMing with a friend one afternoon, and suddenly caught movement out of the corner of my eye. I turned and watched a shadow move past the crack under the door. I thought at first it was the neighbors behind us pulling into their driveway. So I waited. The next time the shadow paused part way across and then I heard a sound as if someone were bumping into an object. I opened the door and while there was no one in the room, off to the side of the door where the bump came from, was the hamper basket. There's other shadow stories with what looks like someone passing by the back window when no one is on the balcony, and family members constantly complain of seeing someone walking just out of the corner of their eye while in the living room. Outside of the shadow, the first month I lived there someone would rap sharply on my window each morning about 8:30 am. I live on the second floor. Then connected to my son are two things. Now just over a year old, he giggles and babbles to someone no one else sees, and has petted an animal that isn't there. The other is when I spilled my mother's heart pills. I spilled them in the kitchen and they fanned out towards the backdoor. I thought I had gotten them all, put the bottled back up on the icebox, and climbed over the gate behind me to bring my Mom her pill. I returned to the kitchen to find two pills neatly lined up on the edge of the gate for my to find. The gate was behind me during the time of the spill, and both pills where lined up perfectly in a row. I said a quick thank you out loud and added them to the bottle.
• Nickdanger, off topic - not particulary scary, unless you're a sponge, but something that might interest your hedgehog. NSF spiny insectivores at work. /silly
• And where is that hedgehog today? Sadly, kidney failure. Another reason to not buy exotic animals, most vets don't really know a whole lot about them.
• I was living in New Jersey at the time of this story. I had gone out one summer night to talk with some friends. Being night people, we all would take over a Denny's to talk and drink coffee until the sun came up. While we were there, one of the members of the group slit his wrists in the parking lot, and then came to the window and cheerily waved to those of us inside. Not the most pleasant sight. We got him to the hospital, and I headed home. When I got there, I was too upset to sleep. I ran around straightening up the living room and kitchen, talking all the while to my mother as she was getting ready for work. Finally, she went out the door to head to work, and I sat down in the living room to try and unwind. As soon as I sat down, horrendous crashing and banging sounds began coming from the hallway next to the living room. I stood up to investigate, and the sounds stopped. Instead, I felt I was being watched. I stood there indecisively for a moment, and then sat down again. The banging and crashing started up again, and once again stopped when I stood up to investigate. On a third repetition of this, I gave up and ran out of the apartment and down the stairs. My mom was just starting to pull out of the parking lot, and I tried to convince her to let me come with her to work. I was far too tired and wound up after the night I had to deal with mysterious sounds. She came up to investigate, and of course the sounds from the hallway had stopped by the time she was there. She told me it was probably pipes knocking and left. I knew it couldn't have been pipes knocking. This sounded more like someone kicking the washer or drier in their alcove in the hall, and kicking them hard. I sat down, and all was silent. It wasn't until I saw her drive out of the parking lot and onto the street that the sounds began again, along with the double doors to the alcove opening and slamming shut. At that point, I got fed up. I began hollering at the misbehaving whatever. I ranted and yelled and generally had a tantrum. I've had some vocal and stage training, and I can project when I want to. I succeeded in drowning out all but the worst crashes. I ended the whole rant by telling whatever it was that if it wanted to announce its presence, it could damn well find a quieter way to do it, and it could wait until I'd gotten some sleep. But for now, it had better shut up because I wasn't having it. The sounds and slamming doors stopped as soon as I finished, and none of that ever happened again. I've found since that if there's something unusual going on someplace that I'm living and I don't feel like dealing with it, a good yell and tantrum makes it go away. I have no idea what was causing all of that. I can't think of a natural explanation, and there had been nothing strange that went on in that place before or after that morning.
• She told me it was probably pipes knocking Anybody ever see the BBC's Ghostwatch from 1991? This line reminded me of it. I knew it was fake when I watched it (on import dvd), but it still gives me the shudders. Great story Christophene!
• FunkyHelix Your stories creep me out. Have you actually heard the voice crying "ma?"
• Yes. She had me pup/horse sit while away on vacation one weekend. I was role playing in IM when both dogs sat up and perked their ears. The voice called out and the three of us just sort of looked at the front door. I relaxed after they did. Though that night I let them out and stood on the porch until they returned instead of following them as they did their business.
• Okay, just wanted to get this link back in the sidebar for y'all in the hopes that a) someone would post something new or b) someone would start a new scary story FPP since it's closer to Halloween now. I want to hear stories about brushes with death, ghosts, psycho killers, demons, Ouija Boards, Southern Baptist preachers--SCARE ME! (And someone, please, FPP a new one. Reference this link if you have to. I need scary stories.)
• I saw the PINE-LIGHTS, walking at night along the creek near my scenic sort of exhibit shop in New Jersey. This did happen on a certain HALLOWEEN NIGHT. some five or so years ago - the only one predicted to show a full moon for the previous "sixty years", according to an article in the newspaper I read at the time. You can't believe everything, right?. But the eery lights that I witnessed floated off to either side of the dark concrete slab on which I sat meditating on the moon. They were the size of birds (the two of them), glowing a bright orange color, and threading their flight through tree trunks in a northerly direction. More, the article at the time even stated that this night was predicted to be THE END OF THE WORLD (!) - both by Nostradamus and by the Aztec Calendar. Inadvertantly, I made a sort of spastic gesture when I saw them languidly flying by. Was that some sort of special sign understood by them, if not by me? In any case, we still exist, and I am able to tell you monkeys about it.
• My grandmother's house is haunted. Most of the family has experienced something odd at one time or another in that house. When he was a kid, my uncle would not stay in it alone. My grandparents would get home from work to find him sitting outside every day. Some of the events: - In the back bedroom, my uncle was recording something on a reel-to-reel recorder. The tape he was using was brand new. However, when he played it back, the tape had recorded slow, sad, spooky harp music as well as his voice. - My aunt sometimes came by to keep house for my grandparents. She hated being in the house alone, but did it anyway. I was in high school and living with my grandparents at the time, and she was relieved when I got home. Every day, while she was in the kitchen, she'd hear footsteps walking up and down the hall. And when she was in the bedroom next to the hall, the footsteps would be in the kitchen, along with the sound of cupboards opening and closing. - All of us have seen movement out of the corner of our eye. When we look directly, there is nothing. But one evening, we all sat down to talk about what we were seeing, and everyone had seen the same woman. Her face wasn't clear, but we all could see that she was pale, with dark hair up in a bun, and a dark dress with white lace at the neck. - When I was a teenager, we had poltergeist activity, beyond just the footsteps and opening and shutting cupboards. Someone invisible threw things across the room. The most memorable was my cousin's Magic 8 Ball, which he'd left in my room. I was going through a sceptic phase, and had just been ranting about how there was no such thing as ghosts. When I wandered into my room afterward, the 8 ball rose up from where it had been sitting and flew across the room at me. It swerved before it would have hit me, and smacked into the corner of my chest of drawers instead. While I was the only one to see this, anyone in the family can corroborate the huge dent the 8 ball had in its side afterward. - Several times while I was visiting my grandparents, just as I was falling asleep on the living room couch, the room suddenly became so cold I was shivering. Right afterward, there would be three distinct raps on the window at the end of the couch. They were so hard that they rattled the panes of glass. For a while afterward, there would be an intense feeling of something watching. Then the cold and the feeling would dissipate, and that would be it for the night. - More than once, someone will find the door to the basement standing open, and close it. The three of us here will know that no one has been down there, and yet the next time we go past the door, it's open again. This has happened periodically since my grandmother's cat died. He managed to open the basement door many times when he was alive. We suspect he's still in residence. The other two cats are convinced of it. I've seen them staring with the familiar wary expression at the same spot in the hall that the cranky old cat used to occupy every evening. - The night after the cat died, he visited my grandmother. Draped himself across her legs just like he always used to at night. Forgive the length. Hope that helps the need for spooky stories, TenaciousPettle.
• Do you know anything of the history of the house, Christophine? That sounda really cool -- in a freaky way, obviously. How did you react to all these things, or were they commonplace enough that they didn't bother you?
• In the same house Christophine described, when I was in my 20s (and my brother, her uncle was about 12), my brother had gone out to visit friends one afternoon, and had been gone longer than I expected, but I wasn't really worried. I was in the living room reading. A bit of scene setting here. In the living room, hanging over the piano, was a picture of my step father's second wife. She was beautiful in her way, with black hair and eerie, pale, almost white, blue eyes. She had died, in the house we'd lived in before this one, of something involving a blood clot and rotting intestines. She was into palm reading and other spiritualistic things, and and had refused to tell my step father what his future held. Perhaps she foresaw that he would suffer a brain abcess in his 50s and be partially paralysed till he died at 90 from the effects of a stroke. Her picture was on the wall in the house my step father had inherited from her and in the one we moved to after his surgery to relieve the abcess, at the insistence of my step father. My (half) brother and I had always found it spooky. If you looked at it for any time at all, the pale blue drapery in the background would begin to move, as if swayed by a breeze. Then, we'd stop looking. So, anyway, I was sitting on the couch reading, and the picture was hanging over the piano, when there was an incredibly strong "rap" at the piano. It was strong enough that the strings vibrated. (I later tried to duplicate that, but couldn't rap hard enough to get the vibration.) I looked toward the piano, and the "rap" happened twice more, and the hair on the back of my neck stood at attention. I thought (second wife) is trying to tell me that something has happened to my brother! And I paced anxiously till he came home. He denied that there had been any danger, so I never knew if he lied, or if (second wife) was just trying to freak me out. My mother eventually took down the picture. We found it a year or so ago and threw it away. Things have been much calmer since.
• tracicle: We've never investigated the history of the house. I probably know less about it than anyone else, really. I know my grandparents bought it long before I was born. I don't know whether the house was new when they bought it, but I don't think it was. path might know. Reactions have varied across the family over time, and even from day to day. We've all had bouts of deciding that it's all a combination of coincidence and overactive imagination. Most of us (certainly including me) have gone through periods where we did not want to be alone here. Most of the time, we might get a bit of an adrenaline rush combined with a minor creepy feeling, but otherwise pretty much accept it. And, though I have heard someone wandering around in my bedroom occasionally at night, path is right. Ever since the picture of my step grandfather's second wife was tossed out, it's been much quieter. Only the occasional footsteps in my room and the cat-related incidents of the last few months have continued. Even the footsteps are well-behaved now, though. They were keeping me awake one night, and I told the invisible whatsis that now was not a good time, and I'd really prefer not to have someone wandering around in my room uninvited. Ever since then, while I'm still quite awake, the door will rattle once in a while. I'll open it and no one will be there. Once the door is closed, the footsteps will start, continue for a short time, and then the door will rattle again. I open the door, no one there once again, but the footsteps stop. I figure that whoever it is came by for a short visit. It's become routine, and doesn't bother me at all any longer.
• Eeek, these are scary! It's not even dark out, but I'm still jumpy. This thread's fallen off the sidebar, but it's so appropriate for today, I hope it's okay that I've revived it? Our school theatre is supposedly haunted. Rumor says she fell off of the balcony in a production of Romeo and Juliet, but there's no proof of it, so we doubt it's true. But during our fall play, I was ushering and I always helped put up the seats after the performances. There was one seat, towards the back, that would never go up no matter how many times I tried to make it. The seats are new, so though it's possible, it's unlikely that it would be broken. After we left, the lights would be turned off and no one else would go into the theatre. Yet, when we would do a before-show sweep, even when I gave up trying to put up that seat the night before, it would be up the next day. Also, one Saturday, my friend and I were exploring the basement, where the prop and costume rooms are. Supposedly, the ghost lives in those rooms. The basement has a hallway with doors on one side. We walked down the hallway, trying all the doorknobs to see if we could get into the prop or costume rooms so that we could see them, because we never had. They were locked. We reached the end of the hallway and turned back, trying the knobs again on the way back, just 'cause we felt like it. Only this time, the door to the costume room opened. We stepped in, but were overwhelmed by a super-creepy feeling and ran away as fast as we could. (eek. sorry that this post ended up so long.)
• Cool story, Fabala! In my home town, there were stories that the high school and community college's theaters were haunted, too. (I wonder if theaters hold a certain type of energy? Or maybe sensitive artist types feel this type of stuff more? Or are just more superstitious?) In the local community college's theater, one of my best friends had a couple of strange things happen to her. In one, she was up in the sound/light booth one night helping the lighting guy practice, and around midnight all of the lights flickered on and off crazily. The light guy said he was used to this, asked the ghost to stop, and they did. My friend also said that, if they didn't keep a particular seat empty for the ghost, lots of little things would go wrong in productions: missing props, actors hurting themselves, lights refusing to turn off or on. When they kept the seat empty, though, things would go smoothly. (They also had a tradition of asking the ghost's permission to start a new production!)
• Great thread. I'm a huge skeptic, but I love to hear this stuff. I don't have many supernatural experiences to relate, at least not ones that can't be explained away through my overactive imagination. This story, though, creeped me out more than any other on the 'net. Can't remember where I came across it. Maybe here(?)
• meredithea- I've always assumed it was that actors are incredible superstitious... about as much as sports players, I'd say. ;) Your theatre ghost sounds like the phantom of the opera!
• Great stuff guys, thanks. :) By the way, if you like this sort of thing, here's a list of "true" hauntings, compiled by the fledgeling Horror Channel. They update every fortnight or so, and it's always pretty good.