Eerie Stuff

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Jip_Bip_Jo

“Rotting Meat”
The following events occured during a two week vacation stay at a rented house in Cape Cod. I was not particularly old; I believe I was 9 and my sister was 4. My mother, however, was in her 30s, so I can’t chalk up her experiences to an overactive imagination.

For the first few days, things were fine. We learned the layout pretty quickly; there was a basement with a washer, dryer and a tv in a seperate room. On the main floor was the kitchen, a proper living room and bathroom. And on the second floor were the bedrooms – three in total.

One day it was particularly stormy, so there would be no trips to the beach or nature walks. My parents, really eager for as much private time as they could get, sent my sister down to the basement to watch what little tv we could recieve. My sister and I managed to get a decent version of PBS, which meant the static wasn’t too bad at all (antennae only at this place). We continued to watch, I absentmindedly playing my Gameboy, my sister more enthralled by some show.

And then it all stopped. My gameboy shut off. The lightbulb popped. The tv did not go off; instead it showed nothing but static.

And then the smell.

From the other room, the one with the washer and dryer, there was a smell that is not even partially described by the word rank. Imagine a bag of rotting meat kept in the summer sun for days at end, and you can begin to imagine it. “Let’s go, please” my sister whimpered. I took her hand and we walked back up.

My parents were not terribly pleased. They listened to our story, sighing as we spoke. Finally Mom smiled and said “Alright, if I go down and check, and it’s all ok, will you go back down?” We agreed, knowing if anyone could make it all better, she could. She disappeared into the black basement, flashlight in hand, replacement lightbulb box held in the other. We expected her to return quickly. She didn’t. After ten minutes that stretched into eternity, she finally came back up. “Ok kids, you can can stay up here. In fact, I don’t want you going down there again.”

We didn’t know what that meant, but accepted it gladly. Mom never went down in the room either; she insisted on doing laundry at laundromats in town. I would not ask her what happened for years.

Another night I was woken by a horrid scream from my sisters room. My Dad burst from his room and slammed her door open, picked her up and took her downstairs. It took over an hour to calm her down and a couple smores, but she finally agreed to tell us what was wrong. She had seen the entire room soaked in blood. Top to bottom. Handprints in blood, streaks, dripping splatters. We wrote it off as a dream, but she refused to go back up for the rest of the night. Mom took a look in the room, and I caught her whisper to Dad: “That smell is there.”

Finally, my encounter with whatever it was. My parents had taken my sister into town, planning on doing some shopping with her. I voiced my dismay and they said I could stay at the rented home if I wished. I whiled away some time watching Disney videos, and eventually started to read a book. Eventually I had had enough reading. I put down the book – and my eyes shot open in surprise. Near the ceiling, slowly circling about as if it were some ethereal shark, cruised an orb, fire red and yet translucent. I didn’t move as I watched it, hoping not to scare it away. Part of me was fascinated by it, as if it were as ordinary as a bird on the porch.

Then I heard the car door slam. My parents had arrived, and the orb, a trailing tail following, raced towards the wall, vanishing. “Hi Scott!” called Dad as he walked in, cooler in hand. “Anything good on TV?”

As for what happened to my Mom in the basement – when I finally did ask her years and years later, she suddenly became very still, and quietly spoke. She had intended to simply change the lightbulb downstairs, figuring the bulb had simply died and I had turned off my Gameboy in surprise and that one of us had nudged the antenna out of clear reception. So, she had taken out the old bulb and put a new one in. It didn’t work. She tried a new one. It also didn’t work. As she tried the remaining two bulbs, she began to smell something too, but this time it had an oily stench to it.

She figured that one of the machines in the washing room had broken, or perhaps a breaker went off or something. She put down the bulbs, and walked into the room. She shone her flashlight on the machines – nothing. Then she looked at the other end of the room – only to see it.

“It” was a short man, crouched over, a piece of maggot covered meat held in its hand. It looked at my Mom, smiled with sharp teeth and black eyes, and whispered “Hello, Laurie”.

Then it sank into the floor.
Mom left in a god damn hurry after that.

Umbilical Lotus

“The Blue Lady”
We had moved into a new house somewhere around my eighth birthday. We had moved just after Christmas – put up the tree, revel, take down the tree, move it move it move it. We had been formerly living on a split house on Greenwood Avenue, which was entirely bad for children as it faced right against a very busy main street, and was close to a not-entirely-pleasant section of the Danforth that stank of desperate men and dead dreams. In contrast, our new house on Norwood Road seemed much better – it was older, with a large front and back yard, in a comfortable neighborhood with lots of children and old people. The house itself was over a hundred years old, and had been used as a schoolhouse in the past – there were still blackboards, corkboards, pencil sharpeners and other school paraphrenalia hung up around the place that the old tenants hadn’t bothered to remove. Cool. Me and my brother staked out a room in the center of the second floor as our own (as we had bunk beds at the time), and for the first little while, until all the moving whatsit was done with, everything was normal.

One room on the east side of the house had been used as a sunroom in the past – it was walled in entirely by windows and faced the backyard. I loved it in there. I loved going in on cold winter mornings and laying in a beam of sunlight, waiting for our ancient radiator system to recover from being turned down the night before. I would lay in there at night, trying to pick out stars from behind Toronto’s constant smog cover. There was a couch in there that was the easiest thing ever to convert into a couch fort, and I would fort up there when feeling pissed off or needing solitude. And it was in that room, on that couch, that I saw her.

I had been watching television in the next room – there was no door, so I could see clear in – and it was early evening, the backyard a dusty blue in the muted colors of spring night. I had just finished watching something and went to go flop on the couch, when I turned to look in the room and saw that someone was already there. One of the most notable things I remember is that, seeing someone I didn’t know just peacefully sitting on the couch in the room next to me did NOT scare me or make me uneasy. She was just there, and if I felt anything towards her, it was curiosity. I could see only a silhouette, ruffled and indistinct from her position – a tall, long-haired female figure in a dress or skirt that went to the floor, sitting with her hands clasped in her lap. Her edges were very precise, unlike an actual silhouette – she seemed two-dimensional, like a paper cutout, colored completely a dark, navy blue. I could see no features, no face, I couldn’t even tell which direction she was facing, but it seemed like she knew I was there, and if she felt anything towards me, it was mute acceptance.

It was only after I left the room and her presence when I realized, wait a minute, what the hell was that?

I had checked out that room for the next couple of days, but noticed nothing out of the ordinary, and definitely no strange blue silhouette-woman sitting there. I had just started putting the episode out of my mind when my brother brought it up. He’s three years younger than me and was five at the time, totally boisterous, easy to enrage, impossible to scare, hell to try and calm down. We were doing something together, playing Power Rangers or something of the sort, when he asked if I had seen the blue lady yet. Curious, I said yes. He said “Oh,” and we went back to playing. Again, there was no fear, no uneasiness, nothing to say this is wrong and unnatural. But now she was an acknowledged presence in our house, and we began seeing her more often.

We would always see her as a blue silhouette that looked two-dimensional. Her edges were sharp, as if she was cut out of paper, and she was always completely silent. We would see her move around the hallway, walk through the rooms upstairs, sit and look out of windows – we would see the motions where her feet were falling and she would make absolutely no noise at all. We never saw her downstairs or in the basement. She seemed to be limited only to the upstairs room and hallways, preferring the sunroom and its view. We never felt scared around her, even when we knew she was there – if anything, we were calmer, like she had accepted our presence and bore us no ill will. She was just there, and there was nothing wrong with that.

Eventually I got tired of sleeping in the same room with my brother and demanded my own bedroom. Mom thought this was a capital idea, and we began a long process of disassembling the bunk bed into two seperate beds, choosing a room and moving all my crap around. We picked what was formerly the TV room, a pretty much useless room that we had just stuck a TV in and forgot about, which happened to be the room that bordered on the doorless sunroom. We sponge-painted the walls pink, aquired furniture and a wardrobe, and moved me in. The room retained the TV. I was happy.

It was the Halloween of the year I had moved into my new room when I saw her for the last time. I know, Halloween, cliche omg cliche cliche, but I’m telling it how I experienced it. I had had a terrific night, obtaining much candy in my very spiffy Sailor Jupiter costume, and even better, it was a weekend the next day! After mom inspected the candy, as good moms do, I went up into my room with my sugar-filled pillowsack to watch some quality halloween cartoon programming. I hadn’t even turned the TV on when I saw her again, sitting on the couch in much the same way as I saw her in the beginning. Except, this time she wasn’t a silhouette. This time I saw her as a full human being, and I felt her too – as if her presence was far too large to fit into one little image, as if it had permeated the room like smoke.

She was absolutely beautiful. Her hair was long and shining blonde, and her skin was very pale, but bright with its own light, a luminosity that reflected on her hair and her clothes but nothing else. She wore a long, cream-colored shimmery negligee, and her feet were bare. Her arms were very long, and I could tell that she was very tall, with a long-nosed, youthful, beautiful face. Her eyes were wide, and bright blue, and she was looking out the window, out at the backyard and the jumbled, ugly, moon-filled Toronto Halloween night. She sat with her hands clasped in her lap, her eyes open, with a serene smile on her face – she didn’t look at me, but just by the way she smiled I knew she knew I was there. Knew it and, like everything about her, bore that knowledge with an otherworldly grace and serenity that I think will always come to mind when I think of the word “peace”.

And I never saw her again. I never heard what she sounded like, and I don’t think I’ll ever know her name, and none of that matters at all. If I ever die and end up as a ghost – which, despite the improbability, is still possible – I think that’s how I’d want to be. Not out to hurt anyone. Just watching.

InediblePenguin

My grandfather built a house for his wife and two young sons when they moved from Pennsylvania to New York in the early 1960s. He put a lot of effort into providing a new home for his family. He lived there for twenty-five years, long enough to see his first granddaughter into the world and lavish her with affection. He died of heart trouble before his second granddaughter was born.

Twenty-five years after that, his widow moved into a nursing home, and left the house to the older granddaughter. She had nothing but good memories of her grandfather; he was a kind and loving man, and she still has a trunk full of stuffed animals he’d given her (he could never go anywhere without picking up a small gift for her). She sometimes felt a presence in the house as she renovated it (for all the care with which it had been built, it was still rather outdated – all the flooring was original, and there’s not a single built-in light fixture in the entire house!), but she was never really worried. She figured that if it wasn’t just her nerves, it was her grandfather, and he was nothing to be scared of. Sometimes she’d hear a noise in another room, and say “Hi, Poppy!” – half in jest, and half in case.

I moved to Texas, and the first time I brought my boyfriend back home to meet my family, we were lodged in my sister’s house – she had two spare rooms, and everyone else had no room at the inn. One night we all went downstairs to do some laundry and dig around in the boxes of old stuff she’d packed away when she took possession of the place. Both cats and the dog followed us downstairs, and every living creature in the house was in the basement.

That’s when we heard the footsteps up above us. A heavy pace, crossing the floor in the living room, into the dining room and towards the cellar stairs. We all froze, the cats hid in a corner, and the dog stared toward the door at the top of the stairs in silence. Another couple of steps, and my sister started toward the steps herself. “It’s just us, Poppy. We’re all fine.” Two more steps, and silence.

I don’t believe in ghosts. And in theory, there’s nothing wrong with the ghost of a family member, because in theory, if that ghost existed, it would certainly do no harm to those it loved in life. But in practice, if I’m in the cellar of a locked and empty house and I hear footsteps upstairs, I’m going to get the hell out of there.

anne frank fanfic

I lived in the second oldest house in my area near Waco, Texas, from when I was about 11 til I was 18. I don’t know the significance of this really but I feel it’s the only possible explanation for any supernatural presence. I’m not sure when the house was originally built but the rest of the houses around mine were built in the 40s and 50s so I supposed it’s older than that.

The house seemed normal when we first moved in. Only two families had lived there over the years so it wasn’t like there was a high turnover rate. In fact no one really noticed or mentioned anything supernatural with the house.

However, there was a “secret room.” This room was actually a selling point for my parents to help us deal with moving. Even though my dad was in the military we had lived at our past house for quote awhile and didn’t want to move. So of course when my parents said there was a secret passage connecting one of the possible bedrooms with a secret room we became excited about the new house. My sister and I fought for it but I won because the other bedroom already had flower wallpaper up. When I first saw my room I went straight to the closet to see the “Secret door.”

The secret door wasn’t really secret, it was right in the back of the closet and plain to see. However it was a lot smaller than any normal door. Even when I was only 11 or 12 I had to squat down to get in. It looked like it was made for a child to use.
Another interesting thing was that the door handle was not really built into the door, it was just a handle added as an afterthought. This made me think it was originally just some sort of attic or crawl space door and not meant for a room. The door was lockable by key from my side of the door, the other side had no handle or keyhole. When you open the door there’s a very small hallway which is the same height as the door and not really fit for an adult, but it’s just a few feet long and then you get into the room.

The room was just an empty room added above the garage of the house. There was no way out except for the “secret passageway” to my closet. There were no windows, one light with a string used to turn it on hanging from the ceiling, and the room was completely white with seemingly new wallpaper. There was no furniture or anything left in the room from the previous owners, in fact I don’t think the previous owners used it at all. I believe it was sealed before or soon after they moved in and wasn’t touched since then, since it was pretty dusty, but who knows. The lock did seem very old and had a hard time moving as if it was rusted or the wood was warped or something.

Now my parents thought the room could be me and my sister’s own little toy room or whatever when they first saw it, but after moving in they had second thoughts. I’m not sure what it was but they said it was because they wouldn’t be able to hear us if we got hurt in that room since it was so detached from the rest of the house. Of course since we wanted our own secret room so badly they gave in, but said that we had to tell them when we were playing in there and we had to keep the door to my room, my closet, and the secret room open at all times when we were there. So we went on and like I said earlier nothing much really supernatural happened in the rest of the house, and not even too much in the “secret room,” at least not to me.

My sister began having an imaginary friend. Whenever I wasn’t in there I could hear her talking and whispering to someone. I noticed that although at first she used to have fun in there that as time went on she kind of seemed sadder when she was in there. However up til now this could all be coincidence so I didn’t give it much thought.

The only weird things that happened with me was at night I thought I could hear some sort of scratching on the walls behind my room, except it wasn’t really with fingernails it was softer sounding. It wasn’t on the door, but coming from inside the room.

Now I believe that I only heard this at night because it was quiet at night, and the scratching rubbing sound was so soft that you normally couldn’t hear it. I really had no idea what it was, I told my dad once and he looked around for some animal but couldn’t find any so we just forgot about it and I lived with it. Like I said it was so soft it never really bothered me. It could be some far off tree rubbing against the house for all I knew. This rubbing happened consistently but like I said I never paid it much mind, at least until my sister went into the room one night.

She knew about the rubbing too and never really said anything about it. One night though, probably about a year or so after moving into the house, the rubbing was going on as usual. I was in that limbo before falling to sleep when I thought that someone was in my room and unlocking the closet door. I thought it might have been a dream but I looked around and saw my door and closet door open, so I got up to check it out. I was a little scared but I realized it was probably mom or dad checking out the rubbing sound since I told them it still happened sometimes. I turned the light on in my closet and looked in. I saw a figure sitting in the room facing the wall. Now even when I was a kid, I had been pretty brave. I was still scared since I was pretty young, but I knew that you can’t just run or you’ll never know. I said “Hello?” and I heard “She wanted me to see” in what sounded like my sister’s voice. The light was in the middle of the room, and it was tough taking even those few steps to get to it in the middle of that dark room. But like I said, I couldn’t just leave so I just went there and turned it on. When I looked at the figure, it was indeed my sister, sitting and scratching at the wall paper. I touched her and she was crying so I pulled her up and took her out of the room. I’m really glad that I didn’t just lock the door and run or else she’d be stuck in there all night (this is one reason why I never run away from anything abnormal). I locked the door, took her to her room and watched her as she went to sleep. I really thought she could’ve been sleepwalking or something although she never had before, and since it was over I didn’t want to wake up my parents. I went back to sleep.

The next day I asked my sister in the morning if she remembered going into the room and she looked freaked out. I told her she was probably just sleep walking but she said that “the girl” asked her to come look at her pictures. She didn’t start crying but she was about to because she was so scared. I didn’t ask who “the girl” was. I told her it was just a dream and went to prove it. She didn’t want to enter the room again so I went in and saw where she was scratching on the wall. Only a little bit was scratched away, so I started peeling some more wallpaper off. Under the wallpaper were different pictures drawn in what looked like crayon. They were typical kid pictures of mainly cats, and houses, however there was one picture that I thought was weird.

It was a little girl, a cat, a mom, and a dad. Now everything looked like a normal kid family portrait, except the dad had no face. It was just a circle. Of course my rational side said she just never finished it. But still the dad picture looked strangely out of place, like the lines were distorted like she had trouble drawing it. Anyway I told my parents and they yelled at me for pulling back the wallpaper. I didn’t want my sister to get in trouble so I didn’t say anything about her or what happened last night. My parents said we had to get it fixed now and were mad, and didn’t let me play in there again as punishment. The whole thing still seemed normal to me. Kid draws on wall, parents put wall paper up to cover it up. I didn’t realize until later that night when the scratching rubbing sound started up, that it sounded like a crayon. I really started thinking that it was “the girl” that my sister talked about was drawing on the wall.

Now after this happened, I started believing that the girl was actually in there. Once I started acknowledging her presence, weirder things began to happen. It happened really slowly. I was about 14 or 15 after the episode with my sister, and the weird things were happening slowly over the course of the next years I lived in the house up until I was 18. The changes were so subtle that I didn’t really notice that they were happening until much later. The drawing sounds increased a little bit and soon were audible even during the day. I also started hearing little pattering of feet. The more I heard these things the more emotional I felt about them. I started feeling angry the more I heard the sounds, especially when I was trying to sleep. However I always managed to control myself and try to think that this girl was obviously sad and just trying to have fun and I calmed myself down. However this was going on so long that I finally asked my sister when I was about 16.

I asked her if she ever heard the sounds. She said that she did, although they were pretty quiet. Now I didn’t think this was so weird since obviously I could hear them too, and I told her how annoying it was. She kind of looked at me as if she was hurt, and said that every time she heard the sounds she felt really sad. She had trouble talking about it, but I told her this is pretty important since it’s going to affect the rest of my years left in the house. She told me that “the girl” was the girl that she used to talk to when she played in the room. She didn’t know her name, but they used to play together. She said she looked just like a little girl about her age so they had fun together. However, as my sister got older, the little girl seemed to get older too, except very unnaturally. It was subtle at first but soon she began hating seeing her. She said she looked as if she “shouldn’t have been alive anymore.” I didn’t really know what this meant. My sister said she wore the same dress the whole time, even when the girl grew out of it. I asked her why she went into the room that one night to find the pictures, and she said she really didn’t want to but the girl made her feel so sad and she’d do anything to help her out. However this still freaked her out and I didn’t ask anymore questions.

Things got worse every night, and I hated hearing that sound. I was so mad that she wouldn’t just shut up so I could sleep. The weird thing was I was scared at the same time, since I knew that whatever it was in there wasn’t actually alive anymore. What also freaked me out was that the sound didn’t annoy my sister, but I guess she had more tolerance than I did.

I asked my parents who used to live here, and they said a family with two sons. Of course this didn’t have anything to do with the room, since they had it locked off the entire time they were there. So I asked if they knew anything about the family before them. They said the original owners were the ones who had the house built and that they didn’t know much about them, except that they had a daughter who died when she was 11. I asked if they knew how she died, but they said it was some sort of accident, so it wasn’t murder or child abuse or anything. I also asked if she died in the secret room, but they said they didn’t think so. I really think that this was the girl in the room, although I have no idea why she inhabited it still.

Once I knew this I sort of had an idea with what I was dealing with. Last year was when things got the worst. I heard almost constant drawing and her jumping around inside the room. The footsteps sounded heavier and were louder. If I ever heard it I’d pound on the door to the room and she’d stop immediately, but I’d hear soft whimpering or crying. She’d also start drawing again later on. Sometimes I’d scream at her to shut up. I really got mad every time it happened since it had been going on for 6 years. However, I knew that I had to do something about this. I was a lurker by this time so I’ve read a lot of ghost story threads, and I remembered how pussy most of the goons were regarding ghosts and never checked anything out. So I knew that I had to at least understand what was going on exactly, and if possible end it. I didn’t really have a plan but I knew I had to see the girl or talk to her or something.

Last year, shortly before I turned 18, my parents went away for the weekend, so I took the key to the secret room from their room (they kept it ever since locking it that day when I took off the wallpaper). I was determined to see her so I stayed up expecting to hear sounds. I couldn’t hear anything so soon I just fell asleep. It was about 1 am when I woke up to a loud bang, like someone jumped or fell. I heard her footsteps afterwards and of course the drawing. The first thing I felt before any fear was pure anger. I hated that she woke me up, even though this was what I wanted. I immediately grabbed the key and went to the door. I was pounding on it as I said “That’s it!” and unlocking the door. The sounds stopped and I heard whimpering. I threw open the door and this was the first time I saw the room in years.

The light coming from my room illuminated a figure in the room, much like when I saw my sister years earlier. This was when I began to feel a wave of different emotions. I was really angry, really scared, yet I also knew that I had to do this and remain calm. I went into the room and stood a few feet away from the figure which was standing in the corner. I turned on the light. What I saw was probably the most horrific sight I could probably have ever even thought of in my entire life. Any horror movie monster had nothing on how unnatural the girl looked.

I finally realized why my sister described her in such a weird way. Her body was taller than she should have been. Her limbs were so lanky and bony and stretched like she kept growing past how tall she should have been. She was wearing a really small dress, and it was really tight on her body. Her face looked as if her head had continued to grow but her face had not. The skin was stretched and the eyes were sunk back into her head yet wide open and her small, childlike teeth were exposed since her lips were stretched back with the rest of her face. Her hair was down to her waist, her face had tears streaming down. I took all of this in in just a moment, and as soon as we met eyes she let out a wail as if she was crying and moaning at the same time. It wasn’t a loud wail like most people describe ghosts, it was pretty soft and it was as if she was in terrible pain, but I couldn’t tell her expression since her face was so unnatural and stretched.

As soon as I heard the wail all the anger in my body was overcome by fear and I ran. I wish I could say I ran for a video camera, but I just ran. I know I’ve been talking about how much I hate when people don’t investigate things but I was so terrified that I ran. Once I got out of my room I ran to my car and drove away and spent the night at a friend’s house. Once I realized what happened I was in a cold shiver and scared out of my mind for the entire night. I was too scared to go back home until my parents came home.

I waited until they came back on Sunday, and then I came over. They asked me why I took the key and left the closet door open and I just told them I wanted to see if I could sell any of my old toys on eBay. I took one last look in the room and locked the door. Ever since then nothing happened. I don’t know why things stopped, but I’m always hoping its not because I “let her out” like in the Ring or something and that she’s really evil. Since nothing has happened since then I do really hope that I helped her out in some way, but in all honesty I don’t care. My parents moved after I went to college, and I have no intention of ever going back. I came up with a theory that the male family member in her life was really mean to her and hated her playing in there, and possibly beat her, while the female family member always felt sad (hence my sister, and the girls willingness to open up to her first). Anyway like I said that’s just all theory but it kind of makes sense. This all happened last year, and the more I think about it the harder it is to remember.

Neukoln19

I’ve got one, happened kind of recently.
My house is very old, and we have heard footsteps downstairs, and other odd noises (if these are ghosts, they are both infrequent and courteous with their shenanagins) but nothing really worth breaking out the video cameras for.

However, one time I was sitting on the toilet reading, like I always do, kind of tuned out. My house is right near the trains and a few miles south of an international airport, so I’m kind of used to ambient noise. However, one noise made me perk up, it was getting louder and louder. It sounded like a cross between Marlon Brando in his later years and a shrill child. It was going “Hell-ooooo? Hell-ooooooo?” over and over, getting louder and louder. At first I thought, “Oh! some poor child has lost his way from his friends outside on the street, nearby, what a crazy-sounding kid!” Until the Hellos got so loud i could swear they were coming from right outside of the bathroom door.
I leap the fuck up, fasten my pants on, and open the door.

Nothing.

No one is there. And none of the windows or doors in my house are open. I grab the mag-lite and check the basement, and the perimeter of the house. Still nothing.

Radio F Software

My brother’s got a bunch of toy swords, one of which makes noise when you push the button on the side (it lights up, vibrates, and makes a “ching!” sound). So my entire family went to Lowe’s today because I was sleeping. I get up and went downstairs for lunch and I sat on the couch watching Mythbusters.

Then I hear a “ching!” sound. I didn’t think much of it at first so I kept the TV on. Then I hear it again so I go to look to see what’s making the noise. I hear it two more times before I figure out it’s that dumb plastic sword in my brother’s room, so I took it off the shelf and clicked the button on it. Nothing.

I shook it, and there’s loose pieces inside of it. Heavy loose pieces like the vibrate motor and the speaker. I click the button a few more times as I shook it. No dice, so I tossed it onto his bed and went back to watching the show. Commercial break comes on, and the sword goes off again. I walk into his room and just stand there looking at it. I must have stood in there for at least 15 minutes and it didn’t do anything.

The moment I leave to go TRY and finish watching the show which I’ve missed half of now, it keeps going off. I ended up just shoving it under his pillow. I have no idea what the hell was wrong with that thing, but it was just a tad bit unnerving.

Smelly

I was at a graveyard a couple months ago in Gettysburg, was the middle of the night naturally, My friend and I got out of the car with our 3 other friends inside it still. I’m not one to get freaked out easily so I was willing to stand right next to the entrance (I didn’t want to go in simply for the fact that it had a posted no trespassing sign, and a cop lived right down the road.)

We’re both standing there talking to each other, Cracking jokes here and there, when I noticed a sign on the tree was glowing. There were no lights anywhere near by, the car lights were off, and it was a new moon. I point it out to my buddy and he thinks nothing of it.

Soon afterwards we both noticed a bi-pedal shadow move past a headstone rather quickly. My buddy’s going “Maybe we should get back into the car now…” I took it off as seeing things, then it happened again. Just going the opposite direction. This is when I’m really curious about it. Once more again, the opposite direction from the previous time. This is when it dawned on me that again, there was no light that could show a shadow, but somehow the headstone was brighter than the others. By that time one of my friends in the backseat is dragging me into the car and we head on out. I wish I could find out what that was.

———

I moved back to Florida from Pennsylvania last tuesday. Two nights before Myself and 3 friends (We’ll call them J, M, and B) went to an old abandoned house. Now my buddy from the previous story had alrighty shipped off to Basic Training in South Carolina, which he’s still currently at.

Well, we get up to the house and everyone’s naturally on edge. Being the brave/idiotic person that I am, I’m the first one out and up the small incline towards the house. I was carrying a battery operated lantern (The only bright source of light we had) so naturally I was going to be point anyway. The way the house was (and I have a picture of it that needs developed, if the threads still around I’ll scan it in) you had to hop up about 4 feet to get into the screen door which by the way was ripped to shreds.

I get in there and take a few steps in, noticing an old burner stove and what looked to be a boiler directly in front of me. To the left was an old Claw Foot bathtub sitting in the middle of the hallway, completely blocking the path that way. Thinking my friends are behind me, I go further inside. Then, I notice footsteps leading away from the house. I head back to the screen door and notice B and M are inside the car with J standing right next to it, after mentioning a reference about them reminding me of Scooby-Doo (B is a stoner and M is just scared all the time) I manage to weasel them inside the house.

Looking around the house revealed that it was attempted to be remodeled, but someone left in a hurry. The bathroom had no flooring, but that was the only part in the entire house that was being worked on. Inside the bathroom was another doorway, which led past the bathtub into the hallway. Within the hallway was another door leading outside, and a bunch of little boy’s toy trucks laying next to tons of pieces of shattered glass. Finding it a bit odd that anyone working on a house (which is quite bare of anything showing that it’s lived in I failed to mention) would have children’s toys in an area that was so hazardous. Not only was their glass, but parts of the flooring looked ready to cave in.

Continuing further in I found the stairs leading to the second and then the attic floors. Telling everyone to stay downstairs in case something happens and we need to leave in a hurry, I head upstairs alone. I thought it would be safer than having 4 people rushing down an old house’s stairs, upon reaching the landing to the second floor I noticed one room that was a bit off than the others. Not visibly off, but I had a gut feeling that it was different. Taking a peek inside I noticed a large splatter of what looked like blood on the wall. Not wasting anytime and hearing that my friends below are starting to get a little more frightneded than usual (I left them in the dark.) I head downstairs in a hurry, Not telling them what it is that I’m heading away from, we get to the car and are a safe distance away when I tell them about the splatter.

The next afternoon J and I went back to the house curious as to what that could be, she figured it was paint or something strewn across the wall. We arrive at the house and head inside, within the fireplace that seemed normal enough in the dark was a white dove laying dead. I placed that to the back of my mind, wanting only to confirm what I saw last night.

I ran upstairs and found that the splatter was gone. a little disturbed by that we explored the other rooms. Inside one room was graffiti of a dreamcatcher and a large R.I.P. scrawled across the wall to the left of the dreamcatcher. I checked out the attic and found what seemed to be an old rat cage in there, the stench was unbearable and I figured that’d be enough. On our way out we noticed a staircase that was extremely thin. Heading up it I found another space in the attic which had what seemed to be the entire collection of National Geographic books. We left the house with more questions than answers.

I still want to know what it was that I saw on the wall.

twoheadedboy

My grandparents live in an ancient (1820, if I recall correctly) colonial, featuring lots of fireplaces and sharp edges for children to hit their soft little heads on. There’s an absurd amount of little cupboards that haven’t been opened since the great depression, and a basement that was made for rapin’.

In said basement, there’s probably ten rooms, all haphazardly divided with slats and broken sheetrock, as well as flickery lightbulbs and a green fridge. The fridge isn’t very scary but it does have a very old cake in it. The basement also has a secret room, that you can’t access from the rest of the basement, but you can see into due to an oddly placed window. It was wired with the rest of the basement, however, so flipping a switch to turn on all the lights in the basement turned on that one. You could only get into the room from a trapdoor underneath the front porch. My grandfather considered making this his workroom back in the seventies, but all that came of that was a few cigarette butts in one corner and a pile of newspapers on the workbench. There was indeed a workbench, because this had clearly been used as such previously. There was the ubitquitious pegboard-with-tools-sort-of-attached, as well as a vise, and various drawers with nails and screws and things for fixing other things.

Anyway, I was simulataniously fascinated and scared of this room, so I would go down sometimes (at an age of ten or eleven) and crush Matchbox cars in the vise, nail things to wood, try and make catapults, etc., but I always kept the trapdoor open. I would usually try to go down with my cousin, who was two years younger, but I could outrun him should ghosts try to take me down. He was an asshole anyway, so the family would probably be better off. One day, I’m down there with my cousin, hitting something with a hammer, and between smashings of the GI Joe, I hear an incredibly loud crack. Now, I am a jumpy dude and was a equally jumpy kid, so I jumped. My cousin twitched, then looked at me like I was retarded, and I’m not one to loose face to a kid in Lion King underoos, so I kept on with the smashing. I hear the crack again and pretend to ignore it, and likewise ignore my cousin staring at me. I assumed he was staring at me because I wasn’t acknowledging the crack, but he kept staring and staring. It was creeping me out. So I called him a butthead or something, and he shakes his head like a dog shaking off a tick, and punches me in the arm. We go about our smashing business undaunted. The crack cracks again, but this time it’s absurdly loud and combined with the crashing down of the trapdoor.

At this point I am flipping the fuck out

I’d seen horror movies, I knew the score. I manage to leap the steps in two jumps, and start smashing into the trapdoor with all my weight (a whopping seventy pounds or so). My cousin, on the other hand, is sitting on his stool and staring at me. I yell at him to help me open the door, and he stands up slowly and starts walking to the stairs. He’s on the next-to-bottom step, probably ten feet from me, when the light in the room snaps off. I somehow manage to keep my sphincter clenched while I hear a veritable flurry of steps, and see a glimpse of my cousin’s LA Gear in the shaft of light from the window. He slams into me like a fucking truck, and I fall and roll down the steps, after which he leaps down after me. While he’s falling, I see his face in the light, and it’s at this point when I piss myself. It looks nothing like him. His face is contorted like someone in obscene amounts of pain, but at the same time more angry than I’ve ever seen anyone. He starts clawing at me, and I’m screaming as loud as I possibly can and trying to keep his fingers out of my eyes. We fight for probably thirty seconds, rolling in the dust and grime that old unused rooms accumulate so well. I try to hit him with the hammer but I miss, he grabs the hammer out of my hands and raises it. I do the only thing I can, which is grab him by the throat and start choking.

My father wrenches the trapdoor open, presumably after hearing my screams. The trapdoor opens, the light turns back on, and there’s another crack. My cousin passes out, either due to a lack of oxygen or that final crack. He claims he remembers none of it, despite various threats of violence from various members of my family. I believe him, personally. We’ve since sealed the workroom.

PhoenixEdge

This isn’t a ghost story or anything, just a nightmare that I thought was cool. Please tell me if it is cool and creepy or just retarded, as I’m interested in what others think about it.

A buddy and I decide to do some urban exploration. The two of us find our way into a run down part of town, and eventually make our way to a series of dilapidated buildings. At one rather large complex, there is an outdoor stairway and balcony that wraps around the outside perimeter of the building. The two of us walk up the stairs and find a door that looks like it has seen recent use. I turn the handle, and the door swings open. I peer inside, and I see what appears to be a long staircase descending down. My friend and I are intrigued, and go down the staircase.

As we descend the steps, we begin to feel a bit uneasy. Something in the air is not right. There is a palpable sense of something unnatural, but we can’t seem to put our finger on it. We reach the bottom of the staircase, and judge that we are about two floors underground at this point. There is a door slightly ajar at the bottom of the staircase, and I open it.

That slight sense of dread I felt earlier suddenly erupts. I almost panic, but I decide to suck it up and see what is in this room. It is a square shape room, with a wood railing fenced balcony extending around the perimeter of the room. Below the balcony, a floor down, is a large room. It is dimly lit by a large circle of candles, about 20 feet in diameter. In the center of the circle of candles is an expensive looking, ornately carved iron table with a glass finish. Outside of the circle are various pieces of furniture spread out in disarray. There are couches, chairs, peices of paper, desks, and even a bed that are all just kind of tossed about the room.

I get the feeling that the room is filled with people, but I don’t see anyone down there. But out of the corner of my eye, I can see dark shapes moving. Once I look in the direction I saw the shapes, they are gone, however.

It seems there is something a bit strange about the room. There are no doors or any visible entrances to the room below me. In fact, it seems as if the only way down into the room before me is to jump down from the balcony. But I wonder how all that furniture got down there, and who could be using those candles that are currently burning.

I look behind me, to my friend for comfort, because I am on the verge of panic. But my friend is not behind me. I have no idea where my friend went.

I decide to flee the room and run back up the stairs in order to find my friend.

I hastily climb the staircase, hoping to see my friend at every landing. But I don’t see him. As I am nearing the top of the staircase, I get a sinking feeling that I have just seen something I was not meant to see. Irrational fear and despair wells up deep inside me. I decide to find my friend as soon as I can, and just go home.

As I open the door at the top of the staircase and go back outside, I realize something is wrong. While it was a cloudless day in the middle of the afternoon when I had gone down the stairs, now it is an overcast red sky. I had only been down the staircase for five minutes. The sky is colored in such a way that I first think it is simply evening and I lost track of time, but the color is somehow bleaker, somehow more colorless than it should be, in an unnatural sort of way.

As I look around, I notice something else is wrong. While there was a little bit of activity in this run part of town, there is now nothing. There are no signs of life. There is no wind, no sound of cars, no people, no birds, not even any insects. The only sound is the fast beating of my own heart. All the buildings are still exactly the way they were before I went down into the staircase, but they are now discolored by the peculiar lighting that the sky offers.

I know something is not right. Despair and panic well up in me. I begin to wonder if I am in some strange nightmare (fortunately this was the case). This can’t be happening, I tell myself. Possible explanations for what is going on fill my mind. Perhaps a nuclear warhead was detonated? Perhaps I am under the influence of some strange hallucinogenic gas that was present in the strange room below? And furthermore, where did my friend disappear to? I search around in panic, desperate for the comfort that my friend’s presence would provide.

But then I hear something that breaks the silence. Something terrible. In the distance, I hear what appears to be a scream of despair. I freeze in terror. It is a scream that lasts for almost a minute, and varies little in pitch. It sounds like the scream of a man mixed with wind. It is chilling to the bone, and I realize that no human could possible scream that long without taking a breath. There is also the fact that something is off about the scream. It doesn’t sound exactly human. There is something unnatural and disturbing about the scream. The scream trails off, and once again silence overtakes me.

I look around, suddenly freed from my fear, but now overtaken with panic. I am too afraid to make much noise, but I quickly walk around the run down town. I give up hope for finding my friend, and take off on a jog towards my home. I notice that there are still no signs of life at all. What should be busy streets are deserted. There are no cars, not even parked ones. There are no birds. There is no wind. I take off at a fast walk/slow jog for nearly 30 minutes. I finally get into the more civilized part of town. There are still no cars or signs of life. I am practically in tears at this point. I take off at a dead run towards my house, screaming for my friend, or for anyone.

I finally see my home in the distance. But there are no signs of life at my home, not any that I can see at this distance at least.

The air begins to gain a sort of presence, a sort of electricity. I hear faint whisperings all around me, but cannot make out any words. I then hear a few footsteps behind me. My blood freezes in terror, but I look back.

A wave of relief flows over me. It is my friend. I am practically in tears of relief as I begin to shout at him asking where he was been.

My words stop dead in my throat. There is something terribly wrong with him. His face is contorted into an expression of horror, and his mouth is open as if letting out a terrible scream. But no sound escapes his lips. Worst of all are his eyes. They are pure black orbs of darkness. My “friend” lurches towards me at a slow walk. I scream at him, asking him what is wrong. But he does not respond to anything I do. Terror overtakes me yet again as I look into the void that are his eyes.

I run in terror from my friend, not looking back. I am nearing exhaustion at this point, but adrenaline and fear keep me going. I have never felt so alone in my life, and I truly feel like I am the only sentient being left in the universe.

I cannot run anymore, and just walk. I look behind me to make sure my “friend” isn’t following me. But my heart sinks and I scream when I see him behind me, literally five feet behind me. His empty black orbs stare blanklessly at me, and his mouth and face are still contorted into a horrifying silent scream.

I packpedal, but he follows me, taking off at a run when I run. I finally just stop backpedaling and turn around and run again. I hear his footsteps trail off far behind me, but when I look behind me again, he is suddenly right there, five feet from me, staring at me.

I scream at him, telling him to go away. I call upon God to aid me, but nothing happens. My friend keeps lurching towards me slowly, as I stand there looking at him, trembling. He reaches out his hand and is about to touch me with his finger, when my senses erupt. An explosion of horrifying images and sounds flood my mind, and I feel myself falling.

It turns out that strange room I had discovered was a gate to Hell.

methodman_uk

“The House”
About 8 years ago, my sisters boyfriend told us about the House, he works for the electricity board in England, and his job was to travel all over the area fixing remote problems. On one of his travels he noticed a house on the North Yorkshire moors, that was abandoned and set back on its own, he mentioned it to my sister and she told me, the thing with this house was that if you counted the windows, then dared to go inside, you would find you would be a room short.

Well this was enough for me and my friends, so off we went armed with flash lights and general directions.
On the journey we had various theories about the room, from simple miscounting, to more heinous activities, Wayne was convinced it was like a punishment room and a secret door would reveal a withered mummified remains of a long forgotten child. I was suspecting something bad had occurred and the room had simply been sealed off.

After getting lost on the foggy moors for ages, we eventually find a landmark we were told was nearby. Parking up we all got out and tested our torches. We located the farm track and set off. The track was about half a mile long ,covered in water and rutted from animals and tractors, It was difficult going and made us think about exactly why we were doing this.

Then up ahead loomed the house. A grey building surrounded by trees and totally pitch black, when the first torch illuminated the outside, we all just stopped and were like “ohh shit man, this is scary”.
We approached the back of the house, and could see various outhouses and equipment abandoned. Wayne counted the windows of the upstairs, 2 on the front, 3 at the back with a small one in the side.
At this point we felt like we shouldn’t be here, and we were going to get into trouble for trespassing. Mike, called us all pussies and went up to the back door. It wasn’t locked, as the lock had been removed but someone had used hay bale twine to secure the handle to the frame. We cut the twine and the door was opened with a huge squeak, we all bolted at the noise, but eventfully we reorganised and entered the house. I’m not exaggerating when I say we were all scared. It was the fact that a perfectly good house had been left to rot for no reason. Now my sister’s boyfriend had told us to try and find the electricity meter and write down the number, he would then be able to find out who the last owners were. We found the meter near the cellar door which was open. I quickly wrote down the number, and Wayne suggested we go down the cellar . he shone his light down the steps but after the flashlight illuminated the bodies of some dead rabbits we decided against it. Maybe the rabbits had just found some were quiet to die, but it was too fucking scary to even think of going down there.

We headed upstairs after checking out the rooms downstairs, we didn’t find anything exciting, all though every cupboard we opened we all expected some homeless guy to jump out on us.
Walking up the stairs we saw 2 doors that must of been the front bedrooms, a quick look revealed nothing out of the ordinary. Then we found another room which faced the back, this had two windows, so we were still 2 windows short. From the layout of the house, the other two windows must belong to a side room but there was no door anywhere.

At first we couldn’t understand it, and were convinced we had fucked up, then it struck us, were is the bathroom? There wasn’t one downstairs, unless it was in the cellar, but no one wanted to go and check. After sending mike outside to stand where the hidden rooms windows where, we deuced that the room was behind the wall at the top of the stairs. Now the wallpaper in this house was peeling and mouldy. But the wall we were interested in was just dirty plaster. No evidence of wallpaper, and as we looked harder you could just make out a sunken crack, were the plaster had shrunk back, and if you followed this depression you could see the faint outline of a doorway. Why this room had been boarded up we didn’t know, but we all started getting freaked out. I wanted to just go back to the car with the number and see what we could find out. Wayne wanted to see what was hidden in the room.

After a few moments Wayne goes downstairs and returns with a lump of angle iron that had been discarded outside. He comes up to the wall, tells us to move back and starts trying to break down the wall, At this point all hell breaks loose, with the noise of Wayne smashing the house up, Mike shouting at him to stop, im screaming at them both to lets just go home. When suddenly Wayne stops, we both look and see he has smashed a fist sized hole in the plaster, a damp smell emanates from within. We all just look at each other. Wayne asks mike for the torch, he puts it upto the hole and looks in.
At this point we hear a massive bang from downstairs. We look at each other, apart from Wayne who is looking through the hole. Then there’s another bang, and another. These are massive noisy blows on metal. We all freak out and run like fuck out of the house. we noticed whilst running that the cellar door was now shut. Im not joking we ran like fuck not stopping until we were at the car. I was covered in mud from falling over on the track. Mike was having an asthma attack Wayne was acting weird and kept saying we should go back.

On the journey home, Wayne was trying to convince us to go back, when we asked him what was in the room he said it was full of stuff and wouldn’t elaborate. We all get back to my house and start questioning Wayne. He says when he looked in the room, it was full of furniture, chests of drawers and stuff like that, he said the bath was full of liquid but didn’t explain he says we should go back and get all the stuff and sell it. To be honest he was freaking us out, from his explanations of the rooms contents, it doesn’t sound like there was anything of value there. And why would someone plaster up a load of furniture in a house and then abandon it. I don’t know why Wayne was so interested in it. But I honestly think, that there was some presence in that house and it got to Wayne.

A few days later my sisters boyfriend, told us that the number we got off the meter was wrong, there’s no record of any supply from that meter, we must of wrote it down wrong or the records have been deleted.

About three weeks later, mike told me that Wayne had been back to the house on his own, which totally freaked me out. And Mike says Wayne has just made a lot of money off some stuff he acquired. I don’t know what Wayne was selling but I suspect its got something to do with that house. I know one thing, I wont be going back there. Ever.

Darth Tang

Frankly, I do not expect this to be believed. But I’m going to tell it anyway, simply because its been weighing upon my mind lately. I ran into Flash last weekend, who was back in town, and he spoke to me about it.
Knowledge of the physical environment is essential to an LEO in Patrol. It is one reason why seniority counts for a great deal in this line of work-the longer you work a given juridiction, the better you know it. And locals who become police officers quickly learn that growing up in an area does not mean you truely know it.

Part of it, is that an LEO, unlike most people, has no perception of private or personal space. We can go anywhere, given correct circumstances. And because of that, a great deal of ‘idle time’ or ‘routine patrol’ is spent exploring. Can you get a patrol car through the gap in this fence? Where does that track lead? Is there a way to get from this parking lot to another? If you walk this easement or power-line access, what will you see?

This is essential, because at some point this knowledge can mean shaving thirty seconds off a response time, or catching a fleeing subject.

In every police jurisdiction of any size, in my experience, there is always at least one strange place. Not the spots you take rookies and play Find the Mud Hole, or the crime scenes you use to scare Explorers, but the real thing. The places that nobody talks about much. The places you don’t find out about until you have to go there. The places you go to only if you have to.

We have a place that is sometimes called the Patch. Its about thirty-five acres of very broken ground covered in scrub oak on the edge of town, completely isolated from everywhere else, out beyond an old brick plant that now makes clay pots. Nothing, as far as I can tell, have ever been built there, nor is it really good for anything. Its at the base of the tall ridge that currently marks the west boundry of our burg, cut by numerous gullies, and whose red-clay soil is about useless from growng anything.

The City seized it for taxes back in 1932 from a land company; it was listed as ‘waste land’ (no commercial use) back then.

Its really a strange place. I’ve been on search teams across it six times in eleven years, and every time I’ve been on it, it creeps me out. It gave me the willies when I first explored it shortly after being cut loose on my own; you can’t get a car very deep into it, and frankly, a short walk on foot into it gave me such a bad feeling I never went back without a reason. It wasn’t until about eighteen months later that I learned that I was not alone in my reaction to the place.

One factual thing that bothers me about the place, is that I get lost in it. I have, since I was old enough to think about such things, an unerring instinct about the direction north. I can always find it. Night time, snowstorms, forest, whatever; give me a few seconds to concentrate, and I know which direction north is. Even the desert, which screws many people up, never bothered me. And the Army taught me land nav to a fine degree; I’ve run compass courses with multiple dog-legs and hit my target location every time, even on featureless terrtain such at Fort Hood, where one bit of scrub is identical to every other bit.

But every time I’ve been in the Patch, I’ve gotten turned around. In broad daylight, with a ridgeline a quarter-mile away that is only a couple degrees off a true north-south axis. After the first search, I started taking a compass with me.

Near the center of the Patch is a structure we call the Playhouse. Its a building made out of sheets of old galvanized tin nailed to thick posts and four-by fours, with a dirt floor. We call it the Playhouse because there is absolutely no rationale for its positioning or design; firstly, you can’t get a vehicle larger than an ATV or dirt bike to it due to washouts and gullies; maybe a jacked-up 4×4 if it was dry and you really did not care about your paint job.

Secondly, because the place is big (about 3000 square feet, as near as we can tell), but has no purpose. There’s no animal pens near it, nothing; just a wood framework with tin nailed to it, no tar on the roof-seams, no doors (but several door-way sized openings), no windows at all. Inside its split into at least a dozen ‘rooms’ by either more tin sheets, or partitions made out of old packing crates from the railroad. Some of the rooms are completely isolated from the exterior walls.

There is no logic or reason to how the rooms are laid out; several have openings that are barely 3′ high. It reminds you of how kids put together a fort or treehouse.

Except that this one has cut-down telephone poles for roof supports set several feet into the ground. Whatever else you can say about it, someone built it to last.

There no junk or litter about the PH, and no grafftti; while its not very obvious, its been there since before the City seized the place, and with all the generations of kids, you would expect some beer-drinking, ghost-hunting, or general spray-can antics.

Nor is there any sign of animals taking advantage of the shelter, nor have I seen any bird’s nests, although hornet’s nests and mud daubers are present.

And it smells odd. That’s all I can say about it: it smells different than what I think it should. This has been commented on by others, as well. No specific odor. Just odd.

And flashlights fail in it. Yes, flashlights fail everywhere, but flashlights seem to fail a lot more in it than anywhere else. $70 Streamlight Stingers that are City-issue and have reliable rechargeable batteries go abruptly dead in there. And not in the usual fashion, the light going yellow for twenty minutes, getting dimmer and dimmer until they just fade away; rather, going from hard white light to dead in a minute’s span. When you carry the same light every day for years, you know its battery in detail. Yet many of us have been caught by an unexpected dead battery in the Playhouse.

Some time in the past, we were searching for a missing girl. It was likely that she had been carried off by a recent high water after massive cloud burst (10″ in ten hours), but foul play was also a possibility, for reasons best unrelated. A search was mounted. I was tasked with taking two officers and checking the area around the old brick plant and the Patch.

I had two veteran officers, both entry team members and well-known to me; call them MD and Flash. They readily accepted my suggestion that we change into tactical gear in order to protect our uniforms from the brush; to be frank, I was less concerned with the brush, than for having an excuse to bring my MP-5 along. I wasn’t alone in that, as unbidden, both Flash & MD got their shotguns out of the arms room. Flash had a 14″ pump, and MD a Benneli semi-auto.

We searched the Patch first; and although all three of us were carefully keeping track of where we were in a place we had all been in before, we managed to get well and truely turned around twice in the space of ninety minutes.

It took us a lot longer than it should have to search the area, because frankly, we weren’t splitting up. At all. Anywhere else, we would have been twenty to thirty feet apart walking on line. Here, we stuck together. We had been on other search teams which had gotten got hopelessly jumbled and separated in the Patch before.

It was late afternoon when we went to the Playhouse. The sky was completely overcast, the color of lead. The ground was muddy, everything was wet, and there was a cold breeze out of the north. To say it was a miserable day was an understatement.

We circled the Playhouse, looking for footprints, and found nothing. However, drainage was such that it was possible that they could have been washed away, so a search was nessessary.

Inside, there were no gaps in the ceiling to speak of, and very few in the walls; the gray daylight hardly made its presence known through what gaps there were, although the dull light through nail holes made you think (unpleasently) of animal eyes in the night.

I led the way in. Twenty feet in a portable metal detector (a wand type used to check for weapons) that Flash was carrying suddenly started beeping, and did not stop until he pulled the battery pack; he swore it had been turned off the whole time he had been out. Later, at the PD, it worked perfectly.

We were clearing the place like a hostile building, rather than a seach; we had not talked about it, but all three of us were on edge. Very much so. The place smelled very wrong; not a smell of anything in particular, just not the way such a place should smell. I can’t explain it any way better than that.

I was on one knee checking out a closet sized-‘room’ when abruptly the light on my MP-5 died, going from white & bright to dead in a couple seconds. Flash took point and MD center while I tagged along and switched batteries (I had a couple full-charged spares on me, as well as two more flashlights and some cylumes).

A minute or so later Flash’s light died the same way, and he dropped to the rear to change out, while MD and I moved up a place. We stopped at that point, and we heard something. Flash muttered ‘What was that?’ and we all listened carefully.

It was coming from ahead and to our right; we did not speak at the time, of course, but later, we never agreed on what it sounded like. To me, it had sounded like a sick cat might sound as it whimpers.

We moved forward towards the noise, and came to a largeish room which had the exterior wall on one side. MD made entry, and at that exact moment his flashlight died. He immedately side-stepped and dropped to one knee; I moved in and past him along the wall as Flash slid along the wall on the opposite side of the ‘doorway’.

Flash was to the left of the ‘doorway’, MD was right, kneeling, and I was about two feet to MD’s right . The room was about twenty by eleven, with us at the narrow side.

And something moved in the far right corner. Flash hit it with his light a second before I did; I remember MD yelling, and then both fired.

To this day, I swear I saw a big dark dog, I mean large, 150+lbs, bull mastiff-sized, in Flash’s light, moving fast.

I fired, three-round burst, and then kept firing as MD and Flash pounded away. Both went empty and yelled that they were withdrawing (team procedure), and I fired to cover them as I backed out last.

After the first burst, I couldn’t see much for the muzzle flash, so I just ripped up the corner with three-round bursts. I fired off the full thirty-round mag.

In retrospect, I can not explain why I fired thirty rounds at a dog. There was no valid reason to simply hose it down; nor for Flash and MD to blaze away like we had. Nerves, is the only explanation I can offer. All I can say is that that encounter was quite simply the most stressful incident I have ever had, bar none.

In the second room, we reloaded, and MD switched out batteries. Then we re-entered the long room.

There was no dog. No body. No blood. Zip.

None of us decribed what we saw the same way. Flash was extremely reluctant to describe what he saw at all.

But there are a couple facts: all three saw a target ‘in motion’. Despite the fact that we all perceived it as being in motion, we all saw it in a corner, and never shifted our point of aim, despite the fact that we all trained regularly on moving targets, MD & Flash were hunters (I shoot lots of moving varmits), I served in military actions, and both Flash and I had been in fatal police shootings.

And we had twelve 12 gauge 3″ magnum hulls and 30 expended 9mm brass. Thirty bullets and 108 000 pellets were fired at a specific area, in this case an area consisting of a dirt floor and tin walls. All three of us were classified as expert shots.

No matter how closely we, nor the two investigators who came out later, looked, we could find no hits on the floor, and only 23 projectile penetrations in the tin walls. Out of 138 projectiles fired (000 pellets are 0.36″ in diameter steel balls; 9mm bullets are roughly 0.38), 105 remain unaccounted for. The 23 holes we found were concentrated in the target corner; 9 to the left, 14 to the right of the corner, with the two groups 22″ apart at the closest.

As if something solid between the two groups had soaked up the missing rounds.

The dept wrote the incident off as an ‘accidental discharge’.

The girl was eventually found elsewhere.

Flash, MD, and I never realy talked about the indicent except indirectly. All three admitted having felt more stress than before or since.

None of the three of us have been to the Patch since. Both MD and Flash have moved on to other agencies for unrelated reasons.

One of the creepier things from later on: when we tried to explain the whole matter (and a firefight is not a joking matter to the police, no matter that no one got hurt), the administration members we were dealing with, who have been LEOs here for 40+ and 30+ years respectively, nodded, asked few questions, and let the matter drop.

Thats all there is to it.

Super Locrian

Last week I stayed in a Marriot hotel room so haunted that we got a refund.

My brother Jason and I shared a room on the third floor of a Courtyard by Marriot in Phoenix. We had been partying all night at a rehearsal dinner and need to be awake early the next day. Exhausted and ready for bed, we turned off the lights and I tried to turn off the TV. For some reason, the TV was extremely reluctant to be turned off; every time I hit the power button, it would turn off for a few seconds and then immediately turned back on. Finally it stayed off, and I turned over to fall asleep.

The lights turned on. I yelled at my brother, but he was fast asleep. I rolled over to hit the switch, and the same thing happened; the lights were extremely reluctant to turn off. This trend continued for about an hour as I tried in vain to fall asleep; every five or ten minutes, the lights or the TV would turn on by themselves. At around 1:00 am, the alarm, which we had set for soft radio at 6:30, began blaring the digital BEEP BEEP BEEP that makes every man cringe.

I was understandably fed up. I stormed downstairs to the desk in the lobby and told the young lady on duty that something was wrong with the electronics in room 321. She made no effort to hide the fact that she thought I was full of shit; eventually she indulged me and sent a maintenance worker to check on the circuit breaker. He came back upstairs after about five minutes and assured me everything was normal. Dissatisfied, I went back to bed.

By the time I returned to the room, Jason was wide awake, himself struggling with the phantom-powered electronics. We were both exasperated, but not yet scared. We unplugged the TV and the clock, unscrewed the light bulbs from the lamp, put the remote control in the nightstand drawer, and at last fell comfortably asleep.

Our respite was brief; not long after we nodded off (the clock was unplugged, so I don’t know actually how long), I was awakened by the unmistakable feeling of something heavy striking the bed. The mattress springs echoed with the impact as I looked around in the pitch dark. I heard my brother stirring in the bed across the room.

“The hell was that?” he murmured.

“I don’t fucking know. We’ve got to get some fucking sleep.” I rolled over again and shut my eyes.

“Why is the water running?”

Until now, I hadn’t noticed, but the faucet in the bathroom was indeed running; neither of us had used the bathroom since before we went to bed. At this point our moods went from annoyance to fear. I got out of bed and felt around in the dark until I found the bathroom, and turned the faucet off. We fell into an uneasy sleep.

The phone rang.

“The fuck!” Jason yelled.

I answered it. A nasal male voice was on the other end.

“Hello, this is the front desk with your 4:00 am wake-up call.”

Confused, I hung up the phone. We definitely hadn’t ordered a 4:00 am wake-up call, and the person on duty at the desk was female. Jason and I had had enough. We left the dark room and spent the remainder of the night watching ESPN in the lobby downstairs.

The woman at the desk saw how disturbed we were. When a manager came in to work at 7:00 the next morning, we met with him and explained the events of the night. He was an older businessman with stern mannerisms – aggressively firm handshake and a general air of being busy. Of course, we didn’t say that we were scared or that we thought anything supernatural occurred; we just explained everything in detail and complained that we didn’t get any sleep. The manager refunded us $150, which was most of the rate, and apologized.

“That damn room.” he said as he turned to leave.

Daylight gave us new courage, so we returned to the room to shower and pack. We weren’t especially surprised to find most of the lights on and the remote control on the foot of my bed. Hurriedly we cleaned up and left.

In every photo from our cousin’s wedding that afternoon, Jason and I are visibly pale and exhausted.

Shpritsz

First, a little backstory: my grandfather used to be a marine engineer. Not one actually working aboard ships, but he made repairs at submarines and other navy vessels in port. Most likely, due to the chemicals (“dopes”) inside lubrication oils and a habit of not washing his oil-covered hands prior to using the bathroom, but merely wiping them clean at a piece of cloth hanging from his belt, he developed bladder cancer, which eventually proved to be fatal. When I was 5 years old, he died in horrible pain.

When my cousin was about 3 years old, she started talking with a portrait of my grandfather. At first the adults found it rather amusing, but after a while it became a little creepy — as it became daily routine. Finally, my aunt questioned her about it. The response? “I know this man. He always talks to me and asks me what we all have done today.”

Ofcourse, my cousin was born when I was 7 years old, so she never knew him alive. A little bit stranger: she knew his full first name. Maybe she just picked this up (unlikely, because no one ever addressed him in this way). But then we started noticing something else: my mother and my aunt had this very same portrait at home; yet my cousin would only talk to the one at my grandmother’s home. With the other two, she’d claim that she’d never seen the man before.

Both my uncle, aunt and my cousins, and my mother and I had moved to a new house after my grandfather had died. He’d never been there, but he lived at my grandmother’s house for over 30 years. Just very strange coincidence?

This continued for over a year or so, and we all got pretty spooked about it. The more my aunt would tell my cousin that there was no way on earth that she could possibly know this man because he died over two years before her birth, the more my cousin insisted that she talked to him on a daily basis, and that every day she had to tell him everything (through the portrait, I guess) that happened that day, so he could “keep an eye on us” (actual quote).

Then one day we were all out, walking through the forest nearby my grandmother’s with the whole family, all of a sudden my cousin started shivering and then just said: “Now I’ve seen enough. I can die again. I can die again. I can die again.” Keep in mind that she was only 4 years old at this time.

My aunt heard this and freaked the fuck out. She ran to my cousin, shook her quite violently and started yelling: “What did you just say? What did you mean?” The only reaction of my cousin was a puzzled look. Up until this point we had always believed it to be pure coincidence, or caused by a child’s over-active imagination. But then we started to think that, hey, maybe my grandfather was keeping an eye on us through my little cousin.

It all ended that night, however. When we were sitting at my aunt’s(!) home, watching television, and my little cousin was already in her bed, asleep. When we heard the most blood-curdling scream coming out of my cousin’s room, we all bolted upstairs and into her room, where we found her sitting straight up in bed, screaming at the top of her lungs, histerically crying. My aunt comforted her; asked her what was the matter — was it a bad dream?

“No,” my cousin said, “it was the mister from the portrait. He was in my room.”
“Did he do anything bad to you? Did he try to scare you?” my aunt asked.
“No. He just said goodbye. But I felt so sorry for him because he had a terrible pain in his belly.”

Since that day, she never spoke to the portrait again. She even claims to not know my grandfather at all, and shows no memory of what had happened. We still can’t explain it.

Billiam

My friend lives in an apartment in an old house on Youngstown’s north side. I started hanging out with her a lot recently. We have a new favorite tradition of grabbing some beers and watching bad porn or “Intervention,” the fucked up reality show about people with hardcore drug addictions.

We were watching Intervention one night when she brought up that she used to share the apartment with a friend of hers who had a heroin addiction. She said how he used to shoot up in his foot on the couch we were sitting on. What’s more, he felt ashamed of his habit and tried getting her to watch him do it. She said this made him feel like his habit was more normal. If someone was watching him, he reasoned, it wasn’t such an abnormal thing to be shooting up as many as six times in a single day. It was a fucked-up way of making himself feel that his bad habit was accepted, though he himself was ashamed of it.

The guy ended up OD’ing a short time after he moved out of the apartment. A bunch of his stuff is still sitting in the room he used to live in. I got an unused pair of Airwalks from her apartment that I’m pretty sure belong to the guy.

It’s getting late, we’re on the couch watching the end of Intervention and our conversation is starting to die down a little.

It’s at a quiet part of the show when we hear at one end of the couch:

“Stop me.”

Then what sounded like “pah pah pah” circling from one end to the couch, to the other, stopping at the staircase.

We looked at each other.

“Please tell me you heard that,” she said.

Now, as I said, I’m not really certain of what I heard. I agreed that it might have been some weird noise made by the television, but I’m not so sure. My friend got upset and said “Don’t scare me. I have to sleep here tonight,” so I agreed with her about the TV to make her feel better.

It sounded like it passed *right* in front of us, though. Like I said, I’m not sure that’s exactly what I heard but that definitely threw a scare into me when it happened.

“Guardian Angel”

And I am always with you.

I was there from the time you were born. I stood in the delivery room, staring down at you before you could even open your eyes to see me. Your parents, relatives and doctors couldn’t see me there, in the corner, watching you with cloudy eyes, but I was there from the time you were born.

And I followed you home.

I was with you always, your constant companion. You played with your toys alone while I stared from all angles in nearby mirrors; my matted, clotted hair with oily sweat that hung off my dented forehead like glue. I was always your constant companion, drifting behind your mother’s car on your ride to preschool. You alone in the bathroom, but I was on the other side of the door, wind whistling through the bruised hole in my throat. My arms twisted and hanging in their sockets as I stood hunched on the other side of the shower curtain. I wait and follow you. I follow and drift behind you.

I’m not seen. I’m almost not-there in light. You never saw me that morning as I sat across from you at the breakfast table, a shiny red clot hanging from an empty tooth socket as I gaped grotesquely at you. I wonder sometimes if you know I’m there. I think you are aware, but you’ll never understand just how close I am.

I spend hours of your day doing nothing more than breathing in your ear.

Breathing – gagging, really.

I crave to be close to you, to always wrap my crippled arms around your neck. I lie near you ever single night, cloudy eyes staring at your ceiling, underneath your bed, at your sleeping face in the dark.

Yes. You caught me staring occasionally. Your parents came running down to your room one night when you screamed. You were just beginning to talk, so you were only able to cry out “Man! Man in my room!” You thought you’d never forget the sight of me, with my collapsed jaw hanging to my chest, swinging back and forth. I sank back into your closet and your mother was unable to see me though you pointed and pointed and pointed. You thought you’d never forget when they left that same night. You saw the closet door crack so softly and me crawling across the floor to your bed on all fours, shambling in jerking movements as I pushed myself under your bed on disjointed limbs.

You learned a new word for me: boogeyman. Not quite the monster you thought I was. I’m just waiting and following you always, touching your face with my knotted fingers as you sleep.

You’ll see me again soon. Any day now, I’m coming, blunt and brutal. One day you’ll walk across the road and – I believe I’ll plow into you with loud roar and a screech.

You rolling on the pavement, rolling under wheels, bluntforce metal fenders and my fingers touching your face again and again.

As you stare up from the cold pavement with cloudy eyes; your matted, clotted hair hanging in your face and your jaw unhinged and swinging to your chest.

You’ll see me approaching.

No one else will see me. You will stare past them into my eyes and I’ll leer down at you. For the first time in our life, something like a smile will come over my face. You’ll swear you’re looking into a mirror as clotted red bubbles from our mouths.

I’ll lean down, past the doctors and the oogling people and pick you up in my crooked arms.

Our faces will touch. My wings will unfurl. And then you’ll have to follow me.

And I am always with you.
I am your guardian angel.

Acadius

For the longest time I thought that my room as an add on to the house from the last owners. I always thought the feelings I felt when I faced my wall as I tried to fall asleep was of that of someone watching me. After reading the last thread I was talking to my mom about some of the stories. living in plenty of hunted houses she tells me that she wouldn’t be surprised if the house we lived in now was hunted. The conversation kinda went like this

me:”why do you say that.”
mom:”well someone did die here.”
me:”…what?”
mom:”yeah the original owner died of cancer in your room.”
me:”wait let me get this straight your telling me that you knew someone died in my room and you didn’t tell me.”
mom:”yeah..”

I found out that day that my room was built for her and she died in her sleep. For eight years I’ve felt the presence of someone watching me as I fell asleep. It was never anything bad but it did clear a few thoughts in my mind.

Another story, Back when I lived in Levenworth,Kansas we lived in a duplex. From the day we moved in to the day we left something didnt feel right about the basement and my mom felt it too. My brother on the other hand was one of those horror movie junkies so it took alot to scare him. One time he thought it would be funny to close the door on me as I was walking up the stairs(he was a dick sometime). In a panic state I dashed up the stairs but was too late to catch the door. Banging and screaming I beged him to open the door. All of a sudden the lights started to flicker and I got more scared and after a few flickers they cut off. I cant remember why I stoped banging a screaming but the lights cut off thats when I heared something. It souned like someone walking on the concret floor of the basement and then I heard the foot steps start to lead to the starts as what ever it was slowly stated to walk up them. My brother thinking it was no longer fun since I wasnt screaming anymore opened the door and I dashed out. He asked me why I tured the lights off and when he tured around to point at the basement the lights were back on. I was 6 when that happend and never when back into that basement.

Corny

I don’t have any stories, only experiences.

The house I currently live in, every night I come out of my room to go to the kitchen to grab something to eat, put something in my binder for school, I get the feeling as if I’m being watched. Some times, it gets so bad I just forget what i’m doing and focus on getting the fuck out of there.

Personally, I have no idea what the fuck is going on there. I don’t feel threatend, in any way shape or form, I just feel really creeped out, like something isn’t right there.

My house was built in the 60s, so it’s not that old.

Now, my old house…

the house I used to live in is fucking haunted to all hell. My old bedroom was right under what was the 2nd living room, because my house was huge. We lived mainly in the basement, and the computer rooms/kitchen/my parents room was upstairs, and we also had an attic for storage.

This house was built in the 1910s, so it was older then the house I live in now.

My Dad absolutely forbade me to go into the attic, for any reason. One day, during summer when he was away, I went up into the attic to see why. It was fairly normal, and I actually found a storage room my dad had turned into a bedroom.

However, when I went into the room down the hall, everything changed. It was as if the air had suddenly changed in the house, and it was fairly cold in there, while the room across the hall was fairly warm. The air also felt thick, and to me it seemed as if walking across the room took forever. I heard something drop, and I ran the fuck out as fast as I could and jumped down the stairs to get back into the main part of the house.

I later asked my Dad why I wasn’t allowed into that room, and he said that alot of creepy stuff went on up there and he didn’t want me getting scared. Too late for that dad

The only other event, or ongoing events, was when I would be asleep in my old room, and it would be the dead of night, aronud 1 or 2 AM, and I would wake up and I would hear what would be footsteps in the 2nd living room upstairs, which as you read earlier, was directly above my room, and these footsteps would go on for about 5 to 10 minutes, and then they would suddenly stop. I’m almost positive it happend every night, some nights I would be awakend by it, some nights i’m not.

I’m still not sure exactly what goes on in both of those houses, and writing this has inspired me to find out what exactly goes in them.

dawgtree

Not really a scary ghost, but still pretty interesting. I work at a summer camp for disabled children and adults during the summer on a secluded area of a large lake, and everyone has accepted that it is haunted. We actually have a small marked area in the middle of camp that is a cemetary, complete with a small headstone that is so worn that you can’t read what it says surrounded with a little wooden fence. I know it is weird to be in the middle of a summer camp, but supposedly it was there before the camp was and even though we walk past it everyday, if you don’t mention it to the campers they won’t notice it.

Anyways, back to the haunting, supposedly the person, who we call Sidney, who is buried there was an old fur trapper that lived on the land before it was settled, and he was always really protective over the land. Apparently the cabin he lived in burned down and they buried him there because he wouldn’t have wanted to leave. He is still protective, and we only see him when we are doing something that we aren’t supposed to do, which happens a lot.

The best example was one night after hours when a camper unexpectantly left the sleeping cabins, and we were preparing to go out and search for him, when he suddenly just walked back in. Now I remind you that this was a mentally disabled camper, who I know we wouldn’t have told that the place was haunted. He was pale white and said that he was going to our dining hall to get a drink of water when a man who looked like a ghost appeared in front of him and told him to go back. During one weekend when no campers were there, my girlfriend at the time, another counselor, decided to take advantage of our alone time, when we heard the outside door(which we couldn’t see from where we were) open and close and footsteps walking around. I got up to search, nobody around, looked outside to see if it was someone walking out, and a friend was standing nearby, said nobody had gone in or out while he was there, so I guess we were being warned to stop fooling around at camp? Anyways, if I think of more Sidney stories I will add them

Oh yeah, the girls in only one of the girls cabins always claim to see a little girl in a blue dress that just stands there all night, they aren’t even shaken by it anymore

Boogeyman

Up until I was four years old, my mother, my father and myself lived in a small two story house that was haunted. I don’t remember many details other than hearing noises at night and my father will never admit to anything that happened there. Most of what I know about it comes from my mother. We’ll call my mother N and my father T in this story.

My mother was an RN at a local hospital and usually worked the 7AM to 4PM shift. She would wake up around 4:30AM to have coffee and get ready for work. Not long after we moved in, she started hearing footsteps on the basement stairs while she was in the kitchen making coffee. Sometimes she would hear a man’s voice softly calling out a name (I can’t remember the name for the life of me).

The first time it happened, she opened the door to the basement and flipped the lights on. She could still hear the footsteps, but no one was there. Obviously, this freaked my mother out and she told my father about it. He didn’t believe her and told her it was her imagination. She continued to hear the footsteps and voice and eventually became able to deal with it.

One day she came home from work and walked in through the kitchen door. As soon as she set her keys down on the table, a voice called out “N!” (her name). She figured it was my father in the living room. She walked in to the room near the stairs and looked around. No one was there. She said “T, where are you?” A voice from the stairs right next to her said “I’m right here!” She turned and looked up the stairs…no one again. She left the house and went to my grandmother’s until my father came home from work.

Near Christmas one year, my mother and father were outside hanging Christmas lights on the roof over the porch. My father was on an aluminum extension ladder about 15 feet off the ground. My mother was trying to untangle a strand of lights when the ladder started shaking violently, as if someone had grabbed it and was tugging on it. My father grabbed the gutter and held on and the shaking stopped after about half a minute. My mother asked him what happened and he said “It was just the wind.” She tells me that wasn’t the case since it was calm out that day and my father is a decent size guy…a ladder wouldn’t shake like that from “the wind”.

The only other incident I remember her telling me about happened in the laundry room in the basement. She was doing laundry one day, home alone, and was bent over in front of the washer, pulling clothes out and dropping them into a basket. She felt someone brush up against her and then run their fingers through her hair. A voice said, “Hello, N!” She quickly turned around…no one was there. After that, she stopped going in the basement unless my father was home.

We moved to a new house shortly after the last incident, but not because of what happened…my mother was pregnant with my sister and we didn’t have enough room in the house for four of us. My mother says that while she was uncomfortable with whatever was in that house, she never felt like she was in danger. The incidents spooked her when they happened, but she was able to shrug them off. As for me, I vaguely remember hearing the footsteps once or twice, but I never heard the voice.

Years later, around the time I turned 12, my parents divorced and my mother, sister and I were getting ready to move to another house. The man who came to read the meter for the final electric bill turned out to be the guy who bought our old house from us. My mother jokingly asked him if it was still haunted. He looked at her funny and said, “You heard all of that stuff too? Man, I have a story to tell you.”

He told her that an older woman in her 60s had come to the house one day a few years ago with her therapist. Apparently she was molested and beaten in that house by her father. The therapist wanted her to return to the house for closure. My mother asked the meter reader what her name was…it was the same name that she had heard the voice calling out on the stairs every morning. The meter reader said that the voices and footsteps stopped abruptly after the woman left that day. Hopefully the ghost (or whatever it was) found closure along with the old woman.

Stonut

I’m a music performance major. The music building on our campus is one of the oldest buildings in the city. It’s rumored to be haunted by multiple entities, though no one really remembers the stories or the circumstances behind how it came to be so.

McCray Hall is four floors of steep stairs and pseudo-gothic architecture. On the main floor, there is a large recital hall with an ancient organ. The practice rooms, where I spend most of my time, are on the third floor. I’ve caught high school kids having sex in the practice rooms, but I’ve never had any supernatural encounters up there.

One evening around 10:00 I was headed up to the practice rooms to work on some music. As I walked by the exterior of the building, I noted that the lights were off in the recital hall. When I went inside it quickly became apparent that I was the only person in the building. I’m a pretty rational girl most of the time, so I opted not to let my imagination get the best of me and I settled right into my practice routine.

Five minutes into my warm-up I heard it: an organ power chord, like the beginning of Phantom of the Opera. Loud, dissonant, and obviously coming from, duh, the only organ in the building – the one in the recital hall. The organ began to play a mournful minor melody. Whoever was playing definitely knew that they were doing. The organ is an extremely complicated instrument and requires the use of the performer’s entire body. And this person could play. I thought this was a little strange – who would practice organ in the dark? I went back to practicing for all of 30 seconds. My curiosity got the better of me and I decided to go downstairs and check it out. Surely someone had just come in while I was upstairs and the lights were on now.

I went downstairs and went outside, circling around to the front of the building. The recital hall was pitch black. The organ kept playing. The building is equipped with numerous motion sensors and none of them had been tripped while I was upstairs. Scratching my head, I went back inside and tried to open the backstage door. It was locked. I went around to the main doors and pulled on the handle.

The doors were locked from the outside. The melody continued.

Now it was time to panic. I shot back upstairs, taking four or five steps at a time. I grabbed my horn and my music and blasted down the fire escape because I didn’t want to walk by the recital hall again. I could hear the organ continue to play its sad, rhythmic tune as I ran back to the dorm. I took one last glance behind me and the hall was still shrouded in darkness.

The worst part is that I have no choice but to continue to practice in that building. I refuse to be up there alone after dark. This seems to work, as I haven’t had any more experiences like this one.

Gyoza

I grew up in a suburban town that was stuck somewhere between city-suburbs and just plain old urban suburbs. I lived on the edge of town, just down the street from what’s labeled unincorporated in that town. There wasn’t much difference between corporated and unincorporated except that there are less cops and less teartown homes.

Anyway, my elementary school was right down the street (across a field, actually) and was the closest school to the unincorporated part of town so it ended up having more of the lower-class familes, which meant alot of them lived in not-so-well-kept houses. It was already a bad neighborhood, occasional gunshots–or, as my parents explained them, mattresses falling and tires blowing out. I still don’t know if they were gunshots but it seems likely, on the other end of the field opposite the school were some apartments that were filled with druggies and frightening sorts of people. I tended to avoid those apartments.

Anyway, in fourth or fifth grade, when I was 9 or 10, I befriended a kid who’s name escapes me but he was probably named Jessie since I’ve known like 10 of them in youth. So anyway, Jessie lived on the outskirts of town just before it turned into the next town over. The houses that were in this mid-town limbo had large lots and were much older than the house I lived in at the time. Jessie was one of my 2-week friends, and it did have something to do with the going-ons in his house.

Originally he invited me over to play his new N64, since no one I knew had one yet (surprisingly, since he was one of the poorer kids in school). I said hell yes like the gamer I was and went over there one day after school to play Wave Race 64. I actually didn’t get to play because his sister and brother would take the controller and I didn’t really care much for racing games at the time so I watched. His dad brought over Taco Bell (which is wierd because of all the mexican’s I’ve known I think Jessie’s family was the only one to eat Taco Bell and not complain about it being fake shit)

Anyway that’s not the point. There was nothing strange going on until that night when we decided it would be cool if I slept over. You see, his house was on a large plot of land that was overgrown with weeds and bushes that were never trimmed. The next house was about 6 or 7 normal houselengths away (for those of you who have been in suburbia). Also, in unincorporated parts of towns there are very few streetlights, only on corners and even then not on every one. Jessie’s street was a dead end and all gravel so the city had decided not to bother lighting it and at night it would be terribly dark. I guess his dad didn’t care much about it because they never had a porchlight and the one from their neighbors house only cast slippery shadows across the unkept lawn.

So once night fell and Wave Race (His only game) got boring we decided to just find something fun to do since we were kids and it seemed entirely possible. It was pretty awkward, though. His family was loud and annoying, young kids and a single parent who needed sleep to work the next day (Yelling of course), and Jessie and I had just become friends days earlier.

He didn’t have any drapes on his windows so as we sat around before going to sleep I would look out the window. I was probably only a mile away from my house but even that didn’t comfort me from the fear his street brought. Like I said it was awfully dark and there was only the light of his neighbor’s porchlight shining towards me. There was a row of scraggly bushes that were glowing along the edge and then casting gross shadows across the grass. In the backyard was a tree with no leaves (it was fall), and it was drawing its claws across a delapidated old shed. The house and shed were both that dark-grey deadwood color like old shanties are always portrayed as. The site and eerie feeling gave me goosebumps, but the livelyhood of Jessie’s smaller siblings kept me from sinking into it.

But eventually Jessie fell asleep and the kids fell asleep almost instantly. The father was snoring in the other room which I could hear faintly as I laid on whatever they had provided, I think the cushions from the couch, and stared at the bleak painted ceiling. I have always been a light sleeper and can’t stand sleepovers because I always listen to the other person’s breathing and can’t get my attention off of it. So as I sat there and listened to Jessie breath I could hear the howl of wind stirring around the house and that groaning creek of the tired old wood

Now, I’m kind of an artistic and musical person I suppose, and I have an extremely active imagination most of the time. This, coupled with my sleepyness and inability to sleep, is what I blame for the following occurences. It should be noted I do not beleive in ghosts, I was too young to be THAT brave, and it’s been a long time since this occurance so I could be rememering wrong. It didn’t affect me that much the next day since I just kinda dismissed it and promised never to go back.

Anyway, I was laying there listening to the wind of the house and Jessie when I started to hear a pattern in the groaning. Like I said, I am musical so I clutch onto rhythms alot and try to figure them out. When I try to sleep with a fan on it drives me crazy because all I hear is the slight wump-wump-wump that fans make from rotating. Anyway, I hear this groaning and I start to hear a rhythm. The howl of the wind, however, isn’t on the same beat (or any beat at all) and so I get curious. I’d probably been sitting there for like 20 minutes but it felt like forever to an ADD 10 year old. This rhythm was driving me nuts and keeping me awake even more than Jessie was so I got up silently and decided to investigate.

I made the mistake of looking out the window just as it groaned louder than usual and got very frightened. The groaning was sounding more and more human with each 2-second pulse. For those of you who havn’t been in an old house on a windy day, it sounds like a creek when you sit down in a chair, only deeper and more grumpy and longer. At first it was like any other house in the wind but once I stood up it sounded intimidating, like it was an drunk old man trying to complain.

I walked over Jessie’s sleeping body and past his father’s open door. He was still snoring loudly but it still didn’t cover the groaning, which was getting louder the closer I got to the kitchen. Once I reached the kitchen I noticed that all the cabinets were open and I thought to myself that we had left them closed, but I guess it is likely I just made that up.

The groaning was louder now so I looked for a dishwasher, checked the refridgerator, the sink and all that technological stuff but nothing was making the noise. Then I pressed my ear to a dark brown door and as soon as it touched it, the groaning was like a loud exasperated grunt. I jumped back and almost went to wake up Jessie but I bit my tongue and opened the door instead.

It turned out to be a staircase downstairs. I checked the wall on the right to see if it had a lightswitch and, like my house, it did, so I closed the door behind me and flicked the light on. The stairs were tiled with this creepy green and orange flecked fake marble and shimmered blindingly since I wasn’t used to the light. I paused a second to get used to it and then began walking downstairs.

The upstairs walls extended the length of the stairway, so once you reached a certan point on the way down you could see the basement room. The groaning was louder in here but not as offensive as when I’d touched the door so I wasn’t as scared as I’d expected. My heart was pounding still as I progressed slowly down the stairs, still being quiet as all hell but more in fear of waking the unknown than fear of Jessie’s father.

Once I was about waist-hight with the bottom of the wall I bent down and peered under. The room was a large rectangle with cement floors, walls, and rafter ceilings that supported the floorboards above. There was a washer-and-drier twin thing on the left next to a pile of old clothes. The stairlight didn’t effect the whole room but the metal of the machines shone back at me. This was actually bad because I couldn’t see into the far corner of the room since the light was making my eyes adjust to it. I kept going down the stairs, a little less scared but still fucking freaked out. As soon as I touched the concrete floor that was cold as ice, the groaning stopped. I could still hear the wind howl, though, and there was a cellar-type window that glew from the neighbor’s porchlight with a silvery kind of aura.

I ran my hands along the concrete wall but couldn’t find a switch so I squinted into the darkness to see what was there. Something shiney was in the middle of the room. Ah, I realized, a pull-chord for a light! I crept towards it

and stepped in something wet

The only thing was, the basement floor was freezing, like I said. This wet substance was really warm like, well, blood, but I didn’t think of that at the time. I just kind of froze and then the groaning came back and I got really scared.

I stepped again with my other foot to get a little closer to the pullchord but it was too far away. Now both my feet were wet in this paint-like, warm liquid on the freezing floor. I took long strides and reached for the pull-chord, grabbing it and yelping quietly. It was wet too and when I pulled it my hands slipped off. I wrapped it around my hand and then pulled but the light didn’t even work. I decided to get the fuck out of there, my last hope destroyed, and turned on my heels. In the corner of the room, atop the glistening washer-and-drier thing and below the silver glowing window, a man sat cross-legged watching me. He had thin shoulders and a bushy head of curly hair, his legs dangling over the side of the machine and his hands clutching the edge loosely. He looked pretty fucking relaxed and scared the shit out of my regardless.

Now, when I was little I thought I saw a witch in a pile of clothes. When I turned on the light and realized what it was, I felt like an idiot. So here I was in Jessie’s basement, staring at a clothes washing machine and seeing a figure. Logic somehow sprang up in my frightened mind so I decided it wasn’t nearly as frightening but I still wanted to get out of there. I stared to walk towards the stairs with my eyes still on him.

Then he turned his head at me and groaned.

I ran upstairs fast as greased lightning, flicked off the light, opened and closed the door quietly and turned around to Jessie standing right in front of me. I ended up waking up the whole house, crying, being sent home and not telling anyone what had happened because I had looked like such an idiot. I told Jessie about it later in school and he said that there wasnt anything in the basement and sometimes the washing machine overflowed. But that still doesn’t explain why it was warm…

Cicada

Unfortunately (or it could be fortunate depending on how you look at it)I’ve never had any really paranormal experiences worth mentioning. But, one of my friends had something really freaky happen to her. She lives up in Evansville, Indiana and there’s an old abandoned hospital that shut down in the 50’s. The legend is that back in the 50’s, this Catholic hospital took care of a lot of kids that were suffering from an outbreak of TB. Many of the kids died and soon after the hospital was quarantined and shut down. Nowadays, kids old enough to drive trek out to this abandoned building to prove they’re not scared of things that go bump in the night. I live in Nashville, so I’ve never been able to personally vouch for the authenticity of this legend, but my grandfather was transferred to Evansville from Nashville back around 1952 for a few months, and he told me there was in fact an old Catholic hospital in the town. Last year I got a call from my friend telling me that she’d just come from the hospital.

She was in a car with a bunch of her friends, and she sounded incredibly freaked out. She said she and her friends had gone in the hospital, and among the litter and debris along the ground were children’s toys and old medical equipment. She said that the words “help” and “get out” were written on the walls in what looked like blood, but I’m sure some wise-ass kid decided to put that there. She had started to get scared so she and her friends go in there car to drive off, but as the drove off their windshield wiper snapped in half.

Needless to say they were all screaming bloody murder, but the farther away they drove, the more they began to rationalize the situation. They figured and screw holding the wiper had come loose and caused it to come off. When they got back, they showed the wiper to her father who told them that there was no screw in that type of wiper. The only way it could have fallen off like that was for someone to physically tear it from the car.

Soonmot quotes an epic tale

I don’t really know what I’d call this story if I was submitting it for publication in Fate or something of its ilk. “Brian vs. the Evil, Black-eyed, Possibly Vampiric or Demonic But At Least Not Bloody Normal Kids” doesn’t have much of a ring to it. (Shrug.)

But that’s at least an accurate title.

As so many things do, it all started out innocently.

My Internet Service Provider used to have offices in a shopping center before they moved to their (comparatively) lush accommodations elsewhere. There was a drop box at that original location. The monthly bill was due, and thus, there but for the Grace of the Net I went.

It was about 9:30 p.m. when I left. From my relatively isolated apartments, it’s about 10-15 minutes or so to downtown (Abilene has a population of about 110,000).

Right next to Camalott Communications’ old location is a $1.50 movie theater. At the time, the place was featuring that masterwork of modern film, Mortal Kombat. I drove by the theater on the way into the center proper and pulled into an empty parking space.

Using the glow of the marquee to write out my check, I was startled to hear a knock on the driver’s-side window of my car.

I looked over and saw two children staring at me from street. I need to describe them, with the one feature (you can guess what it was) that I didn’t realize until about half-way through the conversation cleverly omitted.

Both appeared to be in that semi-mystical stage of life children get into where you can’t exactly tell their age. Both were boys, and my initial impression is that they were somewhere between 10-14.

Boy No. 1 was the spokesman. Boy No. 2 didn’t speak during the entire conversation — at least not in words.

Boy No. 1 was slightly taller than his companion, wearing a pull-over, hooded shirt with a sort of gray checked pattern and jeans. I couldn’t see his shoes. His skin was olive-colored and had curly, medium-length brown hair. He exuded an air of quiet confidence.

Boy No. 2 had pale skin with a trace of freckles. His primary characteristic seemed to be looking around nervously. He was dressed in a similar manner to his companion, but his pull-over was a light green color. His hair was a sort of pale orange.

They didn’t appear to be related, at least directly.

“Oh, great,” I thought. “They’re gonna hit me up for money.” And then the air changed.

I’ve explained this before, but for the benefit of any new lurkers out there, right before I experience something strange, there’s a change in perception that comes about which I describe in the above manner. It’s basically enough time to know it’s too late.

So, there I was, filling out a check in my car (which was still running) and in a sudden panic over the appearance of two little boys. I was confused, but an overwhelming sense of fear and unearthliness rushed in nonetheless.

The spokesman smiled, and the sight for some inexplicable reason chilled my blood. I could feel fight-or-flight responses kicking in. Something, I knew instinctually, was not right, but I didn’t know what it could possibly be.

I rolled down the window very, very slightly and asked “Yes?”

The spokesman smiled again, broader this time. His teeth were very, very white.

“Hey, mister, what’s up? We have a problem,” he said. His voice was that of a young man, but his diction, quiet calm and … something I still couldn’t put my finger on … made my desire to flee even greater. “You see, my friend and I want to see the films, but we forgot our money,” he continued. “We need to go to our house to get it. Want to help us out?”

Okay. Journalists are required to talk to lots of people, and that includes children. I’ve seen and spoken to lots of them. Here’s how that usually goes:

“Uh … M … M … Mister? Can I see that camera? I … I won’t break it or anything. I promise. My dad has a camera, and he lets me hold it sometimes, I guess, and I took a picture of my dog — it wasn’s very good, ’cause I got my finger in the way and …”

Add in some feet shuffling and/or body swaying and you’ve got a typical kid talking to a stranger.

In short, they’re usually apologetic. People generally teach children that when they talk to adults, they’re usually bothering them for one reason or another and they should at least be polite.

This kid was in no way fitting the mold. His command of language was incredible and he showed no signs of fear. He spoke as if my help was a foregone conclusion. When he grinned, it was as if he was trying to say, “I know something … and you’re NOT gonna like it. But the only way you’re going to find out what it is will be to do what I say …”

“Uh, well …” was the best reply I could offer.

Now here’s where it starts to get strange.

The quiet companion looked at the spokesman with a mixture of confusion and guilt on his face. He seemed in some ways shocked, not with his friend’s brusque manner but that I didn’t just immediately open the door.

He eyed me nervously.

The spokesman seemed a bit perturbed, too. I still was registering something wrong with both.

“C’mon, mister,” the spokesman said again, smooth as silk. Car salesmen could learn something from this kid. “Now, we just want to go to our house. And we’re just two little boys.”

That really scared me. Something in the tone and diction again sent off alarm bells. My mind was frantically trying to process what it was perceiving about the two figures that was “wrong.”

“Eh. Um ….” was all I could manage. I felt myself digging my fingernails into the steering wheel.

“What movie were you going to see?” I asked finally.

“Mortal Kombat, of course,” the spokesman said. The silent one nodded in affirmation, standing a few paces behind.

“Oh,” I said. I stole a quick glance at the marquee and at the clock in my car. Mortal Kombat had been playing for an hour, the last showing of the evening.

The silent one looked increasingly nervous. I think he saw my glances and suspected that I might be detecting something was not above-board.

“C’mon, mister. Let us in. We can’t get in your car until you do, you know,” the spokesman said soothingly. “Just let us in, and we’ll be gone before you know it. We’ll go to our mother’s house.”

We locked eyes.

To my horror, I realized my hand had strayed toward the door lock (which was engaged) and was in the process of opening it. I pulled it away, probably a bit too violently. But it did force me to look away from the children.

I turned back. “Er … Um …,” I offered weakly and then my mind snapped into sharp focus.

For the first time, I noticed their eyes.

They were coal black. No pupil. No iris. Just two staring orbs reflecting the red and white light of the marquee.

At that point, I know my expression betrayed me. The silent one had a look of horror on his face in a combination that seemed to indicate: A) The impossible had just happened and B) “We’ve been found out!”

The spokesman, on the other hand, wore a mask of anger. His eyes glittered brightly in the half-light.

“Cmon, mister,” he said. “We won’t hurt you. You have to LET US IN. We don’t have a gun …”

That last statement scared the living hell out of me, because at that point by his tone he was plainly saying, “We don’t NEED a gun.”

He noticed my hand shooting down toward the gear shift. The spokesman’s final words contained an anger that was complete and whole, and yet contained in some respects a tone of panic:

“WE CAN’T COME IN UNLESS YOU TELL US IT’S OKAY. LET … US …. IN!”

I ripped the car into reverse (thank goodness no one was coming up behind me) and tore out of the parking lot. I noticed the boys in my peripheral vision, and I stole a quick glance back.

They were gone. The sidewalk by the theater was deserted.

I drove home in a heightened state of panic. Had anyone attempted to stop me, I would have run on through and faced the consequences later.

I bolted into my house, scanning all around — including the sky.

What did I see? Maybe nothing more than some kids looking for a ride.

And some really funky contacts. Yeah, right.

A friend suggested they were vampires, what with the old “let us in” bit and my compelled response to open the door. That and the “we’ll go see our mother” thing.

I’m still not sure what they were, but here’s an epilogue I find chilling:

I talk about Chad a lot. He’s still my best friend, my best ghost-hunting companion and an all-around cool guy. He recently moved to Amarillo, but at the time this happened was still living in San Angelo of Ram Page fame.

I called him and talked to him briefly. He had two female friends with him at the time, both professing some type of psychic ability.

I started telling him the story, leaving out the part about the black eyes for the kicker. One of the women (we were on a speakerphone) stopped me.

“These children had black eyes, right?” she asked. “I mean, all-black eyes?”

“Er … Yes.” I said. I was a bit taken aback.

“Hmmm,” she said. “One night last week, I had a dream about children with black eyes. They were outside my house, wanting to be let in, but there was something wrong with them. It took me a while to realize it was the eyes.”

I hadn’t even gotten as far as them wanting to come in.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I kept the doors and windows locked,” she said. “I knew if they came in, they would kill me.”

She paused.

“And they would have killed you, too, if you had let them into your car.”

So, from this extra-long post, we have three unanswered questions:

A) What did I see?

B) What would have happened if I opened my car door?

C) Why does Chad always get the cool psychic chicks?

–more–

Far from being scary, I’ve discovered that ghosts are more annoying than anything else. Just the other night, I took a trip down to the morgue in order to get a cart to transport a body downstairs with. Normally this is a happy time for me, I still haven’t beaten my corpse race record of eleven minutes, but I’m getting closer with every death.

Anyway, tonight there was a family lining the upstairs hallways as their loved one wasn’t doing too well, so pushing a body down the hallway at mach 3 was just out of the question, leaving me time to actually organize the bodies down in the morgue. It’s funny really, you have people in the hospital who have no problem dealing with piss, shit, vomit, cancer, amputation, bed sores so deep you can see bone… all of these horrible things, yet the second a person dies, they freak the shit out. It’s funny really. What this means, is that invariably when I go downstairs, all the empty morgue carts are in the back, while all the bodies are in the front. It’s up to me to do a quick rearrangement, so that the bodies are hanging out by the wall and the empty carts are easily accessible. It’s sort of like that puzzle game where you have to rearrange all the little slidey things in order to form the picture. Except, you know, with dead people. And they usually don’t make kitten pictures.

I should have known something supernatural was going on, as it was eerily cold inside the 20×20-refrigerated room. Much cooler than the outside air, and cold equals ghosts. I had set about rearranging everything, keeping all the bodies inside as I brought the empty carts forward, and all went well. I did it in 5 moves of 6 carts, so that’s not bad. Now that everything was in order, I grabbed an empty cart and pulled it out into the hallway. Or at least, I tried to. As soon as the front wheels hit the threshold, the cart stopped dead.

Swearing, I went to click off the brakes, even though the cart had already been pulled up form the back of the morgue with no problems, but hey, sometimes these shitty carts they have us use for bodies act up. Oddly enough, not only were the breaks not on, but “steer mode”, which is supposed to help with steering, but in actuality makes the cart immovable, also was not on. The cart should have rolled fine. So I pushed it back easily enough and bent down to check the floor. Sometimes a roll of tape or a plastic needle cover, which are almost invisible, can get caught up under a wheel, effectively acting as a wedge brake. Nothing was on the floor, but I did get a good look at the crazy amount of amputated arms and legs kept on the bottom of one of the morgue shelves.

Standing, I checked the sides of the cart, making sure nothing was sticking out and preventing it from moving. I found nothing so I grabbed the front and pulled it forward again. The cart rolled a good 3 feet to the doorway until once again it just stopped. It felt like it hit a wall. So again, I go through checking everything, thinking to myself, “Heh, haunted cart in the morgue… classic”. This time I pushed the cart all the way back to the body filled carts, probably about 6 feet, more than enough room for the wheels to make a complete rotation. For a third time I check everything. Brakes, floor, side rails… nothing is caught nothing is stuck, there is nothing on the damned floor, but this cart will not go forward past the fucking doorway. I pull it forward again, and again it hits the invisible wall. With both hands I pull, leaning back, putting my weight into it, full expecting to fall on my ass. NOTHING!!! It did not move. I’m straining, pulling it with all the strength and weight I can muster with my 190-pound frame, and the cart isn’t budging an inch. It’s not even close to the sides of the morgue door, not caught up on any other cart or the amputation/dead baby/brain shelf. I can see that there’s nothing underneath to stop it from moving, but still it refuses to budge.

At this point most people would either get scared, get another cart or just give up. I was more annoyed than scared, I couldn’t give up, because I had a body to move downstairs, and getting another cart would require moving this one out of the way. So what did I do? I walked behind the cart, pulled if back, and with the room afforded me, took a running start in order to push it out the door.

I got the wind knocked out of me as the cart hit the invisible wall and smashed into my stomach. Now I’m pissed, dead or not, you do not hit me. I wrap my arms underneath the cart, getting a good grip. Crouch down a bit and push. Now my legs are pretty well developed. Even with the extra weight I’ve drank onto my stomach, my thighs and butt have remained very muscular, I do a lot of walking and squats when I’m bored at the computer and need a break. Plus with my workouts starting again, I’ve become much stronger over the past few weeks. I say this not to brag, but to point out that I am neither a stick boy nor a hambeast. It took all of my strength to push that cart forward. Inch by inch it went, and while I never let up to see if it would try to move back in, I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had. A cart is a bit over six feet long, and I had to fight for every inch, every quarter inch of that six plus feet. By the time it was halfway through the door, I was sweating. Sure it’s a giant refrigerator, but I was working hard. Add to the fact that I’m working in converse and the tile floor of the morgue doesn’t have the greatest traction, and you can begin to imagine the difficulty I was having moving this cart forward.

As the back end of the cart passed the threshold… not the back wheels, the actual back edge, I almost fell on my face as whatever was preventing that cart form moving vanished. I pushed that cart a good twenty feet, turned it from side to side reversed it, and had no problems moving it once it was in the hallway. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to use some haunted cart to move a body on, last thing I want is for the fucking thing to tip over and dump the body on the ground. Not good. So I grab another empty cart and pull it out of the morgue with no problems. I’m standing in the hallway just looking at the other cart, at the Ghost Cart, and I think to myself, sounding oddly enough like Jack Burton, “What the hell, why not?”

I push Ghost Cart back into the morgue and meet no resistance. I grab the front, I’ll admit, hesitantly, but I did grab it, and pulled it forward towards the doorway again. Now that it was inside the morgue, once it got to the boundary between the morgue and the hospital proper, it stopped dead at the invisible wall. Refusing to move again. So I moved it aside to where the other cart I had grabbed used to be, and pushed it out of the way. Away from that doorway it rolled well enough. “See ya ghostie”, I called out, “I’ll be back soon with a roommate for you”.

After I came back with the body and opened the door, I had planned to try moving the cart again, but there was a lot of traffic in the hallway and I couldn’t disrupt it for as long as had before, keeping the morgue door wide open. I never got a chance to try moving that cart again; I even went down there two nights ago with another body, only to find the Ghost Cart gone. Did someone move it? Did the spirit and the enchantment depart? Or did the cart vanish into the netherworld; will night shift doctors and nurses start hearing an eerie rattling through the deserted hallways of the basement as the Ghost Cart wanders, looking for the body that used to rest upon it?

YASD

True Story:

EVERY neighborhood has what we call “The House.” You know it’s THE house by the way little kids giggle and run back and forth on the borders of its lawn, trying to step one toe on the lawn, one toe off. One foot on, one foot off.

Of course it takes teenage daring to do something truly stupid, and what me and my friends did that summer night epitomized the teenage ethic of pushing the bar on stupidity.

The House was, appropriately, the only house on its block, the rest of the houses having been razed as the nearby bog/swamp ecology was promoted by tree hugging hippies. So far The House had not been demolished, but it had lain vacant for what we assumed was years. The House on the front was a lot different then the neighborhood I lived in – all prefab housing, the same pattern of houses repeated block after block after block.

Not so The House. With what looked like antique glass windows that seemed to suck in the last of the day’s light prematurely, The House seemed to be a paradigm of gloom. But it was very apparently empty; glances into the windows during dares would show an empty house, with concrete showing through ragged moth eaten carpet. At least we assumed it was moths; the air around The House was curiously bug free. In the middle of summer in Illinois, you’ll notice the lack of mosquitoes.

What it took was not bravery nor challenge to breach the sacred portal of The House. What it took was simple teenaged boredom. It was late afternoon, with that golden color of sun that means you still have a couple good hours of daylight left. It was the middle of summer, we had beaten all of the good video games at least twice, we’d visited the pool 4 times that week and it was still tuesday, and to top it off the cool kids had made fun of our bikes so we obviously couldn’t ride them around anywhere.

So we, in this case me, my friend Scott, and my friend Tyler (not real names, of course), decided that paying a visit to The House would earn us some cool points and give us a good story to tell our grandchildren. We set off with smiles on our faces, Tyler with an old polaroid camera, Scott with a small metal cross he had gotten at confirmation a year earlier.

We walked up to the front door of the house; Tyler, being funny, hit the doorbell. It did nothing, but Scott and I hit Tyler upside the head. No need to risk our lives for popularity. At least not yet. Entering The House was surprisingly uneventful.

The air was strangely, almost sickly sweet, but no one had breathed it for years, we thought. The foyer had a large living room on the left, a hall leading to what appeared to be an old kitchen in front of us with a door to what we later found was the basement, a bathroom immediately to our right, and a hallway to the garage immediately to the right of that. Along the hallway were hung two pictures, one of a little girl with a flower basket sadly walking through a well lit forest, one of an old man with his head facing downwards into his lap so you couldn’t see his face. The floor was covered with dust from years of disuse; no one had been there for a while. We proceeded as a tight group into the kitchen. In the kitchen was a glass door to the backyard (unfenced).

Nothing strange, just another large empty room to our right and mostly fixtures for piping and stuff in front of us, and the large room I mentioned earlier on our left. Tyler, always the motley fool, stepped over and turned the wheels of the disconnected tap.

Upstairs water started running.

Old house, strange water systems, right? Right. Right. OK Tyler, since it’s your fault you go upstairs and turn it off. Eventually, of course, all three of us proceeded up the staircase.

We could hear water moving in the pipes upstairs, but couldn’t quite ascertain where. As we reached the top of the staircase we could see a bathroom to our right; I bravely led the way, flashlight in hand, to show that the sink wasn’t in fact running. But whence that strange noise of water in pipes?

With my awesome knowledge of houses I deduced that we should head to the basement to see where the water heater was hooked up to so we could stop this madness. So, rather unwillingly, we proceeded down the basement stairs to the darkness below.

The basement was completely unfinished. There was no graffiti on the walls from older kids. There was only a palpable atmosphere of unease between the trio as we proceeded to search the basement for evidence of a water heater. In one corner we found some rusted junk, in another some shards of glass from a shattered window well.

Scott decided at this point that he’d like to be a major player in this innocent little voyage and raised his cross up high like he’d seen in the movies and said in a clear voice “If there are any ghosts in this house, let them show themselves in the name of the Lord!”

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. If I ever see Scott again I must remind myself to hit him particularly hard. The atmosphere in the house changed, and the sun shining through the window wells of that basement chose that moment to go behind a cloud. Pathetic fallacy in real life, I know, but scary as fuck. I cussed Scott out and suggested we go upstairs.

At this moment a door in the upstairs portion of the house slammed. We exchanged one last frenzied look of terror and as one man ran for the stairs. In the darkness we stumbled up the stairs, and opened the doors to find a horrible change.

The sunlight of afternoon had changed itself to the harsh orange of twilight, and it illuminated the two paintings we had seen earlier. Except the old man with his head down was now facing out of the portrait, and instead of eyes he had two black round things. Even now I shudder at the thought of the horror of making eye contact with that painting. I took this moment to bolt for the back door, and as I ran towards the kitchen I heard a terrible groan come from behind me. I looked back to see my friends right behind me, and on the staircase from the upstairs there was a hand.

And as I looked at my friend Tyler, by some trick of the ambiguous evening light his eyes had changed into the horrible things I had seen in the painting. Adrenaline kicked in and I practically ran into the door seperating me from sweet, sweet freedom. But it was LOCKED. FUCKING FUCK FUCK LOCKED. But Tyler and Scott ran into me directly from behind and all three of us hitting the door at once broke it down.

We ran as fast as fuck knows away from The House. We didn’t care about the door or the water any more; we just knew we had to run. We ran straight into nasty, dank marsh, but we didn’t care. And eventually I kneeled down and puked out everything, as though the air of The House had made me sick. I saw Scott and Tyler doing the same thing next to me. Then I made eye contact with Tyler, and he said:

“Your eyes…the old thing.”

As the harsh light of evening began to fade, we looked back upon The House in the distance to see the back door on its hinges, as though we had never broken it in the first place.

Maybe a vagrant had come to stay in our house, and in our ramblings we disturbed him. But the musk of The House was unique; certainly I have never experienced a smell like that ever again. The sweetness of decay, almost of gangrene, as though whatever had been shut up in there for years was rotting and decaying. The paintings and my friends eyes? Tricks of the light and teenaged imagination. And we obviously didn’t break the door, although it felt like it, merely swung it on its hinges.

But the dust on the floors of The House had lain undisturbed so that it was inches thick and uniform. And I felt the door give way underneath me; in fact I saw it fall to the ground as I scrambled for footing. And even today, when I see the harsh orange light of summer evening I shiver. No matter where I am the air becomes stuffy and oppressing, and I can sense on the edge of smell that odor which I can now recognize as the smell of death.

Again, names have been changed to protect the innocent. Take this as you will. Tyler still has the old polaroid camera; he forgot to take even one picture.

Daedalus256

My old house was built in the 1920s. You could definitely tell if you went down into the basement, it was an unfinished one and all the floor was chipped and all this crap. I hated going into that basement, I hated that basement until I was like 18 and we moved out of it. I swear I’ve seen shit down there but who knows. The cats were always alright with it so I guess nothing bad actually ever happened down there but it had that certain darkness and such that just gave me chills. Anyway I’m off topic.

Our house was old. I don’t think it was ever considered haunted or anything but a few times some weird shit happened to me.

We renovated the house when I was around 10 or so, for many years nothing happened. The only weird things that happened prior to renovation would be that I’d think I’d hear my dad come home and say “Mom, dad’s home” and no one would actually be there.

So when I was around 16 or so is when this began to happen. I’d be laying in bed in that period before sleep where you’re not really awake and I’d feel what seemed like paws on my chest. I had two cats, no big deal. I’d always mutter “Boots, go away.” I’d look down at my chest and there would be nothing there. I’d even look around my room and there wouldn’t be a cat in sight. My theory is that it was actually a deceased hamster of mine. One of my hamsters somehow just…got lost. My sister had it out of it’s cage, forgot about it and it disappeared. A second hamster got out of it’s cage when we were gone for the weekend. I came home to find it down in the basement drowned in a bucket of water near the heater. So it could have been a “hamster ghostie” or god knows what. So yeah, that’s experience number one.

Experience number two is one of those loud crash experiences. I was laying down in my bed, nearly everyone was. When all of a sudden, something downstairs (beds were on the 2nd story addition) sounded like it just fell and crashed and a bunch of shit flew everywhere. My mom got up as did I and we ran downstairs, turned on the kitchen light and found…nothing. Absolutely nothing was out of place but both cats had this bewildered look on their faces and their ears were back. That was a bit scary.

Captain Rehab

One: “The Clothesline Man”

When I was a young fella, growing up in Brisbane (Australia), my family lived in a house typically known as a “Queenslander”. It had a big verandah out the front, and another out the back. In the back yard was a Hill’s Hoist kind of clothesline, you know, the ones that spin around.

I grew up with two older brothers, and when you’re a kid, there’s nobody bigger and tougher than your big brothers, except your dad. So living in a house with these tough bastards, I wasn’t afraid of much.

Except for, of course, the clothesline man.

I saw this guy several times from around the ages of 5-10. It would always be in the middle of the night, when I’d woken up and found I needed to go to the bathroom. This was a harrowing experience in itself, as just above the bathroom door was a fairly detailed painting of Jesus’ crucifixion. It really was a freaking awful, gory painting – not something a kid needs to see in the middle of the night, but I digress.

The first time (actually, every time) I saw the clothesline man I was taking a whizz, staring out the bathroom window over the back verandah and into the back yard. He would be there, holding on to the clothesline and walking in circles, spinning it, with a grin on his face. Not looking up at me, just watching where he was walking.

I didn’t know how to describe the feeling I got looking at him back then, but I do now. Foreboding – I felt a dreadful sense that something terrible was going to happen when I saw this guy.

Especially if he looked up and saw me.

Thank Christ he never did.

I didn’t see him every time I got up to go to the bathroom, but I told my dad about him the first time. He had a look around the yard, didn’t see anything, and told me to go back to bed. I never mentioned it again. The old man, did, however, eventually get rid of the Jesus painting above the bathroom door, for which I am forever grateful.

Two: “Burning Trees”

Uh, I don’t know how to explain this one, it’s just something that has happened exactly five times. In every place I have lived.

The first time was at the same house as the previous story. I was eighteen at this time, and the clothesline man had long since gone. Anyway, my street turns off from a long road lined with trees, each of them pretty close to one another – close enough that their branches intertwined.

This night, driving home alone after seeing a movie with some mates, I came down this road like I had a hundred times before, and just before my street was a tree, a single tree, on fire. The whole tree was on fire, and none of the others were, which I guess they should have logically been.

OK, that was a little weird, but so what?

A year later I moved out of home to another part of town with some friends. I’d gone to a party, and not having much cash at the time, decided to catch a cab home instead of hitting the clubs with everyone else. Guess what? Burning tree, across the road from my house. How odd.

Two years later I moved out of this house and went to live in Ireland for a year with two mates. One night I went on a date with some Spanish girl I never saw again (who coincidentally was abiding in the house that Bram Stoker used to live in – oooooooh, spooooooky). After taking her home, I decided to walk back to my place, as it was an uncommonly pleasant Dublin night. OK, have a guess….burning tree, this time right in front of my house. By this stage I was getting a little spooked by this shit.

A year or so after coming home from Ireland and moving back in with my mates, I went off to Israel for six months. I was almost expecting it this time – yep, three months into my stay, on the way home from a night-shift at work, burning tree, outside my room.

Now I’m back in Oz and have been living on the coast since then, and yes I have seen the burning tree, and yes, I’m a little freaked.

JohnnyCanuck

“The Damned Shack”

When I was a teen, I lived out in the country on a 100-acre hobby farm. Most of those 100 acres were forest and swamp. Our main focus was rasing exotic birds/fowl. Fancy geese and peacocks and such, but also regular chickens, ducks, and turkeys.

One late afternoon, a friend and I were exploring a trail we’d found a few days earlier. It’s a barely visible trail cut at the end of the dead-end road where my “driveway” was (the driveway was a little more than a mile long).

My buddy and I are wandering down this trail, having nothing better to do, when we spot across an even smaller and more overgrown trail branching off from this one. We’ve already had supper, so we think “what the hell, let’s go see what we can find”. Sometimes, you’d find the coolest stuff somebody’d dumped years and years ago, like the old rusting van we’d turned into a fort. Anyway, we wander down this barely visible trail, and we stumble upon a clearing. By the edge of this clearing is an old one-room shack, most likely put up by a squatter. It’s in a pretty bad state; planks are falling off the sides revealing old, rotting tarpaper, there’s a hole in the roof, and the one window has been broken and re-broken. We start to get nervous, as whoever built the place might have a gun. You don’t want to be trespassing on a squatter’s land, as they’re usually pretty crazy.

As this fact is registering on us, I look over and notice that there’s some kind of an animal pen made out of chicken wire built onto the back and side of the shack. I move a bit to look at the pen, and I see about 15-20 dead and mostly decomposed chickens lying there. They’re mostly bone and feather, and what little flesh is left doesn’t stink all that much anymore. The remains haven’t been scattered, which means no animals have been chewing on them. Some of the chickens from our farm had gone missing a year or so before this, and some of the bundles of feathers had the same coloration as ours.

Suddenly, my buddy grabs me by the arm and screams “Let’s get out of here!” He’d been staring intently at the shack when he’d freaked out. I look back to see what had scread him, and I donn’t think I see anything… unless…

We run back to the mouth of the trail at breakneck speeds, jump on our bikes, and tear off down my driveway. When we arrive safely at the house, I ask him what he thought he saw. I’m terrified that he’ll confirm what I thought I’d glimpsed.

He did: “It just felt like something was really wrong there. Then I saw those eyes… those creepy red eyes staring out at me from that shack…”

We eventually tell his dad – who’s lived in the area since he was a kid – what we thought we saw. He gets very quiet, and makes us promise we’ll never go down that way without an adult present ever again. He refuses to answer any more questions about it.

My friend and I have never talked about it since, and we certainly never repeated our trip down the trail.

WyldChyld

I’ve got a small one that a lady I worked with told me about her son.

First off a little background on her, she was originaly born in the United States and her family moved to Ireland when she was really young. She came to the States when she was around sixteen with her mother father and brother. She said her family moved a lot because her father was in the military. I always enjoyed talking with her because she always had very interesting stories to tell to pass the boring hours in retail clothing sales. She always had a fabulous stories that where very entertaining, she never really told me a scary/ghost story just stories of her childhood and adjusting to different places after she moved with her family each time.

Now she was probably about ten years older than me making her around 32-33ish. She was and is a school teacher just trying to make ends meet working two jobs to support her family of two boys and her husband who was out of town often, I believe she told me he worked off shore.

It was around Halloween when we were talking about spooky things, I was telling her how I spent my childhood growing up in a turn of the century victorian style home that had a presence to it, that I believed was a little girl (but that’s a different story).

She shared with me this amazing tale. Now when she moved back to the states with her family they moved to Mississippi which is where I am from. As some of you may have heard Mississippi is notorious for ghost stories mainly dealing with the Civil War/ Native American eras. Most everyone from Mississippi or the South for that matter can share with you some type of story involving one or both of these eras. My co-worker was no different.

She told me when her and her husband first got married they moved into a small “starter home” where they knew they would be able to raise a family and be comfortable. Two years after she and her husband moved in baby number one came along and shortly after baby number two. Now when baby number one was about three she began noticing that when it rained he would stare out the big picture window they had in there dining room and smile and talk with what appeared to be the window. Thinking nothing of it she just left him to his devices thinking he was just watching some wildlife outside or talking to an imaginary friend. After the rain would stop he would beg to go outside like most kids do to step in mud puddles the rain left behind, but she noticed that he was very aggressive and tedious about making sure he stepped in every mud puddle and sloshed most if not all the water out. After two more years though of this constant behavior, she became curious and asked him why he always did this every time it rained.

She said what he told her sent shivers up and down her spine (also gave me the creeps too). He informed his mother that when it rained “the rain lady” came up out of the puddles and came to the window and stared inside at him and his family. He told his mother if “the rain lady” caught him not looking she told him she would come into their home and never leave, so he had to watch her and protect his family. She eventually put two and two together and reasoned that, this was why he was so adamant about stepping in every mud puddle after it rained and making sure that most if not all of the water was sloshed out of them. Well she shook it off as a child with an overactive imagination and thought nothing more of it.

She said that she left all that he told her alone for about four or five more years until he was around 9-10 years old. She said she noticed that he would still perform the rain ritual of watching out the window and immediately going outside after the rain to empty the mudpuddles. She finally asked him again about “the rain lady”, this time though she asked him to describe her for her. What he described sounded like a general description of a young Native American girl, tanned skin long black hair. Now during this time period she said she noticed him having a lot of nightmares and not being able to focus in class. She said they had ended up putting him on ritolin at the time because they thought he was suffering from ADD, but nothing was really helping.

Also, around this time some new homes were being built in their subdivison. She said there was a great deal of dirt work going on beside their home preparing to lay the foundation for a new home. While some of the construction workers were preparing the dirt to lay the foundation they unearthed several arrowheads and potsherds. They called over the local university to do some excavation and the university declared the place worth doing a full excavation, which lasted a good two years.

She said that once the excavation work started her son’s behavior became very irrational. To put it in her words “I began living with the devil.” His behavior became so irratic that many times during the week she would stay with her mother for help in keeping him under control. Now i asked what kind of behavior she was talking about and she said the worst was when he actually strangle his little brother to the point of him passing out and just leaving him without telling anyone. She confessed that she actually considered putting him into a mental institution for protection for the rest of the family, but she noticed that as long as they were not at their home he was a perfect little angel.

After battling with this for another two years she spoke with her husband for the first time about “the rain lady” and her son’s irrational behavior and told him that she was not comfortable in her home anymore and wanted to move. Since her husband was not home very often he wanted his wife and children to feel safe, and with much dismay gave in and decided to try and locate a new home. They finally did “a long six months later” and to her surprise all of her son’s irrational behavior stopped and they were even able to take him off of ritolin for good.

As for “the rain lady” after they moved into their new home she noticed her son did not run to the windows and stare outside, he did not even go out after the rain to splash through the mudpuddles. She said she asked him about her and he told her very non-chalantly that “the rain lady” was not at their new home and that he felt sorry for the new family that moved into their old home.

Manny Calavera

At one of the pubs I work at, something weird happened to my manager (tom) and I only six days ago. We had locked up the pub after closing so that we could sit around drinking, chatting and playing pool. At about 3am, he suddenly said “my ring’s gone”. He said that the disappearance had felt sudden, rather than it having slipped off. It was a huge fucking silver ring that had always lived on his thumb, the kind of heavy ring you had to pull on extremely hard to get it to come off (he later demonstrated this). He got all worried because he’d had it for years, but calmed down after a few minutes and carried on playing pool, hoping it would turn up later.

About half an hour later I went for a piss in the gents, and just as I was walking towards the door to leave after I was done, the door made a loud *bang* and flew open, sounding and appearing just as if someone had kicked it open. I was to the side of the door, and couldn’t see round the corner. I thought it was Tom being a joker trying to tell me to hurry up to take my next shot on the pool table. I ran through the door fully expecting to see him there, but he was at the other end of the pub pouring drinks behind the bar. The distance between the door and the bar was far too great for him to have run in two seconds.

I yelled to him to come over to the door so I could explain to him what had happened. He walked over to me and said “what?”, and at that exact moment we heard a metallic *ching* on the floor. The ring had appeared directly between us, around half an hour after it had gone missing. It was extremely weird.

Also, in the same pub, none of the dogs will go down into the cellar. To the landlord’s knowledge, no dog has ever gone down there. The landlord’s dog that’s lived there the longest won’t go within a couple of feet of the cellar door when it’s open, and won’t look into it either. Even if you stand on the steps with dog treats, he’ll only look around the door, and never at you. The moment you close the door, he’s fine.

liwet

I’m currently living in a flat with 6 other girls in university-owned accomodation. It’s a very old building, falling apart mostly – lots of damp and dry rot.

Radios in our flat behave very strangely. Due to a large electricity bill, we are very picky about not leaving tvs/radios on stand-by, so we turn then completely off. Radios frequently turn themselves on despite being switched off, and tune into channels we have never used before. Case in point, my flatmate Liz loves her drum n’ bass and house music but when she went away for the weekend her radio came on at full volume in her locked room and started playing strange, sort of classical music.

We joke about it being a ghost, because the building is so old and hundreds of students have passed through it – they always say that poltergeists are just left over impressions of negative energy, particularly from troubled teenagers. Then again, it could just be that the wiring’s dodgy.

That doesn’t bother us particularly. The dreams do though.

I have experienced them a couple of times. They are waking dreams and they are always the same. I am lying in bed, and I am half-awake. It is morning, bright through the curtains. I am facing the window on my side, with my back turned to the rest of the room. My bedroom door opens and someone comes in – usually a flatmate or a friend or family. They say something I can’t really hear, so as not to startle me since I can’t see them. They come and sit down on the side of the bed in that comfortable sort of a way someone trusted does. Then all of a sudden they are replaced by this blackish… thing. I never get a good look at it before waking up as it is just out of sight, but I know that I do not want it there.

I always thought it was just sleep paralysis, black hag and all that, until it came up in conversation and I wasn’t the one who mentioned it. As it turns out, 4 of us have had the same dreams without ever speaking up.

D0N0VAN

My parents and I used to live in a block of flats. These flats were built on a piece of land that was previously a cemetery. The next block was still a cemetery, and remains so to this day. The agreement between the developers at that time, and the council, was that they’d move the graves of the one block to the current main cemetery. Thus, the cemetery is currently quite full – you can drive past it to this day, and its rather creepy to go along that road on your own late at night.

I don’t have any experiences to report with the road, but I do have a few that we experienced in our flat.

Apart from the smaller insignificant things, like my mom would pack the dishes away in the kitchen cupboard and find them in the bedroom cupboard, one night does stand out.

One night, very late in the evening, my mom and dad were in bed. My mom was awake, but my dad was not aware of this; and my dad was awake, but my mom was not aware of this. They hear the front door open, and footsteps coming down the hallway.

Next thing, my mom feels like someone is holding their hand just a few centimeters from her face. The ghost (I assume thats what it was) then walks out the window – on the 3rd storey.

Both my mom and my dad experienced this, but it wasn’t until much later that they mentioned it to each other and it was all very spooky.

Califa

But I do have a tale from my best friend of all times, Pam. I’ve known Pam since grade school. It was a sad day when we were around age 13 that she moved from central California, our home, to eastern Kentucky. It was the unfortunate side-effect of her parents’ divorce; she was sent to stay with a grandmother while her father moved off unexpectedly with a young mistress and the mother fell apart for a while. Pam’s move ended up being only temporary, just for the summer. But it was a terrible time for her.

The grandmother was as sweet as could be, but that part of the country was “backward,” Pam explained. You could still see old shanties in the hills that seemed to house either the poorest of folks or nobody at all. It wasn’t uncommon to see horribly poverty-stricken places. Pam said to me in a letter that summer that she didn’t like staying there. The place gave her the creeps. It felt like she was going back in time. The smells and ambience of the country were old and unsettling. The hollowed sounds of distant truckers on highways carved through the ancient hills at night, making lonely sounds.

The hills had a lot of lore and history, and some of it was just plain nuts, like a “crazy” lady living in the hills near an old coal mine…and supposedly if you went near her old shack she would wail and moan and stuff, but was she really a crazy lady or a ghost? That sort of stuff freaked Pam out. Pam had barely remembered going to her grandfather’s funeral a few years before, and the cemetery was just some little area out in the middle of suffocating hills, and the wildflowers and weeds were overgrown and the graveyard itself not attended at all. Everything about the area was wholly different than where she was from.

Anyway, the grandmother’s house was built in the 1930s or so, not tremendously ancient or anything, but old enough to have creaky moans and stuff. The house had a living room, three bedrooms, one bathroom, kitchen, and dining room, plus a basement. Pam’s grandparents had moved into the house in the late 1960s.

The main story of the house was filled with antiques like a butter churn, old dishes in the China cabinet, home-made quilts, featherbeds, and so on. The basement is what scared Pam the most. She had to go down to there sometimes because that is where her grandmother kept a big meat freezer.

The basement was more like a glorified storm cellar. A rickety pair of steps went down to the basement from a doorway in the central bedroom. Though the basement floor was cemented, the walls were not finished. There were two heavy glass windows at ground level. One risen area of the basement, off to a side and separated by some wooden fencing, was just dirt-floored. The smell of the place was very earthy, and the basement itself was always cold. Pam said the basement gave her the creeps for several reasons, the antiquity of it, the fact it wasn’t modern. Also, she once saw a worm in one of the dirt floors, so that alone was gross enough.

Pam met some friends in the area that summer, and they would come over sometimes to hang out or have slumber parties. The grandmother was a good host. She baked and had plenty of good food, and she also went to bed pretty early, leaving the girls to their own devices. Pam enjoyed these times most of all. Most of the teenagers surrounding her grandmother’s home were weird, she said. There would be young boys standing outside, drinking beer and not good-looking at all, just rednecks with no civility; they’d yell sexual stuff when she would drive by with her grandmother. Pam being a blonde, blue-eyed, really good looking young girl, got a lot of attention and even had modeled some, but she wasn’t used to people acting like those boys did. There were rabid dogs in the area, cottonmouth snakes, you name it—a lot of good reasons to stay inside.

The few friends Pam made were the only reminders of her world back home. The girls she met, though having heavy southern accents, were not too different than what Pam was used to.

Anyway, nothing too out of the ordinary had happened at all during the summer. Pam never did learn to feel comfortable in the house, though. She felt something was out of place, unnatural, but couldn’t put her finger on it. She ultimately concluded that it was the cultural shock of eastern Kentucky and a different way of life compared to her life back home, combined with the uprooting experience of having her father and mother split up and she having to stay somewhere else. Not the greatest of times.

Nothing too unusual happened, anyway, until one of these slumber parties took place near the end of the summer. By this time, Pam found out that her mother was on the road to recovery and had found them a new place to stay back in Monterey. Pam would be coming home before sophomore year, which she was thrilled about. Also, the few good friends she had made in Kentucky were throwing her a farewell party. There were two other girls coming over to Pam’s grandmother’s on a Friday night. Pam would leave on the following Monday.

Her friends Kay and Bonnie came over with some rented movies, and the girls watched movies until about eleven p.m. or so. It was mid-August, very humid and hot. The grandmother didn’t have any air-conditioning, just some fans. Before midnight, it got very rainy and stormy, and the grandmother woke up to check the weather. Pam and her friends were making popcorn in the kitchen, having no desire to sleep yet. Apparently the grandmother was very steadfast about being safe in case of a tornado, even though she had never been in one before. When the wind started howling uncontrollably, and there was a lot of stormy stuff going on outside, however, the grandmother ushered the girls into the basement, just in case.

On their way down the basement steps, the power went out in the house, and of course the girls all screamed. The grandmother seemed to be unafraid of anything, though, just prepared. She lit a lantern in the basement and had a flashlight on hand and even went back upstairs to get some extra blankets and quilts. Despite the fact it was unbearably hot upstairs, the basement was always chilly.

Within minutes, the grandmother had given the girls a blanket, and had enough light set up so that they could sit around in a small circle and stay warm. The grandmother tried to calm them down, though Pam told me that the girls were freaking out from “shadows” in basement corners and the storm outside sounding so spooky. The door leading up to the central bedroom was rattling, there was that much wind (the windows were open upstairs too).

Suddenly there was a large crash upstairs, and the girls screamed again. But the grandmother went calmly upstairs to check it out. Pam said it felt like she was gone for ages. They wondered if someone had broken into the house or something.

Pam was shaking uncontrollably. Even the blanket couldn’t keep her warm. She huddled with Bonnie and Kay, who were also scared and cold. Then at once, everything subdued. The grandmother had not yet returned, and there was absolutely no sound from upstairs at all. The wind stopped howling, the door stopped rattling, and everything became still. The air was heavy and hot still, and the power was still off.

That’s when the girls started to really worry that something was completely wrong, and just then, they heard a scratching noise at one of the basement windows. Looking up, they saw a face of what appeared to be a man. It was hard to tell by the lantern light, but the girls didn’t stop to analyze it and booked it back upstairs, screaming. They could clearly hear in the background a man’s eerie and evil laughter, as if he was close enough to be in the basement, not outside. His voice had what Pam described as a raspy tone, an unearthly one too. He yelled at them to “Get out.” And said something that sounded like “What’s done is done. What’s left is gone.”

The door to the bedroom from the basement was suddenly LOCKED or wouldn’t budge open. What Pam said felt like an eternity, they waited at the top step, afraid of the sudden intruder behind them. She held the flashlight, and her friend Kay the lantern. After a moment of no luck opening the door and not knowing what else to do, they both turned to point the light sources back down the steps, and that’s when they saw the man squatting on the floor on one of the blankets that they had left behind. He had a terrible posture, as he squatted there, peering up at them evilly, bent over with his hands hanging down over his knees. In that one quick instance, Pam said she got a good enough look at him (as did her friends) that Pam really wishes she could erase the memory, because it is with her still even 10 years later. He had a very pale face, translucent skin, and pinkish-red eyes with black pupils. His jaw was elongated and his chin pointed out, his hair long and black but very stringy, his fingernails long but old looking, his fingers also long and narrow. He had a sneer while he gazed upon the girls, his face taunting.

Then he said clearly, “Get out! This is my lair.”

And at that moment, the basement door burst open, with the grandmother at the other side. The girls could suddenly hear the storm outside as if it had never ended (which, according to the grandmother, it had not), and things were back to “normal”. The girls told Pam’s grandmother about being stuck in the basement, and the old woman said the basement door sometimes became stuck if it got too humid outside, and she apologized for the scare. The girls refused to go back to the basement.

Pam said that her grandmother was always a strong woman, not scared easily, but after the girls told her about the evil man downstairs, she agreed it would be a good idea to go somewhere else for the night. She drove the girls to the nearest town, 15 miles away, in the middle of a raging storm that night, just to get them out of the house. The four stayed at Bonnie’s for the night after explaining the incident to her parents.

Even though while at Bonnie’s, Pam’s grandmother called the police to “check on an intruder” that night, she didn’t tell Pam until a few years later that the description of the man in the basement reminded her of a story of the man who had built the house. He had never completed the basement because he’d disappeared after the majority of the house had been built but before the cellar was completed. He left behind a wife and two daughters. Rumor was that his wife had been cheating on him, and her lover had come to kill the man late one night while he was down in the basement. But nothing was ever substantiated. The grandmother had never seen this man until that night, and moved out shortly afterward. She reasoned that her own highly suspect nature might have prevented him from showing himself to her.

She also admitted to Pam years later that she didn’t see the man clearly when the basement door opened, but did see the outline of him and was actually frightened for one of the first times in her life. She had simply tried to keep it cool that night for the sake of the girls, didn’t acknowledge it, and instead tried to calmly get everyone else out of the house. They never did determine why the storm ceased to those in the basement, while it had not actually stopped, according to the grandmother. Pam jokingly said later that it must have been they entered some kind of parallel dimension where ghosts were also allowed to exist, thus no sounds from their earthly reality.

To this day, that time bothers Pam, and she tries not to think about it. In reality she grew up to be pretty unafraid about most things. She realizes this incident could have been an intruder, but neither the circumstances of the storm quieting, nor his physical appearance and preternatural ability to even get into the basement so suddenly, exhibited any kind of naturalness about them.

maakia

My Opa and i were very close, i was his first grandchild and I like to think his favorite. ( my mom has confirmed this, while threatening dire consequences should i ever tell my little brothers)

He had been a heavy smoker for many years and had a hearty (though not healthy) apetite for red meat. As such his heart wasn’t up to much. He had been visiting us for the Christmas holidays and grumbling about his bad turkey-and-gravy enduced heartburn. Upon his return he went to the doctor who told him the turkey heartburn was actually a series of minor heart attacks. He stayed in the hospital for about three months for surgery and when he was released the prognosis was a-ok.

We went to visit him after his release on a Sunday afternoon. He had lost weight, quit smoking and regained his usual passion for gross-out jokes. We left that day confident that Opa would be fine and continue to enjoy his favorite past-time of fiddling with the chunk of shrapnel stuck in his leg.

As a child I wasnt much of a dreamer, meaning that I never remembered my dreams and when I did they were scanty recollections at best. However that Sunday as I drifted off I fell into a very strange dream. I was sitting at my grandfather’s favorite restaurant with all my family sans opa. All of a sudden a set of bagpipes materialised floating over the table (opa was an accomplished bagpipe player) followed by Opa himself, transparent, looking despondent and playing the saddest sea shanty i had ever heard. I jolted awake, (by awake i mean wide awake) and could still clearly hear the song that had been playing in my dream for a good minute followed by faint whispering and a steady pressure on my shoulder.

I was frightened and ran into my mother’s room where i found her sobbing in my father’s arms. I looked at her and, totally deadpan, said ‘opa died didn’t he’.

He had indeed passed away in the middle of the night, a massive heart attack. Almost completely unexpected given his apparent 180 health wise. I have thought of my dream many times, and although i would like to put it down to childhood suggestibility I can’t. I think, corny as it sounds, it was his way of letting me know everything was okay.

68k

Ok I’ve never really talked about this to anyone because I knew it would never be taken that seriously, and I know that it’s quite possibly just night terrors, though I think you may find it interesting (and maybe not!).

I have always had completely fucked up dreams ever since I can remember the dreaming process at all. When I was younger my dreams were more demonic monstrosities and as I got older they became more realistic (humans and violence, not green scaly beasts and violence). This experience, however, I have always felt was different from all the typical dreaming experiences I had growing up. It occurred in a house that is my favorite place from my childhood, the one house that I lived in for more than five years. I always have had weird dreams and experiences surrounding this house, and even to this day many times when I have fucked up dreams they revolve around this house.

Anyway, to the point. From the ages of about 6-8 I would have a very realistic experience in my bedroom at night that probably occurred more than fifty times or so within that time period. Basically, it went the same way every night. I would wake up, sometimes startled, sometimes not. My bed would then proceed to slowly lift off of the goddamn floor, with the head side in the air. It would take about five minutes to happen, and by the time it had “peaked”, I was almost – but not quite completely – verticle, to the point where I should be sliding off into the floor but I wasn’t.

When this first started happening, it obviously scared the shit out of me. I would scream and cry and eventually in the haze and confusion it would pass and my folks would be in my room with the light turned on. Eventually, though, because it happened so frequently and I got so used to it, I became more curious than afraid. Nothing else ever happened. No demons encircled me and tried to pull me into the pit of hell, no voices spoke, nothing like that. My bed just lifted up for a couple of minutes then slowly returned to the ground. And eventually I became so familiar with the occurrance that it just sort of became my own little “experience.”

I told my folks but they knew I had dreams and shit and so they obviously didn’t believe me; and hell I don’t know if I ever actually 100% believed it wasn’t something having to do with my dream/sleep cycle. The weirdest part was, though, that when my bed lifted up I could see things that were under it (toys and what not) and it got to the point where I was putting certain things under there each night to see if I could see them when the event took place, and indeed it worked that way. I did lots of experiments like this over time. On several occasions I slept with a stuffed animal, and when the occurrance happened I would drop the bear onto the floor that would be under the bed, and then in the morning I would get up and find the stuffed animal under the bed where I had dropped it.

Jorge Cauldron

My friend used to always claim his house was ‘haunted’. He said a woman died in his house, and that she inhabits the house today. I never believed him, although he would rarely lie to me about anything, but it still seemed so…farfetched.

Until I slept there one night, and things started getting weird.

First, my friend, we’ll call him Mike, has a big German Shephard. She is a great dog, very obedient, but VERY protective. She was trained by a former Police Dog trainer and is the ideal guard dog, she will play with strangers all day if the family welcomes them, but won’t ever let them in the house if the family hasn’t let them in.

We were downstairs in his room, which was in the basement, where Tess (his dog) would NEVER go. She would start wimpering, or would just back away.
Mike pulled her collar down the stairs, and the dog finally gave in and came down. She seemed pretty calm and was just sitting next to me, when something happened.

Tess started whimpering, over and over. To see this big intimidating dog crying over nothing was unnerving, to say the least. Then, his doorknob started turning.

At this point, the 4-5 people that were in the basement stopped talking and looked over. The knob kept turning and stopped, and the door didn’t open. The doorknob was released, and Mike, opened the door and there was nothing.

Everyone stood there stunned, until Mike started laughing. ‘Agatha is PISSED’, he said. Agatha is what we called the ‘ghost’, mockingly. We eventually just forgot about it and went on doing whatever.

So that night, I was sleeping next to Mike’s poker table. The table had a computer chair next to it, and that was right next to where I was sleeping. I woke up, in the middle of the night, because it sounded like someone had gotten out of the chair and it revolved, and hit the table. I looked up and there was a woman in a white gown, walking out of the room. She was tall, and had straight hair. Mike’s mom was tall, but had curly hair that was blonde. She wasn’t built like this women though, because the ‘Agatha’ appeared to be very thin, and have hair cut perfectly at her shoulders.
She walked out of the room, and immediately I looked at Mike, he hadn’t seen it, he was sound asleep. I looked around the room and after about 30 minutes of gathering my thoughts, I very surprisingly fell right bask asleep.

The weird part is I don’t remember being scared at all during this. I was terrified the next morning as I comprehended what I saw, but I was never actually scared watching a ghost walk out of the room.

I haven’t slept at Mike’s since, though.

Riddle

“Christmas is the Scariest Time of the Year”

My story starts two Christmases ago when I was home alone packing boxes full of old clothes for storage. I was sitting in front of my amoire on the floor and had an empty box on its side, open end facing the door to my right. I set a roll of packing tape on top of the box and began to go through the bottom drawer.

I was only two minutes into my work when I saw movement out of the corner of my eye and heard loud thumping like foot steps coming towards me. When I turned my head I saw a black streak close to the ground jet through the door and into the box. The box slid across the room and the packing tape went flying and rolled underneath the bed.

I had adopted a gray kitten a week prior since it was Christmas time and I missed my cat back home. I laughed and said “Silly kitty…”, when I leaned down and looked in the box though it was empty and I got this shrill piercing pain in my ears and I couldn’t swallow. Adrenaline shot through me and I could feel the blood draining from my face. I sprinted out into the living room and saw the kitten in his basket, ears up and alert and he just sat there stock still. I didn’t know what to do so I went out onto the balconey and stood out in the cold until my boyfriend came home and rescued me. Needless to say, he didn’t believe me and I started to believe it was just my overactive imagination…

Flash to last Christmas, I had completely forgotten about the incident with the box and the black streak and was busy making myself pretty in the hallway mirror. The mirror reflects the stove in the kitchen and I had a tray out while I was preheating the oven for some cookies. I looked to see if the light was on and it wasn’t so I reached down for some lip gloss and when my eyes came back up to the mirror, there it was. I could hear the metal of the tray groaning like it was under massive weight and saw a large black outline of a feline creature. It had a long thin tail and tall spiky ears. It just stared at me with huge, green eyes with skinny slits that went from top to bottom for what seemed like days. It’s lips curled and it smiled at me with big sharp teeth, I screamed. When I turned around it was gone.

I have never owned a black cat in my life, especially not one with almost human teeth and eyes like that. Nothing had eyes like that… I dread Christmas this year because I know it’s waiting for me.

Wet Seth

Imagine you’re about ten years old and at summer camp. Your counselor decides it’s a good idea to research haunted houses of Texas and brings a bunch of ghost/haunting material to camp from the gigantic public library. One of the things she brings is a roll of newspaper clippings about haunted houses from your own town. Interested, you start to flip through to see if you recognize any.

Ha. The second to last one in the collection is a an article accompanying a gigantic picture of your house.

I lived on the island Galveston, Texas for a few years in a gigantic old house that used to be an inn. It was awesome; huge ceilings, wrap around decks on two levels, an attic, basement, a great yard and was fairly historic (built around 1920). A ghost too, apparently.

According to the article, we were haunted by a woman named Sarah, one of the first owners of the house. She would do nothing more than move furniture or adjust pictures that were crooked. The previous owner claimed that in a dream he had been drawn to the kitchen where Sarah was sitting. She said, “please sit and talk with me,” to which he gladly obliged. He woke up after a long conversation in the kitchen sitting in the same chair as the dream. The end of the article even referenced my family saying, “who knows what the new owners will encounter.”

I showed this to the counselor who told me not to tell my brother or sister, who were younger and enrolled in the same camp because it might scare them. Anyway, years later when I was seventeen and living in Maryland, we decided we would visit Galveston again, and it reminded me of the article, so I asked my dad about Sarah.

He looked at me bug-eyed and said. . . . What??? and followed with a story.

In our first year living in the house, my brother (who was probably about four or five, came running downstairs yelling “THERE’S A LADY IN OLD CLOTHES WATCHING ME PLAY GAMES!” My dad said he followed him back upstairs and looked around, but couldn’t find an intruder, so he left my brother alone with the computer. Later, he came running downstairs again and yelled, “SHE’S BACK AND SHE TOOK MY GAME INTO THE ATTIC, CAN YOU GO GET IT?”

Ha. My dad looked around for the lady in old clothes again, then went up into the attic where he found the edge of the cd on top of a rafter that he had to stack things to get to. It would have been impossible for my brother to get there, and despite my dad asking him over and over how he did it, my brother insisted he didn’t do it and that he left to get my dad right after she took it. So my dad left my brother again, confused as ever and went about his business, only to be drawn back by screaming and banging.

My brother was in the office screaming and banging on the glass doors which had somehow locked themselves. Keep in mind, they are old locks and you need a specific key and you have to be outside to lock it. He just kept yelling “THE LADY RAN UP AND SLAMMED THE DOOR AND LOCKED IT AND WALKED AWAY!!” My dad eventually found a master key and let him out. There were no problems after that, besides the occasional footsteps in the attic right above our room.

So we went back to Galveston and visited the house, and at the end of the tour, the new owners asked if we had any questions. I fired back immediatly with, “So have you seen Sarah?

She looked at me bug-eyed and said. . . What???

Sure enough she had had problems too, starting with her piano. The movers dropped it and it was sent away for three years to be repaired. When it finally returned, they needed tuning keys to get it playing again, which were at this point lost. After exhaustive searching, the new owner finally had a moment of intuition and traveled up into the attic. She moved a bunch of boxes and pulled Sarah’s old trunk (it comes with the house) and found the keys under Sarah’s wedding dress. Next, one night when she was alone, all the furniture in the guest room started to move, the door slammed shut and couldn’t be opened. She called the police and an old cop answered, taking the door off by its hinges and finding nobody inside, but all the furniture pushed up against the door in the corner. He chuckled and told her it was probably just Sarah. Apparently this stuff is old news to th rest of the town. So finally, when she was alone again, the entire house started shaking. Furniture was sliding, pictures fell off of walls, and thunder roared on a clear night. The new owner lost it, slammed her foot on the ground and shouted, “SARAH THIS IS MY HOUSE NOW GET OVER IT. I’M STAYING!” The house stopped and she didn’t have a problem later.

The strange thing is Sarah didn’t die in that house. She was actually transferred to a hospital in Dallas of all places after an accident. However it doesn’t surprise me that she came back to spend her afterlife there. People are drawn to that house. Traveler’s still stop asking if it is still an inn, and old owners still come back. Hell, we came all the way from Maryland to basically just visit a house for fifteen minutes. The lady before us returned from Minnesota. There’s something about that old house, but it is beautiful and I don’t blame Sarah for sticking around. But she really shouldn’t be so picky about furniture, or art, or how long someone spends on the computer.

cardinalpuck

“The Cancer Ward”

There was a period in my childhood when my mother was very, very sick and my younger brother and I would spend months on end sleeping and playing in the long term patient’s ward of Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago.

Our father died when I was only three of a massive heart attack while he was working on a construction job, and the news hit my mother very hard. She was only twenty-three when he died, mother to me and eight months pregnant with my brother, so times were tough for us in those early years.

Anyway, my mother contracted breast cancer one hot summer, and because she could not pay for both an apartment to live in and her daily cancer treatments, she sold our place and called in a favor from the head nurse at the hospital, who allowed us to stay in her room at night, and run around the ward during the day, (as long as we promised to stay out of the way.)

Every morning, when my mother got her daily cocktail of injections and pills, my six year old brother Jacob and I would hide under the desk in the nurses station and attempt to scare the pretty young nurses who sat there to fill out their paperwork for the day. Valerie was a particularly kind woman who would pretend to be scared each time one of us made a grab for her ankles, and allowed us to trail along behind her when she made her rounds.

One day, as I led Jacob by the hand as Valerie walked around the ward, dropping off pills and taking notes, we noticed that the door to the hospital basement had been left open. Valerie was inside a room, giving a stomach cancer patient his pain medication, and had told us to wait on the low bench in the hallway for her to return.

Now, we had learned from experience that she would be with the patient for upwards of twenty minutes, and it was actually Jacob who made mention of exploring the basement while we waited for her to return. I was three years older, and there was no way I was about to lose face before my little brother, so we watched to make sure the coast was clear before running across the hall and plunging down the basement steps.

The stairway was not nearly as long as we had expected, and it ended in a disappointingly well-lit hallway that was filled with gurneys that stood along the walls like suits of armor, empty and waiting. Jacob took my hands and we ran down the hallway, making twists and turns until we stopped before a large set of double doors. The morgue. We were both far too young to realize what we had found, but still some primal feeling made us enter cautiously, quietly. The room was just as bright as the hallway had been, and filled with gurneys, though these were filled with heavy shapes, each covered in a clean white sheet.

When the realization hit me that each of these presences was a corpse, a real dead body, I started to cry. Tiny, muffled sobs that still sounded like gunshots in the quiet of the morgue. My younger brother, however, was merely curious. He still held my hand, and pulled me to the closest cart. With terrible slowness, he reached up and pulled on the corner of the sheet until it came loose, and the pale, screwed up face of a very old man was revealed, eyes closed and teeth bared in a horrible grimace. I let out another sob, and my brother started to cover up the man’s face again when through some unlucky chance, an arm fell out from underneath the sheet and almost seemed to reach for us. We both let out loud screams, and within seconds an orderly was at the door. He took us both from the room and brought us back to nurse Valerie, who was just now finishing her duties and come to collect us.

Jacob and I didn’t speak much for the rest of that day, and I was mad at him. On some level, I blamed him for the scare we’d had. When we were both tucked into cots on the floor near our mother’s bed that night, I laid awake for what seemed like hours, staring at his back and shivering despite the muggy summer air that rolled in from the open window. I managed to drift into an uneasy sleep within a couple of hours, and was on the verge of actually getting some rest when I awoke to the sound of my brother gasping. I opened my eyes and shot up from my cot as I saw what appeared to be a thick mist rolling over my brother’s blankets, somehow twisting around his neck and stopping him from breathing. I reached up to turn on the lamp on the window ledge, but missed and sent the heavy light crashing to the floor. Immediately, the fog was sucked out of the room, and my mother was there at Jacob’s side, comforting him and telling him that everything was going to be alright.

Despite the hallowed, haunted look in his eyes the next morning, my brother refused to talk about what had happened, claiming it to be a dream, or a night terror of some sort. But each morning he looked a little more shallow, a little more gaunt, a look that was terribly frightening for a six year old boy. One night, Jacob was crying as he crawled into my cot and asked if I would sleep with him. I felt it was my duty to provide some kind of comfort for him, as I was technically the man of the house, and I was deeply saddened by his dark eyed expression, so I shrugged over to one side of the cot and let him crawl under my blankets.

After hours of dreamless sleep, I awoke to the now familiar sound of my brother letting out shivering little gasps, and I opened my eyes with his name on my lips but stopped, completely terror-stricken. Above us, kneeling on the cot was the twisted face of the very same man we had seen that day in the morgue. His head was completely devoid of hair, and his skin was pulled tight across his face. He had cracked, yellow teeth and a hungry expression, and his stringy, grayish arms were wrapped around my brothers throat. His face was inches from ours, and the feeling of sadness and hate that fell from him hit me in great, rolling waves. I opened my mouth to scream, but found I couldn’t. Pinpricks drifted up and down my spine, and my heart was beating so fast and so loudly that I thought I was going to die from fright. It wasn’t until my mother flicked on her bedside lamp that the man vanished, seemingly yanked out of the room by an invisible leash. She asked us if we were all right, and finding we couldn’t reply, switched the lamp off and went back to sleep.

I sat with my brother for a long, long time that next morning before he told me the truth. When the man’s arm had fallen from the gurney that day in the morgue, it had dropped a wedding ring. And when the orderly rushed to remove us, Jacob had picked it up quickly. I asked him why he did it, and he claimed to not know, but told me that every single night since then, the man had come to his cot and sat on his chest. And though he never spoke, my brother knew what he wanted but was too terrified to give it to him.

I didn’t know what else to do, so I turned to my mother for help. I told her about the man, and the ring, and instead of ridiculing us like I feared she might, she took the old silver band from my brother and strung it around the gold chain on her neck, so it sat between her engagement and wedding rings, now too big to fit on her wasted fingers. She told us everything would be alright, and we believed her, and for the first time in a week, my brother and I got a full, peaceful night of sleep.

That next morning, Valerie and our mother’s doctor sat us down and explained that our mother had died peacefully in her sleep the night before.

We went to live with our distant aunt, after that. And though I still talk to Jacob about what happened, I don’t think I’ve ever really forgiven him. I’m not sure I ever really will.

LeechCode5

A couple years ago one of my best friends found a book about haunted places in Ojai and got a bit obsessed about a couple of the stories he’d read, including a story about a camping location on Old Creek Road, where according to urban legend a man was set on fire and ran into the woods. They say if you stand on the bridge at night and yell “Help me!” the ghost of Charr-Man would come and attack you, or something. Yeah, its bullshit, but it was a good story. He drove up there with a couple of his brothers one night to look around, and told me that while they were walking around the temperature dropped at least 30 degrees in a couple minutes, and that his brothers’ watches died.

Not too long after, the gang and I were all hanging out. It was getting late and we were all bored, and after my buddy brought up his last trip up there, we decided to take a drive up and look around. We drove up and down Creek Road for a while, with my buddy telling us all the stupid stories he’d read about headless ghost bikers and Charr-Man, but none of us really gave a second thought to them. Yeah the woods and the empty road were kind of creepy in the dark, but none of us were about to believe some piece of shit saying there’s a vampire’s coffin in the hills.

Finally we decided to stop near the bridge that Charr-Man supposedly haunts and take a look around. The friend that dragged us all out there of course pussied out and stayed in the car, while the rest of us walked over the bridge and into the parking lot in front of Camp Comfort. Had we not brought a couple flashlights we wouldn’t have been able to see a thing it was so fucking dark. I took a few pictures with my digital camera, but the night setting sucks on it and they came out terribly. We split up, a couple of my friends looking around for a bathroom, and one following me. Right behind the parking lot was a children’s playground, really old and rusty, that caught my attention. I put my flashlight away and got out my camera to take some pictures. As I snapped my first picture I heard the girl behind me jump. I turned around and asked what the problem was.

“Someone just unbuttoned my shirt.”

Again, I wasn’t that spooked. This girl was always looking for attention, and I shrugged it off. I turned back towards the playground and clicked the review button on my camera to see picture I’d taken.

Ok, now I was a little surprised. Sure, orbs are generally bull, a piece of dust or a bug in front of the camera lense. But it was late and I was tired, and somewhere in my imagination I wanted to believe that yes, I had just taken a picture of the ghost of PacMan. I don’t know how he died, probably choked on a pit from one of those cherries. I took a few more pictures, trying to keep as still as I could, keeping the camera at the same angle as the first time. Nothing. I heard the voices of the two friends that took off coming back, so I ran over to them and showed them the picture before we headed back to the car. On the drive home they told us that they’d found the camp’s bathrooms, and that the toilets all flushed on their own as they left. We got back in town, we called it a night, and we all went back home. It was cool, we had a fun night and a couple of us got spooked.

A half hour later I got a call from the friend who gave me a ride home. On his way home his tire blew out and he almost crashed. I asked him if he was ok, and he said he was fine and waiting for the tow-truck. His car was fine too besides the tire blown out and being covered in dust after he swirvved off the freeway.The odd thing though, he was sure his car had hit the brick wall beside the road, but there wasn’t any damage to the side of the car. Just child-sized handprints in the dust.

Stimpy

First off, some background. The story takes place in Johnstown, Pa., site of one of the deadliest floods in US history. Basically, the short story of what happened: some rich fuckers (we’re talking Andrew Carnegie, the richest of the all time rich fuckers) get together and form a “hunting club”. They dam up a stream/river to make themselves a lake so they can sail their sailboats and what have you. Being rich fuckers who assume they can do whatever, they pay no attention that they are up in the mountains, blocking off the flow of water down into a large valley, which is populated by a rather booming city for its time, Johnstown. As the years go on, they exand the lake, making it bigger and bigger, while not upgrading the dam, despite several wanrings to do so. Eventually, as one would guess, after a few days of quite heavy rain, the damn bursts, spilling millions of gallons of water down into the valley, which funnels it, allows it to pick up speed and debris, before slamming into Johnstown and obliterating parts of the city. An engineer who saw the wall of water coming, hopped in his engine, got it going backwards toward Johnstown and held the whistle down (which is a clear sign of distress), which allowed some people to get out of the path, but not enough.

So, on to our story. I’m a senior in college, VP of the history honor society that consisted of about 6 of us and our advisor who liked to sit around and drink beer while discussing history. We head up to Johnstown to stay with a colleague of our professor who taught at UP-Johnstown. He llived up on the hillside of the town, a relatively younger part of town than down in the valley. We want to hit all the sites associated with the Johnstown flood, so we do it in chronological order. We first head up to the “hunting club” and dam.

We hit the dam, and see the video detailing the events for us. Then we head out to the club and dam itself. They never repaired the dam, so there’s literally a giant gaping hole on one side, a hole where the lake used to be, with just the old stream running through, which made it a bit creepy. We head out, walk around, and walk straight out to the dam, walking even to the hole and looking around. As we head up the hillside to head out, it starts to rain, ever so lightly…

The next day, we head downtown, walk through downtown, head to a couple more museums there. We go to the official flood museum in Jtown, where they have a replica of the cabins brought in for the survivors to stay in. There’s a lady in period dress, talking about what it would have been like and such. We go through the museum, which is in an old Carnegie library, which really gave me the creeps anyway. As we’re headed out to head home for the night to drink and discuss, it starts to rain again…harder this time…

The next day we hit some sites outside of Jtown. Cruising around, nothing all that unusual happened.

Day four we’re back in Jtown. We hit some immigration museums in the area, peruse the city, check out some spots where they filmed “slapshot”, and had some diner food. All in all, quite fun. That evening, we head to the stone bridge, where debris piled up during the flood, and caught fire, basically incinerating people hanging on to parts of houses and debris trying to avoid the flood water. They had to choose between taking their chances with raging waters, or trying to avoid the fire. Not a choice I’d like to make at all. We all stood there, quiet, almost reverently, just looking around. No rain this time…just quiet. Complete quiet…as though the city froze for a few minutes. When we walked off the bridge, the sound of cars came roaring back to me. Maybe I was the only one that happened to.

Final day before leaving, we head to a friend’s place on the top of the hill over Jtown. Coincidentally, his place is 10 feet from the cemetary where most of the victims are buried, and right next to the unknown victims memorial. Four of us head over to look at the memorial, and we’re milling about, mostly quiet, reading the graves and the memorial as the sun sets. Just as the sun went down, the mood changed as the light levels dropped. It was reverent, quiet, respectful, but as the sun dropped, the mood change slowly, but drastically. It wasn’t a sense of fear, or anger, but one of pain…and that it was time for us to go. It honestly felt like the people there were happy we came to see them, and were glad we were reverent, but that it was time for us to go. Kinda like the sense when you’re at someone’s house and they want to go to bed but they stay up til you leave.

That night, we head back to the house we’re staying at, and sit out back, overlooking the city. We’re all just sitting there, kicking back a few beers and discussing what we’ve done and learned. I mention something about how the whole place doesn’t feel like a tragedy happened. There was a sense of a disaster, but it wasn’t a sad thing. It was more like, this horrible thing happened yes, but let’s remember it in a way that isn’t depressing. I was leaving with a sense of reverence, and respect for a place and people that dealt with horrible things as best they could. The victims did their best, as did the survivors, and that’s what I felt most, a sense that the folks did their best, and we should respect that. No sooner had I finished those thoughts, then I hear thunder, and the rain began to beat down hard on the ground. I was awake much of that night thinking about what we’d seen.

As we were leaving the next day, I had more of a sense of dread. A dread, and a feeling of sorrow for the city itself. As we drove out through the rain, we were discussing the people and events of Jtown. Our advisor asked what we took away from it. I was the last to speak, when I said that terrible things happen, through events that we often have no control over. However, those events bring out strong people, and make us more respectful not only of those lost, but those who live, and life in general. Man tries to control nature, but is ultimately at its mercy, and Jtown shows that. We should move on, but not forget those lost, and deeds done, but keep them in mind to shape how we act going forward. As I finished that, with the rain pouring down on the Jeep we were in, we all heard a train whistle in the distance, that sounded for quite a bit longer than normal. None of us spoke, but somewhat nervously looked at each other before sitting in silence for a good 15 more minutes….

The Cameo

My theater used to be a supermarket. Before that, though, it was a slaughterhouse. Keep that in mind as I talk about our projection booth.

The projection booth of the theater I’ve worked at for the past four years now is about the length of the theater itself, and is essentially the second floor of the building. We have seven projectors sitting from one end of the booth to the other, with one and seven facing opposite directions from two through six. A wall juts out about ten or fifteen feet from projectors one and seven, giving space for storage, a break room, and a bathroom for the projectionist and other employees.

Now, at my theater, we (the employees) used to hold “game nights” in the summer, when the place closed at midnight. When the theater closed, we’d hook up TVs and PlayStations and Xboxs and old NES systems, eat a bunch of junk food, and generally have fun. Perhaps this is where things got stirred from wherever they were in the building.

After one game night, the next evening, as one of my co-workers was finishing up “threading” the projectors, he was heading towards the light switch. His hand reached out for it — as usual, there was his shadow, covering the switch. However, as he reached for it — something loomed over him. Much larger than he could possibly have been. And it was as dark as night.

He spun around. There was nothing there. He came down to the concession stand, told us what had just happened. We believed him.

I’ve personally had a couple of experiences: one morning, I was walking around, trying to find a co-worker whom I had planned to hang out with that day or something. Anyway, I entered our break room. I called his name out, figuring perhaps he was asleep somewhere where I couldn’t see him. That’s when I heard it:

Growling. Like the guttural sound of a protective Rottweiler with a trespasser in his yard. That kind of growl. I called out my co-worker’s name again, and got closer to a nailed-to-the-wall table the room had. I figured he had heard me come in, and slid into the darkness underneath. But when I looked, there was nothing. And yet the growling started again — louder, angrier now than before. I left the room immediately.

It was a few weeks later. I was standing at the third theater’s projector, fixing the framing and missplice, and I had the lights off. The only light was coming from the projector, which was shining off a spare platter that was laid up against a corner of the jutting wall.

I turned around, having fixed the framing. Within a second, I saw a human shadow — hopefully one, at least — speed right across the light shining on the platter. It was independently moving, that shadow. It wasn’t my movements in control of it. I was merely standing there.

I came downstairs and told everyone about it. Now we don’t do game nights, and tend to get out as quickly as we can. There’s an eerieness to that theater, and you can feel it.

Sh3kel

I don’t know how I’d react to an apparition by a hostile ghost if I ever ran into one, but I sure as hell recall the run in I had with one while on-duty…

Back in October ‘05 I volunteered to cover for a guy in my unit, and got sent to pull guard duty near a Regimental HQ near Nablus in the West Bank as part of my service in the Israeli Air Force. That regimental HQ is responsible for a lot of troops in the area and deals with some of the nastiest pieces of human feces the Israeli-Arab conflict can produce, and there’s a major holding compound which can house up to 30 prisoners if memory serves. These people are usually there because they’ve been caught with weapons or ordnance or brought in when a the shit hits the fan and there’s a ton of people arrested for violent riots, and the MP on duty told us that the youngest one there was an 8 year old kid carrying a 5 kilo belt of TNT in his school pack. He also told us about a guy in his 40s that was apparently poisoned to death in the cell – creepy. The base is also mounted right on a hill, one of the tallest in a ridgeline, and surrounded by at least five Arab villages, each with a mosque in it. Now, seeing as this is Israel and everything’s a stone-throw away, we’d get the pleasure of 5 Mouazin towers call the people to pray, at least 5 times a day, and an additional prayer from inside the holding cells. At night the place got real dark, the mosques shimmer at the distance with a neon-green light at the top and you’re stuck pulling a four-hour guard in the middle of the West Bank. The overall feel of the place isn’t that it’s haunted, just that it’s a god-forsaken hell-hole that’s depressing as fuck and specifically designed to make you miserable.

Now, most servicemen that pull guard duty there don’t give a lot of thought to these kind of things because hey we’ve got M-16 assault rifles at the ready, have full combat gear on and we’re only going to be in the shit-hole in a week, right? I was one of the “eh, fuck it” crowd too, until October that is.
During September or October, depending on the Jewish calendar, Judaism celebrates New Year’s and ten days afterwards it has what’s called “Yom Kippur”. It’s basically a day where you’re supposed to atone for all your sins of the past year, fast and have a miserable time remembering how evil and wicked you were and beg for forgiveness from the almighty, so that he may decide that he’ll let you live another year and sign your name in “the book of life” for that new year. If he chooses you should die over this year, it is signed and made official on “Yom Kippur”, and hence people pray a lot and act like better human beings between New Year’s and Kippur. It’s overall a pretty neat holiday what with everyone wearing white and asking forgiveness, the streets being totally deserted and everyone being in temples, I like it. So of course the military’s going to stick me in a guard post during the high holidays.

It gets real cold around that area in October. I was up at the shift at 17:00, just as the fast started and prayer commenced, and it must have been about 3-4 degrees Celsius above zero at the base entrance, which is basically an electric gate with a man on the gate and a man on the cover position in a tower, me on the top position. I was freezing cold, hungry, thirsty, and dead-tired as I was pulling my 36th hour of guard duty in three days, overall being totally miserable and hating life. The Arabs were delivering a “kill all Jews” sermon from the hill in front of us, and the guy at the gate had gone in to the guard hut to warm himself up before he froze his ass off. Time passed really slow until about 19:30, when all of a sudden I felt really warm and hot inside. I got outside the tower to cool off a minute and stepped a bit to the west on the building the tower was mounted on. I’d taken the helmet off and attached it the back of my vest because we were told it wasn’t necessary to have it on at all times, and as I leaned on the building’s guardrail I laid my M-16 in front of me and put my hands on the rail, so that the weapon was balanced on the rail and the strap was loose and rested between my arms, when I felt something pull me at the left shoulder. I reached back with my right hand and touched my helmet, thinking it snagged on something – and found it hanging loose. That struck me as odd, so I turned my head to the left, and saw I was at least a meter away from any potential nail that could snag my vest when I felt another gentle pull at my shoulder. I grabbed my M-16 and moved the safety to “Semi”.
I was still miserable as hell, but now misery had given way to fear and adrenaline. Whatever the fuck was pulling me was dead. I turned around with the weapon to my left side ready to blast the shit out of whatever was there, when I felt a warm presence, smelled an old woman’s perfume and heard a familiar voice tell me “It’s ok, we’re with you and proud of you, kid”. Chills ran down my spine as I realized what the fuck I just experienced, I set my weapon on safe and things got really, really cold again.
I walked back into the tower and when relieved at 21:00, the sentry replacing me said I looked unusually pale, and he suggested I get some sleep.

My grandmother had died July that year after a year-long fight with the aftermath of a stroke, which left her with advance brain functions but virtually no motor functions at all. She had to learn how to talk all over again, and when she did, she had no “filter” which kept her from saying what she thought of people. She was unable to pronounce my name, so the day after the stroke I became her “kid”. At her funeral, my sister, my two cousins and myself delivered the eulogy.

That’s when I realized that my dead grandmother had come to me, during “Yom Kippur”, the Day of Atonement, to tell me she was proud of me and watching over me. I called my grandfather immediately after the shift, and told him what had happened. He sounded relieved, but I couldn’t sleep a single minute for the entire 8 hours of free time I had before my next shift.

Two weeks ago a car-bomb blew up not half a kilometer away from that guard post, killing four Israeli civilians as well as the suicide bomber. I hate that goddamn place.

Miho

I’m so glad that I’ve never experienced anything as scary as what happened in some of these stories. I only have 2 incidents where I may have seen something, but most likely they were just dreams.

The first incident happened a few summers ago when I was staying at my parents’ house after getting out of the army. I was in bed and it was early morning. I remember opening my eyes to see that it was really sunny outside, but it was still to early for me to want to get up. Then I looked towards the foot of my bed and I saw the figure of a little boy floating in the air about 4 feet off of the ground.

The weird part about it was that it wasn’t a clear image. It was like an outline of a person, but instead of being able to distinguish features, it was like looking at snow on a television screen. The only thing I could tell was that it looked like the boy was wearing a sailor suit which I thought was really strange. I don’t remember feeling scared, just that I had to have been dreaming and I shrugged it off.

The second incident occured a few months later in the same bedroom. This one is a little bit stranger because of how it happened. Before I went to bed that night, I set up a new clock radio that my mom picked up for me. I positioned it on the night stand right next to my bed so that it was about eye level with me when I layed down. This thing had huge green numbers like no other alarm clock that I’d ever owned.

Anyway, I went to bed, and in the middle of the night I remembered opening my eyes and noticing that the green light from the clock radio was shining on my pillow and matress. It was really bright, and I distinctly remembered thinking that I should turn the clock radio around while I was trying to sleep so that it wouldn’t wake me up all the time. Then I looked towards my bedroom door which was opened just a bit, and there was a figure of a young woman standing there watching me. At first I thought it was my sister, but then I realized that she covered in television snow just like that little boy that I saw months before.

As she was standing there watching me, some animal, I couldn’t tell if it was a small dog or a large cat because it also had that static appearance, squeezed into my room between the woman and the door and ran around the foot of my bed. This time I really felt scared, because I realized that there was no way I could be dreaming if I was seeing the light from the clock radio which never existed before that night.

I was petrified, but I wanted to scream to my sister who was sleeping in the next room. I remembered staring back at this lady and trying to force some noise out of my throat, but I couldn’t make a sound. I’m not even sure what happened after that. It just went blank, like I passed out or something.

I woke up the next morning remembering every detail about what I saw, and I wondered for days afterwards if I was just dreaming it or if I was awake. Or if I was in some in-between state that allowed me to see something. I’ll never know for sure. I’m not sure that I want to know.

dahanese

ever since i was a little girl, i’ve seen things. both my sisters have had the same experience, but never as much as me. i used to think they were night terrors, or hallucinations. i would wake up in the middle of the night and look down on the right side of my bed, and there would be two dead children sitting cross-legged by my bed, playing chess. they were opaque, and gaunt, half-rotted. i was terrified of them, so i would stay still and watch them play. they never looked at me. once i ran my hand through them. it felt like nothing at all.

more recently, i’ve seen shadows. what appears to be a man in the doorway of my room sometimes at night, cat-like animals darting into drawers, my closets. my boyfriend thinks this is fascinating (luckily he hasn’t had me locked up yet). i can play these down to sleepiness, tricks of the eye, darkness. once over the summer, though, i was walking down the street in daylight with my boyfriend and i *swear* i saw a raccoon-shaped animal run past me and slither into a nearby mailbox.

joeynfulleffect

a man is driving home, on a late stormy night. the rain is pouring down so thick, the windshield wipers have a hard time keeping up.
he decided to take the scenic route, in the backroads, because he felt it would calm him down after a long day at work.
“just might luck,” he said aloud to himself, “rain.”

as he turned a sharp corner, something in a lurid white immediately caught the headlights and his eye. a woman, standing in the middle of what seemed to be nowhere.
her back turned against the flood of the lights, he came to a screeching hault.
of course, he was a gentlman, and couldn’t bring himself to not stop on such a night like this, especially if it were a woman.
rolling down his car window, he spoke softly.
“please, get in the car! it’s raining so hard. i’ll give you a ride home!”
as he spoke, the girl turned slowly towards the gentleman, and revealed the most beautiful face he had ever laid eye upon.
albeit, she wore a surgical mask (which is very common in japan, when people have colds, they wear them to not spread the sickness), but it was as if her beauty shone through the mask itself.

her eyes were wide and gorgeous, her hair, though wet and matted against her head, looked soft to the touch and peerless. though she looked frail, her manner and stance were firm, her frame athletic. she nodded faintly, and stepped into the car.

“goodness,” he thought to himself, “even her ears are cute.”

“sorry i don’t have a towel to let you dry yourself off with,” he started, “but i’ll give you a ride to your doorstep. where do you live?” he smiled wide, hoping she was a sucker for a nice smile.
“just inside the city.” was her reply. she averted her gaze from his and said nothing more.
he coughed nervously, then started heading down the long stretch of backroad.
“so,” his voice cut through the silence, “the city is quite a way from here. what were you doing all the way out in these parts?” he glanced in his rearview mirror, to see the girl staring right back into his eyes through the mirror. so he waited for her response.
but it never came.
he made a few more attempts at small talk, but soon gave up. he figured he’d blown it somewhere in the beginning.
“i’m such an idiot,” he thought to himself, “who carries a towel with them in a car anyway?”
the minutes continued to pass in heavy silence, as the man drove along, every once in a while glancing in his rearview mirror.
her eyes were unwavering, still staring at him in the mirror.

suddenly she spoke, afer what seemed like nearly half an hour.
“do you think i’m beautiful?”
his heart pounded heavily inside his chest as he finally got a response from her. he glimpsed back at her through his mirror. she actually seemed to be smiling beneath her mask.
“YES! you’re absolutely gorgeous!”
his knuckles turned white as he gripped the steering wheel ferociously out of anticipation.
“maybe i’ve finally found a nice girl in this town!” he thought to himself, now trying hard to focus on the road ahead of him. he could see the city lights in the distance.
almost immediately after he had given his response, she spoke again.

“do you think i’m beautiful?”
as he began to speak, he glanced in the rearview mirror again.
she had taken off her mask and was smiling. at first the darkness skewed his vision, but he noticed something awkward about her smile.
then a streetlight flooded the car for a split second:
the edges of her mouth had been cut all the way to each ear. her smile stretched farther and farther, revealing an almost skeletal smile.

all he could do was scream.

a few hours later, a police car passing down the same road came to a screeching halt as it spotted a familiar car that had swerved off the road and into a ditch.
the officer turned on his siren lights, and proceded down to the wreck.
the back door was ajar, but from within the officer heard a stirring. opening the driver door, he found a man, limp, head resting against the steering wheel.
the officer noticed blood streaming downward from the driver’s face.
as the policeman pulled his head back, he gagged. the edges of the driver’s lips had been split into a hideous smile.
the officer quickly went to his radio.
“yeah. we got another victim.”

wow. creepy. the chinese version is pretty ghastly, too:

it was said that in the 70’s in hong kong that there would be this woman who would wear a beautiful dancing mask and stand outside of the elementary schools.
when school got out, she would stop children that would walk by themselves and ask them if they thought she was beautiful.
if the kid replied, “yes.” she would take off her mask, revealing that horrifying, ear-to-ear smile, and of course, the child would run away. but, it was said that she was extremely fast and would catch the child and cut the edges of their mouths, laughing the entire time.
if the child would reply, “no.” she would follow the child home, then kill them on their front doorstep.

apparently the only way to satisfy her was to tell her she was “average”.

one last story, that has nothing to do with the previous two:

a woman (we’ll call her cindy), is walking down a street, going to work, in a bit of a hurry because she hit the snooze button one too many times. she deviates from her normal path because she sees an alleyway that she believes will act as a shortcut to her workplace.

now, this alleyway is creepy as hell, dingy, graffiti everywhere. there’s so much trash and random liquids clinging to the walls of the alley that it almost makes her gag. as she speeds through, she notices a short distance ahead that one section of the alleyway is particularly clean. no graffiti, no trash near it. almost as if it doesn’t belong. she stops long enough to ponder this fact, when she hears something.

it sounds like a grunting, almost, like a harsh wind. still walking at a fast pace, she finally makes out a human voice, whispering what sounds like “thirsty”. she shrugs it off, thinking she’s heard weirder shit in the city and goes to work.

the entire day at work, cindy can’t seem to get over the voice. why did she only hear it when she passed by the clean part of the alleyway? why the hell did “thristy” mean? the mind-numbing banality of her job only made her process these thoughts more and more throughout her shift.
finally, during her lunch break, she decided to go to her favourite deli down the street. on the way back, she noticed the alleyway again. shifting her feet nervously, she decided, “oh fuck it. i’ll just walk past to see if the noise is still there.”

walking briskly past the decay of the majority of the alley, she neared the pristine section of the alley. she could hear the voice a little clearer now, a little louder. it was coming from one side of the alley. she then noticed that the opposite side was equally as clean, save for numerous spots of caked, red paint splattered randomly on the brickwall.

cindy slowly down just to hear the voice better, and by now the voice was loud enough that she could make out what it was actually saying.

“thirteen” over and over. and over.

the voice was coarse and, quite frankly, creepy. cindy skee-daddled back to work.

she avoided the alleyway on her way back from work, but as soon as she got home, her curious nature got the best of her.
“what the hell does 13 mean? is that what it’s really saying? where is it coming from?” the questions grew and she knew she would have to return to the spot sooner or later.

so, from that day forward, she would through the alley, only to hear that each time she passed by the clean section, the voice would grow louder.
and louder.
with the utmost certainty, the voice was saying, “thirteen. thirteen”
it was starting to drive her crazy. she desperately wanted to have someone walk down the alleyway with her, but she was new in town and to her job, so she didn’t have any friends to ask to accompany her without her sounding crazy and her family lived about 5 states away.

sitting at work, cindy stared blankly into her computer screen. she had to know what was behind the wall. inside the wall. what was calling out to her. “thirteen”

on her way back from work, she mustered up all the courage she could suffice and made her way down the alley. the voice was LOUD now, almost a shrill screaming.
“THIRTEEN! THIRTEEN! THIRTEEN!”
she looked around nervously, hoping someone from the street would be hearing this too and come to check it out. no luck.
as she neared the clean section of the she noticed something that she had never seen before.
a small hole, at least two feet from the base. the voice was now hissing loudly from this hole, begging cindy to kneel down and look into it.
cindy had to know what was behind the wall.
she knelt down slowly and peered in.
at first she saw only an eyeball stare directly back at her, unblinking and bloodshot. almost as soon as she saw the eye, it was replaced by the end of a long, narrow barrel.
before she realized what it was, she could only gasp.
BANG! the bullet exploded through cindy’s head, leaving a streak of blood on the wall behind her. as she slumped lifelessly to the ground, the voice behind the wall finally stopped.

then started at a whisper, again.
“fourteen. fourteen. fourteen.”

–more–

but if you want a real one, i’ve got one from my uncle, from korea, when he was a young boy:

my uncle and his two older brothers found a narrow trail that lead through the mountain in their little town. it seemed particularly untraveled, so they decided to hike up to the top of the mountain in one trip.
they packed a few supplies (it wasn’t a huge mountain with a snowcap, or anything. just something you could hike in maybe a day) and decided to camp out for the night at it’s peak. as they started out, they noticed that although there seemed to be a sorry excuse for a trail, a lot of underbrush and scrub still needed to be hacked away with their gardening tools (c’mon. we’re koreans. we use makeshift things). the middle brother commented on this, trying to scare my uncle, saying that this trail probably hadn’t been used for a long while and probably for good reason.

this was a common scene: my uncle, being the youngest, was often picked on and scared by the middle brother, while the oldest brother always had to chide the middle one for being a dick and my uncle for being “a pussy”. at any rate, the oldest brother turned around and, in one swift movement, punched the middle brother in the shoulder and shook a finger at my uncle.

they continued on their way, stopping to eat dinner, laughing and chatting loudly the entire time. my uncle mentioned to me that he felt a bit uneasy the entire time, even though there was still a bit of sunlight left and the scenery was beautiful woodland. my uncle couldn’t shake the feeling that they were being watched.

now, remember that this is back in the day, in freaking korea. the trio of brothers had the plan to walk until they couldn’t see any longer, then make camp and sleep. they didn’t have any flashlights or lanterns. i’m sure they could’ve made a fire if they wanted, but they just didn’t see the point, besides keeping away mosquitoes.

so finally it came time. the sun was long gone and they were stumbling through the darkness, when finally the older brother gave into his pride and told the other two to pitch camp. they couldn’t see a thing by now, and the oldest brother kept telling everyone to keep talking to one another, to make sure they were within safe distance of each other. they laid out their sleeping mats over what felt like terribly lumpy ground, and sprawled out.

my uncle instantly started to feel wary. finally, he just shut his eyes and tried to force himself into slumber. he was startled by a noise, but settled down once he realized it was just his other brothers snoring, almost in harmony.

a few minutes passed, but my uncle still couldn’t fall asleep. finally something happened. he heard a noise.

it sounded like a child laughing. a short burst of laughter. and his brothers were still snoring. he had never felt so alone. the laughter faded away.

he turned over quickly and pawed out towards the snoring closest to him. just his luck, it turned out to be the middle brother.

“what the hell do you want?” he always hated being woken up. my uncle reported the strange noise, but regreted doing so almost as soon as he did. he could feel the second brother’s lips curl into a malicious smile trough the darkness.

“it must be a dog-demon of the mountains! it’s come to eat the weakest of us! and that’s probably you.” and with that, the second brother’s snoring started up again. any other time, my uncle would’ve been gullible enough to believe in dog-demons of the mountain, but he knew what he heard was anything but a dog. he was sure it was a child’s laughter.

he scooted his mat closer to his brother’s, dragging it over the lumpy ground. he kept scooting until he could touch his brother’s back, then laid down. when he sprawled out, it was at an uncomfortable angle, like he had pitched right over a huge tree root. but this was a small price to pay for comfort.

then he heard it again. louder this time.
the laughter. it seemed now that more voices had joined in. at least two or three more children’s voices. almost suddenly, he felt the ground shift beneath him.

he started to panic, and shook the second brother awake while hissing loudly at the oldest to wake up. immediately, the second brother smacked my uncle in the shoulder (probably meant to hit his face, but swung blindly), but the oldest woke up and sounded startled.

he could hear it too. almost as if on cue, the laughter grew in number. the middle brother started to get angry, yelling at my uncle, accusing him of doing something stupid while they were sleeping and he was awake.

“you shit on sacred ground, didn’t you!” he spat angrily. but now my uncle was too afraid to speak. he just shook his head, although he knew no one could see each other.

finally, the laughter started to fade away. but was replaced instead by weeping. sobbing. a horrible noise. still, children’s voices. my uncle clung to the second brother, who freaked out, thinking he’d been grabbed by one of the “children”, but soon settled down after he noticed that it was my uncle. the oldest started screaming out into the darkness, telling whoever it was to quit fucking around. the wails grew shrill and almost angry, but still unmistakeably belonged to children.

the only thing the oldest brother could think to do was huddle with the other brothers. he protectively draped his arms over them and kept yelling into the darkness.
by now, my uncle was in tears, the middle brother in hysterics, and the oldest wearing his voice out and shaking. the wails would softly come and go throughout the rest of the night and none of the brothers got any sleep. finally, just as the voices finally faded away, daylight broke.

my uncle finally opened his eyes, to see his two older brothers. they looked horrible: pale, bloodshot eyes brimming over, shuddering and shaking. the oldest brother looked up and realized they were sleeping under an enormous tree. and when he looked down he realized why the ground felt so lumpy under them.
the oldest brother demanded that they pack up and the middle brother did so, quickly without hesitation. the middle brother even packed up my uncle’s things for him in a panicked fashion, then knelt down to give my uncle a piggyback ride.

my uncle was dumbfounded as to why the middle brother was acting so nicely, but weird at the same time. but he wiped his tears away and climbed onto the middle brother’s back. although it had taken them hours to climb up this far, the trio were making their way down the mountain at a break-neck pace.

finally, when they reached the beginning of the trail and into an open field, my uncle broke the silent tension.

“what happened back there?” he asked, using his sleeve to wipe his eyes and nose, once again.

not stopping their pace and without looking back, the oldest brother said simply:
“we were sleeping on their graves.”

apparently, they had pitched camp right under a tree, where people of the village would bury their children, way back in the day.

Chairman Wow reposts a story

I am currently sitting in front of my computer, scared witless. Any moment now I am going to be killed.

Today a friend of mine told me a story.

His aunt had taken care of him since he was a small boy, and she told him last night about how his parents died. He did a very fair imitation of her (I knew them both pretty well):

“They were doing mission work in some nasty little south american country when a man burst into the mission hospital one night, terrified out of his mind. He told them that his sister had been killed by a Muerto blanco, and that he was certain that it was coming for him next. What is a Muerto blanco? Apparently it was some sort of bogey-man, something like that dumb chupacabra or whatever. They called it the White Death or the White Girl, because it was the soul of someone who hated life so much that they came back in their shrouds to kill those who told of them.

The man had been told about the vengeful spirit by his sister hours before her death. It was a girl with dead, black eyes that wept bile. The thing moved without ever actually moving its legs, and it stalked its victims back to their homes. Now, if you weren’t already aware that this thing was following you, once it got back to your house, it would start knocking on your door…

Once for you bones, which she’ll use to patch her own decaying flesh.

Twice for your muscle, which she’ll gnash her teeth on between victimes.

Thrice for your bones, which she’ll make knives to pick her teeth and kill her victimes.

Four times for your heart, which she’ll wear around her neck.

Five times for your teeth, which she’ll polish and keep in a box.

Six times for your eyes, which she’ll see the faces of your loved ones through.

Seven times for your soul, which she’ll eat whole – you can never pass while you’re in her stomach.

She has to repeat this on any mirror or door between you and her.

You can try to outrun her, but she’s faster than the fastest man. And if you leave your home while she’s knocking on your door, she won’t be so courteous when she catches up to you.

Now the man was certain that this thing had killed his sister, that he had tried to tell the police, but they would not listen. Next he had tried to tell his priest, but the priest turned him away when he saw that the thing was following him now – oh, that’s right, I forgot about that – it can only get you if you tell someone else about it, or you saw it kill someone else. The man, after finishing his tale, stole a car from the mission, and was never seen again.”

Apparently his mother and father had immediately called his aunt about this when it happened. They were found in the morning, skinned and dismembered. Their bodies were covered in tiny, child-like handprints.”

His aunt was really drunk the night before, and had told him about that. He told me this story early in the morning today at school, before the cops arrived. His aunt had been murdered that night. I called him later that night, and he told me that he was being chased by someone, and now they were knocking on his door. I told him to stop shitting me.

He held the phone away from his face for a minute, and I could hear slow, deliberate knocking. A moment later, I heard the door rip from its hinges and the dying screams of my friend.

I was scared out of mind – I wanted to call the police, but I didn’t want to get off the phone in case he wasn’t really dead – or worse, just playing with me. I sat there, listening to horrible sounds, then silence.

Then a little girl’s voice spoke over the line: “WITNESS.” I hung up.

Three minutes ago someone started knocking on my door. She has to knock 28 times on my front door, 28 times on the mirror in the hall, and another 28 times on the door to my bedroom. She’s doing it slowly… I think she wants to scare me some more, let me know that my death is just moments away. I will not run – I couldn’t get to my car in time anyway. She started knocking on my bedroom door a minute ago, she should be done any moment.

Nice knowing you guys, it’s been fuy5

WITNESS

–more–

To homeless children sleeping on the street, neon is as comforting as a night-light. Angels love colored light too. After nightfall in downtown Miami, they nibble on the NationsBank building — always drenched in a green, pink, or golden glow. “They eat light so they can fly,” eight-year-old Andre tells the children sitting on the patio of the Salvation Army’s emergency shelter on NW 38th Street. Andre explains that the angels hide in the building while they study battle maps. “There’s a lot of killing going on in Miami,” he says. “You want to fight, want to learn how to live, you got to learn the secret stories.” The small group listens intently to these tales told by homeless children in shelters.

On Christmas night a year ago, God fled Heaven to escape an audacious demon attack — a celestial Tet Offensive. The demons smashed to dust his palace of beautiful blue-moon marble. TV news kept it secret, but homeless children in shelters across the country report being awakened from troubled sleep and alerted by dead relatives. No one knows why God has never reappeared, leaving his stunned angels to defend his earthly estate against assaults from Hell. “Demons found doors to our world,” adds eight-year-old Miguel, who sits before Andre with the other children at the Salvation Army shelter. The demons’ gateways from Hell include abandoned refrigerators, mirrors, Ghost Town (the nickname shelter children have for a cemetery somewhere in Dade County), and Jeep Cherokees with “black windows.” The demons are nourished by dark human emotions: jealousy, hate, fear.

One demon is feared even by Satan. In Miami shelters, children know her by two names: Bloody Mary and La Llorona (the Crying Woman). She weeps blood or black tears from ghoulish empty sockets and feeds on children’s terror. When a child is killed accidentally in gang crossfire or is murdered, she croons with joy. “If you wake at night and see her,” a ten-year-old says softly, “her clothes be blowing back, even in a room where there is no wind. And you know she’s marked you for killing.”

The homeless children’s chief ally is a beautiful angel they have nicknamed the Blue Lady. She has pale blue skin and lives in the ocean, but she is hobbled by a spell. “The demons made it so she only has power if you know her secret name,” says Andre, whose mother has been through three rehabilitation programs for crack addiction. “If you and your friends on a corner on a street when a car comes shooting bullets and only one child yells out her true name, all will be safe. Even if bullets tearing your skin, the Blue Lady makes them fall on the ground. She can talk to us, even without her name. She says: ‘Hold on.'”

A blond six-year-old with a bruise above his eye, swollen huge as a ruby egg and laced with black stitches, nods his head in affirmation. “I’ve seen her,” he murmurs. A rustle of whispered Me toos ripples through the small circle of initiates.

According to the Dade Homeless Trust, approximately 1800 homeless children currently find themselves bounced between the county’s various shelters and the streets. For these children, lasting bonds of friendship are impossible; nothing is permanent. A common rule among homeless parents is that everything a child owns must fit into a small plastic bag for fast packing. But during their brief stays in the shelters, children can meet and tell each other stories that get them through the harshest nights.

Folktales are usually an inheritance from family or homeland. But what if you are a child enduring a continual, grueling, dangerous journey? No adult can steel such a child against the outcast’s fate: the endless slurs and snubs, the threats, the fear. What these determined children do is snatch dark and bright fragments of Halloween fables, TV news, and candy-colored Bible-story leaflets from street-corner preachers, and like birds building a nest from scraps, weave their own myths. The “secret stories” are carefully guarded knowledge, never shared with older siblings or parents for fear of being ridiculed — or spanked for blasphemy. But their accounts of an exiled God who cannot or will not respond to human pleas as his angels wage war with Hell is, to shelter children, a plausible explanation for having no safe home, and one that engages them in an epic clash.

An astute folklorist can see traces of old legends in all new inventions. For example, Yemana, a Santeria ocean goddess, resembles the Blue Lady; she is compassionate and robed in blue, though she is portrayed with white or tan skin in her worshippers’ shrines. And in the Eighties, folklorists noted references to an evil Bloody Mary — or La Llorona, as children of Mexican migrant workers first named her — among children of all races and economic classes. Celtic tales of revenants, visitors from the land of the dead sent to console or warn, arrived in America centuries ago. While those myths may have had some influence on shelter folklore, the tales homeless children create among themselves are novel and elaborately detailed. And they are a striking example of “polygenesis,” the folklorist’s term for the simultaneous appearance of vivid, similar tales in far-flung locales.

The same overarching themes link the myths of 30 homeless children in three Dade County facilities operated by the Salvation Army — as well as those of 44 other children in Salvation Army emergency shelters in New Orleans, Chicago, and Oakland, California. These children, who ranged in age from six to twelve, were asked what stories, if any, they believed about Heaven and God — but not what they learned in church. (They drew pictures for their stories with crayons and markers.) Even the parlance in Miami and elsewhere is the same. Children use the biblical term “spirit” for revenants, never “ghost” (says one local nine-year-old scornfully: “That baby word is for Casper in the cartoons, not a real thing like spirits!”). In their lexicon, they always use “demon” to denote wicked spirits.

Their folklore casts them as comrades-in-arms, regardless of ethnicity (the secret stories are told and cherished by white, black, and Latin children), for the homeless youngsters see themselves as allies of the outgunned yet valiant angels in their battle against shared spiritual adversaries. For them the secret stories do more than explain the mystifying universe of the homeless; they impose meaning upon it.

Virginia Hamilton, winner of a National Book Award and three Newberys (the Pulitzer Prize of children’s literature), is the only children’s author to win a MacArthur Foundation genius grant. Her best-selling books, The People Could Fly and Herstories, trace African-American folklore through the diaspora of slavery. “Folktales are the only work of beauty a displaced people can keep,” she explains. “And their power can transcend class and race lines because they address visceral questions: Why side with good when evil is clearly winning? If I am killed, how can I make my life resonate beyond the grave?”

That sense of mission, writes Harvard psychologist Robert Coles in The Spiritual Life of Children, may explain why some children in crisis — and perhaps the adults they become — are brave, decent, and imaginative, while others more privileged can be “callous, mean-spirited, and mediocre.” The homeless child in Miami and elsewhere lives in a world where violence and death are commonplace, where it’s highly advantageous to grovel before the powerful and shun the weak, and where adult rescuers are nowhere to be found. Yet what Coles calls the “ability to grasp onto ideals larger than oneself and exert influence for good” — a sense of mission — is nurtured in eerie, beautiful, shelter folktales.

In any group that generates its own legends — whether in a corporate office or a remote Amazonian village — the most articulate member becomes the semiofficial teller of the tales. The same thing happens in homeless shelters, even though the population is so transient. The most verbally skilled children — such as Andre — impart the secret stories to new arrivals. Ensuring that their truths survive regardless of their own fate is a duty felt deeply by these children, including one ten-year-old Miami girl who, after confiding and illustrating secret stories, created a self-portrait for a visitor. She chose a gray crayon to draw a gravestone carefully inscribed with her own name and the year 1998.

Here is what the secret stories say about the rules of spirit behavior: Spirits appear just as they looked when alive, even wearing favorite clothes, but they are surrounded by faint, colored light. When newly dead, the spirits’ lips move but no sound is heard. They must learn to speak across the chasm between the living and the dead. For shelter children, spirits have a unique function: providing war dispatches from the fighting angels. And like demons, once spirits have seen your face, they can always find you.

Nine-year-old Phatt is living for a month in a Salvation Army shelter in northwest Dade. He and his mother became homeless after his father was arrested for drug-dealing and his mother couldn’t pay the rent with her custodial job at a fast-food restaurant. (Phatt is his nickname. The first names of all other children in this article have been used with the consent of their parents or guardians.) “There’s a river that runs through Miami. One side, called Bad Streets, the demons took over,” Phatt recounts as he sits with four homeless friends in the shelter’s playroom, which is decorated with pictures the children have drawn of homes, kittens, and hearts. “The other side the demons call Good Streets. Rich people live by a beach there. They wear diamonds and gold chains when they swim.”

He explains that Satan harbors a special hatred of Miami owing to a humiliation he suffered while on an Ocean Drive reconnaissance mission. He was hunting for gateways for his demons and was scouting for nasty emotions to feed them. Satan’s trip began with an exhilarating start; he moved undetected among high-rolling South Beach clubhoppers despite the fact that his skin was, as Phatt’s friend Victoria explains, covered with scales like a “gold and silver snake.”

Why didn’t the rich people notice? Eight-year-old Victoria scrunches up her face, pondering. “Well, I think maybe sometimes they’re real stupid so they get tricked,” she replies. Plus, she adds, the Devil was “wearing all that Tommy Hilfiger and smoking Newports and drinking wine that cost maybe three dollars for a big glass.” He found a large Hell door under the Colony Hotel, and just as he was offering the owner ten Mercedes-Benzes for use of the portal, he was captured by angels.

“The rich people said: ‘Why are you taking our friend who buys us drinks?'” Phatt continues. “The angels tied him under the river and said: ‘See what happens when the water touch him. Just see!'”

Phatt insists that his beloved cousin (and only father figure) Ronnie, who joined the U.S. Army to escape Liberty City and was killed last year in another city, warned him about what happened next at the river. (Ronnie was gunned down on Valentine’s Day while bringing cupcakes to a party at the school where his girlfriend taught. He appeared to Phatt after that — to congratulate him on winning a shelter spelling bee, and to show him a shortcut to his elementary school devoid of sidewalk drunks.)

One night this year Phatt and his mother made a bed out of plastic grocery bags in a Miami park where junkies congregate. It was his turn to stand guard against what he calls “screamers,” packs of roaming addicts, while his mother slept. Suddenly Ronnie stood before him, dressed in his army uniform. “The Devil got loose from under the river!” Ronnie said. “The rich people didn’t stop him! The angels need soldiers.”

Phatt says his dead cousin told him that as soon as water touched the Devil’s skin, it turned deep burgundy and horns grew from his head. The river itself turned to blood; ghostly screams and bones of children he had murdered floated from its depths. Just when the angels thought they had convinced Good Streets’ denizens that they were in as much danger as those in Bad Streets, Satan vanished through a secret gateway beneath the river. “Now he’s coming your way,” Ronnie warned. “You’ll need to learn how to fight.” Ronnie nodded toward the dog-eared math and spelling workbooks Phatt carries even when he can’t attend school. “Study hard,” he implored. “Stay strong and smart so’s you count on yourself, no one else. Never stop watching. Bloody Mary is coming with Satan. And she’s seen your face.”

Given what the secret stories of shelter children say about the afterlife, it isn’t surprising that Ronnie appeared in his military uniform. There is no Heaven in the stories, though the children believe that dead loved ones might make it to an angels’ encampment hidden in a beautiful jungle somewhere beyond Miami. To ensure that they find it, a fresh green palm leaf (to be used as an entrance ticket) must be dropped on the beloved’s grave.

This bit of folklore became an obsession for eight-year-old Miguel. His father, a Nicaraguan immigrant, worked the overnight shift at a Miami gas station. Miguel always walked down the street by himself to bring his dad a soda right before the child’s bedtime, and they’d chat. Then one night his father was murdered while on the job. Recalls Miguel: “The police say the robbers put lit matches all over him before they killed him.”

Miguel’s mother speaks no English and is illiterate. She was often paid less than two dollars per hour for the temporary jobs she could find in Little Havana (mopping shop floors, washing dishes in restaurants). After her husband’s death, she lost her apartment. No matter where Miguel’s family of three subsequently slept (a church pew, a shelter bed, a sidewalk), his father’s spirit appeared, bloodied and burning all over with tiny flames. Miguel’s teachers would catch him running out of his school in central Miami, his small fists filled with green palm leaves, determined to find his father’s grave. A social worker finally took him to the cemetery, though Miguel refused to offer her any explanation. “I need my daddy to find the fighter angels,” Miguel says from a Salvation Army facility located near Liberty City. “I’ll go there when I’m killed.”

The secret stories say the angel army hides in a child’s version of an ethereal Everglades: A clear river of cold, drinkable water winds among emerald palms and grass as soft as a bed. Gigantic alligators guard the compound, promptly eating the uninvited. Says Phatt: “But they take care of a dead child’s spirit while he learns to fight. I never seen it, but yes! I know it’s out there” — he sweeps his hand past the collapsing row of seedy motels lining the street on which the shelter is located — “and when I do good, it makes their fighting easier. I know it! I know!”

All the Miami shelter children who participated in this story were passionate in defending this myth. It is the most necessary fiction of the hopelessly abandoned — that somewhere a distant, honorable troop is risking everything to come to the rescue, and that somehow your bravery counts.

By the time homeless children reach the age of twelve, more or less, they realize that the secret stories are losing some of their power to inspire. They sadly admit there is less and less in which to believe. Twelve-year-old Leon, who often visits a Hialeah day-care center serving the homeless, has bruised-looking bags under his eyes seen normally on middle-aged faces. He has been homeless for six years. Even the shelters are not safe for him because his mother, who is mentally unstable, often insists on returning to the streets on a whim, her child in tow.

“I don’t think any more that things happen for some great, good God plan, or for any reason,” he says. “And I don’t know if any angels are still fighting for us.” He pauses and looks dreamily at the twilight sky above the day-care center. “I do think a person can dream the moment of his death. Sometimes I dream that when I die soon, I’ll be in some high, great place where people have time to conversate. And even if there’s no God or Heaven, it won’t be too bad for me to be there.”

Research by Harvard’s Robert Coles indicates that children in crisis — with a deathly ill parent or living in poverty — often view God as a kind, empyrean doctor too swamped with emergencies to help. But homeless children are in straits so dire they see God as having simply disappeared. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam embrace the premise that good will triumph over evil in the end; in that respect, shelter tales are more bleakly sophisticated. “One thing I don’t believe,” says a seven-year-old who attends shelter chapels regularly, “is Judgment Day.” Not one child could imagine a God with the strength to force evildoers to face some final reckoning. Yet even though they feel that wickedness may prevail, they want to be on the side of the angels.

When seven-year-old Maria is asked about the Blue Lady, she pauses. “When grownups talk about her, I think she get all upset,” Maria slowly replies. She considers a gamble, then takes a chance and leans forward, beaming: “She’s a magic lady, nice and pretty and smart! She live in the ocean and comes just to kids.”

She first appeared to Maria at the deserted Freedom Tower in downtown Miami, which Maria calls “the pink haunted house.” A fierce storm was pounding Miami that night. Other homeless people who had broken in milled about the building’s interior, illuminated only by lightning. Her father was drunk. Her mother tried to stop him from eating the family’s last food: a box of saltines. “He kept hitting her and the crazy people started laughing. When I try to help her, he hit me here” — Maria points to her forehead. “I tried to sleep so my head and stomach would stop hurting, but they kept hurting.” A blast of wind and rain shattered a window. “I was so scared. I pray out loud: Please, God, don’t punish me no more!”

An older boy curled up nearby on a scrap of towel tried to soothe her. “Hurricanes ain’t God,” he said gently. “It’s Blue Lady bringing rain for the flowers.” When Maria awoke late in the night, she saw the angel with pale blue skin, blue eyes, and dark hair standing by the broken window. Her arms dripped with pink, gold, and white flowers. “She smiled,” Maria says, her dark eyes wide with amazement. “My head was hurting, but she touched it and her hand was cool like ice. She say she’s my friend always. That’s why she learned me the hard song.” The song is complex and strange for such a young child; its theme is the mystery of destiny and will. When Maria heard a church choir sing it, she loved it, but the words were too complicated. “Then the Blue Lady sang it to me,” she recalls. “She said it’ll help me grow up good, not like daddy.”

Maria’s voice begins shakily, then becomes more assured: “If you believe within your heart you’ll know/that no one can change the path that you must go./ Believe what you feel and you’ll know you’re right because/when love finally comes around, you can say it’s yours./ Believe you can change what you see!/ Believe you can act, not just feel!/You have a brain!/You have a heart!/You have the courage to last your life!/Please believe in yourself as I believe in you!”

As she soars to a finish, Maria suddenly realizes how much that she’s revealed to a stranger: “I told the secret story and the Blue Lady isn’t mad!” She’s awash with relief. “Even if my mom say we sleep in the bus station when we leave the shelter, Blue Lady will find us. She’s seen my face.”

Shelter children often depict the Blue Lady in their drawings as blasting demons and gangbangers with a pistol. But the secret stories say that she cannot take action unless her real name — which no one knows — is called out. The children accept that. What they count on her for is love, though they fear that abstract love won’t be enough to withstand an evil they believe is relentless and real. The evil is like a dark ocean waiting to engulf them, as illustrated by a secret story related by three different girls in separate Miami homeless facilities. It is a story told only by and to homeless girls, and it explains how the dreaded Bloody Mary can invade souls.

Ten-year-old Otius, dressed in a pink flowered dress, leads a visitor by the hand away from four small boys who are sitting in a shelter dining room snacking on pizza and fruit juice. “Every girl in the shelters knows if you tell this story to a boy, your best friend will die!” she says with a shiver. When the boys try to sneak up behind her, she refuses to speak until they return to their places.

She begins: “Some girls with no home feel claws scratching under the skin on their arms. Their hand looks like red fire. It’s Bloody Mary dragging them in for slaves — to be in gangs, be crackheads. But every 1000 girls with no home, is a Special One. When Bloody Mary comes, the girl is so smart and brave, a strange thing happens.” Bloody Mary disappears, she says, then a pretty, luminous face glows for a moment in the dark. The girl has glimpsed what Bloody Mary looked like before she became wicked. “The Special One,” Otius continues, “is somebody Bloody Mary is scared of because she be so good, people watch her for what to do. And if she dies, she will die good.

“Boys always brag what they can do, but this is the job of girls and — I wish maybe I were a Special One,” Otius says wistfully. “Maybe one of my friends from the shelters are now. I’ll never see them again — so’s I guess I never know.”

Her name was first spoken in hushed tones among children all over America nearly twenty years ago. Even in Sweden folklorists reported Bloody Mary’s fame. Children of all races and classes told of the hideous demon conjured by chanting her name before a mirror in a pitch-dark room. (In Miami shelters, the mirror must be coated with ocean water, a theft from the Blue Lady’s domain.) And when she crashes through the glass, she mutilates children before killing them. Bloody Mary is depicted in Miami kids’ drawings with a red rosary that, the secret stories say, she uses as a weapon, striking children across the face.

Folklorists were so mystified by the Bloody Mary polygenesis, and the common element of using a mirror to conjure her, that they consulted medical literature for clues. Bill Ellis, a folklorist and professor of American studies at Penn State University, puzzled over a 1968 Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease article describing an experiment testing the theory that schizophrenics are prone to see hallucinations in reflected surfaces. The research showed that the control group of nonpsychotic people reported seeing vague, horrible faces in a mirror after staring at it for twenty minutes in a dim room. But that optical trick the brain plays was merely a partial explanation for the children’s legend.

“Whenever you ask children where they first heard one of their myths, you get answers that are impossible clues: ‘A friend’s friend read it in a paper; a third cousin told me,'” says Ellis, an authority on children’s folklore, particularly that concerning the supernatural. As president of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research, he’s become an expert on polygenesis. “When a child says he got the story from the spirit world, as homeless children do, you’ve hit the ultimate non sequitur.”

Folklorists have not discovered a detailed explanation for Bloody Mary’s ravenous hatred of children, or her true identity. Today, however, shelter children say they’ve discovered her secret mission, as well as her true name. All of the secret stories about her enclose hints.

In Chicago shelters, children tell of her role in the death of eleven-year-old Robert Sandifer, who shot an innocent fourteen-year-old schoolgirl he mistook for an enemy. Cops combed the streets, shaking down gangbangers. In desperation Sandifer’s gang turned to the one who could save them from justice. They sat in a dark room before a mirror and chanted, “Bloody Mary.” The wall glowed like flames. A female demon weeping black tears appeared. Without speaking, she communicated a strategy.

That night, realizing his gang was going to kill him, Sandifer ran through his neighborhood, knocking on doors. “Like baby Jesus in Bethlehem — except he was bad,” explained an eleven-year-old at a Chicago homeless shelter. The next morning police found Sandifer’s body, shot through the head, in a tunnel. According to the eleven-year-old, the boy was “lying on a bed of broken glass.”

Bloody Mary commands legions. She can insinuate herself into the heart of whomever children trust most: a parent or a best friend. Miami shelter children say they learned about that from television. Salvation Army shelters offer parlors with couches, magazines, and a television. While their mothers play cards and do each other’s hair, the children carefully study the TV news. They know how four-year-old Kendia Lockhart died in North Dade, allegedly beaten to death and burned by her father. Bloody Mary was hunting Kendia, shelter children agree. “Gangsters say that God stories are like Chinese fairy tales,” observes twelve-year-old Deion at a downtown Miami Salvation Army shelter. “But even gangs think Bloody Mary is real.”

This is the secret story shelter children will tell only in hushed voices, for it reveals Bloody Mary’s mystery: God’s final days before his disappearance were a waking dream. There were so many crises on Earth that he never slept. Angels reported rumors of Bloody Mary’s pact with Satan: She had killed her own child and had made a secret vow to kill all human children. All night God listened as frantic prayers bombarded him. Images of earthly lives flowed across his palace wall like shadows while he heard gunfire, music, laughing, crying from all over Earth. And then one night Bloody Mary roared over the walls of Heaven with an army from Hell. God didn’t just flee from the demons, he went crazy with grief over who led them. Bloody Mary, some homeless children say the spirits have told them, was Jesus Christ’s mother.

“No one believe us! But it’s true! It’s true!” cries Andre at the Salvation Army shelter on NW 38th Street. “It mean there’s no one left in the sky watching us but demons.” His friends sitting on the shelter patio chime in with Bloody Mary sightings: She flew shrieking over Charles Drew Elementary School. She stalks through Little Haiti, invisible to police cars. “I know a boy who learned to sleep with his eyes open, but she burned through a shelter wall to get him!” a seven-year-old boy says. “When the people found him, he was all red with blood. Don’t matter if you’re good, don’t matter if you’re smart. You got to be careful! If she see you, she can hunt you forever. She’s in Miami! And she knows our face.

madgrad

had the worst dream of my life last night, which is saying alot since I’ve had some weird ones.

A preface: I never feel pain in my dreams. I’ve been shot at, fallen off cliffs, hit by cars but in my dreams I have some sort of immortality/invincibility that means I don’t really feel any of it. I can smell in my dreams, feel pleasure, etc but never severe pain.

This is very important when it comes to last night. I was outside of a house fighting something that was a bizzare cross between Voldo from soul calibur(I think that’s his name) and pyramid head. Picture a man with a smaller pyramid for a head, except it’s studded in spikes, and he has a sword and gloves with shears on them. I’ve got a sword to and I seem to be holding my own, until the thing just laughs and drops his sword. The monster lunges forward at me and stabs his garden shear hands through my goddamn ribcage, lifts me up, and crushes my heart while laughing at me. This wouldn’t be too terrible of a nightmare except for the fact that I could fucking feel it. My ribs braking, the muscle tearing, the alien presence of a fucking fist inside my chest, I could feel it. I could taste the goddamn blood in my mouth in the dream. The best part was when I woke up my chest still hurt, and it’s been aching all day for no reason.

I’m a little aprehensive about going back to sleep tonight.

SHAKY DEFENSE

“You should tell them about that one day.”

I haven’t thought of that day in nearly 20 years, not since my interest in girls replaced my boyish imagination. We were about nine or ten years old at the time, just walking back from an old abandoned school out in the country about a half mile from our homes, taking a shortcut through the woods, when I saw Brad freeze in his tracks and then something very odd happened. If you’ve ever seen a long root or string get pulled out of the ground at a high speed, I guess it would be something like that, only the string or root was invisible and above the ground just enough to unsettle the tall grass and weeds in a straight line, starting a few feet from Brad’s leg. As soon as “it” reached Brad, he fell forward as if his legs had been kicked out from under him, and let out a startled cry, followed by the most horrifying scream I’ve ever heard. I ran up to check on him, and he looked absolutely terrified, balled up holding onto his calf all the while shielding himself from…something. I shook him and he came out of it, propped himself up, and scrambled to his feet while he shook his head all around as if he were looking for the snake that bit him.

“Did you see that?”

“What happened? Is your leg OK?” I didn’t see anything on his leg when he pulled his pants leg up halfway, but the way he fell!?

He looked at it as if he was unsure, got up, took a few steps, and moved around a bit. “Yeah, it’s OK…nevermind.” Of course I didn’t let it go that easily, but he was apparently a bit traumatized so I didn’t press too hard. I made sure to walk with him to his house first (which was a bit further out than mine…which is normally the first stop.) Later that evening, he called and told me what he saw. As we were walking, he saw a man running towards us, but then as he was about 5 yards away, he disappeared. That was when and why he was standing frozen. Then, the part that I saw, he said he heard a loud crack and then it felt like something stung/shot him in the leg and he fell. When he fell, he saw the man that was running towards him lying beside him (“I was afraid of him at first, but he looked hurt and scared like me…and oh yeah, he was black”) and could hear all these hateful voices all around him, and then he started to feel cold and dark until I snapped him out of it. All of these things could just be an overactive imagination, but that disturbance in the air right above the brush/weeds/grass, right up to his leg…and the way he fell. I really don’t know.

Ghostship

Some people think my house is haunted. It was built in the 70’s so there isnt much history. We are the 3rd owners and as far as I know no one has ever died here.

Once, when I must have been 6 or 7, I was sleeping in my room, when I woke up and saw a boy at the foot of my bed. He was the traditional ghost: Semi-transparent white figure.

He had his back to me and didn’t look behind him when I woke up. I slowly curled into a ball at the far corner of my bed, hid under the covers, and went back to sleep.

Now, I’m really skeptical when it comes to ghosts and quite frankly I don’t think they exist but besides me imagining it, I can’t come up with another explanation.

My mom has always claimed to hear kids talking up stairs when she walks in. She can never hear what they say, but she hears that they are talking. Though they stop right away. I shrugged this off easily, my mom is easily excitable and it could very well be nothing.

The strangest thing happened when we were building our basement though. When they were laying the cement for the walls, some of the constructors approached my mom with two pictures they had found ontop of the newly dried cement.

The constructors thought they were family pictures or something so they gave them to my mom. My mom asked them if they were playing some sort of trick on us becuase they obviosly weren’t ours. They swear that they didn’t put them there and there was only a few workers there that day.

The pictures are of two kids, a girl and a boy. I can’t say for sure if the boy in the picture is the same boy I saw at the edge of my bed, but from it looks to be about the right age. The pictures look a little old to be from only the seventies, and we still have them somewhere. If I find the pictures I’ll post a picture on here.

Reposted Causality Jane’s Excellent Sleepover! (In Three Parts)

As luck would have it, I ended up spending an afternoon at Liz’s house to work on some project for Biology class. I had only been over to her place once or twice before, which even at the time I considered strange for best friends like us, but to a kid like me who had spent a good part of her life in apartments and military housing, the place was a dream. At just under 50 years old with 2 stories, 4 bedrooms, a massive basement area, and an equally huge backyard, the house was phenomenally beautiful. Sure it was a little too dark, but the weather was appropriately stormy, and that’ll make any place more than a little spooky.

Liz’s sixteenth birthday was a few weeks away, and we got onto the topic of what the party would be like. She and I had a reputation of being little party animals, and therefore we had to make this party as awesome as possible. I suggested using her massive basement, what with its pinball tables, TV, and stereo system.

“No parties in the house.”

Ah yes, the parents. They could be pretty troublesome for us wild teens, but I told her not to worry. If we could conjure up a few promises of no drinking, no smooching, and the like, we would get our party. Heck, I was already figuring out what food to bring.

“It’s not my parents.”

And that was how I got her talking.

“Tick-Tock”
Four years ago, Liz and her family had moved from their smaller, older house across town to the current one. At first no one sensed anything out of the ordinary. There were no creepy feelings, no moving shadows down the hallways, no nothing. Strangely, it was Liz’s baby brother, Sam, who picked up on whatever was in the house long before anyone else did.

Liz and her parents started noticing that as soon as they left Sam in his playroom he would start talking to someone. Sam had made a friend. His friend’s name was Tick-Tock. Why Tick-Tock was never really clear, but apparently he was a little shy. It took a few weeks for Tick-Tock to feel comfortable “talking” to Sam in other rooms of the house with other people present. They chocked it up to Sam playing with his first imaginary friend.

One afternoon, Liz was studying in their living room while Sam played with some of his toys. He was chattering away to no one in particular, and Liz wasn’t paying much attention to him. It was when he suddenly went silent that she looked up. Sam was standing in front of her, transfixed by something on the wall behind her. As she watched, his eyes followed the thing as it moved up the wall and along the ceiling. Of course, when she looked there was nothing there, but he was so still and so amazed by whatever the hell it was that she felt shivers scurry down her spine.

“Sammy, what’re you looking at?”
“Tick-Tock.”

Indeed.

From that point on Tick-Tock was no longer a friend. Sam couldn’t be left alone for five minutes without him screaming bloody murder. He stopped sleeping through the night, and her parents had to move him back into their room for a bit. His toys would turn on and off by themselves or go missing and turn up in the weirdest places. Sam and their cat, Jabberwocky, continued to watch things move along the walls, sometimes in unison.

Ok, so that was creepy, I’d admit to that, but it could also be explained. Sam was a little kid, and who knew what made them do the things they do? Some of the toys were hand-me-downs and could have been screwing up like old toys tend to after awhile. Jabberwocky might have been watching dust or whatever it is that fascinates cats.

“I guess so, but Jabber had other things to worry about.”

“Jabberwocky and the Bandersnatch”
“Bandersnatch” was the name affectionately given to the critter that lurked around the little shed in their backyard. Tools would go missing, wood piles would be scattered every which way, friends and family alike would see a small shadow curled beneath the old elm tree or darting around a corner. Liz spoke of the Bandersnatch like a pesky family pet rather than a possibly undead being, and it never sent out threatening vibes to any of her family members, with the exception of poor Jabber.

Jabberwocky hated the Bandersnatch and the Bandersnatch hated Jabberwocky. They loved to torture each other. Liz’s father was forever rushing out to break up extremely vocal catfights only to find Jabber hissing and spitting into the darkness. Jabber’s new pastime was chasing some unseen thing around the shed, darting this way and that before retreating to the safety of the porch. If Jabber ever chased anything with flesh and blood, it had some kind of camouflage, because no one ever laid eyes on it.

The only time the Bandersnatch ever really frightened Liz’s family was after Jabber ended up on the receiving end of a minivan and had to spend some time at the vet for surgery. Right around sunset, a long howl/growl/moan could be heard coming from the shed. Now, I forgot to mention something: Liz’s father always kept the shed locked, just in case, I don’t know, tool-snatching aliens invaded. Nothing could have snuck into it because not even Jabber could find any suitable holes. In addition to that little fact, there was also the issue of the howl going on for a good 3-4 minutes straight and sounding, if anything, like a large wildcat or possibly a crazy person. The pitch and volume varied, shifting erratically unlike the call of a frog or most animals in distress. This was just low and angry and feral. After it finished, Liz’s father, armed with his hunting rifle, ventured out to unlock the shed and found it absolutely empty. To this day, they claim that the Bandersnatch was calling for Jabberwocky, angry that he wouldn’t come out and play.

So these stories were nice and all, but I still failed to see what the big deal was. So her brother freaked out, so something had made a nest in the shed, so what? I demanded a real reason as to why the party of the century could not be held in the perfect spot! I pressed her for more information on the house, and reluctantly, she continued. I would get my answer alright. This was only the beginning.

“Cue Theme from Psycho”
The master bedroom had its own master bath, but the other two bedrooms upstairs had a bathroom situated between them. The bathroom was terrible. Liz always felt like she was being watched in the shower, handprints had a strange habit of appearing on the mirror for no reason ( “No, I will not show you.”), and she and her mother had both been physically tripped while bathing her brother. Could they have slipped on the wet floor? No, apparently this was a hand shoving them face first into the tile. The lights also had a habit of turning off on their own during inopportune times, leaving whoever was unlucky enough to be in there in complete darkness.

At one point Liz was home alone, lounging in her room. She distinctly heard the sounds of water running, complete with pipes clunking and such. After a bit, the water turned off, and someone or something started splashing and messing around in the bathtub. Liz slowly got up and stepped out into the hallway.

“Mom?”

If only. The only response was more splashing, still audible in the hall. The bathroom door was cracked open and the light was on. With a display of more guts than I could ever have mustered, Liz crept up, reached out, and pushed the door open with her finger tips. As the door swung up, Liz got ready to bolt at any moment.

The bathtub was completely empty.

“Mirror, Mirror”
I don’t mean to take any glory away from the famous TacoCriminal’s blood mirror, but this bad boy could very well have duked it out for supremacy, were they ever given the chance. The monster hung in the hallway. It was old and had evidently been left by one of the former tenants (though no one would claim it). The damn thing actually had a few gauges in it (or if you used your imagination they could almost be scratch marks), but what would be powerful enough to beat that thing up like that is beyond the realm of my imagination. Still, mirrors have a habit of being spooky, right? No big deal.

“Have you ever actually looked at the glass?”

What? Well… No, now that I thought about it, I had never really looked into it. In fact, I found myself walking as far away from it as possible, my shoulder always brushing against the opposite wall. Apparently no one looked directly at the mirror, and it took them years to figure this out. When the bright idea of confronting the mirror ever popped into their heads, they suffered a full blown panic attack, hyperventilation and everything. Everyone in her family had nightmares about shit coming out of that thing, stuff I won’t even go into because it’ll give me nightmares. In fact, I’m blasting loud, up-beat, obnoxious music as I type this.

The thing was evil. I apologize for my vagueness, but that’s the only word I can think of to describe it. No one had the courage to take it down, and for all I know, when Judgment Day rolls around, it’ll still be hanging there. Really, who knows what slinks around on the other side of mirrors? Sure, it’s just a little reflecting light, but tell that to all the stories and legends and whatnot. No, I never looked directly into that mirror, and you better believe I’m damn glad I didn’t. I firmly believe I would have stared straight into hell.

If memory has blurred or will blur anything about these events, it won’t be this. The memory of the two of us standing there with the house looming before us like some kind of sleeping giant is burned into my mind. It was as if the house were challenging us, and I was about to make a witty comment when I realized that Liz wasn’t paying any attention to me. She looked smaller, you know? Sort of sunk into herself. She was staring up at the highest window of her house, the one that reminded me of an angry, black eye.

“It’s the worst part. I don’t know why, but it is.”

“The Attic”
I guess you’ll have to take my word for it, but Liz’s family was a rational bunch of people. They decided early on that they were going to stay in the house, both out of stubbornness and lack of money. They had filed the ghostly activity into two groups: “Creepy but Generally Harmless” (Tick-Tock and the Bandersnatch) and “There’s Nothing We Can Do about It So Why Worry” (the upstairs bathroom and the mirror). As time passed, they got used to it, as most people do in such situations, and even started to joke about the oddities of the house.

Then the attic started up.

It began with pacing. Liz especially would hear something shuffling around at night, the ambling, wandering footsteps of something big. It usually traveled along a set path, but occasionally it would stop just above her head. On these occasions, she swore she could almost hear mumbling, though that could have been all in her head. After about a week of these sounds, Liz and her father gathered up the courage to go up and investigate.

Their family only used the area closest to the trap door for storage, so the rest of the attic was bare except for the few remains that the other tenants had shoved near the little window. Incidentally, this was also the area where the shuffling took place. The closer they got to the window the colder it got (strange when everything else was baking during a pretty vicious heatwave), and they became more and more uneasy.

Next to the window they found piles of old junk, the most notable of which were a heavy, locked trunk and an old rocking chair. They found absolutely no evidence of vermin, and the thick layer of dust hadn’t been disturbed in the least. After one more quick look at their surroundings, they quickly escaped down the stairs and securely shut the trap door behind them.

For the sake of brevity, I’ll sum up the attic like this: It started with shuffling, then scratching on the trap door, then wailing, and finally someone on the other side of the door would call out people’s names and whisper. Her mother was so upset about the whole thing that she called their church to ask for help. I’m not sure that their preacher really believed them as they weren’t exactly regulars at the church, and all he could suggest was to put up crosses in the house and read a few verses from the Bible. The crosses slowed down the activity, but apparently they had a habit of disappearing after awhile. The spirits, whoever or whatever they were, were there to stay.

***
You know that voice in the back of your mind that says, “This is not a good idea”? Well, I don’t have that voice. I live to put myself in situations like this, and when I was younger I was five times worse. I was going to live forever, right? Nothing could do me any serious harm!

Now, you know that one scene in horror movies, the one where you’re in the audiences thinking, “Walk away! Just walk away right now!” Yeah, this was that scene. It took me awhile, but I finally got her to agree on a small sleepover to find proof that these ghosts existed. There was a story just begging to be told here, and I was going to grab it.

I was stupid. Oh man was I stupid.
***
So now we come to the part you’ve all be waiting for: the sleepover. It took place after Liz’s party (movie and dinner party, totally not as cool) and included Liz, myself, Katie, and Jessica. We were like the generic name squad. Here’s what our amateur ghost hunting team brought to the house:

1)Flashlights – You’ll see what happens to those.
2)Tape recorder – Batteries died and we had no more AAA
3)Junk food – Consumed to give us strength against the spirits
4)Caffeine – Did more harm than good. Keep reading and you’ll understand.
5)Ouija Board – Because the Parker Brothers are obviously the masters of the occult

Oh yeah, we were set. We chose Liz’s room as our base camp, and spent a little time getting a tour of the place and playing in the basement. Liz’s parents and brother were in the house as well, but they stayed out of our way, allowing us chill and do girly things. Obviously, they had no idea we were here solely for the ghosts. If they had, we never would have been allowed to have the sleepover.

Now, you have to give me some credit. I said, “No frikin’ way!” to the Ouija idea. I don’t like those things, I never have, and even I could see that busting one out in that house was bad news. Still, my friends pointed out that we were there to find ghosts, and I was stupid if I didn’t go all the way. Even Liz was calling me a chicken, so I finally gave up and joined in.

We sat on the basement floor between the entertainment area and the foosball table (see the map I drew up). We brought out the tape recorder and pushed play but promptly found out that the batteries were dead. We pointed fingers and blamed stupidity, but after reading incarna’s thread, maybe it wasn’t our fault. At any rate, we didn’t have a spare set of AAAs, and asking Liz’s parents would have been too risky. We decided to proceed without it.

There was plenty of giggling and horsing around. We had “Elvis” make a guest appearance, along with “Ur Mom.” Nothing much came of it, but I can’t help but feel like our insults and mockery stirred something up. We soon abandoned our divining for video games and Mountain Dew. The real fireworks weren’t going to happen until much later that night.

* * * * *

“CJ, are you awake?”

No, go away.

“C’mon, I have to pee, and I don’t want to go alone!”

I shot Katie a pretty evil look, but the truth was that I hadn’t been sleeping too well (bad dreams), and I really didn’t care about escorting her. I grabbed my trusty flashlight, as we crawled out of our sleeping bags and made our way as silently as possible into the hall.

I don’t really know how to say this, but the house had changed. The shadows seemed unnaturally thick, and things were almost too silent, as if all sound were being muffled by some invisible barrier-my pitiful flashlight just didn’t seem to want to penetrate the shadows. Katie was so spooked that I had to argue against standing in the bathroom with her. In the end, she left the door cracked, and I stood on the side farthest away from the mirror and the trap door. Things were going fine until my flashlight died. I started to shiver as the temperature dropped, and that’s when I heard it.

Footsteps, but not coming from the hallway. These were shuffling steps moving from directly over my head to the trap door. The shadows at that end of the hallway seemed to deepen, and I decided to keep my eyes locked on the space directly in front of me. Next came the scratching. When animals scratch, the sound is usually lighter and fast. This was heavy and slow, obviously the sound of nails on wood. It repeated a few times before I told Katie to hurry the hell up and get out.

“I’m coming! Will you chill out already?”

Easy for her it say. She wasn’t the one out here with the demon in the attic. It was at this point that time seemed to slow down, and I heard the sound that still haunts my dreams from time to time.

“Psssst…”

Oh no. No, no, no, that was not coming from the attic.

“Pssst! Hey! Come here!”

This was a sick joke. It had to be. Ghosts did not talk to people, especially not me!

“Look, just open the door. C’mon, please, please, please…”

Fat chance, buddy. I started singing a song in my head, hoping to make the voice go away.

“I know you’re there! OPENTHISDOORRIGHTNOWBEFOREICOMEDOWNTHEREANDTEARYOURFUCKINGHEADOFF!”

I don’t know what the voice was. It could have been a joke, I guess, but it was a really, really sick one. I don’t know if any of you have ever had the pleasure of being near someone who is truly unstable, but there is a certain twinge their voices get when they are really off their rockers. This voice had that feral twinge, and something like that is really hard to fake well. Hell, I was fooled.

I heard the blessed sound of the toilet flushing, and Katie came walking out of the bathroom. She saw my face and asked me what was wrong, and I told her to listen, that something was in the attic. We waiting a few seconds, but before she could call me a liar, we heard a muffled bumping noise. In all my paranoia, I was sure it was the attic door being pounded in.

“That’s not the attic. That’s the mirror!”

She was right. From where we were, we could just barely make out the mirror bumping against the wall. To say that we ran out of there is the understatement of the century. We shot down those stairs so fast, I swear we were flying.

We only had a few moments to stand in the foyer and wonder what to do next before we heard the growling and moaning coming from down the hall.

The playroom. The sounds were coming from the playroom. Determined to face whatever was tormenting us, I made my way to the end of the hall with Katie close behind me. We clutched each other’s hands and opened the door, preparing to come face to face with the yowling demons infesting our friend’s home.

It was Jabberwocky, pacing in front of the door. I’m completely against the harming of animals, but I swear I wanted to kill that stupid cat. I told Katie that he probably wanted to be let out as I nearly dragged her into the room.

I think I was a little too optimistic. Jabber’s fur was standing on end, and his ears were flat against his head. He was pretty worked up, and I was deciding whether or not I should get any closer to him when the door shut behind us. I asked Katie why she shut it, and, of course, she hadn’t. Jabber made himself as small as possible as he crouched against the door, his pupils nearly engulfing the rest of his eyes. Everything went completely still, and I think I actually held my breath.

Then things went batshit.

Every single toy in that playroom turned on by itself. Teddy Whatshisface, Tickle Me Elmo, the robot dude who does math, all of them were yammering away.The little TV used to play kiddie videos turned on full blast and started to (hell, I really don’t know how to say it exactly) manual fast forward through whatever tape was in it (I think 101 Dalmatians). Katie and I did what any red-blooded American girl would do in a situation like this: We screamed bloody murder and sprang for the door. I swear I almost had a heart attack when it refused to open, but thankfully Katie had the sense to turn the lock and set us free.

We sort of collapsed in the back yard and started bawling for no reason. We just sat their clutching each other as the dew soaked our PJs, trembling and sobbing. I like to imagine that even back then I was not that big a baby. It’s always taken a lot to make me shed a tear, and even something like that was not going to send me into hysterics. I felt like I was suddenly overcome with anger and terror and immense sorrow.

Let me put it this way: The next time I would cry like that in front of my friend would be a few years later in Katie’s hospital room after she lost the fight to viral meningitis. (Right after she was accepted in LSU on an athletic scholarship too. Life’s a bitch, know what I mean?)

Still, even in our pitiful state, we fared much better than the other members of our ghost hunting team.

Now, at that time I thought that our screams had just been incredibly loud. She was a swimmer and I had been taking voice lessons for about two years, so we had some lungs on us. This, however, was not the case. Our screams sounded loud to me because at that point Liz, Jess, and Sam all woke up screaming in unison. Jess was so upset that she bolted for the bathroom and vomited, and I’m not talking about a little dry-heaving either. Apparently this was the kind of soul-purging puking that makes you wonder when you last had that Chinese food. Also (and I can attest to this) she was covered in scratches.

Jabber was downstairs with us. The family had no other pets. If she inflicted those wounds on herself, what would make her do such a thing? Jess never told us. The most Liz’s parents and later her own family could get out of her was something about a nightmare and not feeling very well. It was Liz, during on of our last conversations together, who finally told me.

I can’t explain it, but this part is always hard for me to tell, and what with that whole rule against drunk posting, the going is going to be rough from here on out. You’ll have to forgive me if the writing goes to shit.

Liz had been through nightmares about the mirror before, but nothing like this. In her dream, she saw the mirror. She said it began to jump, much like it had before were made a run for it. Apparently a man had “spider-walked” out of the mirror. She said his arms and legs were bent at all the wrong angles, and he moved fast and jerky like in the movies when they mess with the film speed. He came into her room, got onto her bed, pinned her down, and started laughing like a maniac. As he laughed, he transformed into something that she refused to describe, but I suspect was pretty damn disturbing. Whatever it was, it had a mouth full of sharp teeth, and she woke up just before it could use them.

She was shaking as she told me this. She actually said, “I don’t know what it did to Jess.” As she wiped the tears from her eyes (and if I’m making this up, someone better refund me about a month’s worth of sleepless nights) I thought I saw bruises on her wrists.

It was at the point I decided, if you’ll pardon my French, to never go back to that fucking house ever again.