Eerie Stuff

n00nches

When I was younger, my family moved from the city of Richmond, Virginia to the tiny little town of Tappahannock. We were remodelling the family summer home to become permenant living space. In the mean time, we stayed with family friends. They owned a horse and cattle farm, and with it, a shitload of wooded land.

Like most young boys are apt to do when they have vast expanses of woodland at their disposal, my group of friends began exploring the acreage. We found a shitload of old deer runs, hunting trails, and horse trails. We found rusted out hulks that used to farm equipment. We found more than a few old headstones, whic creeped out a few of the younger boys. We explored damn near every square foot of woods we could. And then we made the biggest mistake of our young life. We found a nice clearing and decided that the only logical thing to do was to establish a fort.

There was only one path leading to this clearing. I remember even then thinking that this was odd. Surely there must have been more than one way out of the woods from there.

Over the next few months, we drug every piece of scrap plywood and metal we could find down to that clearing. We dug out a foundation. We erected plywood-and-2×4 walls. We even attached a corrugated metal roof. We spent every hour of every day for a good two and a half months building the greatest fort in the history of forts. This thing rivaled the Alamo in its glory.

With the fort complete and the return to school looming on the horizon, we decided it was time to have our first overnight camp at our new fort. We cleared it with all the parents, loaded up our backpacks with Little Debbie snack cakes and bottled water, and headed to the fort. At this point, I should point out that it took nearly three hours to make it to the fort from my family friend’s house at a brisk pace.

We left in the early afternoon, and made it to the fort. We unloaded our supplies and gathered enough firewood to keep a decent fire going until we’d fall asleep. We spent the remaining hours of daylight running around the clearing, playing army, and doing the crazy things that pre-teen boys tend to do. Eventually dusk settled in, and we got the fire going.

It had been dark for a few hours when we decided to go to sleep. We drowned the fire, unfurled our bedrolls, and began chatting about which girls we’d like to kiss. Everything was going great, until a lull in the coversation. I could swear I felt the ground shaking a bit. I shrugged it off and the conversation picked back up. Eventually, one by one, we all succumb to sleep. For a minute.

I was not the only one that noticed the ground shaking. Slowly it dawned on us that something was not right. I put my ear to the ground like an indian in a western, and sure enough, the fucking ground was rumbling like a freight train was approching.

And then all hell broke loose. It started as a distant rustling in the trees that drew closer and closer and seemed to be gaining speed. In a scene that will never leave my memory, our senses of sight and sound were totally overwhelmed.

Do you know the sound that a scared, horribly injured piece of livestock makes? A horse with two broken legs? A cow that wasn’t killed by the first blow in a slaughterhouse? If so, you know how terrifying that scream is. That unearthly, unholy, pants-shittingly scary fucking scream that no human being should ever fucking hear. Imagine a cat in heat crossed with the shreik of a pissed off eagle and a woman in labor screaming at the top of her lungs and you’re close.

From every direction, from every angle, filling that clearing and our ears was that noise, multiplied by the 100s. The ground was shaking furiously, the rustling was right at the tree line, and in an instant the clearing was filled by disgusting, deformed, damaged, injured, tortured, rotting, charging, running, stampeding translucent livestock.

Horses missing flanks, cows with exposed vicera, donkeys split and broken in unnatural places. Goats, sheep, dogs. All in varying stages of decay, all charging through the clearing, and all filling the woods with that unholy shriek only a terminally injured animal filled with panic and scared to death can make.

And then it was over. The rustling was gone, the shrieking was gone, the ground was no longer rumbling beneath us. One or two of the boys was screaming and crying. All of us had jumped out of our sleeping bags and huddled together in the corner of the fort. None of us spoke for what seemed like eternity. We all knew what we just saw, but none of us could manage to understand it.

We didn’t sleep. We built a new fire, and kept it burning until the sun was completely up. We didn’t leave the fort until the sun was completely up, either. And when we did, we saw that a new pathway had been exposed at the opposite end of the clearing.

It had to be explored. Three of us decided to go, the other two made the trek back to the house.

We pushed through the overgrown path, through briers as thick as our wrist; through saplings no bigger than our fingers. Occasionally, we’d find an old rusted horseshoe, a rotted piece of leather tack. We pushed our way through this path until the sun had gone totally over our heads; a good four to five hours.

Then we saw it. A clearing up ahead. We picked up our pace to a flat run, or as much of a run as we could maintain in the thick underbrush.

We broke the treeline and noticed that there was a cliff at the opposite end of the clearing. We also noticed an abundance of spent shotgun shells, some old rusted cowbells, and more pieces of rotting leather tack. I and one of the other boys surveyed the ground, looking for anything cooler than shotgun shells and 30-06 cartridges, while the third boy made his way straight to the cliff.

He shreiked, fell back, and scampered away from the edge of the cliff as soon as his eyes peaked over the edge. Me and the other boy both ran over and helped him up. He was pale, his mouth was agape, and his eyes were beginning to tear up. I walked the few feet to the edge of the cliff, and will never, ever forget what laid before me.

A gorge, stretching as far as I could see in both directions. The bleached bones of 100s of dead livestock filled the floor of the tiny canyon, some with sun-cured pieces of leather flesh still stretched across their remains.

We decided to follow it, to see where it stopped. Eventually, the remains started to thin out, and soon it was just an empty gorge. We walked the entire length of the gorge, and by then, the sun had set. The gorge had eventually become nothing more than a tiny crack in the earth, and we emerged from the woods approximately a 1/4 mile away from the house.

I was never able to find this gorge again, and when we went back to the clearing the next day the “new” path was nowhere to be found. I later found out that back in older times, if a piece of livestock had been hurt or had become diseased, th owners of the property would take them on a trek that led to their eventualy demise via shotgun, and they would then push them into this gorge to rot. Sometimes, the poor animal didn’t die from the shotgun blast to the head, and would lie in a pile of rotting animal carcasses screaming and bleeding to death.

There are a few goons here who spent some time in Tappahannock. Most of them lurk. I graduated in 2001, so if she graduated within four years of that either way, chances are I know her or her family. In a town of ~2500, it’s hard not to know everyone. Also, FUCK CHRIS BROWN.

Tappahannock has got some seriously fucked up history. The slaughter of the Algonquian Toppehannock Village, various lynchings, and it was even a slave trading hub way back when. The woods are full of the ruins of old plantations, family and civil war cemetaries, and actual Algonquian Indian Burial Grounds.

One of the greatest legends of Tappahannock dates back to the first encounters of English settlers with the Algonquian tribes: The Tappahannock Treebabies. These little ceatures are said to be the disembodied spirits of tribal shamans killed by white settlers. They stand about two-and-a-half to three feet tall with large, round heads and beady glowing green eyes. They had emaciated bodies with faded copper skin stretched across their bones. They were said to gather en masse at the tree line of white settlements and “chant” in unison. As the chant grew in ferocity, they’re beady green eyes would begin to flash bright white. The chants grew louder, eventually awakening the entire camp.

Legend has it that as soon as the men had loaded their rifles and made their way to the treeline, they would vanish into the woods. The men would follow, but find no evidence of anything out the ordinary. As they made there way back to camp, they would find it either in total disarray with buildings burned, women and children slaughtered or in perfect condition with fires still burning, food still cooking, but completely vacated by the women and children. They would never find any sign of the missing persons and would usually abandon camp.

According to the town historian, citings continued through the revolutionary and civil wars, often causing entire divisions of troops to change direction or abandon camp. My great uncle, who grew up in Tappahannock and the surrounding Essex County during the early 20th century, would tell me that he used to see them as a boy, quietly watching his small neighborhood from the treeline but never chanting or doing anything malicious. Just simply standing and staring, beady green eyes glowing from just beyond the treeline.

I, personally, have never had an encounter with the Tappahannock Treebabies but have no reason to doubt my Great Uncle or the town historian. My great uncle was a strong man, a sailor in the Korean War, a football and baseball player for Randolph Macon, and a true waterman up until his death in the early 90’s. Even though I was too old for spooky stories, he still maintained that he had seen the Treebabies up until his death, so I doubt he was making it up.

Flynner Magee

My mate Dave lived with another guy, Gary, in a house in Prahran, a suburb of Melbourne. Every few months or so they would throw a bit of a house party where a few of the locals would come by and chill out. At one of these parties was a girl, Kelly, in her 20’s who they hadn’t met before but chatted to her assuming she came with one of the other guests which happened regularly. She was pretty quiet but answered back with the small chit chat you do when meeting people for the first time. Dave got a weird vibe from her, but put it to the side and continued on with the night. A couple of hours later, she came by him and mentioned she had a good time and that it was time to leave. He said goodbye but before she left she wanted to give him something. Not thinking too much about it, he gratefully accepted the little handmade object and put it on the mantlepiece in his bedroom. It looked like something an 8 year old would make in Arts class from paper, feathers and such.

All of this was a non issue until about 6 weeks later.

A week or two after the party Dave & Gary started to notice the occasional weird sound in the house. Sometimes they would hear a loud creaking sound towards the back of the house when they were in the loungeroom & the occasional dull thud late at night. The sort of thing you dismiss at the time. About 3 weeks after the party was the first WTF moment. While sleeping, both of them awoke to a loud breaking sound. They both stumbled out of their respective bedrooms at about the same time to investigate thinking the other had gotten up in the night and dropped something. They went to the kitchen to find one of their potplants smashed in the middle of the floor. The small potplant had been on the window sill and the kitchen windows were closed and locked. The kitchen was pretty large and the smashed plant was right in the centre of it. They’re both pretty level-headed guys and they realized it was not possible for that plant to fall where it did and this is the point they actively thought about the noises being really weird too.

A few nights later Dave had a dream about himself & Gary being involved in a horrific car accident in which they both died. He told me it was the most full-on, lifelike dream he had ever had and he told me this after the 3rd successive night he had that dream. On the morning of the the fourth night of this happening Dave brought it up with Gary. He hadn’t wanted to tell him about the dream but four nights in a row was getting really freaky. Dave started to tell Gary about it but was shocked when Gary continued the dream for him in exact detail. He had been having the same dream for four nights too! The dreams stopped after that fourth night, and except for the occasional strange noise things were pretty normal again.

About 6 weeks after they had the party they figured another one would be in order. Another new person showed up at this one, Paula, who had come with a good friend of Garys. Paula was early 30’s, really outgoing and quite open about being Wiccan. She didn’t dress all weird or anything and was pretty cool. About 20 minutes after getting there, Paula was chatting to somebody in the loungeroom and suddenly stopped the conversation dead. She went all serious and went over to Dave and simply said that there is an angry spirit in the house. This freaked the hell out of him. Besides telling me about the dream, he & Gary hadn’t gone around to people saying that they thought the house was haunted or anything. I was only told about the plant after their meeting with Paula. She said there was a spirit there, and it didn’t want to be there. It was angry at this, not angry at them. So, Dave got Gary and they went through the couple of weird things that had happened and from when. It was Paula that asked, “has anyone given you something recently” and it was only at this prompt that Dave thought about that little object from the previous party. He took her to his room and she immediately zeroed in on it. She said that she would take it with her that night and get rid of it. Obviously they thought about destroying it but Paula said she would get rid of it “the right way”.

From that night, no noises, no weird crap.

hazrdousmaterial

The first story isn’t a ghost story, but since there are a few other supernatural/dream experiences posted that went over well I’ll add mine to the fire. I have, as long as I can remember, never had a nightmare. I’m not easily frightened or very jumpy. One night, though, back when I was around 18 I had a dream. I was standing by myself in what can only be recalled as a black void. There were no walls, no floor, no feeling of standing on or hanging from anything. I was just “standing” in the empty blackness when a figure approached. It took a moment for me to realize that the figure was, well, me. It got to within five feet of me and stopped. Once it stopped a terrible feeling of dread enveloped me. The other “me” smiled this supernaturally evil smile and finally uttered “You can’t get away” as it dove into my chest and seemed to be absorbed into my body while cackling as I imagine only the devil itself could. Immediately I woke up and could still hear that godawful laugh echoing in my mind. I slept uneasily for the next few hours until I got up for school. The rest of that night and almost consequently for the subsequent week I felt like something was watching me wherever I was.

But, now this thread needs a happy ghost story so I’ll recall mine as best as I can since it happened when I was around 5.

My parents split up when I was young and so I ended up staying with my aunts and uncles a lot while my Mom was at work (she, for a while, would work two jobs to pay for Christmas, etc). Usually I would stay with her sister who lived less than a quarter mile away from us and worked for a dentist, so she had a lot of free time in the afternoons. One day she took me with her to go visit an old friend of hers who lived even farther out in the boonies (Clay County, WV for those who know the area) than we did. Her friend had a son around my age so I had someone new to play with. As it got later on in the day we decided to just stay there so she could talk with her friend and I could play with the son.

I had brought my Nintendo with me because, well, I was a kid and Nintendo was fucking awesome. As night wore on, I was playing Nintendo with the kid and he began to fidget and eventually decided to tell me not to be afraid, but there was a ghost in their house. Great, thanks, that’s just what a kid wants to hear before he goes to sleep. He told me some stories I don’t really remember because it was so long ago. Well, I finally drift off that night and am sleeping nicely when I wake up. I don’t know what woke me up but I had been sleeping in the floor beside the kid’s bed and felt the need to set up. As I did so, I noticed the little red power light of the Nintendo was glowing. That was strange since we turned it off before we went to bed. But then, the TV turned on and began to scroll through different channels of static until it go to Channel 3 and Mario was running his happy Italian ass through some stage. Creepy, yet awesome that a ghost felt the need to play Super Mario Bros. while I was asleep.

doctor clockwork

I don’t have anything near as scary as these full-blown narratives with unique ghosts. But I have experienced some minor haunting stuff in a house I lived in after dropping out of college in Vermillion, SD.

It’s an old house, not sure the exact age, but it’s been a college house for many years and a lot of students have passed through. It was referred to as the Beaver Hut, due to the last group being a bunch of slutty girls who threw constant parties and supposedly made amateur porn in the basement.

Before I moved in, I hung out a lot with my friends that lived there. There was always a funny feeling about the house, but I could never place it. The day that I realized it may be haunted was when my friend John’s girlfriend came out of the bathroom crying. We calmed her down and asked her what happened and all she said was “I hate this house, I hate being here.” That was my first clue, and I asked another roommate Sean about it. The following stories came out:

Sean had several incidents when he was home alone in the house. He would often see a black shape, like a cat low to the ground, out of the corner of his eye that would dart around. When he looked, nothing was there (Obviously this isn’t necessarily a haunting thing, but it contributes). There were three times where he was sitting in his room in the center of the main floor and heard loud, forceful knocking that sounded like it came from the back door. When he ran to check, no one was there or in the yard or anything. This would happen repeatedly throughout the night, accompanied by “black cat” sightings.

Mike, the patriarch of the house (by that I mean he’s been there for three years, through several roommate configurations) told me that people reported zones in the house where it smelled like fire. Step forward, fire smell. Step backward, nothing at all. Late one night, when he was alone in the house, he was in the living room watching TV and a small smoke form, low to the ground, shot down the stairs and across the living room.

The day after I moved in I went up to my room on the second floor to grab a dvd. My room faces down the hall from Becky’s room. We all agreed that her room was possibly the “center” of at least one of the ghosts. Her closet would often open on its own and the contents dumped out all over her floor when she was away. Anyway, when I turned around I saw a smoke form about three feet in diameter hanging in her room at chest height. It disappeared within two seconds and I ran downstairs.

About a week later Mike and I were watching TV around 2am when we both heard singing. It was coming from the kitchen or possibly the basement, which is off the kitchen. As soon as we called attention to it and hit the mute button on the TV, it stopped. A month later Sean’s girlfriend got up early to use the bathroom off the kitchen and when she came out she heard a loud woman’s scream from the basement. For some reason it didnt even bother her…

The last tidbit was that Tom, yet another roommate, who’s room was connected both to Sean’s and the kitchen bathroom, was playing PS in his room well after everyone had gone to bed. We had a black cat in the house named Boo, and out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw Boo walk in and sit near the bathroom door, watching him. After about five minutes, with the cat in view the entire time, Tom looked directly at the black form and nothing was there.

Pavlos

When I was about 7yrs old I was bought a Ventreloquist doll for Xmas by my parents,I was living with my grandparents at the time and as soon as I opened it my grandma said “oooh thats horrible”.
It was about 2 foot tall with glasses and short cropped ginger hair.
I thought it was great and spent a couple of days walking around with my hand up its back saying ” gottle of gear, gread and gutter ” and took charlie, as I’d named him, everywhere with me.
My grandad made a little chair and charlie sat at the side of my bed everynight in his new chair.

After a couple of weeks I started playing less and less with charlie until eventually one morning I left him at the side of my bed and got up without him and thats where he stayed for a couple of nights…..

However, one night something woke me and I sat bolt upright in bed. My eyes adjusted to the darkness and thats when I saw Charlie sat at the end of my bed staring straight at me.
I sat speechless until I finally summoned up the courage to scream and my grandma came into my room. I told her what had happened and she took Charlie into her room and put him in the cupboard.
I was soon back asleep in no time, when I woke in the morning my blood ran cold….Charlie was sat back on his chair.
I jumped out of bed and ran downstairs, I told my grandma and she said that she would put in her wardrobe and lock it.
I felt better at this and happilly went off to school.
I came home from school around 4:00pm, I walked into the living room and froze….Charlie was sat on the sofa and..my grandad was sat in his chair talking to Charlie!
My grandad said hello to me and said that my friend had come to see me…meaning Charlie.
Now my grandad had bad eyes and couldn’t read the newspaper without a magnifying glass so for him to mistake a ventriloquist dummy for a small child didn’t really worry me…..what worried me was how did Charlie get downstairs and why was my grandad talking to him…
I didn’t say a word I just stood in the doorway not believing what I was seeing or hearing, just then my grandma came in from outside.
She walked into the living room and started shouting at my grandad for bringing the dummy from upstairs a mighty row ensued and I was packed off upstairs.
I listened to the argument from upstairs and the gist I got was that my garandad had been watching tv when Charlie walked in and said he’d come to see me, my grandad told him I was at school but he was welcome to wait for me, and it was then that I came in from school.
They didn’t know that I had heard the argument and when it went quiet I went back downstairs, this episode was never mentioned again and Charlie was put away somewhere..?

being a 7 year old I soon forgot about Charlie and went about 7ry old stuff, summer came and I went to my parents for the summer holidays.
I came home after about 6 weeks away and was greated with kisses and hugs from my grandparents. after a few hours of chatting about my holidays I went upstairs and entered my bedroom..I saw Charlie from the corner of my eye sat in his chair with a big grin….I turned and looked and at him and then it happened….he said “Hello, where have you been ?”

my knees gave way but like a cat that has been startled I jumped out of my room, cleared the landing and several stairs, hit the stairs about 6 runs up and landed in a heap at the bottom.
My grandparents came running out to find me quivering and crying.
I told them what had happened and my grandma got straight on the phone and phoned my uncle, my uncle came and collected Charlie and took him away.
I never heard anything about him again.

cupidstrick

Most of the things that have ever happened to me have always been when I’m in my room, and always at 3 am.

My room is right under the kitchen and the stairs going up there from the living room. This makes it so that even slightest tap of a shoe on the floors or the shutting of a cabinet is heard perfectly in my room. Any night that I am awake and in bed at this time I will hear the footsteps of someone walking around. Sometimes they will walk around in the kitchen for a bit but they always end walking down the stairs to my room.

The first time this happened it was basically the sound of someone casually walking down to the front door (which is right outside my bedroom door). This wouldn’t have bothered me too much except for the sound of loud panting coming from under the door crack.

I quietly had a breakdown in my bed while listening to the weird panting. Whatever it was seemed to want to come into my room, like it was peering under the door and breathing through the crack. It didn’t sound human. Finally, the sound went away-although I waited for any sign of it to be walking back the way it came and never heard any.

The sound of footsteps happened a few other nights with the same routine-walk down the first set of stairs, walk about the living room, then walk down to stop in front of my room. I never heard the panting again though.

I got used to it- until my last trip home over Christmas break.

It was about three thirty when I start to hear the footsteps. I think I’d forgotten about it at that point since I’d been away at college for six months. I rolled my eyes and thought “fuck, not this again” when it abruptly started POUNDING up and down the stairs from the kitchen to the living room. It was as if someone was sprinting around in boots. My eyes were popping out of my head staring at the ceiling, praying it wouldn’t go down the second flight of stairs. Thankfully it didn’t; it sort of tapered off into the living room. It took me a very long time to fall asleep.

I also get the distinct feeling that something is chasing me or right behind whenever I walk through the kitchen/living room at night. I always have an urge to run into my room and slam the door. Usually I fulfill that urge.

Tsadition

Like many young people, I had a lot of weird and several unfortunate experiences with ghostly phenomenon. Many of these experiences I have thankfully forgotten about, but the sum of the experiences shapes the attitude I have toward ghosts. One day I will come to an understanding about what happened to me many, many nights when I just wanted to sleep; however, there is one experience that I remember quite well.

I was 10 years old at the time. Things were not that great when it came to my emotional health — I hated going to school, I had recently lost all of my friends and I lived in a neighborhood with few people my own age, and the hormone changes of puberty were kicking my ass just in time. Most of all, I was convinced that I had run out of good luck. Therefore, I had to go look for a good luck charm. I had to go search my backyard for a four-leaf clover. After about 30 minutes of seaching a clover patch, I somehow stumbled upon a real four-leaf clover. I didn’t know why these things are so special, and I had never seen one before, but there I was holding one in my own hand.

That night, I placed the green four-leaf clover upon the stand beside my bed with hope that it might bring me good luck. I’m not sure if the clover delivered on that hope.

It was the middle of the night. It was dark in a house that the rest of my family believes to have been haunted. I’m not sure if the green man I saw that night was the same presence that my family speaks of, though. It was dark in my room in the middle of the night. I was sleeping on my back, covers over my face as an ingrained responce to my past experiences with ghosts in the night. I was dreaming, but there was a strange sensation of whispering. There was unintelligible whispering and a strange sensation of something whisping against the covers of my bed. I was jolted awake by these strange sub-concious sensations, and my heart spikes adrenaline throughout my body. That familiar sinking in my stomach, the sweat, the excited trembling — but my eyes didn’t see anything under the covers. I didn’t see anything until I looked towards my doorway.

I don’t know why I used to insist on sleeping with the door open, especially since I did want to remain undisturbed while I sleep. I looked straight ahead towards my closed closet, but I saw nothing. I knew something was wrong, and that old sinking feeling verified my suspicion when I next glanced to the left towards my doorway. There, standing about two feet past the doorframe was a semi-transparent, green old man dressed in a classic three-piece suit. The green semi-transparency covered the old man from head to foot. The old man was complete — not an intangible, unhuman, or imcompletely-formed entity like most others are. I could have been convinced that this old man was a real person, were it not for the fact that he was green and semi-transparent. Strangest of all, his face and his full hair resembled my recently deceased grandfather. Chills ran from my shoulders down my arms, and tingling throughout my skull. I stared at this figure for seconds, until he decides to make the first move.

“Boo.”

I shit you not, this ghost that I am staring at looks me straight in the eye, winks, and says “Boo.” I keep staring, but with a feint sence of closure. The ghost probably doesn’t mean me any harm. I keep staring for several more seconds as the green man slowly de-materializes into thin air. I keep staring for a relative eternity until I bolt for the nearest light. I tried to bolt for the light as calmly as possible of course, lest the spirit world know just how I was feeling.

I look to the clock and see that it is about 2:30 A.M. I don’t have to wake up for school for at least another four hours, but I tell myself that there’s no way I’m going to try going back to sleep.

This is thankfully my most recent vivid experience with ghostly phenomenon. Coincidence or not, I promptly got rid of that clover the next day.

I have other earlier experiences, I have tales from my parents about a fucked up house in York, Maine. I have tales from my sister about what happened at night in the bedroom we shared as children. It seems like myself and my family have too many experiences with ghosts. I want to remember what I have repressed, but at the same time, wisdom tells me that it may be better that I don’t remember. Still, I want to know more of the details about those nights that I have thought about countless times over the years. I want to know why I still am loathe to sleep in the dark — to this very day.

“Why I don’t like to sleep in the dark”
I have fractured memories about the room I used to share with my younger sister. Unfortunately, I have a relatively good memory about one night in that room.

The house was ordinary; it was built next to a park in the heart of suburban San Jose, California. When I would check the date on the foundation stone along the backyard patio, it would always say 1963. I used to think that ghosts only haunted old places. But there was something wrong with this house in which I spent my first 10 years. One night, when I was about 9 years old, I saw something that I cannot unsee. I saw something that I can still remember when I close my eyes in a dark-enough place.

It was a hot August night in California. My grandfather had passed away from lung cancer the preceding spring, and in just two days my family and I were going to fly out to northern Maine to recover the possessions my grandfather had bequeathed to my mother. The night was hot and my thrifty parents did not believe in running the air conditioner at night. There I slept in my bed, resting, yet sweating under the covers. I dreampt whatever it is that kids dream, until I awoke to that familiar feeling: something doesn’t want me to sleep well at night.

I may have been having a nightmare before I woke up, or it may have even been sleep paralysis. I don’t care. The nebulous thing I saw floating above my cowering body has taken a piece from my psyche that I may never recover.

I awoke to a feeling that something is wrong — a feeling that I felt many times before in this room that I shared with my younger sister. I had been sleeping on my back, and there I remain. I opened my eyes; I saw the huge white face floating silently above my body.

Immediately, adrenaline spiked my young body. I felt that sinking in my stomach — that feeling that people who have seen unimaginable things can empathise with. The terrible sensation of chills run down my spine towards the small of my back. My jaw slowly drops and my skull tingles, my body is cold under the blankets in this 75 degree room, I am literally frozen in fright. I don’t want to look at this thing — this thing that has to be evil — yet I cannot look away.

The face keeps grinning that sinister grin, static, unchanging from start to finsh, still looking me straight in the eye. There is a disturbing resonance that accompanies the face, this strange noise that sounded kind of like a muffled, pulsing groan. I keep looking at this thing until I can take no more. Finally, I do the smart thing and pull the covers over my face. Little did I know that I would be using this tactic as a preemptive responce for many years to come.

Somehow I got back to sleep in that hot room. I woke up at about 9:00 that morning, but I didn’t immediately remember what had happened. I got up, got dressed, went outside, and met up with my friend from next door. She had her bike with her, and we met in the shared front yard that ran along the corner of our street — somewhere around the boundary point between our two houses. We exchange whatever normal greetings that kids share, and I look to the grass towards my left. Finally, I exhange glances with Kristin, and drop the unfortunate news of last night:

“Last night, I saw the devil.”

In my mind, that is all I could equate my experience to. I was not raised a religious boy, but the devil was the one who visited me. At least in my young mind, that was the only paradigm of maliciousness I could equate the white face to.

“What?” She responds.

She may have been unnerved, and she have asked me if I was joking or not, but I can’t exactly remember. Quite frankly, I couldn’t believe I was telling anyone this. Either way, I responed in a resolute way:

“No.”

We left it at that. Kristin and I went off, and spent much of that summer day socializing with the rest of our neighborhood friends. The rest of the day was a daze, and the next night was a terrifying proposition; allthough, I am thankful that I can’t recall anything happening. Nothing happened until the next afternoon when I was sitting in my room near the doorway. There I sat, as the door adjacent to my left slowly shut on it’s own.

I am relating this memory as much to tell a story as I am to hopefully cathart an experience that scarred a part of my mind. I don’t think words can do justice to the subjective feeling of terror I felt that night, and I have never told anyone about what happened to me. For whatever reason, I just haven’t been able to bring myself to admit this tale. At least I can blame a lazy breeze in the house for the door, but I haven’t discovered a definitive explanation for what I saw that hot August night. Sleep paralysis, some other hallucination, or malevolent entities; it’s really inconsequential to me. If these things are real, or if they are but a figment of the imagination, I can still see them. Quite frankly, both propositions are equally disturbing to me.

PeachyPeach

I guess I’ll share a story that happened quite a while back. It involves my Goddaughter when she was just getting big enough to run around and talk so you could understand her. (She’s 15 now, ohgodiamsoold).
She and her parents had moved to the first of the two creepy houses they would stay at in Pickens, MS.

Her aunt J and I drove up to stay for several days. The first night was fun, we cooked dinner, played with the munchkin, and her new imaginary friends, got ready for sleep. We always pulled out this ancient feather mattress and slept in the living room, with the TV on my side and the couch between us and the dining area/kitchen. I wake up with J elbowing me in the side and saying , “turn off the TV”. I roll over to reach out for the knob on the ancient TV.
The TV is not on.

I jolt into full awakeness. I grab J’s arm and whisper, “it’s not on, it’s not on.” She and I grab each others arms and listen. It sounds like people, a lot of people in the kitchen just on the other side of the couch. Now, Pickins is a weird and violent little town. I had a handicapped uncle burned to death in his truck there. I immediatly think crazy redneck murderers have broken in, and we will never be found as we are 10 miles down a dirt road with no street sign, no phone.

J says, “go see what it is.” I say “fuck you”. We finally grab hands, jump over the couch, screaming like maniacs, and run for the bedroom where the rest of the family is sleeping. We get to the room, lock the door. J’s brother is already up, loading a shotgun. He throws me an old revolver from up in the closet, and heads out to find out WTF.

He circles the house inside and out, nothing. We drag the mattress into their room, lock the door, put heavy furniture in front of it and pretend to sleep.
The next morning, we talk about it quietly, we don’t want to scare the kid. She , meanwhile is talking to the “sad baby in the closet.”

Pretty creepy. I’ts a pretty day, we shrug it off. That night, same thing, except we were already all sleeping in the same room. We all woke up and heard “a bunch of people talking.” This goes on for a day or two. The last day we are there, we’ve set out a pallet for the baby to play on and are having a little picnic. The baby is trying to learn to act like a human and pee in a toilet, but she’s got a bit of diaper rash, so we let her run around the yard sans-clothes to dry it up.

Every day at the same time this great old man would ride his tractor to town. He’d go to the store, come back and get everybody’s mail at the beginning of the road. His tractor was ancient, and he always wore a clean suit when he drove it to town. He stopped to bring us the mail, and some of his tomatoes (which were delicious by the way.) And to yell at us for letting the shrimp run around nekkid. We share our picnic with him, and he starts to tell us about the house. Turns out, it was part of a larger farm house with several segments burning down. The wife had several babies die and eventually died in childbirth. The farmer hung himself in the living room closet. We all sit there for a minute, letting this bomb sink in when J says, “what happened to the babies?”
“Oh, they’re buried in the back.” At this the baby pipes up with , “yeah, the babies are sad, so is the man in the closet.”

Picnic over. J’s brother’s car is busted, so I let him take mine to work. We can’t leave. When the brother gets home that afternoon we are frazzled from watching the baby play with her friends and talk to the man in the closet all day. He convinces us to just stay the night, and all of us leave Sunday. J and I are back in the living room, trying to sleep. I wake her up this time, flipping out, hearing the same voices and sounds. She doesn’t even open her eyes, but sits up and screams “SHUT THE FUCK UP! FUCK YOU!”, lays back down, and I await our icky death. Instead, we hear what sounds like an old man laugh. It’s not a creepy laugh, but what sounds like a suprised laugh. Then it’s quiet.

I wake up that Sunday early morning in the house with my Goddaughter leaned against my back, eating Pop-tarts, watching TV. The whole house is shaking with this WHUMP WHUMP noise. She is just totally ignoring this noise. I look at her and she just says “drug-copper”. I open the front door to a fucking police copter not 12 feet above the house, looking around for pot fields. My Goddaughter follows me outside, we look at each other, and both flip off the “drug-copper”. Later that day, we learned how much shit my car would hold, and while the brother and his friends had to move the furniture, us females never went back to that house.

Instead, they moved into a far far creepier house. I hate that town.

The 2nd Doom

First a little background on the House I lived in to better understand. The house started being built in the late 80’s. I actually lived literally “up the street” from it. It was at the bottom of an old ravine surrounded by two giant hills pretty much secluded by anything else. I was young at the time but I don’t remember exactly how old, and as Our neighborhood was deep in the woods, I often went exploring with my friends and could be gone for a whole day and night.

At some point they stopped building the house and I never knew why, it sat unfinished for years and occasionally became apart of our exploring. It was never scary or anything like that, just a big construction site.

My parents got a divorce when I was about 5. My dad informed me that He was having the house finished so he could move into it. I asked him why no one had ever finished it before and he told me that the original builder of the house died, and that 2 other men had tried to finish the house and died before it was finished.

The house was finished when I was about 10 or 11. There had been multiple
problems in having the house finished, random things that couldn’t be explained, injuries, accidents, complications. When it was finally completed it was actually a beautiful house. Surrounded by a beautiful forest and valley in the middle of two hills. It often seemed to have its own weather pattern as often times we would wake up and the whole valley would be covered in a thick thick fog that made everything wet, until you drove up the hill out of the ravine and the weather was fairly normal.

Weird things Started occurring about a month after we moved in. Lights in the hills, like street lamps in the middle of the woods. Voices in the forests. I found Old burned stakes out in the woods, HUGE ones, over grown with plants, but clearly man made with planks of wood nailed across them.

“they use to lynch people here” My dad said. ” And burn witches”.

My Dad is from the South and still retains his southern lore like “Heints” (ghosts) “Witch Women”, and random things

It wasn’t long before shit started in my house. It started with the Dreams.

I began having Vivid and realistic Dreams in which I felt like I was awake, almost more like hallucinations.

The first I remember having, was of lying in bed at night, and suddenly rolling over and falling out of the bed on to the floor. When I stood up I was looking down at my self still sleeping on the floor, and when I looked up something was standing in my door way. It looked like a shadow, tinted very slightly red, it was tall and humanoid. When I saw it I took a step back out of fear, and when I did, it lunged forward. I suddenly realized what it was about to do! I ran forward trying to get to my body before IT did, but it had already leaped into my body laying on the floor. I watched my body stand up and walk out of the door in horror and shock… And then I suddenly woke up a moment later on the floor.

I also had reoccurring dreams about a Young girl. I would be sitting at my computer, in my basement next to my closet. My Computer set up was Like Lains.. just without liquid on the floor and F’n holograms and shit. It was in a dark corner next to my closet and the only light was the glow of computer screens. . I would glance over and she would be standing beside my computer. It always lit her face up a stark pale blue and her eyes were black holes that looked like they were torn with blackness around the edges, Like her face was a paper mask and someone had just torn eye holes there. Her hair was long and black, but it kind of melted into the darkness behind her, I just got the sense that it was long. She wore a dress but it wasn’t detailed, it looked like some kind of paper hospital gown. She Frowned hard and kept very still. I would stare at her for a long time frozen in my chair and then all the sudden wake up and fall out of my chair as if Id fallen asleep and just woken up. There would be nothing there. I would go to bed.

The Worst of the Dreams has become famous to my friends, as completely fucked up. It once again Starts out with me sitting at my computer like I am always doing, its late but I cant tell what time it is. I cant ever tell time in these dreams or when I first wake up because when I look at clocks, the numbers don’t make any sense to me. For some reason as I’m sitting there I get the intense feeling that something is in my house. Something wrong. It starts filling me with dread, I can feel this thing going through my house searching, and I am to scared to move from my chair. I just sit waiting and waiting, Suddenly I cant take it any more. I turn and open the door to my closet. From just beyond the darkness in the doorway I see a huge white thing, Its hunched over so far that its head is actually somewhat low to the ground, its back is touching the ceiling. Its face resembles something of one of those small Old Harlequin or Clown Dolls, little cross shaped eyes, and the mouth just a line that went all the way across its face like the jaw disconnected in a puppet sort of way. I freeze the air gets still and its Face Raises up into mine and Screams at the top of its lungs right into mine, the most shrill inhuman thing Ive ever heard. I then wake up and fall out of my chair.

“My closet”
when I was 14 my room was moved into the basement, and my closet door was a 7 foot tall, four feet wide, rectangle cut into the side of my room that lead into the cellar beneath the house. It lead far back into a closet my dad kept his clothing in. It went back about 30 feet, but was only 5 feet wide. To turn the light on, you had to walk into the middle of the closet and pull the light string, by this point the door seems like its a mile away and will also inexplicably close while you are in it. When the Door to my Closet is open, The temperature will drop drastically, You can actually feel the cold air roll in like a blanket. My room had no windows so was always pitch black except for the glow of some electronics, but the opening in the closet door was Always black

It was one night, I couldn’t get to sleep,I had a bad feeling and was wrapped up in my blanket out of fear for some reason. The house was incredibly quiet, and I was trying to get to sleep but to scared. I don’t know what it was, it was just dread. I heard my dog start pacing up stairs and then He would stop at the top of the stairs and growl. I forced myself to get up and look up the steps, and he was just staring back down the steps growling. I turned around and running leaped under the covers, and when I did I rolled over and realized that the closet door was open and it had grown cold. I closed my eyes and stayed hidden. and then I heard it. a sort of

“hmph”

From deep in my closet. My Eyes shot open and I froze under the blanket , not seeing anything but darkness and blanket. I held my breath to hear complete silence and then again. “hmph!” It sounded like an old voice, thinking about a question. My dog was growling at the top of the steps an everything else was quiet, but the voice kept going until it was a full on moan ..Like ” aaaah” It got louder repeating over and over,complete with gasps in between, until I freaked out and jumped out of bed and slammed my closet door shut. I ran back to the covers and hid under them waiting. Silence… and then from right behind the closed closet door a muffled ” Hmmph”

This happened almost every night, I learned to sleep with it some how, but I would often wake up in my room with the closet door just slightly cracked. I use to fall asleep with a little lamp on that I read next to (Game of thrones). When I would wake up to the sound of the closet door creaking, and then stoping just slightly open, as if someone were trying to open the door and peak at me and not wake me with the noise. I would roll over turn off the lamp and hide under the covers, and a few moments later hear. “hmph”.

There was more than a couple times that while I was reading a book staying up late, I would suddenly feel like someone leaned right over the bed from behind me. I would jump and turn and see that the closet door was open some amount. The feeling would still be there, the feeling of someone suddenly moving right next to you.

“The curious little girl”
I call her the curious little girl because of the way she reminds me of the ghost girl in my dreams.
My bed faces the entrance to my room with the closet door being about 5 feet away from my bed to my right. The foot of the basement stairs ends right at the door to my room, and the giant windows are at the top of the steps. There is no door, so moon light always was bright outside my room. It hit the wall opposite the steps. One night while sleeping I heard the familiar creak of the door, but this time it was the entrance to my room. the door opened wide, and on the opposite wall I saw the shadow of what seemed to be a big lump sitting on the steps. I thought it was my dog trying to nose his way in, so I called his name.

When I did. The shadow stood up on two legs.

It was too thin and short too be my dad, and it didn’t make any noise when it turned and started walking up the steps. My dad is 6’6 250 lbs. He cant walk up the steps without everyone of them creaking and groaning. I watched the shadow it cast move out of the moonlight, and I rolled over and hid under the covers.

I would often see shadows walk and dart by the moon light cast on the wall. It wasn’t my dogs because thier feet would click on the floor when they walked and even make the steps thud in a four legged hopping pattern if they came down stairs. The shadow would do things, like peek around the corner, as if looking down the steps shyly, or full on just stand there. The shape of it was very small and very thin, like a child.

The last time I had interaction with her was a strange night indeed.

One night when My dad was on vacation I was home alone in the house. We had a workout room, and I was in there watching tv and working out. The Tv was right next to the glass basement door that lead outside, and at night with the lights on it was like a mirror. I was watching tv when all the sudden it looked like something in the reflection was moving. when I turned my head I saw a blip of light in my vision, kind of like a blue spark, kind of trail in my vision. I shook my head and looked into the reflection, beyond the glass I saw the hill Suddenly dotted with lots of lights in the distance, and then My eyes focused on my actual reflection. it looked like there was a small out line of something behind me. It scared me so bad think I did like a flip or something and then ran to the bathroom, when I opened the bathroom door the first thing I saw was the mirror, and in the mirrors reflection a long shadow was moving right behind my head. It was long and horizontal shaped sort of like an arm with out a hand on it moving behind my head. I spun hard, at this point I was at the point of fear where I was starting to get violent instead of scared. I spread my hands waiting to see what it was, and there was nothing there.

“Blanket time”
I sped away from the bathroom toward the door to my room. As I was walking, I looked back to the bathroom doorway and in its darkness saw a small shadow crouching. I jetted, into my room, flipped the lights on and slammed the door. I was under the blankets in no time. I lay there for a minute and then suddenly from right behind my bed room door, I heard a distinct childish and feminine. “eh heh” It sounded like a mild laugh from a little girl. I shot up out of bed and looked at the door. It was then that I also saw, my closet door wide open, no light penetrating the darkness beyond. I wrapped up in the blanket until there was nothing exposed but a little breathing hole and stayed that way until I could manage to go to sleep.

Thats just some of the stuff that has happend in my house. My friend and Fellow Goon, has actually witnessed the Closet noise’s “HMPH” while he slept in my room with his girlfriend one night. Something has happened at least once to everyone who has spent the night there. My Friends and I are convinced that the whole little area is just a gate to some other place… Most likely Hell.

My Dad still lives there with my step mother, and the house gets passed to me when They die.

I can’t wait…

Chido

This happened in 1994, if I remember correctly. My family has had some weird encounters with ghosts and other supernatural phenomena, and this one was shared by all the members of my family. It may not be scary, or creepy, but it is one of the creepiest things that has happened to me.

My mother’s family is from a small town 3 hours away from Guadalajara, a city in the state of Jalisco in Mexico. In the beginning of the 20th century it was in the middle of a conflict with the church, and many cristeros used to wander around and hide in the area. It is said that some of them hid treasures (stolen good, golden coins), in the nearby hills or in the houses of the town, and sometimes you’d hear rumors of haunted houses where you’d see a spirit roaming around, pointing where the treasure was buried. It was believed that the cristeros would kill one of their prisoners (or even one of their own), bury the body on top of the money, and let it guard it until they came back. That rumor was, and still is, widely spread among the people of the town.

I always thought it was just a legend until I was told that in 1985, after the earthquake that caused damage mainly in Mexico City, my grandparent’s house cracked. The damage was rather serious, and the house had to be rebuilt. When the workers dug in the foundations, they found a skeleton. My grandparents thought it might have been a cristero, since the house was pretty old, but they didn’t find any treasure. The house has always been haunted, but nothing serious until then. The finding became just another story among my relatives until my mom decided to go digging. That summer my grandparents came to the US to visit their relatives, and we decided to stay in their house for some days. My mom rented a metal detector, and off we went. We were 5: my mother, my siblings Ana, Pepe and Pedro (names changed), and we took our dog with us.

The first day we found something under a tree in the chicken pen. We dug, but didn’t get anything, yet the detector kept showing something there. We went to the field behind the house, and there the metal detector detected more metal in a spot near the farthest fence. My brothers started to dig, and didn’t find anything. My mother decided to continue tomorrow, and we went to downtown to have dinner. We came back home pretty late, and went straight to bed. My two brothers and the dog, Lady, took one room, and my mother, sister and I took the one next to it. We were sleeping when my mom felt something jump on the bed. She pushed it off it, and heard some claws against the floor. The kind of sound a dog makes when walking on a tile floor. She thought it was the dog, and yelled at her. I woke up and heard the claws scratching on the floor, and turned on the light. There was nothing. We looked everywhere, but we found nothing. My sister thought it might have been a rat, but we moved everything, checked all the drawers, under the bed, behind the closet and found nothing. Then we hear Lady bark. She was locked with my brothers. They told us that she was barking at something under one of the beds, but not the kind of bark a dog makes when they see a stranger. She was viciously barking and growling at something that was not there. My mom decided not to dig in the house anymore, and we left the following day. It was just too creepy.

Aggro Craig

Through high school I worked as a sacristan for my church. If you don’t know what that is it’s really just a fancy word for a superintendent. I did tons of random jobs, from office work to snow removal to greeting guests to filling in as a Eucharistic minister or an usher if we were shorthanded. I even helped out an undertaker once, and remember being amazed at how quickly a body can turn into something moving and breathing into plain deadweight (and a lot of it at that.) But my main job and the reason I was hired in the first place was “security.” This just meant I had to sit in the office until everyone was gone, then I’d go walking around with my ductaped hockeystick-o-keys, flipping the lights on and off to make sure everybody was gone, locking the doors, setting the alarm and taking off for home. The first couple nights on my own I got some chills walking past crucifixes and statues of martyred saints, but I grew familiar with the place fairly quickly and never had an incident.

So I’ve been working for a summer and just started my junior year of high school, when 9/11 happens. I work that night, and the staff and I sit glued to CNN, occasionally talking to people who just want to come in and pray. I didn’t work again until Saturday night from 3-close (usually around 7.) In that time the priest set up a small memorial: a table placed in the middle of the gathering area with a wreath and a candle on top. He informs me to blow out the candle when I lock up to make sure it doesn’t start a fire. After mass I do the rounds, shut off all the lights, blow out the candle, and right before I leave I look back into the darkness and shout “Goodnight!” as I always do to make sure everyone’s gone.

I work the next morning (which pissed me off since I have to have the building opened by 7.) I shut off the alarm and walk into the gathering area. I’m halfway to the doors to the chapel when I stop dead in my tracks to see the candle there, lit. I set the alarm the previous night and disarmed it that morning. There’re magnets on all the doors and motion detectors in the halls – nobody else was there in that 12 hour period. I thought I was just mistaken and I forgot to blow it out last night, but there’s no wax at the bottom. It’s as if it’s just been lit. I shrug it off and go on with my work. After the last mass of the morning I turn off the lights, blow out the candle (I make sure of it this time) and set the alarm.

Later on that week my coworker and classmate comes up to me and starts complaining about the boss chewing him out again. They never really liked him, so I don’t pay much attention, until he mentions the candle. He was working the Sunday afternoon after me, which meant he opened the church up for the second time in the day and closed it after the 4:30 mass (I never knew why we closed the whole church just for an hour and a half between masses.) He told me the candle was still lit but he didn’t want to get me in trouble so didn’t say anything, just went about his day. After the last mass of the day, he blew out the candle and locked up. Well, Monday morning the priest opens the church and sees the candle lit and chews him out for it that evening. They end up taking the thing down that week. I worked there for the rest of high school, but never had anything funny like that happen again. Aside from the crossdressor who used the women’s bathroom, but that was funny haha, not funny hmm.

sniccers

My grandmother told me this story once years ago. She swore it was the truth. I’ll share it here just the way she told it to me.

My grandmother, her sister Dorothy, her mother, and her stepfather were dirt poor people living in the country. They did not have a lot of money and when they stumbled into this nice big farmhouse for rent, they did not pass up the opportunity.

The house was a two story. At the top of the steps there were a set of heavy, ancient french style doors. They didnt lead to a landing or anything, just a straight drop off. My grandma said she had never been a sleepwalker before but it suddenly started once they moved in that house and stopped after they left. She said they woke her up one night trying to open those doors. She would have probably died had she fallen off the ledge.

My grandmother and her sister’s portion of their bedroom were divided by a big archway. She had been asleep for sometime probably when she awoke with a start. She had an odd creepy feeling that something was watching her.

She rolled over and saw what she described as the ugliest and most horrible looking face you could imagine. She said she was scared at first but then annoyed because she thought it was her sister trying to scare her. She told Dorothy to take off that stupid mask and go back to bed. The thing never moved. She rolled back over and tried to fall back asleep but she could still sense it there. She again told Dorothy to take off that mask. She wasnt scared and she wanted to go back to sleep so she rolled back over and tried again to go back to sleep. The thing never moved. By this time my grandma was getting really annoyed and angry. Nobody in their right mind wants to be woken up in the middle of the night for a stupid prank. She told it to take off its silly mask and go back to bed and by golly this time she meant it. It just sat there and stared at her. She reached up meaning to shove her sister away and her arm went right through it.

She pulled the covers over her head and lay there cowering and shivering till morning. She said they moved out of that house a short time later but she never saw that thing again.

–more–

I have another story to share. This happened about 15 or 16 months ago.

My now husband and I were living in a three bedroom townhouse. We were in the process of saving up to buy a house of our own. My older kids each had a bedroom of their own but in the meantime the babies were sharing our large bedroom with us. Our bed was in the middle of the room. If you were lying in the bed, I would be sleeping on the right side. Piper’s basinette would be to my right with Phoebe’s crib to the right of that up against the wall. (Please no Charmed jokes. Ive heard them all. I did not purposely name my children after characters on Charmed)

Phoebe was probably 19 or 20 months old at the time. Piper was around 2 or 3 months and still getting up in the middle of the night to nurse.

As any parent will tell you, anything out of the ordinary regarding your children can rouse from a deep sleep in an instant. I had been sleeping with my back towards the girls when I awoke with a sound that appeared to be Phoebe whining.

It was very dark in our room. I was also very tired and maybe I really didnt see what I thought I saw.

I looked over to Phoebe’s crib and I swear I saw her silhouette. I cant recall if it had legs but it was a perfect likeness of her bedhead hair (Phoebe has had a headful of hair since she was born. She had full pigtails at 6 months). I was sure I could see her little hands gripping the rails of the crib waiting for me to get her. She didnt fuss though but kept sitting there staring at me, at least thats the way her black silhouette appeared to me.

I distinctly remember saying something outloud telling her Mommy was going to be right there and I turned on the small light attached to the basinette as I climbed out of bed.

Phoebe wasnt standing up in her crib looking at me anymore. Whatever it was that I had seen from the bed had totally disappeared when I turned on the light. I looked down at her and realized from her breathing that she hadnt been awake in sometime and that it clearly had not been her that I saw watching me from her crib. I dont know what it was but my heart started hammering immediately and it was weeks before I was able to go back to bed without having the lights on. My husband thinks I was dreaming but I know I was wide awake. I still dont know what it was. It didnt feel evil or bad but it didnt feel loving or warm either.

rammark

It was the summer after 8th grade. This puts it somewhere around late August of 1993. I was very excited because I was finally going to be a high school student. Those were happy days. I had money, because I had a paper route that my best friend Jim and I delivered on every day. I had transportation – my Giant 12 speed was the best bike in my part of town. And I spent just about every day with my two best friends, the afore-mentioned Jim and my other best friend, Nick.

We’d spent the summer riding our bikes all over town, exploring the bike trails that wandered through the fairly extensive woods that stretch through the middle of town. The three of us were inseparable. So when the time came for Jim’s parents to take his older sister Christine to college, we ended up holding down the fort at Jim’s place. That night, it was just the three of us, a lot of Jolt Cola, two large pizzas from Dominos, Batman, and Batman Returns.

It was somewhere around 3 am the first night. We’d just finished watching Batman Returns when we heard what sounded like voices coming from upstairs. So, being the strapping young men that we were, we trooped upstairs to investigate the strange noises. We hit the top of the stairs and the sound cut off, like somebody had thrown a switch or something. We made a quick tour of the upstairs rooms and made sure no TV’s or stereos were on. In the master bedroom, Jim’s father’s clock radio was very softly playing some old 40’s dance music. Now, it was set to a local hard rock station, and this sort of music shouldn’t have been playing at all. So Jim muttered something about “That’s weird” and went to turn the radio off, thinking his father had left the alarm set. But the radio wasn’t on. The switch was very clearly in the ‘off’ position. Jim put his hand on the radio, and the music stopped. A little freaked out, we headed back downstairs.

Now, that’s explainable, I suppose. I pick up distant radio stations from time to time, that for whatever reasons, will completely drown out a powerful local station. And maybe the radio was somehow on, but static electricity from Jim’s hand killed it? I don’t know. Read on!

We no sooner hit the living room, when the noise starts up again. It was definitely voices, but they were indistinct, almost like the murmur of quiet conversation from across a room. There were also footsteps, as if people were walking around upstairs. And very faintly, we heard dance music again. The three of us looked at each other, eyes a little wide and shared a nervous laugh. My first thought was that Jim’s older sister had set us up. She knew that we were going to be spending a few nights alone in the house and had probably sent her friends over to hide make spooky noises to freak us out. I voiced my suspicion to Jim and Nick and they agreed with me. We silently headed back up the stairs. As we reached the landing at the top of the stairs, the talking stopped, the footsteps ceased, and the dance music faded away to nothing. And then a door slammed. Aha! We had them!

Very quietly, we crept toward the bathroom, the first door on the right. It was wide open. Nobody’s in there – not even hiding behind the shower curtain. The next room, also on the right, was Christine’s. The door was wide open. And once again, there was nobody in there. So we peeked into his parents’ room. Again, the door was wide open and there was nary a soul in the room. The radio was silent this time. This left us with Jim’s bedroom. But his room is right next to his parents’ room and the door was wide open. We could clearly see that there was nobody in there. BUT WHAT ABOUT THE ATTIC? Of course! That’s why we didn’t find them before, they must have been hiding in the attic!

In order to get to the attic, you have to walk to the back of Jimmy’s room and right next to his closet is the door to the attic. The attic door was shut, which wasn’t all that surprising, as the attic door was [i]always[/] shut. Nobody went into the attic, and as far as we knew, nobody had been in the attic since Jim and I put the artificial Christmas tree away back at the end of winter break. But we’d heard the door slam, and it was the only closed door, so they had to be hiding in the attic. As we assumed we were going to be dealing with some of Christy’s friends, the three of us reached for weapons. -We regularly sparred in the backyard, and our weapons of choice were kept in Jim’s room. I chose a short cudgel made from a broken shovel handle, Jim always went with the axe handle, and Nick grabbed a mop handle with an evil jagged point at the end. We threw the attic door open and surged up the steps.

I noticed the change in temperature immediately. It was probably 70 degrees that night, but in the attic stairwell, the temperature had to be close to zero. I could see my breath and I was shivering pretty badly by the time we hit the top of the steps. I was already trying to figure out how Christy’s friend’s had done this. Maybe they had brought like four air conditioners into the attic and brought the temperature down. That was theoretically possible, right? I was expecting to have five or six high school seniors jump out at us from behind boxes and yell “Boo!”

That’s not what happened at all.

Jim flipped the light switch, illuminating the low-beamed attic filled with dust covered boxes and bags of old clothes. There was absolutely nothing up there. The months old dust on the floor hadn’t been disturbed. I’m not ashamed to admit that this is when I started to worry. There was very obviously nobody in the attic. Jim swore, turned off the lights and turned to head back downstairs. We were back down in his room when the attic lights came back on behind us. Something deep in my guts quailed at the thought, but I knew we were going back upstairs.

We ran back up the stairs, passing into the freezing cold air and reaching the top, just in time for the lights to go out. We were plunged into pitch black darkness. Not to be put off by whatever tricks were being pulled on us, Jim stepped away from the stairs and into the darkness of the attic. And that’s when the screaming started. It came from everywhere and nowhere all at the same time. It had multiple voices and tore through various octaves, ranging from a harsh growl, a medium yell, and an ear splitting shriek. I started to shake, whether from fright or the cold, I can’t say. Probably both. The scream rattled the windows and the very floor seemed to tremble. We booked it, running blindly down the stairs, dropping our weapons in our haste. We fell into Jim’s bedroom and slammed the door shut behind us. The screaming was still going on behind the door and it was getting louder.

And that’s when the lights in Jim’s room started flickering. It started slowly, just a quick dimming and then the lights came back on full. And then they did it again. And again. We left Jim’s room in a hurry, heading for the stairs again. Behind us, the attic door crashed open and the shrieking came louder. The lights were flashing on and off like strobes, and all the radios and TV’s in the house came on, blaring at full volume that same dance music that was playing before.

Jim and Nick hit the stairs at full tilt and tore down them. I wasn’t far behind, but something grabbed me. It wasn’t fully substantial. It felt kind of like a rope made from cobwebs, but it had no trouble at all pulling me off my feet. The screaming was all around me and inside me, bouncing off my bones and hammering away in my chest. An intense wave of nausea bored into me and I vomited convulsively, my vision going grey as I retched. I rose up, a good three feet off the stairs and slammed headfirst into the ceiling. And then I was thrown down the rest of the stairs. I landed in a crumpled heap at Nick’s feet. Jim was frantically trying to get the front door to open, but it wouldn’t budge.

The lights stopped strobing and died completely, leaving us in the glow from the TV. The screaming retreated, seeming to fade back up the stairs. The downstairs stereo, the big TV in the living room, and the little black and white one in the kitchen sputtered with bursts of static and died. The only noise left in the house was the slow dance music coming from someplace upstairs. The front door clicked open. Nick hauled me up and he and Jim dragged me out of the house. I couldn’t walk. I felt completely drained and emotionally ravaged.

We went next door to the really nice elderly couple that let us swim in their pool every summer and banged on their door till they came downstairs. In gibbering bits and pieces, Jim explained what had happened while the nice old lady poured hot tea down my throat. During the whole tale, they didn’t say a word, but just listened and exchanged glances, as if they knew all about it. They didn’t actually come out and say it, but I suspect that this sort of thing had happened before and they just didn’t want to talk about it. We called my parents and my dad came and picked us up. We took Nick home and Jim came over to my place for the rest of the weekend. My dad told us that we just got scared, being all by ourselves for the first time in our lives, with no adults around to protect us, and I was probably sick from eating too much pizza and soda. After a week of trying to explain what really happened, I gave up. My folks are too fundie Christian to believe in anything like ghosts and Jesus Christ would have protected me from a demon, so I shouldn’t tell such tall tales.

“The Name Caller”
I spent the first few years of my life living in a small house at the back end of my grandmother’s property. Mine is a large family and it was not uncommon for the various aunts and uncles to stop in to pay a weekend visit or to spend the whole summer at Grammy and Grampy’s, camping out in one of the many large bedrooms on the second or third floor of their giant Victorian house. Being the baby of the family, I always got trotted out to be shown off and then shooed off to play with the cousin nearest my age. More often than not, this would be Dickie. Dickie is only a few months older than me, but he’s always looked years older. I think he grew his moustache at the tender age of nine.

Dickie and I spent our summer together, roaming our family’s acreage day in and day out. When we’d finally get home from church on Sunday, it was a race to see who could get changed into their blue jeans the fastest. It was usually Dickie. He’d always be waiting patiently for me by the giant Willow tree that set at the Y where my parents’ driveway branched away from our grandmother’s. Hand in hand, we’d run off to do those things that only children can do with such enthusiasm. We’d explore the ruts that Grampy’s tractor left in the soft earth or play soldier in the tall grass by the woodpile. Sometimes we’d get too close the woods at the edge of the property and one of the adults would swoop down upon us and bring us inside for a snack or tell us to get ready for dinner.

My three year old mind wasn’t really up to the task of putting two and two together, but years later I’d look back and realize that we were always being carefully watched over by the family and not let to wander too far a field. And this is the way it was for the whole summer. Endless days of sunshine and fun with my favorite cousin, safe and secure under the watchful eyes of my family. Until the day my older brother got hit by a car.

I didn’t see it, because Dickie and I were way off at the other end of the property, down by where the dark trail to the creek is. But the story goes that my older brother Gabe was riding his bike back and forth in front of the big house and a drunk driver came from behind him and just kind of clipped him a little, sending him out of control and flying off the bike. He wasn’t hurt very badly, just a lot of scrapes and bruises. But my mother’s shriek was enough to bring the whole house out to the road, including my Uncle Danny, who was supposed to be watching me and Dickie that day.

Being children, we were ever curious and finding a path that we hadn’t taken yet intrigued us. Also, being that it was the middle of summer, the dark shadows under the Oaks were very inviting. And so it happened that my stalwart cousin and I wandered into the woods at the edge of the property, down the hill and to the creek.

I remember the walk down the creek being very short. It was an easy downhill slope and hard packed earth, as if many feet had trod it before me. Dickie led and I followed, down to the sound of fast running water. We sat on this big flat rock immediately to the right of the end of the trail, contentedly plunking rocks into the water when I heard my mother call out our names. It was kind of a sing song thing, My name first and then Dikie’s.

Startled, and knowing that we weren’t supposed to be down in the woods, especially by the creek, I grabbed Dickie’s hand and started running for the trail. Except that the trail wasn’t there anymore. Now, I’ve been back to this place many, many times since that day. (Granted not till I was much older, but still) and I know exactly where we were sitting on that day. The trail is right there, in plain sight. I have no idea how we could have misplaced the trail, but we did. And so we were lost.

My mother called out to us again. And this time she was echoed from across the creek.

It wasn’t a human voice. And no matter how many times I’ve tried to convince myself otherwise, it wasn’t a mocking bird. It sounded mechanical. It was almost rusty, like the wind blowing through an old duct and moving a fan around. The way it hung on the vowels in my name, like it was savoring them… Fuck I’m getting shivers remembering this shit. It’s actually more frightening now, when I can reflect on it. At the time, it just scared me. Now however, especially considering that it only called to me and not my cousin… really don’t want to know what we came across that day.

I stopped dead in my tracks and stared back across the creek. There was nothing there. No animal that would have made a sound that seemed like my name. Nothing. I turned to Dickie and said, “Let’s run.” He took my hand and led me off the big rock, onto the sandy bank. We trudged along through the wet sand, making for the sound of my mother’s voice. Every time she’d call out to me, whatever it was on the far bank would mimic her almost immediately in its horrible, grating voice.

I pull-dragged Dickie off the bank and into the woods. I have no idea what I was thinking running full tilt into the woods, just that I needed to get away from the water’s edge. So there we were, two little kids, crashing through the woods for all we were worth, pushing through thickets and getting scratched to hell and back. I’m guessing that because it’s easier to run downhill, we ended up back at the water. My mother called again, this time sounding farther away than she had been before. And this time, when the mimic came, it was on our shore. There was no doubting it. I slowly turned, afraid of what I’d see, feeling an undeniable sense of presence, that feeling of eyes boring into the back of my head.

This time, there was something there. It wasn’t until years later when I’d have the words to describe it, but it was a shimmering spot in the air. It was almost like a heat mirage, making the air dance. But it didn’t stay in one spot. It moved, slowly but steadily, growing larger and large as it came. As it approached, it left footprints in the wet sand. They looked like bird foot prints, but writ large. There were three long toes that left deep holes at the end of the print ( claws? ) and one short, hooked toe off the side, followed up with a back toe at the rear. Think of a peace sign with an extra line off the left and give it claws.

As it came closer, I could feel kind of a hum somewhere deep in my head. I have no idea what this was. My mom started yelling for me again, sounding more and more frantic now. And for the first time, it occurred to me to answer her. I hollered at the top of my little voice and ran toward the sound of her. The fucking thing mimicked me! But it didn’t say “mommy”. It crooned out my mother’s name. At the time, I didn’t know my mother’s name. So the horror of that moment didn’t hit till years later.

I turned my back on the thing and dragged Dickie toward my mom’s voice, screaming for her as loud as I could with this fucking thing grating out her name behind us as we ran. Mom broke through the brush in front of me and gathered the two of us up in her arms. She turned and ran back into the woods and up the hill, got us into the house and sent my youngest uncle out to tell the men that we were found. Grampy and the cop (a family friend, actually) who came to take the report about my brother getting hit by the drunk went down to the creek with guns drawn. They came back hours later and had a hushed conversation in the dining room. I don’t know if they found anything. In fact, as soon as we were safely locked in Grammy’s bedroom, we started playing with blocks as if nothing had happened. Sadly, that was the end of my summer of fun. Dickie and his parents went home the next day. I wasn’t allowed to play outside anymore. We moved about two hours away at the end of the summer

It wasn’t until years later when I watched Predator that I started to recall what happened that day. Of course by that time, I knew better than to talk to my folks about it, so I called up Dickie and asked if he’d seen the movie Predator. He went silent for a few minutes. We talked about it for a little while. Neither of us could make any sense of what happened that day but we both remembered it the same.

I don’t think what I saw at the creek that day was an alien headhunter sent to earth to hunt humans for sport. I do know that it scared the hell out of me and my cousin. And I do know that I wasn’t allowed near that creek until I was about 15 and even then, my folks got upset whenever I told them I was planning on hitting the creek. I’ve never encountered anything down there since.

“Only God”
As I’ve mentioned a few times before, my family is very fundamental Christian.

They do not admit to believing in ghosts or spirits or demons… despite the fact that Jesus made a practice of driving demons out of people in the Bible. So you can understand their chagrin when their youngest kept insisting that there was a scary old man that wouldn’t let him sleep at night.

We’d been living in our new apartment for about a year and a half. My brother and I attended a public school about three blocks from home and despite being country boys now living in a fairly large city, we fit in rather well with the other children in the neighborhood. However, despite Dad’s new job paying better than he used to bring in being a small town cop, money was tight. Mom took a day job so we could afford to eat something other than pancakes, hot dogs, and that disgusting canned chicken noodle soup. It took a little while to get used to it, but soon my Brother Gabe and I were in a routine.

We would walk home from school together and sit down at the table together to do our homework. Seeing as how it was kindergarten, I didn’t have much in the way of homework, so I usually ended up watching Gabe do his math and spelling for a while before I’d get bored and go watch GI-Joe. Mom would come home around 6:00 and start dinner. Dad would come home at 7:00 and we’d all eat and watch M*A*S*H before I got sent to bed.

It was late May, shortly after my 5th birthday. It was one of the first hot and muggy nights of the year, so I had the window open and I was sleeping on top of my blankets. A cough woke me. It was the sort of cough I would later learn to associate with my maternal grandfather, who would die from pneumonia after a long battle with emphysema. It was wet and labored and from the sound of it, whoever was coughing should have been doubled over in some serious pain.

I opened my eyes and standing at my window was the oldest man I’d ever seen. His face was a giant mass of wrinkles and his head was nearly completely bald, save for the Picard ring around the sides of his head. His long white beard was stained yellow around his lips and he absolutely reeked of cigarette smoke. We made eye contact.

His eyes were the most intense blue I’ve ever seen. If there’s one thing I will take with me from that incident, it will be those piercing blue eyes and the way they shimmered in the darkness. He didn’t say a single word; just stood there, stooped against the window sill and stared at me.

I screamed like the little girl my mother’s always wanted and ran crying out of my bedroom. My parents were in the living room still, which means it couldn’t have been terribly late yet. I gibbered something about a man in my bedroom and Mom held me close and told me it was ok while Dad took his gun from overtop of the fridge where Gabe and I couldn’t reach it and went to investigate. Of course, there was nobody there and I’d had a bad dream and should go back to bed. I refused and spent the night sleeping in my He-Man sleeping bag at the foot of their bed.

The next night I made dad check the room with me. Nobody was in the closet. Nobody was under my bed. And the window was closed and locked. It didn’t matter. Somewhere after midnight I woke to the sound of a wet, lung tossing cough followed by the sound of wheezy breathing. I lay very still and pretended to still be asleep. The stench of cigarette smoke began to fill the room and I started having trouble breathing through it all. I forced myself to open my eyes long enough to find the door and ran for it.

Mom held me. Dad yelled. That night they wouldn’t let me sleep in their room. Intead, I took up residence on Gabe’s floor. Something he was none too happy about. I laid out my sleeping bag and curled up inside it, crying softly until Gabe hit me with his pillow and told me to shut up. I shut up. But I didn’t sleep. I waited. I waited because I knew, as only a child can, that the old man would be back that night. I waited for hours. And then, just before dawn, I was rewarded. There were footsteps out in the hall. Footsteps that were drawing closer and closer to Gabe’s door. Footsteps that stopped. The smell of smoke permeated the air and even Gabe started to cough a little bit in his sleep.

The door rattled. I moaned a little and curled up into a little ball hidden deep in my sleeping bag. The door rattled again, harder this time. I started to cry again and begged the old man to just go away and leave me alone. The door continued to rattle until finally when it sounded like it was going to come flying off its hinges, it broke off and went completely still. I risked a peek out from under my sleeping bag. The smoke still lingered in the room but it was fading fast. I breathed a sigh of relief until I heard heavy footsteps come pounding back down the hallway and up to the door. It burst open.

I screamed louder than I had the night before. And with good reason too. It was my dad and he was pissed at being woken up again. He yelled at me for banging on the doors and when I tried to tell him that it was the old man he spanked me for lying. I don’t know what hurt more, the spanking or that my own father thought I was a liar. I spent the rest of the pre-dawn darkness standing in the corner doing what seemed at the time to be an odd punishment; repeating the phrase that my father wanted me to say: “There are no ghosts in this house. Only God.”

This was to become quite familiar to me over the years and while it still strikes me as odd to deny a spirit’s existence, the probably billions of times I’ve repeated it have made it seem like a normal, everyday expression. There ARE no ghosts. Only God. What this means is that God is a nasty old man with emphysema and smoke stains in his beard who likes scaring the shit out of little kids. Bastard.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

The next few weeks plowed on like this. I would wake at random times during the night with a coughing old man stinking my room up with his smoke smell. He wasn’t actually smoking anything though. It was like his very essence was made up of tobacco smoke, like he’d smoked so much in his obviously very long life that his lungs were still full of the stuff and it just came out when he exhaled. That would explain the coughing. Every time he showed up I would start changing the mantra. “There are no ghosts in this house. Only God. There are no ghosts in this house. Only God.” Over and over again and it never seemed to do anything. I imagine it really freaked my parents out, though. Waking up to me screaming this at the top of my lungs about every other day for weeks on end.

One night in mid-June he finally acknowledged me. I was mid-mantra when he coughed. This time it wasn’t a gut wrenching cough but more of a “Pardon me good fellow, but I’d like to say a few words.” sort of cough. All this time, I’d been refusing to look at him but being a curious person, I just had to look.

He was leaning against the window sill, in the same place he’d been in the first night I saw him. His eyes were still as piercing blue as ever and they drew my gaze like a magnet. “Rammark,” he said. “You shouldn’t be afraid of me. I’m just an old man.” And then the jumped out the window.

I never saw him again.

I would really like to write all of that off to a five year old’s over-active imagination or a recurring nightmare or something. In retrospect, this wasn’t all that scary. But at the time, I was ready to piss my pants.

For the sake of continuity, I have combined two tales that overlap each other. I don’t know that they are related, but they happened over the same span of time, so I wrote them together. Again, I want to attribute all of what follows to a hyper-active imagination. But I just can’t.

My family moved out of our apartment in the city and into a house in more of a country setting on the outskirts of town. It was only country because it was a state preserve. Go about five miles away from the house, in any direction, and you’ll hit four lane highway. But to a family born and bred in small towns with more cows than people, it was a nice little refuge. There was actually a horse ranch about a mile down the street.

The house we lived in was owned by the company my father worked for, so it was win-win. We got out of a cramped apartment with no parking and we also got to save all that rent money. Of course, nothing is to be that simple.

There had to be a reason that nobody else in my father’s company wanted to live in that house. Dad had only been with the company for like two years or so and they were giving him a company house? I mean the car was one thing. But a whole house? Aside from the fact that the basement like to flood when it rained, dad couldn’t find anything wrong with it. So we moved in.

The house was really nice. It had a little foyer area right at the front door. Off to the side was my father’s office. Off to the other side was the alcove that would later house my little brother’s playpen. Past that, you reach the living room which had one wall lined entirely with mirrors. Being impressed with my own facial expressions, I could often be found kneeling backward on the couch and making funny faces at myself in the wall.

Through a set of pocket doors on the left was my parent’s bedroom. Continuing out the back was the kitchen/dining room and the downstairs bathroom. At the end of the dining room was the stairwell. My folks cut a doorway into their bedroom from the base of the stairs so they could hear Gabe and I when we were in our bedrooms, upstairs.

The upstairs was basically two rooms that split off from the stairs. Just off my room was the upstairs bathroom. At the back of Gabe’s room was the toy room. It had unfinished walls with exposed foam insulation. I found a model liberty bell hidden in the wall once. Running between the bathroom and the playroom was a corridor that I would eventually discover. On the side of both rooms were our closets, which ran the length of the house and were split in the middle above the stairs by a thick wall made by un-mortared bricks.

Here is a terrible representation of the upstairs:

We’d only been there for about two weeks when Mom and Dad decided to cut the doorway to their bedroom from the stairwell. That very night the bumping started. It started small and quiet and down at the bottom of the stairs. At first, I thought it was our cats, recently recovered from Grammy and Grampy’s since we weren’t living in the city anymore and could have animals again. We had two cats back then, one for each of us boys. Mine was named squash. He was a big orange beast who probably weighed as much as I did at the time. Gabe’s cat was exactly the opposite: small and black with lots of hair. They hated each other and would often end up fighting, so hearing a soft bumping from downstairs was nothing new and especially nothing to worry about.

This went on for a few nights and it continued to not worry me. That was until the night that Squash was on my bed when the bumping started. His ears perked up and he let out this horrible growl noise that is guaranteed to make your skin crawl right off your bones. My first thought was that Gabe’s cat was coming up the stairs and that Squash was pissed. But then she came running in from my bathroom and hissed down the stairs at whatever was bumping around down there.

I called down to my mom and dad to see if maybe it was them. No answer. They were sleeping. The bumping started coming up the stairs. I slowly started to freak out. I stood up on my bed started the mantra that my father had forced me to learn, hoping that maybe God would protect me from whatever was going on. “There are no ghosts in this house…” The bumping stopped almost immediately. I was floored. It had never worked on the old man, but it worked on the bumping. I settled down on my bed and closed my eyes.

It was in my closet! Down by the back wall.

I screamed. I screamed loud as I possibly could. “THERE ARE NO GHOSTS IN THIS HOUSE! ONLY GOD! THERE ARE NO GHOSTS IN THIS HOUSE! ONLY GOD!”

The bumping stopped. And of course, this is when my parents decided to wake up and come storming up the stairs.

They figured I was upset because we had moved and I wasn’t adapting to the new house and so I had decided to wake up in the middle of the night and pretend I heard ghosts. And then they brought me to talk to the pastor.

I don’t really remember all of what he said because it was a bunch of bullshit about how there was no such thing as ghosts and spirits and that Jesus would not let a demon come into the house of good, faithful Christians. I asked him what would happen if the demon was already in the house before the Christians moved in. He sputtered for a minute and then said that the light of Jesus would drive any demon out.

This went on for what seemed like a very long time. It was probably only a few hours, but that’s like four or five episodes of He-Man and that’s a very long time to a kid.

He finally ended the tirade about god and his power over demons and then gave me a silver cross. (I overheard him tell my parents that it was just to make me feel better because I was obviously making the whole thing up.) Mom and Dad took me home. In retrospect, I should have asked to stay at the pastor’s house. The scariest thing there was his toupee. At my house, I had something evil in my closet.

Things didn’t improve at my house but I never woke my parents up by screaming at the thing ever again. Instead, I entered into a wary co-existence with it. It bumped and I hid under my covers. I stopped sleeping at night because I was so terribly afraid of whatever was in my closet. I relished nap time during school as the only time I could get any decent sleep. I was a five year old zombie.

My sixth birthday came and went; just another sleepless night filled with a racket coming from my closet. Two days later, I got off the school bus and found a boy about my age standing in my front yard. He was short, like me. He had red hair and lots of freckles all over his face and arms. He dressed nicely and looked as if he’d just had a bath. He said, “Hi, I’m your neighbor Charlie. Want to play?” His voice was that squeaky pre-pubescent little boy voice that is so easily mistaken for a girl’s.

So we played. We played a whole lot of He-Man because He-Man ruled. I mean, he was the Master of the Universe, for Christ sake. Charlie always left before my mom got home from work, something about how his mother might worry if he was out too late. With my parents, I understood and never thought anything of it.

One day when I got off the bus, Charlie asked me if I’d like to go exploring. I was up for exploring, so off we went. We explored behind the hedges in front of the house. Nothing cool back there, just sticks and leave. We explored the little nook behind my father’s desk and found nothing but dust. We weren’t very good explorers. Then Charlie decided we should explore the upstairs. He led me through the house and up to the bathroom that set off of my bedroom. He stood in front of the full length mirror that was set into the wall and said, “I think we should go into the walls.” I watched, fascinated as he pressed his hand against the right side of the mirror and pushed in. *click*

The mirror was a door.

I don’t really know how the hinging and latching system worked, but when he pushed in, it released and then opened outward, revealing a dark passage. Now THIS was exploring. For some reason, I didn’t think to question how he knew the door was there. I simply followed him inside. There really wasn’t much to the passage. It was simple plank flooring with unfinished walls, just like the play room had. Charlie shut the door behind us and little cracks of light at the far end of the corridor began to slowly light the passageway.

Charlie was standing just in front of me, staring at the wall and tracing his fingers over a dark stain on one of the two by fours in the wall. “I used to come here and hide a lot when my daddy was mad at me. But one time he found me.” He sounded so sad and small at that point.

I wanted to say something, anything to make my friend not sad. But I found that I couldn’t move my mouth. In fact, I wasn’t even breathing. I don’t know how long I stood there frozen, watching my new friend absently tracing the stain on the wall. It must have been hours because I was suddenly snapped from my reverie by my mother frantically calling my name from downstairs. I took a huge gasping breath and turned back to the mirror door, hastily telling Charlie that my mother was calling and I had to go, but Charlie wasn’t there anymore.

Thinking that he must have just been hiding in the darkness, I blundered my way through the door, figuring out to open it from the inside by accident. I hurried downstairs to find my mother in tears at the kitchen table. I told her that I’d been playing with Charlie and hadn’t heard her calling me. She grabbed me into her arms and hugged me half to death, babbling something about how she’d come home and couldn’t find me and I didn’t answer her and I wasn’t in my room and she thought I’d been kidnapped or ran away from home.

I told her again that I’d just been playing with Charlie upstairs.

She stared at me blankly. “Who’s Charlie?”

It didn’t occur to me that she’d never actually met my new friend. It also didn’t occur to me that I’d never mentioned him to anybody until just then. So I plowed ahead and dragged Mom upstairs to the bathroom and opened the secret door to introduce her to Charlie. He wasn’t there. He was gone. And of course, Mom wrote it off to me having an imaginary friend.

I never saw Charlie again.

But the bumping… the bumping never stopped.

In fact, after Charlie stopped coming over, the bumping got worse. Instead of staying on the back wall of my closet, the bumping started to get louder and move closer to the door. After a few nights, it was slamming against the door so hard that I heard the wood begin to crack and splinter with each blow.

Finally, the night my mom went into labor with my little brother, whatever was in the closet got out. I had been wakened by my dad. He was going to take us all to hospital and then a lady from our church was going to come pick us up. I was groggily putting my shoes on, ignoring the slamming going on off to my right when suddenly it just stopped, the door standing open by about an inch or so.

There was darkness between the door and the jam. Not just the regular darkness that one sees in a closed off room, but a tangible darkness. An inky black darkness that seemed to be both substantial and vapor at once. I watched as tendrils of darkness seeped from the closet and into my room. There was a moment of hesitation, much like watching a cat pause before it strikes at an unsuspecting mouse. And I knew what was coming. I hurled my shoe at the door and flung myself into the bathroom, slamming the door shut behind me.

I fell in a heap in front of the mirror door and suddenly knew that the thing in the closet couldn’t come through because of the mirror. In a flash, I had myself locked inside the secret passage and was huddled against the far end, ready to break through the flimsy barrier of foam insulation that separated me from the toy room. At the other end of the passage, I heard the bathroom door give way with a crash. That was enough for me.

I pressed myself through the gap between the wall supports and easily knocked the insulation away from the wall, tumbling into the toy room and coming to my feet like an acrobat. I didn’t pause but ran as quickly as I could, through Gabe’s room and down the stairs, knowing that any moment I would feel the icy grasp of whatever was now trashing my bathroom. One step. Two steps. Four steps. The racket in the bathroom suddenly stopped and I leapt the last dozen steps to the landing, plowed into my parents’ room, and ran out into the living room where the mirrored wall was crawling with shadows. I screamed and ran out the door to the car where Gabe was already waiting. Dad, carrying Mom baby stomach and all, strode out of the house, completely oblivious to all that was going on in the mirrors right behind the couch.

We got to the hospital in about half an hour. Half the church was already there to pray for Mom and one of the deacons’ wives whisked Gabe and I off for the remainder of the night. Nobody asked me why I only had only one shoe. Two days later, I had a new brother. He was named Stephen after the Martyr. A role he’s been playing very well for the last 20 or so years.

Things were quiet for a while after that. I had no explanation for why my closet and bathroom doors were destroyed and why the insulation in the toy room was all busted in. So I got the belt. By this time, I knew better than to say anything about a ghost, chanting and silver crosses didn’t do shit to make me feel better. However, Dad decided to not fix the door and instead took it off its hinges.

I stopped sleeping in my bed. Instead, I slept under the kitchen table with a flashlight and a giant red tape player that my Grammy had given me for Christmas. I played the Beach Boys’ Surfin USA so many times that I broke the tape.

Just because I wasn’t in my room anymore didn’t mean that the thing wasn’t still active. I could hear it, occasionally; banging around in my closet. And the things in the wall-mirrors. FUCK THEM! I started using the back door to enter and leave the house so I didn’t have to see them.

About six months after Stephen was born, there was an electrical fire in the basement. I have never seen anything cooler in my entire life. Sadly though, this is was it took to convince my father that we needed to move out. I finished up second grade while living out of an apartment above the Parsonage. For those of you lucky bastards who weren’t raised in the Faith as I was, that’s where a non-Catholic priest lives. It’s generally on Church property and is usually a pretty nice place.

There were no ghosts there. Only God.

“There’s Something In The Woods And It Followed Me Home”

Part The First

My family left the city a few months before my little brother Stephen’s first birthday. Dad had gotten an offer from the company to move up north to be part of a new office. It meant living closer to his parents and leaving the big city behind. He jumped at the chance.

We moved to Stump Falls, a small industrial town that dated back to Colonial days. The place was a perfect fit; just the right mix between industry and cowpatch. It felt just like home, even after nearly four years living in the city. Guess I’m just a country hick at heart, no matter how much time I’ve spent in the big city. There were a couple of kids my age in the neighborhood that I got along with real well, and soon I was accepted as part of the clan as if I’d been there my whole life.

The years went by fairly quickly as I grew into my new town. I liked the town just fine, but I had the typical new kid troubles in school and so, I got in a lot of fights that I didn’t start. It’s been my experience that most times, new students that don’t fit in right away will get the hell beat out of them for a few weeks until they’re accepted. But with me, it didn’t end. It went on for years, me basically getting my ass kicked by no fewer than twenty other students for no better reason than because I was different. The school staff couldn’t manage to get the story straight and somehow, the kid that got beaten black and blue ended up getting suspended and nearly expelled. You can imagine how well this went over with my family who abhors violence.

This series of events, while not really part of this story, kind of kick started me off into a new direction in life. I had a lot of anger and frustration to deal with and needed to find some way to put a handle on it. For some reason, being in the woods tends to calm me down, so I went and hung out in the woods that bordered town, about two blocks from my parents’ place. The woods are actually the beginning of a good sized forest in the foothills of the mountains. It’s rather quiet there and very peaceful. I ended up spending a lot of time in those woods that spring, basically avoiding my family and dealing with some serious inner demons for a ten year old kid.

The main part of the woods that I spent time in had been thoroughly explored by generations of other children and there were numerous trails throughout the place, especially down by the banks of The Kill (which is a largish creek or smallish river that runs down from the mountains and through the center of town. Kill is kind of a holdover from the Dutch that settled the area many, many moons ago.). Most of the trails ended up in little clearings littered with the debris of decades of beer bashes. Some of the trails petered out, reclaimed by the forest. But one or two went for what seemed like miles and miles. It was on one of these long trails that I found what I affectionately refer to as ‘The Ruins”

To this day, I’m still not sure what they are. I suspect they’re the remains of a mid-19th century property; supposedly there was a factory up in the hills at some point and most of what I’ve found may be the remains of the foundation and a couple walls. I spent weeks exploring this area before moving further on up the trail. What I found there doesn’t quite fit the ‘old factory’ story. The hard-packed trail changed over to a narrow, grassy path; evidence that it hadn’t been traveled in a fairly long time. It also deviated from the bank of the Kill and went straight up side of a steep grade. Standing out right at the very top of the hill was what I can only describe as something straight out of the Bible: A Sacrificial Altar.

Standing about four feet high and solidly constructed from rounded Kill stones and mortar, the Altar stood like a sentinel over the hilltop, watching the forest and the Kill below it with stony eyes. I’m pretty sure this was actually a gatepost of some kind but a few fine points seem to counter that thought. First, there are no post holes in the sides of this thing, so it didn’t hold a gate. Additionally, there’s no second gatepost, whether on the other side of the trail or elsewhere. I’ve searched the whole place many times over the years and not found a mate for it. Lastly, the top is blackened as if it’s been scorched many times over. The earth around the altar is packed down hard and nothing grows within about a six foot radius.

Summer came and I finally escaped from school for a while. I also got to see my neighborhood friends Ritchie and Jerry, who spent the summers and the occasional weekend with their father. I couldn’t wait to show them my secret place in the woods. Being the good friends that they were, they excitedly joined me for a trip into the forest. We took our bikes, mostly because it was faster and their father had always told them that they’d be grounded if he ever caught them going into the woods. A long bike ride was a good blind to hide a trip to the woods behind.

We spent a few hours poking around the ruins, climbing up the crumbling walls and pretending that it was a castle and we were knights. A good time was had by all. Then I decided it was time to bring my friends to the Altar. I told them that there was something even cooler further up the trail that they really needed to see. So we took to the bikes, riding as far as we could into the forest before setting off on foot, leaving them locked to each other through the spokes of the front wheels.

It was only a short walk from where we left the bikes to the bottom of the incline and soon we were climbing to the top. Jerry stopped about halfway up though, complaining of a sudden headache. Ritchie and I called him a pussy and dragged him up to the top of the hill and we let him sit down, just outside the circle of hard beaten earth. Ritchie was thrilled with the altar and gave it quite the thorough inspection. We discussed the oddness of finding an altar in the middle of the woods and decided that it just had to be for some other purpose than animal sacrifice.

This is when Ritchie got the brilliant idea to go further up the trail than I’d gone so far. I’m not really sure why I hadn’t explored more. I’d only spent a few weeks hanging out at the ruins, which were actually terribly more interesting than this stone oddity. Something struck me as being vaguely wrong when Ritchie and I started down the other side of the hill, dragging Jerry between us, but I wrote it off to just being unfamiliar with that part of the trail. But the further we went, the more wrong I felt about it, almost like I somehow knew that I was someplace I wasn’t supposed to be.

We didn’t make much progress with our complaining burden hanging across our shoulders and so we decided to turn back. The trip back up the hill was exhausting. I don’t think Jerry weighed more than 60 or 70 pounds back then, and while I was a small kid, I wasn’t a weakling and Ritchie was much bigger than me, being 12 years old and all. We were both worn out by the time we reached the altar and I was in the beginning stages of a headache that would stay with me for roughly a week. We stopped outside the circle and took a breather. The thing was though, that the longer we sat there, the worse I felt. Even Ritchie was pressing on his temples as if trying to relieve some pressure. We finally got back up and headed on down the hill.

Each step we took toward the bottom felt better and easier than the last. By the time we reached the base of the hill, my headache was more or less just a dull, throbbing pain behind my eyes. We found our bikes and rode unsteadily home. Jerry still wasn’t doing so well and his father’s girlfriend hemmed and hawed about sunstroke and berated us for not bringing any water with us on our bike ride. We slapped our foreheads and called ourselves idiots and made sure to drink a whole lot of water that night.

Three days later, Jerry still wasn’t feeling up to doing anything but Ritchie and I were back on our feet. I still had my headache, just kind of a lingering afterthought. Ritchie was 100%, or so he said and wanted to go back to the altar. We packed some sandwiches into my backpack and filled up a couple soda bottles with water. Go Go Ghetto sports bottles!

Once again, we left our bikes chained to each other near the bottom of the hill. The climb up went much easier without Jerry’s complaining ass and soon enough, we were at the altar. It hadn’t changed at all, not that I’d expected it to. The two of us kind of stood there, staring at it for a while. I really don’t know what we were waiting for if anything, but nothing happened. So we went on our merry way down the other side of the hill, drawn as if by some unseen power to find what was at the end of this trail.

Now it’s hard to be sure of this because all trees look alike once you’ve been in the woods for long enough, but not terribly far up the trail from where we’d given up before, we came to a bend. There’s nothing all that unusual about this as, for the most part, the trail followed the Kill. But this bend in the trail was different. As we came around the bend, we entered a fairly large clearing that ran down to the water’s edge.

The clearing was typical of what one would find by a good sized creek; mammoth willow trees on the borders, deep, lush grasses, tall ferns and dozens of little stone obelisks. Wait what? Yeah. There were, by my count, 38 of these small stone obelisks dotting the clearing. On close inspection, we discovered they were all about two feet tall and made out of a fairly low quality concrete that was very pitted with age. Many were broken near the top and the worn look of the exposed edges seemed to express that the break had happened quite some time before.

I have absolutely no idea what these things were supposed to be or had been used for. But they were pretty interesting and so we hung around, checking them all out and wandering around the clearing. We decided to have lunch there before continuing on up the trail. (Note: Bologna and cheese with mustard on wheat will never get old.) While we were enjoying our hearty feast, I began noticing something a little… off. While I’ve always enjoyed the silence of the woods, it wasn’t true silence. There are always little noises; the scampering of chipmunks and squirrels through fallen leaves, the chirping of birds, the occasional crashing of a startled deer… stuff like that. These woodsy noises were constant, kind of a background noise that one eventually tunes out. So it took a little while to notice that they were dropping off.

Before too long, the only noise was coming from the Kill, which was actually a good distance away from where we were sitting. You know in books when an ‘uneasy silence’ descends? That’s a pretty apt description. Ritchie and I just kind of looked at each other and stood in unison, slowly gathering our gear, trying to ignore the unerring feeling that something was definitely wrong.

They say that human beings are a predatory species. Our eyes are located on the front of our heads, to allow for depth perception, rather than to the sides to allow for greater range of view. We have sharp canine teeth meant for ripping and tearing other animals’ flesh. We have opposable thumbs, which allow us to create and use tools. Above all else, we have a highly developed brain. All of these things combined have placed us at the top of the food chain. But we weren’t always there. Once upon a time, we lived in fear of larger predatory animals. We huddled in groups, armed with crude spears to protect our tribe against lions, wolves, or bears. Somewhere deep inside each and every one of us is a genetically preprogrammed response to certain stimuli that centuries of being king of the hill cannot erase. Thank the gods for that.

Most of us know when we’re being watched. Some call it a 6th sense. Some call it Extra Sensory Perception. Some call it the Force. Whatever you want to call it, it fucking works. Something was watching us. Something that scared the animals into silence. Something that moved so silently that neither one of us had heard it approach. Not speaking, and keeping our movements slow, Ritchie and made our way back toward the trail. We wove our way through the concrete plinths, trying not to get caught up in the long grass, while continuously spinning in slow circles to check behind us.

The uneasy feeling pursued us to the trailhead where, once out of the tall grass, we broke into a run. There was still no noise at all from the forest around us. It was absolutely dead calm. We tore down the trail, up the hill, past the altar, and practically jumped down the steep grade to the bikes, where every second Ritchie spent fumbling with his combination lock seemed like an hour. Still, there was no sound from the woods, and even the Kill sounded subdued and muted. With the lock and chain off our bikes and hastily wrapped around Ritchie’s handlebars, we took off for safety. Safety from what, we didn’t know, but we didn’t feel safe and so we rode hard all the way to the street.

That night we held a conference of war in my basement.

Jerry was feeling better and the prospect of playing my Nintendo drew him in. Also invited were a friend named Mike and the brothers’ cousins from across town: Matt and Angie. Matt, as it turns out, had actually found my ruins before, but had come from a different path that I didn’t know about. He hadn’t seen the altar or the clearing, though and was excited to see them. Mike was invited because he was a tough guy and not afraid of anything. Angie was invited because she said she’d tell if we didn’t bring her.

The conference established a few things. First: there was what seemed like a sacrificial altar in the woods. Secondly, there was some kind of… well we didn’t know what the clearing full of stone things really was. But it was unusual to say the least. Thirdly, we suspected that there was something in the woods that didn’t want us there, something that had twice taken steps to drive us off, first with intense headaches, and secondly by scaring the shit out of us at the clearing. Lastly, we knew that our parents didn’t want us going in the woods. That, alone, was reason enough for most of us, especially me. It suggested that there was something dangerous that needed to be avoided. And despite having just been scared out of the woods by little more than a little bit of silence and an uneasy feeling, I was ready to go back in, but this time with backup.

I am a fucking idiot.

The next day was Saturday, which was good because Mike and Matt both had summer school and were normally busy till noon during the week. The whole bunch of us met up at the center of town, where the old train tracks used to be and followed Matt to his trail, which was up at the other end of town. His trail was actually better worn than mine and it was a short ride to the spot he’d spoken of in my basement. It wasn’t my ruins. Hurray for a pointless side trip. We made good time getting back to my trail however, and were at my ruins in short order.

We formed our battle plan there and rode on up the trail, locking up the bikes at the base of the altar hill and then climbing to the top. Almost immediately Angie started complaining that she was short of breath. She’s a girl and we considered her weak, so we disregarded it. Mike actually picked her up and carried her down the other side. He was feeling a bit winded afterward, but that’s understandable. Angie wasn’t exactly small for her age.

We continued on to the clearing, where we had to stop so everybody could take a look at the stones. We had all been hitting the water pretty hard, so I left Ritchie in charge at the center of the clearing and took Angie down to the silt beach to fill up the water bottles. The whole time, she complained how she had a headache and couldn’t really breathe. She’d heard Jerry’s story and so I once again disregarded her claim. Did I mention I’m a fucking idiot?

We’d finished filling up the bottles and rejoined the group. So far, Angie was the only one to say anything about feeling weird. I was quite optimistic as I started for the break in the trees that was visible on the far side of the clearing. I took two steps and this time, I was aware of the uneasy silence from the beginning. It was almost like the animals were doing ‘the wave’. The silence swept from the far side of the clearing and back toward the other end of the trail. I have no idea where I got this next impression, but I had the feeling that something very large was running down the trail at me, with its eyes locked on me.

*Crack!*

It sounded like a fucking tree snapped in half. Somewhere behind me, I heard Angie scream. I stood, rooted in place, whether by fear or some stupid determination to face whatever was coming at us, I don’t know. Sudden hands grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me to the ground just as a gust of freezing cold wind shot above my head.

Ritchie held me down, whispering something that I cannot fully recall about how it couldn’t see us in the grass. There was absolutely nothing there that I could see, but there was definitely a feeling of being sought and searched for. Something didn’t want us there and it was fucking pissed at us. Twice more, I felt the cold air rush over my head before it swept back up the trail. We stayed low, waiting, wondering if it had truly left. Slowly, the forest sounds returned and a warm breeze filled the clearing.

I stood and looked around. Everybody else slowly followed suit. Everything seemed exactly as it had when we’d first entered the clearing. That sense of being watched had gone and all seemed well. We took this as a prime opportunity to run like hell for the trail and even chubby little Angie managed to keep up.

We regrouped back at my ruins where it was decided that we were never coming back again, ever. And then we went on our merry ways, thinking that if we left it alone, whatever it was down there in the clearing wouldn’t bother us. Well, I don’t think it agreed.

I had a hard time sleeping that night. This is not surprising as I was busy trying to digest exactly what it was that had happened in the woods. I still had no idea what possible use any of the stone objects I’d found on the trail could have been used for, but there was no doubt that they were man-made and not natural rock formations. The experiences down in the clearing were a bit easier to make sense of. There was some kind of large predator in the woods, probably a bear or a mountain lion. The animals picked up on this and we picked up on the animals picking up on it and it freaked us out. The cold wind… well the wind does funny things sometimes, especially near water. So, I’d found some weird ruins in the woods, big deal. I’d found the old foundation and walls months before, so it really wasn’t anything special. I just let myself get freaked out then my friends caught the fear and ran with it too. Group hysteria or some shit. Granted, I was like 11 years old at this point and didn’t think in these terms, but this is the gist of what I was telling myself that night.

Having successfully convinced myself that all was well with the world, I closed my eyes and rolled over to go to sleep. I would like to say that I fell asleep and woke up with the sun shining bright on a beautiful Sunday morning. Instead, I woke up suddenly, sitting straight up in my bed. All was quiet. The only sound in the room was Stephen’s even breathing coming from across the room. Nothing seemed out of place. Although my cat was not in his accustomed place at the foot of my bed, maybe that’s what woke me.

*Shrieeeeeeeaaaaap*

I nearly jumped out of my skin. I have no idea what made the sound, but imagine five thousand finger nails being raked down a blackboard. I have since had the pleasure of watching Hurricane Ivan rip sheet metal from nearby roofs. The sound of tearing metal is very similar to what I heard that night, but not quite high-pitched enough.

*Thud*

It came from outside. Outside my window! Maybe the wind knocked something off the roof? I stood and peered out the narrow window, looking out at the yard. The trees were still, their leafy branches hanging limp in the humid night air. So much for the wind. I craned my neck to look at the roof of the porch that was immediately below my window. There was nothing laying on the roof, although I supposed that whatever had fallen might have rolled off the roof and was now laying on the ground, just out of site. I gave it up and started to roll back into bed when something tapped on the window.

I froze in my tracks, straining my ears to hear behind me. It was quiet and almost timid.

*tap tap tap*

I willed myself to keep moving to my bed, to wrap the blankets around my head and shut out the night and whatever it was that had decided to pay me a visit. But I found that no matter now hard I tried, I couldn’t take that first step to the bed.

*tap tap tap*

I pulled with all my might and just couldn’t seem to get started.

*Tap* *Tap* *Tap*

That was some very deliberate tapping. Whatever was out there, it wanted my attention. And I couldn’t move. I had no choice but to turn around and acknowledge its presence. I found that I could turn my body back toward the window. And so I did, slowly, trying to keep my eyes low, looking at the floor. Soon, I was fully turned around but not looking at the window. I could feel a presence there, drawing my eyes.

I couldn’t resist any more. Against my will, I looked up. The eyes I looked into were huge and golden and they swallowed me up. I felt an immense sorrow, an aching deep in my heart. So much death. Death all around and nothing would stop it. I was given the mental image of The Kill, running bank full of frothy, muddy water and floating debris. The roaring water soon overflowed the banks and came rushing at me, slamming into me and throwing me off my feet. I flailed for a moment or two but couldn’t find my way to surface. The current had me, pulling me viscously downstream, bashing me against the rocks. My vision went blurred and red as I felt my skull shatter against a very solid rock. My arms and legs were heavy, too heavy to move. A hungry blackness swarmed me, wrapping me in its cold arms and pulling me down, down to the bottom of The Kill.

I blinked. I was standing at my window, staring at an owl. He let out a quiet hoot and then flew off into the night.

Did I dream that? I have no idea. But I wasn’t the only one to have a bad night. After I got home from church the next day, I talked to Ritchie and Jerry. Both of them had dreamt of drowning in the Kill. Mike told me to go to hell when I called him on the phone. I never talked to him again. I didn’t see Matt and Angie for weeks as they both went and got themselves grounded the very next day for doing something stupid. When I finally did catch up with Matt, he confirmed that he’d had an odd dream the night that we went down to the clearing. He didn’t know about his sister and she and I didn’t really talk for a few years afterward. I can’t really blame her. She was really freaked out.

I had random visits from the dream owl over the next few years. Never again did I die in The Kill, but the dreams I’d have after seeing the owl were always associated with it in some manner or another. The owl stopped tapping on my window somewhere shortly after my 13th birthday. I don’t know why he stopped coming, but I took it for a sign that I could go back into the woods. So I did.

I went alone. I went on foot. The ruins were still there, but now they’d been discovered by the beer bashers and the graffiti assholes who think that it’s art to spray some squiggly lines of blue and red paint on things. I’m sorry if that offends anybody who’s truly talented with a spray can and stencils, but this was just vandalism. I spent a few days cleaning my ruins up, actually bringing industrial soap and a boat brush up with me to get the paint off the stones. The trail to the Altar was even more grown in now, but it too had been defaced by some stupid kids who spray painted upside down crosses and crude pentagrams onto the stones and the surrounding trees. I couldn’t do anything for the trees, but I did my best to get the paint of the stones. In the process, I managed to get the black soot stuff off the top.

My next stop was the clearing. The thing was, I couldn’t find it. The trail had disappeared. It was completely overgrown. Of course, I was pretty smart and realized that all I had to do was follow the Kill and I’d eventually come to that silt beach. Well, it didn’t quite work that way. I walked that bank for five hours; more than double the time it would have taken to find the clearing by following the trail. The beach was gone and I didn’t come to anything that even resembled the clearing. I gave up and went home.

I would continue to explore the forest over the next five or so years, taking different trails and getting excited when I’d find a new ruin (That town is covered in old houses and shit that just sit there, decaying in the woods), hoping to find something resembling the concrete obelisks that we’d found down in the clearing, but I never did.

I’ve done some research on the Kill and found that it did, in fact, flood back in 1843, destroying quite a few of the mills that operated from its banks. I suppose it’s possible that the clearing filled with concrete pillars was the remains of a mill, or something. I still have no idea what the altar was really used for, but it probably wasn’t anything to do with sacrificing innocent virgins to the demons of hell. THAT particular site supposedly exists on the other side of town. I’ve searched for it for years though, and continue when I go home to visit my family, and have so far I’ve not found it. I’m pretty sure all small towns in the woods have stories like that, though. And I’m also sure that a bunch of kids finding a fucking altar in the woods did plenty to fuel the fire.

It wasn’t all that long after this wrapped up that I had the experience that convinced me beyond all convincing that the spirit world was real and for better or worse, I was enmeshed in it and probably had been for my whole life. I’ve already posted the story of what happened at my friend Jim’s house. I have a few more experiences that I’m willing to share and given the time, I’ll have them all written up for you guys before the end of the weekend.

Thanks for reading. It’s good to actually tell the stories. Somebody from earlier in the thread said that talking about it is cathartic. I have to agree. There were a few goons who’ve been trying to get me to share these for years now. Well guys, there you go.

–more–

I did manage to rough together a little something about my encounter down at the Hollow for you though. I hope you enjoy it.

Summertime without a car isn’t really that much fun when you’re 16 and want to be out and about. It’s even less fun when you have nobody to hang out with. My best friend Nick was visiting family in California for the summer and my other best friend Jim and I had gotten into a fight over a girl so I couldn’t hang out with him. Most of my other friends had graduated and were off attending college orientation at this or that accredited university. I was very bored and actually looking forward to school starting in a few weeks. So when Angie and Matt knocked on my door one morning in late August, I was elated and immediately invited them inside.

They were nervous and excited about something and both talking at once. It made it very difficult to understand what was being said. When I finally got them to calm down and speak one at a time, it came out. Apparently, Angie had taken to spending some time in the woods near the center of town. This is not that unusual. The old train tracks go through there and it’s a natural path for pedestrians and bikers alike. The Kill runs through those woods also, and there are a number of natural swimming holes there.

In fact, Angie had been swimming. She and some of her girlfriends were down in a part of the woods that we called ‘The Hollow”. I’ll go into the details on the place in a minute. First, I want to tell you what happened to them. They’d been swimming for a while when they started hearing strange noises coming from over where they’d parked their bikes. Angie described it as kind a low, watery growl. Thinking some kids were fucking with them, they ran out of the water and back up the bank to the bikes. Nobody was there and the bikes were undisturbed.

They went back to the water and no sooner had they gotten their feet wet when they heard the noise again. Angie ran back up the bank and just caught a glimpse of one of the bikes, moving as if it were under its own power before it suddenly stopped and fell to the ground. Again, nobody was in site. She freaked out and told her friends that they had to leave. So they did. She told Matt, who followed her down to the woods and didn’t find anything. She suggested that they come and talk to me. Over the years, I had developed something of a reputation among the kids in my town. I hung with the ghosthunting crowd and was in training with a girl who called herself a witch. On top of that, they both knew better than most that I had experience in these matters. So that’s why they ended up on my doorstep.

Now, her story sounded kind of suspect. Especially since that part of the woods is very heavily traveled. I’d been down in there hundreds of times and never encountered anything the least bit strange. I didn’t really think that this was anything more than some kids having fun with them. But I’d known Angie for years by this point and didn’t think she was the sort to make shit up and to be perfectly honest, I had a bit of personal motive. She’d gone from the chunky and annoying friend’s little sister to thin and leggy with nice boobs and I wanted to get in her pants.

So we took to bike and hit the tracks, which is the quickest way to get to the Hollow. It lies pretty much at the exact center of town, amidst the remains of a textile factory that burned down in the 1930’s. There are random bits and pieces of the factory still lying around all over the place and broken and rusted out machinery is one of the most common finds in the woods. Occasionally one will find the remains of a foundation in the form of a cracked concrete platform, overgrown with weeds. Some of these even had small trees growing up in them. One of the really cool things that was down there was the remains of a bridge to the far side of the Kill. If you felt like wading through the rapids, you could actually find the rusted out hulks of the steal girders. It was a pretty cool place.

The Hollow is a really deep spot that’s been eroded away from the bank over the course of many, many years. The water there is much deeper than most other parts of the Kill. It starts as a sandy beach and then drops off almost immediately, diving down past 12 or so feet deep. It’s separated from the rest of the Kill by a natural rock shelf that was pretty close to the old bridge site.

It only took like ten or twenty minutes to get there by bike. Oddly enough, there was nobody else around that day. We dumped the bikes roughly where Angie and her friends had left theirs and went down to the water, trying to see if whatever had made the noises and moved the bikes would re-appear. I was betting no. Seeing as how the girls had all run off, the kids that’d been screwing with them must have left also.

We waited and waited down by the water for like half an hour and I was getting quite bored. This bike moving spirit wasn’t in the mood to do anything. I was all for leaving when Angie had a brilliant idea. “What if it’s hiding because we’re not swimming?” She was still wearing her suit under her clothes, and before Matt or I even had a chance to say something, she was stripping down to jump back in the water. At this point, I stopped paying attention to the bikes and concentrated on Angie and her womanly attributes. I was a horny kid, what can I say?

So she’s swimming and I’m watching and Matt’s contemplating kicking my ass and I hear it. It’s exactly as Angie described. Kind of a gurgling, waterlogged animal growl. It was actually quite disturbing and I lost whatever interest I’d had in my friend’s sister. Every hair on the back of my neck stood on end and I suddenly noticed a terrible pressure in my bladder.

The noise came again, from somewhere behind and above me. And the desire to piss myself became quite hard to ignore. Trying to shunt my baser instincts to the side, I focused on the sound, trying my hardest to place it somewhere closer to the water so I could write it off as water moving through the rocks and making funny noises. But the noise came again and again. And it was definitely behind me.

I made eye contact with Matt. He’d heard it too and he was in a better position to look over the bank than I was. He mouthed, “Angie’s bike is moving.” to me. That was it. In a hushed whisper, I told Angie to get out of the water and get her clothes on. We had company. Once she was ready, the three of us charged over the bank just in time to see her bike drop to the ground about ten feet from where she’d left it.

But I caught something she hadn’t seen the first time around. There was a shadow stretching across the cracked concrete; a shadow that was coming from the wrong direction to have been cast by the sun. And it was slowly retreating from the bikes. This was interesting. We started following it across the cracked and crumbling foundation. Matt and Angie walked behind the shadow and I walked along the side of it, faster than it was receding so I could find whatever was casting it. I hit the edge of the foundation and discovered that the shadow just disappeared into the woods. Matt and Angie caught up to me and we just stood there, at the edge. I’m not sure if we were waiting for it to jump back out at us or if we were afraid to go in or what, but we stood there, listening to the slight gurgling growl as it faded off into the woods. Realizing that we were about to lose the thing, I stepped off into the woods. Matt and Angie soon followed. We tracked the shadow by sound for what I’d say was about fifteen minutes. I figure it at roughly fifteen minutes because my watch had stopped working at some point after we went into the woods.

The noise was getting louder and I had the feeling that we were closing in on it when the rough trail we’d been following came to an abrupt end. It didn’t narrow or anything at all, it just vanished. And so did the sound. I pushed my way into the underbrush, thinking that maybe the trail had just been overgrown in this spot. Angie and Matt followed suit and soon, the three of us were crashing through some pretty dense woods. After a few minutes, I realized that we should have come out onto the old road that had led to the factory by this point and we must have somehow gotten turned around and were walking the long way through the woods. We weren’t getting anywhere and the gurgling had long since stopped.

We started back the way we came. Our trail of disturbed leaves and branches was very easy to follow and we made pretty good time. We made excellent time actually, but we didn’t come back to the trail. Now, granted I had the only watch and it wasn’t working. But the sun was getting lower and lower in the sky and we’d set out in the morning, so it had to be going for early evening by now and somehow, we’d completely missed noon. We kept plugging on, listening for the sound of the Kill to guide us and moving generally downhill. This should have brought us out to the old tracks at the very least but it just plain didn’t.

I have no explanation for how I did it, but I ended up getting myself, my friend, and a girl I wanted to bang lost in the woods in the middle of town. We followed what seemed to be our trail through the woods for at least three hours before I got pissed and started marking saplings with my knife. I’m an idiot for not doing this once I realized we were lost but hey. I marked each tree with a roman numeral and an arrow pointing in the direction we walked past it so that if we came back to the a marked tree, we’d know we’d already been there and were walking in circles.

We started off again, moving in a generally southerly direction (so I hoped) which would bring us down to the tracks. We’d been walking for about ten minutes or so when I started hearing something crashing through the woods behind me. Thinking it was another person, we started calling out. The crashing came louder and faster and flew right through our little group. Whatever it was, it sure wasn’t visible. The crashing noise went well past us and circled around about four times before it settled in behind us and reverted to the gurgling growl. I was officially freaked out.

We started running. The growling picked up and kept pace with us, seeming to be just a few steps behind us at all times. Meanwhile, the woods were slowly growing red as the sun started to set. Frantic now, because I had no clue what was behind us and I absolutely did not want to be caught in the woods after dark with it, I poured on the speed, urging the others to run faster.

Long shadows reached out to us and tree branches seemed to catch at our clothes more and more as we ran headlong through the vanishing daylight. My chest was burning. To this day, I don’t think I’ve ever run quite so hard for so long and I’ve done multiple 15 mile runs in the Army. My legs were aching and my head was pounding. I could hear Angie’s ragged breathing just behind me, and just behind her I could hear the very animalistic growl, growing more and more intense every second. I was ready to drop. I had no idea what to do and fell back on the very rudimentary ‘training’my witch friend had given me.

Those of you who have read the thread all the way to the end should be of the right mindset to not troll the hell out of me here, but if you’re the sort of person who’s going to tell me that my faith is bullshit, please stop reading now. I don’t mock your beliefs and I don’t like it when mine get mocked.

In complete and utter desperation, I prayed to one of my Goddesses. I prayed for my friends. I prayed for myself. I prayed for the Kill to stop hiding itself from me. And finally, not able to run a step further, the ground solved my problems for me and I tripped. Angie and Matt fell on top of me and the growling flew over our heads and faded off into the distance. We lay there on the ground, a wretched heap of panting. Our spent muscles twitched and fired at random. I wasn’t sweating anymore. I’m pretty sure I’d sweat myself dry and would never sweat again.

Off in the distance, the growling disappeared. And in its place, I heard the most wonderful noise. The Kill. Dead ahead. Somehow, I found the strength to stand and pull Matt and Angie to their feet. We dragged ourselves forward, seemingly an inch at a time. Just as the sun dropped below the horizon, we left the tree line and found ourselves standing on the same cracked foundation platform that we’d been on at least 10 hours earlier. Our bikes were nowhere near where we’d left them, but we were so happy just to see them that it didn’t matter. Especially since our water bottles were still there.

In the end, I didn’t have a chance in hell with Angie after that. Which sucked but I got over it. I’ve been through those woods hundreds of times since that day and never once found the trees that I marked. I also have no idea how I managed to get so hopelessly lost in what amounts to like maybe ten acres of land between the road and the tracks.

–even more–

Here’s the story of Aaron Wagner. It happened shortly before I left home to pursue greener pastures.

I was 19 and in my freshman year in college. I’d joined the Army Reserve to serve my country and, more importantly get the Montgomery GI Bill. Sadly, college costs being what they were, I had to get a part time job, so I worked nearly full time at the local grocery chain. It was late may and my friend Sarah was having her birthday party. I had to work that day though, so I wasn’t able to attend. Around 5:00 pm that evening I started feeling ill. I had a terrible headache and I was very nauseous. I decided to go home early. I had no sooner walked in the front door of my parents’ house when my phone rang. It was my friend Tony. He told me that I had to come over to Sarah’s. They were playing with an Ouija board and they’d contacted me from a past life.

Yeah. Me from a past life. I ran this over a few times in my head and no matter how I figured it, there’s no way they could do that, as my soul is currently in my body, not wandering the ether. I was about to tell him to stuff it and stop trying to be funny when he said that my past self was messing with my then girlfriend and she was scared. I told him I’d be there as soon as I could and jumped back in my truck for the drive over. As I got closer and closer to Sarah’s my headache got worse and I felt like I was going to throw up any second.

–Now, before I continue with my actions I’ll tell you what they’d been doing. It was a bunch of girls and Tony at the party and somebody had the bright idea to bring the board. They started playing with it, asking silly questions and generally being very foolish. Of course, anybody who treats a divination tool as a toy is foolish to begin with. Unless you’re very proficient, when trying to contact something from ‘the other side’ you’re basically opening up a door to a dark room and telling everything that’s hidden inside that they should try and get through your door. In some cases, you literally are the door.

Of course, I didn’t think that any of the people present at the party knew enough to actually contact anything real. Most likely, one of the girls was exerting more force over the board than the others there, and handling the answers, as most sessions end up going. But according to Tony, something suddenly took control. They asked who it was and it said that it was a violinist named Aaron Wagner and had been dead since the 1860’s but now lived again in the form of someone they knew… Me.

My ex girlfriend didn’t believe a word of it and started asking questions that only I would know the answer to. It answered them all. She started to get a little freaked out. Especially when it told her that she was the reincarnation of Evelyn Wagner, Aaron’s wife and that they had been separated by bad blood before they died. She pulled her hands away and then was literally hurled up against a wall, where she put her hands to her throat as if something was choking her.—

I pulled up in front of Sarah’s house only a few minutes after I got off the phone with Tony. Waves of nausea assaulted me and I had a very hard time getting across the street and up the front steps, but I made it to the door. Sarah’s a very trusting person and so her door is always unlocked. I didn’t even bother knocking, I just let myself in and upon seeing nobody in the living room and dining room, made for her bedroom, which was at the back of the house.

Something about the place felt all wrong. I’d never experienced anything like it before, and I have what you might call something of a considerable history with things like this. The air was heavy and oppressive and smelled like ozone and decay. The walls seemed like they were closing in and the ceiling felt like it was going to fall down on me at any second. I’ve never before been the least bit claustrophobic, but I was absolutely terrified that the house was going to collapse on me. The feeling got even worse when I reached the door to Sarah’s room. Her room has white painted walls and a very large frosted glass light fixture on the white ceiling. Normally her bedroom is a very bright place. Despite being well lit, however, her room was dark, as if something were keeping the light out. My ex girlfriend was up against the wall, turning blue and holding her hands at her throat.

I don’t recall actually doing anything. And to this day, I don’t know if I could intentionally repeat whatever steps I took to clear my head, but as I crossed over the threshold into the bedroom, the darkness pushed away from me, like I had a bubble of light around me and was filling the room with it. My ex’s hands dropped to her side and she took a deep, gasping breath and slid down to sit on the floor. I walked to the board, which was still active, even though nobody was touching it anymore. I grabbed the indicator and with a great deal of effort on my part, forced it to ‘goodbye’ and then flipped the board upside-down. At that instant I heard two noises that did not come from anything physically in the house. I distinctly heard a mirror breaking. It wasn’t the sound of a window or a drinking glass. For whatever reason, I knew for certain that it was a mirror, shattering into a thousand pieces. At the same instant, I heard a terrible scream of “NO!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Whatever it was that screamed, I can guarantee that it wasn’t a human voice. I don’t know what it was, and I have never encountered anything like that again. My ex was ok after a few minutes, but remained very shaken. To this day, she won’t talk about the party or what happened there. In fact, of all the others that were there, only Tony and a girl named Cindy can actually recall anything unusual. Tony has total recall and Cindy remembers that my ex was talking to ‘me’ from a past life. That’s it. None of the others remember anything.

The party wrapped up shortly after my arrival and I took my ex home where she went right to sleep and stayed in bed for like three days. In retrospect, I’m half tempted to say that she overreacted to the situation and gave herself a panic attack. She was always a little bit on the dramatic side, but I can’t explain the rest of it away. This wasn’t the first time some of my friends fucked up by doing something stupid with an Ouija board. Nor was it the last. But it sure was the freakiest.

–grimore–

Sometime around the turn of the last century, Stump Falls was a happy little town teaming with industry. Of course, all this changed in the 70’s when businesses realized that they could get more labor for less pay out of underdeveloped nations where people would work for pennies a day. Needless to say, having most of the major employers pull out left a gaping hole in the economy and didn’t make for many jobs. This meant that, rather than stay at home and work in the mill like their fathers before them, most of the younger people would get the hell out of town the second they graduated from high school and head out looking for work in a bigger town. Going off to college would assist many a frustrated Stumper and most of my friends took full advantage of higher learning. But alas, I could not afford college. Not seeing any employment opportunities in my future without it, I decided to join the Army Reserve to help pay the bills.

This is a decision that I have since reconsidered many, many times in the years since I signed the papers. My time in the service coincided with an emotional breakdown and on top of that, I had more than my fair share of difficulties with the chain of command. I spent time in and out of the active Army, bouncing back and forth between there and the Reserves before finally finishing up a Spec4 and putting the uniform away. (Or so I thought!) I’d had good times and bad times. I learned a skill that got me a decent job in the civilian sector. I made some very good friends and grew as a person. Even considering my recent re-activation after nearly four years out of active service, I’d say that my time in uniform was a good thing and I’m a better person for it.

However, I think I could have done without cold weather training in the winter of 99.

I was having some serious problems at home. Things were beginning to reach a boiling point with my super fundie family and I was a few steps away from getting kicked out of the house. I was also pretty sure that my girlfriend was cheating on me and was really tired of the whole situation and needing to escape for a while. I was looking for any excuse to get out of town, and jumped at the opportunity to participate in a voluntary exercise that would take me up north to play in the snow for a week. So in the wee hours of the morning, like shortly after 2:00 am or so, I packed up and drove out to the reserve center, where I met up with my unit. Most of my detachment had signed up for this training mission and so I had my regular team, which was nice as I got along with all of them pretty well.

The team consisted of: Assistant Squad Leader and Commo Chief, PFC Rammark, PFC Keller -who’s actual job at the unit I’ve forgotten, My buddy Cadet Reagan -he was our ROTC brat and is currently 1st Lt. Reagan and somewhere in Iraq, and last but not least, we had PV2 Matt Dyllard who was a cook. These three soldiers were my team when we were out in the field, assisting me in all things communications related. I’m not sure why I got this random sampling of personnel assigned to me. Maybe it was for cross training or something like that. None of them knew a thing about radios when the commo shop opened up, but I soon fixed that. Since nothing ever fucking broke, I had plenty of time to teach my team the ins and outs of the SINCGARS secure radio system as well as basic computer troubleshooting and we soon operated like a well oiled machine.

Working as well as we did together, our truck was soon packed up and we were ready to convoy it up to the fort. The trip was very long and boring, but made a little bit better by Reagan’s portable CD player and speakers. Also, the fact that we were all smokers made it easier. While you’re not technically allowed to smoke in military vehicles, as long as you don’t make a mess, it’s generally overlooked. After four hours in the driver’s seat though, I was ready to turn the reigns over to my assistant driver and relax in the questionable comfort of a seat cushion that I’m pretty sure is designed to act as additional armor as well as cause hemorrhoids. I spent the next few hours trying to coax the heater to find a happy middle range somewhere between ‘off’ and ‘hell’. I didn’t have much luck. But that’s what happens when you’re in the reserves or the guard. Your equipment doesn’t always work right.

People aren’t kidding when they say that the reserve component is the stepchild of the military. We get the Regular Army’s castoffs. We get their old weapons, their old vehicles, and sometimes their old training installations. We also get the shit end of the stick when it comes to housing on a base. While I was active duty, I got to live in pretty nice two man apartments or at the very worst, a small single room in a barracks. However, every time I’ve gone for a special assignment or two weeks training with the reserves, I’ve been housed in some of the most deplorable conditions I’ve ever seen. I have friends that would rather sleep in a fighting position with a shelter half (kind of a half tent) over them than sleep in the barracks that are generally assigned to reserve and guard troops.

The fort that was our host for that week of training in ’99 made sure to make us feel welcome. We were given one of the worst billets I’ve ever been in. We were located at the far end of the base, about 20 minutes away from pretty much fucking everything. It was two story structure with shingles missing from the roof. Some of the windows on the second floor were just plain missing and had been replaced with plywood. And it didn’t look like it had happened any time recently. Despite the fact that this training had been planned for over three months, nobody had prepared the barracks for us. The building had been built sometime prior to World War II, and I don’t think it had seen regular maintenance since. Well okay maybe once within the last ten years or so. The floor was thick with dust, and cobwebs hung from the overhead light fixtures, most of which were empty. We didn’t have power. We didn’t have heat. This was going to be fun. According to Dyllard, the DFAC (or dining facility) wasn’t in much better shape.

The colonel was pissed as all hell, but there wasn’t much he could do aside from set us to cleaning the place up while he went and raised a small shitstorm at brigade HQ about the building not having any heat or power… or running water as it would later turn out. Fortunately, cleaning out a barracks that hasn’t been inhabited in years makes for decent exercise and we were all pretty warm. After about three hours, we finally got a maintenance team to come down. After getting the power switched on and getting water flowing again (the building had been winterized so the pipes wouldn’t freeze.) they dicked around in the furnace room for like an hour before getting things working again.

There was a tremendous booming sound as the furnace kicked on, followed by a muted roar as the stale, dusty air started moving. As the barracks warmed up, it became apparent that something had died in the ducts. And rotted there. Great. And the maintenance team didn’t have time to fish through the ducts to find it. Great. So we worked with pt shirts tied around our faces while Sgt Booth ran to the PX to buy as much air freshener as she could find. Meanwhile, having a clean barracks, we started putting the place together. Since there weren’t many individual rooms, we would be sleeping in two open 30 man bays. This meant that the females would have one floor and the males would have the other. The males won the coin toss and we got the first floor. So we started putting the bunks together. Literally. All the beds had been disassembled and the pieces stacked neatly in one room at the far end of the first floor. All the mattresses had been piled in a room at the other end. It looked like our barracks had been the site of some institutional punishment. I’ve done my share of moving dirt from place to place and back again, so finding something like this didn’t surprise me. However, it was really annoying to us to have to build our bunks and then drag mattresses to them. Within about an hour however, we had the downstairs bay set up and were ready to move upstairs to where we’d house the female soldiers.

I was in the middle of the stairwell, dragging a mattress up to the second floor when I got nauseous. At first, I thought nothing of it. After all, I’d been breathing dead animal for a while. I don’t exactly have a stomach of steel, so it was hardly surprising that I was feeling sick to my stomach. I kept dragging the mattress up the stairs though, and finally reached the second floor. Everything there was just completely wrong. I don’t know how to explain it better than that, just that my first impression of the place was that nothing there was right. Just going by sight alone, I’m not sure how I would have come to this conclusion as most of the second floor was a virtual twin to the first floor. In fact, the only real difference between them was that instead of an electrical closet, the second floor had an enlarged laundry room. I didn’t really stick around to enjoy the view on that trip though. Even if I had been feeling ok, I still had more mattresses to haul up before we’d be set for the night and everybody could hit the rack.

So I dealt with my stupid stomach and my disorientation and kept hauling mattresses up with the rest of the group. Every time I got to that halfway point, my stomach knotted up on me and I really had to rough it up the rest of the steps. Now granted, this could be a result of breathing in the stench of an animal corpse while trying to cart a mattress up a narrow flight of stairs, but even when resting for a moment on the second floor, I felt heavy and constricted as if the air pressure was much greater than normal. I was having difficulty filling my lungs and was taking huge, gasping breaths. Of course, I was a smoker so there’s nothing terribly special about my being out of breath.

After nearly two hours, we got the women all squared away. By this point, most of us were worn the fuck out and ready to hit the sack. We’d all had a very long day and would have an early morning before attending our first class on cold weather training. However,I have a hard time sleeping at night. I’m a night owl and it takes me a good while to settle down, even after a long day, so I volunteered for the first watch that night. The first hour of my watch was uneventful for me. I wandered around the first floor, poking my nose into those rooms I hadn’t had the chance to see earlier and generally just making sure that no fires were starting or unauthorized persons were trying to enter the barracks.

I joined my counterpart from the female floor outside for a smoke about every fifteen minutes or so. Her name was Jenny Sopak and she was a hot brunette. Who says that all the hot chicks are in the Air Force and Navy? Jenny was having a bad night. Despite the fact that she was wearing her Army issue Parka, she was shaking like a leaf. She told me that she’d been seeing things out of the corner of her eye; things that, when she turned to get a better look, just up and vanished. I told her that she’d been up for nearly 24 hours and would feel a whole lot better when she’d had a few hours and a good Army breakfast.

The second hour of my shift was not so uneventful but still nothing so entirely unusual as to put me on my guard. There was as steady stream of female personnel coming downstairs, ostensibly to bum a light or a smoke off of me. I’d brought a carton, I was set and willing to share. Every single one of them was complaining about the smell of the place and how much trouble they were having breathing. Having experienced it myself, I wrote it all off as the dead animal in the ducts combined with the insane amount of air freshener that Sgt Booth had sprayed up there. The women hung around downstairs, smoking and talking and generally not going back to their bunks. I think that roughly half the female population of the unit was downstairs at one point. My watch ended at 12 and I woke SFC Morris for his turn. I hit my bunk and tossed and turned for nearly an hour, listening to the steady stream of people coming downstairs and heading outside before finally passing out.

The next day dawned grey and chilly. There was no PT because everybody was exhausted from the day before. That was nice of the colonel. I hate running in the cold. Breakfast was a simple affair. We ate T Rations that I’m pretty sure were canned in 1964. In fact, Dyllard told me that we were eating food that was older than he was. Eggs are eggs, however green they look and canned chipped beef actually gets better with age so it wasn’t a bad breakfast. The coffee was strong and plentiful and that’s really all I can ask for at oh five hundred hours.

Our first day of cold weather training was conducted in a classroom environment and was boring as hell and most of us ended up standing to stay awake. The female personnel especially were falling out left and right. From what I understand, none of them got a very good night’s sleep. Training dragged on and on. We stayed awake by walking around the building in the cold air while on our smoke breaks. The day dragged on, but it eventually ended and we got released around 18:00 hrs for chow. Chow was chili mac. I like me some chili mac. mmmmm

That night was more of the same. I volunteered for CQ again, this time taking the 12-2 shift. Once again, the women didn’t stay in their bunks. Now, I’ve spent a fair amount of time in various barracks during my years in service and it’s not unusual to see a few people randomly coming downstairs for a smoke during the course of a night. But I’m pretty sure I watched everybody on the second floor come outside over the course of that two hour watch. Some of them weren’t even smokers. This was pretty unusual, but I didn’t complain about the company and once again shared my smokes freely.

Our training over the course of the next few days was a mix of classroom sessions and field exercises, basically learning how to combat hypothermia for fucking 2 days straight and then strapping on snowshoes and skis and learning how to use them effectively. Being the son of an avid hunter, I’m well acquainted with snowshoes, but I had rarely skied before so that was actually an interesting part of the training. Once we’d mastered both… or at least stopped falling down every ten minutes, we went to the firing range to learn how to fire while on skis and snowshoes. Sadly, this didn’t last anywhere near long enough. I love to shoot the M16. I could do it all day long. But it was cold out so I suppose I can understand why they didn’t want us staying outside ALL day.

In fact, as it turns out I probably shouldn’t have stayed out in the cold as long as I had. I got sick. It was one of those weird combination stomach and head colds that just completely knocks me on my ass for a few days. I ended up spending the next day at the Troop Medical Clinic, having some foreign exchange doctor diagnose my illness and prescribe me some cepacol for the non-existent coughing and some Motrin for the headaches. I love Army medicine. I broke my foot once and the doc gave me a 60 day supply of 800 mg Motrin. Two weeks later, I finally got me some X-rays. But that’s a different story. The point is, I was sick and laid up in my bunk for the next two days, missing the Field Training Exercise. I spent those two days dozing in and out with a high fever. I vaguely remember my section Sgt checking up on me a couple times and my team asking me for my keys so they could get into the commo locker. (We had new radios that didn’t lock into the mounting bracket in the trucks and so I had to lock them up in a foot locker that we stored in the barracks.)

I came to when everybody was coming back from the field. It was somewhere around 8 pm or so. I talked to the colonel for a few minutes and learned that my team had kept everybody in comms the whole time. I was very proud of them. Apparently the whole unit had done very well during the training and most of them were going out on the town. Being that I wouldn’t be heading out with everybody, I volunteered for a four hour watch on CQ,-or Charge of Quarters- so that my friend Staff Sgt Miller could take off with the guys. The way I figured it, I’d just slept for two days straight and wouldn’t be passing out anytime soon.

After commiserating with the boss and getting the short list of people who weren’t going to hit the town, I realized that I was starved and dug through my pack for an MRE. (To anybody considering military service, remember that the vegetarian MRE’s taste the best but have shitty desserts. They’re also a really great thing to have in your car in case you get stuck in a 6 hour gridlock while visiting a major city, but that’s a different story.) While I was waiting for my cheese tortellini to heat up, I pulled on my parka and stepped outside for a smoke with the few people that would be hanging out with me that evening.

PFC Mary Keller and my ROTC brat Reagan were still there, as was Sgt Booth. Everybody else had booked it for the comforts of town. As anybody who’s served or grew up in a military household can tell you, most of the towns around military bases are filled with bars, tattoo parlors, pawn shops, and -in the fun states- strip bars. The quality of these establishments is generally not that great, but when a bunch of soldiers come in from the field (even from a 2 day ftx) they don’t care how posh the place is; they just want to get out and get drunk. So they were going to have a fun night.

The four of us who stayed back broke out a deck of cards and played some pitch and talked for about an hour or so. The conversation ranged all over the place but kept coming back to how glad Keller and Booth would be to go home and how they finally got some sleep while on the ftx. Every time this came up, Reagan would nod sagely, like he knew all. Despite being loggy from too much sleep and only semi-lucid from whatever the hell cold I’d picked up, I wasn’t so out of it that I couldn’t put two and two together and realize that there was something going unsaid.

This unsaid something didn’t stay silent for very much longer.

After Reagan and I swept Keller and Booth for the third game straight, Keller decided she needed to pee and asked if she could use the latrine on the male floor. I honestly didn’t care but Booth said she’d go upstairs with her and so, the two of them went together. Absently, I followed their footsteps up the stairwell and down the hall to the latrine. I was in the middle of asking Reagan if he wanted to go smoke when I heard what sounded like the footfalls of a good number of people. The were coming from the far end of the second floor and making for where I knew the latrine to be. As I listened, I also started to hear a thumping noise, as if somebody was banging a fist against Reagan had heard this too and he was already standing up and moving to the stairs.

Now, I’m not sure what Reagan was expecting, but I had it in my head that some of the women had decided to hang back and I hadn’t been made aware of it. This was kind of annoying as it wasn’t a normal night, so the regular charge of quarters rules didn’t really apply and we wouldn’t have regular watches. Of course, that’s why I had the list of personnel who were staying behind, so that everybody was accounted for. Now, I was just a PFC but I was the CQ till Booth took over and that technically put me in charge. So I was ready to start yelling at whoever was upstairs.

I followed Reagan to the stairwell, letting him yell out, “Male on the floor!” to announce our presence as he reached the top. “WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU!? Woah, what!” I bolted up the stairs. Right as I hit the middle of the stairwell, my nausea returned, as did the oppressive feeling that the air itself was heavy and somehow charged. Reagan was standing just outside the doorway and staring down the hall, a look of disbelief on his face. I pushed through my nausea and joined him at the top step. “I didn’t really believe them, but I just saw it for myself.” he whispered hoarsely.

“What did you see, man?”

He stood, transfixed and refused to take his eyes of some spot down the hall and pointed to the wall nearly at the end of the hallway. At that point, Booth and Keller came out of the latrine, faces white and eyes darting.

“Please tell me you just banged on the bathroom door?” That was Keller. Booth was busy staring at Reagan and turning to follow his gaze down the hall. Keller turned to look too. “Reagan what are you staring at? Did you see it?” He took a deep breath and told us exactly what he’d seen.

After he announced our arrival on the floor, Reagan looked down the hall toward the latrine and had seen what can only be described as a shadow person. He said that it was about man-sized and pitch black as if it was sucking up the light. He said that it had been standing at the door to the latrine and despite it having no discernible features, Reagan said that when he yelled at it, he could see a change in the head shape as if it turned to look at him. Also, it wasn’t like an actual shadow on the wall, but something standing there, next to it. He said that the shadow person turned away from him and then walked a few doors down from the latrine and simply passed through a closed door.

Booth grabbed his arm excitedly and whispered how the female troops had all been seeing these things for the last week. That they would wake up in the middle of the night to find these things wandering around the bay and leaning over their bunks, occasionally shaking the beds and banging on the walls. All in all, the women felt vaguely threatened by the things, but how exactly does one report that you’re afraid to sleep in your barracks because of the shadows and some random noises?

You just plain don’t do it because you’d get laughed out of the unit. Apparently the female personnel had discussed it at length and decided that they were just going to gut it out for the remainder of the training and then forget all about it when we left. That sounded like a good idea to me and I was all for going back downstairs and leaving the shadow thing alone. Knowing that there was something odd going on there, it made sense why I got nauseous on the stairs and that the air on the second floor felt heavy. And I was not in any kind of mood to deal with anything remotely paranormal just then. I convinced everybody to head back downstairs and ignore what Reagan had seen, hoping to just ignore it and then go home.

We trooped back downstairs and this time I was waiting for the heavy air to dissipate and for my stomach to return to normal. The last few times I’d come back down the stairs, I felt perfectly fine after passing through the middle of the stairwell. No such luck this time. The heavy, charged feeling carried on downstairs and well into the bay. And my stomach? Well, I could blame my random illness for the way my stomach felt. Or perhaps the MRE I’d eaten earlier. But somehow, I just don’t think there’s any way I could blame good Army chow for the churning and knotting going on in my guts.

Everybody else seemed to be picking up on the change of atmosphere downstairs also. We moved the card table from the common area just outside the bay to one of the small rooms that must have been a squad leader’s bunk or an office or something in times past and nervously set up for another round of pitch. We left the door open so that we could see the main door and also the doorway to the stairwell. By unspoken agreement, we played in near silence; all of us listening for a hint of movement from Reagan’s shadowy friend. We were all intently straining our ears when the door flew open and banged against the outside wall.

I’d like to say that I was the only one that didn’t jump, but I have to admit that it scared me pretty good. It wasn’t a ghost or a shadow person, though. It was Spc. Jenny Sopak. She said that she’d been out at town and just started feeling really crappy so she decided to come back to barracks and lay down. She gave Booth and inquiring look and Booth told her that Reagan and I knew what was going on and that whatever was going on, it was still going on that night. Jenny sighed and told me that she wasn’t going to go upstairs alone. I offered up my bunk for her to nap on till some of the other females came back or till Booth and Keller were ready to go upstairs. She thanked me and went out into the bay. We continued to play cards in silence, freezing at the occasional bump or hurried footsteps coming from upstairs. We’d all make eye contact and wait for whatever it was to start heading for the stairwell. That never happened. Or if it did, they didn’t make any noise about it. It was somewhere around midnight when Jenny screamed.

Keller was closest to the door and so she was out in the hall first, with me right behind. Reagan and Booth took up the rear. Running into the bay was like getting caught right around the middle by an invisible rope. It was almost as if I’d been punched or kicked. I nearly fell down, it was that much of a shock to my system. Once we were passed the threshold however, the going got a little easier and we were able to fight our way through the heavy air and into the bay.

Booth hit the lights and only about half of them actually lit. In the sudden light, the man standing over Jenny looked up. But it wasn’t a man. And it didn’t have a face. And oh Jesus-fuck, it was definitely looking right at us. Christ. It looked back down at Jenny, who by this point was sobbing quietly and curled up in the fetal position. This faceless thing had hands. And it was reaching down at her. Christ, I was not up for this.

I hastily uttered a prayer to my goddess, seeking protection for all of us – specifically Jenny- and plunged forward. As I got closer, I could see that it was pretty ill-formed and that the edges of its body weren’t very well defined. There almost seemed to be tendrils of black fog whisping off of it. After about five steps, I ran into another invisible rope and got stopped in my tracks. The shadow man was about to touch Jenny’s face.

“HEY!”

It looked back up at me and made some kind of murmuring noise that just made my skin crawl. The best description I can come up with for the way it sounded is as if somebody was tied up and gagged and screaming through their gag… from under water. Kind of this ‘mu mu mu mu mu mu mu mu’ sound that seemed to hang in the heavy air. Ugh. It looked back down at Jenny and once again reached toward her face. I lunged forward, fighting through waves of gut wrenching nausea. “Hey motherfucker, leave her alone!” Once again, it stopped reaching for her and jerked its arm in my direction. I don’t know if I simply stumbled because I flinched or what, but it felt like a strong gust of wind came across my body and I nearly lost my footing.

Reagan caught my shoulder and steadied me as I set my feet firmly on the ground.

I once again called out to my goddess, and with her aid, cast a circle of protection about myself. Say what you will about placebo effect and power of suggestion and crazy moon religion, I felt 100% better the instant I did that. My head cleared, my nausea left me and that heavy charged feeling in the air was reduced to a vaguely electronic buzz. I advanced on the shadow man and crossed the remaining space between me and Jenny in moments. I pulled her out of the bunk and passed her back to Reagan and started backing out of the bay.

The shadow stood there, regarding us for a moment and then started mu mu mu mu mu-ing at us, in a rather frantic tone of… voice, I guess. I backed away from it, trying to push my circle out to include everybody else but just couldn’t manage it. It took a step toward me, passing through the bunk as if it weren’t even there. The way the thing moved was crazy. Its actual movements seemed jerky, almost like watching an old film that was set to a strange frame rate, or maybe some really awkward stop motion, but somehow it seemed to glide at the same time.

I kept backing up and the thing kept making that fucked up murmuring noise at me, suddenly raising pitch and changing tempo, so that it was no longer a steady mu mu mu mu, but more of a prolonged sound each time it… spoke. As I slowly stepped backward, I became aware that my nausea was creeping back and the electric buzzing was getting stronger. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed movement off to my left. Unwilling to really take my eye off the thing in front of me, I told Booth to check nine o’clock. She yelled something I can’t quite recall about ohmygoditsanotherone and right at that moment, I caught something else moving, just inside my peripheral vision on the right. Fuck that.

I yelled something about making for the trucks and we tore ass out of the bay and then out the front door with Reagan dragging poor Jenny Sopak behind him. We all piled into Booth’s Humvee and slammed the (canvas) doors. Booth flipped the starter switch and nothing happened. Now granted, it was a cold night and diesel engine needs to warm up first because gelled fuel doesn’t work so well in the cold. It can some times take five or so minutes before a truck will heat up enough to start. That was one long five minutes and we sat there in the freezing cold, waiting for the barracks door to bang open again. It never happened. The truck started up and we took off.

Just off post, there’s a 24 hour diner. And that’s where we went. Booth called the senior female officer on her cell phone and basically told her that we weren’t going back to barracks till the sun came up and that we’d be running the CQ desk from the diner, and how if she could let the colonel know that whatever had just happened at the barracks, it wasn’t kosher and we didn’t feel safe there. The old man ended up being cool with it and after sunrise that morning, we went in and packed up our gear. Thank the gods this happened on the last day of training.

My little group spent the rest of the night drinking coffee and smoking and waiting for the unit to pretty much assemble at the diner. We talked quietly about what had happened and I answered as many questions as I could about what I think that thing was. While it had most of the features of a typical shadow person, it sure as hell wasn’t behaving like one. In my experiences, I would have to say that this thing was intelligent. It knew we were there. It interacted with us. And it didn’t appear to actually be bound to one spot in the barracks. If I had to classify this thing, I would call it a demonic haunt. Not in the sense that it’s a fallen angel from the Bible, but rather a malevolent entity seeking to do harm. This thing was one of the worst that I’ve ever encountered and I’d rather not bump into anything like it again.

I was back up to that base a number of times over the next few years, but didn’t have any reason to go near that end of the base till sometime in 2001. I’m not sure when they did it, but the barracks had been torn down. Nothing stands in its place except the concrete slab from the foundation. Good riddance. I don’t think the beings that we encountered there were necessarily tied to the actual structure, so I don’t know how much good demolishing the barracks did, but seriously. Fuck that place.

Brandford

This one was told to me by a guy at work. I can’t verify it, but the guy was never one for BS stories or anything like that.

There’s a pretty famous hotel/restaurant in a town next to mine, right on the beach. It’s big, old, and supposedly a couple people have died there. Jay worked in the kitchen of said hotel. I think he said that someone had told him a couple of ghost stories when he first started there. Obviously nothing happened until this particular night.

Most kitchen workers didn’t get out before midnight because the restaurant was open late and the managers were very picky about cleanliness. Jay was mopping the last section of the kitchen which was somewhat seperated from the rest. It wasn’t even really kitchen anymore because it was a hallway near storage areas, etc. It ran along the back of the building, and at the end were the walk-in coolers. There were no exits on either side of the hall, just rooms on one side. So picture a long hall, with one exit and a dead end where the coolers were.

The lights were very dim, and Jay had made it about three quarters of the way down this hall. Someone had left the lights on in the coolers, which Jay noticed because there were circular windows in each door. When he looked up to go turn the light off, there was something looking at him through the window in the freezer, just staring. He dropped the mop and ran, and found all of his coworkers in the kitchen where they should have been. No one was missing, and when they all went back to investigate, nothing was there.

The hallway exit was in plain sight of all of them the whole time.

VampireRobot

i don’t have any proper “stories” to tell, but i figure my info is creepy enough, and is 100% real, and since this is a ghost story thread, i might as well share the info.

It’s about my home. It’s where my parents live now, since i have been living out of state for a few years now going to college. i still go back and visit on holidays and such, but i’m busy with school, so since i’m an only child, my house is a tri-level filled with only my parents.

as i said, my house is a tri-level. My bedroom used to be upstairs at the end of the hall, but i moved down into the dank, cold basement when i was about 17. The odd thing is, in all my extremely late nights down in the basement, nothing really crazy has happened down there. Everything seems to be centered around a small area at the top of the 2nd floor stairs, in the hallway which leads to bedroom doors and a bathroom door.

Like i said there are no real “stories”, just incidents. it started when i was about 16, and still living in the bedroom upstairs. Right next to the room that was my bedroom is my parents’ bedroom, which has a connecting door to the bathroom. This bathroom has two doors, one being the mentioned door into my parents’ room, and the other being a door directly into the hallway at the top of the stairs. One night i woke up in the middle of the night on a school night to hear the bathroom door opening and slamming. I figured it was my mom having another alcohol episode where she pukes all night and makes my dad wake up to help her drunk ass out every time she pukes. So i figured my dad was getting irritated about having to do that crap and was slamming the door while my mom puked in the bathroom. Then the door kept on slamming and opening, and i opened my eyes to see that there were no lights on in the hallway or any light visibly coming out of the bathroom. so i listened to the door opening and slamming a few more times before saying out loud while still laying in bed, “Mom?? are you ok??” And she answered back, from her bedroom in the dark, “Uhh yes. is that you? are you in your room?” to which i answered back, puzzled, “yes. what’s going on in the bathroom? what’s dad doing?” and she said, “dad’s right here.. i thought that was you messing with the doors.” Around now the doors stopped slamming.

I was a little freaked out but too sleepy to think “GHOSTS!” or anything, so i got up out of bed, lazily questioning my mom out loud, “whaaat??…” I walked into the bathroom and turned the light on to see the door connecting into parents’ bedroom slowly creaking shut, even making the CRRRREAK noise. I sensed something odd in the air and realized something odd was going on. I thought maybe the cats had been dicking around in the bathroom having a cat fight and bumping against the door or something, when i looked up into my parents’ bedroom through the doorway to see our two cats perched on the bed next to eachother staring wide-eyed at me in the darkness with their ears perked, with the light from inside the bathroom making their eyes do that creepy shining-in-the-dark thing that cat eyes do. I asked my mom about them and she said that they had been laying right there on the bed the whole time, and my mom had apparently been laying awake watching the bathroom door from her bed opening and slamming shut violently for about five minutes straight. so i guess i woke up at the tail end of it. I still suspected my dad was doing something and i said, “well maybe it was dad?” I was thinking that he had done something in the bathroom and was now laying there in bed next to her asleep, since i could make out his outline in the darkness on their bed. but he was actually awake, and replied to me in a gruff voice something about how yes, something unexplainable really did just happen, and he doesn’t know what’s going on.

i have learned over time that my dad likes to act tough, especially when it’s concerning these type of odd ghostly things, and pretend that he’s not scared. He does this by saying that he just doesn’t know what’s going on while putting on a bad “it doesn’t affect me so i don’t care” act. But i think really he’s just keeping quiet on it because he is afraid that if he talks about it worse things will happen. it’s actually kind of weird now that i really think about it. he acts as if he knows more than he lets on, and gives gruff answers about everything concerning this type of thing and pretends like he’s not interested, while it’s clear he’s nervous about it.

Anyhow, that was that for the night, and i went back to bed, still not really putting together the conclusion that, “GHOSTS ARE IN MY HOUSE!” but still pretty uneasy about it.

–

a few weeks later, there was apparently some type of ruckus that happened in the same general area of the house, right at the top of those stairs or in that bathroom in the middle of the night that i slept through, and my parents didn’t. Went downstairs in the morning to find this really old antique, gigantic, glass, oval portrait of my grandma when she was young, in a place it shouldn’t have been. It had been previously hanging up on the wall in that upstairs hallway, but that morning it was resting, right-side-up, propped against the bottom step. that thing was a big old heavy antique, and made mostly out of glass. if that thing managed to fall down the stairs in any capacity, it would have broken, chipped, or completely shattered. it most certainly would not have been sitting propped up against the bottom step. but that’s what it was doing, in perfect condition. The crazy thing is that grandma is not dead – she’s still alive even today. However just to be sure, directly after finding that and realizing it was a bit spooky, my mom called my grandma (her mom) to make sure she was ok. My mom is a bit of a worry-wart, anxious-annie, neurotic-nancy, and every other neurotic little thing you can think of. so she was starting to panic about the possibility of a ‘presence’ in our house.

–

there were, and still constantly are, instances of the pets battling over the rights to sleep right in the hallway at the top of the stairs, and always doing that cat-sees-a-ghost-thing where they chase nothing in the middle of the night and stare at thin air. there’s also a spot on the wall that is in the general shape of a vertical 1’x3′ oval right there that is always warm and has progressively gotten darker than the rest of the wall. i guess that might be some type of pipe inside the wall or something, but it’s always warm – winter or summer, whether nobody’s used a drop of water all day or if someone’s taking a shower.

–

then i moved downstairs a few months later (pretty much unrelated, since i still didn’t really think anything too odd was going on, and didn’t really believe that a ghost was in the house). i half-way believed, mostly just to freak my mom out, cause it’s fun.

–

then i never really heard of anything else going on upstairs, which could have been because nothing was going on, or because my parents were keeping quiet about it. anyway, i ended up moving away to school, where i am now. i always kept my little experiences there in the part of my brain reserved for scary stories to tell people who bring up the topic of their house being haunted. i still didn’t totally believe my house had a ghost in it, but i liked telling people about it and feeling creeped out by my own stories sometimes.

Then, i returned home for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and spring break the next year, after telling people that, “i hope something ghosty happens when i’m at home!”

nothing really happened, though. Then i went home for a few weeks in the middle of the next summer. a few nights before i was to leave home again, something happened. I had gone skating that night, and came back late, and my parents were in bed already. i went into the bathroom to take a shower. i was in the bathroom, putting a cd into the cd player and taking off my shirt while the door into the darkened hallway was still open, when i heard a loud thump from out there. i went and looked and found something on the floor. in that hallway, there is some dorky QVC-type “collectible” display thing, which has a rack that holds like 10 different little decorative carved marble egg things, each one depicting a different stage of Jesus’ crucifixion. it’s arranged with three eggs per shelf, with one being right on top. however, the one that had fallen to the floor was from the middle of the bottom row, which didn’t make much sense. even creepier is that it was the one depicting the actual death of Jesus on the cross. i picked it up, realizing something kind of odd was going on because the house was as still as a house in boise, idaho is in the middle of the night, but this thing managed to fling off the shelf and onto the ground several feet away. i noticed that this little decorative cross that stuck out on top of it was bent from the fall, so i tried to bend it back only to find that it was made of a totally unbendable hard material, and it snapped right off. i felt like i was accidentally committing sacrilege or something, and i freaked out a little bit. i put the egg back on the shelf and tried to telepathically tell whatever was there that i acknowledged its presence and that i want it to stop trying to freak me out, because it was late and i needed to take a shower. i was a little freaked out but really only doing that to cover my ass JUST in case something really was there.

from then, i have seen nothing happening. it’s been like a year and a half since that incident, and i have been home and back here numerous times. the only noteable odd occurence that has happened on two of my trips back home is that i have gotten REALLY bad stomach flu TWO times at that house. I never get that sick – i’m a really healthy guy. but i seem to have a tendency towards stomach problems at home. what’s even worse is that i’m an emetophobic, and i haven’t fully done an all-out puking since i was like 10. but the only two times i’ve sort-of, part-way, kinda dry-heaved spit and puke in the past 11 years has been when i returned home on break. this probably doesn’t have anything to do with ghosts or anything, but it is possible. cause i’m like the last dude on earth that people would suspect of getting sick to my stomach. i have a rock solid stomach.. except when i’m in that house.

–

i had pretty much dismissed all of this stuff recently, even while reading all the ghost story threads. then, i talked to my mom yesterday and she told me that they were talking to one of the neighbors at the moment about the house being haunted. my ears perked up. apparently, starting just recently, the “activity” has increased dramatically. my mom is a little chicken and won’t give me details. i think it’s because she thinks if she talks about it, the ghosts will hear it and get angry and make things even worse or something. anyway, she won’t give me details. all she’ll tell me is that, “eehh.. ahmm… well, there are .. like, sounds..” “sounds?! what kind?” “well, it sounds like maybe, an animal.. or an animal making a noise.. or something falling over or a loud BANG.. just different noises..” “well, if it sounds like an animal, it PROBABLY IS!”, i say. “but when it happens, i’m always downstairs on the couch, with our pets sitting right next to me. they always perk their ears up and they just start staring towards the top of the stairs every time some noise happens.” she says. So it’s sort of odd to me. she said it happens “VERY often lately”, and that her and my dad have started to learn to just ignore it. She said she gets the sense that “whoever is here is trying to make us aware that they are here, and that we are sort of co-existing with eachother.” she has hinted that it’s not just sounds, but other stuff is going on, but won’t talk about it. i called my mom again today when she was at work, to try to get more info out of her since she wasn’t at home. she wouldn’t tell me much, but she mentioned that this morning when she was leaving for work she noticed that my senior portrait that is hanging in that hallway was turned all crooked and hanging practically sideways on the wall, so she corrected it and “hoped everything was ok”. i’m kind of freaked out now. i probably won’t really know all of what’s goign on, until i go back this summer. i’m actually starting to believe that something might really be going on in that house. or at least at the top of the stairs.

Yodzilla

About a week ago, my Mom and I were alone in our house together. My Dad was out taking his weekly night course for his Master’s Degree and my sister was visiting her boyfriend. The only other person left in the house was my cat Frisky and no, I did not name him that.

Our house is a standard two story home with attic crawl space and sizeable basement in the suburbs of Delaware. I was in my room upstairs trying in vain to clean some of the post graduation shit up and my Mom was in her’s watching TV with the cat. All of the sudden we heard something banging around downstairs. I heard my Mom get up and yell “hello” to my Dad. When no one answered she said “Steph?” thinking that maybe my sister had come home early. it was then that she walked rather quickly to my room.

“Yodzilla.” she said. “Go check downstairs. Make sure all of the doors are locked.” Uhh…sure. I got up and made my way to the top of the stairs. Frisky was staring down with with his eyes wide open, ears perked, and tail fluffed. The sounds of someone wandering around downstairs continued. Dammit, why couldn’t I be one of those nerds that keeps swords and shit in their rooms. All I had were those miniature baseball bats they give out at ball parks. I decided that I’d have to be man enough to face whomever was down there with my fucking fists and feet of fury.

My Mom and Frisky watched me in wide-eyed silence as I descended the staircase. I crept down slowly as to announce my presence any more than necessary. Realizing this was the incorrect course of action (according to various home safety guides) I hit the bottom landing yell out “Hello? Is someone there?”. No more noises. The only sounds I hear are coming from the TV upstairs. Probably That 70’s Show or something equally horrifying.

Having gained a bit of confidence I ventured further into my house. The front door at the foot of the stairs was still double locked. No one got in through here. The dining room was empty and dark so I flipped the light switch on. Nothing here either. The kitchen was also devoid of life save for some rather industrious ants that were attacking a dropped piece of melon rind. I made a mental note to deal with them later.

It was then that I went further back towards the office. The garage door was still close as was the door leading in from the car hole. The back door was also deadbolted. I ventured back through the kitchen and peered down the steps into the darkness of the basement. I flip the switch at the top of the steps and listen. Nothing. As I turn my back to check the porch door I hear my Mom coming downstairs to lend backup. She joined me in the living room as I was checking the locked on the porch door. Still fastened tight.

As I turned to say something to my Mom a lound thud emanated from below us. It sounded like something heavy hitting a carpeted floor. If you’ve ever been to a party where a fat guy passes dead out you know what I mean. I sprinted to open basement door and almost trip over Frisky who’s peering intensely down the stairs. “Well, go see what it is.” I said to him. The cat gives me the normal feline “Fuck you. You’re expendable.” look. I hadn’t taken more than one step down into the basement when two more thuds fire off in rapid succession. The second one was much louder than the first and seemed to come from directly under the stairs. Fuck. Forgetting my fears I charge into the main area of the basement. Nothing. Silence. The only way of getting out or into the basement is either though the steps I’ve taken or from the storm door leading to the back yard. Not only is the storm door fastened, but it’s also propped shut by a 2×4. There is no way anyone could have gotten out and locked it back up like this.

Noticeably shaken I return back upstairs and turn the lights back off. I hear one more softer thump come from behind me and I quickly close the door. After that there was nothing. My Dad returned home a little more than an hour later and searched the house with me. There was no sign of any animals or anything being disturbed or moved about. My Mom is still kind of concerned about what happened that night but laughs it off easily. I’m more curious than anything, but I’ll be sure to keep my eyes and ears open from now on.

Cleric

Not really a ghost story, per se, but a cemetary story:

I and my friends Kelly, Kris, Michelle, and a guy friend from campus, Mack, all decided that we were going to to to the cemetary close to the campus to just look around, hang out, get some fresh air, time in the sun, whatever. There is really nothing to do in my town…

So we’re walking around this cemetary, in broad daylight, looking at tombstones and talking about our plans for funerals when we die. Morbid, yes. We’re standing at the end of one of the rows when Kelly takes a step back. Now, Kelly is not a twig, she’s strong, well-built, etc., and is NOT an easy woman to scare.

We’re still talking when Kris notices that Kelly has this ‘holyshitholyshitholyshit’ look on her face and has gone completely white. She can’t talk and can’t step away. I and Mack grab her arms and pull her forward. She starts hyperventilating and while Michelle makes sure she’s okay, Kris, I and Mack notice that her back foot had landed on one of the graves.

By now, she’s freaking out, talking about how a cold grip like a hand was clamped over her ankle, how it kept her from moving, how when she tried to talk her mouth wouldn’t move but she could hear herself speak. She looked at us, but we were all in black and white and talking and laughing but she couldn’t hear us.

Needless to say, “+5 Hoot of Doom” Kelly was the FIRST one out of the cemetary. Mack and I hung back a little, not really wanting to leave, when I looked back at the grave and I thought I saw a man about chest deep in the ground, leaning forward on his elbows, and I swear to God he waved at me. “Okie dokie, Mack,” I say, not wanting to take my eyes off him for fear of attack, “Leeet’s go.” and we bolt like hell. It took us a while to catch up with the others because, apparently, I stared at the grave for something like 3-5 minutes when I swear I only glanced.

In broad daylight. Heh, I still shiver when I walk by that cemetary.

gramlock

Reading this thread in a big house on my own with thumps from the neighbouring terraces and “Nightmare” by Ronan Hardiman playing really isn’t good for the soul, but goddammit I love these stories. Finally I have something of my own to contibute. Forgive me for this being long but its not about a specific event but rather the whole experience of being in a house where something is happening. It’s not spectacular but it’s enough to creep me out.

My parents’ house is the source of the occurences, and its not the kind of house you’d expect anything from. It’s very new, and no one died in it, the area it was on used to be a farm but nothing bloody has happened there as far as we know. The atmosphere of the house is quite unusual. Sometimes, it’s the most inviting warm comforting place to be, where you can walk anywhere in the house and feel good and not unnerved. At other times it becomes a place where I’ve literally not been able to sleep through fear.

“Dreams”
The only real nightmares I’ve had as a kid at the house have been about the bathroom being haunted. I would always get the same thing, go in and stuff from the room would slowly start moving in the air and swirl around and a voice would yell “Get OUT!” and someone else in the dream would get thrown physically out of the room. I would always try and tell it to fuck off, but I could never get it out and I would either leave and wake up or just wake up. I had similar dreams about other rooms, but all having a connection with the house. One night I managed to get out “Fuck Off” and said it a few times. Everything seemed to come to a head like an orchestra reaching the highest pitch as everything swirled into black and I woke up. I realised the reason I could’nt say the words before was the same reason I’d never been able to beat bullies up in my dreams of a while back, because I was trying to do it in real life as well, but the paralysis you get when dreaming prevented me from doing so properly, and this transfered to the dream. When I managed to say it, the dream never returned. I don’t know if the dreams had anything to do with the house, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

I’m not afraid of the dark, I used to be as a kid but many are. I can sleep without the covers if it’s hot and I wont think anything of it and all manner of things will be well. But sometimes, and more often since I went back there for Easter, I become overwhelmed by unease. As soon as the lights go out, for no reason what so ever I start to feel uncomfortable, and have to wrap myself in my duvet and cover my ears.

I have to do this because I often get the thing where I’m just about to fall asleep and I’ll hear someone very realistically speak in my ear, not an imaginary voice but as if it had actually happened and I always get a shot of adrenaline from that. It doesn’t seem to happen when my ears are covered by the duvet. The idea that this might happen to me only occurs when I’m feeling afraid once the lights go out.

Normally I put this down to irrational fear and when I woke up I’d shrug it off. But it puzzled me why sometimes I would just feel frightened for no reason. Living in the house with my parents as a kid and teenager, this feeling of unease sometimes spread to other parts of the house, depending on the mood. While the bad feeling in my room only happened sometimes, whenever the lounge was dark it was always there, the feeling that something was wrong. When I had appendicitis I had to sleep downstairs so I didnt have to move to much after the op (I didn’t get stiched up so the wound could drain). I spent most of the time in the now dining room which at that time was a games/spare room. The door wasn’t even open but whenever I looked in the direction of the lounge I got that same fear again. Walking up the stairs has often been the same, and hasn’t been helped by the addition of a mirror with a frame of a witch’s head carved out of wood.

“Noises and Breathing”
The house has a habit of being noisy, if the heating comes on one side will heat up first and will creak as the cold side takes its sweet time. But there have been other noises which can’t be explained away like this. The landing upstairs sometimes just creaks for no reason, right by the stairs. Not in the “I’m a house and I creak way”, but in a “Sorry, bub, this one wasn’t me” way. I was hovering between a sceptic and a believer about ghosts, I thought strange things could happen but I wasn’t sure about it being caused by dead people, but I never attributed a ghost to the house, I just thought my imagination was playing up.

The worst thing to specifically happen was the breathing in the spare room. Next to my room upstairs was the main spare room with a comfy double bed in it. I had managed to convince my parents to let me stay in it and use my smaller room for all my stuff. I woke up one night with the same terrible feeling in my stomach, the adrenaline rush and pin pricks of blushing skin when you know something is off. I could hear breathing in the room. I thought it was the sound of my own breathing, but it carried on even when I held my breath. I was terrified but just tried to stay calm, hoped that breathing would be all that would happen and I managed to get to sleep. I woke up in the morning, and the breathing was still there. It was light through the curtains so I was feeling braver and got out of bed. I walked to where I thought the noise was coming from, the corner of my room nearest the stairs. I walked closer, it got louder, until I was right in the corner and the breathing was significant enough that I could say it wasn’t my imagniation. I got out of the room and told my parents, who dismissed it all. They didn’t say I was making it up they just said it wasn’t so. The breathing wasn’t always there, but it never disappeared for good. Having said that, I have yet to hear it again since moving out to Uni and going back to visit.

“Enquiring Mind”
I went back recently for Easter, and took a regular holiday job at my mum’s school where she teaches, doing the deep clean they perform at the end of each term. Towards the end of the clean, I heard the rest of the full time cleaners talk about someone up in the dorms at the top of the main building. I asked who it was and it turns out there is supposed to be a lady up in the dorms who gets restless now and again. They told me about their experiences and true or not they were definately creepy. Even the head of the school and her husband had reportedly had experiences and kept it quiet from the girls so there wouldn’t be a riot everytime it was time for the boarders to go to bed. I saw my mother for dinner in town after work, and I told her about the ghost. She said “Which one?”

I said, “um the lady in Leaden Hall”, and she said “oh yes, I thought you might have meant the one in our house.”

It turns out even my parents now thought there might be something in the house. Apparently they had often heard someone going up and down the stairs and shuffling over the landing even when they’d been the only ones in the house. It’s detached as well, so it wasn’t the neighbours.

“Easter Break”
After that, everything about the noises made sense, whether it was a “spirit” causing it or whatever, something was definately happening and it wasn’t just me going crazy. Everything seemed to centre around the stairs, the lounge had the stair intersecting it going up, the corner of of the spare room was right by them and the study where my Dad had heard someone going up and down the stairs was right next to them.

In a way this made things worse, because your mind can become overactive when you think something might be there and you attribute everything strange to it. There were a couple of things that happened this Easter vacation that I can’t explain though. One night, a cold one so every door and window was shut, the hanging light switch in the bathroom started hitting the wall. It had a fairly hefty ceramic lighthouse on the end, but it kept tapping at the wall, steady, never louder or softer for at least an hour. My room and the bathroom shared a wall, so I could hear it rather well.

A few days later I was in the lounge in an empty house watching T.V. when suddenly there was a huge “BANG” from upstairs. Instantly I got the nasty feeling, but knew I had to investigate, it sounded like I imagined a boiler bursting would sound like. When I got upstairs nothing was out of place, except the spare room door was now shut. I slowly opened it, expecting to get that rush of activity like the mother in Poltergiest when she opens her kids room while trying to get on with everything. No, nothing was wrong inside. The windows were shut and everything was still. I went downstairs worse off than going up.

I don’t know what this qualifies as, everything is rather minor, but it’s not normal. We can all distinguish between “noisy house” and “something else”. It doesn’t seem to affect my parents or my brother that much, and I just get nervous out of anticipation rather than knowing or suspecting it to be supernatural. In a way I want something more substantial to happen just to prove it to myself.

Nazerel

When I was about eleven or twelve years old, I lived in a house located on the very edge of the Atlantic Ocean. It was not difficult to be unnerved by the location, whether it was the brightest day or foggiest night.

It was on a foggy night in February, actually, that my story takes place. While this experience took place approximately thirteen years ago, I remember it quite well. I don’t think I’ll ever forget it.

I awoke to the gentle, but persistent jabbing of my brothers finger digging into my back. We shared a bedroom, with me sleeping in the top bunk of our bunk beds.

“Stephen,” said my brother, still jabbing his finger into my back as I struggled to regain wakefullness. “I think there’s something strange happening.”

This was quite the understatement, for while it took me a moment to realize the meaning of his words, I was strongly shocked by a moment of powerful lucidity, as I saw that indeed, “something strange was happening.”

I’ll try to describe what I saw, but words tend to fail me in every retelling of this story.

I saw faces. More precisely, I saw two distinct faces, only multiplied at least a dozen times, and spaced at least two feet apart throughout the room. The faces were of a young boy and girl, appearing more as neon portraits than anything else. In the background of these “portraits”, I could see what appeared to be trees or bushes of some sort, which swayed in an unperceived wind. There was no uniformity to the locations of these portraits, only that there were none on the ceilings nor on the floor. Also, while the portraits had clearly defined colours(almost to the point of glowing), they also had the appearance of being slightly washed out.

If there was anything comforting about the portraits, it would be that they were smiling. Regardless, my brother and me decided retreat was probably a good idea, and so we left the room in favor of a saner environment.

However, the unusual night did not end after leaving the bedroom. As we entered the downstairs living room, we witnessed a strange light strobe against one wall. I remember it being green, without any real shape or form. Even after turning on the light, the strobe continued for sometime.

My brother and me stayed downstairs for awhile before curiosity overcame us and we began the ascent back to our bedroom. However, we made it only as far as the first step upstairs before we broke into a unified scream. From somewhere above us, appearing to be almost a foot long and made of something darker than the dark of the unlit room, was a…something. I suppose, upon reflection, I would describe it as being spider like, as it hung in the air about a foot above us.

So we screamed and quickly fled back into the living room. A moment later, we heard our father yelling at us to go back to bed. Reluctantly, we did so. Upon returning to our bedroom, the faces had disappeared, and I remember nothing else from that unusual night.

Hida Mahn

That being said, I’m more than a little certain that the house I grew up in was haunted. It was an old four-story lemon-yellow behemoth, built sometime in the 1920’s and built to fucking LAST. It was also creaky as all hell, and had this… feeling about it. Like you were always being watched. Having lived there since I had been born, I didn’t really notice it until I started going to school, and I didn’t feel that way anymore.

You would always hear things in the house too. Creaking, groaning, all the normal things that came with a house that old, along with scratching and banging that I’m sure my young mind exagerrated to the extreme. I suppose it didn’t help that I was having night-terrors at the time, and had this irrational fear of… SOMETHING when I tried getting to bed. Nothing tangible, just something.

The only real, physical experience I had beyond the usual flickers out of the side of my eye was when I was about eight, and using the computer in my parents room one afternoon while they were gone. My parent’s door opened right next to the straircase up to our attic, which was visible through the wrought-iron bannister. Since the stairs were absolutly gigantic (about twice the width of your average staircase) it didn’t have a door, and just opened straight out of the floor into the next story. So, to stop heat from escaping in the winter, we covered the stairs with a huge slab of foam insulation, and propped it up in the summer/spring.

Anyway, I was playing some good old Incredible Machine, having a ball of a time, when I hear something scraping on the metal bannister. I look over just in time to watch the shadow of the insulation start sliding down to cover the stairs. Since this happened once or twice a month when the stick holding it up fell over, I didn’t freak out at first, though the fact that it fell so slowly was kind of creepy. So, I get and start heading to the door, intending to stand it up again and get back to my fun with physics.

Then I hear another slow scraaaaaape… and saw the shadow start to move UP again.

Now, I’m only eight at the time, but I knew enough about the laws of gravity to know that things aren’t supposed to do this. Needless to say, this freaked me out, so being the brave eight-year old I was, I bravely froze in terror for about three seconds before bolting out of the room. After skirting dangerously close to the attic of doom, I about flew downstairs and into the well-lit safety of our sunroom, where I proceeded to shake like a leaf. The freakiest part was that I could hear the sheet scrape its way down the bannister again when I got there. The TV turned up as loud as I could stand blocked out anything after that, though.

My bedroom was just across from those stairs, too

Bozarth

Our downtown area hadn’t fared very well in the economic climate of the early 90’s. Things are better now. There’s restaurants and bars and shops, it’s all very groovy.

However, in the time this story takes place, there was a really decrepid building downtown. Everyone called it haunted, and when you’re a dumb little kid like me and my friends, you have to find out for yourself.

The door to the place was unlocked and we slowly moved through the lobby area. We could already hear booms and clanks. It sounded like a truck was driving by, but inside the walls. I was shaking and having trouble trying to breathe. If this were a movie, I’d by the asthmatic kid in glasses that gets eaten by a werewolf or something. We all made our way to the only door we could see.

We felt our way through the pitch black hallways trying to find even the faintest of lights. The noises were strangely gone. I could feel small hands touching me, but I figured it was just furniture or objects we couldn’t see. They were ice cold though. We somehow found a small room with a broken staircase and old grandfather clock. I was going to shit my pants if that clock rang. Since we all got out of the cramped hallway we spread ourselves out a bit. big mistake.

We needed to regroup and could barely see. We grabbed for each others hands. If we were in a safer situation, we would have called each other queer-baits, but we were in a serious situation. To make sure we had each other we all asked who we had ahold of.

Peirce asked “Whose hand do I have?” I replied.
Scott asked “Whose hand do I have?” My brother replied.
Kyle asked “Whose hand do I have?”

Then a voice bellowed out “MINE!” A face appeared in the middle of us. A contorted, angry face. It glowed yellow and shook about. We ran screaming for the next hallway. The floor was giving out underneath us. We made our way to the basement. The basement! That’s the worst place! I started breathing hard again. Out from the wall, a hulking giant appeared. He grabbed Kyle. He came out of the wall and grabbed Kyle! An ungodly roar filled the room as another giant appeared. We ran for the steps that led to the street, leaving Kyle behind. We kicked the door open and fled. As we got outside, I felt something grab my jacket. It was Kyle. He made it out.

We ran until we got to a far street corner and sat down on the curb. We were all panting and sweating. It was the best Jaycee’s Haunted House ever. Sorry, guys, I’m jealous I’ve never seen a ghost and I wanted to be included. Plus, I figured you guys needed something else besides another nightmare.

Roma

Quick Backstory: About 2 or 3 years back, my Aunt Maria passed away sadly after giving a cesarean birth to her second child (a few weeks after the birth, that is.) from something which was explained to us as similar to a stroke, except a bit different. In what way I’m unsure. It was rather sad in itself.

Story: A work friend of my uncle (husband of Maria) went to a psychic who she had never met. The intention of the meeting with the psychic was to contact her father who had just recently passed away, and whom she had unfinished business with (What exactly I’m unsure)

The psychic begins the meeting. She starts by saying something along the lines of “Ok, your father is in the room with us. As well as your mother, and a much younger lady named Maria, who passed away soon after giving a cesarean birth.”

Apparently the psychic said Maria had joined their meeting to pass on a message of well being to my uncle through my uncle’s coworker. My Aunty had said something along the lines of “I’m not happy with what has happened, but I have come to terms with it” (regarding her death)

The thing that really made it freaky, is the person who met with the Psychic had given no information or anything before their meeting. She had just met the psychic.

My Uncle went in and met with the psychic shortly afterwards, in which Maria attended. They talked for about 4 hours. A lot of the stuff Maria said was slightly off, which made my Uncle rather skeptical. However there was also a lot of stuff said which there’s no doubt only my Uncle and Aunt knew.

After the 4 hour meeting, the psychic refused to charge my Uncle money for the meeting (or charged him such a small amount it wasn’t near worth a profit to the psychic, I can’t remember exactly.)

Although my Uncle remains quite skeptical about it to this day, he seems satisfied that it was a nice meeting to say a final good bye to her.

AlbinoHagfish

My house has had some odd things associated with it. It was built in the 1970s but the land was used before as a Kumeyai indian villiage. The basis for this is the prevalance of old adobe walls in backyards and the local national park’s obsession with the Kumeyai tribe.

Since I was little I’ve been involved with something that lives in my house. It started when I first moved in and was just four years old. The first thing I remember happening involved a really old television set with dials. They had to be on a special setting to recieve cable and were always being knocked onto static. My parents blamed me, and not having an explanation I settled on blaming my stuffed animal. It seemed logical at that age but the blame settled on me.
Later on in that year I started having incredibly vivid “dreams” where I was flying around my bedroom. I knew it was really happening, but since my family told me I was sleeping I accepted it. It happened every night and I eventually accepted it and began to enjoy it. I dubbed it “Peter Pan Time” after my favorite Disney movie. Now I figure it was that whole astral projection thing, but it was really fun.

As I got older, school got harsher and angst settled in. The presence got stronger, and although I never “saw” it until later I had images in my head of it watching me. It wasn’t really human, it was elongated and wrinkly with pits for eyes and seemed to have no mouth. It patiently observed and I wasn’t afraid of it until I got older and things changed.

I had to change bedrooms when I was eight due to the birth of my sister, and it didn’t like this. I don’t know why, maybe it thought I was abandoning it. The new bedroom had ceiling-to-floor glass doors leading to the yard, and one night it full-body slammed into the window. I can’t describe how horrifying that was. I froze, couldn’t move or breathe. Where I thought there was no mouth was open and pressed against the glass, disjointed and wide. I was unable to do anything except stare until it went away.

I would have thought it was just me, but my mother’s and my relationship had soured. By then it seemed to have forgiven me, and took off after my mother. I didn’t know this until last year, but every morning she woke up to an unearthly howling only she could hear. It followed her across the house, around the yard, wherever she went on the property.

Understandably, she called our church and they congragated into my bedroom and sprinkled holy water, prayed, and basically consecrated the house. It seemed to have no effect, not only did I still feel it but some friends I brought over were very uneasy in my house. I need to say here that as a rule I tell very few people, and it wasn’t prompted.

It got less and less intense, and by the time I moved out a month or so ago it was gone. I don’t think it will follow me, I’ve had plenty of people tell me it was “tied” to the earth. Most strongly this comes from friends in the Kumeyai tribe itself. Without this experiance I’d be a viciously devout cynic, and I’ve tried to explain it. I can’t. Eventually I want to know what it was, maybe someone can tell me.

Mach 30

I moved to Boise, ID in quite the rush. It was myself, my girlfriend, a good friend and his fiance. The only place we found on such short notice was a SMALL 2 bedroom house in a shitty part of town. One good thing was that there were two large ponds just behind us we could fish in.

From the beginning, all four of us felt uneasy when we were alone in either bedroom, regardless if there was someone in another part of the house. Soon enough, my friend and his fiance moved out. My girlfriend and I decided to try to sleep in their bedroom due to the uneasy feelings in ours and the lack of sleep we were getting. That didn’t help either. We then moved out to the living room and began sleeping on the hyda-bed. It was then we began to hear noises.

I worked overnights and my girlfriend worked mornings. Regardless, when either of us slept we would wake up to faint talking or a rhythmical *thud* *thud* *thud* as if someone was pounding the ground in one of the bedrooms with a hammer.

Well, one day before my girlfriend came home I decided I would go fishing becasue I could not sleep over the subtle noises going on on the other side of the wall. I grabbed my pole and tackle box and started across my lawn and my neighbor (we’ll call him Dave) was also headed down to fish. We began talking about random stuff and out of the blue he asks me, “So, did you know that someone was killed in your house?”

What now?! This house couldn’t be more than twenty or thirty years old, max. In utter disbelief, I asked him how he could possibly know that. Turns out, that my neighbor built his house and the one I was in was built shortly after. He informed me that the highway division decided that they were building a highway through that street, and therefore, was going to be razing all of the houses along there. No one saw a point in sticking around and everyone but Dave sold their places in short order. From there on out, our landlord was hired by the highway division to rent out all of those houses to keep the neighborhood inhabited until they could make their highway. Dave didn’t know how many people went in and out of our house, but after a year or so, two men moved in that he rather enjoyed spending time with. One was mid twenties while the other was late forties.

These two men were very heavy drinkers. The older one, Steve, was a quiet drunk. He wanted to get wasted, have some fun and then go to bed. The younger (whose name I have forgotten so we’ll call him Jack) was a very angry drunk. Dave goes on to tell me that one night, he and his normal group of friends decided to play some poker. Steve and Jack opted not to come because they always lost too much money. Well, sometime around midnight, Dave hears a panicked knock on the door. It’s Jack, blood covering him from the bottom of his feet to his knees. “I killed him, Dave…” he gasped…

All of the men quickly ran to the next house and found Steve’s legs and head intact sprawled on the floor. His torso (organs and all) had been smashed into near nothingness. In a drunken rage, Jack had pulled the unconcious drunk out of bed and began jumping up and down on the man’s torso for what must’ve taken over an hour(considering what was left of the torso).

Completely bewildered, Dave and I fish the early evening away. I don’t tell my girlfriend because I was unsure how she would take it. That’s when the truly bizzare began to occur.

On one of my nights off, I was too awake to sleep so I decided I would play some Half-Life 2. The computer was in our original bedroom, and I was quite nervous considering what I’d heard of the house’s history. Nevertheless, I couldn’t sleep and Half-Life 2 was calling me. At the time, I had a dual monitor setup (two monitors for my one computer, for those of you who don’t know) and to really get into games at night, I like to turn the lights and one monitor off.

Bad call.

You all know what a turned off monitor reflects. All you call really see is dark and light areas. No distinction of much else. The only thing the powered off monitor was reflecting was my outline and my bed bhind me. White wall, no posters, nothing else for it to reflect. Well, I was at one of HL2’s god-awful long loading screens when I see another outline in my secondary monitor. Fantastic, my girlfriend was gonna chew my ass for staying up too late playing video games! I began to turn saying, “I’m sorry, I couldn’t sl…”

No one in sight.

I quickly turn on the light. I walk into the living room to find my girlfriend sound asleep. No biggie, just my eyes playing tricks on me. I walk back into the bed/computer room and turn off the lights again (I’m stubbron). I continue playing and come to another loading screen. I try to concentrate on the [LOADING…] text. But those few seconds seem like an eternity when the hair on your neck stands up and you KNOW someone is watching you. My eyes shift to the next monitor. Another outline.

I’m scared shitless now. I flip on the light, turn off the primary monitor, walk out of the room and turn the light back off as I close the door. I climb in bed all warm and cozy and then I think to myself… I’m twenty years old! There’s nothing to be afraid of! And… I didn’t save my game! I’ve just about convinced myself to head back in (if for no other reason to save and shut down), when I hear walking from one bedroom to the other and then the rhythmical

*THUD*… *THUD*… *THUD*…

I listened to that for nearly six goddamn hours… until the sun rose. I pretended to be asleep when my girlfriend woke up. She got me up, we had breakfast, she left and I drove my truck across town and slept for 8 hours like a rock.

I told her about what happened the previous night and what Dave had told me. Needless to say we were out of there like lightning. Before our lease was up actually. We paid rent at two houses to get out of that place. Because almost every night one or both of us would hear, for at least a short amount of time

*THUD*… *THUD*… *THUD*…

We moved back to my hometown and, ironically enough, another friend and I became avid ghost hunters. Got a haunting in or around eastern Idaho, let me know! We’re always looking for new hauntings!

StaticAxeGrinder

This story takes place at my old house. It was the color of salmon (yuck) and my room was on the far left corner if you were looking at it from the road. It led to many summers of me and my computer almost over heating for the two windows caught both the sun rise and sun set. All sun all the time!

We moved in when I was in 8th grade, and it was still farely new, in fact I can remember when the plot of land was nothing more than a field. It was a duplex that had a nice old couple living on the other side. The prior residents to our side were the first people to live there; a small family that eventually found a house closer to one of the local schools. At any rate, no one had died in this house or near it, at least to my knowledge.

I don’t remember noticing the Shadow People until tenth grade, and I atribute this to my horrible memory (I forgot my own birthday this year). It started out with just feeling a sense of being watched while I was in the hallway. It was usually dark because it had no windows and was made out of ICF, and if anyone has been in an ICF house, you know how much darker it seems. I would get thirsty at night when chatting with people or reading my stupid fandoms at the time, so I would go to get a glass of water from the kitchen which was at the other end of the hallway. Every time I felt that some one was watching me and I would usually run to my room as a result. Eventually it got so bad I refused to walk in the hallway at night unless there were lights on in the house.

Then I started seeing things. When I was out in the living room during the day, I would see what I can best describe as Shadow People peeking out from the kitchen at me. Some times they were in the living room with me. Our dog, Rascal, didn’t give a shit however because he’d be passed out in the sun or barking at the neighborhood dogs, but seeing the Shadow People was more tollerable with Rascal there. Sometimes I’d get so creepied out I’d sit in the living room with him all day until my mom and dad got home because I couldn’t go anywhere in the house without something following me. I always had to have a light on when walking around my house at night or I would swear that I was being followed. They mostly stayed in the front of the house and the hallway; I only saw two in my bedroom. A friend of mine said they were probably being perverted Shadow People. I don’t know, but they started a trend of me not being able to sleep unless I had a T.V. or computer on as background noise and light.

Around my junior year I had two friends stay over, Arlo and Dan, who slept out in our living room. My father was out of town at the time but my mom was asleep in her room with Rascal. The next morning I came out to make them breakfast and found them more tired than high school stoners should be. They asked me if my dad had come home last night, and I told them that no, he was down in Richmond, California. They then told me that some guy woke them up last night by walking from the kitchen to the front door. To do this you would of had to walk over both Arlo and Dan for they had slept on the floor. I was freaked out.

My parents eventually moved to Nevada and I moved to where I live now. On our frist trip of moving crap (which we all did ourselves because my dad is a tight wad), my dad and I were discussing the paranormal. Both of my parents listen to Coast to Coast at night, which I tried to listen to but most of the time I’d think the people calling in were crazy. We were discussing ghosts and I brought up how I had seen Shadow People in our old house. My dad told me that he had seen them too in the living room at night, which freaked me the fuck out even more. He acted like it was old news and that EVERYONE had seen them. Christ, I wish I had set up a webcam in there. I haven’t seen any Shadow People at where I live now or where my parents live, but I’m always going to wonder why they were in that house. I think they might have built it over an Indian Burial Ground or something, but I’ll probably never know.

This is the story about my dead grandma. Her name was Diane and she had my father when she was 15, back in 1950. Over the course of a few years she would divorce and re-marry Tad, my dead grandfather, and Buzz, my step-grandfather who I have never met personally. Hell, I don’t think he even knew about me when I was born. She would have my father and his three brothers, K, B, and J. J was seven when my father married my mother at the age of 21, just to give you a clue on how spread out the boys were.

But this story is all about Diane, and I’m sure she would have liked it that way. See, she lived most of her life sucking money and attention out of others. She used to hold property here in Ashland, Oregon, above the Ashland Spring’s Hotel, near the hospital, and near the university; all were sold to support her habit of buying stuff. She would buy the most expensive things that would eventually end up broken if she didn’t get her way. She was the epitamy of a spoiled brat. She also had an addiction to cigarettes and pain killer which would eventually lead to the cancer that killed her. She also made my dad her personal servent from the age of five on, making him take care of his little brothers and her. This explans why he’s a great cook, great at laundry, and able to fix a ton of shit because he had to for his mother.

My only memories of her are how she got as much money out of us as she could and having to visit her in her nursing home. Nursing homes are altogether creepy, but having to see someone you didn’t like made it that much worse. She would give me gifts that I felt were attempts to get me on her side, but hey, she was part of the reason we were living in a shitty house at the time, so her plan didn’t work too well.

When she died my parents went to see her off, so to speak. My dad said she was afraid of dying because she had been a horrible person in life and knew she wasn’t going any where nice for a while. We inherited all of her stuff, including the bags of pill bottles she kept for who knows what reason. I always got a weird vibe from her stuff and never liked it being around me. It was worse when my dad tried to convince me to keep her old dresses, which I refused to wear. I don’t wear dead people’s clothing. It’s weird and creepy.

Things were fine, for a time. But then things started to get odd.

My parents moved to Dayton, NV, while I stayed here in Ashland. While my dad was on his way home from Las Vegas, he pulled off onto one of the few dinky towns between there and Carson City. When he pulled off a woman came out of no where, sat down, and smoked a cigarette, all the while looking at my dad. He got a weird vibe from her, and when he got out of his car, it hit him: she looked exactly like Diane. Well, at least what Diane would look like now if she wasn’t dead. She stayed out there until he finished with his business and got back into his car. Then she disappeared.

Spooked, he called his brothers because seeing your dead mom glare at you while you’re getting out of your car is no fun event. His brothers told him the following events:

K said that, on a few occasions when he would go to the places up in Portland, OR, that would take Diane, he’s smelled her cigarette smoke. Once he swore he saw her at a resteraunt.

B reported that he’s seen her walking along the side of the road on his UPS route around Ashland.

J hadn’t actually seen Diane, but he swore she called him one night on the phone and he talked to her. J said this may have been a dream, but he remembered vividly talking on the phone with her.

Creepy, yes, but things were okay for a few months.

Then I was walking down town Ashland a few weeks ago. As I was passing a one of the resteraunts on the way to the plaza, I saw Diane. She was sitting there, smoking as usual, looking at me as I walked by. It was Diane like I remember her, smoking and glaring. I turned cold and tried to walk by as fast as I could, all the while feeling her eyes on me. I didn’t like her in life and seeing her freaked me out. I didn’t warm up the rest of the day.

Now maybe our minds are playing tricks on us and we just think we’re seeing her, but it’s not like we’re activily looking for her. God knows I’m not because I didn’t like seeing her when she was alive. But the fact we’ve all seen her, minus J, is a little freakish to say the least.

I swear my dead grandma is haunting my dad’s side of the family, and I think it’s to remind us that she’s still going to be a pain in our sides. I haven’t seen her since and no one else on my dad’s side has reported it, but I don’t think this is the last time. It wouldn’t be like her to just visit once and never come again.

Alter Ego

“Phantom Phone Calls” (Also seen in “The New England Ghost Files”)
About 15 years ago, a woman (we’ll call her Michelle) moved into a house in rural Rhode Island. It is important to note that this house was rather secluded–there were neighbors fairly close by, but the house was set deep back at the end of a long driveway and surrounded by thick forest on all sides. The point is that it is not visible from the driveway or from any of the sides at any other house along the road.

Anyway, Michelle quickly integrated into her new neighborhood (perhaps to compensate). She got involved at her local church, met some new people, and eventually made many friends.

Michelle was also an avid gardener. In fact, that is what she was doing when she began to receive the phone calls.

The first time, she picked up the ringing phone and heard the loud hissing of static on the other end…but faintly, she also heard someone calling her name. “Michelle…Michelle…” over and over. Thinking it was a prank, she hung up and thought nothing of it.

The next day, Michelle went outside to plant some azaleas in her garden. She had been out there only about 45 minutes when she heard the phone ring again. This time, the hissing static was back, but what the voice on the other end said was stranger.

“Michelle, I hate azaleas,” it said, then the line went dead. It sounded to Michelle like an elderly woman’s voice.

Bear in mind that no one, NO ONE, knew that she had been planting azaleas outside in her garden. The house is not visible from the driveway, and there are no visible neighbors at any point around the house. She had not gone anywhere or told anyone. Michelle was shaken, to say the least.

The next day, Michelle went back out to her garden to tend to the sunflowers she had planted. Only a half-hour had passed when the phone rang again.

The static was back, and this time, the voice said “That’s better. I like sunflowers, Michelle.” Again, there was absolutely no way for anyone to know what she had just been doing–house not visible, etc. This was the last straw for Michelle–she resolved to find out who was calling her. So, she decided to talk to the pastor at the local church.

She told him of the strange phone calls, and to her surprise, the pastor did not bat an eye. “I’ll talk to the woman,” he said. “She’ll stop bothering you.”

“Who’s the woman?” Michelle asked.

“My mother,” the pastor responded.

He explained that his mother had moved into the house in the 1940s and was also an avid gardener. She took great care in the house’s appearance, and she didn’t want to see her work messed with.

“Why, though?” Michelle asked. “And what business does she have interfering with the house long after she’s moved out?”

At this, the pastor shook his head. “She never moved out,” he said. “She died in that house in 1959.”

Oh God…I need to go lay down.

Code Jockey

My father, on the other hand, who grew up in Hawaii [and is half Hawaiian, his mother was full blooded, his father was German and a lot of other stuff] believes in a lot of the Hawaiian spirituality. I never got too deeply into it, but he told me about numerous times he’s felt protected by various forces, or felt watched over and guided by them.

And then there’s his beach story.

Now, it’s been AGES since I heard this [and he’s getting older now, I don’t know that he remembers it fully – I’ll ask him next time I see him, try to get a clearer version than what I can remember], but here it goes: I believe he told me that he was once driving, at night, along the beach in Honolulu. He parked, got out of his car, and sat down on the beach on a large log which was partially buried in the sand. If memory serves, he said that he sat there for a while, admiring the scenery, before getting up for a moment to go back to his car. When he returned, he found enormous footprints [well, more like hoofprints, or from what he’s said, footprints like an elephant might leave] “walking” from the log to the ocean, with a large, maybe foot wide trench in between them.

As for myself specifically, I have sneaking suspicions my old home, the one I more or less grew up in [3rd grade up until I moved out fully sophomore year of college], was haunted. There were a number of reasons, but mostly I used to see odd things when I’d walk from the kitchen to the “family room”. There was a small, S shaped hallway between the two rooms [imagine the top-right of the S connects to the kitchen, and the bottom left connects to the family room], and every single time I walked from the kitchen to the family room, as I rounded the last corner into the family room, I’d see a glowing sort of something out of the corner of my eye. I’d be gone as soon as I’d notice it.

Tons and TONS of scratching, sadly attributed to rats. Stupid house.

I know for a fact there’s more, because I know myself very well, well enough to know I repress a lot. I developed a mechanism early in life to respond to some things I went through, that I could repress and conciously eliminate events from my memory without much effort. I know I’ve done this with supernatural events in the house. I know it because the back of my mind tells me I experienced some horrific things there, but my mind refuses to let me access the memories. Maybe someday in therapy it’ll all come out, who knows?

–more–

Just got back into my apartment from dumping some trash out in the complex’s dumpster, and saw something somewhat disturbing…

I usually walk around behind my complex, keeps me away from the street I live on – I do this because I live in a small college town, and I dunno about other small college towns, but the police here tend to harass people my age if they’re outside past about midnight. Thus, I walked through the little side parking lot, behind my apartments, to the dumpster, and was headed back through the parking lot when I saw a pair of cats in the lot.

Now, this isn’t odd on it’s own – my town gets positively overrun with cats at the beginning of summer/when it gets hot. What makes it odd is one of the cats of the pair. One was this marmalade/white cat that hangs around all the time, fairly friendly, but skiddish. The other, though…

When I first saw it, the first thing I thought of was hidden room girl. The cat was skinny, pure white, and had long legs. Unnaturally long legs. They looked way too long to be on that cat’s body. Its head was normal size for its body, but its face was just too small. Not radically small, but just enough that it didn’t look right. It’s eyes were pure black. Granted, I saw it from a distance, at night [the lot was illuminated by a security light] – but its eyes were so black, they seemed to be sucking in the light around them.

When I approached it, it would do this interesting dance – it’d walk towards me, then run off, look back, and repeat. If I stood still, it’d just watch me, or look between me and the other cat, almost nervously.

Then I noticed the other thing that bothered me – whenever I’d take another look at the cat, analyzing it, its dimensions would change. I swear, one minute those legs were too long, the next they were perfect proportion. The change was big enough that it wasn’t just my eyes playing tricks [and I have excellent night vision, and like I said, the lot was illuminated]

KillRoy

Right around when I started high school my rich aunt died and left my family a nice chunk of change. Dreams of rocket cars and a year long vacation in Hawaii , oiling the breasts of bikini models were dashed when my dad quickly parleighed every red cent of the inheritance into a dilapitated 2 bedroom shack that we cleaned up and sold for a tidy profit. He soon started buying more houses around town, turning into quite the little real estate baron. Some he sold, some he rented. The upside of this was that when I graduated high school and went to college I got a free house. All I had to do was find 3 room mates and pay utilities. Pretty sweet deal if you ask me. Little did I know that his house my dad had graciously laid at my feet kept tenants in it as well as a caullender holds water. The turnover rate was insanely high. All of this he kept from me and my merry band college freshman friends,eager to taste freedom for the first time in our lives.

I got 2 guys I was friends with from high school and one guy from Chicago I knew from the internet who was moving here for college to move in and we were set.
My dad was a pretty cool guy so the rent was astoundingly cheap. The four of use ended up paying about 175 each for rent for a 4 bedroom house with washer/dry, bbq, lawn, etc. Other houses in the neighborhood were easily going for 1,300 to 1,600. Yet somehow we weren’t the envy of the neighborhood.

The house was set up like this. You walked in the front door directly into the living room. to the left of the living room was the main hallway that lead to 3 bedrooms, 1 of the bathrooms and a patio. To the right of the living room was the kitchen, another bathroom, the laundry room, the stairs that lead to the downstairs basement and room. I had the sweet basement room. The freaky shit started almost immediatelly. We noticed that the hallway was always cold, no matter the time of day or what we set the heater too. Second, the phone in one of the bedrooms seemed to always be picking up other peoples phone conversations. You couldn’t really make out what they were saying, the voices were pretty washed out and quiet. Brian, the guy who lived in that room, listened for awhile , trying to pick up some juicy neighborhood gossip. I was in the kitchen when he ran out of his room looking really pale and sick. I asked him what was up and he said that the voices on the phone had gotten alot more clear and one that sounded like an old hindu had called out his name and laughed. A little while after my other room mate Collin was in his room talking to his girlfriend. They were the only ones home. I came home and they came out looking a little confused. They asked me what I was doing and I said I had just gotten home. They both appeared a little shaken when I said that so I asked what was up. They said the whole time I was gone they thought I was home because they heard people walking around the house and talking. We searched the whole house, top to bottom and we didn’t find another living soul. His girlfriend got really freaked out and left and wouldn’t come back to the house unless alot of people were there. Meanwhile, Brian was becoming increasingly erratic. He was never in his room. Ever. He was either at school, work, or watching tv in the living room . He would watch tv at all hours of the night until he’d fall asleep on the couch. With all the lights on. He would do his homework either in the kitchen or in the library. One day we came home to see his room abandoned, all his stuff gone with an envelope with rent and utilities in it. Collin ran into him about 3 months later and asked him what happened. He said the most terrifying thing in his entire life was living in that house. He said the phone would talk to him, he could hear people walking around above him in the ceiling, his things were never where he left them and he never felt like he was alone . He said he always felt like someone was there, watching him. His electronics would always turn themselves on and at the most random times he would hear this really eerie laughing. He said it was a really throaty, deep laugh. The breaking point was when walked into his room after taking a shower and saw what he described as a ” enormously fat, half rotted pirate/gypsy hybrid ” walk across his room with some kids walking behind him holding hands and then they all dissapear into the closet. He didn’t open the door, he just walked through it he said. Then he heard the laughing. He moved out right then.

We had a party a few weeks later and at least 5 people asked us who that super fat guy was. They said he was walking up and down the corridors.One girl said she saw him walk into the bathroom and turn the light on. She had to go so she waited about five minutes until she walked over and saw that no one was in the bathroom. The only way in or out is through the door she had been watching for 5 minutes. Collin and Mike had both started to hear laughing coming from Brians room when they walked by. I never heard since my bedroom was downstairs but they said they could hear laughing and walking. Collin’s girlfriend had refused to come to the house after she had looked through the garage window to see if Collin’s car was parked inside and she saw the “Fat Man” as we had dubbed him sitting cross legged in the middle of the garage with about 4 ragged looking children walking in circles around him. Heads down, hands at their sides, just walking in slow circles. The Fat Man turn his head and laughed at Collin’s girlfriend. She said his face looked like that really old fat green alien leader from Dragon Ball Z. The one on Piccolo’s home planet. A huge fat face carved with wrinkles. She said she could barely see his squinty black eyes but she could see them. He didn’t open his mouth when he laughed and the children never stopped walking in their circle. She screamed and ran away as fast as she could.

After this the Fat Man shifted his attention towards Mike. Mike’s room was shared a wall with what was Brian’s room and he said it sound liked a bunch of people would get at the far end of Brian’s room and run full sprint at his wall. Just as the noises sound like they would smash into the wall they would abruptly stop, sometimes followed by laughing. Collin said that stuff in his room was always switching places when he was gone.This was actually me fucking with him, but he would say things that I hadn’t moved had been moved. They both moved out soon after.
The weird part was I had never really seen anything. I had heard maybe a footstep or to but had never had anything in my room touched, never heard any laughing or saw the Fat Man or his creepy children. All of my phone calls were crystal clear and my shit never turned itself on. That lasted about 3 days.

At first all I heard was a groaning. Not a human groaning, but the house was groaning. Like a something really heavy was standing still and the house was adjusting to its weight. This was right above my room. I started seeing things out of the corner of my eye. I’d look real fast but never saw anything. I heard the bedroom doors open and close at night and I started to get that feeling like I was being watched as soon as I walked upstairs. I never went up stairs. I’d run from the stairs to the front door and I’d go through the window into the basement.

One night I was eating macaroni and cheese watching Seinfeld re-runs when I heard the front door slam louder than any door I’d ever heard slammed in my life. It sounded like someone had put every single ounce of their strength and energy into slamming it shut. The noise was ungodly loud. I ran upstairs fully expecting the door to be in at least 1,000 pieces. It wasnt. It was closed and locked. Then all the lights went out . All of the sudden it was dark all over the house. Dark doesn’t describe it. It was like light was slowing being asborbed by dark. It was the type of dark you only see camping at night or when the power goes out and all ambient light is gone. Absolute dark. I heard the laughing. It was loud and evil and right behind me. I turned but nothing was there. Then the bedroom door farthest down the hall from slammed shut as loudly as the front door had and I hear the shuffle/running Mike had coming right towards me. Then the second farthest door slammed as hard as it could and the running sounds continued toward me. Then the bathroom door, then running. I calculate from the sound of the running that whatever it was was about 30 feet from me. I didn’t stick around. I unlocked the front door and ran out. As I did I heard the laughing again and the front door slammed shut. I ran to my car. As I was driving away I saw 3 small shapes through the window into Brians room and the Fat Man right behind them. I paid 3 day laborers to move my shit out and found an apartment. My dad was understandably pissed so I had to find more people to live there. Rent being as cheap as it was in that neighborhood it went fast. I actually became friends with someone who was friends with someone who had moved in and was at the house alot. She said that they heard the same shit we did, and one of the people living there found some old growth marks in what was Brian’s closet. You know , those marks parents make of their kids. ” Mark, 3 feet tall, 7 years old”. Those marks. She said they found 3 of them scattered around the house, all for different kids and none of them went any older than 9.
So yeah, that’s my freaky as fuck story. My dad sold that house after people just kept moving out. Last I saw it , it was deserted.

kindermord

My friend Paul decided to abandon the renters’ lifestyle a few years ago. He went house hunting. After a few months and dozens of prospects, he settled on what could only be described as an excellent deal. The house had been on the market for quite a while, and was a good 20k less than similar homes in the neighborhood. As is the case with most ‘excellent deals’ though, there was a catch: the previous owner had killed himself in the basement. Apparently disclosure of such things is required by law in this area, and the the Real Estate Agent kept to it. Paul said she was uneasy when she told him the suicide part. No wonder the house had been on the market so long and was so cheap. The stupid bitch was scaring people away! And he would be the beneficiary! Yay!

Now Paul, being a Good Atheist and Sceptic, shrugged this off without much thought. A suicide is no different than any other death. When they’re gone they’re gone; it doesn’t matter how they leave. The End. Paul cheerfullly moved in and spent the 20k savings on furniture.

His first night in his new home, he felt a little creepy. Stupid disclosure laws! Wtf was that scratching and banging downstairs? The house was filled with pricey new furniture, of course. It was merely settling. Nothing more. His imagination was getting the best of him. But he was exhausted after the big move and easily fell asleep.

The house continued settling. The indications were always from the basement. It would only make sense, since thats where the foundation was. But he of course had been in many different homes of varying ages and sizes, and he hadn’t encountered this kind of disturbance before. Paul was only the second owner, and the house was fairly new. Maybe more noise than usual was usual at this age, or maybe it was rodents. He set traps all over the house. Only the ones in the basement ever went off, and the bait was never taken. Nothing in the basement was fond of cheese or peanut butter. The traps were probably going off because of changes in heat and humidity. Science has an answer for everything.

Months had gone by and the noises continued. Paul shared his anxieties with his friends, and felt his scepticism wavering. He got varying explanations and some simple shrugs. Someone suggested shoddy construction. A building inpector told him it was solid as a rock, built by the best construction company in town. He had also gotten engaged, but did not feel the need to trouble his fiance with annoying disclosures. Cassie was definitely the type that would worry about it. Why bother her with such silly nonsense? His fiance regularly sent him downstairs with the softball bat to investigate. He told her it was ‘settling.’ She answered ‘No it isn’t.’

That’s how this story ends. Paul and Cassie are married now. He still hasn’t told her about the house’s history, and she sends him on almost nightly trips through the house with his bat. They have a security system installed and security lights covering every inch outside. Cassie wants to move. The neighborhood kids are fucking with them, she thinks, although there’s no evidence of it. And the banging and scraping are never outside, it’s always from the basement.

But Paul doesn’t think it’s kids. He’s still a bit of an atheist, but he’s no longer a sceptic.

Exzy

Beyond my great uncle Bud’s horse field were an apple orchard and pecan groves. Uncle Bud lived in rural Texas, bred race horses, and generally had one of the most beautiful bits of land for his main home. (He also owned a huge ranch for hunting and fishing.) When I was young, I loved visiting his house, riding horses, and generally wandering about.

But the pecan groves. I’d always wanted to see what was further in them, but the moment I lost sight of the house, I would get a splitting headache. It always started from nothing, this pressure that built up in my head. It took me a long time to notice the coincidence. I’d go for a walk, get a ways into the grove, then go back and take something for my headache, never really realizing that it was only once I’d passed a certain point, or that it always only happened in those groves. Once I’d realized it, though, I decided I’d push through. Beyond the groves, I knew there was more of Uncle Bud’s land, but I had to get through the pecan trees first. Since there was no underbrush and the land was flat, I could go a good while without losing sight of the big old house. All the way through the apple orchard, then on about halfway through the pecans. I brought a bottle of water, some Benedryl in case it was allergies, and a bottle of pain killers, as well as some lunch with me. I told everyone I was going to throw myself a little picnic.

The headache came on after I’d lost sight of the house for a couple of minutes. I was taking my time and not hurrying. I can be very patient when I’m curious. I swallowed a bit of Ibuprofen and pushed on. The pressure got greater and greater, and I had to stop at one point to sit down and let my body get accustomed to it. It felt like my brain wanted to grow out of my skull. But I’d had worse headaches before, and the Ibuprofen was beginning to take the edge off, so I decided to press on. The going was slow, because the pecan trees were getting a bit closer together at this point, and there were smaller ones in with the bigger ones. I realized at one point that I had put down my lunch somewhere and left it. I was getting a bit confused, and it was hard to think. My mind felt all fuzzy, like the morning after a Percocet binge paired with a wretched hangover.

And then my ears started ringing. Loudly. I had started talking to myself at this point, just to keep my sanity, but I couldn’t even hear my voice anymore. Just ringing. I couldn’t find my bottle of water or the pills. It was like I had lost awareness of myself. I was terrified. I could almost describe it as being very drunk and very lost, utterly unable to figure out what was going on. I started feeling like I was losing parts of my body. Not literally, but all of the sudden, my hand was no longer -my- hand. This feeling sort of crept all over me. I was watching, I was there, but those parts of me weren’t ME at all.

Eventually I tripped and fell, and decided to stay where I was. The ringing in my head was horrible and I eventually shut my eyes, still surrounded by pecan trees, even though I’d been walking for what seemed like hours. I had no idea of time anymore. I suppose I fell asleep.

Upon waking, my body felt like mine again. I had no idea how long I’d been sleeping, but I figured it might have been a while, because the headache had dwindled to a low throb. Thinking that I’d finally found my chance to press on, I looked around to get my bearings and realized that I was in the apple orchard. The house was right there. I was back on the safe fringe, without ever having gotten past the pecans. I went back to the house, pleaded headache, and slept through most of the rest of the day, exhausted.

I have no idea about that part of the property. Uncle Bud told me that there’s just forest and one of our family’s small graveyards back there, where most of Aunt Dolly’s siblings had been buried, and that was it.

A couple of years ago, Aunt Dolly died, and I suppose she was buried back there. I didn’t go to the funeral, as I’d never gotten on with her. She had always given me odd looks and would do things like oversalt my food on purpose. She was a weird, superstitious lady. Uncle Bud died not long after that, and though the house and ranch are still in the family, I haven’t been to the house since he died.

And I never went through the pecans again.

beef curtains

When I was little, about 5 or 6 years old, I lived in the far away land of Bulgaria. My parents would often leave me at my grand-parent’s house for the week, while they we’re at work or taking care of my brother, and pick me up on weekends.

My grand parent’s lived in a big 3 story house, with 2 basement sub levels below the ground floor. The house was split into 2 large apartments, with my grandma’s sister living on the right bottom side, with an entrance on the right side of the house, and my grandparents living on the upper left side, with an entrance on the left side. There was also an attic, and the only way to get into it was to use the entrance on my grandparent’s side, up the stairs and past our apartment.

I’ve only ever been in the first sub basement level with my grandpa getting logs for the fireplace, and it was really really really creepy. I don’t recall there being any light at all, and it was very cold and unpleasant, like most European basements tend to be. I’ve only ever been in the 2nd sub-level in my dreams, getting eaten by a horse headed monster. But the basement is not the central place of haunting in this story…

There is a park near that house, and every day my grandma would take me for walks and I would braid whips out of the weeping willow branches and eat ants and whatnot. One day, as usual, we were leaving for our walk, but my grandpa was tired and opted to have a nap.

A little more about the setup of the house: the left side entrance (ours) had a buzzer at the bottom, so you could be let up (we weren’t that backwards). Right above that entrance was our kitchen window, which people usually stuck their heads out of to see who was buzzing up. Above that window, was a window to the attic.

Back to the story, my grandma and i were walking to the park, when she, as all grandmas tend to do, started fussing about how chilly it was and made me go back and get my jacket. Not having any keys, I had to ring up and get my grandpa to buzz me in.

I was buzzing, and buzzing, and buzzing, no answer. I assumed my grandpa was sleeping, so I just kept on pressing the buzzer as I didn’t want to go all the way up the stairs when he could just throw it out of the window. Suddenly, a head poked out of the window, but it wasn’t from my kitchen window, and it definitely wasn’t my grandpa. I remember looking up, and it was hard to see with the sky right behind it, but I definitely made out 2 small beady eyes, a bald head, and two of the biggest fucking horns I have ever seen protruding from the sides of the head. They weren’t pointing out, but down when it was looking down at me.

About this time I realized that this in fact was not my beloved, bald headed grandpa, and I started screaming and bolted towards my grandma. I told her there was a man in the attic, with big horns, but she didn’t believe me… I wonder why. We went back to the entrance, but went up to the apartment, me hiding behind my grandma the whole way (she was a formidable lady). We went inside, and found my grandpa snoozing on the couch…he hadn’t heard anything.

A year later, we sold the house to an insurance company for a hefty sum of money…I don’t live in Bulgaria anymore so I wouldn’t be able to find out anything with the house, but that was by far the scariest moment of my childhood.

zombierebellion

“What the fuck kind of family do you come from?”

Not all of this happened to me, it’s more about my mom.

Some familiy backstory is necessary here, and you’ll see why. My mother had a very, very dysfunctional childhood. Both of my parents were born and raised here in Texas, and both came from very poor families. My mother’s father died when she was in her teens, but she had never really known him. The only father figure she was close to was her step-father, who died suddenly when she was 12. My grandmother moved the family around constantly; by the time my mom had graduated high school they had lived in Dallas, Amarillo, Odessa and various other towns all over Texas.

Primarily my mom and dad both grew up in Dallas. This is important because there’s still a lot of areas that my parents remember “how they used to be” vividly, either because of good or bad memories (really bad ones, in my mother’s case). We still live in the Dallas area, and as kids we thought my mom had some really strange, bizarre behaviors going on. As more of an adult now I can really appreciate with hindsight and some knowledge of my mom’s life what was really going on.

When we were kids, my father was very ill for several years. My mom diligently did her best to go see my dad in the hospital and take care of us, but sometimes it got to be too much for her. One time when I was eight, my mom broke down and grabbed me and started crying.

“zombierebellion,” she told me, “if anything happens to your dad, I swear to you, you and your sisters will always stay with me.”

Later on I learned that shortly before my grandmother had married my step-grandfather, she had attempted to give my mother away to a well-to-do family in North Dallas; she had just packed up my mother in the car one day and dropped her off and said, “This is your new family,” and left. My great-aunt had to track her down and pick my mom up and wound up keeping her for a couple of months; it took my great-aunt three days to find my mom, all while she was staying with this couple.

Needless to say, there are a lot of things that stick out in my childhood as being off-kilter that my mom said or did that make sense years later after a family member will reference something and I’ll have to ask, “What’s that all about?” Then pieces will fall into place.

When I was a kid my mother hated ghost stories and movies. If my father and I watched a horror movie, my mom would leave the room. I watched Are You Afraid Of The Dark? with my little sister in secret as a kid; my mother would demand we turn it if it came on. My older sister and I snuck around reading Dean Koontz and Stephen King as we got older. My mom slowly began to accept it, but hardly ever read them; the Shining scared the hell out of her apparently, but she was okay with the Stand. One day I asked my mom, “Have you ever seen a ghost?”

She went pale and walked out of the room. She absolutely refused to talk about it. As kids, it mystified us. My mother had what can best be described as conniption fits at the mere mention of Ouija boards, and would tell us that there were some things that should just not be messed with, and we should mind our own damn business. My father, ever the skeptic, told us that all the ghost and supernatural stuff was nothing, and to shut up about it.

For years myself and my sisters heard weird things about my grandmother; she would predict things or talk about people long deceased as if they were still there. The occurences were so few and far in between that we never put them together, until one day, when I was digging through a huge old box of stuff, which was filled up with odds and ends. My grandmother had died, and my mom and aunt had divvied up her things. One of the creepy things I found was a letter from the commissioner of the National Football League, congratulating my grandmother on correctly predicting the outcome and score of all the Cowboys games that season, as well as the teams that would advance to the Super Bowl, who won the bowl that year and the score. This was back in the 70’s, I believe.

I showed it to my mom and my aunt, who laughed and said that they hadn’t thought about that in a long time, but Granny was always doing stuff like that.

“Stuff like WHAT, exactly?” was my question.

“You know, predicting games, events happening, things like that.”

“…What?”

Later on, when my aunt had left, I asked my mom if there was anything else I needed to know about my grandmother. My mom, after much prodding, admitted that my grandmother also had seen ghosts, but that was all she would admit.

About six months later, I got up in the middle of the night to get a drink, and dragged out the chair from the table to sit down. My mom came down, white as a sheet, to ask what exactly I thought I was doing. I told her I was just getting a drink, and I asked her what she thought was going on. All of a sudden, she just bursts out with, “I thought the ghosts were back,” and sits down.

I have never seen my mom look so afraid in her whole life. She managed to tell me that when she was a kid, over the course of their moves and everything else, she would wake up to hear people whispering and furniture moving outside her bedroom. Wherever they were living, it was most always coming from the kitchen or living area. The worst part is she would hear my grandmother in there talking to them. As in, carrying on conversations, laughing, etc.

Now that alone scared me, but my mom described how she would hide under the covers because some of the ghosts would come in her room and stand around her bed and talk and she could feel people staring at her. She couldn’t physically see anyone, but she could feel them looking at her and whispering. She could feel them sitting on her bed. Things would be moved around in the morning. She said it was the worst feeling in the whole world.

Later on, another family member connected this specific kind of occurence with instances where my mother had misbehaved or angered my grandmother; they theorized that my grandmother had been sending in the ghosts knowing they scared my mom to punish her.

Now, at this time, I didn’t believe in ghosts, but I believed that my grandmother could be a very scary person. Later on (after her death) I began to believe in at least my grandmother dropping by, but that’s another story.

Since this post is practically novel-length, if anyone wants more stories about my grandmother, or the crazy stuff that actually happened after my grandmother died, I can supply that too.

One day we were going to visit a family member in Dallas, and my mom passed by a residential street and shuddered. This was shortly after her nighttime ghost revelation, and I asked her what was the matter. Apparently a house on that street was one that they had lived in for a short time where she had met “the old man,” as she called him. He was one of the ghosts that my grandmother was friendly with, and my mom would see him in passing while she was wandering through the house. She described him as “black vapor” and got the feeling that he wasn’t a very nice man. She woke up several times with him in her bedroom. She said as soon as they moved out of that particular house, the old man never physically represented himself again, but she could still sometimes hear my grandmother talking to him. Later on this would scare the piss out of me as I had a weird experience of my own. My mother has also reported seeing a woman in a strange dress and various other spirits, gruesome or otherwise walking about in their various houses that she saw growing up.

A lot of family members commonly knew about my grandmother’s “talents” and believed a lot of it. I wasn’t a big believer in this sort of thing until after my grandmother died, actually.

Having never really heard my grandmother do this, or see anything out of the ordinary in her house, I was hard pressed to believe this. I did believe that my mom had a particularly stressful and traumatic childhood, and I knew a lot of it still bothered her. My grandmother was very bitter about many things, and I think it colored a lot of her life, unfortunately poisoning her relationship with my mother. Basically she could be very charming, or very cruel.

I should also say that I think my mother had a hand in making sure my grandmother didn’t mention certain things to us. And also that I was close to my grandmother as a child, but not that close.

Anyways, my grandmother died before I graduated high school. A year passed with no odd occurences; we began to sort out her things as best we could and get everything taken care of.

A couple of months before I graduated, weird things began happening. I would come home from school, having been the last one out of the house and things would be different. I would turn off all the lights and when I got home, they would all be on. Doors that would be shut would now be open. No one was at home, either. My mother would put up groceries and would come back minutes later to find stuff switched around. I started hearing someone going up and down the stairs at night, even though no one was up. My cats started getting skittish. They would crouch and stare at something in the dining room that we couldn’t see. One of them would hiss all the time at something in the dining room corner. The other one took up to hiding underneath my covers in my room 99% of the time.

My mom started having weird dreams as well, really bizarre ones that seriously bothered her, but she would never tell anyone what they were about. A weird flowery smell started in the house that permeated the kitchen and the dining room at odd times. A strange cold spot happened in the bathroom. You could go in the middle of summer in Texas with no a/c and all around the bathroom it would be freezing. I hated going in the middle of the night to the bathroom because half the time the lights wouldn’t turn on for absolutely no reason. Either that, or you’d be taking a shower and the lights would suddenly go out. Only in that bathroom, too; my dad checked the wiring and everything appeared to be fine.

My high school graduation day came and my mother requested that I wear specific jewelry for the pictures, so my family would see them in the photos. The jewelry in question were my grandmother’s pearls and a necklace my great-uncle had made for my grandmother that got willed to me. I didn’t like wearing them; they felt too heavy and too cold. There was something weird about them. That night, after I got home, the chain and the pearl clasp had tangled and we couldn’t get the jewelry off. I told my mom that I would take them off in the morning. I hardly ever remember my dreams; sleep is like blacking out for me. That night, I had the worst and most vivid dream. I dreamt my grandmother was telling me that I was too much like my father and was trying to smother me, all while holding on to these jewelry pieces, like she was trying to rip them off me. It was terrible. I woke up in a cold sweat, shaking all over, and spent an hour and a half trying to get the damn things off. I refused to go back to sleep for fear of sleep-smothering. Whenever family members ask me why I don’t wear them to special occasions, I just always say I put the necklace in a safe-deposit box and the pearls need to be restrung. I have no intention of ever wearing them again. Whether or not it was a ghostly visit or not, the damn things freak me out too much.

Through my freshman year of college, holidays started to get really bad; it was like you could physically feel my grandmother in the house. Christmas Day, Thanksgiving and my birthday I woke up suddenly feeling like someone was watching me, and then like I felt my grandmother was watching. I kind of knew how my mom felt, right then.

The weirdest thing was all the stuff moving around. You’d literally leave a room and come back and something would have switched places with something else. No one ever talked about it; I think my dad didn’t really notice or wanted NOT to notice, and my mom and sisters and I were just all too freaked out.

Finally one day my sister freaked out after having some weird dream about my grandmother and screamed, “I wish you’d leave us the fuck alone!”

After that, stuff stopped moving. The smell gradually vanished; it only pops up on Christmas and Thanksgiving, when I still feel like she drops by, which I hate. It’s a weird feeling. The air all around and inside the house gets thick and sticky feeling (and this is not just from cooking, it’s outside too) and it feels like there’s something there that shouldn’t be. Something that is not right. My grandmother had a pretty commanding presence, and it just feels like she’s there, just watching. I don’t ever have a good feeling about it; I know it kind of bothers my mom. This is probably why as a grown up I kind of dread holidays. No footsteps on the stairs anymore, either.

And as for the black vapor thing mentioned above, when I was still in high school, my family and I visited Vicksburg, Mississippi, home to a Civil War battlefield. We visited this crazy house called the McRaven House, if I remember correctly. We went up to the third story first and worked our way down as we started the tour. Immediately I felt sick, like I was going to pass out. I started feeling like someone was literally squeezing my chest — like a huge guy behind me had wrapped his arms around my torso and was squeezing. I don’t even remember what the tour guide was talking about, I just remember looking over in this corner by a chair and seeing this misty black stuff that was shaped like a man. I had to literally crouch down and stick my head between my legs because my head just felt like it was going to explode, and the fact that I couldn’t breathe. I nearly fell down the stairs when they took us out of the third story, and when we left, my sister told me later on the tour guide had been talking about how there had been some murder in the house. (I didn’t pay attention to the tour at all, needless to say) To this day, it’s the weirdest feeling I’ve ever had and have never felt like that ever again. The whole third floor just felt really bad, that’s the best way to describe it.

LividLiquid

Interesting night.

Here’s the aftermath of my haunted theater adventure:

Realizing I had absolutely no interest in spending the night in a haunted theater by myself, I texted my friend Beth. Beth works at the same bar I do. About four blocks down from the theater. She got off at 11:30 and I needed to break down our copy of “Cillestine Prophecy” (Spelling?) around twenty minutes later. My staff left at 11:40. I spent 10 minutes alone, smoking outside being terrified after reading the thread. Beth showed up, I broke down the movie, nothing happend.

Then…

After a few drinks at another local pub, we both realized we were too drunk to drive. This being Seattle and cold at night, despite the unseasonably hot day, we needed a place to go. Well, I figured even my boss’s boss’s boss would understand if I used my keys to prevent my own death, so we hung out in my office for awhile drinking water.

Booze has a fairly stong effect on the bravery and, given enough time, I suggested it. It was bound to happen.

“Let’s go into the haunted theater.”

Sitting there, I felt nothing. Absolutely nothing. Beth, on the other hand, chimed in:. “I didn’t want to say anything, but when we were walking up the stairs to the theater earlier tonight, I heard somebody walking behind us.” She continued to psyche herself out. I, being drunk as I was, passed it all off.

“If, in fact, this theater is haunted, whatever haunts it isn’t here. I don’t feel it like I usually do.” I only half believed myself.

Time rolled by. We talked. The subject changed to less supernatural concepts. When I stopped, suddenly, convinced I saw a shadow out of the corner of my eye.

“Don’t fucking do that.” She says. I’m scaring her. Knowing my sudden silence mid-sentance is terrifying my friend, I continue my unrelated story.

That’s when we hear it.

WHOOSH!

I pause.
I panic.
I’m terrified.
It’s the fucking environment control. The furnace/air conditoning (still not sure) had come on.

All I want is to go home to my girlfriend and get some sleep, but I’d administered an amateur sobriety test to Beth and she’s nowhere near driving capability.

The minutes drag by and Beth continues her frightened rant.
“Do not EVER make me do this again.”
“Fuck off.” I say. “You take care of me when I’ve had too many.” It’s true. “My turn”.
“I make you drink water. You make me sit in a haunted theater!”
“And which…” I ask “is more sobering?!” I have a point.

Just then, it happens. The door to the theater opens. We hear faint footsteps. There’s a voice, but it’s not english. It doesn’t even sound human.

She grabs my hand. The first thing I think… “Let go of my hand. I have a girlfriend.” The second? “Jesus fucking vaudeville-performing Christ! There’s a Ghost in the theater!”

Boom!

The door slams.

“Sorry.” I say to the janitor. “We’re leaving”.

Scared the B’Jesus out of us. Fucker. Great timing.