Eerie Stuff

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Senor Bambos

In my younger days, a group of friends and I would go ghost hunting. We were rarely successful, and when we were successful it was usually some strange little incident that could be easily explained with science or any other sort of rational thinking. I think what was appealing to us most probably was the wait for something to show up. Though we rarely had any real run-ins with anything one could call “paranormal”, our trips were always tense. It was the anticipation that was the most exciting. It stayed in the area where it was exciting without being totally, mind-breakingly horrifying. An enjoyable level of emotions for a bunch of bored, midwestern teenagers.

The end of these fun little outings was abrupt and unexpected. There’s a cemetery in the town of Anderson, Indiana that has quite a bit of lore attached to it. There’s two parts: the newer part where people are buried now, and the original cemetery, which probably hasn’t had a fresh corpse buried in it since the fifties. The older part contains a grave for two young children who died sometime around the turn of the 20th century, I believe. There’s a statue of the two, a brother and a sister, above the grave, and it’s said that the eyes of the statue follow you around. This is true, but it’s merely an optical illusion. A little interesting, but not enough so that you’d want to waste a night checking it out.

That wasn’t the rumor about the grave that had us out there. Recently, an article in the local paper (this was around Halloween) had talked about strange occurences happening on the somewhat busy road near the old part of the cemetery. People would be parked at a certain red light, and they’d get the feeling that they were being watched. They’d turn to face their window and see a small child peering into their car. Naturally, this scared the shit out of the drivers, and they’d take off, leaving the kid behind. The description of the child matched the description of the little girl’s statue.

We hoped to visit the cemetery and piss of the ghosts. That’s right, we deliberately set out to irritate two dead children. It had been weeks since we had even heard so much as a strange noise, and we were growing a little restless. I had noticed that in many stories written by former skeptics, they claimed that they aroused whatever entity they encountered’s presence by saying something rude or doing something obnoxious. As someone who was growing more skeptical with each paranormal outing, I felt this to be a good last-resort kinda tactic. We’d kick their grave, mutter some foul words about them, and perhaps we may feel bold enough to literally spit upon their grave. If that didn’t offend ghosts that had no problem scaring innocent passerby, what would?

We showed up shortly before the sun was to set. We walked around the grave a few times, noting that the statue was very creepy. It was also surprisingly well-done, though time had taken a bit of a toll on its overall condition. The grass was a brownish green, and it was obvious this cemetery was not being tended to properly. We had been there for about ten minutes, and nothing had happened. I leaned on the boy’s section of the statue (him being the oldest and taller of the two) and noticed something strange. There was a very faint pulse coming from the statue. I told the others about it, and they all felt it as well. Only one other of our party of four felt the pulse. I thought about it for a few seconds but dismissed it as possibly the pulses in our own hands somehow resonating through the statue. Seemed plausible enough.

We began to grow bored, and despite our promise to be as hateful and vindicitive to the little dead bastards as possible, no one said anything. Only as we were leaving did Rob, our driver and most assholish of friends, kick the base of the statue out of frustration.

“Waste of my goddamn time.”

I was not looking forward to the drive home, as Rob’s car stinked horribly. He had many food wrappers, soda cans, and other useless waste lying around the car, as well as a dirty old blanket in the backseat he refused to throw out. The youngest member of our group had headed back to the car about five minutes befhorehand. As I climbed into the back, I saw him asleep and almost completely covered by Rob’s blanket. It was almost adorable in a “don’t sleep under that filthy thing” sort of way. Rob didn’t seem to notice or care that his fluid-covered blanket was being used in such a manner. Even though he was the most skeptical of us all, he had always been disappointed with the lack of ghostly activity at the end of those summer nights. However, with disappointment on all our minds, the five of us in the car set out for Todd’s house.

About halfway there, the youngest, who I’ll call James, began to snore from underneath the blanket. We all thought it was a little amusing, but not exactly hilarious. Slowly though, the snoring turned to a strange gurgling noise with bits of incoherent gibberish. We chuckled at this originally, but it grew more annoying/disgusting/unnerving as it continued for the next five minutes. Finally, James made a small whimper, like someone who was having a nightmare in which they felt completely helpless. He was quiet the rest of the ride.

Everyone in the two front seats seemed to have noticed nothing wrong, but the two of us besides James in the back were quite afraid. I thought about pulling up the blanket, but some sort of instinct was preventing me from doing so. We finally reached Todd’s house, and as we all got out of the car, James stayed behind. I nudged him a couple of times and told him we were at Todd’s house. I knew at the time something was wrong. It was particularly cold for a summer night and it’d be wrong to leave him out in the car, but I couldn’t bring myself to take the blanket off of him. I left him to his slumber and went back up to the porch where the others were sitting.

“What’s his deal?” Rob asked. I explained that he was sleeping and that it felt wrong waking him up. It was then when I noticed something that almost made me throw up in its creepiness. All of us were out on the porch. Me, Rob, Todd, and James. I did a cartoonish double-take and noticed that somebody was still laying underneath Rob’s ratty blanket. I realized that there had been five people in the car the whole time, when there were only four people in our group. Rob and James had sat in the front seats (James calling shotgun by leaving the gravesite early), and me and Todd had sat in the back. James and Rob claimed that they had heard nothing strange in the car on the way over, and that they had never really noticed the guy under the blanket. Seen him possibly, but not really noticed his presence.

We slowly walked back to the car and opened the passenger-side door next to the Blanket Ghost. The blanket, which had previously appeared to have a human form under it, collapsed as soon as we had opened the door. I know what we were all thinking: “Maybe it just looked like it had somebody under it the whole time.” Of course, that didn’t explain the noises Blanket Ghost had made earlier. And it certainly didn’t explain the black liquid trickling down from the underside of the blanket in the aftermath of its collapse.

Rob carefully pulled up the blanket. What we saw was a reddish-black liquid that covered almost the whole underside of the blanket. It started to get cleaner torwards the bottom of it (or, in this case, the part farthest from the door) and eventually, only one red-black handprint had been left in that area. Todd threw up a little as soon as he saw the handprint. I felt nauseous myself. Rob insisted on keeping the blanket as a souvenir. He seemed proud of it for some reason. A year later, a friend of the group caught him burning the blanket in a field near his house. He wouldn’t respond to her when she talked to him, and he refused to talk about the blanket (or the incident) afterwards. In fact, he insists none of this really happened.

Todd and I have always felt the worst about the incident. We were the two who felt the statue’s pulse and the two who had actually noticed the Blanket Ghost’s sick snores and sleep-talk. James doesn’t seem to feel strongly about his blanket-covered doppelganger either way.

Raikonnen

Anyhows, when I was around 10, me and one of my friends used to go to this leafy track near our area on our bikes. I think its called ‘The Towers Road’ because of some ancient 1800’s towers that used to be at the top. Its basically a long (3 miles) dirt track, that is completely straight, and a nice steep downhill angle for us to go down on our bikes. From the top of the road, you can see right down to the bottom. Both sides of the track have a downward incline, then masses of trees all the way down.

So this one day we had rode down the track at least 4 times (and walked back up) and it was getting dark. Halfway back up the track we stop for a rest, sit down and look down to the bottom. Just as we were turning, I saw something/someone run up the incline, over the track, and back down the incline into some bushes. It was a completely indistinct figure, but I asked my friend and he saw it too. So being investigative 10 year olds, we went to check it out.

We got to the place where the ‘figure’ had went into the bushes, and looked down. Absolutely nothing there. If I remember correctly, it was autumn so there werent many leaves on the bushes, but enough to obscure our view a little. We scan around a bit and see some random bits of rubbish. One of which I am sure is a shirt.

Thats a shirt down there <—Me
No its not, its a crisp packet <—-Friend
Its not a crisp packet, its too big
OI YOU! ARENT YOU A CRISP PACKET
*lots of rustling, like someone coming towards us* <—Evil creature from the black lagoon

Cue two scared 10 year olds, pushing their bikes back up a mile and a half of hill, faster than they managed to go down it. We laughed about it in the light of day (at the top of the hill), but for a good few months neither of us wanted to ride our bikes down there anymore

UMDSparks

My hometown (Oxford, MA) has a haunted library.

When I was a Senior in high school (like 2003ish) we did a unit on parapsychology in my crappy psych class. My buddy’s mom worked at the town library, and there was always talk of the library being haunted; chairs being turned to look at portaits of Hugenot people who founded the town, noises, etc. So my buddy and I bought an audio casette recorder and left it upstairs running with the longest tape we could find, just out of curiousity.

When we went to grab the tape the next day, all the books on the tops of the bookshelves were knocked over. We listened to the tape, and there was some sort of demonic howling devil noise (I honestly don’t know how someone could have fake-produced these sounds), there was piano music (there was a piano about 10 feet from the recorder), and there were very loud banging sounds (presumably the books).

We played the tape in my buddy’s living room stereo and his dog wigged the fuck out.

Apparently we’re mentioned in some book but not by name.

Jesus of Funkytown

“The Hamrick House”
The Hamrick House was basically “the” freaky place to go visit near my town in good old North Carolina. It was built in the 1790’s, and supposedly was home to a mass murder in the house at one time. People who have went there when the furniture was still there have reported that the rocking chair moves by itself, and others too scared to go inside have said that they’d drive by and the rocking chair would be inside, and then drive by ten minutes later and it’d be out on the porch. One of the most interesting and freakiest things about this place is the fact that many of the dead Hamricks are buried right in the front yard. I wrote this in a blog a few months ago, back in March, and figured it’d be good to post here.

——–

Before I begin, let me tell you that I do not believe in ghosts or spirits or whatnot, and I’ve been searching to find them forever. I put myself into freaky situations simply because I love the thrill you get when you’re scared. In the following blog, I didn’t lie at all. It’s completely the truth- I’m not one to lie about stuff like this. However, don’t expect to read some shit about how I saw a ghost and it beckoned me to join them. You’ll be sadly disappointed. On the other hand, this isn’t a “Omg, I heard a twig break GHOST RUN” story.

Tonight was probably the freakiest time I’ve ever had at the Hamrick House. I’ve been there at least five or six times, and nothing this freaky has ever happened before. At least, not to this extent. Maybe it’s all in our heads. Maybe not.

So it’s me, Kasie, Travis, and Aimee tonight. We had just left Katie and her friends Amanda, Jessica, and Nichole at Walmart (you wusses), and we decided hey, let’s go explore the Hamrick House because Travis hasn’t been there before and we were in the area.

We get there, I hand out flashlights (always prepared), and we proceed towards the house. About halfway there, I realize that I’ve forgotten the Ouija board in the car, but it was cold and I really didn’t feel like playing it for some reason. So we kept walking, and arrived to the house.

When we entered through the fence and walked past the graveyard, Aimee, Travis, and Kasie all heard this weird sound. It was like a banshee shrieking, and the freakiest part of all was that it seemed to be emanating from the house itself. The weird part is, I was in front of all three of them, and I didn’t hear a thing. Travis swore up and down that he thought it was a tape or something, because that sound didn’t sound natural at all. I believe him too- Travis isn’t one to mess around about scary stuff.

Anyway, we go through the side door into the Hamrick House. We all heard this weird scratching sound as soon as we entered, but none of us thought anything of it. We all pretty much kept to ourselves about freaky stuff that happened in the house until afterwards, where it all naturally came up.

I lock the door behind us, and we walk around the bottom marveling at how much they’ve remodeled since I last been there. There’s a stool laying overturned in one of the rooms, and the room below the stairs was open. I, of course, decide to crawl under the stairs and chill a while.

When I was under there, it was pretty freaky, and not because I was a confined area. I don’t know…. It was just weird. Kasie was about to get everyone under there and close the door, but I told them not to, partly because the wood wasn’t remodeled under there, and partly because for some reason I didn’t want all of us to be underneath the stairwell.

We climb the stairs, and for a while we all chill in the attic. Nothing eventful really happens. Me and Travis, being penilely gifted, take pisses out the window. Not at the same time, you freaks. Anyway, we chill in the attic for a while before heading back downstairs.

Downstairs, I remember the overturned stool. I walk towards it, and I hear this weird sound to the left of me next to the table- like somebody had walked over there, and the wood had creaked. I paused, looked for a second, told myself it was my imagination, and continued looking at the stool.

It was made completely of wood, with three wooden logs around each other, upon which the seat was nailed to. When I first saw it, it looked like those figure things from the Blair Witch Project. Remembering my fetish with gathering a souviener from all scary places I’ve been to, I decide to steal this stool. I’ll get a picture of it later for you guys, because it looks pretty cool.

Anyway, I unlock the door, we leave, and we drive down the road noting how the Hamrick House wasn’t really scary, and how next time we’re gonna play the Ouija board in there and sit in all four corners of the place and everything. Then we started remembering all the little things that happened to each of us individually.

I remembered that when we were first walking to the house, I forgot the Ouija board but I wasn’t so excited to go back and get it. Now, if you know me, you know I’m a big Ouija board man. Also, Travis had been on my ass all day about it, reminding me to bring it at least twice. But…. we both really didn’t want to play it anymore because I had a really uneasy feeling about cops catching us in there this time.

Then there was that weird banshee noise that all three of them had heard and I hadn’t. It seemed to be coming from the house itself, but oddly stopped when we got there. I myself did hear some weird noise outside, but didn’t think anything of it until later.

Later, when Travis was pissing out the window, he swears that it sounded like his piss was hitting something that wasn’t there, like there was some kind of grate over the window that made his piss sound like it wasn’t getting outside. He actually moved to make sure it wasn’t bouncing back and getting any on himself. When he was done, he shined his flashlight out and there was nothing there.

When I heard that weird creaking sound by the table near the stool, I didn’t think much of it. Later on, driving down the road, I remembered that the last time I went to the Hamrick House, I heard the same exact shit at the SAME spot in that house- right next to that table.

When we were first entering the house, I locked both locks on the door- the turny thing where you put a lock, and the kind of lock where you place the hook into the little hole. When I was leaving, I swear I can’t for the life of me remember unlocking the hook lock- Travis and Kasie swear I only unlocked one lock too.

Just to add to freakiness, when we all left we noticed that the moon was shining bright as hell, and very pale in color. Later on, we were driving down the road discussing our beliefs in ghosts and whatnot. Aimee was telling this story of something chasing her brother and cousin through the woods, and she stopped in mid sentence and says “Oh my god, look at that.” We all looked, and the moon had turned a dark orange, almost red in color, and seemed to have grown larger. The thing that got me freaked out was that after that, Aimee turned straight to me and said “Gaisser, you shouldn’t have taken that stool.”

I don’t know. This may be just my nerves, or some shit. There’s just something weird at that house that makes me keep wanting to return. And, son of a bitch- Earlier, Jessica was talking about how she went there, and it was all cool until suddenly a stool flew across the room by itself.

And now there’s a stool sitting in my damn room directly behind me.

I keep looking back at it, half expecting it to have moved or some shit. It’s pretty cold in here. I’m just hoping it’s because the heat’s off, not because there’s some fucking ghost in here with me.

I don’t know. I’m abnormally jittery. I don’t usually get this way. I mean, I’ve been to some scary places and shit, but I haven’t been this jumpy since the Ouija board almost spelled Devil over at Dan’s. I keep feeling this breeze, but all the windows are closed. God dammit.

I really shouldn’t be saying that right now, should I?

The Hamrick House always keeps me coming back, I don’t know why. There’s something that draws me to it, some kind of force of nature that I’ve yet to be able to explain. Maybe we’re all crazy. I don’t know.

Funny fact- I’ve never been able to take a picture of the house before. The few times I’ve tried, it’s like the flash of the camera is unable to penetrate the house- like some kind of forcefield is around it that doesn’t allow light to enter it. It’s weird.

Thora

I have two stories, both of them swear-to-God true.

One of my hobbies is photography. When I first started it was fall of 1997, taking pics of cemetaries with fall color (why yes, that is a little strange, thank you.)

In early February 1998 we had an unseasonably warm day so I went out with the camera to see if I could find anything interesting.

I stopped by an old cemetary near my parent’s house. Pretty typical, with tall monuments in the old part, low, highly polished stones in the new part.

I went walking in the weeds on the north edge of the cemetary, looking for long-lost graves in the tall dead weeds which separated the north side of the grounds from a small pine grove. I noticed a sweet smell, like hyacinth flowers, while walking in this area. This was strange as I was walking not 10 feet from towering pine trees, on a carpet of their dead needles. The scent of pine should have been prevalent, not spring flowers.

I started walking to the south, towards the more well-kept, newer section. Again, I smelled the sweet hyacinth scent, more intense and longer lasting than the time before. I looked around and saw no flowers left in pots, and of course none coming from the ground. It was February; the ground was frozen, it rarely rose above freezing during the day.

I started to wonder if I had someone accompanying me.

I walked through the southern part of the graveyard where the newest graves are, the sweet flowery smell drifting in and out in front of me, like if I had been walking next to someone wearing too much perfume. I turned and walked north.

Then again, stronger than before, the sweet hyacinth smell. I stopped and inside my head I asked “Who is there? If you are friendly, give me a sign. If you are not friendly, GO AWAY.”

Not surprisingly, there was no answer.

I turned to continue walking through the old part, the hyacinth smell still with me.

I heard something skittering in the leaves behind me. I thought maybe I had stirred up a field mouse or a squirrel had come out to investigate what I was doing.

I stopped, and the rustling continued. I turned around and three leaves were chasing each other counterclockwise in a small tight circle, rising and falling from the ground to roughly eight inches off the ground, like they had been caught in a tiny tornado. There was no breeze. The air was perfectly still.

Fighting an intense urge to run to the car going :blarg: , I asked out loud, “Who are you?”.

The leaves spiraled to the ground and remained still and the hyacinth smell faded.

I didn’t stick around to see if anything else was going to happen.

The other time I was in a (one guess, make it count!) cemetary (Did you say cemetary? Good job!), but I wasn’t taking pictures, I was in the area and wanted to stop by the family plot (which I hadn’t done in years).

I wasn’t sure where exactly it was, as this cemetary is huge (Roseland in Berkley MI at 12/Woodward).

As I was walking through it, trying to decide where to go (this is kind of hard to explain), something grabbed my right arm and pulled. Not my physical arm, but like, the energy around my arm. It was a firm enough tug that I yanked my arm away and jumped. Anyone looking on must have thought I was nuts, jumping and flailing my arm and “what the fuck”-ing at thin air.

Needless to say this story ends with me running to the car going :blarg: and staying out of cemetaries for a few months.

turgidrod

After an epic night of Starcraft, I was driving back from Boulder to Littleton (sup CO goons), some time around 4 in the morning. Being around 19, and having nothing better to do, I decided to take the “scenic route”, and ended up on highway 26, behind the hogback near Morrison. A couple miles from Morrison, I’m doing about 60, when something raccoon-sized darts out from the edge of the road. I didn’t really have time to swerve, so I just braced for impact, hoping that a raccoon wouldn’t fuck up my front end, when…nothing.

I was dead center at less than 10 feet with whatever it was, but no impact came.

I’m not sure how that happened, as the front air dam on that car was less than 5 inches from the ground. This thing was at least 18 inches tall, and I’m pretty sure raccoons can’t become two dimensional without the aid of truck tires.
Whatever it was just seemed to evaporate.
I pulled over and got out, to check for any possible damage and injured animals, but there was neither – no broken air dam, and nothing scrambling through the brush scared shitless or smashed and twitching on the road, just silence.

Maybe it was an animal that I just barely missed, or maybe it was a sleep deprivation induced hallucination, I dunno. I still can’t fully explain it though.

—

Up till a few months ago I was renting a room from a friend, in his big ass 1899 victorian house, which was spooky as fuck, partly due to it’s in-progress renovations, and partly just because big old houses are inherently fucking spooky. Anyway, I would fairly often hear what sounded like footsteps coming from the 3rd floor, and I frequently got a feeling that something was just “off”, in a disconcerting but unquantifiable way.

From there, the story gets…boring.
Nothing bigger ever happened, just the odd noise that could maybe be explained by the house settling, or whatever explanations people usually come up with to assure themselves that their world is operating exactly the way they expect it to. However I never felt very comfortable there, and always seemed to have problems sleeping, more so than usual.

rammark

“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.

zoink2000

Back in high school there was a program called “Earth Odessey” which was basically English, Geography and a couple other courses all rolled into one. It was a cool programs because the curriculum was based around the environment, so more or less every other week was a camping trip.

One of these trips was a canoe trip to Massassauga Park, Ontario. (here is the wikipedia for the park http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massasauga_Provincial_Park). The final stop of the trip was an abandoned logging camp where we had to do manual labour and help with the upkeep of the provincial park.

For this class we also had to keep journals, which was often just sit by yourself somewhere and doodle pictures for marks. When writing these journals we had to be alone, I guess to avoid outside influence? I really don’t know.

Anyways, I decided to go into one of the empty cabins to write my journal, since there was a chair and desk and everything in one of the rooms. As I’m sitting there writing, I hear a wood-on-wood scraping noise, so I get up and scope out the cabin and surrounding area. No one is inside, and no one is outside … atleast not close enough to have made the noise and escaped silently.

So, back I go to writing. A few minutes pass when I hear a really loud, long wood on wood scrape. Needless to say, I booked it out of there and ran to the main cabin where everyone was conjoining (so much for solitary). After babbling my story to pretty much everyone, a few people and one of the park rangers follow me back to where I was and we notice a bookshelf had moved from one corner of a room to the opposite corner.

Later that night, the campfire story was told of the clumsy handyman who died in that cabin, information I could’ve used earlier.

Violet1211

I work as a tour guide at a historical society, and every Halloween there’s a walking tour down the street (it’s Huguenot Street in New Paltz, NY- UMDSparks, this town was also founded by Huguenots) with ghost stories for the houses that we pass. And most of the stories are crap. But there’s one house that definitely has something in it. This is Deyo, the 1910 house. (Here’s a picture.)

Deyo has a strange feeling to it. I think it’s centered around a portrait of Gertrude Bogardus Deyo Jessup. She died a few months after the portrait was painted. The story goes that originally her portrait was displayed on the second floor, with portraits of her parents; then, for some reason, the parents’ portraits were moved downstairs, and people began finding Gertrude’s portrait moved around the room- against other walls, on the floor. This didn’t stop until her portrait was also moved downstairs near her parents’ portraits again. People also claimed to have seen objects moving around on tables and desktops when no-one was near them.

That’s all been handed down; I don’t know of anyone who can verify these things now. Here is what I do have:

1. The registrar once told me that she was doing some light cleaning one day when she heard footsteps inside the house. Knowing that she was alone there, she panicked and ran outside.

2. A fellow tour guide told me that another tour guide often felt as though he was being watched when he was in the house alone. This is something I’ve heard from other people as well.

3. A former maintenance guy who I’m friends with is a wellspring of ghost stories, including some from Deyo. He told me that once the housekeeper had something fly out at her and now she will only go into Deyo with another person there (I know that that’s true), and that he had been in there alone when he’d heard a tea kettle whistling. When he went downstairs to the kitchen, the noise disappeared and there was no kettle on the stove. This guy is awesome- he does medieval re-enactment, including making his own armor and doing hand-to-hand combat- but he refused to go into the house alone, especially at night. In fact, nobody raises any eyebrows when people asked, “I’m going into Deyo, who wants to come with me?” because so many people just don’t like to be there alone.

4. A woman on a tour last week walked into the house and immediately asked if there were any ghost stories here. She said that she felt a presence, not malevolent, but afraid of change.

5. My own part- I was scared out of my wits for the first few weeks of tours, because I am a big baby. Then I got used to going around the house alone to turn off lights and close up. The maintenance guy said that I’d probably start talking to the houses, but Deyo is the only one I talk to. I think I do feel something there, in a way that I don’t in other houses, so I’ll just talk about the weather or the tours that day or whatever, and it’s gotten to feel more comfortable. I don’t know if I’m getting complacent or if whatever-it-is has decided I’m all right. I’m very curious about the whole thing and not very frightened, maybe because I feel like I know who the ghost is. She’s like a housebound lady I visit sometimes to bring news from the outside world.

I also was bringing a tour through a few weeks ago, and I heard thumping, like somebody walking around on the second floor in heavy boots. I thought it might have been the construction outside, but thudding loud enough to be heard in the house would have echoed. Plus it really sounded like it was in the house. I have to compare notes with the registrar to see if she heard the same thing.

There are a few other things on the street- there’s the story that the director’s wife told about how she was down in the library building’s basement to get something and she saw a woman with a fur around her neck. She panicked and ran upstairs, onto the street, where she met a friend of hers who was a volunteer there. She told him what had happened, and he offered to go down and check the basement, so they went back in and she waited at the top of the stairs. After a few seconds he came right back up and they both ran outside; he had seen the woman too, and this time she had just disappeared. They waited until the director came back and made him go down, realizing only later that they hadn’t explained to him what had happened and that they could have been sending him to a terrible death, although probably not. (He didn’t see anything.) In addition to this, there’s a headless woman that haunts that Dubois Fort/Visitors Center, although nobody’s there at night now, so there hasn’t been a sighting in several years.

The maintenance guy also said that he’d seen a rocking chair moving on its own while he was alone in Locust Lawn, an offsite property that’s open for tours on th weekend. I was surprised by that. I did a lot of catalogueing in that house over the summer, and I never noticed anything weird. Everyone agrees that LoLa, as it’s nicknamed, is a very comfortable house. Even if there are ghosts, I learned enough about the family who lived there that I don’t think I could be very frightened. Mostly I would just apologize for catalogueing their old clothes.

Sapper

To contribute: My first house was a ghetto shack originally built in 1940. We had to gut it before it became livable. I was up in the attic running wire late one night, my Dad still worked down the road as a security guard and would often stop by after his shift (3-11). My wife wasn’t up there helping that night, for some reason (we still lived in Gettysburg with my folks until we had, you know, a working toilet).

Anyway, I was getting filthy in the attic running 12ga. and I heard the screen door open, the rickety entry door squeak open and shut, and my pleasingly plump (chubby) old man lumber down the hall, putz around the living room, and finally waltz into the bedroom (which led to the closet, which had the giant fucking hole in the ceiling I made with a reciprocating saw to access the attic, and I still haven’t patched up thank you for reminding me honey I’ll get to it someday I’m fucking busy). He stopped outside the closet (the floors were all bare because I’d peeled up and burned the ratty linoleum layers that someone had been pissing on, so the footsteps were loud). I crawled over to the ceiling hole, baning my head many times in the process, popped my head out the ceiling and looked through the bare studs (walls got ripped out to), “Hey Dad I’m up heeee……what the fuck?!”

Nobody there. I dropped out the hole and dashed between the studs, looking into the bedroom (and living room, yep yanked that wall, too). Nobody. This house was 718 sq. feet, and 3/4 of the interior walls were gone, there was no way a fat rent-a-cop could hide. Hell, the bathroom was still open-air on one side! At this point I was feeling a bit disconcerted, and my bowels were feeling a bit disappointed I hadn’t reinstalled the toilet. I ran outside…just my Pontiac, no other cars, not even the neighbors.

Then the door shut behind me. I’m going to chalk that part up to the wind, and pressure differentials, and ignore the fact that this shack had more holes than swiss cheese. Yeah.

Nonetheless, we got the place livable and moved in. I awoke one night to my wife frantically tugging my arm, calling my name, and shivering. She’d awoken because someone had sat on the end of the bed on her side, and was calmly sitting there smoking a pipe, staring at her. She couldn’t tell the gender, but the person had heavy lidded eyes, and the smoke smelled sweet. I told her it was “just a dream, go back to sleep, I have class in the morning….”

“Don’t you smell the FUCKING SMOKE?” (My wife has every allergy known to man, and a few known only to horses. I could Cleveland Steamer her and she wouldn’t smell it)

Yes, my delicate dedicated smoker nose was detecting the pungent odor of tobacco. Not Marlboro, not Camel, but sweet pipe tobacco. Strong.
That woke me up. I had to down a double Rum and coke with a chaser of Benadryl to get back to sleep that night…and the odor hung around for hours.

Come to find out the old lady kicked the bucket in the house a few years back, and her and the old man both smoked pipes.

Ars Arcanum

“The Room in the Dark”

When I was 15, my Mom decided to call it quits with my Dad. Until this point, I’d been happily growing up in a tiny town in western central Jersey. I was attending high school in the dimunitive city of Lambertville because my parents weren’t thrilled with the high school associated with our own district. When Mom decided to separate from my Dad, she figured it would be a good idea to move to town so we wouldn’t have to pay tuition for my school anymore. So I found myself packing my stuff and heading off to the town where all my school friends lived.

The house we were renting was a big old place, and I think it’s even registered with some historical society or another. Anyway, the situation was a bit odd because a friend of mine had been renting the house with her family right before we moved in. So I already knew the house. Furthermore, it was decided that my new bedroom would be her old bedroom. Kind of weird, but whatever.

Anyway, in July we moved in: me, my mother, our female housemate (and my Mom’s coworker at the time), and our housemate’s young daughter (she was around 6 or 7). I took my friend’s old bedroom, our housemate took the bedroom next to mine, and her daughter took the tiny third bedroom on the second floor. My Mom decided to take a room downstairs–it was intended to be a family room, I guess–that had the downstairs bathroom attached to it. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but I was a little perplexed that my Mom hadn’t chosen to take the other two rooms upstairs–an area the realtor called “The Apartment”–as her bedroom.

“The Apartment” was not really an apartment. It was actually one large room that had a counter with some cabinets and a working sink, and then a smaller room that also had a doorway leading out to a tiny balcony (which overlooked the equally tiny backyard). Our housemate wanted to use it as a sort of playroom for her daughter, since the girl’s bedroom was really small. We thought that was fine, and since it was plenty big enough, I put some of my stuff in there as well–art supplies, games, jigsaw puzzles, etc. The linoleum floors and sink made me think it would be a great place for me to paint. We all began to think of it as the playroom.

I should mention at this point that I had a lot of reservations about this house. Sure, I was an overdramatic angsty teenager who was pissed about her parents’ marriage dissolving, and being hauled from her home and brothers to a crummy old house with a housemate I hardly knew and her pesky kid hanging around. More importantly, I was not a fan of the house. I had visited my friend several times while she’d lived there, even sleeping over on occasion. And I just didn’t like the house. In particular, I hated the dining room–a tiny little green affair set off the kitchen at the back of the house. The first time I stayed over, my friend took me to the kitchen for breakfast, and then we’d gone into the dining room to eat. There was an ugly little clock hanging on the wall, and she shut the odd door that existed between the small kitchen and the little green room. She ate her cereal obliviously while I sat there, inexplicably frightened and unable to stop casting shifty glances at the fucking clock–despite the company and the sunlight streaming in through the windows.

I mentioned to her that I didn’t like it in this room, and she said she thought the house was haunted. But she insisted it was a “good” ghost. Considering the feelings I was experiencing, and the fact that my good pal was well on her way to becoming a total pothead (smoked my first joint–even though it was probably mostly oregano–in that house with her, I did), I kind of disagreed with her.

Back to us moving in. I still hated the dining room, and when I mentioned to my Mom that I was creeped out by the clock, she responded by pulling the plastic piece of crap, which was designed to look like an antique made of dark wood, off the wall and tossed it in the garbage. I felt better, but quickly realized I still hated the damn room, creepy clock or no. I also hated the downstairs bathroom, which I dubbed “Satan’s Shithole” for its ugly red carpeting and outdated fixtures. This bathroom shared a wall with the dining room.

Anyway, we managed to settle in after a week or two. I never felt completely comfortable there, just as I’d never felt comfortable staying there with my friend (I’d always chalked that up to being away from my own home). I especially hated walking down the upstairs hallway at night to get to the bathroom and back. I always felt like someone was watching me, and was consistently afraid that if I looked over my shoulder, something would be chasing me. I also hated how there was a creepy closet right across from the playroom that had a little octagonal window in it (and there were no rooms on that side of the hall…so the closet, which was pretty deep, was kind of inexplicable). However, I never suspected the playroom to be the cause of my unease; I blamed everything on the dining room (the upstairs bathroom was close to being over top of it).

One night, I’d been up reading or watching TV in my bedroom after everyone else had gone to sleep. I went down the hallway to use the bathroom, and on the way, I happened to glance in the playroom’s doorway.

Now, opposite the doorway was a large window. Lambertville is a tiny, rather crowded town–it’s very hard to have a window in one’s house/apartment that doesn’t have a streetlight, store light, or someone else’s outdoor light shining in it. So, when I walked past the playroom and glanced in, I fully expected to see light from the nearby streetlamp streaming through onto the floor–just as I had on previous nights.

Instead, there was nothing.

When I glanced through that doorway, it was like looking a solid black wall. I stopped, confused, and stared in. At first I blamed it on my being tired, but I was definitely awake. Then I wondered if there hadn’t been a power outage…except I could see another streetlamp shining through the bathroom window in front of me. “Ok, Ars Arcanum,” I told myself, “the streetlamp outside the playroom must be out.” But this also didn’t make sense, because there were no lights from the windows of other houses or other street lamps coming through the playroom’s window.

At this point, I was kind of like “WTF, is there something blocking the window?” So I went to step inside the room. And then I froze, because I–who hadn’t been scared up to this point, just sort of confused and curious–was suddenly fucking terrified. The second I put my foot within a few inches of that doorway, my blood ran cold. I considered running back to my room, or downstairs (my Mom was out with her boyfriend), except I couldn’t. My mind was too filled with the shock of how wrong everything suddenly felt. Not to mention that despite staring into the room for several long moments, I still couldn’t see a thing–not the window, toys, cabinets and counter, or cat litterbox–nothing. Just darkness.

Eventually, I moved away from the door, trying to convince myself I was being stupid. But I wanted to prove to myself that there was nothing wrong with the room, so I would be able to sleep easily. I wasn’t going to be a 15-year-old baby about it. Then I remembered reading somewhere that animals are better able to detect “ghosts” than people are. I’d always written this off with a big “whatever,” but I didn’t have any better way to prove that the house was non-haunted. So I set off back down the hallway to my bedroom, where my cat, Gold, and our housemate’s cat–a giant black and white monster named Cowie (who was actually one of the most laid-back, easygoing cats I’ve ever met)–were chilling on my bed.

I picked up Cowie because his dry food (my cat didn’t eat dry food at the time) and favored litterbox were in the playroom (Gold rarely went in the playroom, if ever–come to think of it, I don’t remember ever seeing him there. Smart boy). Surely Cowie wouldn’t mind being put in such a familiar place. He wouldn’t be scared, and that would mean I shouldn’t be either.

And it was with this logic that I took the cat back to the doorway, and placed him carefully inside.

The reaction was almost instantaneous.

As soon as I put Cowie on the floor, he hunkered down. I had expected him to either check out his food bowl, or immediately step out of the room so he could twine about my ankles and beg to be picked up and cuddled again. But no. He pressed himself down on the floor. A second later, his ears went flat against his skull like he was pissed and/or terrified. I was shocked because I’d never seen him do this before. I didn’t have much time to contemplate it though, because the second after that he tore out of the room and back down the hallway. He stopped at the door to my room and looked back. I could see his eyes, open ridiculously wide, staring back towards me. He looked about as freaked out as I’ve ever seen a cat look.

I was an obstinate little brat back then, so despite my senses and the cat telling me otherwise, I still thought I was just being silly. Foolishly, and rather cruelly (I adore cats and other pets…I was being so stupid), I went back down the hallway. Poor little Cowie started rubbing against me really hard, obviously seeking reassurance. And me, being an utter idiot, picks the poor cat up and carries him back to the playroom.

And puts him inside it again. The poor thing was wriggling the second I started down the hallway, which was weird because he was a giant slug who loved to be held and never tried to get away from anyone, not even our housemate’s over-enthusiastic daughter. And I still put the unfortunate guy back inside that fucking blackness-filled doorway.

He hunkered down again, and then–shockingly–he growled. I’d never heard him growl before, ever, and I’d never any cat growl like this. I owned three cats at that point in my life (two stayed with my Dad), and had fostered a fourth before my parents separated. Practically all of my friends had cats. I own seven now, including Gold, who’s still with us. Suffice to say, I’ve heard lots of cat growls in my lifetime, but never one like this–never one so loud, so enraged. Next thing I know, Cowie lets out a howl–again, the likes of which I’d never heard from him before–and shoots past me, down the hallway, and into my bedroom.

And while I’m contemplating all of this, I suddenly realize that while his howl had faded as he ran down the hall, the growling had not faded. And since I’m relatively sure he had only one set of vocal cords, it made no sense that he was producing both his retreating howl and the growl at the same time.

Needless to say, I took this moment to abandon all pretenses of bravery and logic and ran after the cat. I slammed the door to my room shut and locked it. I found Cowie huddled under my bed–again, something I’d never seen him do before, but fucked if I was going to question it at this point. Hell, I was tempted to join him. Maybe whatever had produced that impenetrable darkness and hideous growl wouldn’t be able to find me under the bed, had it chose to come looking.

Eventually, I heard the front door open when my Mom came home. I ran downstairs, and told her that there was something wrong with the playroom. I explained every detail to her. Being the bright and wonderfully indulgent woman she still is, she accompanied me back upstairs to the playroom, set on soothing my fears.

And be damned if when we got to the doorway, there wasn’t light streaming through the window opposite it. The counter, litterbox, toys and everything in the room were clearly defined. I could even see the orange blob of the streetlamp outside. The feeling of dread and cold was long gone.

The next day, I realized that the damn dining room was directly underneath the playroom. I also managed to convince myself that I’d let my imagination get away with me, and that the streetlamp had flickered out for a bit and Cowie had just been being wonky. So a few days later, I walked into the playroom and started working on a half-finished jigsaw puzzle I’d left in there. I didn’t even consider the events of a few nights ago, and was soon totally absorbed in my puzzle.

When the sun started to go down, I turned on an old desk lamp I’d put in the room for just this purpose. But as soon as I turned on the light, I started getting that feeling again–the same feeling I’d felt a few nights before. It was just…wrong. The atmosphere of the room changed from sunny and warm to cold and almost angry, despite the daylight still coming in through the windows. It was like something wanted me to get out, and stay out. I didn’t question it. I just turned off the lamp and left.

Later, my Mom mentioned my unease with the playroom to the realtor. The house was actually for sale, she was actually the owner and had grown up there, and she was renting it out between looking for buyers. Every time a renter moved out–which happened frequently–she put it on the market again. Upon failing to sell it, despite it being a gorgeous old house in great condition in a highly desirable neighborhood, she’d give up and put it out to rent for a while. She told my Mom that her grandmother had lived with her family when she was a child, and they’d renovated the playroom into “The Apartment” so her grandmother would have more space and privacy to herself. The old woman had died while living there.

I moved out after a bare month of living there to go stay with my father while my mother moved to Colorado for a while. Our housemate, unable to cover the rent on her own, moved out shortly afterwards. The house went back up for sale, and stayed that way for a good long while. Eventually, someone bought it, presumably renovated it (they repaired and repainted the exterior wonderfully, so I assume they did the inside)…then sold it. I moved back to Lambertville with my Mom a year later. The house ended up on the market again soon after. Eventually, someone else bought it, and repainted the outside again. A guy I knew from work told me years later (when I was 23, so a good eight years or so) that they had redone the whole inside of the house again. I was out with him, and mentioned the place had been my first home in the town. He said he’d take me over to meet his friends, the current owners, and I could tell them how it had looked originally.

I politely declined.

It was then that I remembered when my friend was living there, her dog–an adorable Sheltie–had loved to follow us everywhere in the house when I was over. One night, we’d gone into the playroom/apartment/gate to fucking hell so we could go out on the balcony. After a while, I’d noticed he hadn’t come with us. We later found him acting distressed and whimpering by the doorway.

HELLSHARK

I’ve never had ghost encounters personally but I have a friend that has. My friend Jo lives on the south side of Chicago with her aunt and grandmother. From what she tells me, there is a ghost in the house. Some people in her family can see the ghost and others can’t. Her aunt and Jo’s twin sister (interestingly, they are identical twins) have seen the ghost on multiple occasions while Jo personally never has.

Every time the ghost is seen, he has the same form. The aunt has seen a middle aged man with a hat inside the house several times. He also makes noises when nobody else is home. She’s never confronted the ghost face to face, but she’ll typically see him walking in the hallway and enter a room. Apparently, she’ll just yell “You need to get out of the house right now!” and then when she checks on the room there is nothing there.

Jo’s encounters with the ghost have more to do with hearing him or having him move her things. For example, she once had a bag of laundry at the bottom of the stairs which somehow got to the top of the stairs while she was in the kitchen. The aunt being the only other person home at the time, Jo asked her if she moved her laundry. The aunt replied “I just saw him. He must have moved it.”
My friend isn’t the type who would make this stuff up. She isn’t religious either. But when I ask her about it all and mention how skeptical I am, she just shakes her head and calmly says “No. There are ghosts. We have a ghost”.

Ashcans

This happened years ago, when I was about eight or nine, during the summer vacations. My sister and I were in the living room, reading (in my case) and harassing the poor cat (in my sister’s case; she took great pleasure in trying to put hats on the poor thing). While entertaining ourselves, we suddenly became aware of this thin, mechanical music in the background, too quiet to have heard if we’d been watching TV or the like.

Never having heard anything like it before, we began to look around for the source, making sure that the tv and radio were off, checking to see if it was coming in from the yard somehow. When that failed we began checking the rest of the house; it is a big stone place and echoes travel weirdly sometimes, it can be hard to tell where people and things are. Fortunately, the faint music kept repeating its chimes the whole time, until we found it coming from a box on my mother’s dressing table.

Now, a music box playing is not very unsettling at all, it was just odd because we’d never heard it play before. Being as we weren’t supposed to mess with our parent’ things, I stayed and watched the box while my sister went and got my mother. The box stopped playing just as my mother and sister returned, but she had heard it playing. She was equally puzzled because although the music box was old (it had been a gift from her aunt) it had never malfunctioned before, and when we opened it, it began playing again — meaning that it hadn’t just malfunctioned and wound itself down. It had apparently just started and stopped itself playing, which we attributed to some quirk in the machinery.

So why is this in the ghost thread? About six days later, we had a phone call from my Grandmother, to let us know that her sister Doris (my mother’s aunt, the one that had given her the box) had passed away. On the day she had died, her music box had played just long enough for it to be found and her neice to hear it. To my knowledge, it never malfunctioned like that again. My mother maintains it was a message, and even I have to admit the coincidence is eerie.

Saint Witchdoctor

I used to live on a little street called Eclipse Lane, in a small suburb called Whitby – in Wellington, New Zealand. When we moved into the house, we were warned that not only was there a retirement home a street away, the street had an alarming move-in/movie-out rate. Nobody stayed there long.

The house was beautiful, I admit. But it wasn’t our house that was the problem, it seemed to be the whole street. This was back when I was still living with my parents, and we lived there for five years. We moved in when I was 13, and I moved out at 18. In that time, our neighbours on both side only lasted a year each, number 7 across the road never got sold, the kids at number 11 went absolutely nuts, and everybody in the street always seemed very stressed and tense.

The first encounter, I remember walking past the living room – we had large sliding Japanese doors which were constantly open – and out of the corner of my eye, I saw a man sitting on the sofa. Perfectly poised, hands on his knees, black suit, neatly combed black hair, illuminated only by the blue glow from the VCR digital display and streetlights coming in from outside. When I did a double-take, he was gone.

The same thing happened a lot. I’d be walking past a room at night, and see figures for split-seconds, and they’d be gone by the time I looked back.

It wasn’t flashy, it wasn’t dramatic. The ghosts/figments/what-have-you weren’t bloody, or angry (most of the time), but they were there. Domestic ghosts, if there is such a thing. They didn’t cause trouble most of the time, whatever odd things I saw were generally very calm.

That house made me have a lot of strange dreams. There was one particular one that recurred; I’d find myself sitting at a black table, looking in turn at eight other people sitting around the table. I didn’t recognise any of them from ‘real life’, but I know their faces as well I know my parents’.

One night I remember in detail, during the first year of living there, something got mad. I don’t know what I did that day, but it really made me curse my decision to segregate myself off downstairs while my parents lived upstairs. I was in bed, trying to fall asleep, when I hear a woman’s voice call. “Are you in bed?”

I thought it was my mother. I replied quietly that I was. The voice asks again, “Are you in bed?” I roll my eyes and call back louder that yes, I was in bed. No way she didn’t hear that.

The woman asks me again, louder, sounding irritated. Was I in bed? Fuck’s sake. “Of course I am! I answered you already!” I shout back.

I can’t even describe her voice in what she said next. Just a simple, “Get in bed!” But it was twisted, agonised, howling and I instantly broke into a cold sweat just hearing it. I huddled under my sheets, replying fearfully that I was in bed. This carried on, the woman’s voice getting louder and harsher, my voice breaking and barely audible because I was shaking too hard.

And then I don’t remember anything. It was like someone turned off my brain. I woke up what I think was a few hours later, and heard footsteps on the deck outside. I quickly discerned they were walking in a circle, pacing round and round on the deck outside. Needless to say, I hid under my sheets for the entire night.

Whenever I asked anybody else in the street about ghost-related incidents, they would clam up. Or laugh it off, entirely falsely. Nobody wanted to talk about it, especially not middle-age businessmen who probably thought they were past all that ‘spooky’ bollocks.

aversion

So, there is an abandoned house in my home town. Just as there is in any town. Large, handsome real-estate which for some ‘unknown’ reason is boarded up and unused.

Unused by everyone except of course all the local kids, junkies, and winos. For all of whom the supposed unknown reasons are very well know, but by no means held in agreement about the specifics.

I’m young, I have a pocket full of dope and an attractive opportunity to spend some alone time with an attractive girl. I am young, so doing all this at a supposedly haunted house is a fabulous idea. I’ve been there before so know all about the loose boarding at the back where you can leaver it away from a windowframe and climb inside.

So we do. It’s not night time, so while most of the windows in the place are covered over light filters through by osmosis and the empty shell of this house is more or less visible inside. I’d been there many times before and I knew that there were a few choice rooms on the ground floor to sit in and smoke up; rooms predominately where no homeless men had thrown up half a gallon of cheap cider or taken a vast shit any time in the last two months.

But this girl, you see, she’s all full of spunk: not my own, not yet and actually not ever. A feisty bit and as a new comer instead of just getting high and exploring our developing sexuality, she actually wants to explore the house instead.

So we go from room to room and it’s more of the same crap. Sometimes literally. But mostly just empty rooms, boarded windows, holes in the walls, and so on. She wants to go upstairs, which I’d never done because, well, I’m not a fucking idiot. The whole place being a rotting death trap.

But flying in the face of reason she wants to go and I’m not going to deny her biased on my desire to not appear cowardly and my stronger desire to remove parts of her clothing. Which is more or less the same desire but viewed from different angles.

Upstairs, for the sake of simplicity you can imagine there are four rooms, all connected by a single corridor that splits them down the centre; four on either side. All the first six we pass without entering are empty and featureless. Most of their windows are just voids in the wall through which the sunlight falls in. Without disappearing through the floorboards, I’m considering this to be a wasted trip and as we approach the end of the corridor I’m wondering how stoned I could have become in the time it’s taken me to get here.

But the last room on the right is dark. The window is still boarded up and there is a girl lying in the centre of the floor. She is curled up, foetal and sobbing.

Beyond how bad that would normally be, things just felt utterly awful. Like you were seeing something terrible just before you could understand quite how terrible it could be. She’s like a mouse. Seriously, that is as best as I can phrase it. She like a mouse that’s halfway through being tortured by a playful cat.

It’s dark and I’m never going to be sure about specifics; but she seemed to have mousy grey hair, yet still be young. And even when I close my eyes now and picture it, I have simply no idea if she was naked. When I tell myself she was, I can see her being naked – very thin, all jutting ribs and hip bones – but then if I want to I can utterly convince myself she was draped in a kind of blanket. Like a dirty piece of tasteless 70’s carpet or something.

The girl I’m with, she just stops dead her mouth just drops open. This is a junky hang-out and while my rational mind is just wondering if I should even bother calling an ambulance – whether that would just create too many problems for both her and us – I know all too fucking well that this is no junky. Like I say, it just felt so, so wrong.

I said something like, “Hello?” Because I’m English and I find it very hard to do anything but be extremely polite in an emergency.

But the thing on the floor doesn’t move. It’s not static, it simply just doesn’t react to our presence.

Then I glace at the girl I’m with. I’m feeling a bit like someone just kicked me in the kidneys, but it’s not until I look at her that I really feel the bottom drop out of creation.

She’s staring, wide eyed and her mouth agape in a way I’ve never seen in a human being since. Like she would scream, wants to scream, but there is nothing tangible to scream against.

I follow her eyes, not to the floor, but across the darkened room to the corner furthest from us to where a man is stood. That simple. Some guy is just standing there, in this room with the girl on the floor. Almost completely in shadow. Just standing. Nothing in my life has ever fucked me up so much as seeing that.

None of this felt supernatural. It felt violent and wrong and fucking awful.

I grabbed the girl I was with and just fucking turned and walked very quickly and very purposely away from there. She was like a sack of feathers, like tugging a balloon, I mean that girl was just waiting for me to take her anywhere that wasn’t there. I march down the corridor with that feeling like if I run, something will chase me. Like walking away from a snarling dog.

And I don’t hear anything. Not in the lifetime it takes me to get down passed the other six rooms that lead off the upstairs corridor and to the staircase at the end.

But I’m passing the final door before the stairs and I’m looking inside because I know there’s no choice. And there it is again. A girl lying curled up on the floor. A man standing in the corner.

The room, unlike the last, was in daylight and if I’d taken the time I could have made out his face, I could have looked at what she was wearing. Seen how old she was. But are you fucking kidding me? I was down those stairs and dragging my failed date behind me faster then a sneeze.

I don’t really remember forcing her through the broken window at the back of the house, but I do remember running the fuck away and her suddenly starting to cry. We’re about seventeen and she’s crying like a child as I continue to drag her away. When my heart finally falls down out of my terror gland and I turn and look back at her. I see there’s blood all down her face and lips. Just pouring from her nose. And there’s almost a second where I’m wondering if I brought the right girl out of that room.

Well, that’s a true story. While I can mess around with the specifics of it my head to make it more or less fucked up depending on how alone I’m feeling, two things always stand out to me as irrefutable. Firstly, no feeling has ever crept over me that was so unpleasant as the feeling of looking into the dark room. Nothing. From funerals to horrible emotional break-ups and personal tragedies. Because nothing has ever felt so tangibly inhuman or as evil.

And secondly, I have never seen blood pour from somebody quite like it did from that girl. I don’t know if she just burst a blood vessel in her brain or something, whatever it was, not in years of playing rugby or being beaten-up in bars. It was like someone was trying to pull all her guts out at once, and they were damn well going to do it out of her nose.

We never did get to make out.

oblongshrew

My story isn’t totally scary or anything, but my friend who was involved refuses to sleep over in the spare bedroom now.

I’ve always been a bit creeped out by the spare bedroom in our house. It’s not that I sense anything evil or nasty, but the fact that I get a feeling of someone there in the first place. I myself have never actually seen anything even to this day.

A couple of years ago, one of my friends named Dafydd stayed over after we went out clubbing during the week. Throughout the night everything was normal, and at about 6am, my Husband left to go to work and Dafydd called out from the bedroom saying goodbye. He says that he heard him leaving and the front door banging shut. A few moments later though, the spare bedroom door started slowly opening. He said that he assumed that my Husband had forgotten something, and knowing that Dafydd was awake, was going to try to scare him. When the door fully opened though, he said that a man just walked straight across the room, past the foot of the bed without even looking at him and disappeared after a few seconds. It obviously freaked him the fuck out and he managed to get the courage to run out of the bedroom and went downstairs to be within the protection of my cats.

I woke up at about 9am and trundled down the stairs with my usual grace, and Dafydd seemed relieved to see me. He told me about what had happened and I asked him to describe the ‘ghost’. The way he described him was exactly like the bloke who had lived (and died) in my house before me. He was my friend’s Grandad and I knew him for most of my childhood. His Daughter had sold me the house a few years after his death. Dafydd never knew him though, and I’d never even spoken about him before.

I still get creeped out by the bedroom a bit, but I know that if there is a ghost, and it is my friend’s Grandad, then there’s no need to be scared as he was a lovely man. It doesn’t stop the hairs on the back of my neck going up everytime I walk past the spare bedroom though!.

tennbjj

Do I believe? Well, I’d like to think that there’s things out there man can’t explain, like ghosts or monsters. It makes life more fun, I think. Here’s a true story:

A little background on this story: I grew up in a southern baptist church in Tennessee. As you may or may not know, it is very common for a preacher to be at a church from his 20s until the day he dies without switching churches, leaving etc. This was the case with every chruch in town, except ours. From the time I was 7 until I was 18, we had 5 different pastors, which is VERY VERY unusual in the Souther Baptist Association. And to top it off, quite a few of them left under mysterious circumstances. One pastor’s wife became mentally ill, and she accused mutliple men(including deacons in their 80s, 90s) in the church of raping her, and another pastor’s wife(who was working as a secretary) more than once claimed she was pushed down some stairs in the church, resulting in multiple broken bones, dislocated hip, etc., even though she was working in the church alone at night. Anyways, the church itself is a fairly old building, built in 1924. It is a very large church, with two additional wings built on to accomodate the community.

Anyways, I was very active in the church growing up and spent a lot of time there. I had seen very odd things going on like lights turning off and on, although I accredited that to it being an old building with poor wiring, as well as a general feeling of creepiness anytime the church wasn’t inhabited by multiple worshippers. When I reached “youth group” age, we used to take several trips a year, to places like Six Flags, Mrytle Beach, etc. To make sure everyone would be on time, typically all of the teenagers would sleep over at the church in the “youth room”, and leave the next morning. When I was 16, about 40 of us were staying in the youth room one night before a missions trip, and decided to play hide and seek in the church. Now, considering the church is a 20,000 square foot plus building, this was gonna be one heck of a game. I was a little wary of walking around in the church at night, as I had done so in the past on previous overnighters, and had heard and felt things I couldn’t explain. Strange noises, almost like a piano playing, but you had to strain to hear it, and that general feeling that “something isn’t right”, when I was in certain parts of the church. However, we pressed on, and my friend Andy and I were chosen as the seekers in the game.

We stayed in the youth room about 10 minutes whilst everyone went and hid. When the time was up, Andy and I ventured downstairs to the main level of the church and started searching the church chapel, in between the pews, in the balcony, etc. to no avail for the hiders. We checked the offices that weren’t locked, Sunday School rooms, bathrooms(both M and F), but noone was to be found. We took a quick peek outside to make sure no one was playing a trcik on us, but the outside was as still and calm as inside the church. Finally, we worked up the courage to go downstairs into the basement to find the hiders. I say “worked up the courage”, because the basement was truly a scary place. Due to either some supernatural presence, or perhaps just poor building design, the basement was overbearingly humid. You literally could sweat just standing around, even if it wasn’t hot. Now, the basement had a LONG hall that ran the length of it, and the hall flanked on either side by classrooms, and a large “fellowship hall” and kitchen area. The hall wasn;t lit, save the emergency exit light on each end, and the dim emergency lights common in big buildings.

Andy was on one end of the hall, and I the other. We decided to start walking down the hall, checking each classroom, as surely this had to be where the hiders were. As I said “Ready Andy?”, we heard footsteps. The footsteps I presumed were hiders trying to move around and find better hiding spots from us, but I had the distinct impression the footsteps were in the hall. The sounds were loud and clear, not muffled at all by a door or walls. Andy asked “Do you hear that”, and I answered “Yes”, rather sheepishly. The footsteps were now coming towards me, getting louder, and moving faster. Fight or flight took hold of me, and I froze in place, unable to move, speak or react. About 5 feet or so(it seemed) in front of me, the steps stopped when Andy yelled out “What the hell’s going on” I was able to answer back ” I don’t know”, when suddenly they started again, this time running away from me at a very fast pace towards Andy. Right as I was getting ready to say “Lets go back”, Andy’s body hit the wall rather violently. I ran down to see if he was OK, and he said, “Who the hell just pushed me?” I told that I had seen nobody, just heard the footsteps. When I said that, a look of fright came over his face that I can’t describe, nor have I ever seen again on a human face. We both had the same thought, and bolted upstairs back to youth room. When we got there, we found all 40 of the others, waiting on us, asking where we had been. Andy was too ruffled to talk, so I asked “Who was hiding in the basement?”. Everyone, almost simultaneously answered that the basement was far too scary, and they wouldn’t hide down there alone. 12 years later, Andy won’t mention this occurence to this day.

c0balt

Let’s see. When I was a wee lad, I lived in a town called Jasper, TX. Sometimes my sister and cousins would all stay with my grandparents who lived in a community called Magnolia Springs, TX which was about 15-20 minutes south of Jasper. Among the various activities that we would engage in as children, most of them involved us following the lead of our older teenage cousins. Many times we would explore old abandoned houses, most of which belonged to my family since they owned most of the damned land out there and still do. Except one house. This house was quite small and sat on the very corner of my grandparents land which was a large fenced in field that cows would graze in. The house itself was in the field. I remember it had an open well behind it that we would gleefully throw dried cow shit into just to watch it splash below. Strange enough, this house was less that a hundred yards from my grandmother’s house while the other abandoned homes we would explore were as far as three miles away, yet we would never set foot in this one. It didn’t seem like we were afraid of it. It just never crossed our minds nor had it ever drawn our interest.

Many years later when I was about 13, my mother, sister, and myself were looking for a new place to live. Well my grandmother offered a piece of her land out in Magnolia Springs, and apparently the best plot of land happened to be that corner of the field since it was right along the main road that ran through the place. And so some other relative came in with a backhoe and demolished the old house that once stood there and upon that site was placed our new home! Well it wasn’t long before the fun began. My room was on one end of the house at the back end of a long hallway. My sister’s room was midway down the hall, My room was always cold and always gave me an uneasy feeling. I had this closet with two sliding doors that slid independently of one another. Well the craftsmanship was shoddy on the wheels they rolled open and shut on and at some point, the wheels ended up breaking leaving nothing but metal pegs to scrape across the tracks. This meant that when you opened my closet doors, anyone on the other side of the house knew it. What always got to me was when I would lie down for sleep and start to nod off, I’d get a strange feeling like someone was watching me. Without having to guess, I could always just feel where the look and that was always in the direction of my closet to see one of its doors wide open and nothing but darkness staring back at me. Fuck that. I would get up and close it, waking all of creation up with the awful scraping sound, and then lie back down. 10 minutes later, same feeling, look up and I’ll be damned, the door is open again. Without a sound. Sure, closing it woke everyone up, but it would silently open. Sometimes you would hear that light scuffing sound of someone walking up the carpeted hallway, or whispers that sounded like 3 different people whispering at once but playing in reverse and with an echo effect. And the one time I felt something crawl into bed with me and there was nothing there was the moment I started sleeping on the living room sofa. I might share more later or just go into more detail.

FoonyMan

My friend Brian used to have this big house in the city of Saint Louis. It was one of the big old manors that the wealthier people of the city used to live in during the 1900s. It was really nice looking and very roomy. It had a basement that actually had all marble flooring, it was really nice.

Anyway, I used to spend many nights at his house during my childhood. I remember, he had a really strict mom. We used to stay up late telling ghost stories and using “potty language” away from his mom so that she wouldn’t scold us. Seriously, words like “poop” and “butt” were things that she’d get really angry over.

One night, we were in Brian’s room, which had a big window and a really cool telescope that we could look at the stars with. It was maybe 11 PM, and being the big-shot 1st graders that we were, we felt like real men for staying up so late. I guess 11 PM was our natural bedtime, though, because we both decided that our conquest over the night had been won, and sleep would be our prize. So, we slept. During the night, I woke up to hear a weird breathy sigh, like someone was exhaling very slowly. It didn’t come from the direction of Brian, though, it came from the closet. I pulled my blanket over my head, but the sighs continued. I thought it would never stop, so I woke Brian up. Quietly, we both listened to the strange, breathy sighs coming from his closet. Then, Brian shrugged and said
“It happens sometimes. I guess it’s a ghost. Goodnight.”

NOT THE RESPONSE A 1ST GRADER WOULD LIKE TO HEAR

I didn’t hear the breathy sighs but one more time that night, but I didn’t get to sleep. I told Brian’s dad about it, but he just laughed at me and told me that their house wasn’t haunted.

In retrospect, it was probably an old vent or something, and my memory probably played it up to be something a lot more scary than it was. Anyway, that’s the story of my friend Brian’s house.

The Saviour

Last year i kept a journal of my dreams.

I bought House of Leaves last year, and it affected me greatly. I was consumed by it, and spend most of my time reading it, and trying to decipher the hidden messages, and meanings in it. It was only a matter of time before i started dreaming about it.
One night i awoke in my room, only it wasn’t my room. There was no light comming in from the window. There was no red light comming from my playstation. In fact i couldn’t make out any furniture at all. There was nothing but darkness. It felt like i was covered in shadows. Then i realised i wasn’t lying on a mattress. The floor beneth me was cold. I tried sitting up, but couldn’t, it was then i had such a feeling of sheer terror. Like the walls were closing in, to try and describe it, would be like a group of people swarming at you, pushing your chest, until you collapse from the pressure.

I awoke in my bed, and everything had returned to normality. I quickly moved over to my journal, and wrote everything down, i still had that feeling of dread, and as i wrote, i swear i could feel something watching me. I quickly lay down and tried to sleep, but i couldn’t shake that feeling.

I woke up groggily in the morning, with the dream still hanging in my mind, When i went to look at the journal, i had written only one word, it wasn’t in my handwritting, it was shakey, and took up several lines. One word, when the night before, i had written almost a paragraph describing the dream. I know this. I vividly remember writting it. The one word on the journal?

Fear.

It wasn’t until the next night, that i really got confused. The writting on the pad was in black ink. The pen i was using, was blue.

Needless to say, i haven’t been sleeping well for the past months.

Reason

My family built the house we lived in for most of my life so I was never too worried about it being haunted or anything. Like many young people though I loved scary things, movies, books, television shows. I’d watch them all the time and scare the crap out of myself and then go to bed scared.

Like any little kid when I was scared at night I would pull the covers over my head so I would be ‘safe’ or something. One particular night I did this shivering with fear in my bed, covers over my head. I felt something tap on my face through the covers.

I tore the covers off my head screaming looking around my bed thinking someone must be around there hiding after they had just tapped me on the head, but there was no one in my room.

Despite us building the house I would say it was haunted, the ghost was a good ghost though, a helpful sometimes tricky ghost. I never felt as though it was bad. I never ever felt alone in the house, and someone would always be running the water in my parents bathroom. My mother had a ghost following her around when she was a child after her grandmother died, so I just decided the ghost was a family one, sort of a guardian angel or something.

One time, I had left some tea in the microwave to heat up. Gone back to mess around on the computer, our office room is right next to the kitchen. When I heard the microwave beep I went to get the tea and it was on the counter, thinking I had accidently started the microwave without putting it in I picked it up, but it was hot like it had been in the microwave.

Another time I was at home with my family, our house has two living rooms right next to eachother pretty much. One was for my dad and the other was more of a kids playroom, the kids playroom one is right in the middle of the house and from there you can see pretty much the whole house depending on where you are.

This particular night I was watching TV while my family watched the movie in the other living room, I was standing so that I had a clear view of the front door and the television. I hear the door handle to the front door jiggle and then the door comes open, I just think that maybe whoever had come in last didn’t shut it all the way and it came open by accident. So I went over and closed it and made sure it was locked, and it was.

As you walk towards the front door you go passed the second living room and I made sure all my family was in there, and I asked them if one of them had opened it and I just hadn’t noticed. They said they thought I had been at the front door. So I just think whatever and go back to watching television when I hear the door handle jiggle again and I watch as the door swings open.

At this point I think someone is trying to break in, so I yell for my dad, run to the kitchen and grab a knife. And go screaming for the front door, as my dad comes around the corner he is looking out the door turning on all our outdoor lights and I am running passed just trying to look scary to whoever might have been breaking in.

But I didn’t see anyone out there. After that my dad started ramming a chair in front of the door whenever we were all home, I know that door was shut and locked the second time for sure. The only way to open would have been from inside and I had a clear view of it no one was opening that door.

On another note I love these stories and I have always wanted to go ghost hunting, I think that would be an interesting goon meet.

The Dawn

I live in a small apartment in Brookline, MA. It’s the sort of old pre-turn-of-the-century building that once upon a time was obviously something else; the lay out is disjointed, the mouldings different in one half than the other, odd little nooks and closets are jammed in places no rational builder would ever put them. There’s a marble staircase in the lobby, an open skylight at the very top of the spiraling darkwood stairs. It’s pretty, but strange. And now you have the setting.

My bedroom is the dining room. This is fine. There is a door that closes tightly with a chain-bolt lock, and I sleep just fine. Most nights. And frankly, some afternoons, since the life of a law student is full of late nights and frequent catnaps. One afternoon, I was indulging in one of these afternoon naps. I was curled up quite happily under my covers when I felt the cat jump up onto the bed. The covers shifted, and shifted again as she settled down, and I half leaned up to scratch her ears as per usual when I realized there was nothing there. I remebered then that I had purposely closed the cat out, because she’d been having one of her feline freakouts, skittering around the apartment barely touching the ground.

So maybe I’d been half asleep and was near-dreaming without realizing it. Maybe. But then, this has happened quite a bit since.

Not long after this I was on my computer, doing homework. The television was on, mostly as background noise. Law and Order makes a great soundtrack for reading law school cases.

Out of nowhere, my computer started blasting awful hiphop music. I ALWAYS keep my volume off; the incidental noises every single fricken program makes drive me crazy. So it was more than a bit strange, and quite loud. The music was coming from the AIM advertisement. I yelled something clever, like “Aaaah, no more sound!” and flailed for the external volume dial to turn it off. When I found the dial, I turned it down and the room was completely, blissfully silent.

Even the television, which was still on, was completely silent. Lennie Briscoe was moving his mouth, but no words came out.

In the silence, I distinctly heard the word “listen” spoken quite plainly, and out of nowhere.

At this point, of course, I freaked out, started looking about desperately for the remote control, and pushed buttons until I got the sound back.

Then I went for coffee. The end.

Swanson Broth

In the Eighties I was a child in Brooklyn, in New York City. Italians lived in the area, and they kept the streets safe with what little muscle remained after the U.S. government broke the Mafia’s back in the Seventies (sidenote: the Mafia is still alive and well these days, and always will be; I hate them, but they’re like roaches. No matter what you do, you can never completely get rid of them).

Immigrants have always streamed into New York City, and my neighborhood was no different. We had the Chinese, the Koreans, and the Russians moving in, but also an oddity and a bit of an anachronism – we had Sicilian immigration. This was a holdover from the Seventies, when the powerful mafia families imported friends and relatives from Sicily so they might serve in New York as paperless, untraceable trigger men, or “zips.” We all knew why the Sicilians were coming to our neighborhood, so many years after the major zips were busted in famous cases like the Pizza Connection, in which Gambino boss Paul Castellano smuggled millions worth of cocaine using pizza shops: the local gang was building its numbers.

Shortly before I was born, a man called “Poccione” came to live in the neighborhood. Poccione didn’t speak English – only Sicilian-dialect Italian – yet he drove a Cadillac, dressed exceedingly well and carried himself with great dignity, despite having no marketable skills in America. Everyone knew he was a zip, and steered clear of him. Even the other zips did, and the zips were known for their crazy bravery and fearlessness. The local gang head resented Poccione, but we grew to understand that Poccione was part of the package. Either he came with the zips, or none of them came. The Italians in my area needed the zips to avoid losing their territory to the Chinese and the Russians, and so Poccione was tolerated and respected.

People tolerated Poccione a little too much. His demeanor was cold, and he made no effort to learn English. He often demanded to be let into people’s houses so he could look around, on the pretense of sharing dinner with them (which he would always leave early), or on the pretense of visiting their young children, which he claimed to love in his remote yet rhythmic Italian.

Poccione did take a particular interest in children. One of my first memories is of him, tall and black-haired, with cold eyes and pale skin, staring down at me while visiting my grandparents (who could not refuse). He claimed to love children, but he never talked to us. We passed him on the way to the store, we saw him walk by as we played kickball in the street, but he only stared, as if appraising something.

He was pushy about more than visitations with the parents in the neighborhood. When a child was born, people talked about how Poccione would visit them and demand that they accept a small gold charm. The parents would place this around their child’s neck and would not take it off, Poccione explained, because they should be honored that he would give it to them, and he would be very upset indeed if he saw the child without it. Why, he would question their friendship, he would say.

I had one of these charms around my neck for the first years of my life. I remember it as a kid. I remember thinking it was very strange. It was a small gold hand with its fingers arranged in the popular devil’s-horns metal gesture, and it hung from the neck with the fingers pointing down and out. I remember that it was heavy and always cold. I would take it off sometimes, or hide it, but my parents would never let me walk around the neighborhood without it. I had to stay in the house, and know where it was at all times so I could rush to put it on if Poccione stopped by for coffee.

By the time I was six, in the late Eighties, my parents started thinking about moving away. I had been to about fifteen different doctors and I was always sick with infection. When I was a younger child, I would do strange things. When I was three my parents told me that more than once I walked out of the house in the middle of the night and stood in the street (only the vigilance of a neighbor saved me from getting hit by a car, I think). I would go into the basement of our house and tear at the wood panelling with my fingers until my hands were raw and bleeding. I needed a nightlight because I would always complain about seeing shadows and feeling unbelievable terror at night. My parents only let me go into a pool once, because, as they explained, I stood by the lip of the water for a good minute, staring in before I pitched face forward, limp, into the pool. I don’t remember that.

I was a fucked up kid, and it’s a miracle I didn’t kill myself. Bad, dangerous things kept happening to me. I remember being very young and climbing up furniture to get to the top of the refridgerator (just to do it). I grabbed onto a knife rack as one of my handholds, and brought the thing crashing down on me. I fell to the floor and watched the knives tip out of the drawer and fall, helpless to move. They punctured the ground around me, forming an outline like a cartoon machine gun makes. I laid there until my parents found me. And throughout all this time I was in and out of specialists’ offices, because I was getting worse.

My parents found out that this was not abnormal in the neighborhood. If you lived in Brooklyn in the late Eighties, you may remember reading a news story about how a certain neighborhood in Bensonhurst had an unusually high rate of child mortality. That was my neighborhood. I grew up with no friends because the families with young children either moved away or lost their kids to car accidents, illness, or going missing (and in New York, you have to assume that’s abduction).

It was at this time that I remember Poccione becoming very pushy with my father. I remember that Poccione used to take food to the house, saying it was for me, because he had heard about my illnesses and wanted to “get my strength up”. He claimed that they were old-fashioned Sicilian recipes, but the food looked and smelled wrong. My father took the food from him, but threw it out. He didn’t refuse; I remember that Poccione looked angrier in those later days, more gaunt, paler.

One day, Poccione disappeared from the neighborhood. Apparently, he was killed in some gang dispute. When the cops raided his house, they found a weird altar in his bedroom, filled with candles and idols of a bipedal goat, and reportedly the altar gave off a very strong smell of sweetish rust (cops today won’t tell you this sort of thing, but back then, the neighborhood cops were the sons, brothers and fathers of neighborhood families, and word got around).

With Poccione gone, the gold charm was removed from my neck that day. I remember throwing it into the trash. I stopped getting sick after a few weeks, and my odd behavior ceased almost immediately.

I haven’t talked about it with any of the other kids who survived that neighborhood. I’ve lost track of them. I’m not sure I want to think about it.

NON

The group home was a regular home in a regular neighborhood, 3 bedrooms, 2 bath, 1 story, etc.

Now, I don’t think that the place was haunted, but I think that some of the kids that came there (there was a somewhat high turnaround) brought “things” with them. These kids were messed up, had emotional, mental, physical problems and had been severely abused (in sometimes horrifying ways). To me it doesn’t seem too far a stretch to believe that negative energy, evil spirits, whatever, would hang around, or in, these kids.

I’m a very logical fellow and don’t easily believe in all ghost stories and understand that what happened to me wasn’t beyond explanation, but it was strange and befitting this thread.

Enough rambling!

As it’s a group home, we have everything locked down. No doors on the bedrooms and anything relating to storage, including the linen closet is locked. As the manager of the place, I made it absolute habit to check doors and cabinets when I was done with them.

One day while working there alone (during school hours), I needed a rag from the closet it. I unlocked it, got the rag, locked it and shut it. As I walked away, I heard a “creeeeeak” as the door opened. This door is not on some slant where it would open half way like it did…it’s never done that before. Also, it was locked and I knew it was. My brain just told me I didn’t shut it all the way (even though part of my obsessive habit with the doors was to twist the handle to make sure it was locked). I went back to the closet and shut, twisting the handle, pulling the handle, making sure it was locked and shut tight.

I walked back down the hallway and “creeeeeeeak” it opened again. I had a little heart flutter at that point because there was no doubt in my mind that the door was shut tight. I did the ritual again and walked backwards watching the door. Nothing more came of that for a few months, when my staff who were watching the hallway at night said it popped open on them, when no one had even been in the closet for hours.

We’ve had kids tell us strange things that cause some alarm…one kid who was classified as retarded came running out of his room one night ducking down, claiming there was smoke all over and that the smoke created faces on a door (the same door as above).

One night a phantom kid appeared to two of the staff there in the hallway. He peeked around the corner at them and it was someone who was not a resident and did not look like any of the residents currently living there (we had 6 kids max at the house).

One night I had to fill in a shift for the overnight (I hated doing overnights!) and according to the staff that I relieved, one child told them that he was already dead and that his body was just a shell. What kind of 9 year old says that? Why tell this to me at 11pm either? Stupid employees.

Nimb00da

Probably two years ago, when I was home for summer vacation, I woke to the sound of something slamming into the door to the guest room. The guest room is through the bathroom, and my mom keeps it almost-closed all the time so the cats can’t get in there. She wants to keep the air circulation going, though, so she’s got a hook and eye latch rigged up to keep the door propped open a few inches, just tight enough so cats can’t get through.

Anyway, something’s just pounding on this door. The only two possibilities are our dog and our two cats. The pounding sounds way too loud for a five-pound cat to produce, and though our dog is definitely big enough to make that racket, I knew it wasn’t him. If it was, he would have stopped slamming and started barking and yelling after a few minutes. Plus I could see him passed out at the top of the stairs. Rather than get whisked away by a demon I put the pounding sound out of my mind and went to sleep.

A few months later, I think it was Christmas vacation, I came to bed late and went to the bathroom before going to bed. I was sitting there doing my thing when suddenly the guest room door, maybe two or three feet away, starts rocking back and forth on the latch gently. As I watch, the rocking gets more insistent and turns into a gentle pounding. At this point, I’m thinking a cat is the culprit. Both our cats are very vocal and will generally respond if you meow at them, so just to reassure myself I gave a little meow, hoping that I’d get one in return and know it was a cat so I could finish my shit in comfort. I didn’t get a meow in reply, though- the pounding at the door just got a little louder.

So now I’m starting to get a little freaked out and I figure I should probably just finish the shit, open the door, let the cat out and be done with this. So I give another meow, don’t get an answer, and start rolling out the toilet paper. As I’m doing this, the pounding turns into a hammering, and it’s focused on the upper-center of the door. It was like somebody was pounding a fist into the door, and pretty hard. About this time, something grabs ahold of the doorknob and starts twisting it wildly from side to side, shaking it, pulling and pushing on it frantically. All thoughts about cats have at this point vanished from my mind as I’m desperately wiping my ass and trying to get the fuck out. And then, all of a sudden, the hook lifts out of the latch, clatters against the door, and slowly and gently the door swings all the way open.

I’m about losing it by this point. I finish up and pull up my pants and run out of the room without looking behind me. I go into my parents’ room and wake up my dad, and tell him that there’s somebody in the house. He tells my mom to be ready to call 911, and I go and wake up the dog. I can see in the guest room now and there’s nothing that I can see except the door completely open leading into a dark room. Me, my dad, and the dog searched every corner of that room, and the rest of the house, and don’t find anything. We checked the doors and they were both locked, and our doors aren’t the kind you can lock and then close, they have to be locked with a key from the outside if someone leaves the house and wants the door locked. We went outside and looked around the driveway but didn’t find anybody. Except, that is, both cats. Who had been outside the entire time.

That was the end of that, for the most part, until about a month later. It was the middle of the night again and I was heading to the bathroom again, but this time I was about one step before getting to the door when I heard the latch unhook and fall against the door. I peered inside and the door was swinging open silently.

From this point on the door’s been a mystery for me. My parents will be asleep and I’ll go downstairs, making a point to check to see that that door is closed before going downstairs, and when I come back up it’ll be wide open. It hasn’t opened in my presence since, but it seems to open itself all the time for no good reason.

Armanda

My Gramma passed away in December. I loved her so much. Because she was an only daughter and I was her only daughter’s only daughter we were close. I’m pretty sure I was the favorite grandchild.

Anyway, this past July I was sitting in my family room watching the Golden Girls, awesome. I turned off the TV to go get ready for work but decided to sit for a moment to think. All of a sudden I could smell my Gramma’s perfume, an unmistakeable scent. If I moved even slightly I couldn’t smell it anymore. It was right next to me on the couch. So, without really thinking I said “I love you Gramma, and we all miss you.” Immediately the scent was gone.

On the same day, my Mom had said that she went to the farm stand, that she and my gramma would frequent, and heard her/a voice, and someone touch her the back of her arm. When she turned around no one was there. Later, when we looked at the calender, we found out it was the anniversary of my Grandpa’s death(her husband).

DovoDovo

When I was around 14, I had a friend who lived in what people considered a haunted house. The house originally belonged to a man everyone called Doc Eckert. The doctor originally lived in this house but moved later in his career to a farmhouse on the other side of the town of Coldwater, Missouri. He was in a car accident in the mid 50’s and his only son rented the original property out since then.

The farmhouse that Doc Eckert had bought was too much for his son so he packed up his father’s belongings and put them on the upper floor of the original house. That part of the house was off limits to families who would rent it. There were three bedrooms on the first floor anyway so upstairs was just storage.

The farmhouse overtime had become dilapidated and it seemed Mother Nature was reclaiming it for herself. This did not stop my friends and I to see who was the bravest to tough it out in the field over night. I was never the bravest. That house always scared the shit out of me. I swear you could always hear a piano playing coming from that fucking house. It did not help that it was on a rural road with no lights or other houses for miles. We had to walk a good four miles just to get to it. That is another story, though.

My friend Rob’s family rented out the old two-story house from old Doc Eckert’s son when he moved to Coldwater. They did not really know the history of the house and had just moved there from Kentucky when he was 15. The house sat empty for years and stories would get around that people would see things in the attic window when they passed by. I would never find myself staring at the house before Rob moved in because I always avoided it. It was easy to avoid, too. It sat off the main road to where you would have to travel past a small cemetery on a gravel road to get to it from my house. There was never any point in going down that road until Rob moved in.

One-day Rob’s parents were not home so he invited me over to play some Nintendo and just hang out. I rode my bike over to his place around 4 in the afternoon. It wasn’t as creepy during the day and since Rob had been living there for about 6 months and heard all the rumors at school, he pretty much discarded them as bullshit. He said nothing had ever happened while he was living there and the house was completely normal.

I had been over there a few other times so for the most part; I was used to it now. However, I had never been over there past dark. I just never wanted to ride my bike down that gravel road past that graveyard at night. It was old and nearly every grave sunk due to wooden coffins. It was just plain creepy.

We sat around and played video games until around 7 when it started to get dark and I told him I’d have to be getting home. He insisted that I stay and play some more games and his Dad would give me a ride home in his truck when he got home from work. I didn’t want to argue because the sun was already going down and I already didn’t feel comfortable going down that road so I accepted.

Around 8:30, we got tired of playing video games and decided we would just hang out in the kitchen until his dad got home. We were drinking Pepsi and telling each other jokes when both of us heard something coming from upstairs. It wasn’t a big noise. It could of easily been passed off as a rodent but it made both of us stair at the ceiling. He continued telling his joke until we heard what sounded like someone moving furniture around above us. This made both of us shut the hell up real quick. He immediately thought someone broke in the house so he started looking for his flashlight. Then there was another noise. This time it was footsteps walking around in the room above us. It wasn’t someone walking quietly either. Whoever/whatever was up there didn’t care who heard them either. This didn’t stop Rob insisting that I follow him up the steps to the second floor and help him inspect.

His father was supposed to be home any minute so I just told him to wait until his Dad got there and let him handle it but Rob wasn’t having any of that. We heard this thing upstairs moving around from room to room stomping, then silence, then stomping again to the next room as if it was looking for something until the noise finally stopped.

Rob grabbed his flashlight and his bat and I trailed behind him up the unlit old creaky staircase. There was no lighting on the second floor of this old house. I am guessing it probably used to, but over the years it was probably a fire hazard and got disconnected.

Rob had the only flashlight and started shining it into the different rooms looking for what ever it was that a moment before was making so much noise. We worked our way down the hall to each room. It was quiet as it could be and thinking back on it, I wasn’t even that scared. I would never put myself in a position like that today. There could have been someone up there with an axe for all we knew.

After checking all the rooms, we started heading back down the hall to go back downstairs. At the time, I felt pretty brave even still standing in the darkness in front of Rob. His flashlight beam on the floor in front of me helped make my way down the hall. Just before we were about to go down we both heard something in the room to the left of the stairs. The door was open as we walked by it so Rob shined the light in.

The room was empty at our first glance in. Wanting to desperately get going back down the stairs before I did find something up there just told Rob to direct the light down the stairs so I don’t trip. Rob said, “Dude look at that!” He shined the light in the room against the far wall and there was a small door half the size of a normal door. This small door was cracked open about 3 inches. As soon as Rob shined his light directly on it, it slammed shut making Rob and I both scream and start running for the front door.

We ran outside screaming in his front yard when at just the right time his Dad was coming home from work. His Dad apparently had a bad day at work and was not in the mood for us kids. After we told him what happened he didn’t seem to be in the mood for any burglars in his house either.

Rob and I sat outside on the porch waiting for his Dad to inspect the second floor. He came down after about 10 minutes and said that there was nothing up there but old furniture. He said he saw the door in the first bedroom and said it went to the attic. However, he said that the door had a padlock on it. There was no way it could have been locked from inside the attic.

I knew what I saw and Rob swore he saw the same thing but his Dad would not have any of it and continued to call us a couple of pussies and laugh at us. I had to be getting home so Rob asked his Dad if he would mind driving me and my bike home since it was dark. His Dad laughed again. I had to ride down that gravel road past that fucking graveyard.

Diviance

Back when I was younger, a good 10 to 15 years ago or so I would say, my family built a house in one of the nicer sections of the town I still live in. It was a large, red brick two story house. The layout of the house is somewhat irrelevant but I will describe a bit of it anyway. Downstairs contained the living room which connected to the den, which connected to the entryway, which connected to the dining room, which connected to the kitchen, which connected both to a hallway to the garage and the “other dining room” as it were, which connected to the living room and a hallway connecting it, a bathroom, the entryway and the den. Sounds complicated but it wasn’t really.

Going up the stairs put you right in front of the door to the master bedroom with a small little open room to the right which is where my sister, brother and I watched movies or played video games, to the left was a hallway which turned around the stairs and led, in order, to my sisters bedroom, then my bedroom and my brothers bedroom on alternating sides of the hallway and it ended in another bathroom. My room was the second largest in the house with a ridiculously oversized closet that took up an entire wall of a good 40 feet or so with a sliding door on each side of the wall. Looking at the wall with the closet, directly behind you would be my bed in between two large windows, with my dresser on your left and, once upon a time, a small TV that I still own to this day.

Now, on to the story. It was a friday night and I had stayed up a good while, or so I thought while I was a kid because 2 in the morning is incredibly late as a kid, before I decided I should go to bed. My mom was out of town on business she said, though we later found out she was cheating on my dad, and my dad and I were the only ones still awake when I went to sleep. Well, since I went to sleep I should say my dad was the only one left awake.

An hour or two after I feel asleep I was abruptly awakened by a loud voice yelling the word “Boy” much like the Tall Man in the old movies Phantasm 1 through 4. For a moment I believed I had left my TV on when I feel asleep but I remembered that I had removed the TV from my room some weeks earlier because it had a bad habit of turning itself on whenever there was a strong storm around my house which would scare the hell out of me at any time of day or night. So I merely assumed my dad was watching tv downstairs and went to go look. He was not down there, so I checked his room and saw he was sleeping. I shrugged my shoulders and went back to sleep, chalking the voice up to a particularly volatile dream.

This time, however, I did not even make it to sleep before that same voice yelled again, telling me “Boy! Wake up!”. Now, as I said earlier, it sounded a lot like the voice of the Tall Man from the Phantasm series the first time, this time however it got deeper and managed to sound even less friendly than anything I had ever heard. I jolted upright in an instant, quite frightened already, and the first thing my eyes caught was a dark figure in the corner of the room.

This figure was… unnatural to say the least. It was tall, far taller than anything human had any right to be. It was hunched over because it could not properly fit in my room, its upper back touching the ceiling and its head down near its chest. Its breath rasped like it was breathing through some sort of vile sickness and though I could not see its eyes, I knew it was looking directly at me. This thing radiated feelings of sheer terror and revulsion like it was made of them and it knew it. It was looking at me and I knew, without a doubt in my young terror, that it could and would kill me. I heard its breath rasp particularly loudly once as it took a long step towards me, almost half the length of my room in one stride.

Then my bedroom door burst open with a blaze of light from the hallway and my dad was yelling. Apparently, this entire time, I had been screaming bloody murder but did not notice my voice at all, could not hear anything but the rasping of that things voice. With my dad standing in the doorway angry because I woke up him and the waves of terror from that thing wearing off I broke down into tears in short order.

My dad never knew what happened that night and I doubt he ever remembered it a week later. I, however, will never forget that night. For years after that I slept with the hall light on and my door open and even now I tend to leave my monitor on at night. I have not seen or felt the presence of that thing since.

Vivisector

There has always been talk of the house where i’m an RA being haunted. As a preface, most of the campus is built on Native American burial grounds(which probably doesn’t make matters any better. There’s this creepy rock and plaque by our rec. center that talks about it.)

Anyway, RA’s and RD’s have all witnessed strange occurances in our House. Some say its the spirit of people who have committed suicide, which could account for the seeming movement of the occurances around campus, but our House seems to be the center. Most believe it to be the spirit of a maintenance worker named Sam.

Things we’ve encountered: Doors opening on their own, blinds raising and closing, lights turning on by themselves (you go to turn them off and they already are), cupboard doors open, stange voices, and most disturbingly, reflections of other people in the mirrors. Most of the time, this is before residents move in, so it’s not just people being stupid.

I’ve always thought that this shit was awesome, and experienced some similar things my freshmen year when I lived there the first time. Strange voices and noises, and doors slamming shut when there is no wind. I would say its random coincidences, but there are only 8 suites in our house (about 64 people) and a LOT of people over the years have claimed to have this stuff happen.

But last night, I had my creepiest run-in. I was sitting here at my computer working on a project, and all of a sudden, my T.V. turned on by itself. Which, is pretty wierd, but I just assumed maybe there was a random spark or something. There was just snow on the screen, because I don’t have it hooked to cable right now(my cable is being used for the tv in the main suite.)So, I get up and turn it off. I sit back down and another minute or two later, the TV TURNS BACK ON, only this time, THERE WAS A FUCKING COMMERCIAL ON. Mind you, there is no cable hooked up, and there was snow minutes before. I was a little too much in shock to process what the commerical was, but i’m pretty sure it was for Red Lobster. And then,10 or 15 seconds later, it turns off on its own.

Man, that was badass.

n00b

I cannot remember exactly when this happened, it must’ve been when I was around 10-12 years old. My friend’s Dad somehow knew this billionaire businessman who had (amoung many other enterprises) a date farm in the desert. This billionaire used the date farm mainly as a place to chill on the weekends, and to entertain guests/family when he felt like it. My friend’s family were often invited to stay, and I usually came along as well.

The farm was a kids dream, a large fresh water swimming pool, games room and horse stables, but best of all 2 ATV bikes that the businessman kept for his handicapped son. I guess it sounds ridiculous (and not very safe), but Ali’s (the billionaire) son liked to ride the bikes around all day; he didn’t go to school or work, just rode the ATV bikes around the farm from morning until night. We usually managed to score the 2nd bike, and both of us would take turns driving it around the farm like maniacs. Ali just handed us the keys and told us to refill the tank when it got empty.

The farm is surrounded by desert on all sides, with only 1 gravel/sand road connecting it to the main highway. Since there was nothing around for miles, Ali wasn’t too concerend with safety and had built a flimsy wire fence around the farm’s perimeter; all to say, you could see for miles in any direction.

One evening we were bombing around the farm, and ended up stopping at the main gate to let the ATV engine cool for a bit. My friend was driving and I was sitting on the back, looking around and getting ready to switch places. I can still picture what happened next perfectly in my mind, like it was yesterday.

We heard a loud ‘crack’ sound, like a gunshot, and a flock of birds exploded from the trees in front of us. Ali had built a small living area under these trees for his staff, who were sitting outside smoking and talking, but with the second shot they were all on their feet shouting and waving to something outside farm. I turn to look at what they’re yelling at, and see an old Arab man in a dishdash standing right outside the farm gates with an enormous rifle. Behind him was an old grey Mazda truck, and he was standing so close to the fench that the rifle barrel was overhanging the wire. I figure that the old guy is trying to score a cheap meal; the farm staff seem to agree and keep yelling at him (to presumably piss off).

I’m about to say something to my friend, but at that moment the old guy turns suddenly and points the gun right at us, and I instinctively cringe and yell “GO!”; my friend revs the engine but we stay still. I look back and see nothing.

Up until now the whole incident has lasted maybe 5 seconds, and neither of us are scared. We just sit there dumbfounded for a second or two, and then out of sheer curiosity drive over to the place where the old man was standing. I get off the bike and walk right up to the fence, and proceed to figuratively shit myself. The man and his truck have disappeared without a trace; there were no tire tracks, footprints or gun cartriges, just undisturbed sand for miles around. Both of us drove like demons back to farm houses, babbling about what we saw, but couldn’t get anyone to take us seriously.

I can still see his white eyes, looking down the barrel of his gun at us.

egowanderer

My parents are divorced and most of the time I live with my mom in a lower middle class neighborhood. Our house isnt more than 10 years old and we know the only previous owner… so what happens here doesnt make much sense. The previous owner never complained about anything like what I’m about to tell you. Maybe they just wanted to sell it badly, or maybe they never saw anything at all.

Some of the first nights I stayed here I couldnt sleep, so I’d walk to the fridge in my underwear to get a nice bottle of chilled water. As I walked on, sort of groggy, I noticed, when I opened the fridge, that the walls were moist and shiny in the dim light. Noticing this, I turned on the light to check out where this water was coming from. I turned on the light and noticed that the droplets were brown like mildew. I looked to see where it was coming from, but I couldnt find a source. It was like the fog on the mirror when you get out of the shower. I turned off the light and figured I’d tell my mom in the morning.

I went into my room, plopped down on my bed and drifted into a light sleep. I was awoken by the sound of scissors clipping cloth. It was 2am, so I figured I should check it out to see what my mom could be up to at this hour. I walked into the living room and the lights were off, I didnt hear the scissors anymore so I figured it must have been a dream or something. I went back to bed and at about 3:30 I heard a sliding sound. I picked up my guitar and planned to use it as a club, my eyes were tearing a bit out of fear as I walked slowly down the hall. My own voice stunned me as I said in moderate volume, “who’s there? mom?” I heard a scurrying and nearly lost my water (urine folks.) I turned on the light and nothing was there in the living room. I looked around and noticed the corner of the tv was dimly lit yellow, green, blue, and red. It looked as if someone had taken a magnet and pressed it to the surface of the screen. I couldnt sleep at all, so I just sat there in the living room with my guitar as a club, with the light on. I soon fell asleep sitting up.

I woke up one more time just before dawn and realized the lights were out and that the dim early morning light was coming in from the kitchen window. (living room is connected to kitchen – open floor plan sort of thing) As I looked up and pissed myself this time at what I saw. There was dirt covering the table in the kitchen, I saw a man there in military clothing covering his arms with the dirt. He looked up at me once and all I saw for his eyes were voids.. perhaps because it was too dark to make out detail (I didnt stick around.)I caught only a glimse and started running for my mother to get her out of the house. I took off down the hall , got my mom up, called the police, and escaped out her bed room window. The cops got to our address pretty quickly. We were across the street at a neighbor’s house and watched through their window to see if anyone had come out of our house. We saw noone. The cops went in, searched around, and of course found nothing.. not a spec of dirt on the table or ground. No military man, no weird noises.. nothing. My mom thought about getting me examined after that, but I strongly advised against it until she dropped it.

I sleep with my door locked now, it’s been over a year. I’ve heard noises now and again, but I dont go to check on them. In the morning nothing is ever there, so I leave it alone. My mom says she’s heard things now and again, she goes to check on them but hasnt seen anything like I have. She figures it’s just the mechanics of the house or something.

TheOneTheyCallTom

I’m a senior at Tulane, but when I was a visiting pre-frosh back in 2003 my mom and I stayed in a hotel called La Pavilion (on Poydras, for NO goons). We had read about it being haunted and, being ghost nerds, were both pretty psyched about the prospect of seeing some ghosts. The story of the hotel was that it used to be a theater until something like 1850, when it burned completely to the ground, killing close to 40 people. It’s now haunted by a variety of ghosts, some of which you’ll meet shortly.

Right when we walked in our room things started getting weird. We were just chilling and talking when all of the sudden the light in between our beds started turning itself on and off, over and over again. At the same time, I noticed the ceiling fan was swinging violently back and forth. We’re not talking a little motion, this thing was going like a pendulum on crack and I was a little afraid of it breaking out of the ceiling.

Later that night my mom went up to the pool. When she came down she told me to get up to the top floor as quickly as I could becuase you could smell sulfur. The entire hotel is non-smoking, but the myth is that you can smell the burning of the theater on the very top floor. Curious, I went up and sure enough it smelled like something was on fire. Not like someone-lit-a-cigar fire, more like someone-dump-water-on-that-before-Smokey-has-a-heart-attack fire. Extremely strong, extremely noticable.

Alright, now for the ghosts.

Later that night after my mom went to bed I resolved to do some hunting. I went floor by floor, walking around, looking at artwork, just kind of waiting to see if anything would happen.

The first thing I noticed, on I think the third floor, was the reflection of a tabby cat in a mirror, running toward me. I saw this fairly clearly, and from the reflection angle the cat would have had to have been directly in front of me when I saw it. Being as how there was no cat in front of me, I concluded said cat was probably not there. Encouraged, I continued on.

One of the ghosts in La Pavilion is reputed to be an actor who died in the fire, who goes around playing tricks on people. He isn’t said to be spiteful, just playful. To this day, he’s the only full on ghost I’ve ever seen. I was walking around a floor and as I got back to the elevator I noticed there was a weird cold spot in front of one of the doors. Lacking any better ideas, I stepped back and said, “is anyone there?” and looked around a bit. When I finally turned back to the elevator, there was a tall, skinny man leaning out of the open door wearing an old waistcoat and tipping his hat at me. He had kind of a half-grin and really bad skin; pale with a few bright red pimples on his cheeks. His facial shape and features were vaguely reminiscent of Alfred E Newman (yes, Alfred E Newman), but he had a rounder nose and a rounder chin. He was kind of leaning out of the elevator, holding himself with his left hand as he tipped his hat with his right.

I blinked and he was gone, but I was convinced he was still there so I said, out loud, “You’re welcome to come with me.” On every floor after that I saw silhouettes and felt weird cold spots, but the weirdest thing was that two floors later I clearly saw the outline of a tophat standing next to me. No hat, just an outline, and no one under it.

He was kind of the highlight of the trip, though on the 9th floor I did see some cool colored balls coming down a hallway at me. Not like floating orbs, imagine the dark spots you get when you look directly at a light source, moving toward you. Yeah, that was strange.

While I’ve got the floor, my grandma’s house is haunted, too. The coolest stories my mom has all involve footsteps she would hear stomping up and down the hallway almost every night that she lived in that house, but also my grandpa was once reviewing an insurance video to make sure he didn’t miss anything and saw a woman standing in his kitchen window. Not my grandma, no one anyone there knew, just standing there, calmly looking out the window. About a year later, that tape disappered, never to be seen again.

Coitus_Interruptus

Here is one I shared in the last one, I figured its worth reposting. I was very young when this happened. So there are a multitude of rational explanations. Primarily that im young, the event was emotional, for all I know is it could all be the product of an overactive immagination. It still gives me chills though.

I was born and raised in Mexico and while I now live in the States, Mexico is where the story takes place. To be more precise it would be my grandfathers house, in a tiny town called Jahuara, In the state of Sinaloa. Close Los Mochis if anyone has a map handy.

We used to visit during the holidays. Stop by to see my Grandfather and his second wife. You see my grandmother died giving birth to her third child. It was my mother, uncle U., uncle C. and then she passed. So I never got to meet her. When I was little I didnt quite grasp what that meant. As far as I was concerned I had a grandmother, a sweet old lady who gave me money for the arcades and milk candies I loved so much.

My grandfathers property was great. The entire family lived right next to each other. The property still held the original house my grandfather built, the shack put together with scrap wood and broken signs and whatever else he had at hand was now used for storage. The foundation of the second home which was destroyed by a hurricane. My grandfathers house, uncles houses, aunts houses. Intermixed plenty of chiken coops and pig pens and what you got was an entire neighborhood for myself and my cousins to run amok in and cause general mayhem.

In the twilight hours we would play “Escondiditas”. Our version of hide and go seek if you will. With a can to ring and several other complicated game mechanisms. One such evening we were running around. I had no shoes, I never wore shoes at my grandfathers, hell Vicente never wore a shirt and we were all lucky El Borego was wearing any clothes at all. When the next round began I crossed the foundation of the second house, running to hide among the seeds and tack stored in the shack.

I felt something tear into my foot, When I usually tell the story I say it was a nail, honestly it felt that way, the memory of the pain is so vivid that to me it had to be a nail, or knife or something huge and pointy although to be honest I cant be sure. What ever it was it sent me to the ground, and crying. I was never one to cry out and make a lot of noise, So it was a while before the woman working by the shack came over to help. The conversation happened in spanish, but ill translate.

“Hey Son are what are you doing there crying?”
“I hurt my foot”
“Well come here let me take a look”

I managed to hop up on one foot and hobble over. She inspected my grevious wound. Produced a a small container of green salve and told me to ” Bite your lip ” as she added the strange concoction to the wound. She gave me her chanklas to walk back without getting dirty and remarked with a sigh as she went back to her work, half in spanish half in the native indigenous language the people in my grandfathers town still speak.

“Chamaco Witahuba” ( My spelling might be off, both for Spanish and the tongue, I wish I knew the name of the language but to be honest its just reffered to as The tongue. For those of you wondering what the hell. There are remote parts of Mexico especially the Sonora where a lot of small towns and villages still speak the native tongues of their ancestors, Well not so much now as they did back then, this was like 1988. Since then technology and large government programs have helped to change a lot of that. There are still plenty of people who speak the tongue, like my uncle and granfather and stuff. )

Not much Ghost yet huh? Hold on.

Fast forward four years.

We had come back to my grandfathers town for a very very important reason. The one photograph ever taken of my grandmother and several other photos and family artifacts that had been considered lost had turned up. Not only that but my uncle U. had a second daughter. He’s always been my favorite guy. He settled down and became a teacher but he had spent years wandering the country. He just left one day, with a bag of white bread, Of the Bimbo brand ofcourse, and jumped onto a train. He earned the nickname of Conejo Vago, or wandering rabbit. He always had great stories and I hung around him all the time as a kid. One day non chalantly sitting on his porch, desperately trying to learn guitar, as he played with his daughter I heard him sing.

“Chamaco Witahuba,
Chamaco Sissihuba,”

I laughed, I knew “Chamaco” was a rather crass term for a child, usually pre-empted by an expletive, but the two words I recognized as the tongue were new to me. I questioned him.

“Its a song, my mom used to sing. It means

Little kid that smells like pee
Lttle kid that smells like poo”

I laughed. Yet I didnt quite make the connection.

When the time came to rummage through the familial artifacts everyone stuffed into my grandfathers livingroom was an emotional wreck. Tears stained faces as they stared at pictures of long lost relatives, their old homes ( there are actually two Jahuaras, this one being the second ) Soon the lone picture of my grandmother was being passed around. I sat next to my mother, trying to comfort her. She was in tears, she had raised her two brothers, tended house, She probably couldnt even remember what her mom looked like. When the photo got to her, she collapsed, sobbing.

I was pale, and shocked.

My grandmother, was the woman who tended my foot in the shack years ago.

–more–

I really dig stories that involve children. While I still dnt believe in ghosts there is something I find fascinatng about children and ghosts. Kids being so innocent, not yet burdened with a pre concieved notion of evil or malice will sometmes discuss Ghosts or Spirits very non-chalantly and it scares me silly for some reason.

Here’s a story im trying to recall from the Summer 06 Thread. If the goon who originally posted the story wants to correct me on th details I would be much obliged. To be honest the majority of the stories details ive written, such as exactly what he is doing at the stories climax, are imagined since they could not be recalled. The important events are as they were written though.

The story talks about a young single father. Lets call him Dave, and his son Tommy. Dave’s primary source of income is as a flipper, this job entails that he purchases a less than optimal property. Then he spends an aount of tme repairing the property to then “flip” it, that is sell it for profit. Apparently its a decent living and allows Dave to watch over his son as he goes about the house repairing this and that. The job is good. As he works he checks on his son, tends to his needs, all is well.

One day Dave is outside repairing some of the siding standing precariously on a ladder. Suddenly he realises he hears a parents worst nightmare. Silence. He rushes inside to find tommy sitting alone rather somber in the living room, tears in the boys eyes.

“What happened?”
“The Black Man stole my toy”

Terrified that his son has become the target of a child molestor Dave quickly prods for answers.

“What black man Tommy? Where does he live? What does he look like”

The young boy responds

“I dont know, he’s all black he lives in the house with us.”

kombatMedik

I saw a lot of death. I held soldier’s hands as they died, looked in their eyes, listened to their last words. I watched for anything different, anything new, anything odd about death.

there’s isn’t much, from what I saw. final breath, done. Alive one minute, dead the next.

I knew a flight medic while I was there. Hella nice guy, but he swore up and down that there were ghosts there. I looked at night, tried to see something out of the ordinary- nothing. Not a damn thing.

It happened one night, pulling Ammo Guard Duty.

We called it AHA (Ammo Holding Area)- it’s pretty much a large area fenced off, in the middle of nowhere on post, that had a crapload of trailers. Duty was from 1800-0600, we and a girl from another company.

Now, this duty was very taxing. We’d sit in a shack. In this shack, there was a regular Army radio, a TV, and two chairs. We’d sit in said chairs, watch some movies, hang out, pull a radio check every hour, and if you served with a cute girl, flirt like hell. it was about a 15 minute drive away from the closest builiding, and close to the perimeter fence.

I was being a nice guy, and the girl wasn’t that cute. I told her to catch some z’s, i was going outside to chill and smoke some cigarettes, and maybe write some letters home.

It was PITCH black outside, save for the light from the shack, and the starlight. I sat there, chilled out, smoked a crapload of cigs, and pondered about what I was missing out at home.

Then I saw it.

A dark figure, about half a football field away. I saw it againt the starlight. Human shaped.
I try to squint. nothing. i can barely see it.
I load a magazine into my m-16. load a round in. kept it on safe.
I walk out a litte bit, trying to keep silent walking on gravel (i fail) and walk about 15 feet out. it’s still there.
Its just standing there. i can’t see a face, but it seems to me he’s facing away from me. I walk out another 10 feet, I realized I have my NVG’s on my helmet, so I lower it, and turn the knob.

The green flickers on, and my eye adjusts to the light. I look harder.

All I see is an abcense of light. Like a man-shaped hole. I walk closer, about 5 more feet. My mind is blank, I feel the hairs on my body stand on end. It’s still a good distance- I don’t want to get too far away from the shack.

I hear a clatter behind me- the girl woke up, and was walking around the shack. I turn back to the shape, and it’s gone.

I dunno if it was a ghost. I have no idea what it was. I walked out to where it was when the sun begins to rise, nothing. And there was nothing there in the first place- nothing but gravel.

still freaks me out to this day. Sorry if it’s not as cool as the others, but that’s my tale.

Chickenz

Someone earlier asked about battlefield ghosts, and in reply, someone else brought up Civil War ghosts. This is my battlefield ghost story.

I was with a group of my reenacting friends, taking part in the 140th anniversary Reenactment of Cole Camp (MO). It was a pretty bloody battle, but none of the people in our group was thinking about that. We were pretty much just wandering the site, finding out who was there that we knew, and who was there that we wanted to know. The group consisted of Justin, Jared, Linda, me, and some other folks who really don’t matter for the storyline.

For those not in the know, let me set up a reenactment for you. Union ladies are camped near the Union men, in one large group. The Union men camped in smaller groups; this battalion in one area, another battalion 50 yards away, and so on, with several battalions being camped in a large wooded area. The Confederate reenactors are set up the same way, but about a half a mile north (ironic, no?) from the Union folks. Anyway…

We were wandering from camp to camp, when Justin noticed that there was a cookfire set up on a hill, in an area of treeline that was not considered “camping ground”, as it was part of the battlefield itself. One man sat at he fire. Juston decided that he would be polite, and go tell the reenactor that he had set up in the wrong place, and if the person was willing, Justin would help him move camp. Jared went with him, Linda and I decided to wait for them at the bottom of the hill (we’re lazy), and the other folks decided that they didn’t want to deal with moving a camp site, and went on to other things.

So, as we watched from the bottom of the hill, we saw Justin and Jared talking to the fellow, but he never stood up. After about 2-3 minutes, our guys came back down the hill, looking a bit freaked out.
They told us that the man had just sat there, ignoring them, and that they felt like he wasn’t right in the head. The four of us headed away from the camp, and joined up with our other friends. After a few hours of carousing, we headed back to our own camp, which meant that we had to walk past the assumed psycho’s camp.

No one was there. There was no fire. We moved our lanterns around the area, and saw no fire ring, no fire pit, and certainly no sign of the man that had been there 2 or 3 hours earlier. The ground was completely undisturbed.

We had heard other people mention that this had happenned to them at reenactments, but I hadn’t believed it. From that day forward, I did.

Blood and Pavement

I grew up in a smallish colonial built in 1920 on the western border of Cleveland,and I had a few experiences there that convinced me the place was haunted to some degree.

1) The first story I recall clearly happened when I was roughly six, laying in bed. To explain the setup, the head of my bed allowed me to look out the door and into the hallway that containted the clothes chute. In the dim light coming down the hall from the kitchen, I could make out that the door to the clothes chute was open, which never happened. (Little kids love to climb in ’em, apparently.) I look away from the chute, unnerved that it’s open, and then look back to find myself staring into the eyes… er… sockets, of a skeleton. Its jaw opens in a sort of silent scream, I scream, and it’s gone. Not a fun night, and trying to articulate that to my sleepy and skeptical fatehr made it all the more enjoyable.

2) While playing a game upstairs in the “computer room/storage room” I had been making use of a large map that I had set out on the floor next to my chair because I could not, and still cannot, fold a map properly. So I left it open until I needed it again. I looked back a few moments later to find it sitting neatly folded on the floor, and I know no one had been up there save me. I cleared out pretty quick.

3) I suppose this puts me in a somewhat special group of people, but I’ve seen a full-bodied ghost. My bedroom at age 10 (now rearranged from when I was younger) was the same as before. The foot of the bed was closer to the door, so that I could see the wall-mounted coat rack behind it when the door was closed. I had been preparing for bed one night when I glanced up and a man stood near the wall there, looking dimly luminescent and blue. I remember him clearly. He was about 5′ 9″ or so, in his mid-fifties, and balding. He was simply watching me with a somewhat sad look. I did not feel at all nervous or uncomfortable when I saw him, but once I looked away and looked back to find him gone I was out the door in a flash.

4) My family came home one night to hear a loud, heavy thump from upstairs, heavy enough to shake the house slightly. Upon heading up to investigate, nothing had been moved, and nothing had fallen.

ltho98

“The Story of the Summerville Light”
I was a strapping young sailor training at the Naval Nuclear Power Training Command in Charleston, SC. Me and my friends get *very* bored there since we were all under 21 at the time and decided to look up some haunted places and investigate.

One such place was a suburb of Charleston, called Summerville. Possibly the biggest white trash town in America. In any case, the legend follows:

My personal account is this. We decided to grab a camcorder and a couple cases of beer (purchased from our over 21 friends and very against Navy regulations) and head to “Light road.” There is a hump in the road which is where the old railroad ran through and according to legend, that is where you park and wait. The road looks identical to the OP’s photos with a long dirt road with trees on eitherside. Anyone that lives in the low country knows that swamp like sounds are normal- frogs croaking, crickets chirping, life everywhere. We weren’t really expecting anything towards beer #5 and were just happy to shoot the shit and enjoy our alcohol. We see a small light in the distance. We get excited.. light disappears.. reappears.. it approaches closer to us with every second.

I hear the sound of a high buzz– its a bike and the local rider just looks at us, three guys in a truck drinking beer, slows and drives off far into the distance. Around this point in time we’re afraid that the cyclist would call the cops on us for drinking in a vehicle and decided to start up the truck and leave. We start the truck, start throwing the beer cans into garbage bags and all the sudden, the sounds of nature around us goes completely silent.

I’m in the passenger seat and we all just pause. All the sudden, something hits the passenger door, hard. Imagine what it would feel/sound like if a bowling ball was thrown at the door. Thats what it felt and sounded like. We’re freaked out, a little buzzed and haul back into shitty Summerville. Step out at a local gas station, giant dent in the passenger side. No scrape, just paint cracking around the edge of the crater in the door.

Could it be locals fucking with us? Could it have been the spirit?

One thing is for sure, insurance didn’t cover the dent.

ChuckMaster

I live in a duplex with a hard wood floor. It’s not a very old house but it creaks all the freakin time. It’s two floors, with a basement/garage and an attic too low to stand up in. The weird thing about the attic is that you can only get to it from the closet and through an access panel.

Last year I woke up to a loud noise. Now granted, in my neighborhood people come home at 3 am, party, and to make things worse I can hear my neighbor walking around since the house creaks. So it’s usually a loud car door, a door slam, and sometimes the domestic fight. The year before that the other side was broken into, so I was on my guard.

Now normally, I have learned to tune myself out, since often I would get scared, search the house with a weapon, and then feel stupid and paranoid afterwards. Nevertheless, I keep a 45 inside the bed’s two small sliding drawers, one side keeping the gun and the other keeping the ammo (I don’t load a gun unless I’m using it.)

Well, so I’m wide awake in my bed, and I heard another bang. I turn on my reading light, and then I walk over and turn on my bedroom and hall light on. I peer over the stairs and I just listen. I hear it again, but I’m having trouble pin pointing it. And it’s loud enough to cause me concern. So I walk downstairs in my boxers, check the living room door, check the kitchen door, and everything is fine.

I have the dishwasher in front of my kitchen door which blocks it from opening. Rather than pulling that away I flicker the basement light on a few times, figuring that would freak out an intruder. I hear nothing. So as I walk back up stairs I hear it again, but I attribute to my neighbor walking around again.

So as I turn off all but my reading light I hear it loud and clear. It’s above me. I then hear slow footsteps moving about, and some small shuffling. I wait for a moment while listening to it, making sure I’m hearing what I think I’m hearing.

I grab my 45 from the head of the bed and push the clip in. I turn on the light again and I open up the closet door and turn it on. The noise continues, but seems startled now since the pacing of the footsteps increase.

I push my clothes aside that are handing and I proceed to tear away the empty boxes I placed in front of the access door (I was meaning to put these in the attic but I got lazy.) My heart is racing, I’m half terrified and half hoping to catch the intruder before he gets away.

I pull open the attic door and reach for the chain light. The light comes on, and I hear footsteps and stumbling on the other side of the attic, opposite of the small staircase.

Now, there still isn’t a lot of light in the attic with the naked bulb, so I reach outside the closet and grab a flashlight I had on a small dresser. I crawl onto the shelf that the boxes were on and shine the flashlight in the direction of the noises, while keeping me safely hidden in the staircase. The noises continue as I blindly shine it on the far side of the attic. So I slowly crawl on the first step and rise to poke my head above the attic floor.

My flashlight is shining on a white figure. It’s skinny and lanky and it’s hunched over like an ape. At first I’m thinking it some crack head that crawled on my roof and somehow found a way in my tiny attic but couldn’t figure out how to get out. So I yell at the guy, asking him how he got in here. He just stares at me with these black eyes. I didn’t know if he was naked or just wearing underwear, and at this point I’m just pissed and disgusted. I put the flash light down, figuring the light in his face may be scaring him more than I need to. After that he still isn’t moving or talking. So I yell at him again, telling him he needs to get the fuck out of here.

Well, the white figure stands up, as much as he could in that little space, and strikes a pose that reminds me of a bull about to charge. I can hear the joists creak as he shifts his weight.

I chamber the gun and point it just below his feet. I’m doing my best to breathe slowly to keep myself calm. I tell him he needs to sit down and tell me how he got in or how he plans on getting the hell out of here. I tell him I have a loaded 45 on him and he’d better sit down.

He starts making slow strides towards me. He takes about two steps, each one creaking the floor boards, exaggerating each sound. I start to squeeze the trigger and I am damning the slow trigger pull on this cheap browning knock-off. He takes a third step, he’s halfway across the attic, and I’m aiming at his legs. The gun finally goes off.

Now there is a loud band, the shell ejects and bounces off my face, slightly burning me, and the attic fills with dust. My hearing goes away for a moment and I can smell the gun powder.

A moment later the dust starts to clear, but there’s now a white cloud where the figure was, and that clears away as well. At first I think I’m seeing things or going crazy, but I’m alone in the attic and I just fired a gun in a residential neighborhood. I uncock the gun and set it down. I pick up the flashlight and check every corner of the attic. I don’t see a damn thing. I check the small window above me, but it’s intact. There seems to be no way in or out other than the stairwell I’m standing in which I had to clear crap out of my closet to get to.

I walk over to where the white figure was standing. I look down and I see black footprints on the joists. I trace the prints and see that they seemed to have moved back and forth the attic several times. There were even prints on the stairs.

I peer down at one and poke it. They’re made of some soft, black mud and the smell like shit. I look down at myself and I seemed to have kneeled in it when I was on the stairs and didn’t notice until now.

So leave the attic and head to the bathroom to clean up, I’m still in disbelief of everything that had just happened. Then the front door starts pounding.

It’s the police and they’re pissed. My neighbor called them when she heard the shot. I let them in, and there are three of them. I tell them I saw an intruder, shot at him, and tell them where the gun is and how many rounds are still left.

So they sit me down on the couch and two go to check upstairs. This takes them maybe ten minutes. I can hear them muttering amongst themselves and they don’t sound happy. They come back down and start drilling me to go over my story several times. I mention the foot prints, and they said they say them, but if someone was in the attic they’re gone now. Then they start asking if I’ve been drinking or on drugs or medication. I tell them no, and that I’m drug tested at work.

So they have a pow-wow outside with one babysitting me inside. I can see a few neighbors trying to peak into the open front door from across the street. I’m tired, pissed and embarrassed as all hell. I’m in my damn underwear with a tiny burn on my face and shit smeared on my legs that’s half washed off.

So one sergeant comes in, gives me a speech about gun safety and how I could have hurt someone, and tells me they’re going to call me to come to court and issue a citation. They don’t leave until I give them a trigger lock to put on the gun and close it in its case.

So I’m awake the rest of the night. In the morning I check out the attic again. The foot prints are still there but the wood has absorbed most of it. I look at the window again and wonder if there was any possible way anyone could have got through it.

I take one last look and I notice something in the corner. There is the skeleton of a rat or other small rodent. Its head is crushed and its back legs are torn off. There are some tiny bits of rotted fur or flesh around it.

I reluctantly clean it up.

So a year later, the cops never called me back, and I’m moving out of that place.

Rick

The sun left bloody wounds on the night sky as it crept over the Eastern skyline.

“We aren’t going to find it tonight,” said Randy.

“Let’s keep looking,” said Lisa, “you’re sure it’s here, right?”

“Yeah, I’m sure,” Randy stated assuredly. The truth is though that he wasn’t positive. It had been several years since he had went to the Old Rincon Cemetery. In fact it was probably the last place on Earth he imagined he’d end up at tonight.

Randy and Lisa had been hanging out a couple weeks. They did all the typical things in town and were looking for something new to do, before the typical kissing/groping night caps. They drove around for a few hours or so without any sort of luck in coming up with something different. That’s when Randy remembered the old cemetery. It was a joke, but Lisa thought it was a great suggestion.

They drove for hours trying to find this old cemetery in the desert. They were young, so driving around aimlessly wasn’t that big of a problem. Randy was starting to get in the mood for other forms of entertainment.

”It’s morning, let’s head in,” urged Randy.

”Fine, one more pass on this road,” begged Lisa.

Randy had no idea why she was so interested in finding this cemetery but it was clear that this was very important to her. He concentrated on the scenery as they drove through the desert. Finally, he spotted something.

”It’s here!” he shouted. He pulled the car onto a run down dirt drive. It was rough, even by dirt road standards: it was clear people didn’t drive here often. A tiny white wall surrounded the front half of the cemetery. Most of it was unfenced. In the center of the wall there was a tall iron fence, with a patio in front of it. The fence was locked, but there was a smaller door right next to it that was wide open.

“Great! Wow. But the sun is already up. What fun is a cemetery in the daylight?” Lisa asked.

Randy rolled his eyes, “well we have been looking for it for hours. I suppose you’re right, though.”

Lisa smiled, “don’t worry, I’ll make it worth your while.”

Randy smiled wickedly and they rushed back to Lisa’s apartment. There would be other times for spooky fun.

…
The next night, they watched some movies to kill some time. Lisa insisted that it had to be after midnight. Randy was getting anxious. The couple hadn’t quite gone all the way yet. He figured last night was the night, but Lisa put him off. It was starting to get hard to think about anything else. Lisa promised to make it worth his while though, so at least for now, he was willing to do things her way.

When the clock finally struck twelve, they hopped into Lisa’s car. Lisa drove like a madwoman, with the radio blasting. She seemed possessed-and ignored all attempts that Randy made at conversation.

It was a moonless night: when they turned off the headlights it was pitch dark, save for the beam from Randy’s small keychain flashlight.

”Maybe we should head to the store and grab a better flashlight?” Randy said.

“Don’t be such a wuss,” teased Lisa.

The cemetery had gone out of use several years ago, but it had not been completely abandoned. A few graves had flowers and newer headstones. As they made their way to the back, the cemetery fell more and more into disrepair. When the wall failed, the perimeter of the cemetery was scattered cacti. They paused to check various headstones along the way, but Lisa seemed to be looking for one specifically-almost frantically.

Finally, they reached a tiny headstone, with a bench next to it and a many-armed cactus. This was the only grave this far back in the cemetery that still had flowers. Lisa touched it and sighed to herself. She was on the verge of tears

“What’s wrong, Lisa?”

”Not a thing! Hey . . . isn’t this hot?”

Randy was quite a bit surprised. Lisa had changed demeanor in an instant.

“Hey . . . there isn’t anyone for miles around . . .”

”I don’t know Lisa this is kind of weird. Are you sure you’re ok?”

Lisa grabbed Randy and kissed him. “Just fine!”

Randy protested a bit, but Lisa kept kissing him. His will was weak. He couldn’t hold himself back. As Lisa took her shirt off, everything but their bodies seemed to melt away.

. . .

It had been a few weeks since that night. Lisa hadn’t returned any of Randy’s calls since that night. He didn’t really blame her. As intense as it was at the time, the creepiness of it all had left him feeling dirty.

The phone rang.

”Hello?” answered Randy

“Hey. I’m pregnant.”

. . .

Despite feeling in no way ready to be a father, Randy did the right thing. The young couple married, and Randy stuck by Lisa every step of the way. Finally the time had come-right at the stroke of midnight. As they headed into the delivery room, his head spun with excitement. Young or not, he was going to be a father; yet he couldn’t quite shake a feeling of dread.

Lisa pushed and Randy watched in anticipation. He expected the cry of his child to come at any moment.

But they never came. The nurse grabbed her mouth as the child appeared. Lisa screamed in horror. The doctor quietly wrapped the child in a blanket. Randy felt like he was watching himself in a movie. He grabbed the child from the doctor’s arms.

He pulled back the blanket and was aghast; in his hands was a dry and brittle corpse. It sunk of death and rot and maggots crawled from its empty orifices. Randy could feel the vomit rising in his stomach. As he handed the body back to the doctor, the head came lose and rolled to the ground.

He turned and ran. He could hear Lisa screaming behind him but this was too much for him. He had to get out of there.

Randy hopped in his car and headed straight to the cemetery. Now he was the one who felt compelled. It was a miracle he didn’t get into an accident or get a ticket.

He ran to the bench where Lisa and him had done their deed. The headstone had been shattered and there was a gaping hole where the grave had been. There were footsteps leading away from the grave. He looked back towards the iron fence. It was open.

He ran out of the fence and noticed some footprints and he began to follow them. They headed deep into the desert. Randy followed them as best he could. It was a full moon. The footsteps went on for what seemed like forever, until they abruptly cut off. Randy fell to his knees. As he gazed into the distance he saw what appeared to be a woman just reaching the top of a dune. In her hands appeared to be a small crying child.

Randy ran screamed and ran after the woman as best as he could. When he crossed the dune though, there was no one to be seen. And there were no more footprints. Randy collapsed from exhaustion finally.

When he awoke in the hospital, he asked about Lisa. She was dead. Suicide. Randy couldn’t blame her. The guilt and pain his little suggestion had caused never left him. He made sure Lisa was buried in the now-empty plot, next to their child. He hoped it wouldn’t be too many years before he joined them.

Ozz81

My parents had just bought a brand new house in a small subdivision in town, and I was excited because it was literally 2 blocks from my best friend’s house. He lived in an older part of the neighborhood (in the northwest area) and another company was building on the land to the east and southeast, completely undeveloped land. The house was great – it was considered a “tri-level” house because of the layout, but that really doesn’t matter a whole lot. It was 3 bedrooms, and all of them were upstairs on the topmost floor. Going upstairs, my room was on the immediate left, a bathroom was directly across from it, my brother’s room was straight ahead down the hall, and the master bedroom was across the hall from mine.

Moving on, I remember one night being pretty tired, and I ended up going to bed a little earlier than usual (I think it was around 11 or so). I had a full size waterbed, which was comfortable as all hell, but it always shook around with the slightest bit of movement. Anyways, I drift off to sleep, but soon start groggily waking to the feeling that something was in the room with me. It was dark, the streetlight outside barely lighting my room due to the dark curtains and plastic shades I had (I hate having light in my room, it has to be almost BLACK for me to sleep comfortably). I peek out of my covers, but don’t see anything…so I’m thinking it’s just my imagination and try to go back to sleep. It’s a little tough, but I manage to drift off within a couple minutes.

About 5 minutes later, just after I dozed off, I feel someone SIT ON MY BED, near my knees. And not just sitting gently, it was like they just plopped right down, making the waterbed shake with waves…and I distinctly felt something brush against my legs, a slight pressure. I scramble to turn the light on, scared shitless that someone is in my room sitting on my bed (at first, I think it’s my older brother, trying to fuck around with me). Looking around, I notice that nobody is there, and I’m about as awake and adrenaline rushed as ever.

I look down and by my knees is the perfect imprint of what looks like someone’s butt and legs. Again, my eyes widen, and I finally get the courage to reach down and feel around, and nothing is there. I shook my blanket, and since I couldn’t sleep, decided to turn my TV on and watch it for a bit. I stayed up until probably 4 in the morning because I didn’t feel comfortable after that.

It never happened again, but damn did it freak me out. I knew nobody owned the house before us, because it was brand fucking new. I never did check to see if anything had happened with the grounds where the house was situated, but my guess would be that perhaps there were some old unmarked graves, or something happened on or around the area where our house had been built. Occasionally, I’d get the feeling I was being watched, especially if I was in the basement (regardless of how many lights I had on).

Villon

I’ve had some paranormal experiences, and think I might be slightly sensitive to… otherworldly what-have-you. I’ve only met a few “ghosts” and they didn’t do anything very spectacular. But this happened at the last place I was living, and I figured I’d share.

It was a big apartment- 2 bedrooms and a lot of space for just me and the cat. I put my bed in the small bedroom and used the big one for my office. After a few months, I realized that I almost never slept in the bedroom- most nights I would sleep on the couch in the living room. And around that time I noticed that I really couldn’t sleep in the bedroom. It was too… energetic in there. I’d be dead tired, but the moment I laid down I was wide awake. Even if I fell asleep in there, I couldn’t stay asleep.
I had been in a place like that before, and figured there was some extra energy in the room, but I didn’t really mind. My couch was comfy, and I wasn’t being bothered by any hostilities or anything. So I pretty much just used the bedroom as a big clothes closet- laundry on the bed and the floor, only going in and out to change clothes.
My cat didn’t hang out in there much either, now that I think of it.
I’d been living there for almost a year, and went to sleep on the bed for some reason. I laid awake for a long time, and then drifted into…

I understand that what happened next was probably a dream. But just because it was a dream doesn’t mean it isn’t true, if you get my meaning.

It seemed to me that I wasn’t asleep, that I was just in that relaxed pre-sleep dozing state when I opened my eyes. I wasn’t alone.
I wasn’t afraid. The light in my room was on, but it was more than the light in my room- it was a really bright yellow light that seemed to come from everywhere. Everything was the same- the bed, the laundry, the dresser, but there was a girl standing in the room between me and the door.
She was young, but grown- late teens, maybe, and dressed “normally.” I don’t know quite what that means, since I can’t really describe her clothing, but it wasn’t old fashioned, or dirty, or torn… it was normal. She was smallish, blonde. Behind her and off to her side was a male. He was less distinct, less present than she was- I think he was only there because he was somehow attached to her.
She was leaning towards me with a kind of urgency, and she wanted me to know that she had had- I want to say a twin, but maybe just a sister or close friend. Whatever the precise relationship was, she was one of two. And something terrible (a fire) had happened to the other one. And it was her fault (guilt from her, drifting back toward the male- had she betrayed the sister for the boyfriend?).
There weren’t any words, really, just impressions. What was really memorable was her posture- the sense of urgency, the appeal in her face.
Then I woke up in my dark room and immediately, as if in conversation, said out loud, “I see.”

The only other element to the story is that the people who lived downstairs from me said that their newborn was always staring at moving points on the wall, and sometimes they made her cry.

Binya Binya

This story is all true.

I moved into an apartment this year and shady things have always been occuring in it. It started out with the innocent door slammings for no apparent reason. You could blame it on the wind and throw it in the back of your head like it was nothing. Until they started bursting open and slamming shut multiple times in a row. It never really bothered me much until things started getting violent with what we thought was a ghost.

It was early in the evening and I was cooking a mean steak. I finished cooking and sat down to eat in another room. My roommate Andrew comes home, walks in the kitchen and he stares back at me. “What the hell man? Why is every cupboard open?” I walk into the kitchen and every cupboard was wide ass open, including the fridge/freezer. As soon as I walk into the kitchen we hear “SLAM SLAM SLAM SLAM” Our bedroom door was slamming open and shut. We investigate and find nothing.

Later that night other roommate Dan comes home. I am on the couch explaining to him what the hell happened earlier because it was bugging me. As soon as I said “I think it’s a ghost” the front door of my computer case blew off and slammed into the wall, leaving a hefty fuckin dent. How do I know it didn’t just fall off? Well it was across the room and left a mother fucking dent.

Over the next month shit kept getting more and more weird. There is one night I will never forget though. Andrew and I share a master bedroom in our apartment. I went to bed around midnight, Andrew was suppose to be home at around 3 or 4 am from a party. I wake up at 3:30 am and I see my bedroom door opening. I thought to myself HAHA im going to scare the shit out of Andrew, he has no idea i’m up. Well I see his shadow in the dark and for some reason he is moving extremely slow, closer and closer to my bed. I’m thinking what the hell is he doing, he is going to tell i’m awake and my plan is wrecked. Suddenly he picks up speed and dashes at my bed. But he stops when he gets in front of me, he gets on his hands and knees and crawls under my fucking bed!!!! I jump out of bed and turn the light on. NO ONE WAS IN MY FUCKING ROOM. I call Andrew freaked the hell out, he was at his girlfriends party still.

Shit still happens at my apartment. Girlfriend has seen multiple faces in mirrors, power flickers when you speak about the ghost. I have kind of adjusted to it. But it’s still scary as shit when you are home alone.

Panzerfaust

All my life, I have seen shadow people. For those not in the know, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_people.

The first time I can remember seeing one was when I was 5 years old. I know it was then because my youngest brother was a newborn baby (1996). Part of this was relayed to me by my mother. I was sitting in my room, reading a book, and I saw something move out of the corner of my eye. I looked up, and saw a black figure standing in the corner of my room. It was sort of a combination between a Ringwraith and a cloud. The best comparison I can think of would be a more whispy version of a Dementor (from Harry Potter). Anyway, I just stared at the thing for a few seconds, and it sorta… dissolved. That’s the only way I can describe it. I calmly marked my page, walked into the kitchen and said to my mom, “The Grim Reaper is in my room.”

They didn’t believe me.

The most vivid memory of them I have took place in 1997. I remember that very clearly because it was the week after the release of the Star Wars Special Edition, and me and my (then 4 year old) little brother were watching A New Hope in the basement. Here is an mspaint diagram of the setup:

Anyway, me and my brother were sitting there, and the light in the laundry room was off. It was at the part where they were in the landspeeder looking for R2, and I glanced to my right on a whim. There was one of the things standing there in the laundry room. I stared at it for a few seconds, and two little pinpricks of red appeared near where it’s head would be. Motherfucking red eyes. I gently nudged my brother and gently pushed his head towards the thing. He stared at it a few seconds, then let out an earth shattering scream and we practically killed each other in the rush to get upstairs.

They didn’t believe me.

We moved out of that house after my parents split up. I thought that it was the house that causing the shadow people up until then. That theory died the first night at my new house. I saw one of the things in the kitchen just before bed.

Over the ten years since that first encounter, I’ve seen them a few times a month. I’ve seen them in windows, in the street, in my room at night (this happened less than a week ago), in mirrors (this is the most common place I see them), and even at school.

Several of my friends have seen them too. I would be convinced of my insanity if they didn’t see the things too. One of them whipped a knife at one that was in his room. Predictably enough, it had no effect. My friend Laura was scratched by one once. She is Wiccan, and she and her friend were fucking around in the basement with a Ouija board and a spirit ball. I don’t know

I will tell you the story of the corpse in the bathroom, and the fucked up Ouija board incident.

All my life I have been able see things others can’t. I don’t mean for that to sound like the start of a shitty Fictionpress.com story, but that’s the only way I can describe it. The shadow people are a big part of that (hell, I’ve seen them standing next to my teachers during lessons even), but I have seen other things too.

“The Bathroom Corpse”
A few years ago, my dad was living with his parents (my grandparents) in their house. This is one of the only bad things that has ever happened in that house. I was 12 at the time, and it was the middle of the night. I had to go take a piss, so I went to the bathroom. I turned on the light, and heard a crack and fizzle.

Great. Lightbulb blew out. Well, there’s some light filtering in the window from the streetlight, I can piss by that.

So I proceed to empty my bladder, then I go to wash my hands. Everything after this was just a blur. I looked up into the mirror as I washed my hands. There was a man hanging by his neck from the shower curtain rod. Just hanging there. Eyes open and rolled up into his head. Everything.

I spun around to look at the curtain rod. Nothing. Nothing was there. I ran back into my room and hid in bed until dawn. I never told anyone.

“The Ouija Board” (or “Why You Always Say Goodbye”)
A few months after the aforementioned incident, I was bored. My brothers were being faggots, so I figured “Ima pull out the old Ouija board!”

I got it, and started doing the usual bullshit, then I jokingly ask “Are there any dead people around here?” The slider moved to yes. I figured that I’d run with it, and I kept on talking, and soon, weird things began to happen. The temperature in the room dropped, and I began to see things moving out of the corner of my eye.

I finally began to get pretty scared, so I asked “Give me a sign.” Bad move. A heavy ass book fell off the table next to me. I upended the board and ran out of the room. I didn’t say Goodbye.

That night, I started hearing voices. Low murmers and the like. I passed it off as nothing and went to sleep.

A little side note, just remembering this is making me feel like puking out of fear. I hate you all. Just kidding, I love you guys.

Anyway, the next day, as I woke up, I thought I saw a figure standing over me. It vanished as fast as I saw it, and I passed it off as grogginess fucking with my eyes. That day was not fun at all. Any time I was alone, I would hear voices. By that time, I had figured out that something was up.

I started to feel things touching me. No, not in that way, you perverts, just things stroking my neck and arms and stuff. I tried to tell my dad, but he, as per the usual, didn’t believe me. I began seeing figures standing in the shadows in the corners of the rooms. As I went to sleep that night, I saw a shadow in the corner, moving.

The next morning, I’d had enough. I woke up and went to breakfast. I felt something bump into me, and I exploded. I yelled for the thing to go back to where it came from, and that I was sorry for disturbing it. Never heard from it again after that. Got in trouble for yelling though

bbqweasel

Around here, students like to play a game called “Spirit of the Coin”. It’s basically a home made ouija board, with numbers 0-1 and letters a-z written on a piece of paper and a few choice words including “Hello” and “Goodbye”. A coin is used as the moveable piece. I went to a Christian school and the authorities there deemed playing such games was rather dangerous so they banned it. Didn’t stop the students from huddling in groups and playing in class during free periods though.

One girl in particular, Sandra, usually lead the activity as she was an apparently an old hand at it. She’d just transferred in from the local Chinese school where the students are notorious for this sort of thing.

Anyway, my best friend decided she wanted to play too. So after school we walked to the back of my flat and found a quiet spot to fool around with the board. Another friend, Cath, came with us. She was a very religious girl and was rather apprehensive about thw whole thing. To tell the truth, I wasn’t so keen on it myself.

So the session started with only Sandra and my best friend playing while the two of us watched on. After a few minutes of shuffling Sandra told us that something was ‘torturing’ her spirit and she had to let it go. She dismissed it and that was that. Later, Cath told me that she was scared and kept repeating “Jesus” to herself during the whole session.

Well, not really much of a ghost story.

Another story I have is what my mother told me. This again concerns the ‘Spirit of the Coin’ game that’s so popular. My cousin, according to my mother, has a very ‘weak’ spirit, thus he is able to attract, sense and sometimes see ghosts.

When he was around fourteen, his classmates would often invite him to join in the coin game. This was because nothing usually happened when they played by themselves but as soon as he joined the game, the coin became alot more active. He was rather pleased with this achievement and would tell his mother that the ghosts ‘liked’ him, since they always came when he was there.

I’m not sure if this is the same as how people normally work ouija boards but at the end of the coin game, the leader would dismiss the spirit and then everyone would take off their finger from the coin at the same time. Except that the last time he played the spirit refused to leave and wouldn’t let my cousin go. Everyone else released their fingers from the coin but his finger stuck there, stubbornly clinging onto the coin. When his friends saw this, they freaked out and ran away. He finally managed to remove the coin, but it involved some blood and tearing.

He went home, and promptly fell sick. According to all accounts his fever was a strange one. There were no signs of throat soreness or any of the other symptoms which usually accompanies a fever. And he would often say strange things, about people nobody else could see and telling them to go away. My aunt, his mother, decided to bring him to a local medium after going to the hospital. The medium told my aunt that some ghosts are apparently very angry at his disturbance while playing the coin game and she was advised to apologize to them, using joss sticks and paper money and food etc. And she was to do it at a crossroads in the middle of the night alone. They lived (and still do) in a rather rural community where there are no streetlights so this means she would have to go out in complete darkness.

That’s about it. She apologized and made all the necessary offereings and my cousin got well after that. I realize that there are many other explanations for what happened but hey, we Chinese are a rather superstitious lot and alot of the old beliefs still hold true in this part of the world.

LeechCode5

“The Smoke Detector Rampage”
For the most part the stuff that’s happened here hasn’t gotten me scared. Every time something’s happened that was odd I’ve shrugged it off, until the last thing. Even then I’m not gonna say for sure it’s ghosts, because I try to be rational.

July of last year my family and I moved to Nevada, due to some financial problems back in California and wanting to be closer to my grandparents who were sick. The house we ended up in is a fairly nice one floor place in a nice part of Dayton, complete with a golf course in front of the neighborhood. The house isn’t that old, ten or maybe fifteen years tops, if even that. The area is just now starting to really be built up, there are houses only a block or so away from mine less than two years old and across the street that haven’t even been completed. The last owner was an older woman who never mentioned any problems with the house, and who was clearly an old hippie; She came back a week after we moved in looking for her bag of “goodies” (oreo cookies and chips she stashed in the master bedroom’s closet) and a framed leaf she left behind. If there were any people living here before her or if anything happened while they were here, I don’t know.

Once crazy stoner lady and her several million decorative cat ornaments were gone, and the pain of realizing the movers broke or lost half of our stuff had faded, we settled in and things were ok for the first few months. Occassionally I’d her creaking floors or scraping on the walls at night, but rarely and I always figured there were simple explanations for it, and I still do. The first really odd thing happened I believe three months after we moved in, so about a year ago. My mom was still organizing the kitchen (we were really slow to unpack) and got out a huge glass plate that she’s had forever (and was surprised and thrilled survived the trip unlike the rest of our dishes). She placed it on the empty countertop, then walked out of the kitchen into the living room to talk with me. A few minutes later we hear a loud CRASH and run to the kitchen. The plate had fucking exploded. Not cracked, but had been reduced to pieces smaller than dimes which littered the entire floor of the kitchen in all directions. Some had flown several feet down the hall. We thought perhaps the cat had bumped it off the counter, but the majority of the tiny glass fragments were still on the countertop, and both the cat and dog were asleep in the master bedroom. It sounded and looked like someone had picked it up and thrown it down hard.

After that, everything seemed pretty normal. There’d occassionally sound like there was someone in a room nobody else was in, but we chalked that up to things like the house settling or the fact that sound travels kind of funny in the neighborhood. Sometimes we’d misplace something, putting it down next to us and then it not being there, and then find it in plane view where we left it five minutes after giving up the search, but again, who hasn’t had that happen to them once or twice? Nothing major, we just shrugged it off and carried on.

A few months ago both my parents had to go out of town for a few nights and I had the place to myself. Occassionally I’d hear something in another room, but I always blamed it on my imagination. Sometimes I’d assume it was the dog, but after living in the house for about a year I’d become familiar with how he sounded when he walked around. I wasn’t hearing claws clicking on the hardwood floor, I was hearing footsteps, but I still ignored it. I do read these threads pretty often, and I believe I was reading the Summer ghost story thread that weekend, so I figured I was just spooking myself. Around 11 on the second night I was alone in the house my friend Sean back in California called. We talked for a while and then I heard beeping from across the house. Realizing it was the smoke alarm I told him I’d call back and ran to see if I’d been an idiot and left the stove on after cooking dinner. As soon as I opened my door the alarm in my parent’s bedroom went off as well, then the one in the living room, then in the guest bedroom which had the door closed, then the one right behind me in my bedroom. All of them turned on two beeps apart from each other, practically beeping in unison. I ran to the kitchen, but as soon as I got there the alarm turned off. Then the one in the master bedroom, then the living room, then the guest room and then my room. Same as they turned on. The stove was off, there wasn’t any smoke anywhere in any of the rooms when I checked them. It wasn’t me smoking, I wasn’t while I was on the phone, and my parents were gone. Anyways, that’s never set off the smoke alarms anyways. It wasn’t even that anything was hot, the whole house was freezing cold. And that’s when I got startled. It was August, in Nevada. Every day and every night that week, and even that day up until I ran out to check the alarms I was fucking sweating because it was over one hundred degrees, and I hadn’t turned on the air conditioning, I just relied on my bedroom fan. But it was fucking cold. A few minutes later, about as quickly as it took me to get out my jacket, the house warmed up again.

After that, no big deal again. Occassional noises, occassional misplaced things, but no big deal, until a few weeks ago. I started to get that paranoid feeling like you’re being watched, like someone’s drilling holes into the back of your neck with their eyes. I began to hear the floor occassionally creaking inside my room. I’ve never been able to fall asleep easy, but it was getting even harder. Then one night a few weeks ago I felt something press down against the foot of my bed. Again, it wasn’t the dog. I keep my bedroom door closed at night. I ignored it, rolled onto my side. Then I felt the bed creak behind me, like someone was pressing against it. And then I heard someone sigh loudly into my ear. I could feel breath against the side of my face.

I flipped out and got up. Since then I’ve tried to rationalize that as well. I thought about it being sleep paralysis, since I’ve had it many times, but I’ve also experienced it enough to know exactly what it feels like. Also, I’d just laid down and I never fall asleep right away, I know I was awake when I heard and felt it. That was the first thing to happen in the house that I couldn’t explain. I knew what I heard and what I felt, and I know I was awake. That night I basically told whatever it was to get lost and let me sleep, but I still couldn’t sleep that night. If it was a ghost maybe it did listen, because I haven’t had anything really odd happen since. Writing this though, I am starting to get that feeling of being watched again…

“The Empty School and the Burning Dumpster”
As I said, I was in second grade. Fairly nice school, with a friendly and fairly funny principal, and some major asshole teachers and students, but that’s another story. My story’s about the other elementary school in my town, one that was only a couple blocks away from my home at the time. Literally right around the corner, next to a nice park where I and many of the neighborhood kids would often play. The school was a typical California elementary school, not all that old. The thing that was odd about it was that nobody went to school there. Nobody. A nice school in good condition, but never in session. I lived in that area for a good four or five years, and never did I see anyone taking their kids to school there. I also spent a lot of time home sick, and just as often pretending to be sick, so it’s not like I just was never around during school hours. The place wasn’t being used. Every morning the other kids in the neighborhood and in all the other neighborhoods in my town would be driven a good fifteen minutes to a different elementary school. The one down the street just sat empty. I’d never heard anything about the place and so I never brought it up. I’d go and have fun in the park right beside it, play on the swings, climb up the hill and scrape myself up, the usual, and never really pay attention to the empty school. It was just there.

One weekend when I was home and awake early I smelled smoke. My family went outside and saw a huge pillar of black smoke coming from next culdasac. Someone had a large dumpster in front of their house, and when nobody was looking somebody desided to start a fire in it. The fire got put out right away, but the smell of smoke stayed in the neighborhood the rest of the day. The police came a couple hours later to ask if anyone saw anything, but nobody had. They questioned me and a couple of my friends living two houses down. We told them we didn’t see anything, the cop thanked us and got back in the car, and my friend Sam and I went back to playing and goofing off as we watched the cops drive away. Then we noticed something: a trail of matchbooks in the middle of our road. There was no way somebody came and set them down without us seeing in the few minutes since the cop had left, and if they were there before it seemed kinda odd that the police wouldn’t have bothered to notice several matchbooks just laying on the road while investigating a fire. So, Sam and I, stupid kids as we were, slipped into detective mode. Sam went and got his older brother out of the living room, and we decided to follow the trail of matchbooks.

The matchbooks lead down our street and around the right corner. It was a small neighborhood in the mid-morning, so we really didn’t have to worry about any cars mowing us down while we bent over to pick up possible evidence. Let me tell you, by the time we reached the end of the trail we had a lot of fucking matchbooks. Every three feet there was another in the road. Some missing a couple matches, some almost empty, a few brand new and full. The trail lead down the road, past the park, then up to the gate of the empty school. Could the arsonist have gone to hide in the school? Alright, I’ll almost guarantee I didn’t know that word as a little kid, but that’s what I was thinking, and the other joy of being a stupid youngster is that I didn’t bother to think “hey, maybe I should go and get the cops at this point.” I’d never actually set foot in the empty school before, but the gates were wide open. Looking back I think they always were. It didn’t take much more than “Should we go in there?” and “Sure.” to make the decision to look around the school and see what we could find.

As we walked across the black pavement Sam’s brother pointed to one of the basketball hoops, with was bent down. “One time this kid was playing basketball during recess and while jumping up to make a basket he slammed into the hoop and fell and cracked his head open. That’s why the school’s closed now.” As an adult now it doesn’t really make much sense that a school would be permanantly shut down just because of one kid getting hurt, but I was little and believed him. It was the first story I’d ever heard about anything of any kind happening there, and it explained why I’d never seen the school in session, and that was good enough for my seven year old mind. A few more steps towards the school buildings and we heard the squeeking of sneakers racing down the halls on the far side of the school and stopped. We waited a moment, and everything was quiet again. We exchanged glances, then kept going, focused on finding out who started the fire. Sam’s brother decided this would be a good time to add to his story “You know that kid who cracked his head open haunts this place.” Mother fucker…

Part of me didn’t believe him, because hey he’d been an asshole to Sam and I before, but another part of me accepted the idea that the school was haunted. I grew up watching the Ghostbusters, I loved paranormal stuff and I still do. But even if he was telling the truth, or the truth about what he’d heard, I wasn’t all that scared. If anything I was a bit excited. We walked up to one of the buildings. None of the classroom doors were locked. The whiteboards were still on the walls, and maps and posters just like any classroom I’d ever been in. Some of the rooms still had desks for students. The whole place seemed in fine condition, and a lot of stuff was left behind. No teacher’s desks or file cabinets or books, but still, you’d think they’d have emptied the place or at least locked it up when the closed it. But no, not a single door we tried was locked.

Occassionally I’d look over my shoulder thinking I heard someone behind me, but there’d be noone and the others would say they didn’t hear anything. Once or twice Sam or his brother would turn around and get the same results. Feeling the need to piss I walked up to the boy’s restroom door and checked it. Unlocked, same as every other door. I told Sam and his brother I’d be back in a minute, and they walked around the corner to check out some more rooms. The bathroom was pretty clean, more than I can say about the bathrooms at any school I’d ever actually gone to. The electricity was off so I had to wedge the door open a bit to see. The plumbing was off too but that didn’t stop me from taking a leak. I listened around, still wondering if whoever lit the fire was in the school, or if there really was a ghost, but heard nothing. Just complete silence. Well, silence aside from me taking a leak. I zipped up, and just for the hell of it tried the sink faucets, but of course there was no running water. I looked up at the mirror in front of me. In the dim light coming through the crack in the door I saw someone behind me, same height as me. It was just a shadow, a black silhouette a few feet behind me in front of the stalls. I turned around, but nobody was there, and my own shadow was cast in a different direction. I looked back in the mirror, and there was the solid black shadow again, but this time it was right behind me, and moving.

I darted out of the bathroom and ran into Sam and his brother and told them what I saw. Sam opened the door and looked around, seeing nothing. His brother just laughed and said “Oh yeah, I heard the kid who cracked his head open bled to death in there.” God damn mother fucker. We all decided it was about time to head back home. We headed back out the gate we entered and walked across the park’s grass. The sky was already starting to look a little dim. We stepped off the curb onto the street, and god damn it, there was a new trail of matchbooks heading back home. I don’t think any of us bothered to pick them up this time. I can’t really remember if any of us held onto the matchbooks we found on the way there, I think Sam threw them away when we left the school. None of us bothered to call the cops to tell them about our amazing “evidence.” Sam and his brother went home, and I walked a few houses down to mine and called it a night. By the next day we all sorta forgot about everything, we never really mentioned it ever again. As far as I know nobody ever got arrested for the fire, I never heard anybody mention it again either. A year later my parents and I moved to a new neighborhood across town, and I continued to go the other elementary school. My grandparents stayed in our house on that block for a couple years after we’d moved, and I still played in that park and would occassionally hang out with Sam, and the school around the corner was always still empty.

Bexx

Negative Zero and rammark, I don’t get why, if your parents were Christian fundies, they wouldn’t believe in ghosts. Ghosts are talked about in the Bible. So are demons. And witches. And witches calling up ghosts. My mother is a preacher and she believes in ghosts.

She’s had a few run ins with them too. When my parents were first married they lived in Scottsdale AZ. They had a ghost there. It seemed pretty harmless. It would just move things around every now and then. But it would also do helpful things like find keys, pull out chairs for you, close the cupboard doors when you left them open. My parents are pretty damn practical so they just shrugged it off and went on with their lives not in the least concerned they lived with a ghost.

Then one day it was really hot out on a weekend. My parents couldn’t afford A/C so it was extremely hot inside. My mother laid down to nap the hottest part of the day away. My father finished whatever he was working on and joined her. Now at this point you need to know that my mother is pretty short. She was only 5 foot 1 at the time. My father is much taller, but thye both have thick dark wavy hair. They both slipped under the sheet to stay cool but my mom, for some reason, was much higher up on the bed. They both sleep on their bellies too. Now my father had just started dozing off when a pillow hits him in the back of the head. He wakes to find out it was the pillow he had been sleeping on. He looks at my mom to see why she smacked him. She is sleeping. He figured it was the ghost playing around. They said he would get grumpy if they didn’t play with him. So my father takes a deep breath to tell the ghost to stop playing when the pillow gets heavier. Then it shoves his face into the bed.

Now at the time my father worked putting up telephone poles. He is not a weak man and he was in his prime at this point. But as much as he fought he could not get that pillow off his face. It held him down until he could barely breathe. Now he is thrashing around on the bed and my mother, sleeping right next to him, does not wake. She is still sleeping calmly. My father in a last ditch effort managed to get his hand up to his face to pull the pillow out of his mouth enough to get air to scream “LYNN!”

As soon as he screamed my mom’s name the pillow fell away. Then the door shut as my mom jerked away asking what was wrong. She got the story from dad and they both wondered what had pissed off their ghost like that. But that was just the start.

After that it started tormenting my older brother, who was still a baby. It would scare him, move him, leave bruises and put dangerous things in the crib with him. My mother was laying on the couch one day, right after laying him down for his nap. She left the door open because of all the problems they had been having and she wanted to keep an eye on him. She told me she blinked and when her eyes opened the door was shut. She could still her the echo of the slam. And my brother was howling and screaching. She had to kick the door in to get it to open. The handle wouldn’t turn. When she got in there my brother was sitting, naked, in the middle of the floor screaming and red all over.

My parents had enough and called in a local preacher. They put a Bible in the baby’s room. So long as the Bible was in there he was fine. If the Bible got moved, and sometimes it did, he would start screaming again. After they found out my mom was pregnant they moved. They thought their troubles were over too since they never saw the ghost again. Unfortunately, they never told us kids. And we never told them what we saw either. We figured they wouldn’t beleive us.

–more–

To start there are 4 of us. I have two older brothers and an older sister. The people are R(oldest brother) C(older sister) M(second older brother) then me(I’m the youngest)

When we were younger there was the girl’s room and the boy’s room. Though we would often sleep together in one room one weekends. It was like a sleepover with your siblings. We would stay up all night playing games or talking. And sine our rooms were at the opposite side of the house from our parents we could sneak back and forth easily. One night we’re sleeping in the boy’s room. I wake up and have to pee. So does C. At the same time. We go to the bathroom. R wakes up and is thirsty so he goes to the kitchen for a glass of water. M wakes up. There is no one in the room now except him. He rolls over and the closet door is standing open. But in order to fit us all in there with our sleeping bags we had to close that door since it openend into the room. M is suddenly terrified.

A black shape appears in the closet. It develops a head, then it gets a glowing green outline. It slinks it’s reptilian head out the door and it’s eyes turn red. It smiles. At the same time all 3 of us other kidshead back to the room and reach the door at the same time. We are very confused how this happened and stand there dumb founded for a bit. I am even more confused as to why the bedroom door is shut. Then M starts screaming. He open the door and he is sitting there with his arm out to the closet, his face is white and covered in sweat. He sees us and starts crying. We calm him down and get him to stop screaming. Then he tells us what happened and R investigates the closet, with the lights on obviously. It is empty. Like seriously, nothing in it. Of course it should have clothes and toys and such right? Nope. It is all gone. Poof. We decide to tell our parents about it in the morning and we all move to the girl’s room. As I start to fall alseep I realize, even with all the screaming my parents never woke up. The next day we wake up and M is not with us. We check his room and he is sleeping where he had been the night before. All the things that were supposed to be in the closet are there again. we shrug it off and decide not to say anything to our parents since we have no proof.

Another weekend, we are playing hide and go seek in the dark. We did this fairly often and it was a lot of fun. It was more about being quiet then being fast. So I am sitting on the counter in the kitchen. I have my legs pulled up to my chest hiding in the shadows. I was extremely good at this game even though I was the youngest because I have the best night vision. R is it and he comes slowly shuffling towards me. I cover my mouth with my hand so he can’t hear me breathing. He is fairly close now, about 4 feet away, holding his hands out to find te counter. All of a sudden a get a serious chill. Goose bumps cover me. I see a figure stand up behind R. I am thinking that dad some how managed to come out when we weren’t out there and was waiting for us to sneak out of bed. Now he is going to be mad and spank us. I decide to stay hidden though hoping neither dad nor R would find me. Then the black figure steps forward and I can see it is not dad. It is not broad enough through the chest or shoulders to be him. Hell there is no way dad could have stood up that way any he. It seemed to flow up then unfurl until it was standing straight. I am about to say something when it looks at me.

I am hiding in the dark and it looks right at me. And smiles. Then it looks down at R who is just standing there now. Like he could sense something but wasn’t sure what. Then the figure reaches out and shoves him. R hits the ground and I jump off the counter. I don’t know what I was thinking but no one beats up my brother. I run at it, and R tags my foot. “You’re it.” He had no clue that he had been shoved down. He thought he had tripped. Even though there was nothing to trip on. we argue for a bit then I see the shape move off to the side. Moving now like a human and heading down the hall. I run and get dad, his bedroom door was only a few feet away at this point. I tell him that there is some one in the house. He grabs the gun, steps out, tosses R into the room with mom and I and investigates. He come sback and says the back door is open and C and M ae hiding under the bed and won’t come out. Mom goes to coax M out. C and M both say they didn’t recognize dad so they stayed hidden. They also say they couldn’t hear him when he called out to them. The house is now empty and the door wasn’t pried open, nothing was broken. So we don’t call the cops. The next morning I could swear that I had seen a rip in R’s shirt but didn’t ask because I didn’t want to know.

–morese–

Time goes by and us kids get just a bit older. At this point we range from 7(me) to 11(R). M is mad at us for making fun of him about what he saw in the closet. We tell him we never did. He insists that we did. We blow him off and forget the whole affair. At least R and M do. I keep thinking about it in the back of my head. Especially when at 8 years old he develops an invisible friend. Now some people might say I’m paranoid, I say those people are out to get me. Why else would they be trying to get people to think I’M paraniod hmmmmm? So I keep an eye on M. Being the closest sibling in age (13 months apart) we play together all the time. He gets pretty odd. I’m not sure how to describe it but he didn’t seem himself. My sister and I talk about it one day and C says it is pretty lame of him to have an invisile friend. She says he is too old. If anyone in the family should have one it should be me. Shortly after that she leaves and I am left alone in our room. It’s the middle of the day, the sun is shining. Out of nowhere I say, “I think I will have an invisible friend too”. I’m not really sure if I said it outloud or not, but I thought I did. I was also confused as to why I would say that. I had never cared before. And all of a sudden it felt like some one was playing with me. I have no way else to describe it, but I didn’t feel like I was alone any more. So, “we” played.

I never mentioned having one. It seemed silly to me then. but I knew when I was plaing alone I wasn’t really alone. M stated one day shortly after that that he didn’t have an imaginary friend any more. I kinda laughed to myself since I now had one. This continued for a bit long, a few months or so. Summer faded to fall. It was cold outside so I made a nest for my friend in the closet. Then I immediately wondered why I had done that. I “knew” that an imaginary friend doesn’t need a place to sleep. Again this all seemed silly to me, but it continued.

Then the circus came to town. I’ve never been able to go to a circus since then. I don’t know if I would go even if I could now. We didn’t have a lot of money then. Hell it was hard for my parents to pay the bills. There was no way we could afford to go to the circus. But a friend’s mom won tickets for 6. How lucky is that?! So I am stoked when he comes over and says that his mom is going to take us all to the circus. Hurray! But there are only 4 tickets for us. I tell my invisible friend that he can not go. He gets mad. I tell him there are only 4 tickets. He says M should stay home then, no one likes him any way. I tell him that isn’t fair. He says I should stay home then so he can go. I tell him that is silly. He is only an imaginary friend after all. Why would I take him to the circus. He gets very very angry.

All along it never crossed my mind that an imaginary friend wouldn’t need a ticket. You see, this friend had started taking up space. Things would be pushed aside so he could sit. He would bump against me as he walked in and out of his nest in the closet. So being a tiny car with 5 kids and an adult in it I knew he wouldn’t fit. It was only logical. So the day arrives, he is seething in the closet. I tell him to stuff it and walk out the door. I was at the point where I would talk to him outloud if no one was around. We used to just talk in our heads.

We all pile in the car adn I see that I am right. There was no way he could have fit in the car with us. We get to the circus, hand in our tickets, and go running to find our seats. I sit down and am happy and giggly, like a school girl you might even say. I’m drumming my heels on the concrete and just waiting for the lights to come on. I can hear the performers behind the curtain and they are getting louder. I can see people around us, they are clapping and having a good time. I look back towards the main ring and see that the lights are still off. I can’t see anything. I keep looking around at all the people. They are pointing at the dark ring and laughing and having fun. I stand up to see what they are pointing at. I see nothing but dark. It’s just all dark. My sister pulls me down and chews me out for standing in my seat and blocking the view of people behind me. I start crying. I tell her I can’t see the circus.

My much taller brother R offers to change seats so I can see. He assumes it is because I can’t see over the guy in front of me. I move. I look at the stage. Darkness. I can’t see anything. R even lets me sit on his lap. Then he scolds me for crying because he can see it just fine. I choke back my tears and just sit there. My sister isn’t sure what is wrong but she holds me as I cry. At this point our friend’s mom has noticed I am miserable. She checks my tempature and tells me I’m not feverish, then she lets me lay my head on her lap and cry for the rest of the show. I never saw a thing. I could see the clowns that walked up and down and sold stuff. but I simply could not see anything that happened on the circus floor.

A passing clown stopped to ask if I was ok. I told him I was fine. Then, to cheer me up I got a balloon. There is some debate on this. I remember her buying me this balloon because I missed the show. What I was told was that I threw a screaming fit until she finally bought me a balloon. I don’t remember actually getting the balloon. I remember waking up in the car on the way home with the balloon.

I sure as hell remember getting in trouble once I got home though. She told my parents what I had done. My sibilings told my parents what I had done. I told them that the balloon was given to me to cheer me up. I got spanked for being bad, then another one for lying. Then I was sent to my room with no dinner. “If you want that balloon so bad that is all you will have for the rest of the day.”

I grumped off to bed, incredibly confused. I untied the balloon from my wrist, put on my nightgown, and crawled into bed to sob. But as soon as I hit the pillow I was out.

Sometime, late late in the night I woke up. I looked for what woke me and saw nothing. My sister was sleeping in bed next to me. The moon was shining softly in through the blinds. I heard a sound near the door. It was the door slowly clicking shut. My sister always insisted on sleeping with the door cracked open. Now I watched as the doorknob turned and with a soft click lastched itself. For some reason this did not bother me. Then my balloon bobbed. Like some one had tugged it. Again, I did not really care. I sat up in bed and waited. I felt my “friend” nearby so why would I be scared? Then the balloon bobbed forward, as if some one had lightly hit it from behind. I should not here that this was a mylar balloon.

The balloon bobbed forward again, moving slowly towards me. I smiled, thinking we were going to play with the balloon. Oh how wrong I was. The balloon slowly spun around. As it was halfway around I could see that there was something on the balloon. Like I said before my night vision is excellent. It was a nose. A long nose. As the balloon continued to slowly turn the face came out farther. I could see the outline of lips and eyebrows. There weer no eyes though and this confused me. I wasn’t scared, yet, but I was keeping that as an option for later. the balloon finished it’s ratation until this incomplete face was now looking right at me. It was also several feet away from the door where it started that night. I knew this face shape in the balloon. It was what I had been playing with for almost a year now.

Then slowly the face pushed out even more. I could see now that it was a mask of some sort. It kinda resembled a generic African mask. As soon as this thought popped into my head dried grasses started growing out the side of the mask. Then the hate. It poured off of this thing. it poured out of it as fast as the grass grew out the sides of the mask. I lurched back in my bed until I hit my sister who was still sleeping beside me. She didn’t move. I had a moment to think that she might be dead before the balloon lunged at me. It moved at first like an unsupported balloon will. Then I saw a shimmery black shape form underneath it. It had a body now and it used that to lunge at me again. I was knocked back against C. fighting and screaming and kicking to get it off of me. I just kept screaming “No.” as loud and as fast as I could. I knew I could deny it out of existance for some reason. Then the mask came down at my face. I was yanked down on the bed. I knew it was trying to pull me off the bed to take me away and I screamed harder. Something hit my face and everything went black.

I woke up again screaming, then threw up. My siter was stting over me crying, holding my arms and shaking me. She seemed to be screaming too. My parents were just inside the door coming in. I quickly looked at the spot behind the door where the balloon had been but it wasn’t there. This sent me into a panic and I screamed again. My fahter snatched me up out of bed and held me to his chest petting my hair back form my face. I coughed, and a bit of vomit and blood came up. My mom was asking what happened while my father checked me over. My sister said something I couldn’t understand and they took me to that bathroom to get me cleaned up. My sister came in too and rinsed off something she had in her hand. It was a shiny piece of mylar.

She had woken up when I started thrashing around. She told me to stop and I did. She said she didn’t like the way I stopped moving completely so she rolled over to check on me. She realized I was choking and started screaming for our parents as she dug around in my mouth and throat. (Thank you Phys.Ed!) She pulled the piece out of my throat and I immediately started screaming “No” at her. She had to hold me down until my parents made it in. They are both fairly light sleepers. My mom checked my throat and it was sliced up, but not bad, from the mylar. So once I was calmed back down and told them I would be ok they followed my sister and I back to our room. As my father pulled the blanket back for me to climb in he saw the ribbon of the balloon. He held it up.

“This is why you kids are never allowed to sleep with balloons in your rooms. Next time leave it in the front room like you are told to.” Very confused I climb into bed. I can distinctly remember him, even now as I write this, tell me to take the balloon with me. He was right though, always before he insisted the we leave ballons out of our rooms while sleeping. Just to be safe. I take the ribbon and look at it. It has a weight on the bottom so it won’t move around. but it still managed to make it nearly 8 feet from the corner of my room to my bed.

Then I look at the corner. I realize that where the balloon had been was directly on the other side of the wall from the nest. I get up to throw the ribbon away. My parents have already left. As I move the blanket I feel something else. I look down and there is a tuft of dried grass. I start to shake. I get pissed pretty easy and I am livid now. I stomp over to the closet and yank the door open. I look back to the nest and yank it apart. “You are not my friend and I don’t want to play any more!” My sister gives me a slightly bewildered look but ends up just holding me as I cry myself to sleep.

True to what I had said, from that day on he was never my friend again. That didn’t stop him from “playing” though.

–samore–

The next few years more than a few strange things happened. Nothing to that extreme though. I was almost killed a few more times, but nothing that could really be blamed on him. Hell, I had more than a few close calls even before my imaginary friend. I’m a klutz, and shit happens. Shit just happens a lot to me. So for me none of the things that happened was too terribly out of the ordinary. Dogs attack. Brakes fail. Boards break under your feet. Life goes on. You learn to deal. I learned to deal by fighting back every time I was attacked. Dog charges me, again, run at it screaming. Corn plant suddenly whips around and slaps me, break the stalk so it falls down. That type of thing, ya know? But most importantly always always always leave notes saying where you are going. Always. That way when you get knocked unconcious or get your leg stuck in the broken slats of some barn some one knows where you are. I did this without fail. It saved me a few times.

Then a few months before my 13th birthday, when I would finally become a teenager, my dad tells us we are moving. For the first time we are moving out of state. I saw a tearful farewell to all my friends. On the ride out of town in the car with my mom I think, this is it. We are leaving that house and I am going to be free. Because everyone knows, ghosts stay in houses right? And I still thought that was what was going to happen. I was such a cute dumb kid. My fish died, while I held the bowl in my lap. Just turned belly up. The dog got horribly sick and for a while we were afraid we would have to put him down. So he rode in the U-haul with my brother and father in case that was needed. (We’re talking seriously sick here folks, the poor thing was puking and sneezing up blood.) The next stop he was better. And so Sandy made it to the new house with us. After a huge fuck up we finally get inside the house. There is no electricity. It is of course a Saturday and we also don’t have the number for the powere company handy. We haul out sleeping bags and crash. This continues for a few weeks as everyone involved is incredibly stupid. In the end we have to have our brand new home re-inspected before we can have any utilities at all. This is late December by the way. It got pretty cold. One day while unloading the Uhaul some AF jets go flying over heard. I think this is pretty cool so my brother and I stand on the ramp and jump up and down waving at them. Then more come across the sky. But they are flying too low and they smack into the tops of the trees. One top breaks off and comes crashing down at us. We both managed to get out of the way but it was a pretty close thing. I had a splinter about the length of my pinky in my cheek. Not a good start.

I spent my birthday night shivering in my room trying to warm back up after my spnge bath. I was miserable and feeling lonely. My parents had forgotten my birthday in the rush of everything until right at the end. Oh yeah, Bexx, happy birthday. My parents and I never did have the best relationship so I wasn’t too terribly surprised. But I was still very hurt. I curled up in my towel with my blanket and flashlight near my little fold out chair bed thingy and fell asleep. I woke up the next morning and the flashlight was off. I was tucked in on my bed, wearing a nightgown, and the closet door was open. There had been a pile of boxes in front of the door the night before so I wondered at who had been in my room that it had not woken me up. My paranoia extends to me sleeping you understand and I will jerk awake with the least provocation. I asked at the breakfast table and everyone said they hadn’t done it. Odd.

Later my father tells me I didn’t need to stay up all night unpacking. We aren’t in that much of a rush. This is when I find out I have started sleep walking. Over the next couple of years I sleep walk a lot. I wake up in culverts. I wake up in wrong neighborhoods. I wake up fairly often in the woods near our house. Every time I am fully dressed, with my keys, and no shoes or coat despite the weather. We tried locking doors, including locking my bedroom door. I would go out through the window then. I never end up really hurt, and there doesn’t seem to be all that much to do to stop it so whatever. I make friends and like a lot of teenage girls I have sleep overs. Since my parents aren’t complete wackos I have a lot of sleepovers.

This whole time though I have been having a recurring dream. I’m asleep in my bed when I wake up. Though I wake up in the dream I still understand that I am sleeping. I sit up in bed and look to the closet. The door goes away. It doesn’t open, it doesn’t fade, it just stops being there. Through the doorway that I know does not lead to my closet any longer I can see dark shapes flickering. Like if fire were black. It comes closer and I can see that there is something inside it. It is a creature, I can’t describe more than humaniod-draconian-reptilian-evil. It laughs at me as it steps out of the ring/pool of flame. I remember the laugh. It is him again. The eyes are the same. He beckons me forward.

I turn to him and tell him where he can shove it. (Like I said, the best strategy is offensive. And I have gotten good at being offensive.) It tells me what fun can be had if I will simply cooperate/submit. I continue to hurl insults at it. Then it turns and beckons to the black flames. I can see that it comes closer. As it does so it resolves int omore life like flames, reds and oranges and yellows. Somehow I know that this flame is worse, this will do real damage to me.

He laughs again and makes a flickering movement with his hand. Suddenly there appears a figure in the flames. It is some one I know. Usually some one I love. My dead grandmother, my sister, my mom, even once my dog but I laughed at that since it was so weird. It tells me they will be tormented until I concede. I wants me to give in. That’s all. The entire time it talks the figure in the flames change. So I see the tormented faces of all the people I love. I refuse, non stop. It hurts me heart and sometimes it would scare me but I keep refusing. And I keep having the dream. Every morning when I wake up the closet door would be open again. I got to the point where I just stopped shutting it.

Then one night, while sleep walking I am attacked. Like seriously beaten to hell. The beat me over the head with a rock and leave me for dead. I gain conciousness and stumble home as the sun comes up. I take a shower, get cleaned up and style my hair to hide the head wound. I go to school like every other day. I decide there is no way we are going to catch the people who did it so I am not going to worry any one with telling them. I’m not really that hurt after all. I had heard them talking and they thought I was dead because of the dirt and blood smeared all over my face and how they were glad they had tickets out of town that same day. I didn’t care.

That night though in my dreams he told me that he would contnue to send people like that until I submitted. I told him to go fuck himself and woke myself up. the sleep walking didn’t stop, but I was never attacked again.

Now being a teenager with parents who don’t give a shit, dreams that you have to wake yourself up from, sleepwalking that leavees you moer tired than you were when you went to sleep and all the crap and drama of being a teenager was not easy. I started to get suicidal. There simply didn’t seem any reason to go on. I was just so tired. During this time I was also taking French, this does have a point so dont’ skip this. In French class we had to choose French names. I had been woken up all night long with nightmares and had ended up waking up in the middle of the street about a mile from my house. I had scratches all over. The day before I had woken up with chocolate all over my legs and sheets. I was tired. So when the teacher asked what name I wanted to go by I wasn’t thinking at all when I opened my mouth and said “Georges”. Everyone laughed and I played it off as an inside joke with some friends. I told them it was the name of my evil twin. (Whoever figures this bit out gets a candybar after class)

So after years of this shit I really starting to get burned out. Everything seems a thousand times worse when you aren’t getting any rest. Some days I knew I was hallucinating from lack of sleep. Other daysI didn’t, but I still saw shit. Shadows that walked around with nothing attached to them. Animals that would turn and look at me with human expressions. Voices that would call out. Or just chatter in the background as I tried to sleep. I debated a few times just telling people about this so I could be admitted to a hospital. But I knew that wouldn’t help. If it followed me from KY to NC I was sure it would follow me to the psyc ward too. I just felt too tired to fight.

So many times I would blank out, or not see something. Or something would be sublty moved to cause me to hurt myself. I once tripped in my yard and fell on a piece of rebar that was stickng out of the ground that no one had seen in the 2 years we had lived there. Luckily I was wearing an underwire and it deflected it enough to bounce off my rib and go below my heart. It came damn close to the sack around my heart though. Twice my brother blanked out while driving with me in the car and each time it was my side that was hit. Several tests later and they never found anything wrong with him. I was driving once and looked to my right before entering an intersection, I saw nothing, and drove directly in front of an oncoming car. I was bit by three snakes on three different occasions and only once saw it happen. I was atacked sooooo many times by dogs I couldn’t even give you a rough guess. This became normal to me. I won’t even go into all the crazy shit that would happen to me due to people thinking I was some one else. Or how many times I had to say, “No I am not Amy. Sorry.” and in the back of my brain wonder if it really was me, and I was doing shit while I was sleep walking.

So, I’m at the end of my rope. I’m 17 now. I’ve been fighting this new kind of crazy for a little over 4 years. I still refuse to give up but I don’t know what else to do. I go to have lunch with a friend at a local Waffle House. For some reason I spill my guts. I tell her about all the crazy shit that has happened for the last few years. She tells me she has had those same dreams when sleeping at my house. This floors me. I end up talking to all my friends and telling them about the dreams.

This is when I learn that for years every friend who spent the night in my room had the same dream. Every person who slept in that room had the same dream. If I was there with them something they would dream that I was there too, but not with them. Like our dreams overlapped. And they could hear my refusal, even as they watched their loved ones burn and scream or saw my loved ones doing the same. And my refusal to give in would help them to refuse as well. Until they woke up then they were angry at me. And I never knew why. I just thought all my friends were grumpy in the mornings. I know I am.

So with this new info I go home. I talk to my mother. She has slept in my room, as has my aunt, for different reasons over the years. She tells me she had the dream and suspecs my aunt did as well. She knows a cousin of mine did. Then she drops the bomb. She didn’t think twice about it. She simply thought that it was an old dream that came back to haunt her caused by my being gone for the first time on a road trip. You see, she knew the figure in the black flames. This is when she told me about George. The ghost that tried to kill my father and terrorized my mother and eldest brother. (Who remembers my french class name? You get a candy bar! see me after class.)

As soon as she says the name I feel a chill. Then, in typical manner for me, I get pissed. Like raging mad pissed. I realize now that I had always felt him. Somewhere in the background. I knew that it was him in the closet in my dreams. Then I knew what he wanted to. What he really meant when he told me to submit. He wanted me to give up on life. He wanted me to die. But he wanted me to choose to die. I had just gotten so used to that feeling over the years that I never gave it a second thought. My mom tells me that I need to get rid of this thing. No shit?! I had a lunch date with the same friend I had already told all this too so I decided to drive out there to see her. 3 times on the way out there my car died. No reason. I kept saying no, and would start the car back up again. I finally get there, almost an hour late, but she waited for me. She’s a damn good friend like that. So we sit down and I tell her about what I have found out. Then she says, “So why don’t you tell him to go away?” I sit there and blink at her. I for some reason never actually confronted this thing. Just dealt with it and refused to give in.

So, in the middle of Waffle House on a nice bright Saturday afternoon I closed my eyes, and I told him to go away. I told him to leave me alone and never bother me or mine again. Out of nowhere I am struck completely insensinate. I can’t feel anything except this writhing mass of hate. “you wouldn’t know how to live without me. you wouldn’t know what to do without me there. you be lost if I left you” I could hear it all at once. Him saying how much I would lose, how lonely I would be, how different everything would be without him. I agreed. Then I thought back at him, the way I had talked to him so many times as a child, I told him how easier life would be, how freer it would be, how calm, how happy, how peaceful. And I told him how much I wanted him gone. We argued like this for what seemed an eterniy. Then I heard/felt him laugh. It didn’t matter I was going anyway. Even as I fought him. I had no clue what he meant. I continued to rail at him to leave me alone. Then I felt my hand. A hand was in it. It squeezed my hand and I smiled. I told him in no uncertain terms to leave me alone forever. And I pushed him away from me. He got less certain then was gone with a smile.

I opened my eyes, certain that I had only blinked. My friend, bless her soul forever, was sitting across from me holding both my hands, tears pouring down her face and squeezing my hands so hard hers were mottled and white. I looked around and kinda laughed. She opened her eyes and jumped up and hugged me. I tried to play it off as if nothing had happened. I was certain the “fight” had only been in my mind. Our waitress came over and asked if we were ok. not in the usual “ya’ll need drinks way” but the “Holy crap are you gonna live way”. She said they had heard something, like a fight, going on at our table but didn’t see antyhing. Since they knew we were best freinds they let it go until she had jumped up. I told her we were ok and she grabbed my coffee cup up. She said it was cold and would get me a fresh cup and asked again if we were ok. We told her we were and she set down my coffee and walked off.

I then asked her what she had seen. She said I closed my eyes. Then I looked very angry. She said my lips were moving but she couldn’t make out what I was saying. She said I then got an even fiercer look on my face. Like she had never seen before. Then she said it looked like I was fighting something. That was about the time she realized I wasn’t breathing. I wold suck in a tiny bit of air every now and then but not in any rhythm. She also said that it got very cold at the table and I was freezing. She didn’t know what else to do so she grabbed my hands, closed her eyes so she wouldnt’ have to see my face any more, and started praying for all she was worth. I told her I was free. For the first time in almost 10 years I was free.

I never had the dream again. I never had a friend who had the dream again at my hosue. I had one friend who had the drea ma few times at her house and I told her to tell it to go away too. She did. It did. That was the last run in I had with that. And it was also what taught me that prayer in a situation like that is the only thing you can do, other than hurl insults and tell it no of course.

I wish that was my last encounter with things like that. But it seemed that after that people would find me when they were having problems like mine. Not that they ever looked for me. Just that they would meet me some how, and then they would tell me their story. And how could I not help them out? And that led to some other interesting… encounters.

“We Fight Back”

As I have stated before I have a tendency to get pissed and attack when things are coming after me, or when they hurt people I care about.

So when S called me a week or so later saying she wanted help I went full out. I set up a time to meet her at her house when neither her husband nor child would be there. We were going to clean house. She arranged it with her husband that the house would be empty for the weekend. I drove over to S’s house. And I see her sitting on her back porch crying. The house was on a corner lot so the side and the front both faced roads. Some one had thrown a rather large rock through her window that morning. She had just finished with the cops before I got there.

She had been so mad that she had gone through and taken all the books she had on witchcraft and everything to do with it and she had started throwing it in the curbsides. I could see that they were stuffed full of books and boxes and cloths. I got her to calm down then I took her for ice cream. She didn’t live that far from the creamery after all and there is never a time that isn’t a good time for ice cream. We went and had ice cream and chilled for a bit. When she was ready we went back to her house. Now we had only been gone for a bit less then an hour. When we got back the curbside was empty. I tipped it over to be sure. We went in and all the books and everything else were back on the shelves.

Now when she had gotten there they were in boxes. Her husband had started boxing them up while she was not living there. It reminded him too much of their problems. Now they were all back on the shelves and the things he had put up were in boxes. She again started crying. I went and got a garbage bag and started throwing all of them away. She joined me and we did what we had come to do. While we were at this I happened to look up. There was a car, on the street outside the broken front window. There was a blonde chick in the driver’s seat. She looked pretty pissed off. I flipped her off. S turned to see who I was flipping off. She turned white as a sheet. She told me that was C. I smiled really nice and big. Then I flipped her off again. She started to get out of her car but another car pulled up beside her. They talked for a bit then C drove off. After a time so did the second one.

S told me that it was probably the rest of the coven and was worried that they would be coming back soon to haul her off again. I told her that was fine. I was there and I would keep her safe. No one was going to take her while I was there. I told her I would kick their sorry asses if they tried. (I kick ass for the LORD!) We continued to go through her house and find everything that had to do with the occult. I continued to haul bags out to the curbside. Twice more I saw the second car. Once it pulled up as I was putting a bag in the curbside. I smiled and waved. They scowled and asked for S. I told them she no longer lived there. The passenger leaned forward and said she had seen her there not too long ago. I told her that was nice. I kept smiling till they left. Confusion to my enemies.

I got back inside after that encounter to find S holding an Oijiaaiaiaiahe board (no I can’t spell it shut up. It’s late. You know what I mean.) I ask her what is wrong. She tells me she has burned this damned thing twice after trying to throw it away several times. It won’t stay gone. I take it from her and fold it till the pressed cardboard is weak. Then I break it into pieces. She sits there and watches me. I take the slider from her as well. It’s solid plastic so not easily broken so I don’t try. I just toss it in the bag with the rest of the garbage. She tells me it will just come back. I tell her it won’t any more because it is not welcome on this house. She looks up at that. Then she tells me that her charm disappeared while she was at my house. It had never happened before. It was not supposed to be able to be taken. I reminded her that my stoop and stairs are part of my house. When I cast them out of my house they had to leave there as well. After that it was just a bird foot and a bunch of charms. Some one probably walked off with it. She agreed. She then told me that was why she decided to ask me for help.

I decide not to say anything else. I only give her the help she asks for. And I know she will ask when she is ready. We continue to clean up the house. She calls to schedule a special pick up with the city. We have all the books, boxes, cards, charms, thingies, and components out if her house. Something still doesn’t feel right though so I ask her what we missed. She thinks about it for a minute. Then she rolls back the rug. There are diagrams chalked on the floor. We scrub that off the floor too. Then I let it dry to make sure it all came off. It didn’t so we hit it again. Again we wait or it to dry. It’s finally clean and the house feels less crowded.

I ask her if she would like me to pray over her house. She says yes. I pray for help, strength, protection and safety. I ask God to keep her house clean and to keep out the things that we have removed. I ask that He keep His spirit and His calm there to protect the people that live in the house and to keep unwanted and harmful spirits out. I ask that God guides S and her family to find a better life and to help reconcile their differences. I ask for strength for myself because I know that we are not done and I have just made some serious enemies. I feel a sense of peace fall around me and S. I know that He is listening and helping us.

I finish up and look up. I look out the window where the car had been parked a few minutes ago. I am greatly disturbed to see that the car is there. But no one is in it. I tell S to stay inside and walk around outside. I don’t see C anywhere. I go back inside and S is on the phone. The window people are coming over and they can fix the front door too. The door was still broken from S’s husband having to batter it in.

I tell her to call again if she needs anything or just drop by if she is feeling lonely or has any questions. She said she would and I leave. I look up as I drive off and I see in my review mirror that I am being followed. I really don’t like this so I drive like a retard for a while. After a bit of being stupid I go to my coffee shop. The only place to park is pretty far away so I have a bit of a walk. But it is near J’s day job so I pop in to say hi. Then I walk out the other side and head to my coffee shop. On my way back I pop back in and gave J the drink he had wanted. He tells me that a blonde chick had come in shortly after me and asked if they had seen me. J obviously didn’t like this so he harassed her and chased her off. The regulars in there also know me so they gave her a hard time and one even caught her plate number as she left. I find this very interesting and explain who she is. J says they will keep an eye out for her and give her a real hard time next time they see her.

On that cheery note I head home. No one follows me; at least I don’t see anyone. I have a feeling in my gut though that the party has just started.

Weeks go by and nothing happens. S comes over fairly often. To ask questions or just to talk. She tells me her house and family are doing fine. There have been no reappearances of any books or anything. I tell her I am happy but not surprised. She also is very happy to say that the board never came back. She comments on how “strong” I must be to keep it away. I explain to her that my strength is God’s and there is none stronger than the makers. She tells me how she used to get her power from the spirit world. I tell her how I only believe in two types of supernatural power. One that is God’s and of his and one that is Satan’s and of his. This leads us to several talks over the next few weeks. We end up bringing in my mom who is much better at explaining this than I am. We have a very very very long talk that night. It is past midnight before my mom leaves. That is insanely late for her. S leaves too promising to think about what we have told her.

Now this whole time I am finding out more and more about her coven. They are some pretty nasty people. There are other covens in the area that practice differently from them. They worship the 3 faced goddess. And S’s coven scares the crap out of them. I won’t go into many details here; I am trying to keep the overly religious bits out. But let’s just say that they do some nasty shit. And all in the name of “helping” since they still follow a twisted version of the threefold rule. Anything is ok, so long as it protects or helps the coven. This is why they think that whatever they do to S is ok. Since they are protecting the group.

In the end S decides she wants to accept Jesus and become a Christian. I tell her that is awesome and ask if she needs anything. She says she wants to do it at my house. That’s fine. She says she will be over shortly. She sounds as happy as I feel. My friend K is there and we go for a walk around my neighborhood for a bit. We’re smoking and walking along. I’m barefoot because I really dislike shoes, so is K. We get up to where some kids are playing so when I drop my cigarette I put it out with my heel. Some kids see me and think that is the coolest thing ever. They come running over and follow us around for a bit begging to see it again. K says something about how I’m so cool that all the kids are starting. Then she drops hers for me to stomp out. I laugh back and tell her they are probably staring because I am the only white chick in the neighborhood. One of the kids that is staring at my foot says that I am not.

I am quite surprised by this since as far as I knew we were the only white people living there. The kid tells me that there is a white chick that moved in across the street. He points to the house where she lives. A blonde chick. One of the parents hears him talking and tells me more. It’s a blonde chick. Alone. Though sometimes she has other female friends over. They never moved any stuff in. They see her every day though, with bags of food going in there. She’s been there a few weeks now. I immediately get a chill down my back. I look at K and we both look over at the house in question. All the blinds are down. There is no car out front. I tell K we had better get back. I thank the people who told me all this. As we walk back I am reminding how God works in mysterious ways.

I send K home and ask her to pray for us. I call my mom and tell her what I think is happening. She says she will pray. I call everyone I can think of and ask them to pray for S and me tonight. I know now that this is gong to be a hell of a ride. I look out my front windows and realize I can see the townhouse where the lone blonde girl lives. One set up blinds on the top floor is open a bit. All I can think is “bring it bitch”. Then I flip her off for good luck.

S finally shows. She says she is scared. I tell her that is ok. God loves her and I will protect her. She says they are afraid they will kill her when she accepts God. I tell her I will be there with her. And it will be ok. I tell her she can take her time if she wants. She decides she wants to do it now. Ok. I tell J that we are going upstairs. I tell him that some people might be coming over and not to let them in. I also warn him that things might get loud upstairs and just to ignore it as best he can and keep praying.

We go upstairs to the spare room. I chose it because the only thing in there is a bed. On the ground even, no frame. We sit down. She asks again how it goes. I tell her it is nice and simple. You talk to God. You tell him that you have sinned. And then you tell him that you want him to be a part of your life and to live within you. That you know now he is your savior and died for you. It is usually a calm and happy thing. But S already had something inside her. And she had already sold her soul to get power in this life. She also let her “guide” come in to control and use her body. That was another part of the agreement. She told me so. This is not me making it up. So, we were going to have to evict some very unhappy things here.

S folds her hands and bows her head. She starts praying to God, barely whispering. I can’t hear her, not really, but I know she is talking. And crying. I wrap my arms around her and I start to pray. Something causes me to lift my head though and I look out the window behind me. The blinds that had been down are now up. All the way. The window behind us shows the house of the lone blonde. In the upstairs window I can see C. She is standing in her window watching us. I can see her. I smile and keep praying.

S is now crying and shaking. I can hear little words now and then but I am so busy praying that I don’t pay much attention. It feels like there is a tidal wave behind me though. I can feel it building. It is getting higher and stronger. It is rage and hate and contempt and malice and it is coming. I kneel on the bend now and wrap myself around S. I move so that my back is between her and what is coming. It is slow moving but it is coming still. I pray all the harder. I hold tight to S and I pray and I tell it that it will not have her. She is not it’s to command any more and I never use. It reminds me how I was fooled for so long. I remind it that it is about to be homeless. It reminds me of past pain. I tell it, it will have an eternity of it. Oh it doesn’t like. Oh I don’t care. It’s the truth. It tells me it will kill one of us. If I don’t move I die. I tell it, it can’t hurt me unless my God says it can. I can feel it rage now. Oh it screams. I am pissing it off so bad. It is going to make me pay. I tell it to fuck off and go to Hell. It lashes out at me. I feel the hit coming. I slide a bit farther to my left to cover S better.

I hear a crash. Pain erupts down my back. I can feel 4 things, big fat pointy things, going into my back right between my shoulder and my spine. I’m thinking the storm I can hear blew the window in. It laughs because it hurt me. I laugh because it thinks it matters. If God let it strike me there was a reason and that is fine by me. Oh so angry now. It starts pulling to the side. I feel it hit my shoulder bone and start pulling it up. I squeeze harder to S and rage back against the thing against my back. I tell it this is no longer its home. And it is now in my home and it can get the fuck out. I lash out at and my arm doesn’t even hurt any more. I cry out in Jesus’ name for it to be gone.

And it is. The rushing sound in my head is gone. S is sobbing softly. I let go of her slowly and she looks up and Oh My God, she is beautiful. Like a woman on her wedding day. Like a mother with her newborn baby. “He loves me.” I get all sniffly then. “This I know” (almost 9 years now and I still remember that. She was just so beautiful in her joy. It seemed to shine out of her.) She giggled, because I’m funny. I asked her how she felt. She said she felt free and open and joyous and happy. And she couldn’t stop crying. I told her to go ahead and go to the bathroom to get washed up. I wanted her out of there before she saw my arm and freaked. I could feel the blood running down my back and red hot pain racing back and forth.

She hopped off the bed and took off. I turned to the window, the blinds were still up. There was no one across the street anymore. No one at the window. I closed the blinds then pulled off my shirt to see how bad my back was. There was no blood on my shirt. No cuts in it either. I felt along my back and shoulder and I could feel something but there was no blood. I figured I’d deal with it later if it wasn’t bleeding and went on out. J said he heard something like lightening or thunder. That was it. I’m a bit shaky. S is giddy. We celebrate a bit. I give her a new Bible. I have stacks of them. She leaves pretty quickly. She wants to see her husband. And she didn’t notice anything going on while she prayed. I thank God for answering my prayers.

As soon as she is out the door I pull my shirt off again and have J look at it. He doesn’t see anything. But he thinks he feels a knot or something. Like a line running across my shoulder. But there is nothing there. I can still remember the oh so vivid pain though. The stab, crunch. Then the grating as it hit and pulled on the bone. The blonde was never seen again either. Not by anyone I talked to at least. My mom called later to ask if I was ok or needed first aid. I explained how there was nothing actually there. She still came by the next day and looked at it. She agreed. She saw nothing, but she could feel something. S ended up living happily ever after. Shortly after she got pregnant and had a cute little girl. I ended up losing touch with her though since our schedules clashed. I haven’t heard from her in years now.

LoungieMu

This has happened maybe a hundred or more times since I was ten years old. I’m 23 now. Honestly, I’ve long since stopped writing this off as simply a morbid nightmare, and I am genuinely worried that it might be something else. Right now, I’ve double-locked the front and back doors, and I’ve locked myself in my room. My gun is under my pillow, and I’m simply too scared to sleep now.

First, I guess I should tell you all about my night visitor – the Blue Man. I don’t know what Blue Man is, so speculation at this point is probably useless. All I know right now is that it is in the most vivid dream I have ever had in my life. This dream recurs EXACTLY THE SAME WAY, and has done so for years on end.

It all goes down like this, each time:

I wake in my bed for whatever reason. Maybe I’m uncomfortable, hot, or thirsty. Maybe I need to go pee. My eyes open, and it is there, at the side of my bed. The sudden shock of it is unavoidable each time, and as identical as these visitations are, the initial fear is always new and more horrifying.

The Blue Man is quite tall. I’d wager about 7 feet or so. As tall as it is, its also hideously gaunt and emaciated. The way its skin just collapses over its bones looks like the survivors of Auschwitz or something. You could almost count the bones. The head is long and bald, and no ears are visible. The eyes are heavily receeded into the eye sockets, and what little can be seen are small and beady. Both the nose and the mouth are slits, and barely interrupt the face. It’s fingers are long and spidery, about seven inches long each. Its skin is hairless, and the tone is a pale, almost iridescent blue. It gives the faintest impression of glowing in the dark of my room.

The Blue Man reaches for me slowly with an outstretched finger. After the wave of initial fear burns through me, I always seem to bolt out of bed to avoid it. I run out of my room, through the hallway, etc. I know I’ve got a boost on it each time, but when I look back, it’s right there behind me as if I never moved. This is the horrible part. Its irrelevant of however fast I may run or not. The thing is on my heels the moment I glance back. Its like it’s traveling without moving, as Frank Herbert would say. Its always eventual that I get cornered by Blue Man. When this happens, it slowly advances on me, reaching at my forehead with a finger…

…and then I wake up

As I said before, I’ve had this same exact dream over 100 times since I was ten. Nothing in it changes. The details are all the same. On top of that, I’m pretty sure that every dream I’ve had since the Blue Man visited me has been a nightmare. I can’t remember a single dream I’ve had that wasn’t horrifying.

I have no idea what Blue Man is.

A person, or person in a suit? Absolutely not.

Alien? Possibly, sure. I am mortified of the prospect of alien abduction and/or greys. Blue Man aside, its really the only thing that scares me.

Ghost? I don’t believe in them, but I suppose it could be.

Subconcious? This is the most likely answer. Even if this is the case, Blue Man would have to be something wired pretty fucking hard into my system. Is this the kind of shit where people repress memories? If so, what the fuck could be so horrible in my somewhat-charmed life to make Blue Man blot it out of my skull?

Something else?

At this moment, I’m awake by virtue of fear only. I’ll always manage a month or two without a visit, and then it will return again at random. The more I have this waking terror, the more I’m worried that this will be the time where I finally find out what Blue Man is.

I do not want to know this. I just want to be left alone. I want the Blue Man to leave, but its been thirteen years, and whatever it is, it’s not likely to do that any time soon..

Benzoyl Chloride

My story isn’t so much a scary ghost story as it is a wtf unsolved event. One day, my father decided to go out and get a build it yourself motion detector kit. I sat down and built it with him. Now, it was a basic light motion detector which would make a doorbell noise when the light was broken. Come to think about it, I don’t know why my father got it in the first place, but that is besides the point. A few weeks after we completed the construction on it, I decided to experiment with it. I went to the basement stairs of my house and set the motion detector at about knee high (which for me is about two feet off the ground), and made sure there was a fresh, new battery in the detector. I stayed up all night to see/hear what happened. I dozed off at about 2 AM that night. At about 3 AM, I was woken up by the sound of the motion detector going off. It wasn’t a single time that the detector went off, but multiple times, at about the rate that it would take for a person to walk to that point of the stairs and back down. Being rather creeped out at the time, I did what anyone would do – I hid under the blankets that I had with me. Eventually the detector stopped going off, and I emerged from my blanket protection to investigate. I went to the basement door, flung it open, turned on the lights and saw…nothing. Remember, the detector was knee high, so even if there were mice running around on the floor, they would not set off the detector. It wasn’t the first time strange things have happened in my house. There was a time that a treadmill that my family has in the basement was turned on and running – with the electrical cord unplugged. Pots and pans have fallen onto the ground in the middle of the night, somehow elevating themselves out of the cabinets we have that are floor level. I’ve never seen anything that would make me go OMG, Ghost, but I really don’t know what to make of stuff like that.

Corporal_Hicks

“The Shadow”
This is back in late 2003, I believe.

I was standing in my kitchen one weekend afternoon looking out the window over the backyard. I was probably smoking a cigarette and ashing in the sink, which is why my back was turned to the kitchen door that takes you out to the main hallway and living room. There is also a door on my left that goes into the dining room.

Anyways, I’m standing there with my back to the kitchen door, and I hear the hallway floor creak. In the reflection in my glasses I see black shape go from my right to my left into the living room (people who wear glasses can vouch for the rearview mirror capabilities your glasses have at the right angles).

For some reason, I thought I should go see who it was, as I clearly heard AND saw someone walk by. So I go stand in the doorway. I look to my right, and no one in the living room. I walk to the living room entrance to the dining room. No one there either. I hear my brother downstairs laughing at something on TV, so I continue down the hall to where my mother’s room, my room, and the computer room are. I turn to my right and look in the computer room, my mother’s in there reading and watching TV.
WTF

I know I heard and saw something. I even tried making the floor creak in the spot I thought the sound came from. Nothing.

Keep in mind, this is several months after my grandfather died, and about 3 years after my friend Kyle died. Kyle might as well have lived at my house he was there so often.

It took a couple of days, but I finally mentioned it to my mother. She said, oh, it’s probably Kyle. I’ve seen him a couple of times. She then went on to tell me how she was sitting in the computer room on 2 occasions, and one time she felt someone push her hair out of the way of her face and kiss her on the cheek. Another time she looked over to her left and saw Kyle standing there smiling, exactly where he would have been when he was alive and he would be over talking to my ma.
That freaked me the fuck out, needless to say.

“Late-Night Noise”
I want to start off by saying that I’m not prone to hallucinations, hearing/seeing things, or having my mind play tricks on me even when I’m completely exhausted. I’ve gone 24-36 hours without sleep many times in the last couple of years due to working overnights and trying to maintain a social life on the weekends.

In this case I had just flown back from Hawaii after a 12 hour flight delay. I had not slept the entire day prior to my flight taking off, so by the time I got back to New Jersey, I was absolutely wiped out. My mother and brother both went to bed and I decided to stay up for a few hours, call my then-girlfriend, and surf the net. I flew home a day earlier than expected (I told everyone I was coming back a day later than I did because I was a dumbass), so my ex was the only person who knew I was home already.

It’s around 11:30pm and I’m browsing the net and I hear loud and clear what sounds like someone pounding on the front door of my house. This is immediately followed by what sort of sounded like my friend Jesse yelling my name. THIS is immediately followed by the persistent ringing of my doorbell.

I’m in panic mode right now, so I run and grab my billy club and head to the front door. I cautiously open the door and peer around. No one on the porch. So I open the storm door, look right, look left, and see no one. I don’t hear footsteps running away, nor do I here a car driving off. I’m freaked and just go right to bed.

The next day, I ask my mother and brother if they’d heard anything at all, and neither of them did. I’m more awake and clear-headed and it dawns on me: It could not have been one of my friends because 1)They fear my ma and know better than to make that much noise at 11:30pm, and 2)they all thought I was coming home the next night and didn’t know I was home til I called them that day.
Nothing otherworldly has happened since though.

Vegastar

This happened probably 5 years ago now, but it’s never really left me, and it’s really hard to explain.

It all starts with my bathroom. I was in a bad mood, I had been walking all day, it was 90 some degrees outside, and the sun was finally going down. I decided to relax by taking a bath.

I put on some music (I think it was Lateralus, to be honest, but I can’t really remember anymore) and, in some weird fit of inspiration, killed all the lights.

I’d noticed in the past that, as the night went on, the right-hand tube light in the bathroom would glow when it was off. Not like, on, but if you touched it, like one of those lamps in teenage stoner shops, you would get an electric-blue fingerprint glow around your finger. My mom always blamed it on some kind of short in the electricity, it was a 70 year old house, after all.

At any rate, I killed the lights and hopped in the bath, and it was dark, but not quite dark enough that I couldn’t vaguely see the outline of everything if I focused hard enough. Except the faucet wall.

This wall adjoined to a strange storage closet. I had always been afraid of that closet, I fears that bats would come flying from the door if I opened it the minute I touched the doorknob. It scared me, and it was right next to that weird light.

That wall was pitch black, I could see the dim outline of the tiles on the wall to the right, I could see the shampoo and soaps on the side of the tub, but that one wall was pitch black.

I stared at it for a while, and I noticed the water getting cold at an unnatural speed. It wasn’t just the “body adjustment” temperature change, rather it felt like laying in a tub full of ice. At the same time, that wall started changing, kind of warping and distorting.

Then, it turned into the face of a wrinkled old woman. She stared at me, and she laughed without any sound at all. Just a demented, evil looking old woman laughing silently at me. I froze, terrified out of my mind. I decided it was my mind playing tricks on me, it wasn’t real. I closed my eyes and layed my head back against the back of the tub.

Then my neck started to tingle. Like that numb, pins and needles feeling you get in your hands after sleeping on it, but this was more intense. It felt like a thousand ants biting me on the back of the neck. I saw the old woman’s face in my closed eyes, laughing, laughing evilly. I wanted to scream, but when I opened my mouth to do it, the tingling pain spread. I could feel it move like a wave, quickly, from my neck down my spine, and up behind the ears, around the forehead, and into my eyes. It hurt, badly.

I snapped, jumped out of the tub ASAP and flipped the lights on purely out of instinct. I’m lucky I didn’t crack my head on the tub slipping over something. But when I turned the lights on, I still couldn’t see. Slowly, everything went from black to a kind of grey static. I could see, but everything was fuzzy and the color wasn’t quite right, everything was dim and dull.

I’ve never gotten dressed and gotten the hell out of my house as fast as I did at that moment.

I slept at my neighbor’s house for the night, terrified of going back to my house, terrified of that old face laughing at me. My vision came back slowly over the course of an hour or two

I never did see her again, and I never got that tingling sensation again, but I also never stay in that bathroom without the lights on, and I never touch that closet unless I absolutely have to.

But, I did say it still lingers with me today, and I don’t know why this happens, or how. Once a day, at least, I’ll be standing, sitting, whatever the case may be, and my vision will go from clear, and kind of dim to black in a second, my head starts kind of spinning, and most of the time, I end up colapsing to the floor, couch, I’ve cracked my head on walls, occasionally it’s so bad I’ll black out for 5 or 10 minutes and wake up on the floor, wondering how in the hell I ended up there. My doctor says it’s low blood pressure, and I should eat more salt. It doesn’t seem to have done anything, and I just always assume it’s still the old woman, inside my head, laughing and screwing with me.

Leroy Diplowski

For two years after Highschool I lived with my Grandad, because he lived right near where I was going to college. My Grandad was the pastor of a home church and a very spiritual person. He has had run-ins with voo-doo doctors in haiti and jamacia and even had some luciferians(sp?)in our hometown levitate his car in a parking lot and then drop it, totalling the car.

He could fill this thread with stories I’m sure, but he’s pretty reluctant to tell them, and this story is about me.

My grandad was out of town I had been hanging out all night with some friends, and as I got in the car to leave I felt something brush past me. It was 2 or 3am and I was kinda on autopilot, so I didn’t really think anything of it. As I was driving home I felt a very uncomfortable prescence in the car, but I just shrugged it off. Until I looked at the passenger seat, and there was someone sitting there. I almost swerved off the road, it shocked me so much. It was a humanoid figure about 4 or 5 feet tall. I remember it looked like a little kid, but it had no face or mouth, and it was covern in gray skin. It didn’t have eyes, but it was looking straight at me. I had a weird impulse, right then and there to just close my eyes and floor it into a tree or whatever. For some reason I started singing all the church songs I could remember from when my parents made me go. It didn’t have a mouth, but it started mumbling “I am pajama man” or something phonetically similar. By this time I kinda had my wits back, and I noticed it was constantly squirming, like it was uncomfortable. as I pulled onto my street, it started trying ot open the door, but couldn’t for some reason, then it began to climb all over the seat. I started freaking out again. When I got to my house I threw open the door, and the pajama man or whatever it was leapt over me, and out my door. I dashed to the door, but as I was fumbling with my keys in the lock I looked over my shoulder, and thre, in the street was pajama man, with the biggest pure white dog I have ever seen. I got the door open, and closed it, but as I was locking it back, I managed to glance through the window on the side of the door, and there was the dog, it’s nose pressed against the window, just looking at me. I noticed it didn’t have eyes or a mouth either, but it’s body was heaving like it was panting. I was pretty hysterical at this point, but I couldn’t scream, and my grandad was out of town anyway. For some reason I ran into the living room (after flipping on every light) and sat on my grandad’s easy chair. As soon as I hit the seat I heard a voice say “he was always there, you just couldn’t see him” Immediately the feeling of intense dread lifted, and I passed out.

dantewyrmfoe

I used to be the head of the drama department during my Sophomore year in High School, as such I had keys to the building (which was converted from a Church that was God only knows how old.) and it was my job to take costume inventory, perform set maintainance and all sorts of other fun stuff that no one else was stupid enough you sign up for.
So anyway I walk to my school at around 4:00am so I can make sure everything is in order for the opening night of “The Fall of the House of Usher” we were putting on that night. As I’m walking up I notice that there’s a light on in the costume closet window.”

“Shit, I must have left that on when I left last night.”

So I head up to the auditorium open the door… the closet is pitch black.

“Hmmm, okay must have been a reflection or something.”

I turn on the light and go about my business, running down the list of costumes and props and make sure everything is accounted for when I hear something from the other side of the closet. (The closet, by the way is located at the top of a flight of stairs and is less of a closet than it is a long hallway leading to a ladder to the attic.) It’s quiet, to the point that I wasn’t even sure I was hearing anything.

But the more I listened the more I made out a quiet sobbing, that sort of heavy throaty crying that at first sounds like it might be laughter.
Proving that I’m incapable of following the advice I’ve given to every horror movie victim ever, I make my way to the back of the closet to see what’s making the noises.

Nothing there, I admit that this area was colder than the rest of the closet, but with a ladder leading to the attic, I can’t say that it wasn’t just cold air coming from up there.

So I hang out in the drafty part of the closet right in between the ladder and the entrance to the dumbwaiter for about 45 seconds trying to make out any further sounds when I hear the familiar sound of wire hangers scraping against the metal clothes rack.
Once again, nothing to see. None of the clothes looked like they had been moved and none of them were swinging on their hangers.

“Ok…I’m tired, it’s late November and this building is creepy anyway. I just need some coffee.”

So I head down stairs to the first floor, into the teacher’s lounge and start up a pot of coffee. No sooner had I flipped the switch on the coffee pot when I hear a sound I’d heard, and made a thousand times in that school.
The unmistakable sound of a kid tear-assing down a flight of stairs like a heard of elephants.

I didn’t even bother investigating or asking who was there this time, I just ran out the front doors and sat on the front steps for a few minutes.
Confident that none of my teachers would be in this early I rummaged through my jacket pockets and pulled out a pack of smokes, lit one and tried to calm my nerves.

Finishing my cigarette I turned around, got my cup of coffee and went back to my work.

The rest of the night went more of less unhindered until I checked off the final costume and turned around to leave when I heard an extremely loud creaking sound followed by a loud crash.

The Dumbwaiter had fallen from the top floor costume closet down to the first floor basement.
Not all that odd except for the fact that as a school rule the dumbwaiter was never used and was kept on the ground floor at all times.

With that I just said fuck it, turned out the lights and left, I didn’t bother to check but I could tell you with a high degree of certainty that if I had turned around the light would have been on in the window.

The Principal of that school was somewhat of a friend of my family, so the next day I asked him if anyone had ever reported anything weird going on in the school?

“Did you hear the crying?” He asked.

“Yeah, amongst other things.” I told him.

The only things he could tell me were that
#1. I’m not crazy
#2. There’s a reason the school Janitors come in to do their work before school opens in the morning and not after it closes at night.

Talking to other students over the next few years I’d hear stories of rattling doorknobs, footsteps and more than a couple stories about faint sobbing noises near the dumbwaiter.

Corridor

This starts when I was 4. My parents and I had just moved into a new house (one that I lived in until I left home at 16) and I was given a bedroom with candy-pink walls and rose-patterned lino. The house was somewhat old, with some interesting patterns and motifs moulded in the ceiling plaster and weird curly wooden fixtures in the corners of doorways. It apparently had some history behind it which I’ve never been able to get details on.

All seemed fine until I gradually began to not like my room. I was always a very oversensitive kid and got upset over quite a lot of things, but I’d generally been fine in my previous houses and bedrooms aside from a few bad nights, and this really became a major ongoing issue. I would cry when I had to go to bed, every single night, and would insist on the door being open or the lights on. I would start becoming upset when the house got dark in the evenings and show visible distress at the approaching prospect of bedtime. Sometimes I would flatly refuse to go in at all, and my parents would force me in there under the assumption that I’d give up trying to get attention and just go to sleep. I would cry for ages before passing out from exhaustion. I don’t remember why I did any of this… I just remember being very, very afraid of that room.

Eventually (I don’t remember this part either), I told my mother that I was afraid of the room because of “the little boy”. My mother, being a bit of a spiritual hippie type, didn’t brush this off, but instead went to investigate. According to her, she stood in the room and quietly asked if anyone was there and wanted some help. She claims that while standing there, she felt something “rush” her, as though in panic… a sudden burst of energy that ploughed into her, accompanied by a sense of fear. Then it was gone and she never felt it again. I was allowed to sleep in my parents’ bedroom after that. But from more or less that point on, I developed an intense terror of being in the dark, which didn’t really abate until I was twelve or so. I’m still hit by it now and then.

Over the years, the Pink Room became my playroom (I was quite happy in there so long as it was daylight… I wouldn’t go in there at night even if the lights were on). Friends and relatives who stayed over would generally sleep in there. My cousin swears blind to this day that one night while lying in bed in the Pink Room, he felt someone pinch him. After we got a computer when I was 10 it became the computer den, and although my newfound love for computer games was enough incentive to spend most of my evenings in that room, I often felt very uncomfortable in there because it always felt as though someone was standing behind me.

The house had several bedrooms, and I was shuffled around from one to another as I grew older. At the age of fourteen, I again set up kip in the Pink Room. I’d long since stopped being afraid of it, and although it still had a bit of a funny vibe, I was quite okay with that because I was a lame goth-punk teenager. I started having quite a lot of nightmares while in that room, often ones that would leave me sweating and panting hard (and not in the sexy way), but I was also an arty lame goth teenager, so I appreciated the horrible surreal imagery after I’d woken up and calmed down.

Then I had That Dream.

I don’t remember how it started, but I was feeling very sick and uncomfortable. The feeling grew more intense until it was enough to jerk me awake. It didn’t end there, though. I found that I couldn’t move at all. My entire body was rigid. I couldn’t even open my eyes. I was thinking quite lucidly, and the whole thing was freaking me out immensely… I thought my muscles had locked up in the throes of some horrible disease. I fought it, hard, and eventually managed to half-open my eyelids and keep them open, so long as I kept forcing them to stay that way. There was also a strange sound, but frankly that was the least of my concerns. I was desperate to get up and try to get help somehow, and with considerable effort, I eventually managed to roll partially onto my back and face the door.

There was a girl standing over me. She looked somewhere between 18-20. She was wearing a long loose white dress like a nightgown and had long, black hair keeping most of her face in shadow. I should note that this was still several years before Ringu was made. The girl, or woman, was leaning forward over my bed with a hand resting lightly on or just above my head, and she was whispering… I couldn’t make out words, or even individual pauses… just an unending, continuous sound with occasional clickings and hissings of ‘hard’ letters like Ks and Ts and Ss. I couldn’t make out more details of her appearance because my eyes were only half open, and that though constant effort, but I saw enough. I went absolutely berserk – thrashing and struggling and kicking in my efforts to break free. Weirdly, what I felt most wasn’t fear, but intense fury. This fucking bitch could think again if she thought she could just come into MY room and try to fuck with ME while I was sleeping. Then all of the sudden, she vanished… and the hold she had on me broke. I could move again. I remember having sore muscles from fighting against the rigidity. I also remember that many small details, like a cup beside my bed or a shirt thrown in a corner, were exactly the same as in the ‘dream’.

After having heard of and researched sleep paralysis in the meantime, it sounds like this was indeed what it was. I have had a few more sleep paralysis episodes since then too, although never any nearly so long or lucid as that one, and none with accompanying visions.

I moved out two years later. Like I said, I lived in that house nearly all my life, so it was only after leaving that I realised what an awful, oppressive, uneasy vibe it’d had. I went back there a shortish while after to pick up some stuff because my mother wanted to rent the place out, and had to go outside after about ten minutes of being in there because a sick, miserable feeling that I’d developed after entering had suddenly esculated into one of the worst panic attacks I’ve ever experienced in my life. I haven’t been back since and I don’t ever want to.

Zealous Abattoir

I attend an old all women’s college in the South. Many stories abound, but this one I’ve experienced myself. Back in the day, the ladies could not bring their beus up to their rooms, so the young men who would come visit here, would wait upstairs as the house mother fetched the girls.In WWI, many girls saw off their boyfriends to war, and many of them never returned. It was told that if you sat in the dating parlor of a certain dorm, facing a mirror, at night, you could see men sitting all around you, the boyfriends who never came back from war, sitting, waiting for their girls to come down.

I, stupid bitch that I am, decided to dare the ghosts, and went to the dating parlor, after midnight, all alone. I sat in the spot, and…nothing happened. I was about to leave when in the corner of my eye I caught a shape sitting in the sofa on the corner of the room, I turned to look and when I didn’t see anything, I just brushed it off. I turned back and saw it in the mirror, guys wearing what looked like uniforms and old style clothes and hats. I only saw it for a split of a second when a bunch of semi drunk girls busted into the parlor and to be honest, that scared me more than the images I saw.

Blokeski

“The man and the door”
When I was at University, we got tired of living in the student halls and a few of us decided that we were going to rent a house together nearby. We managed to get this really cool house on a corner – one of those old Victorian houses… the kind you would imagine Jack the Ripper lived in.

Anyway, Jack, Bob and myself arrived on the day we moved in and immediately broke into an argument as to who would have which bedroom. One of the rooms overlooked the corner and was really grand and bright. The second one was a normal bedroom with a window and the third can only be described as a box room. We decided to play Blackjack to decide with the winner getting the first choice, then the other two in a grand final to choose the last room. After about 2 hours of hardcore Blackjack, Jack won and loudly proclaimed that he wanted the biggest room. Shortly after, Bob beat me and decided he wanted the second biggest room, despite my attempting to convince him otherwise.

I was stuck with the tiny fucking box room.

Late on that evening, I dragged my matress in there and laid it on the floor, parallel to the door – about two feet away, so you could just open the door without it clipping it. The room had a small window which the orange street lamp outside filtered into. I turned the light out and went to sleep.

I’m not sure how long I had been asleep, but I woke up, vaguely aware that somebody was standing by the door looking down on me. I rubbed my eyes. A figure was still standing there.

“Bob?” I said.

The figure said nothing.

“Bob. Get the fuck out!” I shouted, pointing at the door.

The figure mumbled something and raised its hand in, and this is the only way I can think of, the manner of an old Jewish man apologising. The figure backed up and disappeared.

I lay there for a bit. I had been fully awake by the time of when I first asked if it was Bob. My rational mind was now kicking in.

I jumped out of bed and made a leap for my lamp. I switched it on and spun around. My door was still closed and my bag that I had put behind it was still there.

The figure had backed away through a closed door.

I lay there awake for the rest of the night.

The next morning, at breakfast, I sat and looked at Bob for a bit. He became a bit self-conscious and asked me why I was staring at him. I decided to come right out with it.

“Bob, do you sleepwalk?”
“No. Why do you ask?”

I told him the story of what had happened, and as nonchalantly as anything he said “oh that’s weird. I had something happen to me last night”

“What?” I said.
“Well I woke up in the early hours of the morning and somebody’s face was RIGHT IN FRONT OF MINE” he said.
“Fuck! What did you do?”
“Well I just pulled the blanket over my face and went to sleep”.

I couldn’t believe that response.

And oddly enough, that was the only thing that happened in that house.

tiananman

My fiancée and I moved into a great old Victorian house that’s been divvied up into nice 1 bedroom apartments. The house is over 150 years old, and it’s gorgeous. To tell the truth I’d still live here even if the walls were bleeding poop and Stephen King’s “It” lived in all of the closets.

At night when I’m surfing the internet or checking e-mail or whatever, I often hear a high-pitched kind of half-cat meow/half-person scream coming from below my apartment. It’s not very loud, but it happens a few times every night, never during the day. It could be the plumbing or the air-heat coming on, but…more on this later.

Like I said, it’s an old house, and it has obviously settled over the years. A lot of the doors won’t stay open or shut. Often, you’ll enter a room and find a door ajar, which isn’t too strange if taken on a case by case basis. However, a cabinet that we brought from our old apartment which we never had problems with before, will NOT stay shut. Sure, you can shut it and make sure the mechanism is secure, but 5 minutes later you’ll come back and it will be wide open. It got annoying, so we took a rubber band and put it around both handles, and seems to have stopped the “problem”.

We live on the first floor, which is right above a huge unfinished, dirt floor basement. We are the only tenants on the first floor. The water heater is in the basement, as well as locked storage areas for each apartment. Also, the washer and dryer are down there. Every night I would hear a very loud thump coming from what I thought was other tenants entering and leaving the laundry room. It sounds just like someone hammering on the floor with the fleshy part of their hand. In an attempt to placate my own sanity, I got my fiancée to enter and leave the laundry room, to see if she would replicate the thump. Then we switched places, and I asked her to listen for a thump.

No thump.

We tried everything conceivable to replicate the thump. We opened and shut the basement door, opened and shut the washer and dryer, to no avail. I tried slamming everything that would slam, even jumping up and down the stairs, starting and stopping the laundry…I try to ignore the thump now.

Our landlord is a very kind old man who insists on fixing everything. He’s pretty handy, but I always feel bad calling him up to fix stuff that breaks, because he just won’t let me help him, and he’s definitely getting on in years. He’s probably in his mid-70s.
When we first moved in, the bathroom sink would not drain. He took apart the trap, and then snaked from the trap down into the main, and it still didn’t drain. He then went into the basement into a crawl-space underneath of the bathroom (which incidentally branches off from our storage area) and snaked further into the main from the sink.

He came up after 20 minutes or so, and…well…he looked terrible. He is usually always smiling and cheerful, but now he was ashen and miserable. I asked him, “Did you find anything down there?”
And he darted his eyes at me uneasily, and then sort of mumbled, “Oh, no…nothing down there.”

After that, the sink drained without a problem, so I said, “You didn’t get anything out with the snake?”

“No.”

He looked relieved that the sink was draining without a problem, and he cleaned up and left.

A few days later I saw him leaving the apartment, and waved to him. He wanly waved back and drove off. I didn’t think anything of it, because I see him at least once a week coming by to fix something in this old house.
Later that day I brought a coffee table down to the storage area. It was just too big to have it sitting in the middle of our living room, but too nice to throw out.

It’s creepy down there. The dirt floors and lone hanging light bulb make it look more like an interrogation room than a basement. There’s old junk down there, like filing cabinets and rusty tools, bicycles, empty paint cans, broken toys, and other assorted cellar-ania. Everything has a nice coat of dust and cob-webbing on it, and the familiar dank smell of earth.

When we first moved in, we had a lot of stuff that we didn’t want to throw out yet, but didn’t want to keep in the apartment, so we put it in the storage area. I dreaded taking the coffee table down, because I remembered looking into the crawl space when we first moved in. It was elevated off of the ground to about chest height, and it was only 2 feet or so high and only a few feet wide: only high enough to crawl around on your belly. I couldn’t tell how far into the earth it protruded, because it was pitch black, and the swinging light bulb 20 feet away in the center of the basement did not illuminate inside.

When I brought down the coffee table, I willed myself not to look at the crawl space, but when I did, it startled me. My landlord had bricked and mortared the crawl space shut. I knew that it had to be him, because a few hours after he left the mortar was still drying.

I really can’t figure out why he would do this. Clearly, he needs to have access to the main pipe exiting the house. As far as I know, there aren’t any other access points, short of drilling into the sidewalk.

My fiancée does a lot of the laundry, not because I’m sexist or anything, it’s just that she’s a nurse and she takes care of a lot of really sick, infectious people, so she doesn’t want me handling all of her soiled, germy garments.

She came up about a week ago with a load of laundry, and said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with these people, letting their little girl play in that filthy basement.”

I didn’t say anything, but I had been chatting with the landlord’s wife (who is an accomplished chatter) the day before, and she was telling me EVERYTHING about the other tenants. The one tenant on the second floor is an old spinster who has lived there for 15 years, and never says boo to anyone. The other tenant on the second floor is a single guy in the Navy who works at the shipyard. On the third floor, there’s only one apartment, and it belongs to a young, female, single optometrist who works a few miles away.

Nobody has kids, and no other neighborhood kids could get into the basement without a key.

So…that has made me a little anxious, but since we haven’t had anything BAD happen, I’m not going to needlessly worry, and I’m certainly not going to worry my fiancée. Also, I’m going to be doing a lot less laundry.

Tears for Fears

“My Sister’s Story”
There’s a small bridge where a road goes over a creek, an hour or so outside of the city I live in. Some of my sister’s friends claimed that it was haunted, and said they’d parked there and found the little handprints in the dust on the back of their car and etc. etc. A few years ago, my sister and her two friends went to check it out late at night. She showed up back at home sounding very excited with a tape, which she’d recorded while at the bridge. Apparently, they had got out of the car and not walked too far and when they came back, the doors were locked/unlocked unlike they had been when they left (not that that’s a big deal). They then got back in and waited, until something suddenly slammed into the side of the car. They screamed and drove off. The tape that my sister brought home is completely dark save for the clock display, which the camera was focused on. There’s no slamming sound on the tape at all, just their panicked reactions and the sound of them driving away in a hurry. They may all be idiots, or the supernatural may not always translate well to those little VHS tapes, but my sister takes these things as seriously as I do, and I believe her completely.

“My Father’s Story”
My family comes from Kentucky, and even before I moved away in the early 90s, you didn’t have to go far from Louisville to find plenty of rural, seemingly “backwater” areas. Many people from the area know the story of the Goatman, or the Pope Lick Monster.

Apparently the Goatman was supposed to come upon those who’d walk on the trestle, scaring them so that they’d fall to their deaths.
When my father was 18 or 19, he was driving down the road pictured with 3 others in his car: his friend in the passenger seat and two girls in back. Something suddenly ran across the road in front of his car and without breaking its stride, jumped up and over a gate to the left of the road. Everyone freaked out when it happened. He says it looked like a goatperson, though it was dark and happened quickly. But unless Michael Jordan was out for a jog that night, there’s no explanation for why or how someone could have jumped a gate like that.

Boba1213

I’ve a few things. One actually happened last night, but I attribute this to the stories I’ve been reading here, sleep paralysis, and the shirt I was wearing when I went to bed.

So for some reason early this morning I “woke up.” But I don’t believe I actually woke up. My eyes were open, and peering toward my closet. I saw what looked to be a mime (I was wearing a striped shirt that was blue and white) wearing a black and white striped shirt. I think to myself “well, my eyes are just playing tricks on me” and I start to climb out of bed. As I do, this mime rushes at me, hits me full force into the wall and then I ‘wake up’ again. Same position I was the first time I woke up. I see the mime again, however this time I can’t move. I’m not scared or anything, but I keep trying to roll over or close my eyes but nothing works. I can’t even speak, so I think, as angrily as I can “Let me out of my fucking bed!” and all of a sudden I’m able to wake up and move, there’s nothing scary/creepy hanging out in my closet, and I’m suddenly calm.

Now, I have some other stories. At my house (I’m at my college apartment right now) I was sitting at my computer desk in the middle of the day, minding my own business, when all of a sudden something happens to my closed blinds. They are closed so the slats are angled down and into the room. It’s as if someone takes their hand starting from the bottom of the blinds and drags it forcefully to the top of the blinds, making it so that the slats were now facing up and in. I think “Uh… Musta been the wind.” Three seconds later I hear the same exact sound in my sisters room (on the north side of the house, I was on the south) and sure enough, the blinds were facing up and into the room.

One night my brother was watching his girlfriend leave from outside the house when he saw a shadowy figure walk past the window in the living room (everyone else was asleep except for me, but I was in my room.) He’s also heard cans opening, someone urinating, a woman’s voice, among other things in my house. One night I was at work and the family was having dinner and they heard what sounded like a little girl crying in the basement. I’ve had the door to my bedroom swing forcefully open when everyone was asleep. It would have left a hole in the wall, but I have a coat rack behind the door so my coats stopped the door knob from going into the wall.

My sister’s closet light goes on and off by itself, my dog occasionally looks at and barks at someone that isn’t there, and follows it with his head. One time when no one was home and my dog was INSIDE, my mother came home and found him chained up, and wrapped all around our patio furniture with our back door wide open. I went to go use my mothers computer, who’s speakers are usually on either side of the monitor, but found them to be in a pile behind and below a bunch of stuff. On occasion you can hear what sounds like someone walking around in my parents bedroom from the living room (which is directly below) and at other times you can hear what sounds like someone walking around in the attic. I’ve been up there, nothin’ too much in there except a couple of boxes we put there.

My mother has woken up to the smell of bacon and eggs cooking in the kitchen when no one else has been home. One night I was home alone and all of a sudden my piano downstairs starts to play a few notes, I freak out and shout “What the hell!?” it stops, and I go down to the piano to make sure A) No one has broken in B) It wasn’t my dog and C) Something didn’t fall on the piano to make the notes go. None of the above. I can’t really think of anything else weird that has happened in that house, but I assume that is kind of sufficient.

Also, what’s even weirder is the fact that this house is less than 10 years old, and I know the people that lived there when it was new, they haven’t said anything about anything that could have happened there or said anything about weird happenstances.

CandyCain&Abel

All I have is this one that my Writing teacher told us today. In short, when he was about 11 years old in the 50’s in Boy Scouts him and the rest of his group decided to play a prank on this one little scrawny kid who, unknown to them, had a rare form of epilepsy and a short lifespan ahead of him. They decided to wake him up in the middle of the night and shine flashlights on and off in his eyes and tell him his tent was on fire. Well, he had a seizure and died a couple hours later in a hospital. This event happened to lie on Halloween.

Then, the next year, him and his friends from Boy Scouts were out halloweening, when they saw a kid in a skeleton costume point his finger at my teacher, and he said in the boy (Percy)’s voice, “you killed me”. He was not amused, and they chased him down. They eventually caught up with him and he grabbed the kid’s costume. Next thing he knew, the costume was whole in his hand and the kid was nowhere to be seen. He took the costume and took it back home, and told his dad what happened. His dad was a psychaitrist and told him it was just a result of guilt. They looked on the inside of the costume to find a tag or anything to tell them where the kid lived, all they found was a tag with the name of a costume company written on it. His dad spent a while trying to get the number; eventually he found out that the company was an old family-owned costume company from New York that had closed down in the 1800’s. He was living in Kansas at the time, for the record.

Nothing weird, right? Right. Except…

It’s happened every year since then up to this day. One time when he was France in his Junior Year in college, a little French kid walked up to my teacher and his friend, pointed his finger, and said “You killed me” in Percy’s voice in perfect English, no French accent. They chased him back, when the kid went into a house. My teacher knocked on the door and said kid’s parents answer the door. Teacher says “can we speak with your kid, he said something to us we want to talk to him about”. As if that isn’t weird enough, kid’s parents are very offended at this. Turns out this kid is deaf and mute. Impossible that he could have talked, and the kid was standing in the hallway with an evil grin on his face. They left, as the parents were threatening to call the police.

Fast forward 40~ years, in the middle of his teaching courier. His students don’t believe him (i wouldn’t either, at this point). He invites some students to come over and wait for Percy. Sure enough, they’re hanging out by the front door with cameras. Percy shows up eventually, one kid takes a picture and storms after Percy.

Keep in mind, it’s the exact same costume, height, voice, saying, exactly the same thing every year.

They are chasing down Percy when he runs through a lead fence and costume is stuck on the fence. They take it home and the students are shocked. There is a picture of teacher holding the costume with their dog sniffing it. He sent in the pictures to get developed, but when they came back, there is no costume in any of the pictures and Percy is not in the doorway. Instead, there are a couple strange fluctuations of warped light. It’s weird.

Ever since he’s invited students who want to see Percy to come over to try and catch him. They never believe my teacher until they see Percy. There was this one time when the whole Senior class was hanging out. Percy appears in the back yard behind the fence. Half the students storm around the left side, others around the right. They’re about to get Percy, but he disappears just in time. The costume just falls to the ground.

Last year, my teacher had an idea of taping a sign to the door that said: “Dear Percy, I am so sorry. I never meant to kill you. -Tim”. Percy didn’t show up that year. It’s 11:55 PM, and 5 minutes before it’s dismissed as the first year Percy doesn’t show up. Phone rings, Percy says “Despite your note, you still killed me”. After almost 60 years, it’s the same Percy every time. I want to hang out at his house this year and watch for him.

There was also something else about one of his plane tickets getting switched, but I don’t remember that story.

spacemountain

“The Horror at the Window”
Back in the early 90’s my family moved into it’s first house after years of living in rented army accommodation when my Dad got a new job that wouldn’t require him to move around so much. Although she never complained about all of the moving around, the one thing that my mother wanted more than anything was a house of her own so moving into this house should have been a dream come true…but from the very beginning it was clear that something wasn’t right.

The first thing that struck me as odd was that all of the bedroom doors except the master bedroom had big bolt locks on the outside, as if to keep something in rather than to keep something out. The house was also permanently cold despite us moving in during an especially hot summer, with the worst cold spot being in the hallway at the bottom of the stairs. Under the stairs there was a cupboard, and on the inside of the door were a lot a scratchmarks. Then there was the smell which permeated every room but seemed to emanate from the cupboard…now I don’t want to say “rotten flesh” because it’s a cliché and I don’t really know what rotten flesh smells like, but it was like no smell I’ve known either before or since.

This was all a bit odd but not especially creepy…the real creepiness began a little while after we’d moved in when I was outside exploring my new neighborhood. In one of the houses across the street there lived an old woman and while I was playing she came out into her garden. she called me over to ask if I had moved into the house that had been for sale, and since I had no reason to lie I said yes. She then began to tell me that the house had ghosts, and that at least three people had died there. One man had died of a heart attack at the bottom of the stairs after disturbing some burglars during the night, another had been found dead in the back garden and the third she wouldn’t tell me about, saying that “no one should know about such things” and that “terrible things” had happened in the house.

Naturally this freaked me out a bit, I was only about 11 years old at the time. This part might seem stupid but I didn’t tell my parents what had happened. I had this weird belief that ghosts could only appear if I granted them the power be believing in them, so I remained quiet. A few days later an ambulance appeared at the house of the old woman and I learned that she had been in the late stages of dementia and had passed way during the night. This helped my state of denial since it allowed me to write her ghost stories off to the dementia, but things soon began to happen that couldn’t be explained as the ramblings of a crazy old woman.

I can’t really remember the order in which these things happened, and I’m sure there were more events, but I’ll write it as best I can. One day I’d been out with my parents and when we returned the curtains and curtain rail from the top landing was lying at the bottom of the stairs, like someone had grabbed in and fallen down the stairs. I actually got the blame for this, they thought I’d been trying to swing on the curtains and loosened the screws but I swear to you all that wasn’t the case.

Another time I was upstairs in the front bedroom waiting for one of my new friends to arrive. I saw him coming up the street, so I waved at him and he waved back. When I answered the door he asked me who had been standing behind me at the window. I said there was no one there and he said there had been an old man standing behind me who had also waved at him. I got quite pissed off due to my ghost denial and told him he was a liar, but he swore he was telling the truth. I got more and more pissed the more he promised he wasn’t lying until it got quite heated. He could see how mad I was and said he was sorry but that he WAS telling the truth.

One Sunday afternoon I was in my bedroom when I went into my parents bedroom to get something. When I entered the room I could see the shape of a body lying beneath the covers on the bed and hear the sound of someone half breathing/snoring. It wasn’t unheard of that my mother would have a nap on a Sunday afternoon so I quietly got what I was looking for and went downstairs…only to find both of my parents sitting in the living room.

Now the worst of these events was a reoccurring one that happened most nights. It wasn’t as outright freaky as the body under the covers, or the old man at the window, but the fact that it happened time and time again means it can’t be put down to a one off mental anomaly or bullshit. In the front bedroom where my friend had seen the old man standing behind me we had a small pool table set up that I had inherited from my uncle. Every night while lying in bed I would hear the sound of the pool balls hitting each other…clack, clack, clack. Now that’s a pretty unmistakable sound. It wasn’t a dripping tap, it wasn’t the general sounds you hear in an old house, it was pool balls hitting each other when there was no one in the room.

But all of this was just the build up the the main event, the horror at the window.

A few months into our time there we had satellite tv installed, which was great since I was a big WWF fan in my younger days and it meant we would get the pay per view events like Wrestlemania beamed over to the UK live as they happened. Because of the time different this would be around midnight UK time so I had to beg my parents to let me stay up and watch it, which since they were pretty cool parents they eventually let me do.

So there I found myself sitting alone way past midnight watching the wrasslin’. I should explain the layout of the room before we go any further. The living room was actually two rooms knocked into one, so it went from the front of the house to the back. At the front there was a window with five panes of glass looking out into the front garden, and at the back there was a big window/french door looking out into the back garden. The back garden was completely closed off, no one could get in or out other than through the house, and there was also a super sensitive security light set off by motion.

At sometime between 2 and 3 am there came a light scratching at the back window. I assumed it was a cat since I’d seem a lot of them in the neighborhood, so I didn’t pay it much mind. After a while the scratching stopped, but a few minutes later is started again, only much more frenzied, like something trying to claw it’s way out of somewhere. I was a little bit worried though not to the point of freaking out, but then the sound of the scratching started to move, from the bottom of the window upwards, way past the point that any cat could reach. Now I was fucking worried. If it wasn’t a ghost then it was something living, and I didn’t want to fuck with either.

I was too scared to open the curtains on the back window so I decided to go into the kitchen which would allow me to look into the garden without giving myself away. As I walked into the kitchen it struck me…the security light wasn’t on. I had seen a moth set that fucking light off, if there was something big enough to be scratching at the top of the window the light would definitely have been on. I retreated back into the living room without looking out into the garden and thought of what to do next. Logic says I should have gone and got my dad, but the ghost denial stopped me, and they had trusted me to stay up and watch the Wrasslin’ alone so I didn’t want to cause a scene. I sat there for a while thinking of what to do and eventually worked up the guts to take a peek through the curtains. If it was a burglar or something then I would get my dad. If it wasn’t…

I turned off the tv and the lights since I wouldn’t have been able to see outside if they’d been on, and crept towards the curtains in the darkness. The scratching was intermittent by this point so I waited until it stopped, took a deep breath,opened the curtains just a crack and looked through.

Nothing there.

I cursed myself for getting so worked up, it had probably been a cat all along that had somehow managed to magially evade the security sensor with my mind filling in the bits in between.

Then the scratching started at the front window.

I froze. There was no way anything could have gotten around to the front of the house that fast, not even a cat, and the window at the front was DEFINITELY too high for a cat to reach. I was still peeking through the curtains and dared not turn around. Fuck fuck fuck fuck what do I do now? The scratching was now long and slow, like Quint scraping his fingernails down the blackboard in Jaws. I turned slowly and looked at the front window. Through the blinds I could see a shadow cast by the streetlights. In the middle window pane there was a figure that looked human but un-natural at the same time, like the proportions didn’t make sense. It’s arms were reaching out to either side, somehow managing to touch the two window panes at each end (see illustration.) I was paralyzed with fear, I couldn’t even breathe. As I stood there the shadow seemed to expand until it covered the whole window, blocking out the streetlight until the room was in total darkness.

I ran. Out of the living room, up the stairs and into my bedroom. I lay for hours with my head under the covers until the sun came up.

Once again I didn’t say anything to my parents about what had happened. The only way I could deal with it was to go into total denial. Not long afterwards my parents announced that they were selling the house. I found this strange since we had been there for less than a year and all they had ever wanted was a house of their own. The only reason they gave was that it was “the wrong house”.

I never talked about what happened, but over the years my parents dropped hints that they had experienced their own unexplainable events. I guess I’m still suffering from a bit of denial since I don’t like to bring up the subject even years later…like I might somehow invoke whatever it was just by meantioning it. To be honest I’m a little bit worried about telling this story to you now, what with it being Halloween and all…you know, just in case.

Zombie Nixon

I say this only because I have an extreme fear of Greys. When I was about 8, my mother and I were driving home from visiting relatives. We were one block away from the house when my mother pointed out something in the sky that wasn’t flying…properly. It had two or three white lights and she said it looked like a disc, but because of the light formation I thought it was a triangle. Anyway, it moved through the air pretty slowly, then stopped, hovering, and quickly took off at a 90 degree angle, not noticably turning. Scared the shit out of me.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, one night later in the week I was in bed, moderately worried about aliens but nothing major [at the time I was a huge fan of those shows like Unsolved Mysteries when they did stuff about aliens]. My bed faced my window, which was maybe a metre across, and I could see the streetlights outside. I have no idea what time it was, but at one point I woke up and looked out the window to see this fucking figure: short body compared to its huge long arms, which were spread out kind of like in spacemountain’s story. I didn’t have a curtain at that point, so I nearly peed myself and hid under the covers until dawn, unable to explain what I’d seen. Had a phobia ever since.

Sadly I don’t have anything exciting to contribute to the ghost portion of this thread. The only weird things I’ve seen were orbs once in the middle of the day, bright orange ones around my face. Also, a few years ago I went to bed in the early morning [3 or 4AM] and right outside my door I heard unintelligable whispers. Now, my bedroom at that place was in an entirely different part of the house from my parents, and there was absolutely no one outside at the time, nor were any TVs on. Weird, but not necessarily ghostly. Although…a lot of my things disappeared while we lived there, just little things like books and shirts, and I would find them years later in the garage. Keeping in mind I have no siblings and my parents never used the garage, I guess that’s kind of weird.

Caustic

In my early twenties I was a college student rooming at my great aunt’s old victorian home in Eureka, California. The house had been rebuilt a number of times, once to separate it into several rentable units, then to un-separate it, so the interior was a confusion of small rooms, odd walls and enclosed porches. It was a cool old house and not so much disturbing (like the Winchester Mystery House) as it was interesting and boasting a lot of character. Being a skeptic of all things ghost/alien related, I consider myself a rational person, and pretty fearless than most in terms of dark places and silly superstition. I was never afraid of the dark or the house, even the strange living room at the dead center of the house, which could be closed off from the rest of the house with old sliding doors, or the crawlspaces exposed between some rooms converted to endless closets.

Except for that proverbial one night, of course!

My aunt was visiting relatives back east, and my hermetic second cousin was at some LARPer or SCA-fest, so the house was empty, except for myself. Being the California northcoast in November, it was bitterly cold outside, and the house still relied on the ancient and noisy radiator system to sort of heat the house. I had that system on, set at 67 degrees, so it was cranking away. A space heater in the strange living room kept me warm as I settled in to watch CNN or whatever crap happened to be on. The rattling started almost immediately. It was loud, and came from somewhere upstairs. It was a hard, staccato sound. Fuck, I thought, something wrong maybe with the radiators up there? A little creeped out, I slid open the door to the stairway hall, and turned on the lights to the hall – old pushbutton switches. Halfway up the stairs the sound stops, but I can still determine direction from just before it cut out. Down the hall to the right. The unused guestroom isn’t heated, the radiator either isn’t hooked up or is switched off from the system – so there goes my radiator theory. Not particularly wanting to look in there, I stand at the top of the stairs for a second and the stillness freaks me out a bit. It starts up again, the sound, and this time its louder. Convinced it has to be something mechanically wrong with the heating system, I approach the guest room, my heart pounding uncharacteristically. The thwacking/rattling was different from a mechanical sound, I could tell, and it sounded like a sound a person in the house would make.

I open the door and immediately gasp and freeze in place. I had never been that frightened, ever. A giant black beak was struggling between the closet door and the door jam. A conical, black thing is ripping around, appearing to struggle against the small gap in the partly opened door. It was protruding a good four feet, and appeared to be the thickness of an arm. A sealed-up pointy black cone trying to get out. I can remember it as clear as day as it slowed down and tilted toward me – most horrible of all, it felt like it was regarding me.

Normally, I would have turned the light on and taken a closer look. Normally, I would have made sure it wasn’t my cousin fucking around in the closet or maybe a racoon rummaging in the closet. But this wasn’t normal at all. The feeling of horror that thing gave me frightened me to the core, and my heart nearly exploded. I just know that its not a person in there. I pulled the door shut in front of me and ran back down the stairs. I don’t hear the sound any more, but I’m too busy losing my shit and leaping for the back kitchen, where I seal myself off with another sliding door and turn on every light I can find. I pace for a second and regroup, deciding to call another cousin who lives across town, a son of the great aunt who himself grew up in this house. I’m nervous and giddy and not entirely sure what I just saw.

“Are you alright?”
“I heard a noise upstairs and checked it out and saw something really wierd just now. I don’t get easily spooked but that was really wierd man.”

I describe the beak/cone to him and he tries to calm me down. I can tell he’s nowhere near as alarmed as I am and that he’s attributing it to a freaked out kid staying in his old house.

“You know, mom keeps a lot of her sewing stuff in there, maybe it was the ironing board you saw? Could it have fallen down when you walked in?”

He’s obviously not believing me, so I humor him and just say that he’s probably right, something probably fell over in there and spooked me. I laugh nervously and thank him and retreat to the living room. I lock all of the sliding doors so I am locked into the room and resume watching television cranked up really loud. I can think of nothing but that cone whipping around. An hour later I think I hear the noise again and I turn the TV down, but hear nothing. I fall asleep on the couch and wake to my aunt coming home early. She’s in a chipper mood, and the house is lit up and sunny – the mood doesn’t strike me to tell her what I saw. I get brave and go upstairs, the room is dusty and sure enough, the closet is full of sewing supplies. But nothing huge black and beaklike is in there at all. There are marks on the doorjam, but there are dents and dings on every doorjam from a house worn from generations of children.

I’m still a skeptic, but that one event remains unexplainable to me to this day. What was that thing?

SB2000

I live in Taiwan. During the Ghost Month, the gates of Hell open, and for a month people burn paper money and put out food on tables for the spirits.

And nobody ever says the word “ghost” during that month.

Now, I’m not a very superstitious person, so I simply obeyed the rules to keep other people from getting nervous around me. Because even in my wife’s family, which isn’t religious at all, people obey the rules during Ghost month.

I didn’t think much of it. Now I do. This doesn’t sound that weird. It’s one of those “have to be there” type of deals. But for me, it sort of changed my outlook on the supernatural.

Me and my wife woke up one morning to go out and spend a day in city, only to find that my wife’s engagement ring was missing. We always leave our rings in a small jewelery box on top of our desk, and now it was gone. We both get ready for bed at the same time, and I remembered how I had to make room for my ring the night before, since she put hers there first. We always lock the door, and if anybody comes close to our room, our retarded Chihuhua-Maltese halfbreed starts barking.

We decided to look for it instead of going to city. We cleaned the whole room, pulling out our bed, moving all the furniture, examining every single surface. The ring was nowhere to be found. My wife cried herself to sleep that night, with me holding her. That ring meant a lot to her. I bought it for her back when we were so broke we shared a house with 5 other people, and slept in the fetal position from stress. I told her it was just gold and nothing else. I told her we would find it. In the end, she fell asleep.

At six o’ clock, I wake up like I haven’t woken up in years. A military wake-up call had nothing on this. It didn’t even compare to the years when I was in some trouble and had to watch my back constantly. I didn’t jerk into an upright position. It was more smooth than that. I went from sound asleep to a sitting position in no time at all. Somebody was there. I was all tense and ready to go, but without any fear or adrenaline in me – which is what I remember the most. If I get startled, my fist goes up. I almost knocked a female friend out in the middle of a mall, because she came from behind and startled me. This was different, a warm feeling. Tense as hell, but not in a fight-or-flee manner. As soon as my eyes left the soft focus you get when you’re scanning for movement in the dark, I saw the ring. It was sitting on the now otherwise empty surface of the desk.

I got angry. I hate stuff I can’t explain. So I did what any responsible husband does – I woke my wife up.

“The ring is back.”
“Mmmm. Good. Go to sleep.”
“THE RING is back.”
“Good. Now sleep okay.”
“BUT THE FUCKIN’ RING IS BACK.”
“Normal this month, okay. Don’t talk about it.”

I didn’t go back to sleep. We didn’t speak of it again. Because this is Taiwan, things disappear during the Ghost month only to reappear again, and nobody likes talking about Ghosts.

My mother-in-law ended the issue with “It must have fallen down from on top of the mirror.” The mirror you cant put anything on top of.

After living in Taiwan for a long time, I know “Shut the fuck up right at this very moment about this exact issue and never bring it up again” when I hear it.

So I did.

NewsMonster

This happened oh say 4 or 5 years ago. I worked in my high school on the stage crew. We built sets, and operated the theater. We got to play with power tools. The theater in question is actually the oldest continuously running theater in DC, Ford’s (where Lincoln was shot) is older, but hasn’t been run consistently. We had a complete loft, a half loft (my position), lighting loft, light managers station, area above loft where rigging is located, orchestra pits, trap door, and standard pits. In other words, it had to works. Half of these areas were considered dangerous, so only experienced people had access, for example, under the stage? send NewsMonster, in the upper loft? send someone else. Sorry for the extensive setting, here comes ghostliness.

Several events occurred with me before I knew the place’s history. First, and possibly my worst personal experience there, was the light eating darkness incident. Construction was under way in the school, and as a senior crew memeber, I would sometimes sneak through the stage to another part of the building to get to class on time. So, I cut throught the gym to a side door to the theater, and enter. Pitch black, absolutely no light. The curtains are closed, and I’m behind several of the legs (theater term for side curtains that hide the off stage side areas) so I wasn’t immediately woried. I turn on a keychain flashlight, and can see to the trap door, which will lead out into the caferteia, and save me a few minutes. I walk towards the trap door… bad idea I guess, because suddenly the light shines about 3 feet in front of me before hitting what can only be described as a wall of darkness. From a 15 yard range to a 3 foot range, in the space of several steps. Now comes idiocy, I figure it’s the flashlight, hit it a few times, which of course does nothing, and look for one of our work lights. (we had power drills and such, and the same battery packs fit into flashlights, these things were beasty powerfull) I find one on the saw bench, and turn it on. I can see the trap door again… for a few seconds. The light looked like it was moving back towards me, and I could no longer see the door. Now when the battery is low, you can get this effect, regular power which quickly drops of to a dim light. I shrugged it off and went to the door, and start down the stairs. Thats when I hear a crash above me somewhere on stage, and notice the VERY COLD air coming out of the pit entrance next to me… tragically we jokingly call this pit, the ‘darkest pit of hell’ and store paint there. I point both lights there, not a foot from my face, and NO illumination. I look at the lights… they are blindingly bright. I immediately realize that 1) I am an idiot, and 2) I am about to die by horrible light eating ghost. I run the rest of the way down the stairs with a look of complete horror on my face, into the cafeteria and shameful safety.

Only after that did I ask my friends about the theater’s history, and I learned that several crew members had died there, when some hambeast fell from the ladder above them on the way to the loft… including the faculty advisor

Next up is the tale of the helping pit hand.

The area under the stage is a warren of interlocking rooms and passages designed to allow a person to move about without the audience being aware. It consists of two orchestra pits, which are open, a connection between them, which allows access to some tunnel like areas, which connect to a tunnel that goes across the entire front of the stage, a tunnel behind that that is relatively mid stage, and the darkest pit of hell, which as I previously noted, connected to the trap door and the caferteia by joining along a stairwell. I knew this area like the back of my hand, as I helped the light crew to run wires about, and just generally was the most knowledgable about this area. So time comes when we need an extension cord to stick out somewhere, and I’m going to need to be working with power tools under the stage. Get some lights and tools, and under I go. As I work I ask the guy helping me to hand me different tools, and move the lights and such. It goes smoothly, but now that I think on it, I don’t rememeber him ever replying, just doing what I asked. Job’s done so I tunr to leave, lights go out, and I ask D (thats what I’ll be calling my assistant guy I guess) to turn them back on so we can leave. No response, so I reach around till I found them, and turned both lights on. No one was there. I figured he left and was just screwing with me, (even though it would have been accompanied by a shit load of creaking noises from the old stage) so I carry on as normal. I find D on the stage helping L (light guy who has a good story to, which will follow this one) I ask him WTF he was doing. L tells me D has been helping him for like 20 minutes, and had been helping the stage manager before that… I turned white, apparently I looked freaked out, so they asked me what happened, and none of us could think of anyone who could have been helping me. Everyone had been way to busy…

The last sory is one I heard from L, and was only partially involved in.

So L is trying to fix mysteriosu communications problems. We lost comms for 30 minutes durring a show, and didn’t know wtf happened. Not worth its own story, but many of us heard what sounded like chewing before the line dies. (wired into the theater were lines for our communication and co-ordination needs) So L is checking this out, alone on stage, and I’m sitting in the theater waiting for him to be done (I drove the carpool, and he was in it) He comes back, shaken as hell about 20 minutes later, and tells me this: “It sounded like someone was in the loft above me, when I was closer to the back, it moved closer to the back, when I was up front, it moved upfornt, like it was following me, only 60 feet above me in the loft.” I replied “Its not unusual to hear people moving in the loft, thats why they have to stay still up there until they need to move curtains and drops durring the play… keep the noise down.” to which L responds “You don’t understad, the cage around the ladder is locked, NO ONE CAN POSSIBLY BE UP THERE” I looked, he was right… we left immediately.

Thats pretty much all the major events. The loft crew occasionally commented on hearing wheels turning in the over loft area (where in fact the gears for the drops were located) while no props were moving. There was a time I got freaked out and threw some candy up into the loft, which clearly wasn’t going to make it, and then curved UPWARDS and landed in the loft… (I got candy for the crew one Halloween, and then got to the stage early (weekend work day) and got this feeling of dread, so I decided to make of gift of some candy… and yes I know thats retarded) Then of course there were many occassions of really bad luck, which just piled up to an unbelievable level when we did Dracula (the faculty advisor who died was a Jesuit, so maybe the dracula thing pissed him off?) but thats pretty much the end of major events… Anyway, I have to run, and will come fix spelling and grammar later, enjoy.

IrritationX

I worked at a gas station just off I-84 in Pendleton, OR. It’s just downhill from the regional airport, so I couldn’t find any decent overhead shots to diagram all of this out.

The gas station is at the furthest westward reaches of Pendleton. On the map, if you look where it says “Pendleton Hwy” the gas station is roughly below the P and E in Pendleton.

If you follow the Old Pendleton River Road (though, I’ve never heard it called that–only Rieth Road) across I-84, you get to the “town” of Rieth (pronounced like wreath). There aren’t a lot of peolpe there. It’s less of a town than it is a gathering of broken-down houses and a bar. And I’m not sure the bar is even still open.

Anyway, this happened at about 1:00 am in early to mid-October of 1993. I know this because I remember my feet still stinging from the blisters I got after all the running I did during Roundup, but it was starting to get a little cold at night. I had just finished my shift at the station and had locked up for the night. The boss didn’t like us to take our keys home with us, so after locking up, we would throw them through a hole in one of the garage doors as our last official job duty before going home. I put my keys through the hole to the garage and walked to my car, got in, shut the door and was about to start the engine when I heard, “Excuse me” from my left. I looked up and saw two kids standing about three feet from my window. Something was wrong about them right off the bat.

Imagine a white suburban kid about 10 years old trying way too hard to sport the hip hop look. He was wearing a Raiders cap tipped off to the left and pulled low on his forehead, a Kings jersey, black jeans, black-on silver high tops, a gray coat and two metal chains hung around his neck. With him was a kid about eight years old, who was dressed a bit more “normal” or at least a bit more understated than his companion; a more typical t-shirt, jeans, coat and high tops look, but all were almost the exact same color of dark blue. Every bit of their clothing looked brand new, as though they had just had the tags pulled from them. The younger one kept his eyes turned toward the ground, a “beaten puppy” look on his face.

I have no idea where these kids came from, or how they got on the driver’s side of my car without me seeing them. They weren’t walking from the highway toward my car when I got in. Though the fence in front of my car was only a couple feet high, I would have heard them walking through the brush behind it. I definitely would’ve seen them standing either in front of my car or next to the driver’s side door as I got in. The only way they could have approached is from behind the station. And the only thing there is a very steep hill coming up from the freeway. There’s no way they came up that, because if they had they would have dirt on their hands, knees and shoes.

“Excuse me, I was wondering if you would be kind enough to give my *friend* and I a ride to Rieth. It would be most appreciated, as he was meant to be home some time ago.” Now that really fucked with my head on a number of levels. First of all, what are these kids doing out here at 1:00 am? Second, I hadn’t heard any kid talk like that, especially dressed the way he was. Not any of the places I’d been, not at any time. And something about the way he emphasized “friend” seemed like he was adding it ironically.

I had friends who lived in Rieth for a while, and I got to be pretty familiar with the people who lived out there. I would remember seeing these kids, and I definitely didn’t. I usually didn’t have a problem with giving someone a ride–nowhere in Pendleton is more than about ten minutes out of your way–but these kids were something else. I got the feeling that I wouldn’t be safe if they got in my car. I was scrambling to come up with a reason why I couldn’t give them a ride when the little one apparently got a little absent-minded and allowed his gaze to lock with mine. As I’m sure you’re expecting, his eyes were completely black; not a bit of color or white showed. My blood froze as I looked over at the one who had done all the talking and just noticed the same thing of him–I don’t know how I didn’t notice it before. That feeling of “I won’t be safe” instantly changed to “Fuck me, I am dead if they get in.” I don’t know if I said anything or made any noise. I just started the car, backed up, and tore out of there.

I’ve told the story to a couple people, but they haven’t heard anything about it. It’s weird to finally run into a situation where someone has a similar story.

purity control

Last night, I had this horrible dream. I was in the house I live in now, with my boyfriend and our roommate. It was pretty much the same, except the layout was flip-flopped a bit. I was challenging a spirit in our home, standing in the bathroom and staring at the mirrors. I called for it, and it showed itself. I panicked and my boyfriend went into the bathroom. He said the same thing, and his eyes in the reflection started glowing green and gold. Immediately after that happened, I woke up out of a dead sleep, as if I were being roused. I was totally awake now, and felt a heavy thickness to the air in the bedroom. I was terrified. This actually happens a lot to me, even after I’ve taken sleeping pills. Some of the time it happens without even having a dream; I just am ripped out of a deep sleep for no reason and suddenly feel extremely scared as if I’m not alone.

This possibly stems from the fact that my boss at this coffee shop I work at (just up the street from us) said that the shop is haunted. The more I learn about the building, the more it makes sense. It’s been separate into two commercial sections, but it used to be a house, years and years ago. My boss tells me how she’ll come in after she’s closed, and find silverware thrown from the caddies. She said her husband has seen it, and she’s gotten locked out of the shop before. Weird things here and there, but she won’t tell me much about it. I get spooked when I’m in there alone.

Many years ago, when my family and I lived in our old house, there was a moving shadow. It was around Christmastime, and I was leaving my room. My mom was down the hall doing laundry. I remember stopping to listen to what she was saying. I saw my shadow obviously stop with me. As I continued listening and responding to my mom, still frozen in place, my shadow moved. It kept creeping forward, and had strange, long pointed ears. It made me think of some elf-like creature. I bolted out of there once I realized it was moving and I wasn’t.

hello internet

It was the middle of the afternoon and I went over to one of my buddys house. It was just me and him the whole time so it’s impossible that it could have been other people there. We were eating some lunch at the kitchen table when I started noticing shadows moving in the corners of my eyes and whatnot. Then about 5 minutes later I got an ice cold chill go behind me. I keep telling him that I was seeing shit in the shadows and he just told me to shut up. Later that night we were in the basement going through some vinyls that he found the other day and once again I started seeing shit moving. It got to the point where he wanted to go upstairs just to shut me up. We were in his room listening to some music at like 230 in the morning when It started to sound like it was raining. I thought my windows on my car may have been open so I looked outside. nothing. Ok whatever, I sit back down and like 3 minutes later it started doing it again. Once again I look out and nothing. Thats when I noticed the sound was traveling in a circle around the light in the middle of the ceiling in his room. It was loud and was moving too fast for it to have been an animal. There was also no upstairs of the house where is room was so it couldnt have been anything on the second floor (his room was on the first). My friend yelled stop it because it was getting annoying and the sound got twice as fast and twice as loud and thats when we went into the other room. He is convinced that I have the sixth sense or whatever because I kept talking about seeing shit that whole day and then that happened.

I didn’t really hang out with him that much but a few months later we started bullshiting over aim and apparently the sound keep coming back everynight. It turns out which he never told me until a year later that the noise drove him insane. He was going to jump off a bridge over the highway but his parents though something was wrong and wouldnt let him leave the house. they later sent him to a mental help center or whatever.

hepscat

I’m really in a nervous state right now. Right now, as I’m sitting in this chair and my cat and I are staring off into a corner of the room every few minutes.

But let me back up. This has sort of come to a head for me in the past few days because of an incident that happened four years ago.

My husband is really into electric streetcars, and there’s a museum about 60 miles from us in Rio Vista, CA that we are members of. It’s out in the country and they have big barns of old train cars and equipment to visit.

On this visit, my daughter was about a year and a half old so she was toddling, and you had to stick right with her on the big train cars. My husband was showing her something and I wandered ahead to the next car. It was a private railcar with a deck on the back, inside was decorated in Art Deco style. It was gorgeous with intricate woodwork and the inside was like a cocktail lounge with plush chairs and little tables so that people could gather, smoke, and enjoy a party as they rode.

I entered the car to admire the decor, but I found it oppressively quiet. I sat in one of the chairs for a few minutes, but then I stood up to wait. I didn’t really think about it but I just didn’t like sitting there and that wasn’t like me (I tend to sit given the chance). So I was waiting for hubby and daughter, and getting anxious. It seemed to be taking them a long time. Visually it was beautiful in there, but it felt so still in that car, like I was in a sealed box, and I didn’t like it.

Finally I saw them coming toward the car and I waved. They started to board, and I was already thinking that I didn’t want my daughter to come in – not really understanding why I felt that way, but my mommy instincts were making me really anxious. I was standing next to one of the little tables and I started to call at my husband to stop, when all of a sudden the table fell on my leg, really hard. I think I said something like, ‘Honey, —OUCH!’ When I looked down at my leg, though, the table was right where it should be. But I could feel it on my leg…and it was bolted to the floor. I could actually feel the sensation of the table on my leg. But there’s no way it could have fallen, and I could feel it even as I was looking at it standing upright BOLTED TO THE FUCKING FLOOR.

I went from zero to sixty in an instant. I ran towards my husband and screamed for them to get off the train. It was the creepiest feeling ever.

Every time we’ve been there since that train car has been closed to the public. It’s the Western Railway Museum in Rio Vista, CA. I have heard that they use this car for private parties.

We went back to this museum at Halloween, and it was locked up. I spent sometime outside the car looking in and mostly feeling/seeing nothing (just a little nervousness that I chalk up to my own feelings of anticipation). But when I was there, I had very very strong deja vu – I don’t know if that is the word because I had dreamed something particular about the moment just a few weeks prior (it involved my daughter and something she said – when she said it, the memory of the dream was triggered and I watched it play out EXACTLY as I remembered from the dream for about a minute, which was fucking WEIRD).

Okay, so recently I’ve been thinking about this experience instead of just shoving it away into the “stuff I don’t want to think about” part of my brain.

In August, school started for my daughter. We have a routine where I bike with her and she rides a razor scooter. We both wear helmets. About a week into the school year when she put on her helmet the straps were way loose, like down to her chest. I asked her why she did that and she hadn’t – in fact, bike helmets have these quadruple strap thingies these days and it’s a bitch to tighten or loosen them. My daughter can’t even open a bag of M&M’s by herself (she’s 6). So I tightened it, then asked my husband later why he’d loosened her helmet so much. He hadn’t. Whatever, right? The loosened helmet thing happened again and again. Sometimes it was every day, then a week would go by, and it would happen again. My daughter would tell me that “the fairies” were fooling with her helmet. I thought either she was loosening it somehow by wearing it or there was something wrong with the helmet…until it started happening to my helmet. It would go a few days with no change and then one day I would put on my helmet and the straps would be at their loosest possible setting. My husband bikes to work and it never happened to his helmet.

I was still chalking it up to us somehow working the straps loose – frankly, I didn’t want to think about it – but one morning I went biking for fun for about an hour, came home for a bit, then went out to go pick up my daughter from school. When I put my helmet on, which had fit snugly a mere two hours earlier, it was loose again. No one had been home but me. Holy shit.

So a few days after this a neighbor who is in his 40’s and still lives at home told my husband that about 20 years ago they dug up a body in our front yard. My front yard has a beautiful oak tree that is must be over 100 years old, and they found the body in front of the tree. The police were called and according to this neighborhood alkie the bones were given to “a museum”. I don’t really know how to go about researching this.

Ever since we heard about this, the helmet stuff stopped completely. Nothing happened for about two months. Then we went to the RR museum and sort of relived that whole experience.

Now I’m hearing creaks, and the helmet thing happened to my daughter yesterday. My laptop will be working fine one minute and the battery will drain the next. I’ve had it show a full battery, operating on AC power, and it drains in 30 seconds – at most it should give me over an hour if the battery is full and the AC becomes disconnected. I actually went out and bought a new adapter because I thought it was a hardware problem. It works one day and the next nothing will power up the computer.

What the holy hell can I do about this mess, if it is all connected? And yes, my cat is nervously staring at the corner of the room again RIGHT THIS FREAKING MOMENT.