Eerie Stuff

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Mikey Bidness

I’m still in search of my first honest-to-god ghost sighting, but on my recent trip to America there were two occasions I felt the presence of an ‘other side’ – one involving some very, very bad feelings whilst taking pictures in a rural cemetery near Cedartown, Ga, full of the graves of infant yellow fever victims. I’ve never felt so full of dread as when I realized I was alone and my girlfriend and her mother had simultaneously hauled ass back to the car, sure there was something lurking that didn’t want us there.

The other occurred in a Port Angeles, Wa apartment, where it would appear that my girlfriend’s grandfather made his presence known in a very spectacular fashion, switching electrical equipment on and off and rocking chairs back and forth over the space of three hours. My girlfriend’s family took this in their stride though – it seems to be a fairly regular occurence whenever he’s brought up in conversation.

I gotta say, I’m not quite the skeptic I used to be.

Ikona

I just moved into a new house. The sellers were disturbingly eager — their shoulders relaxed and they vanished soon after giving me the keys. Whatever. I just moved in the basics at first: computer, clothes, bed, portable TV, and lots of booze.

I woke up sometime in the night, unable to sleep, and put some laundry in the washer downstairs. The rickety stairs drove home just how old this place really was. Like pre-war old. But I couldn’t figure which war. The window frames were bulky, ill-fitting antiques. The heating duct covers were ornate, giant affairs. Come winter, it would hurt me to heat this place.

And no matter the thermostat setting, the basement was always cold.

I had nightmares. Something in the darkness scratched feebly at the walls. I began to fear the laundry room’s lone, bare bulb.

Sobbing, beheadings, broken teeth, and vicious hammers. Every day I awoke with a start. Every day these things haunted me. Night after night, pallid faces clawed their way up my legs to snap their teeth at my neck. I felt their hostile breath; I felt nerves die.

I saw a night hag shrieking incomprehensible Latin curses in my face, wielding dead children’s bones like an ecstatic scythe. Her skin was grave wax; her eyes melted and foamed with pleasure. I twitched and woke. I hoped it was only the news.

The moon filled a third of the sky and flooded my room with ambiguous light. I rose and peered through the slats of the venetian blinds. The backyard’s fence was overgrown with thick vines on two sides, and a hedge on the third. Everything was vague and smeared and shifting and rippling in the wind. I couldn’t tell where one plant’s evil ended and another began.

More false sleeping. More scratch-scratch-scratching. More knocking.

I was losing my mind.

One day I gave up and went to bed, only to see a teary young woman clawing at my walls, then clawing across my floor, then heaving her way up the basement stairs, and always crying. Help me, she said, help me. She grasped at supports with shattered forearms and shards of fingernails, but slipped and fell and thumped back down the stairs into the dark.

It was the door. It was that fucking door. The basement door to nowhere. That was it. I tried locking it, but it always opened.

She died there.

She’s never stopped scratching. It used to be a curse and I still shudder, toss, and turn in my bed. If she makes it up the stairs, there’s a place for her.

She’ll be there.

One day.

Cloquirk

When I was a kid my bedroom was down the first flight of stairs heading towards the basement.
I fucking hated that basement.
The door to my bedroom faced down into the cavernous depths of the place, and to make matters worse the door had glass panes at the top, so always I could see the blackness that was the hallway leading down into that godforsaken place. (I discovered a weird hidden compartment in the walls of the basement that had in it jars filled with formaldehyde and other creepy unidentifiable things, I guess left behind by a previous tenant as we rented the house.)

Anyhow I woke up in the middle of the night and leaned over to get my glass of water and had a sip, sitting up in bed, I happened to let my field of vision stray towards that door, which I was always suspicious of.
No one was home that night except for me.
The door handle turned, and the door slowly opened with a creak.
Behind the door was a massive, 8 foot tall figure, vaguely human shaped, yet fuzzy and kind of amorphous. Its shape would wobble and change.

Being the frightened kid that I was, I spilled the rest of my water and squeaked, “GO AWAY.”
No hand came in to grab the handle, yet the door swung closed just as slowly as it had opened, and the handle turned and set itself in the doorframe with a soft ‘click.’

I didn’t sleep the rest of the night.

Vingle Prime

I’ve never really experienced ghosts first hand, and don’t really hope to at any point in my life (knock on wood), but I’ve known the occasional person who has. One such man was a guy I fondly remember as Roy.

Roy was Navajo, supposedly: short, skin like old leather, greasy hair that went down to the denim jeans he never changed out of. When I first came to NAU, I lived in McConnell Hall, a freshmen dorm with only a narrow strip of asphalt separating it from the woods beyond.

Naturally, those woods were our favorite place to drink and smoke weed. We’d smuggle out a 12-pack of Natural Ice, a 6-pack of something good, or if things went well, a bottle of tequila. When it was particularly cold and we were particularly bored, we’d build a fire. It was around these fires that Roy would show up, sitting down and casually taking one of our beers as though he’d been invited, occasionally asking for a puff of weed.

Originally, no one even talked to Roy, since he looked a bit off. More nights, though, he began to come around and we started talking to him more and more. He would rarely answer beyond three words at a time, but when he was particularly chatty, he’d tell us stories at length. My favorite story was that of the Thin Men.

Roy and a filthy friend of his were once hired by a rather shady exotic pet owner to go out into the woods and find some skunks to be brought back, de-scented and sold. Having spent much time in the forest (and having the smell to prove it), they went out with delight, eager for a promised fifty-dollar bounty per skunk.

As they went about rambling, setting up traps and talking over alternating bottles of Dos Equis, flasks of tequila and the occasional drag of a joint, they hardly noticed it getting dark. Homeless, they were well used to sleeping outdoors.

Determined to get every skunk they could, they went across over-grown trails, dried-up streams, into portions of the forest they didn’t think to notice as any different from any other part of the forest. “I mean, fuck,” he said at this part of the story, “trees are fucking trees, right?”

The further they went in, though, they began to notice odd little details. The trees were thin, bereft of branches, stripped of pines and leaves. In fact, not a single leaf was found on the earth; especially strange, considering the season was just shifting to spring. But the trees were smooth, unwrinkled, as though someone had ironed them out. They continued to walk, coming across a small circle of trees.

These were the most bizarre.

They were tall, pole-like, and yellowish-pink, like someone had just recently peeled the bark off them to expose still-glistening youngwood underneath. Here they stopped to set another trap, having only one trap and no more beer. Roy stood beneath one of the tall trees while his friend set up the trap.

That’s when he heard it.

Most of the girls drinking with us at this point got up and left.

It was the sound of a house shifting, if that house had been made of logs with old men pressed between: a very long, tired sigh, followed by a flapping, muttering sound of loose lips dangling in a breeze. The groan echoed for a moment, followed by a faint “click, click.” This continued for a moment, Roy straining to hear as it continued…groan, click, click. Groan, click, click. Groan.

Click, click.

Something shifted behind him and he heard something rustle above him. When he looked up, the tree stared back down at him through two pale, rheumy eyes, face hidden in the gloom. Roy didn’t stop to study it; he dropped everything and tore off, screaming into the night, with his friend close behind him.

He ran for however long it took before diving under an overhanging rock. Over the squealing of Navajo and the sound of urine splashing his denim, he could still hear the sounds. Groan, click, click. They lasted for but a moment before he heard his friend. The screaming started, he said, when the moon was starting to fall, around one in the morning. It didn’t stop until dawn.

Roy finally mustered the nerve to get out of his hiding place. Forsaking bonds of loyalty, he tore off running, only keeping the corner of his eye open for his lost friend. Unfortunately, he found him shortly after.

The first thing Roy noticed was his feet: they were planted firmly in the earth, like the fleshy stems of plants. A noose was wrapped around his friend’s neck, tied to a tree branch ten feet off the ground. Every bone and inch of flesh had been stretched, save his arms, that hung there, flaccid and patting against his body with meaty smacks. What Roy most remembers, though, is his friend’s lips: stretched long and thin, flapping with the sound of gasses leaving the body, a kind of bizarre muttering.

Roy ran until he hit the 1-17, then followed it back to Flagstaff.

I haven’t seen Roy since. I like to think there’s some other group of freshmen sitting out in the woods and drinking now, and occasionally he shows up to tell them one of his stories. He had a few worse ones.

wdforty

Anyway, I’ve got a couple tame ones that I’ve experienced. When I was a little kid I was playing with my Ghostbusters in my living room having a great time when I had an eerie feeling, so I looked down the hall and I see a figure standing there watching me and it just turns and walks to my parent’s room. After seeing that I freaked out and got on the couch where my mom was napping and didn’t get down till she woke up.

Another one I had is probably the most terrifying thing I’ve ever experienced. One night me and my parent’s got home from a wedding or something, and I sat down on the couch and started coloring in a Duck Tales book. I’m sitting there minding my own business when I hear somebody whisper my name. I stopped and sat there for a second and just shrugged it off and continue coloring. Then I hear it again. So I look up and I see a face in the fire place. Upon seeing that I instantly jumped up knocking the table over I was coloring on sending markers everywhere and haul ass down the hall, screaming. I thought my mom was in the front bathroom so I just burst through the door and fall down on the floor just to see a pitch black room with no one in it. So I’m flopping around on the floor trying to get up and finally get out of there and find my mom in her bedroom. I was scared shitless, and by this time my dad came in the house wondering what the hell was going on. They had to sit me down in front of the fireplace and show me that nothing was in there so I would finally calm down.

After that I had no occurrences that I remember. But a couple years ago my parents started remodeling, and my uncle was doing the work and it stirred shit up again a little bit. My uncle had heard voices and footsteps when no one was in the house and other minor things. But things have once again settled down since him and his buddies aren’t here anymore.

My mom also told me that I used to talk to a little boy down the hall when I was little, but I do not remember this at all, but she used to get really freaked out by it. We have a little theory that it might be my brother because he died in the bedroom at the end of the hall and was seeing what was up. Pretty silly, but it makes sense to us.

Omglosser

This didn’t happen to me, but to a good friend of mine, let’s call her Jenny(all names changed).

Jenny and her best friend Jay, along with her boyfriend Nate and his best pal Leonard, all decided to go ghost hunting one night at a cemetery. Out here in the cornfields of the midwest, there’s not a whole lot for non-college bound 19-20somethings to do(and we’re surrounded by spooky places). They gathered flashlights and things and headed out to an old graveyard about 30 miles into the middle of nowhere(I can’t for the life of me remember the name of the place). They parked along a fence in the grass so that they’d be not too noticeable if any traffic happened to drive by this late at night, particularly the police. It was a fairly bright night, with a full moon hanging low in the sky. Tombstones were very visible as well as trees once their eyes all adjusted to the darkness.

Leonard’s girlfriend who wasn’t there was all hip and into Wicca and psychic power balls and trees and spirits and any kind of 2-dimensional pseudo spiritual trendy stuff you could imagine(she once took a similar trip to contact the dead saying that her “psychic walls” would protect her, she went home and suffered from nightmares and insomnia for the next month, hence she turned down coming along on this trip), gave him some pointers I guess for talking to the dead or seeing a ghost. I’m not sure what sparked it or caused it, but suddenly Jay froze in his tracks and grabbed Jenny by the wrist, looking ahead intently. Jenny looked up to see pure blackness overtaking the far end of the cemetery, and it was headed their way.
“LET’S GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE!” Jay screamed and he pulled Jenny by the wrist, almost knocking her over. The four of them ran back to Jay’s car, away from the creeping blackness that seemed to want to engulf them. Jay had just recently put in a brand new alternator and battery in his car and it had been working like a dream and cranking up without hesitation since. But not tonight. As they all piled in, Jay cranked the ignition, it tried, but it wheezed out. He tried again and again and it finally turned over. He hit the gas and started to escape the graveyard, but it seemed as though something was sucking the life out of his engine. The interior lights went off and the car died in the road. Jay cursed and screamed at the car, pounding the gas and cranking the ignition. It revved up finally. At this point, Jenny loses consciousness.

She wakes up the next morning on the kitchen floor of Nate and Leonard’s house. She had no idea how she had gotten there or what had happened in the previous 8 hours.
I’ve personally talked to all three and they all give the same story as to what happened that night after Jenny blacked out:
Jay’s car cranks up and they speed away from the graveyard without anymore engine issues. Jenny is sobbing in the back seat. They ask her repeatedly if she’s okay. She says she’s not Jenny. She repeatedly requests that they not ever take her back there and to not let “them” hurt her, or get her anymore. They all just kind of stared at each other dumbfoundedly, thinking it was a joke…Jay flicked on the dome light to see Jenny curled up in fetal position next to Nate in the back seat. Her face is lifeless and pale, tears are running down her cheeks. Upon closer inspection they see that her eyes have no color or white to them, just pure black seeping out from behind half-closed eyelids. A mild panic hits the car when they see this, they ask if she’s okay again and she emphatically replies “yes just don’t ever take me back there”. They agree and head home. Jenny goes into the kitchen and sits on the floor, staring at nothing. They try in vain to help her, sprinkling salt to purify her spirit, tried giving her water, but nothing helped. She eventually fell asleep and woke up as herself.

swiss_army_chainsaw

There have been whispers through the years that the females on my father’s side of the family have “the sight”. No long, detailed stories – just a few small anecdotes that seem to form a generational pattern.

Maybe it started way back when a family matron “went mad” after giving birth (post-partum depression/psychosis). Her husband chained her to the wall in the attic (perfectly reasonable reaction in the 1800’s, mind you). She eventually managed to take her own life somehow. This detail was rarely spoken of, as the family was Catholic back then. But the truth was discreetly passed down to her decedents. Daguerreotypes of her and her crappy husband now sits in acid-free preservation boxes in my parents’ house. Whether family oddities extend further back than that I do not know, but it’s definitely a major one.

Some years after that, when my fraternal grandmother was a child and her own grandmother had recent died, she was awakened one night by a strange light dancing around her darkened bedroom. (Today we’d probably call this an orb.) She was not scared by what she saw. And for reasons she could not quite explain, she cried out “Grandma, stop it!” And the light went away. It was then she knew it was her grandmother’s spirit come to visit her. She did not feel bad about sending the spirit “away” because she was dead after all!

When my aunt and her husband (my uncle) were first married (this would have been the late 70’s) they were driving home from a party on a sweltering summer night. They passed through a relatively deserted stretch of road that cut through a park. They spied a woman in 100% authentic Victorian garb standing by the side of the road as if waiting for a ride. As they drove closer, they saw that her clothes were dead white – and so was her face. They told themselves she was just going to a costume party. In the middle of the night. In heavy clothes on one of the hottest nights of the summer. In the middle of nowhere. My aunt has had several odd encounters like this over the course of her life. The White Lady story is the one I remember the best.

For my part, I have precognitive dreams and hunches. I cannot control when they happen. Twice I have predicted acquaintances’ pregnancies. Sometimes I will wake up in the morning with an unexplained feeling of “something big happened” and lo and behold, the morning news will be reporting a major tragedy or oddity. I can usually “feel out” big celebrity deaths. The morning Pavarotti died, my alarm clock went off and I immediately knew someone very famous was dead. A few years ago, I woke up one morning and knew my elderly neighbor was dead. When I got the call a few hours later, all I could say was “I already know”.

This probably sounds really lame. I’m definitely not claiming to be psychic. All I know is this stuff comes to me and by gosh it’s usually right. If the “family sight” is real then one thing is for certain: it’s not a magic 8-Ball that you shake when you need answers. You get visions and predictions at random. You may miss info you really would’ve liked to have, but instead get tuned into Pavarotti’s ascension.

One other thing about my aunt: she always sleeps with the TV on, as does her brother (my dad). Neither of them has ever satisfactorily explained this habit. They are both perfectly sane people – perhaps a bit quirky for having been born in an era before learning disabilities were really understood. But my aunt once told me she does not leave the TV on for white noise (which is why most people do it). She did not say any more. She was holding something back. I have gradually come to the conclusion that, in the still of the night, as she is trying to go to sleep, she is trying desperately not to hear something.

Grandma?

“The Devil and Mr. Brown”
“The Jersey Devil is real,” said my brother Chuck. “And he’s really nice.”

Chuck had just returned from a week-long wilderness survival training school in the Pine Barrens, New Jersey. The camp is run by survival expert Tom Brown Jr. You may have heard of Brown. The Tommy Lee Jones movie The Hunted was based on his life.

About 30 years ago, Brown’s life intersected with one of Colonial America’s earliest folk legends: the Jersey Devil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jersey_Devil). The Pine Barrens are the Devil’s supposed home. Although the legend has been around since the 1700’s, modern sightings of the creature began in full force in the early 1980’s…not long after Brown established his school in the Barrens. Coincidence? Of course not.

Seeing as Brown and his followers are really into that whole Mother Earth thing, they take in upon themselves to screw with disrespectful campers. So if you come into the Barrens to drink beer, be rowdy and generally make a mess, expect to be messed with.

They never do anything really harmful. Mostly they’re just putting their stealth lessons into practice. Moving items around a campsite, stealing beer and putting it in random places…little things that campers may or may not notice.

But sometimes the woods get real tough customers, and that calls for drastic measures. A few years ago, a group of rowdy college kids drove up some back roads (the Barrens is somewhat populated) and made camp like they were poolside at a Vegas resort. Between the noise and the truck-wrought destruction to the back roads, it was impossible for Brown and his students not to notice them. They hid themselves at the edge of the campsite and watched the campers get good and drunk. They noticed one guy who seemed to be the group leader and dubbed him Alpha Male. AM proceeded to get into a massive screaming fight with his girlfriend and hopped into his truck to drunkenly blow off some steam on those aforementioned back roads. He got back to camp after everyone else had passed out. He quickly went to his tent and did the same.

When Brown saw AM’s mud-splattered truck, he knew exactly what they had to do. They used containers of deer blood from a recent hunt to make a bloodbath on the front grill of AM’s truck. The finishing touch: clumps of long blond hair taken from a female student’s head and matted into the gore on the front of the truck. (They wanted the hair to be obviously, indisputably human). They hid themselves and waited for dawn.

The first camper to awake was AM’s girlfriend. Slowly—for she was in shock at the sight of the bloody, muddy truck—she untangled some blond hair from the grill. The rest of the camp was soon awakened by her screams. Brown told my brother that he’d never seen anyone break camp so quickly. They threw their tents whole into the back of their trucks. And to this day, Alpha Male and everyone who was with him probably believes he killed someone that night.

–more–

My boyfriend’s mother Anna grew up in Communist Poland. She attended art school in Warsaw some time in the 1970’s. She initially rented a room in a big old manor house. The house was owned and overseen by a disenfranchised noblewoman. Poland, like much of Europe, had a large population of landed gentry and minor nobles…before the World Wars and Communism, of course. Anna herself came from disenfranchised noble family, so she and the landlady got along quite well.

The first night (yes, the first!), Anna had a very vivid dream that there was a large French door on one of the walls of her room. Through the door was another room, where she saw people eating and chatting around an ornate dinner table. She heard them speaking, but could not make out the words.

Of course there was no door in the wall. Anna told the landlady about her dream and was promptly informed that there had once been a door. Her room used to be the foyer for a dining room, but the door connecting the two rooms had been walled up years ago. At night, Anna continued to hear echoes of cups and dishes clinking and people chatting. Since the landlady didn’t seem bothered by it, Anna didn’t let it get to her either. She even thought it was kind of cool when she had occasion to venture into the attic…and found the former dining room’s furniture exactly as it had appeared in her dream.

The landlady’s husband died in WWII. About a month before the anniversary of her husband’s name day, she informed her tenants that he would be coming to visit soon. Not to fear, she said. He came by every year and was quite harmless. However, they would notice some “signs” of his impending “return”. The landlady went on a trip for a few days before the actual name day, leaving her tenants, including Anna, to be freaked out by the sudden appearance of heavy, dragging footsteps in the attic at night. On the morning of the husband’s name day, Anna found her landlady dusting a portrait of her husband that hung on the wall. A small bat was hanging from the top of the portrait’s frame. “Good morning husband!” the landlady said to the bat. “I’ve been expecting you!”

Oh and then there was the basement. Seriously, what is up with basements? Anna only went down there once at the request of the landlady (to get a can of food or something). But the landlady kindly informed Anna that the basement was haunted by a Pole who’d sided with the Germans in WWII. He’d committed suicide by hanging in the basement because the guilt of killing his countrymen finally caught up with him. Being a somewhat spacey person, Anna went down to the basement on her errand, not too concerned about the alleged ghost…until she saw the silhouette of a man hanging from a basement rafter.

But that experience was not enough to get her to leave, since she thought the power of suggestion had a good deal to do with what she saw. One evening as she was reading in bed, Anna happened to glance at her bedside lamp and an odd thought entered her head: “If the light bulb goes out…” And it went out. She’d almost had enough.

It was the odd door in the bathroom that finally did it. This was the door to the attic’s staircase. Anna had a clear view of this door one day as she was taking a bath. No one else was at home at the time. Anna found herself transfixed by the attic door. And not unlike the incident with the light bulb, another terrifying thought entered her mind: “If that door opens…”

AND IT DID.

Very slowly, just a few inches. But it did open.

She moved out a few days later.

chainsaw’s copypasta on skinwalkers

”A family encounters a creature from the dark side of Navajo legend”
All of her life, Frances T. has “seen things,” heard things and felt them. Born into a family of sensitives, this was rather normal. “In my family, you were considered odd if you didn’t experience ‘abnormal’ things,” Frances says. “We never talked much about our experiences or our feelings about them. We just accepted them as normal – which, in fact, to us they are.”

But nothing could have prepared her family for what they encountered on a dark, desolate road in Arizona 20 years ago. It’s a mysterious and traumatizing event that haunts them to this day.

Frances’s family had moved from Wyoming to Flagstaff, Arizona in 1978 shortly after her high school graduation. Sometime between 1982 and 1983, 20-year-old Frances, her father, mother and her younger brother took a road trip back to Wyoming in the family pickup truck. The trip was a vacation to visit with friends in and around their old hometown. The only member of the family not present was her older brother, who was in the Army and stationed at Ft. Bragg, N.C.

The course along Route 163 took them through the Navajo Indian Reservation and through the town of Kayenta, just south of the Utah border and the magnificent Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park. Anyone who has lived in Arizona for any length of time knows that the Indian Reservation can be a beautiful if harsh place for non-natives. “Many strange things happen out there,” Frances says. “Even my friend, a Navajo, warned us of traveling through the reservation, especially at night.”

Along with the warning, however, Frances’s Native American friend blessed the family, and they were on our way.

“We have company.”
The trip to Wyoming was uneventful. But the trip back to Arizona along the same route more than justified the warning from Frances’s friend. “It still gives me goose bumps,” she says. “To this day, I have major anxiety attacks when I have to travel through the north country at night. I avoid it at all costs.”

It was a warm summer night, about 10:00 p.m., when the family’s pickup was heading south on 163, about 20 to 30 miles from the town of Kayenta. It was a moonless night on this lonely stretch of road – so pitch black that they could only see just a few feet beyond the headlights. So dark that closing their eyes actually brought relief from the fathomless black.

They had been driving for hours with Frances’s father at the wheel, and the vehicle’s passengers had long ago settled into quiet. Frances and her father sandwiched her mother in the truck’s cab, while her brother enjoyed the night air in the back of the pickup. Suddenly, Frances’s father broke the silence. “We have company,” he said.

Frances and her mother turned around and looked out the back slider window. Sure enough, a pair of headlights appeared over the crest of a hill, then disappeared as the car went down, then reappeared. Frances commented to her father that it was nice to have company on this stretch of road. If something went wrong, neither vehicle and its passengers would be alone.

Thunder began to rumble from the vast, clouded sky. The parents decided that their son should come into the cab before he got soaking wet from any rain that might fall. Frances opened the slider window and her little brother crawled in, squeezing between her and her mother. Frances turned to close the window and again noticed the headlights from the following car. “They’re still behind us,” her father said. “They must be going to either Flagstaff or Phoenix. We’ll probably meet them in Kayenta when we stop to fuel up.”

Frances watched as the car’s headlights crested another hill and began its descent until it disappeared. She watched for them to reappear… and watched. They didn’t reappear. She told her father that the car should have crested the other hill again, but hadn’t. Maybe they slowed down, he suggested, or pulled over. That was possible, but it just didn’t make sense to Frances. “Why in the hell would a driver slow down or, worse yet, stop at the bottom of a hill in the middle of night, with nothing around for miles and miles?” Frances asked her father. “You’d think they’d want to keep sight of the car in front of them in case anything happened!”

People do weird stuff when they are driving, her father replied. So Frances kept watching, turning around every few minutes to check for those headlights, but they never did reappear. When she turned to look one last time, she noticed that the pickup was slowing down. Turning back to look out the windshield, she saw that they were rounding a sharp bend in the road, and her father had slowed the truck to about 55 mph. And from that moment, time itself seemed to slow down for Frances. The atmosphere changed somehow, taking on an otherworldly quality.

Frances turned her head to look out the passenger window, when her mother screamed and her father cried out, “Jesus Christ! What the hell is that!?”

Frances didn’t know what was happening, but one hand instinctively reached over and held down the button for the door lock, and the other tightly grabbed the the door handle. She braced her back against her small brother and held firmly onto the door, still not knowing quite why.

Her brother was now yelling, “What is it? What is it?” Her father immediately flipped on the interior cab light, and Frances could see that he was petrified. “I have never, ever seen my father that scared in my whole life,” Frances says. “Not when he came home from his tours in Vietnam, not when he came home from ‘special assignments,’ not even when someone tried to firebomb our house.”

Frances’s father was as white as a ghost. She could see the hair on the back of his neck standing straight out, like a cat’s, and so was the hair on his arms. She could even see the goose bumps on his skin. Panic was filling the small cab. Frances’s mother was so frightened that she began shouting in her native Japanese in a high, squeaky voice as she frantically wrung her hands. The little boy just kept saying, “Oh my God!”

“From out of the ditch”
As the pickup sped around the bend in the road, Frances could see that the shoulder dropped off deeply into a ditch. Her father slammed on the brakes to prevent the truck from swerving into the ditch. As the pickup was slowing to a stop, something leapt out of the ditch at the side of the truck. And now Frances could clearly see what had started the panic.

It was black and hairy and was eye level with the passengers in the cab. If this was a man, it was like no man Frances had ever seen. Yet despite its monstrous appearance, whatever this thing was, it wore a man’s clothes. “It had on a white and blue checked shirt and long pants – I think jeans,” Frances testifies. “Its arms were raised over its head, almost touching the top of the cab.”

This creature remained there for a few seconds, looking into the pickup… and then the pickup was past it. Frances could not believe what she had seen. “It looked like a hairy man, or a hairy animal in man’s clothing,” she says. “But it didn’t look like an ape or anything like that. Its eyes were yellow and its mouth was open.”

Although time seemed frozen and distorted in this moment of fantastic horror, it was all over within a few minutes – the headlights, her little brother coming into the cab and the “thing.”

By the time the family reached Kayenta for gas, they had finally calmed down. Frances and her father climbed out of the pickup and checked the side of the truck to see if the creature had done any damage. They were surprised to see that the dust on the side of the truck was undisturbed, and so was the dust on the hood and roof of the truck. In fact, they found nothing out of the ordinary. No blood, no hair… nothing. The family stretched their legs and rested at Kayenta for about 20 minutes. The car that had been following them never did show up. It’s as if the car simply vanished. They drove home to Flagstaff with the cab light on and the doors securely locked.

“I wish I could say this was the end of the story,” Frances says, “but it’s not.”

“The “men” at the fence”
A few nights later, around 11:00 p.m., Frances and her brother were awakened by the sounds of drumming. They looked out his bedroom window into the backyard, which was surrounded by a fence. At first, they saw nothing but the forest beyond the fence. Then the drumming grew louder, and three or four “men” appeared behind the wooden fence. “It looked like they were trying to climb the fence, but couldn’t quite manage to bring their legs up high enough and swing over,” Frances says.

Unable to get into the yard, the “men” began to chant. Frances was so scared, she slept with her little brother that night.

Sometime later, Frances sought out her Navajo friend, hoping she could offer some explanation for these strange incidents. She told Frances that it was a Skinwalker that had tried to attack her family. Skinwalkers are creatures of Navajo legend – witches that can shape-shift into animals.

That a Skinwalker attacked them was quite unusual, Frances’s friend told her, as it had been a long time since she has heard of any activity about Skinwalkers, and that they normally don’t bother non-natives. Frances took her friend back by the fence where she had seen the strange men trying to climb in. The Navajo woman considered the scene for a moment, then revealed that three or four Skinwalkers had visited the house. She said that they wanted the family, but could not gain access because something was protecting the family.

Frances was astonished. Why, she asked. Why would the Skinwalkers want her family? “Your family has a lot of power,” the Navajo woman said, “and that they wanted it.” Again she said that Skinwalkers usually don’t bother non-natives, but she believed that they wanted the family enough to expose themselves. Later that day, she blessed the perimeter of the property, the house, the vehicles and the family.

“We haven’t been bothered by Skinwalkers since then,” Frances says. “Then again, I haven’t been back to Kayenta. I have gone through other towns on the reservation – yes, at night. But I’m not alone; I carry a weapon. And I carry protective amulets.”

“the walkin dude”
This happened in the summer of ’03, around July. Five of my guy friends and I were invited over this girl’s house by said girl, this girl having recently met us all. We guys had known each other since around preschool – 2nd grade. This girl, let’s call her Avi, she had complained to us about her house for some time before this event. She grew up in it all her life and felt it was haunted – due to the weird feelings she got once in a while, other odd little happenstances (which I’ll explain after this story), and, on top of it all, the weird appearance of the house (in an affluent neighborhood of Park Ridge, IL). Whenever we approached the house it struck really weird vibes through us all, with its subtle imposing presence and design. Portentously designed. Strange design for a house that was built around 60 years ago.

Avi had invited us all over to try out an Ouija board with her.

Some self-history: I had been a Baptist Christian for seven years until the preceding year, when I dropped out of the religion and its world, becoming neutral. That summer I had started to confront questions swarming forth from my skeptic mind, about my framework of beliefs, about what was possible and what was true, yadda yadda. The usual college freshman neurotic self-reloading. In my seven years, I never saw or perceived anything supernatural. A big reason for my dropping out.

First, I’ll explain the interior of the house. The house was under development, was being remodeled, and there were gaping duct holes everywhere. When you entered, on your immediate right would be the living room, ahead of you would be another living room abutting a kitchen – which had a balcony directly above it, and on the left was a closet, then a TV room, then the door to the basement. We took over the TV room.

It was a small room, with the walls stripped of paint. See the below depiction for a precise imagery of the event:

In this drawing, you see the two blue dash-lines? Imagine a wall between those lines, separating the TV room from the entrance to the basement. The door to the basement opened to reveal steps leading down to a landing, which then led you into a 180 degree turn and down a few more steps into the basement itself.

The basement was full of junk and had Avi’s cat’s litter box and food. It was a pretty big basement and had a door that led into the house’s garage, which was underground. A rarely used, yet crammed-full garage that was basically used for basic carpentry.

When we entered the house, Avi gave us a tour, showing us the basement and the garage. With nonchalancy, we passed through it all.

Ok, back to the TV room. We set up the Ouija board and brought Avi’s cat into the room. The cat has a temperance of extreme laxness, very friendly yet doesn’t really move around too much. After we started playing, the cat started meowing vociferously and pacing back and forth before the TV door, while looking persistently at the duct hole as I have depicted in the image….

Avi’s parents were already sleeping. Nobody was in the basement.

What we asked the Ouija board, and what it “answered” with are mostly irrelevant, mainly due to the fact that after we were done and on the way home, my good friend admitted to me that he and two other guys had fucked with us, intentionally and deliberately pushing the marker toward answers.

But anyway. Apparently we had contacted someone and his/its name was Timothy.

We asked Timothy where he was. “In basement.” So I said I’m going to check it out. Matt, one of the guys, said he’d join me. Now, Matt. He’s a skinhead. White trash, really. Despite the fact that he grew up being very good friends with people of various races (one of us was Indian, and another was Mexican), he professed himself as a KKK/Nazi supporter, dressed like a wigger, and shaved his pate bald. He used to bully me and various others in junior high and throughout high school, and had an aggressive personality that was tempered by a streak of timidity and passivity. He didn’t proclaim his beliefs openly, though. A weird guy. We drifted apart tremendously after high school, and that time at Avi’s house was probably the last time that I really “socialized” with him.

Matt and I went to the basement door. I opened it. Immediately in front of us, as you can see in the drawing, was a green recycle-bin, for disposal of recyclable items. Light from the fluorescent light up on the basement’s ceiling was lighting up the landing.

We saw a shadow pass over the bin for a few seconds, then disappear. It looked like a shadow OF a shadow, as if light was passing through something translucent, not exactly a direct shadow.

Matt and I IMMEDIATELY looked at each other. I asked him, “Did you see that?” “Yeah.” I shut the door, and we walked shakily back into the TV room.

The others had already asked the Ouija board, “how many people are at the top of the stairs?” The board had said “Three.”

We explained what we had seen. The others mostly took it with a grain of salt, but Matt was visibly shaken. His nerves became worse when the Ouija board started talking about Matt, calling him a Nazi, insulting him with things that I’ve long forgotten about. But I remember it was enough to make Matt get up and declare “I’ve HAD IT WITH THIS” and leave. I don’t know why that happened – us boys knew about Matt’s underlying beliefs, and Avi didn’t, we had only just met her, why would the boys bring it out into the open and start insulting Matt like that? Maybe they were being especially malevolent, as they already were manipulating the Ouija board as they confessed to me later – but what the hell was that shadow from? It especially struck me as odd because usually Matt was very self-assertive, dominating and audacious. The board had somehow struck him in the right way to drive him out.

The only way the shadow could’ve appeared was if something had been in the air, something was THAT tall (the basment ceiling was like, 7-8 feet from the ground, and in place JUST out of our sight. That event helped transform my beliefs – 7 years of Baptist christianity had revealed nothing, and that single event has since pushed my beliefs into the understanding that there’s something out there, another realm, possibly, and there are things that we can’t perceive or understand clearly at this current iteration of our senses’ evolution.

I would have dismissed the shadow if it was only me standing there, but Matt and I had seen it at the same time and then looked at each other at the same time.

Anyways, after Matt left, the cat became even more angsty, so we allowed it to flee out of the TV room. We started to stop using the board, and we went home a bit after. Avi became even more antagonistic toward the house afterwards.

Back to Avi’s previous experiences: she told me only a few, but one that stands out in memory is when she found a large bundle of short sticks propping the basement door open when she was tending to errands in the house. Only her father was around, working in his office. On another round past the basement door a bit later, she noticed the bundle had disappeared. She then went to her dad and asked what that bundle was for, it was a bit odd to see something like that in the house. Her dad said, “What sticks? I don’t remember putting anything like that there, we don’t have bundles of sticks in the house either.” When she explained what had happened, he started being quite dismissive, saying that it was nonsense, and when she brought up the idea of something supernatural going on, he became even more dismissive.

A half year later, when Avi and I were dating, her dad told her, upon her asking him what his world/religious-beliefs were, that he didn’t believe in anything except that he knew there was a force beyond our comprehension, not anything like a concept of an omniscient single God, but something else, another dimension, quivering beyond our liminal comprehensive senses.

Also, another event was that one day after Avi had showered and entered her bedroom in her towel, she turned to her bedroom door and saw it closing rapidly, more rapidly than its natural tendency. A overwhelming fear invaded her and she ran to the door, trying to exit before the door shut itself completely. She didn’t make it, and the door slammed in in her face. She then flung it open, her mind rending itself. She stayed out all night after that.

Over the year of my post-Ouija-board-event year-long relationship with Avi, I slept over a lot, but never saw anything odd. The cat was always lax and peaceful. Nothing more. Interesting thing is, I read my first few Ghost Story threads on this forum when I was in her living room, at a computer a few feet away and perpendicular to the basement door. Strangely enough, I didn’t get stricken by horrific feelings of fear during such readings.

Corridor

A few months back I was sitting here at the computer late at night. Sometime around 1am. I forget what I was doing, probably nothing very productive. To my left is the kitchen area, and on the other side of that is the window out onto the porch. The window is about 6 meters away from me, and level with my waist. I keep it open whenever I’m home/awake because my cats like to run around outside and terrorise the neighbourhood dogs and so forth, and the low window is like their cat-door. What generally happens is that they come inside for meals around 11pm and then I shut them in and go to bed, but on this occasion they were unusually late. I wasn’t too worried because they’re fucking cats, going missing is what they do, plus if they were both absent then it seemed likely they were off doing something horrible together and my concern would be better spent on the mice and lizards and possoms.

So it was at this time that I mentioned earlier, with me just messing around on the PC and probably not doing anything special, that I became aware of an intensely strong sense of fear. Not too odd since I suffer from depression/anxiety and I get this shit now and then, but I’m getting better with it so that now there’s usually gotta be some actual trigger before I freak out. And just minutes beforehand I’d been totally fine. The fear continued to intensify until I was shaking and feeling physically ill, and I decided I wasn’t going to be able to get through this one without chemical assistance. So I turned in my chair to face the kitchen (where I keep my medication) and saw a cat in the window.

Even though I was already freaking the fuck out to the point where I wouldn’t have thought a brick to the skull could have distracted me, I sorta jumped because I hadn’t heard this cat hop up onto the sill, and it’d obviously been watching me for a while. And oh boy was it ever watching me. Standing, not sitting like you’d expect a cat to be if it hadn’t gone anywhere for a while, and staring the hell out of me like it was trying to develop laser vision. It sure as fuck wasn’t one of my cats. It wasn’t any neighbour cat I’d ever seen either. It was some skinny, shorthaired thing with a weird reddish-brown sheen and one of those long faces you sometimes see. Bright yellow eyes boring a hole into my head. And the moment I looked directly at this animal, the fear doubled. I almost threw up.

Weirdly, my only coherent thought at that point was not OMG EVIL CAT, but “Oh jesus, my brain has really broken this time, now I’m having horrible panic associations with cats for some reason”. Forgotting that the fear had come before I’d known the cat was there.

It looked at me a bit more, exuding malevolence and terror, and I looked back at it because I was shaking and sick and almost crying, and shock had made me stupid and driven all thoughts of medication clean out of my head. And then it turned around all slinkily while still looking at me, and hopped down off the window out onto the porch and I sorta blinked and went “what the fuck” and it was like shrugging off a hypnotism. “Man, what a totally creepy cat, so glad it’s not mine”.

And of course I still felt like shit so I got up, a bit unsteady on my legs, and got the pills and after taking them I felt better almost straight away. But really, I don’t think they had much to do with that, because these pills generally take like 20 minutes to work and placebo effect has never been that efficient before. I think it was as simple as the cat messing me up, and its removal making me recover.

There’s nothing in this story to really indicate any proof of the supernatural. I do not know what happened exactly. All I can say for certain is that I quit all recreational drug use when I first got depression real bad, and I’ve never seen that animal before or since. Incidentally that’s happened only once before, while looking at a painting in the house of a friend I’d never visited before. Some not-very-interesting broad-stroke pattern or something, maybe featuring flowers, so mundane that I can’t even remember any details except that it featured the colour blue. The terror crept up out of nowhere, and then left within 30 seconds of my leaving the house. A week later I spent the night in that house, and was so horribly ill that my mother had to come pick me up. I felt better shortly after leaving and slept normally after getting home. My friend commented that she’d never seen a person actually turn green before.

My cats turned up again a few hours later. I’d shut the window before I went to bed to deter intruders (and that fucking cat), but I hadn’t been able to sleep so I heard them whining outside. Both together. I think they’d been off hiding somewhere. I doubt it’s related, but it’s still a fact that shortly afterward my most whiny clingy kitty got sick and died of an infected mouth ulcer. The vet said his blood test came up positive for AIDS, adding that it was still really weird for him to not be responding to the treatment and that there had to be some other complication, but she could not figure out what it was.

–more–

All the stories here keep reminding me of my old home, the one I grew up in. I’ve blocked most of my memories from the time I spent there… like, I can remember being at school, and holidaying with friends, and stuff like “we had two dogs” or “I played outside a lot”, but for the life of me I can remember almost zero actual experiences there, whether they were good or bad or fun or boring or anything. It’s like someone went through my memories and carefully wiped almost everything relating to that house, leaving everything else intact.

What I do remember about my childhood in that house is being very, very frightened almost all the time, to the point where I constantly angsted over the unfairness of the distinct lack of fearfulness present in storybook children or the other kids at school. I was six. I’m told that in the previous homes we’d lived in I was more or less normal, but after moving to this one I suddenly developed an intense fear of the dark and of sleeping alone. I always had to sleep with a light on or I would cry all night long. I started avoiding mirrors after dark, and facing them against walls or covering them. My anxiety at night would steadily grow throughout the evening as the dreaded BedTime approached, and would eventually peak into helpless sobbing terror… my mother got into the habit of singing me to sleep each night because it was the only way to get me to calm down enough to actually fall asleep, and after that she had to play music records because I desperately needed the noise. These fears continued longer than most childhood fears, and only wore off somewhere in my early teens when I went all gothy and started thinking that scary shit was totally trendy.

As I was typing this up, one lone memory came to me of lying in my bed while my best friend lay on the folding bed nearby, both listening to the wardrobe creak. The latch wouldn’t quite close properly, and that night it was making a particularly eerie creaking sound for no discernable reason… there was no breeze, no movement in the room, nothing. It would also not creak once the entire time we looked at it, but as soon as we lay our heads back down… CRRRREEEEEAAK. Every. Goddamn. Time. For like half an hour until I wedged a table against it. In restrospect it’s kinda funny.

Pubic Lair

A few summers back I was living with a roommate that was never home and as result all summer random friends would come over. On weekends this meant drinking heavily but during the week fewer people would come over and drinking was usually out so we’d randomly decide to go ghost hunting. I used to take my digital camera and a little digital voice recorder with a professional mic plugged into it and we’d plant it in a remote location and walk away from it and explore then comeback and pick it up before we left.

Now the cool thing was there are 2 old (~1850est. but still used) cemeteries less than a mile walk away. The first was literally 6 blocks away and was owned by the catholic church pretty spooky but very exposed and back light from a warehouse behind it. We’d go there snap a few pics and then walk down the road a ways to the train crossing. The rails diagonally behind the second cemetery and offered a way in without walking the road or jumping the fence. After a half mile walk down the tracks you could cut through the treeline behind the cemetery.

The first thing that I did was walk up to the front where the road is and place my tape recorder on a headstone. I remember it was hot and muggy and pitch black country dark which was intensified by the fact that there was a mist or fog that night. Anyways I booked it back to the back because the front half is viewable from the road. So me and the guys I was with walked around and it was really creepy because we had been there several times and knew the layout but it was so dark and foggy we kept getting lost and loosing our bearings. We thought we heard someone walking out there and seeing lights around the stones but usually I chalk it up to my imagination. After getting pretty creeped everybody wanted to go and I had to beg for a partner to get my PVR. So after a long deliberation I think I got Jeff to go with, we ran and grabbed it and booked back to the tracks and ran most of the way home.

Nothing too spooky till I got to look at the recordings. I love not being a purist and using my PVR because I can look at the waveform for peaks to listen to, thus saving listening for crickets. I saw all the noise up until I put it down and after I picked it up and the rest was silent except for the biggest fucking peak right in the middle of the quiet. I select that spot and listen and it was a tree cracking and falling really loudly. The really creepy part is there were no trees anywhere near the area that I put the mic the closest trees were at least 50 yards away across the road from the cemetery or along the back side even farther away and this was the loudest biggest tree falling noise I have ever heard outside of movie sound effects. Also the fact that if it was a real tree we would have heard it.

I thought it was really weird and creepy but other than showing a few friends nothing came out of it. I still have the files somewhere if I can dig ’em up and someone tells me a good free host I’ll put the one in question up.

“Another story”
About five months after the above story I was driving in a very bad rainstorm and going way to fast for the heavy downpour (about 45) anyways I was on my way to a bar to meet some friends and didn’t know where the place was so I was using my GPS and putting in an address. I look up and the biggest fucking tree ever falls right in front of my car across the road and both shoulders. I slam on the brakes but know I’m going to hit it anyways. The trunk was like five feet wide and I know I’m dead but the moment I hit it, it exploded.

I popped my lf tire and got a huge hunk of tree stuck under the front end and slalomed onto the ditch on the right side of the road and finally came to a stop. Although I fucked up my car really bad I’m ok, so I get out to look at the damage and try to see if I can drive away I’m looking at the tree line on the left side of the road to see where the tree fell from and I hear the SAME EXACT MOTHERFUCKING TREE FALLING NOISE I HEARD IN THE CEMETERY! I look to the right side and realize I am in front of the cemetery in the same area I recorded the sound. The problem is no other tree fell

At the point I realized all this I jumped back in my gimped car locked the door and grabbed my mag light and waited for my brother to get there with a tire and jack before I got out again.

Alfer

When I was a kid we had a large game room in one of our houses. This house was one of many that I lived in, but the only to ever creep me out. The game room was empty except for a closet, and I was only allowed to play in there under the condition that I keep it empty because my parents were about to convert it and didn’t want toys and crap everywhere. If I left that room, I HAD to make sure it was empty.

One night it was just my parents and I in the house, and I was rummaging through the closet to find something to play with. I found this large ceramic pumpkin in a box full of halloween stuff, carried it to the center of the room, and gave it a good look over. My mom called me for dinner, and I remember having a hard time getting it back in the box because of all the packing that was in there, and I had just tried to cram the thing in on top of it. Anyway, I stuffed it in the box and returned it to the closet before going back into the kitchen to eat. Afterwards, I returned to the game room to do something else, and the pumpkin was back in the center of the floor by itself.

I went hysterical and really freaked out. My parents did not do this as a prank, as they were in the kitchen with me while I was outside the room, and they also would have told me that they did it if they did to stop me from going nuts.

That was a weird house.

jidohanbaiki

“My Creepy Bathroom”
There is something wrong with the hall bathroom in my house. I have always had a night time “don’t look in the mirror” policy in that room as you can usually see things moving behind your reflection late at night.

Anyway, the hallway dead ends into the bathroom. From a feng shui perspective, that’s probably not a good thing. To the left is the master bedroom and to the right is my bedroom. From my bed I have a clear view of the bathroom entrance.

I always know when someone I know is going to die because I will see a dark, hazy lump lurking around the bathroom entrance for about a week. Within that week, uncle whoever will finally kick it, so and so’s wife will pass, or maybe a friend will have a miscarriage. I fucking hate this because I don’t see what good it does as it doesn’t prevent a damn thing.

Occasionaly it has been different. One night I looked towards the bathroom and I saw my neighbor Gary standing in the doorway, looking very confused. Then he wasn’t there and I went to sleep, thinking nothing of it. The next day I found out that while his wife was traveling on business, he had gone to bed that afternoon and just didn’t wake up. And his ghost got lost in my bathroom.

But don’t worry about me. I’m used to seeing ghosts in the bathroom and I don’t get creeped out by it until the next day. I’d much rather brave the ghosts and leave my door open in the summer to get the air conditioning.

“Japanese Ghosts”
I lived in the Japanese countryside for a year and it was really haunted. The creepiest thing was the little girl. Once I was finishing a lesson with the elementary kids, and the last thing they do is shake my hand before leaving the room. They make a line and approach me one by one. I was down to the last two kids. I thought the little girl at the end of the line was Reiko, the little shy one, but then I started thinking that she had already shook my hand and left, didn’t she? Well, the second to last boy grabbed my hand and jumped around saying goodbye before running off. Just as he let go of my hand, I turned to greet the last student, but she had disappeared. Maybe it was Reiko and I was just distracted as she made her escape, but from where I was I would have seen her leave.

Other times I have been up in the music room preparing for English class and have heard a little girl giggling. I told myself that it must be a weird echo from the kids in their classrooms. But one time I heard a distinct voice whisper “asobi?” in my ear. It creeped me out bad enough to leave the room for awhile, but I got over it since the little ghost just wants to “play”. I actually feel kinda bad since she obviously wants to be apart of my class.

When I was in the office of that school, I could often feel something running behind the row of desks I sat at, and sometimes my clothing would get tugged at. Eventually I overheard the office ladies mention the ghost, so I told them my experience and they were pretty stunned at what I described as they had experienced similar things.

In my heart, I don’t really believe all this paranormal nonsense. I’m a logical person and a science teacher, damn it. But things happen that I can’t explain, or even begin to figure out so I just go along with it. Although, I notice certain patterns to the phenomena I experience, so I make up tentative rules for how these things work. This is how I cope.

Sometimes dead people visit me in my dreams. When they do this, they have an agenda and get very bossy. One time I met this older woman for a slice of pizza in a cafe that was drawn with pastel chalk on a blackboard. The pizza, her, and the red check table cloth were very real looking though. She did not want the pizza and was looking very impatient. I kept trying to get her to relax and have a slice. She yelled at me saying, “I don’t know where I am!” I thought, fuck this. I’m not getting yelled at in a dream, so I woke up.

The next morning my mom was telling me how a dark figure came to her in the night and she told it to go away. I thanked her for sending it my way and told her my dream. She asked me to describe details of the woman. She was slender, short gray hair, longish face with a pinched expression…okay, how many more details do you need?
“That sounds like Gordon’s wife. She’s been sick for a long time.” my mom said.
Gordon was the old dude who fixed things here and there at the art shop where my mom took painting lessons. My mom called the shop owner that day and found out that his wife had died the day I had the dream.

So now you have an idea of what I have to put up with.

Angry Guacamole

When we lived back at my old house, we and the man across the street tended to all the stray cats in the neighborhood. Feeding them, getting them spayed/neutered, taking them to the vet if they got sick, that sort of thing. There was one cat in particular that I loved, and I called him Bouncer. (I don’t honestly know why, was probably because I got in to the habit of wondering what the cats would look like were they human, and he was a big fucking Siamese-looking cat, so I got the image of a big, asian bouncer in my head. *shrug* )

Sadly, people liked to speed on one of the side streets, and the inevitable happened. We found him laying there, in the street, some jackass had hit him and he’d died instantly. I was distraught, it was late at night, I was already tired, but he needed a proper burial. So I grabbed a shovel, and buried him with a little bowl of food and water. I’m walking out of the back yard, there are no cats around, and I feel a cat brush up against my leg. It actually disturbed the cloth of my jeans, so I know I wasn’t just feeling things. Little dude decided to see me off, I guess. I felt him brush up against my leg outside for a long time, too. He even followed me to where I’m living now.

zoso820

I went to Gettysburg a couple years ago. Many ghost enthusiasts claim the Gettysburg area to be one of the most haunted places in America. While the historical aspect was the main reason I was so excited to go, I was also kind of hoping I’d see some sort of paranormal activity. At one point, my group went up to an old abandoned barn that was used as a field hospital during the battle that a LOT of people died in. The doors were fenced off, but we could glance inside of it. I didn’t get any “feelings of dread” or anything like that. I even took a butt load of pictures all over the place throughout the battlefield; there was no odd or blurry images in any of the pictures that may resemble an otherworldly being, and I remain a non believer.

I’m going to school at WIU, and there’s a lot of talk of hauntings throughout various buildings around campus. I have a few friends who claim to have had encounters. There was a suicide two floors above me a couple weeks ago, and that’s got people a little freaked out too. Still haven’t seen anything though.

Also, my grandma will go to her grave convinced my grandpa visits her from time to time,

If ghosts DO exists, they must think I smell or something, because they always avoid me.

The VP

I worked at three elementary schools in Japan. The vice principal at the school next door to my house was a very nice older woman. She once gave me a jar of ketchup and told me to keep it a secret from the other teachers. Most mornings I would say hello to her on my way to the bus stop as she tended the school’s garden and flower boxes.
One week she wasn’t in the office when I was there to work. I assumed she had a meeting off campus. I didn’t see her in the yard for days after. The next week she was also gone from the office. The head secretary told me that the vice principal had a stroke and was in a coma. Her jacket was still hanging from the back of her chair and her coffee mug and personal effects were still on her desk. It remained that way for weeks and weeks. I felt pretty sad about it and didn’t have much hope for her returning.

I have to pause and tell those of you who don’t know a funny little thing about Japan. Teachers, or staff members at any job really, do not tend to stay at the same branch or campus for more than five years. This is the Japanese passive aggressive way of shuffling crappy employees around and getting new blood. This happens every spring.

So, spring rolled around and the school next door lost three teachers and gained three replacements. Because of this, desks were rearranged, the storage closet was cleaned out and the decor was changed around. The vice principal’s stuff had been removed.

Some nights later, I dreamed that I was walking across the dusty playground towards the front of the school. I could close my eyes and conjure up the scene perfectly right now, I’ve walked that path so many times. From the playground there are stairs that lead to the school entrance and to the side is a long, wide ramp that the catering van drives up to deliver the school lunch to the cafeteria through the windows.

In my dream, a white sedan drove up the the ramp and parked at an odd angle, purposely blocking my path into the school. The vice principal came out of the car and rushed up to me. She grabbed my hands and started speaking to me with urgency in her voice. I could feel it. She was squeezing my hands and shaking them.

I couldn’t understand what she was saying. Despite two years studying Japanese in college, my Japanese isn’t very good. As much as I love the language, I’m just to lazy to pick up more than I can passively. Still, I usually understand Japanese in my dreams because it’s Japanese that my brain is making up. So I was a little confused that I couldn’t understand her. I finally managed to blurt out “wakarimasen”; I don’t understand.

She sighed and said “hatarakitai!” I had to think about that one for a minute. She was impatient. “HA-TA-RA-KI-TA-I!” she resorted to speaking loudly and slowly for the foreigner’s benefit. Hang on a second… “I want to work?” Is that what she’s saying?

So she wants to go back to work, but what am I supposed to do about it? I lead her into the entrance. She put her shoes in the shoe cabinet changed into her slippers and wandered about. I left her there. She looked confused and sad.

I never found out if she passed away, but I figured someone would have told me and I would have been expected to attend the funeral since they are a big deal out in the countryside. I can only assume that she was stuck in her coma, very confused and really wanting to get back to her job, so badly that her last resort was to contact the dumb gaijin.

Out of all the inexplicable experiences I’ve had, this has been the only one to make me this sad every time I think about it. That poor woman.

Grnegsnspm

I was going to college at the time and was living in a hotel since actual housing was pretty scarce. The room itself never seemed haunted or anything to me and there was really only the one thing. Of course, that was enough to make me sleep at a friend’s place for a couple night before going back.

Now, the room I was living in was nice enough. It was one large room that had a mirror and sink inset on one end of the room with the bathroom to the side of that. My bed was at the other end of the room so that when I turn on my side I can see into the wash-room/alcove on one side and the window/entrance on the other.

So, one night, I wake up suddenly and am facing the window/enterance. I hadn’t had a nightmare or anything but my eyes flew open and my breathing was shallow. It felt like every hair on my body was standing on end. It felt like I was having a panic attack. It felt like I was being watched. I kept trying to calm myself down while at the same time not really daring to turn and look behind me.

“Nothing is there. You know nothing is there. You don’t need to turn over and look because you know nothing is there. No. No, you have to look just to prove you’re being stupid and then you can go back to sleep.”

So I turn and look and there was…nothing. I rationally think that this should be helping but my anxiety just stays at this fever pitch. That was when I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, that I really was looking at nothing. In the back of the alcove, right near where the room splits to go into the bathroom was this nothing. Not just darkness but a complete absence of everything. Imagine a man with no head or feet, shoulders slumped and you’ll get a rough outline of what it looked like.

This would have been enough to freak me out but I could have chalked it up to vision or lighting or something. But then it moved. Slowly it seemed to glide forward and moved out from the alcove. I wanted to stop watching it or say something but I felt frozen. I just layed there and watched this monolith of nothing move through my room.

It ended up moving toward the wall and glided right through it. I think the thing that unnerved me most was that I didn’t feel anything from it. It didn’t seem aggressive or sad or confused or anything like that. Honestly, I don’t think it even noticed me. I have, on a few occasions since, woken up like this and felt like there was something there. I don’t turn to look anymore.

PestiferousTrollop

There is only one place thats ever produced true to god chills from me, a friend’s retirement cabin out at the end of long dirt road that you get on from another long dirt road etc etc. Its in the mountains of southern VA, and his place is about 1/3rd of the way up of a mountainside. With the exception of one guy who lives literally 20-30 min away, the place is very much secluded.

First time I went there was to do some camping, the friend who owned to property encouraged me strongly to just sleep in his guest room, but me and my buddies wanted to camp so we did, hiked about 3 miles to a spot just below the ridgeline and setup camp, and as soon as it started to get dark it felt really god damn odd out there. I camp plenty, even solo, so it was really strange to me. It wasn’t fear, so much as I just felt really awkward, like being in a room I didn’t belong. We ate, cleaned up camp so we had as few delicious smells to attract critters as possible, and started drinking and getting ready to sleep, the whole time it just feels really fucking weird. During the night I awoke a couple times to rustles, normal camping stuff, and just brushed it off. Next morning when I got up our gear was scattered everywhere, but none was broken, packs had been unclasped, but not torn into, and our food bag which was hung up a little ways from camp was untouched. Thats a little odd, since with the exception of humans, nothing shoulda been in that camp that cared about our bags. But thats not whats truly fucking scary, my buddies bag has three dead fucking squirrels in it. We’re fucking shitting bricks at this point, so we hightail it back to my friend’s cabin and tell him what happened. He doesn’t even raise an eyebrow, just tells us he got a groundhog delivered last night. He goes on to tell us he has small game delivered to his porch once or twice ever couple of weeks, once even while he had his neighbor over for dinner they found a few squirrels when he showed him to the front door, delivered while they were in the house talking, eating, and drinking. The neighbor has had stuff dropped off too.

A few weeks later when I was visiting again the other weirdest shit happened, occasionally a formation of jets will fly over with full afterburners, Ive only seen it once, but it was something to behold at 9 o’clock at night, unfortunately about two seconds after the roar died down, something down in the valley let out a roar/screech that sounds disturbingly similar to the planes, including volume, though that could be a function of distance. Regardless, sure enough, come morning there is another fucking groundhog.

I have no idea whats in those fucking woods, but never anywhere else have I had shit like that happen. Also, none of the animals were killed by with tools, all had snapped necks or backs.

Considering they just found a new species of fish in West Virginia, I wonder what the fuck else is out there.

Pitnicker

My brother is a heroin addict. Years ago, when I had more faith in him, I let him into my house for a visit. The next night, after he had left, I was about to leave to go to the store, and I noticed my wallet was missing. I immediately knew what was up, and hopped in my car to head to his place and confront him.

He lived in the next city over, and the fastest way there was a lonely stretch of freeway. I got on the freeway and went south, the whole time working up the courage to call him out and rehearsing what I was going to say to him. I was so bound up in my own thoughts that I hardly noticed I was totally alone on the freeway with only the black night around me.

Something drew me from my thoughts—a primal intuition. I was suddenly struck with the feeling that I was not alone on this journey. It’s funny how we can get lost in our modern lives, distancing ourselves from basic survival instincts, then suddenly be sucked right back into our animalistic ways. In an instant the thoughts of my brother and his selfishness were thrust from my mind and I was there, in the present, aware of everything around me.

And I was not alone.

Even speeding along well over the speed limit, there was something with me, stalking me. In my periphery, I saw it, and glanced out my driver’s side window. Striding along the stretch of grass which spanned the median, a hulking shadow kept pace with my car. A huge black wolf dashed through the darkness, intent on following me.

As soon as I saw it my eyes darted back to the road. I knew it wasn’t possible but every one of my senses told me that this impossibility was very real, here right now. Logic goes right out the window when threat defies it. It didn’t matter that no predator on this planet can run at eighty miles per hour, because this night, at this instant, there was one, and I was its prey.

I pressed the gas and flew toward the next bend, hoping to see some headlights or taillights or anything with any semblance of reality. The night loomed thick outside my window, so dark that I couldn’t see the beast within it. But as I pushed forward, I couldn’t help another glance out the window.

The black wolf was still there, with little effort staying abreast of my car. As I looked upon it, it turned its head and looked upon me. Our eyes met, mine were wide and white and its were as black as its body. Its gaze was one of pure malevolence, of hatred untempered by any morals or remorse—how a beast must look upon its prey. In that panic-stricken moment I was sure I was going to die.

Then it broke pursuit. One instant, it was astride my car, the next, its black body disappeared into the night around it. As soon as I was sure it was gone, I breathed a breath I hadn’t known I had been holding. Suddenly the world was back to the way it normally was. My face flew forward and I pressed the gas pedal, eager to leave the sight in the realm of memory.

When I arrived at my brother’s place I found him overdosed in the bathroom; without a word I left him. I took surface streets back the whole way home.

Telivarn

I don’t really know how I feel about ghosts, but I know I have had two things happen to me that shook me up pretty badly when I was younger and still make it hard to sleep if I think about them too hard.

I grew up in dairy farm Upstate New York, think Adirondack region but not on top of the mountains. All my friends lived on windy back roads and half their properties were either corn fields or woods. I was around thirteen and my best friend at the time had this large half-built home that her father was working on by himself slowly on a rise in the center of the property near a small stream.
The family was large, something like seven kids, and they always seemed to have a ton of pets to keep the children company. At the time this story happened however, their beagle had just been hit and killed by a driver on the road in front of their home, and so for the next few months the only pets in the house were a few hamsters the twin boys had. I was good friends with the youngest girl, and so was over spending the night one night when I woke up feeling uneasy. I chalked it up to sleeping in someone else’s home and decided to walk to the kitchen down the hall and get a glass of water.
I get halfway down the hall and hear a sharp click click click noise from the kitchen. I don’t really take much notice and keep going, the noise kind of speeds up, then stops all together. I get to the doorway of the kitchen, see a glint of light, and turn to check out what it was. There was a big window in the kitchen so the light filtered in and you could make out the shapes of the objects in the room.
It was the light reflecting off a pair of animal eyes. What they were connected to was the exact dog that had died a week before. The clicking was it’s nails on the linoleum.
I ran full speed back down the hallway and dove under the covers and pretty much never slept over there again.

The other time is also a night story, but this was a few years ago in 2003. I was staying in an apartment with my sister and her fiancee at the time that was a pretty nice one in a brick building directly over an eye doctor’s place not too far from college. I didn’t have a bed so I slept on one of those awful black metal walmart futons folded up like a couch due to space restraints.
That night I had just laid down to read a bit, given up, and shut the light off with my back to the folded up part of the futon. Suddenly, right in my ear, the most angry voice I have ever heard in my life says “TELIVARN. GET THE FUCK UP.”
I have no idea how I did this, I think it was just my brain not knowing how to react to being so scared because there was no one in front of me or even home at the time, but I slowly turned over so I was facing the back of the couch and forced myself to sleep after several hours of trying not to pee myself.

twid

My two older brothers and I lived with my mom and dad in a smallish house, two bedrooms downstairs and a finished attic with a small landing at the top of the stairs and a largish open area. My brothers and I all shared the upstairs as our group room. The house was pretty old and not particularly well maintained, and the wood stairs going up from the ground floor to the attic were really creaky and pretty narrow.

I was about 8-9 years old and one night I was sleeping upstairs. My middle brother was also up there sleeping and my oldest brother was out and about. At some point during the night I awoke to the sound of someone coming up the stairs. It was strange because they were coming up very, very slowly, like maybe 10 seconds on each step, with each step slowly going CREAK, CREAK, CREAK. I think I must have thought my oldest brother was trying to come up and not wake us or something, and I decided to get up and greet him at the top of the stairs.

When I got to the top of the stairs and looked down, I didn’t see my brother. Instead I saw a tallish man (seems like it was a man), thin, with square shoulders, about halfway up the stairs. He was wearing a hat with a wide round brim. It was dark out, but we lived on a city street so there was a little ambient light coming in from the window at the top of the stairs, but what was absolutely terrifying was that that man was darker than the night. He was absolutely black, like he was sucking in all the light around him. I remember his hat brim lifting slightly as if he was looking up at me.

…. and then I woke up, and it was morning, and I was scared out of my skin. My middle brother was awake too, and I told him about my dream. His eyes got kind of wide and he told me that he had the exact same dream.

Now I’ve got my theories about what happened (someone did come up the stairs to check on us and my brother and i had the same dream from the noise, my brother just said he had the same dream to mess with me, etc.) but it still creeps me out to think about it, and I’m still a little hesitant around dark stairs.

hambbq

So, I grew up in your classic “suburb on the brink of ghetto” town. There were always tons of kids my age to play with, and often enough, we would ban together to explore the “forbidden” areas of the neighborhood. For reference, I was about ten at the time.

This included the abandoned houses at the top of my street. Notice the plural. There was one that even the older kids in Jr. High were afraid to go in to. So, one day after kicking ass at kick ball, the twins that lived down the road and I decided to forgo all sense and go into the house.

The house was turn of the century style, with a large stained glass window on the north wall. It was literally one of the largest houses in the neighborhood. The front porch was completely boarded up. Large two-by-fours blocked off the veranda, and the holes in the floor didn’t look too appealing to walk over. We walked through the clay yard to the back. Because the house sat on a hill, the rear entrance was situated higher.Scaling up the back of the house was a large staircase, leading up to what was the back porch. All that was left of it was the stairs and some debris at the bottom.

As apprehensive as we all were, no one would back down. We were on a mission and an incredible sugar high. This was going to happen. Under the porch debris was the entrance to the basement, much in the style of a storm cellar. (For those who have no idea what I’m talking about). We pulled off all the wood and dead leaves to find it not only unlocked, but completely door less. At this point my child-mind was telling me this was about to be the worst day of my life.

Once inside, it was dusty. Very dusty. I inhaled decades of neglect with every breath. As my eyes adjusted it was clear that the house had not been empty all those years as common school-yard lure let on. It appeared that the house was abandoned, as if the residents got up and left, leaving all worldly possessions behind them. Aside from the inch-thick coating of dust it looked like a normal basement. Boxes of Christmas decorations under the stairs, a workbench littered with crafting tools, the usual crap. But there was one thing in that room that unsettled me most of all. There was a dumbwaiter against the far wall. I looked into it and felt all the life in me being sucked out. I couldn’t look away. Inside that black box was a vast nothingness. The twins we heading up stairs and had to shake me out of it.

On the second floor of the house was more stuff, although it was now more evident that these were artifacts of a different time. A chandelier hung from the foyer, completely covered with cobwebs. It was eerie none the less, but I was glad to be back above ground, where sunlight filtered in through the high windows. In the main room (guessing it was used as an entertainment room) was a sofa covered with plastic and another inch of dust. The rest of that room was empty, save for a large piano. Nikki, one of the twins, tried to play it, only to discover the strings had either broken or the hammers rotted away.

We walked beck to the kitchen, and upon turning the corner was that dumbwaiter again. And I stared right into it. despite the light coming in, it was still the nothing-black as it was in the basement. Then we heard it. A single note. It resounded out from the previous room. I tried to turn away from the blackness in the wall, but I couldn’t. Again, another note.

Danni let out a wail and grabbed my arm. As she pulled me away I could not stop looking into the nothingness. The notes kept playing. No song, just random notes.

TombsGrave

When I was a kid I saw a UFO in the skies over Dallas; a little shining white orb hanging in the sky, lazily looping forward. I looked away for a bit to see something else that caught my interest, and when I looked back, the light was gone–seemingly impossible, as the sky was clear and cloudless, and there was no way a normal plane could’ve moved fast enough to completely disappear from view in a few seconds.

More recently: I was hanging with friends at the house of one of their friends, a dilapidated old house with a hanging tree out front. It’s called a hangin’ tree because it’s very obvious from the bend of one of the stronger branches that people were hung from there a while back. I was standing on the shadow-drenched porch, looking out into the cool night, when I felt something cold and slick slither around my legs. I look down–nothing there.

Most recently, I hit the local haunted cemetery with my friend John in order to test if the stories of it being haunted were true. The big one was the little chapel in the center of the graveyard. Supposedly, if you left a bible there and left it open to anywhere–the middle preferably so that it doesn’t close on you–then leave it there for an hour, the ghost haunting the chapel will turn it to the last page of the Book of Revelation. We left a bible there, lit some candles, John had the excellent idea to play “Tubular Bells” and the Halloween theme on the dusty-ass piano… Yeah, he didn’t help the atmosphere any. The chapel was essentially a single room, the air so still you could feel it part around you as you walked around, with a pulpit and a cloak room, and boarded-up doors at the back. Those doors were odd, because judging from the size of the place, there was literally nothing that could fit back there. There was a solid wall on the back of the church, so they weren’t even rear entrances. The other weird thing was the cloak room, which had weird damage to the walls that looked like a bas relief of a wriggly monster trying to force its way through.

We checked the place and left to explore the rest of the cemetery. There was an unusually large number of dead children and entire families dead in the same year buried there. Most of the other stories about the place–the ghostly noises or the apparitions–checked out false. But an hour later, we went back into the chapel. Once again: there was no wind in the chapel, and there wasn’t even any wind outside. But the doors at the back banged as if blown by wind, and indeed the bible had been gently flipped from Psalms to the last page of the Book of Revelation. Needless to say we left. No, John never left my sight and screwed around. We just had a nice little supernatural experience.

Master_Jay

I don’t know why, we both (my girlfriend and I) experience supernatural stuff but she still gets freaked out when I tell her my stories.

Anyway, I told her about the time I was alone at my house at 2 AM. My mom was gone and went to a fat chick dance (I’m serious… *sigh* ) So it left me with the house to myself. I was laying in my bed, watching anime, and I heard some noise in the bathroom, which is right beside my bedroom. At first, I thought it was my dog so I ignored it.

A few minutes later, I hear my dog growling. Now my dog is a nice dog, although he’s a big Akita/German Shepherd mix. He sleeps with my pet duck, and takes care of my pet bunny, so I’ve never heard him growl like this before. It was vicious, low rumbling sound that freaked me out. I figured he either found a rat or someone was trying to break.

I ran out of my room and saw my dog just staring and growling at the bathroom. I looked at my bathroom and saw the door closed but the light on. Now to be honest, I don’t know why I didn’t run my ass off at this time but oddly, I was more curious than scared. I walked towards the door and knocked on it softly. Nothing. I do it again and this time, I hear a girl give out a small whimper.

At this point I was pretty freaked out. Someone was in my house, possibly some druggy prostitute or a feminine drug dealer. I really wanted to run but at the same time, I didn’t know what to do. Never once did calling the police enter my mine for some reason. I thought the only thing to do at the time was to confront the would be female burgler.

My dog was still growling at the door, but I slowly opened the bathroom door. What I saw didn’t necessarily scare me in the sense of “OMG a monster” but more so like “WTF is going on??”

It was my niece, nude, age 5 years old, sitting in the bath tube staring at the drain.

My first thought was “Oh God, what happened to her?” I thought maybe someone did something to her and she came back here or something so I was pretty much in shock.

She looked at me with a blank expression on her face. She extended her arm towards me, making a motion like she wanted me to pick her up. I went forward to pick her up when my dog bite me.

Actually, more like he launch himself on my foot and was literally pulling me back. He was literally bitting and pulling me so hard that to this day, if you look closely, I still have a slight scar on my foot. (I’ll see if I can get a picture of my stinky feet!)

I was screaming and cursing my dog when, with the pain of him pulling me back and fighting to keep balance, it finally hit me that something was seriously wrong. (Other than my nude niece in my bathroom that is)

My niece was age 11. This girl was 4 or 5.

I looked back at the little girl, and screamed in a high pitched sissy voice. The scene took a turn for the worse. Her wrists were cut, and the bathtube was covered in blood. She was looking at me desperately, holding her arms out, and drops of tears coming out of her eyes.

I continued screaming and my dog finally let me go. The little girl opened her mouth and let out a scream I’ll never forget. If you’ve seen the movie Ghost, it was like the scream of those demons, except much louder, deeper, and you could feel it vibrate all the way down your stomach. I pray to God I’ll never hear it in my lifetime.

I took off running out my house, and into the night with no shoes on, bloody foot, my dog following me, and that little girl screaming outside my door. I was in my pajamas but I didn’t stop running until until I was far away from my house and her screams.

To shorten this up, I went back to the house because I was a pussy and had no where else to go. I ended up waiting for my Mom to get home and she eventually took me to the ER. (I told her I cut myself while knocking over the table. No need to get my dog in trouble) I still live in this house but nothing like this has ever happened again luckily. I’ve had different ghost things happen to me, and to a lesser extent, my girlfriend, but this one will always be the most scariest.

Obnoxious Brit

I’ve seen and heard a few weird things over the years, though they were mostly just catching something out of the corner type affairs. However, a few seemed pretty inexplicable.

Like one time I was at a friend’s house at christmas time a few years back (I think it was early december). We’d been assembling and painting some Warhammer models, and it was getting kind of late. Since his house was only a twenty minute or so walk away, I figured I’d simply walk it and not bother my parents with giving me a lift home.

I set out, saying goodbye as I step out. It’d been snowing, and the air was completley still, it made the kind of silence were you could hear a pin drop on the other side of the road.

As I set off though, I could hear some music coming from the house opposite my friend’s. I can remember the tune exactly, it was Rudolf the red nosed reindeer, but there was something wrong with it. I had a hard time thinking up a decent description, but there was an edge to the notes, if you will. It was a hint of not being right, and it made me feel nervous and edgy to listen to.

I scuttle down the road a bit, and the music faded with the distance, as one would expect. Just as it faded from earshot, something happened which scared me shitless.

It jumped.

The horrid music, which was all but unaudible by now, suddenly stopped and started playing from the house directly next to me, from the exact same part it had left off. I don’t feel ashamed in saying that made me feel actual fear.

I tried to put it from my mind and kept going, but every time I was getting far away enough to have the sound start to fade from earshot, it’d stop and start from somewhere right next to me.

There’s two ways to get to my house from my friend’s, one that goes down some tree-lined avenues, and another that goes past a main road. Up until now I’d been walking along the avenues, but turned around when the music hopped again. I don’t really know why, but I just wanted to get away from this strange sound.

As I walked along the main road, it kept following me, playing from the house closest to me, never missing a beat. Another thing that made me feel unerved was that the road I was walking along is a busy road. Even at the wee hours of the morning traffic along it is pretty common. I was walking along it for something like fifteen minutes and didn’t see a soul, no cars, no engine noise and no rear lights in the distance.

As I thought about that, something in me broke and I sprinted the rest of the journey. Still, I could hear this music coming from a house, fade, then reappear, loud as anything, coming from the nearest domicle. As I openened my gate to bolt inside, it was coming from the house next door neighbours house, which was empty at the time as it was a student house, of which all the students had gone away from Christmas.

I didn’t sleep a wink that night, even though the music abruptly ceased as soon as I got in.

The Crimson Binome

One night a few years back, I was getting ready to go to bed after watching Conan. My room was the basement, which is mostly finished, we have a hot tub in a separate room adjacent to mine with a doorway and a little window in the dividing wall. It costs too damn much to run the bloody thing so I used it as a storage room for my various childhood crap I wasn’t using. Anyway, my dog Kess liked to sleep on my bed with me at the time, so she curled up beside me and started dozing off.

Except for this one Monday night, though. Kess got on the bed as usual, but she became totally awake and began clearly staring at something in the other room, through the window. So I get up and poke my head in and look around; nothing. I go back to bed, turn out the lights and start dozing off. A few minutes later I hear Kess start to growl, very softly. By now I’m starting to get freaked because what the shit does she see in there that I don’t? I’m not a superstitious person by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m usually pretty oblivious to my surroundings. When my dog starts to get pissed, that’s a pretty good indication that something isn’t right.

I get up again, stick my hand through the doorway and turn on the light in that room. Nothing, but Kess is still staring right through that damn window at something. I ended up leaving the light on in that room all night, for all the fucking good it did me, still didn’t get much sleep. When I finally did wake up the next morning, I found that Kess was now laying down normally… except she was still staring through that window. I ended up being late to school because I stayed with her for a while to try and calm her down. When I tried to pick Kess up and move her, she squirmed out of my hands and walked in front of me on the bed. In fact no matter where I moved in the room, she would remain in front of me, as if she were trying to protect me from something.

I ended up going to school, and when I came back downstairs to relax, I found that Kess was still watching that window into the other room. By now I’m really worried, since my dog normally acts like she’s got something between ADD and AI rampancy. I grabbed some cardboard I was planning on using for an art project and covered the window, hoping that would somehow unfuck the situation. No dice, Kess was still staring intently at the window. She knew there was something in that room, and since she was still periodically growling, I knew she didn’t like what she was seeing. Moreover I was really freaked out that she seemed to be acting as if there was some threat she had to protect me from. This was really uncharacteristic behaviour for my best friend.

This goes on for a week, until Friday night hits. Suddenly in the middle of the night, Kess jumps off my bed and starts barking madly at the other room. At this point I haven’t gotten a good night’s sleep in seven days, and I had an exam in only a few more hours. I was more pissed off than scared, so in a groggy haze of irritation I whipped the covers off my bed, stomped over to the window and yelled into the other room:

“Quit fucking with my dog, you slice of shit!”

I very quickly became aware of what I had just done, and was overcome with a visceral feeling of absolute terror. Kess’s barking changed in tone but not intensity, she was now standing prone close to the stairs out of the basement, barking desperately at me; she wanted me to come with her and get the hell out of there. I turned on my heel and booked it past my bed, my shelves of Transformers figures, and flew up the stairs with my loyal dog. I slammed the basement door shut behind me and flung one of the chairs from the dining room table in front of it. We ran into the nearby living room and hid behind the couch.

After what seemed like an eternity, I heard a single, solid bang from the basement. I went to wake my mother on the top floor, who apparently had heard none of this. She went back to sleep, thinking I was just being nutty (thanks, bitch) so Kess and I were left to sit in the dark on the living room couch. When morning came I tried again to tell my mother what happened, she only stared at me blankly with a disinterested stare for a minute and then went to work. (Thanks again, worthless bitch.) I decided not to go to school that day, and instead opted to grow some balls and venture back into the basement with all the lights on. I peaked down the stairs, and found that my Transformers were strewn about all over the floor, as if someone had knocked over the little shelving unit they were situated on. The cardboard piece I had placed over the window into the other room was exactly where I had dropped it after I ripped it off, only now it had a fist-sized hole punched through it.

Whatever this thing was, it was fucking with my dog, it was fucking with my shit, and it was fucking with me. I spent the next half hour screaming at the top of my lungs for this thing to get out of my house, punching the walls and generally making an insane ass of myself. When I got tired of that, I started mocking it; making fun of the fact that it could only get to me through my dog and my possessions. “How does it feel to be a shitty Poltergeist? You think I’m that fucker from Coach?” I cried. I spent the rest of the day just giving this thing shit, and eventually I picked up my Transformers and put them back where their belonged and went upstairs, exhausted.

That night, I went back into the basement with the intent of reclaiming my former sleeping habits. Kess followed me into the basement, and stood in the middle of the room. She looked around, casually sniffed the air, and then hopped up onto my bed. She curled up and began to doze off as usual. I took this to mean that whatever was in that other room had finally decided to shove off, either because I hurt it’s feelings or bored it to death with my rediculous behaviour that day. Even though it’s been a few years since this all happened, I get jittery when Kess sees a squirrel or something in the back yard through a window.

Willfrey

I grew up in a rural area of Idaho, there were all sorts of creepy places, like the closed down woodmill, the abandoned silver mines, all sorts of ‘somebody died here’ places, old cemetaries where headstones are just unmarked rocks, lots of odd stuff happening.

Our house was on a stretch of highway 12 twenty five miles outside of where I went to school (Kooskia). My neighborhood was all state housing, since the small town I lived in was such a remote location the state would let you live in the housing essentially rent and bill free. The winters would bring lots of snow and highway 12 was a critical pass over the Bitteroot mountains into Montana.

Anyhow, a road forks off from the highway and goes up behind my house to two trailer pads. I’d climb up a steep part of the mountain (that was essentially my back yard) to this road, the land flattened out here and I’d go across into the thick woods. There was a stream I’d usually play around, I’d build dams and forts and bridges, or just hike around. One day I climbed much higher on this mountain, and when I turned around I looked down a face of the slope and was able to see over a rise in the terrain, and down the hillside beyond this rise was a flatter area.

In this flatter area I saw the moss-covered roof of an old well house. My curosity got the better of me so I set back down the hillside.

I didn’t usually hike around this area, there were a lot of blackberry bushes (thorny vine-like bushes) and other brush that made it a pain in the ass, but having seen the wellhouse I had to explore. I used my hiking stick and began wacking all the foliage, clearing myself a path. I got through about five or six yards and it cleared out a little.

It looked very old, the paint was chipped, the roof looked to be more or less rotted through in a few places, and it sagged in the center. I approched but immideately froze, I heard something back from the blackberry bushes rustling around. I figured it was probably a grouse or some other small animal, so I picked up a rock and threw it at the bush for good measure. Nothing.

I shrugged it off and walked around to the other side, and saw something pretty disturbing. There was an old iron post in the ground with a chain attached to it, and attached to the other end of the chain was the collar of a dead dog. It looked to be from last year, and something had already got at it (probably a cayote). The skin was all tight against the bones and the coarse gray fur hung in patches. I stood right where I rounded the corner and stared at the corpse, who’s hollow eye sockets appeared to stare directly at me.

I recognized this dog as being my neighbor’s. Johny was my age and this was his dog, Pepper. He had told me the dog went missing, he figured a cougar or something killed it. His neighbor, Ross, hated this dog becuase it always got into everybody’s garbage, especially his. I guessed this was his handy work, he probably took it to this face of the mountain and shot it so they wouldn’t hear.

At the time I didn’t know this was a wellhouse, it just looked to be an old, windowless shack painted beige. It had large ominous double doors, and a rusty chain and padlock ran through the doorhandles to keep it shut. I was still a little creeped out by the dog so I decided to head home.

I didn’t think about it that much and I didn’t revisist the wellhouse intil several years later.

I was probably 15 or 16 at the time, and I stopped building forts and started hunting small game. I would use my father’s 12 gauge shotgun and look for all the grouse, squirrles and rabbits in the hills. I was walking my normal trail up where I used to build my forts when I heard a dog barking. I thought it was possibly one of Johny’s dogs or a cayote, so feeling safe with my shotgun I seek ot where it had come from.

I had more or less forgot about the wellhouse, but when I climbed the small rise and saw the crest of the roof I immideately remembered, and I felt very unsettled. The blackberry bushes had died since I’d last been there, and waist-high ferns and grown in everywhere. I remember raising my shotgun as I rounded the corner of the wellhouse, thinking that the undead dog would lunge at the intruder.

Instead I didn’t see the carcass at all. The post and the chain were still there, and attached to the chain was the dog’s collar. I reasoned that it was probably cayotes dragging it away, but there were no bones left behind, and how did they shimmy the collar around the dog’s head?

I then noticed that the doors of the shack were no longer chained shut. I pulled on one of the doors, it opened about a foot, but it sagged so badly on the hinges and was too heavy to pull it back with just one hand, and there was no way in hell I was setting down my shotgun. I tried to open the other door but it wouldn’t budge.

I poked my head inside, it was pretty dark but there was some sunlight coming down from the holes in the roof, my eyes acclimated themselves and could see there was a large cement ring. Picture the well in the movie The Ring, prety much the same thing, but this one didn’t have a lid.

Something snapped a branch outside, and I quickly spun around and lifted my shotgun, there was definately something about fifty feet away in the dense underbrush, I could see the ferns swaying as it moved away from me. I stood there frozen, my heart racing, my finger on the trigger.

When my blood cooled I set out back home, and I never visited that wellhouse again. When I woke up for school the next morning I walked out to the bus stop and something got into our garbage last night and scattered it everywhere. Weird.

Should be sleeping

I’m stationed in a backwoods little German post called Illesheim. And when you are a married soldier waiting for your spouse to get here, you don’t stay in the nice barracks. You stay in, what is called “the thrift store”. Because, in fact it sits on the second story of the post thrift store.

It’s a very old building and, like many other buildings here, was in fact occupied by Nazi’s at one point. That very fact messed with my head sometimes. Across the street from the tiny PX is the door painted shit brown with various peeling shades of latex paint. I was given a key for that door, but the paint had dribbled over, and settled in the keyhole from whenever someone on extra duty slogged the last coat on. Once you force the door open there’s a creepy utilitarian cement stair case with a hand rail and alternating shades of rust and the same shit brown latex paint from the door.

Once you ascended the cement staircase, you emerge at the corner of an “L” shaped hallway. I’m pretty sure it was a converted office, but I didn’t mind it. The three other guys and I that shared the room had cordoned off our individual sections with the surplus of extra wall lockers in the hall.

My problem was never with the room, or the people in it. I hated the bathroom. I never felt right in there. No one ever took showers at night. And when you had to piss at night, you HURRIED.

After waking up with a full bladder from plenty of beers, I was cursed with not only the need to mobilize myself to relieve my bladder, but I had an awful case of the beer shits. I stumbled down the hall, the lights flickered like they always did, and the institutional grey paint of the walls seemed to vibrate with each flash. I ignored the shapes that my mind imagined in the dark inbetween the flickerings.

I looked into the bathroom, it was dark. Despite SSG Smith, leaving a big note next to the light switch stating that If it was ever turned off there would be “repercussions and concussions”. I switched it on, and headed for toilet desperate to releive myself in all ways, and then…BAM! Someone had slammed one of the doors to the shitters. “Fuck! You scared me you prick!” I said.

After the slam I heard a voice that wasn’t a cry or a laugh, it just sounded deperate as it said, Ah Haaaaaaaaaaaaaah……….

First thought, Someone broke up with their girlfriend, and is wallowing in sorrow in the dark on the shitter. I pissed them off with the light. I expected to find some drunken asshole crying over a picture of his now ex lover drinking himself stupid. Still having to releive myself in both ways, I looked at each and every stall. No one in the stalls. Not one of them locked. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. If someone was in there, I would have seen them leaving. there’s just no other way out of there.

I didn’t know what the fuck it was, but my full bladder, and clenched sphincter begged me to rationalize it. So I did. It might have been a pipe knocking or someone in the next room whining.

I sat down to relieve myself and started thinking. “There’s no other rooms around here. The other side of the wall is an old converted Hangar that’s used for storage now. there’s no pipes overhead here, and that sure sounded like a stall door slamming.”

Just as before, although this time with my pants around my ankles and my ass not completely wiped, I heard…BAM! It was definitely a stall door slamming. I ran out of there, with shit dripping down my leg. And someone was crying at me as I ran out the bathroom door. It was the kind of voice people make if they’re pretending to be retarded. I didn’t dare turn around to see. I went to my room and woke up the only other guy who was in our room that night!

“Under! Under! Wake the fuck up man, there’s someone in the Bathroom!”

He looked at me all puzzled

“So?”

“No, dude, they’re fucking with me. I tried to take a dump and they’re wailing and banging shit around”

I was the private, He was a specialist. He got out of bed to see what this dumb ass private was talking about. We went to the bathroom, the lights were off again. He reached inside for the switch, they would not turn on. We both looked at each other, Neither of us would go in, both of us understanding why. He had heard shit in there too before, and was just as freaked out as I was. Just to check, we opened the fuse box. All of them clicked over properly. I cleaned myself with field wipes, and slept restlessly that night. The only comfort I seemed to have was that the weirdness was confined to the bathroom.

The next few weeks I spent in there, I never went near that bathroom except for bright and early in the morning. Even then, always hurrying. It was one more reason I was glad when my wife and kids arrived.

Eventually, they stopped putting people from my unit up there. We handed over keys to the other Battalion here, and I drive by there sometimes, and see the bathroom lights flicker from the road, just glad I never have to go in there again.

Vaseline Vassal

The first one is apperently pretty common, but hasn’t occured for many years for me. During the time that I was 10-15, I would hear someone calling my name whenever I began walking down the hall from my room (And it only ever happened walking down from that hallway). Now this voice always seemed so familiar to me, though I could never quite place it. But thankfully, it was always friendly sounding. In fact, it was one that actually made me excited for some reason I could never truely figure out. Anyway, it happened periodically throughout that span of 5 years, most of the time when I was totally alone, and others when my mom was downstairs doing landury (who swears she never called me). Honestly, it might very well be my brain fucking around with me, but the thing I could never figure out (other then who was possibily calling me) was the feeling of joy and excitement I would get upon hearing it.

The second one freaked me the loving hell out. It was in the middle of spring, around three years ago, and was late at night and dark out. I was dicking around in my room doing random things when the door bell rung. Since I was the only one there I went to answer it, but when I opened the door, no one was there. I just thought it was one of the neighbour kids was having a good laugh or something. Then, on the way upstairs, the phone rang. I pick it up, again, no one there. Again, odd, but nothing huge right? The kicker comes when I walked back into my room. Clear as fucking day, there is the full face, and hand prints in the fog imprint of someone looking into my window! You know when someone breathes on the window creating fog? Then you can draw pictures in it or something? This is what this was. Except, it was the face and hands of a person, peering into my window. The detail was intense, I could even see the strands of hair surrounding the head. The face, for what it’s worth looked decidedly male in the fog. As you can imagine, I almost screamed, but managed to hold it down to a peep of surprise. The foggy face remained, which freaked me ever more out as the fog is SUPPOSE to fade. I think I stared at the thing for close to 5 minutes before I finally mustered up the courage to go over to the window. I am not sure what made me do it, as in retrospect I was doing what I always critized the dumb characters for doing in horror movies (like going towards the creepy voice or what not). Anyway, I touched the foggy shape. The creepy thing? Well for one, it faded immediately after I touched it. Second, well, here is a mind-fuck for you, the imprint was made, not on my side of the window, but from the outside….2 stories in the freakin’ air! I like to thing of it as a ghost peeping-tom or something…whatever it was.

I live in a off-campus university dorm, with 4 floors of students. I am on the first floor, and haven’t had any real issues until this past week. My roomie decided to go home for the reading break. So I am alone in a three bedroom dorm room with a kitchen, and tv-room. Joy to the world right? The first night was awesome, and I generally got my fill of blasting my music and exulting in being alone.

So, reveling in my new found freedom, I bring my Ipod dock into the bathroom and crank some tunes while showering. Cool right? Apparently someone hates ACDC. An ipod and ipod dock that I have had no problems with, ever, decides for no reason to turn on and off, about 8 times in succession. I rip open the shower curtain, and it loving stops, the music continuing like nothing had happened. The rest of my shower continued without incident. So, I basically decided it was the steam or something. (Which now, I doubt, as I had been in the shower for like 3 minutes, and the ipod dock was on the other side of the bathroom).

After, I go to plug in my hair-dryer. And nothing, so I try the other outlet, and still l nothing.. ‘Well drat’ I thought, my dryer is broken. But my high spirit could not be vanquished, and I wandered off down the hall for some coffee. In the middle of pouring, all the way down the hall from the washroom, the fucking hair-dryer TURNS on! That one made me jump about a meter in the air. And somewhat cautiously I flip on the light, watching the thing vibrate along the counter before finally throwing my shit together and turned it off. Fuck the coffee, alcohol is probably in order!

Eventually I chalked it up to my electronics’s being jackasses and continued on with my night. But the annoying surprises weren’t over. I was washing dishes, when the lights went off. ‘Well poo poo’ I thought, thinking the power was out, and fumbled around the fridge, heading towards my room for my flashlight. Along the way however my hand hits a switch, and what the lovin’ jeeeebus?… The light turns on. Thats when I decided it is time to get freaked out.

So, being the wuss I am, I turn on every single light in the place, and get my flashlight out just in case. I was about ready to get on the line and alert the media to the oncoming apocalypse when a strange noise starts up. I can’t remember the tune, it was faint, but definitely in the room somewhere. At first I thought my roommates phone or something was going off. But it wasn’t. Whenever I thought I was getting close, I could never find it.

After that I decided to chill on the Internet, surfing along my merry way for the rest of a thankfully, weirdness-free evening.

The next day is when it all starts again. It started in the afternoon, my closet, which was closed at the time, started poping, and clicking. Thinking nothing of it at the time, I ignore it. (I mean, houses shift right?…RIGHT!?!?!) Well thats what I thought until the loudest mother fucking bang echoed from it. I split my drink all over the place, and shot to my feet. Fight or flight mode engaged. (More like, I was about to pee myself…but I think the first one sounds much more impressive)

Then a loud knock on the door! At this point I was at the end of my rope. Not sure if I was going insane or what. So, I press my eye to the peek-hole. Turned out to only be my friend from down the hall. (Talk about anti-climatic right?) He originally came to borrow milk, but I convinced him to stay for coffee, just so I would have company. (Of the sane variety at least). We were both scared shitless when the ipod dock, which I had left in the bathroom, decided to turn on, and let loose an alarm. Now, just for the record here, I have never even touched the alarm clock function on that drat thing.

I was at the end of the line with all this shit, so I yelled: “Shut the fuck up already!” From the seat in the kitchen, and to both our surprise/horror, it lovin’ did. There was absolute silence for about a minute while we looked from each other to the bathroom down the hall. The deal breaker was the closet from my room banging again. We both hauled ass out of the house, and basically ran down the hall to his room.

Once there, I was forced to fill him and his roommates in on the story. Eventually all four of all trooped back down to inspect the place. But found nothing out of order. I think his roomies think we are on crack or something, but at least one person was a witness to one of the things that happened.

And to finish, nothing has happened since. So I imagine there is one lovin’ chastened, rear-end of a ghost sitting in my bathroom pouting or something. Did I mention I am now afraid to to shower?

Necru

When my dad was in the military we were living in government housing on base. One Saturday night my parents had some friends over for dinner. After we had eaten, Tales From the Crypt had come on and we all retired to the living room to watch it. The details from the episode I can’t remember but it ties into what I experienced. It involved a caretaker of a funeral home and another guy who was a basketball player. At some point of the episode he kills the basketball player and tries to fit him in a coffin but he is too tall. So he saws off the guys legs from the shins down to make him fit. At the end of the episode the caretaker is at the bottom of the stairs of his basement and all of a sudden he sees this basketball fall down the stairs towards him, followed by a pair of severed feet. I think at this point I closed my eyes cause being that age I was a scaredy cat.

After the credits start rolling I notice that my 4-square/Rubber gym ball, which was in my room, slowly starts to roll into the living room from the hallway that leads to our bedrooms. No one could have moved it there because we were all accounted for in the living room watching tv. I still remember this vividly to this day and it still creeps me out.

Clarington Grey

This was over ten years ago but I remember it distinctly. I was back in high school, up late one night at friend’s house, about five of us were gathered there. We drew an ouija board on a sheet of cardboard with a sharpie and used a guitar pick as the guide. I had never used an ouija board before and was skeptical, of course, and it seemed pretty stupid up until the moment one of my friends happened to look near the fireplace and said, “Hey, what’s that?”

There was a sight crescent-shaped shadow on the wall. To give yourself an idea of what it looked like, hold your arm up and bend your elbow almost like you’re saluting. Look at the shadow this makes on the wall; that’s what it looked like. We all stood up from the board and tried to figure out what it was. We repositioned the floor lamp, we moved furniture, we examined the room from all angles and we couldn’t determine what was casting this shadow. It was just . . . there. A shadow cast by nothing. One of us mentioned out loud that he didn’t want to see it move. Of course, once that seed was planted none of us wanted to be in the room anymore. We went down to the basement for awhile, eventually worked up the courage to go back up to check on the living room again. By then, the shadow had disappeared. We burned that ouija board in the fireplace.

Before anyone asks, no, there were no drugs or alcohol involved that night.

–more–

This is not my story; I have never seen a ghost or slept in a haunted house, but I have read and studied many ghost stories, and this is one of the best I have ever heard, mostly because it’s so deeply frightening. It’s the only “true” ghost story I can recall where the ghost actually killed people. Any London goons reading this thread, please correct/corroborate the following story; it’s compiled mostly from memory of old books I’ve read and documentaries I’ve seen.

“The Berkeley Square Horror”

The house was built sometime in the early 19th century. Even before the “Horror” began the house at Number 50 had already seen tragedy and strangeness. One the first families to live in the house had a young daughter who jumped to her death from an upstairs window (which would later become the “haunted room”).
The next owner to live in the house used that same upper room to imprison his insane brother, who was apparently so violent the room was sealed and he was fed meals through a slot in the bottom of the door. Eventually this man died, and the owner moved out.

The house stood vacant for a time. But neighbors would hear strange sounds coming from the empty house, like heavy furniture grating along the floor.

An older gentlemen named Myers took over the house in the late 1850’s in preparation for his wedding. He spent a small fortune furnishing the house to please his younger bride-to-be, who stood him up at the last moment. This rejection snapped his mind, and he became a shut-in, wandering the house at night with a lighted candle.

After Myers died, the Horror began.

When the next owners moved into the house, one of their maids was cleaning that upper room, when the folks downstairs suddenly heard her screaming. They rushed upstairs to see what was the matter, and found the maid in convulsions at the foot of the bed, her eyes wide with terror. All she could say was, “Don’t let it touch me!” She died in a sanitarium some time later, never revealing what had happened.

The strange sounds from the upper room grew more intense; soon the house was resold again. The new owner forbade anyone to sleep in the upper room. On a bet, a gentleman named Robert Warboys dared to sleep in the room. His friends insisted that he take a pistol with him, and pull a rope next the bed which would ring a bell on the first floor in case anything happened. The bet settled, everyone turned in for the night.

Warboys had been in the room for less than an hour when the bell on the first floor began jangling wildly. The men rushed upstairs; as they reached the door to the room they heard a shot. Kicking the door open, they found Warboys slumped on the floor next to the bed. He was dead – his heart had given out. His face was frozen in a rictus of terror. And there was a bullet hole in the wall across from the bed.

In 1872, following another period of vacancy, another gentleman named Lord Lyttleton took up the same bet Warboys had with the new landlord. Lyttleton also slept with a pistol at his bedside, and promised to pull the “panic-bell” if anything happened.

The scene played out almost the same as before: in the middle of the night, the bell began ringing, and the men of the first floor rushed upstairs, there was another gunshot –

Lyttleton was sitting on the bed, quite upset. He reported that something had grabbed him in the darkness. He fired his gun and heard it fall, but he could not or would not describe what had attacked him.

The story gets even weirder from here. Around the turn of the century, the house was occupied by an elderly couple who kept to themselves. Once every six months, a mysterious stranger would arrive at the house, lock the elderly couple in the basement, then lock himself inside the haunted room upstairs. He would stay in there for hours, doing God knows what. Then he would emerge, unlock the folks from the basement, and disappear for another six months.

Nothing else happened in the house until WWII, when two British sailors found themselves in Berkeley Square after an evening of drinking. With no more money and no place to sleep, they broke into the vacant house at No. 50, not familiar with its reputation. The only furnished room in the house was the upper bedroom – no one had dared remove anything from it. Not thinking anything of it, they turned in for the night.

They were awakened by the sound of something sliding along the floor, coming down the hall towards the door. Their candle went out just as something entered the room. It cornered one of the sailors near the window, the other made a break for the door. It is from this sailor that we get our only vague description of what the Horror looked like:
“Large, dark and shapeless,” making “soft, hissing noises.”

Bounding down the steps and rushing out into the rain, the sailor met a policeman and made a plea for help. The policeman, who knew the house, cried, “You haven’t been in there!”

They ran back to the house, but they were too late. At the foot of the stairs they found the other sailor’s body. He had fallen and broken his neck, in an apparent attempt to escape from something.

This is the last known death associated with the house. Today, No. 50 is home to Maggs Brothers antiquarian book dealers. The haunted upper room is now the accountant’s office. A staff member, speaking on a program for The Learning Channel, reported once seeing a “column of brown mist” drift across the room one night, but aside from that, no one has encountered the Horror in quite a long time.

Moai Ou

“The First Occurances”
In the late 60s/early 70s, my great-great grandmother, Celia passed away. The time came for my grandparents, and my young mother, uncle and aunt to prepare her house for my great-uncle to move in.

The first day of cleaning, my grandpa was in the upstairs hall taking paintings and pictures off the walls. As he finished, the family went out to dinner. When they returned, grandpa went back upstairs to finish up, only to find the pictures back on the walls. As an aside, one of the paintings is a print of “The Laughing Cavalier,” which is one of those creepy paintings where the eyes seem to follow you around. It is also right outside my bedroom door. I hate that painting. Anyway, he again took down the pictures, and went to the bathroom. When he left, the bathroom lights turned on, the door closed, and the toilet flushed. Apparently even the dead need to use the toilet.

My uncle Chris has the dubious honor of first seeing the ghost of Celia. At the end of the first day of cleaning, the family decided to just spend the night at the house. Chris had just gone to bed and was laying on his side. He felt pressure at the end of the bed, as if someone was sitting down. He turned over, expecting his mom, but instead saw Celia, dressed all in black. Specifically, what she wore to her husband’s funeral. He rolled back over, and tried to go back to sleep.

The next night, the family again stayed over. My mom and aunt shared Celia’s bed, and my aunt awoke to see Celia standing over her. She screamed, waking my mom. She saw the spirit, and promptly hud under the blankets. My mom had blocked this from memory until my aunt reminded her of it a few years ago. Until then, she only remembered my aunt screaming and claiming to see Celia.

Chris had one of his friends over at the house to help out the next day. My uncle was sitting on the porch, and his friend ducked inside to use the bathroom. He emerged a little bit later asking my uncle who the old woman he saw in the house was. Chris asked him to describe the woman, and sure enough, it was grandma Celia. His friend didn’t go to the house anymore after that.

”Uncle Doug”
Once the house was ready, My great-uncle Doug and his family moved into the house. The stay would soon prove to be one of turmoil.

Things started almost immediately. Small things would go disappearing and reappearing in odd places. Car keys would wind up in coffee cups, doors would slam, lights would flash, and appliances would turn on. The final straw for his wife came when their two sons began asking questions about relatives that the boys would never have heard of. They never came up in conversation, so my great aunt asked them where they heard those names. They told her of the old woman who would visit them and tell them stories after they were put to bed. That’s right, the ghost TALKS. My great-aunt and the kids left the house while Doug stayed behind.

At the time, Doug was studying law, something Celia didn’t want him to do. His lawbooks often disappeared into a closet, and whenever he would turn his head, even for a second, whatever pen or pencil he was using would disappear. It got so bad that he had to reach for things while his stare was fixed on the pencil.

Doug’s final straw came soon, too. This is the part that I hate writing or talking about, because whenever I do, a horrible sense of dread overcomes me and I just stop for a bit until I can finish. Okay. One night, Doug was woken up in the middle of the night. He went to go to the bathroom, and saw Celia. She told him to follow her, and they both went into the basement. In the basement was a large cupboard against a wall. He pushed it aside, and behind it was a small alcove with a deed to a house (not Celia’s), and a photograph of a family (also not Celia’s). We’ve since speculated that this was proof that my great-great-granfather had a second family, something that was suspected as he and Celia grew apart. More on the photograph, though. The only person who has seen it is Doug, and he’d only describe it as “odd.” The corners were torn off and the faces of the people “weren’t right.”

Another aside, I think part of why Celia dealt with Doug so much is because of his dabbling in astral projection (out-of-body experiences) while at the house. His final attempt at it resulted in my grandpa being called to the house. He was cold and lifeless and took over an hour to be revived.

“The Closet”
One last thing remains tied to Celia: a closet. Shortly before her death, she repeatedly told my mom and Doug to tear up the floorboards of one of the closets, saying that it was important. They never did.

A reference was made by a poem that Celia wrote about a cane in an otherwise empty closet used by a mother to hit her children.

We never really talked about the closet until a few years ago when my grandmother was dying of cancer. My mom was at my grandma’s house, watching after her. We were talking on the phone about the various hauntings and I brought up the closet. She said she always wondered what was in it. At the same time, we both said “a baby.” I feel like I’m going to throw up just typing that. It’s just weird.

The house has since been turned into a two-apartment house. It goes up for rent a lot, and Chris mentioned hearing that Celia is indeed still haunting the place. It’s in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, and is a fifteen minute drive away. We’re thinking about going to the house this summer if it’s for rent under the guise of prospective buyers. I want to go, but I don’t want to go.

Onic

“Corn crib on Haunted Mound”
Cheesy title, but it’s a good story. The farm I live on is quite old, as some of you know. Around 100 years old to be exact. My great grandfather owned this farm, and 4 others a very long time ago. He was forced to sell 4 of them during the great depression, but came out of it with money in his pocket, unlike most people. This farm was passed down to my grandfather, then his father, and then me. So there is a lot of history on this place.

Anyway, the farm includes the original corn crib. For those of you who don’t know what a corn crib is, just imagine a building that looks like a barn. It is about
40 feet tall, it has 2 sides that are devoted to corn storage. They are like big bunkers, where whole ear corn is stored after the harvest. The middle of it is a big drive through gap. There is a grain elevator system running from the ground, up to the top. And at the very top, there are big holding areas for various grains. So basically, you could pull your wagons into the corn-crib. Open a hatch on the ceiling, and let the grain flow out with ease. It was a very good setup back in the day.

These days though, the corn crib is an old, decrepit building. I have been meaning to have it burnt to the ground for a long time now, but I never got around to having the fire department demolish it. It is old, and missing boards off the sides where the corn ears are held. I keep an old skid loader parked in the middle. The upper part of the building is still in great shape though.
The first thing that I found really weird about this building is the lack of pigeons.

Pigeons run rampart around these parts. They inhabit anything that could be considered shelter. The beasts live in my machine shed, nursery, old confinement building. They will not go near the corn-crib though. It’s just so weird. It would be a perfect shelter from the elements.

Alright, enough of this boring back story shit that most of you probably skipped anyway.

My first problem with the corn crib happened when I was around 8 years old. This thing was like a jungle gym to me. There was boards draped around in it that I could swing from, or walk across. And if you crawled up the latter all the way to the top, you could get a perfect view of everything.
So, I was out there one day, playing around in it. When I decided to venture to the top. This was not something my dad wanted me to do. It was very dangerous. I started to make my way up the ladder, which is about a foot and a half wide, so it’s not an easy climb.

I get up about half way, and hear noise bellow me. I kind of peak over my shoulder and see nothing. So, I keep moving upwards. I felt a hand wrap around my ankle and pull me down very hard. I start to fall. Not such a good thing. Underneath me was piles of sheet metal. I frantically grab for the ladder as I plummet to the cuts and boo-boos that waited below me. I finally get a grip on a rung and stop myself from falling. At that point I’m pretty much in tears. I’m shaking as I’m trying to get out of there.

I made it out and went to the house. My father asked me what the hell was wrong. There was no way I could tell him what I was doing in the corn crib. I didn’t want to suffer the wrath of his belt. I don’t remember what I told him, but it wasn’t what I was doing. I had no clue what had happened in there. In the end I just put it off as me slipping, and my mind playing tricks on me.

I still played in it whenever I could. Being on a farm in Iowa..there just wasn’t much to do. Years flew by, and I stopped playing in it. I did however start using it for better activities. Shooting pigeons.

Pigeons. I hate the things. they shit all over the buildings they get in, and drag nest crap with them. They just make a big mess out of anywhere they inhabit. So by the age of 15 or 16 I think, I had taken to shooting them from the top of the corn crib. It was a perfect deal too. I could sit at the very top, look right out a window towards the hog nursery. Which they loved to live in. They would pop out of the vents on the top and bask in the sun. That’s when I would pick them off with an old 22 rifle. Then it was off to the fox hole by my creek, where I would leave the pigeons for the hungry fox and her pups.

Heartwarming in a twisted way huh.

So, one day I was up there. Picking off pigeons, having a grand old redneck time. I was doing great, everything was peachy for late fall. Then it got humid. going from 50 crisp degrees to humid in an instant is weird. Most of the shit I read, people say it gets cold. Well, I don’t know if ghosts are choosy or what, but it gets humid around here in my experience.

So, there I am, sweaty now while wondering what is going on. I feel the 2×12 I’m sitting on hop up. Like if someone had picked up one end and dropped it suddenly. This wasn’t a good thing. It was a good 12 foot drop to the bottom of the grain bins up top, and I was on a board set over the gap. I set my rifle against the elevator, and look around. There is nothing near me. Then it happens again. This time I get tipsy and have to grab the board with both hands.
Fucking thing started doing it really fast now. As if someone had hold of one end and was banging the board up and down. I was filling my pants by now. I just held on for dear life. It seemed like it went on forever, but it stopped after about 20 seconds. As soon as it did, I jumped over to the ladder and made my way down.

After I got down, I realized I had left my rifle up there. A mint condition Remington Nylon 11, that my dad had given me from when he was a kid. No way was I letting the frost that night get to it. So, I was forced to go back up the ladder to retrieve it.

I reach the top, and go to grab the rifle. It was fucking gone. I just stood on the ladder in shock. The thing couldn’t have fallen anywhere. I get up on the board that I was sitting on, and cautiously walk across it, while holding the beam above me for assurance. I go near the 2nd grain bin, look down, and theres the riffle, propped up in the corner of it.
Well, what the mighty hell!? I do not trust those grain holders. There’s no real support under them. So, I really didn’t want to walk on it, or put weight on it. I didn’t have much of a choice though. I pulled the old makeshift ladder out of the first grain bin, and lower it into the 2nd one. I slowly make my way down the ladder. I reach the bottom and put weight on the floor. It creaks a bit, but seems solid enough.

I start slowly walking towards my gun, and reach it just fine. I pick it up and examine it. Everything on it is fine. I empty the round out before I sling it over my shoulder. I turn around just in time for the ladder to hit me in the fucking face. Imagine if you will; Someone is up where I just came from and pushed the ladder off where it was leaned against. That is what happened, but it clocked me. Now I’m in this grain bin, bleeding out of my forehead like a stuck hog, I’m pissed off, and scared. A nail had caught me right below the hair line. I still have a scar/bump till this day on the spot.

I set the ladder back up and scrambled back up it, to be met with hot horrible breath in my face. Goosebumps raced over me, but there was nothing in front of me.
I quickly hauled ass back down to the main floor, making sure to step on a fucking nail in the process. At that point I’m more or less, hopping across old sheet metal and tires. I get out, and just lay on the ground panting and in pain.

One trip to the hospital later. I have 3 butterfly stitches in my forehead, and a nice tetanus shot. That corn crib seriously fucking hates me. My father brings me back from the hospital later that night. We pull into the drive, and the corn crib is worse than when we left. One of the huge doors on the front of it is laying on the ground, and the other is twisted off to one side. He pulls up to it and shines the trucks lights on it.

We get out, and I hobble over to it. It looked like the door that was laying on the ground was ripped off out of the metal slide it was in. After further inspection we could see that the metal it was mounted on was bent outward. As if someone had ran a vehicle through it and pushed the door out. We were both baffled. My father chalked it up to the age of the corn crib. I on the other hand knew this wasn’t anything natural. I didn’t feel like standing near this thing anymore that night, so I went inside and tried to sleep as best as I could.

Many Years Later:

I was outside in the summer grilling. Cooking up some good Iowa Chops. I’m not one for cooking with stoves and ovens, so I mostly live on a grill diet. It’s around 10 o’clock at night. It was a great night too. Stars were shinning, there was no wind, and it was about 72 degrees. It was perfect. I’m standing there, taking in the good atmosphere when I hear this noise. It came from the corn crib of the damned.

The building is around…50 yards from my house, so I look up over the grill at the building. I see nothing out of the ordinary, but that noise is still persisting. It sounded sort of like a raccoon, or some other large vermin. I hate raccoons, skunks, opposums, whatever. All those things could have rabbis, which I don’t want around my farm. So, I kept my eye on the corn crib.
This noise just kept going on, with a few breaks in between. Then the screaming started. Oh god, that noise. It was like the critter that was in there was getting sliced open by a dull blade, but mixed with the sound of an old women screaming her lungs out.

Something started banging around in there. As if concrete blocks were being thrown against the walls of the building. I grab my big light and shine it up into the only window near the top facing me. I see two glowing eyes for just a half a second, then they whip down back into the building.

OH WHAT THE HELL!

Those eyes. They glowed a bright white. Heres the really fucked up part. The light I was using was some 1,000,000 halogen spotlight. It lit up the side of the corn crib like daytime, but that window was just pitch black. Save for those horrible eyes. The noises didn’t stop after I used the light. That shit continued for a good minute. I was very antsy at that point to say the least. I didn’t know what to do. Should I run inside and cower, or stay out here and make sure whatever is in the corn crib doesn’t steal my pork chops!

So I stayed with the food. Cooked it as normal, but kept my senses at their peak. When they were cooked, I shut the grill off and walked inside. Each time I got through one of my 3 doors leading into my house I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand, and had an adrenaline rush. It felt like something was about to grab me whenever I had may back turned. I’m sure you all know that feeling.

I know that I ate some of my food, but couldn’t stomach it all after what I had just witnessed. The next day I went to the corn crib to investigate. By this time I had taken all the sheet metal out, and replaced it with the skid loader, some old tires, and other random items. It was still bothersome to get to the ladder, but I made it. I cautiously climbed it up to the top, and peaked around inside.

Blood, everywhere. Like if you had water balloons filled with blood, and threw them against the walls. I looked down into one of the grain bins, and there lay the remains of something in several pieces. I think it was a raccoon, but I’m still not sure to this day. It was kind of, charred black. It was caked in blood, and was mutilated beyond recognition.
I look around at all this blood. I didn’t think you could get that much out of a small animal. Well, I was right. I look in the other bin and theres a pile of dead animals. They all looked about the same.

At this point I’m thinking the chupacabra or some shit is living in the my corn crib. I am in no mood, or good state of mind to clear the remnants of animals out of the building. I just make my way out of there, and stay the hell away from it for a while.

Still, every night I go outside I can hear what sounds like fast, skittering footsteps in the building. Also agonizingly long scratching noises, and what sounds like celery breaking. That breaking noise just echoed throughout the farm.

I’m a complete fucking moron. Because I went back inside that cursed building a few weeks later. The light was on inside of it. This single bulb that is 30 years old was turned on. How in the hell does that work. I don’t even have power running to the building anymore. This should have tipped me off. But nope, I’m pretty dumb like that. It was at night too. Oh Goody!

As soon as I get inside of the building the light goes off, and I hear quick running in the upstairs part. I leave. Fast. No way am I getting drug upstairs and slammed against walls, till I’m a red stain. I back away from the corn crib, and towards my yard light. Something at the top catches my eye. I look up and see that the old glass globe around the lightning rod is glowing. This really beautiful color. Something I’ve never seen before, and still haven’t seen to this day.

I’m just standing there, mesmerized by this glow. I couldn’t pry my eyes away from it.

“Hahhhksssss” Whispers in my ear.

I whip around and see nothing. I’m doing a full 360, but there is nothing around me. “Enough of this shit”, I say to myself. I started screaming and cursing at the top of my lungs. I was getting pretty sick of this scary shit. I went on a pretty rage induced tangent for quite a while. Until my yard light went out and it turned complete pitch dark. Oh good, a mercury light goes out on a whim. It sure was my lucky night!

I walked back to the house. Not ran, I walked. I heard shit behind me, clomping after me. I didn’t turn around. I just kept swearing up a storm. The noise would get right up behind me then stop. then about 10 feet later it would repeat. I got to my house, opened up the first door and shut it. My 2nd door opened for me. Oh dandy! I get into it, and close it. The 3rd door was locked. I had to kick it down, which was easy, with how old it was.

As soon as I got inside I felt at ease. Whatever was fucking with me must not have followed me inside. The inside ghost that I still deal with was probably territorial or something. He gets to fuck with me inside, while the other gets my outside time. After that night, nothing much happened for a while. I would still hear the random noise from the corn crib, but nothing too big. Friends that I would have out would hear stuff, and get a little freaked out. None of them wanted to go into it, no matter how plastered we were.

One night however, we sort of saw what was in there. We were standing around the good old grill at about midnight. It was a severe case of the drunken munchies that drove us to grill top sirloin. It was a calm early fall night.
We all stopped talking because the banging had started in the corn crib. My one friend asked if there was an animal in it. I told him to wait and see. So we watched intently.

Instantly the one door left on the front flew over to the side and out came this huge black figure. It was hauling ass towards us. Imagine if you will, a buffalo running full speed at you. That’s what I would compare it to. It got within 20 feet of our scrambling asses, before it took an immediate turn right, and plowed into my cornfield. You could see corn stalks bending in the moonlight as whatever it was took off through the field.

I went from shitting myself to laughing at my friends, who were terrified. I had somewhat gotten used to this shit by now, so it wasn’t much of a surprise to me. They all left shortly afterwards though, for apparent reasons. I kept an eye on the crib that night though, but didn’t see the thing that came out of it return.

The morning yielded an great thing. The field had a nice path cut through it. The path was about as wide as a large SUV, and went in about 30 feet then just stopped. Real nice of that thing to wreck my perfect field so close to harvest.

That was the last major incident with the corn crib. Since then I just hear noises, and see a moving shadow in the window on top, but that is about it.

So there you have it. The story of the corn crib. I hope you enjoyed it. I have plenty more to tell. And an update to the story about the asshole ghost in my upstairs. I’ll do those some time soon here.

–more–

So, I trudged my ass over to the corn crib, through the blistering wind. And thats what leads us to the first picture.

This is the beast itself. Around 100 years old, and still standing. At first glance, you might be thinking: “That doesn’t looks safe to go inside of” Well, you’re right, it’s not. If you look at the very top, you can see the lightning rod, with the glass globe around it. That’s the thing that was glowing that one night.

Also, notice the door that is on the front of the building. As you can see, it is split in half. One section is sitting in the middle of the opening, while the other is barely hanging off to the side.
That blackness up towards the top is the window that I saw those eyes in, and that I still see stuff moving around in.

Here is a side view of the corn crib. You see that large opening at the top? That is my destination. That is where the bad shit happens.

Well, guess it’s time to move on to the next picture.

Here is the inside of the ground floor. As you can see it is very messy. It is full of crap like, old tires, boards, a metal grain bin, and a skid loader cage. The vertical Grey things you see are the elevators that tote the grain up top. In between those is where the ladder is located.

So, I cautiously made my way through the crap and to the ladder.
I tilted the camera up, so you can see what I have to climb. I notice that there is now a board above me, perched between two other boards. Upon closer inspection, I can see that it has been ripped from the wall at the top.

I made my way up the ladder to the top, and whipped out the camera to start taking pictures. No go. The brand new batteries were dead. That’s when the swearing started. It’s not easy or safe to get all the way up there, and it was fucking cold and windy. So, I made my way back down, and spent a good half hour looking for new batteries. I ended up having to steal some from a flashlight.

I made my way back into the corn crib, and to the top of it.

The first picture from the top is of my trusty old 2×12 board that had a jumping fit while I was sitting on it.
As you can see, it is covered in snow, and is over the gap between the grain bins that I would talk about.
Also, while I am taking these pictures I am standing on a single ladder rung thats not too big as you will soon see.

Well, I plopped my ass down on the 2×12, since it seemed sturdy as ever. I then snapped a picture of what was directly below me. I’d have to fall through all this shit if I slipped.

I peaked out of the window at the very top, and snapped a picture of the view outside. That red building is where I used to shoot the pigeons that polluted my farm. The top of that yard light pole you see, is about 35 feet at the peak. So you can sort of gauge how high up I am.

I swing over and take a picture of what I’m holding onto this entire time. The ladder just isn’t really that big at all.

I look upward, and see the light poking through the ceiling of the corn crib. At this point, the very top is about 10 feet above me still. You could continue up the little ladder, but I wasn’t going to do that. It’s only nailed to the side of the rickety old elevator.

Speaking of the elevator, here it is. It is a simple design. Small metal buckets on each side of me. They operate with a belt and chain, that attaches to a wooden pulley. They have gotten quite rusty over the years though.

I muster all the testicular fortitude that I can, and grab a hold of a chain swinging in front of me. While holding onto I, I lean out over the first grain bin in hopes of taking a picture.
As you can see in the picture, the bottom is covered in snow, about 2 feet worth I would estimate.

I glance down and see something odd. To me it looks like a bunch of blood splattered onto the snow below me. What makes this strange, is there is no evidence of animals in the corn crib at all. No footprints, feces, or nesting. The splattered stuff in the picture is spread out over a 10 foot square area.

I glance over to the right, and notice something sticking out of the other grain bin. It’s the dastardly ladder that smacked me in the face that horrible night. As you can see there isn’t much to it. It’s a bunch of old boards nailed to a couple of 2x4s. Here is what bugged me. The last time I was up here, it was sticking out of the other grain bin, the one with all the blood or whatever in it.

Upon further inspection of the grain bin with the ladder in it, I see some things. Also, take notice that I’m standing on that old 2×12 at this point. Not fun at all. Anyway, the shovel that is in the bottom was not there. I have been looking for that shovel for about a year now. How it got up there, I don’t know. I also notice that the window is busted out and laying on the floor of the bin.
The last time i checked, the window was fine. There wasn’t any glass missing out of it, and it was still mounted in the window up top.
The white round thing thats sitting next to the shovel is what caught my eye next. It’s a skull of some kind. Probably from one of the animals that got thrashed up there. Now, do you see all that black chunks of whatever? That is the charred animal remains that I was talking about. Most are still hidden under the snow, but as you can see, there is still some visible.

Next I kind of hung over the side of an old plank, and took a picture of the holding area in the corn crib. Each side has these. They used to house entire ears of corn. Now they are used for storing old firewood, and other such things. You can see though, why I called it a jungle gym though. There is all sorts of stuff for a kid to hang from/play around on in it.

Before I left the corn crib, I made sure to walk over to the one end, and take a picture of what I call “The Den”. This is in the upper part, and I won’t go in there. I never have, and probably never will. Right when I got close to it, I heard creaking in there that wasn’t caused by the wind. It sounded like something slowly pacing around.
I quickly snapped a picture.
You see that. It’s really fucking dark in there! The rest of the corn crib is always lit up on the inside, but not that space. It’s been pitch black in there, for as long as I can remember.

Well, there you have it. That is the corn crib in all it’s glory. This post more or less turned into a “rural exploration” but oh well. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them. I might even develop enough balls, to take some pictures in there at night.

But before I leave…

Fan Service.

“Along Dog Creek”
So there I was, typing away on the internet. Making sure to waste my life the best I could. I then received a phone call from a buddy of mine. He sounded really high, which he usually did, but I listened anyway. He wanted me to go fishing with him and another friend. I asked him where exactly he wanted to go. “Dog Creek” was his response.

Dog Creek is more of a river than a creek. It’s pretty big and deep, and extends for a very long ways. The best you could hope to catch out of there was some catfish and carp. It was early spring though, so the fish weren’t as muddy as they would be in the summer. Making them more edible.
The creek itself is located in a wooded area, with some cliffs and other cool features. If you go there, chances are you wouldn’t even think you were still in the farmlands of Iowa.

So, I agree to go with him. He pulls into my yard and picks me up not to long after the phone call, and we set off. We drive the 45 miles to the area where it’s located, but needed to pick up some bait. I was going to use canned corn, but he insisted on getting night crawlers. We stopped at this little ranch style home that sells bait. Outside of the house sat this leathery old man. I stayed in the truck, as I wasn’t buying anything. My friend who we’ll call “Mike” wandered over to the old man and conversed with him for a while. I sat there thinking, “this old fella must be a talker” because they went on and on for about 20 minutes.

Mike finally did come back to the vehicle with his tub of worms, and we took off. I asked him what the old guy was talking about. He said it was just talk about fishing. I figured, yah, that sounds about right.
We drove about another 10 minutes, then got onto a gravel road. From there it was a 5 mile drive to the woods. After you get in the woods, you can drive for about 2 miles. After the 2 miles we reached the dead end, and had to set out on foot. This is the part that I hated, because it was a walk through woods for about a mile to the river. We had 2 fishing poles each, our tackle boxes, a few coolers of beer, and some camping stuff. Talk about a load of stuff to carry around.

I don’t remember how long it took us to get to there. We set up camp when we got there, since we were planning on spending the night. We had decided to spend the night on a sand bank that had developed along the creek. It was the perfect area really. The sand bank itself was about 200 yards long, and 50 yards wide. Behind us was this wall of tall thin trees, so thick you couldn’t see between them. The other side of the creek was probably about 60 feet away. You could tell erosion was taking it’s toll on the waterway. The bank looked like it used to be about 8 feet higher, but all that was left was a crumbling dirt wall. In retrospect, I think the sandbank we were on used to just be the bottom of the creek.

Anyway, we got the camp set up, and started hunting firewood since it would be dark soon. We cleaned out the sandy area of all the dried up driftwood, and soon ventured into the woods themselves. We split up since we could cover more area, and find more stuff to burn. There really wasn’t that much to find out there. I was quite surprised. I figured the woods would yield lots of old branches and stuff, but nope. I returned with a pitiful armful of twigs and sticks.

I waited and waited for those 2 to get back. The one friend returned with about the same amount that I had found, but Mike was nowhere to be seen. We figure he was just smoking a bowl or something, so we started fishing. Around an hour later, it was dusk and we heard rustling in the thin trees behind us. We glance back and see Mike stumbling out of the woods. He had a lot of sticks, and small logs. He dropped the stuff on the ground and started doing a little dance. I thought it was weird, so did the other guy. He then rips his shirt off and screams like a little girl.

Ticks! By the dozens! Those little bloodsuckers were all over him. He starts doing a frisky dance shake deal while screaming. Which I personally found hilarious. Ticks take quite a while to actually suck onto you, so I think he was overreacting a tad bit. Then it hit me. I probably had them too. So the next 15 minutes was spent getting those horrid little parasites off me. Some actually got into my boots!

When we were done, it was dark, so we started the camp fire up. Well, it was more of a bonfire. We had kind of went overboard with all the driftwood we found. Soon, we were fishing once again, and actually catching a decent amount of channel catfish. We got quite a few and cooked the the old fashioned way. Cut the heads off, gut them, shove a stick in them, and hold’em over the fire for a good slow cook. A lot of you probably think thats unhealthy. You’re probably right, but I’m still alive, so I don’t ponder on it too much. Mike dropped a couple of his in the sand unfortunately, but that didn’t stop him. No sir. He ate them without washing or anything. You could hear the sand crunching between his teeth. Yikes.

We kept on fishing, drinking, and telling stories throughout the night. The fire started to dull down at around 1 in the morning I think. So it was off to find more wood. Problem was, we didn’t bring any flashlights. There was a bright moon though, so it should be no problem right. We took off into the woods, but decided to stick together this time. The Department of Natural Resources had confirmed that bobcats and mountain lions were in the area, so we were not up for getting mauled to death.
The air was calm that night as we moved through the woods. Well, not really moved, more like stumbled. We couldn’t see where we were going to well, so tripping over rocks seemed to happen a lot.

A dark image up ahead caught our eyes. We moved closer to inspect what we had seen. My god, it was a stump pulled out of the ground. We could burn this thing for hours! Problem was that it was kind of big. About the size of a 30 gallon trashcan to be exact. Size wouldn’t stop us though. We banded together and started to roll the stump towards the encampment. Not really roll, more like…Pick up on the big root and tip it over, then repeat.
It took a while to get back, but we made it to the camp safely.

The fire was long burned out by the time we got back. Just some glowing coals remained. We shoved the stump onto the embers and doused it with starter fluid. One flick of a lighter later, and the entire river was lit up with this fire that was way too big. The warmth of the fire was more than welcome, being as it was still very chilly outside. I plopped back down to continue fishing. I wasn’t catching anything for a bit, so I decided to take a pee break. I shuffled off into the dark and relieved myself.
On my way back I took a survey of the area and noticed some weird things. I got my friends up and told them to look at what I had saw. All around the camp was these weird footprints in the moist sand.

We were baffled as to what the footprints could have came from. They looked like a human foot basically, only crooked and larger. I know you’re thinking bigfoot, but that’s not what I would compare it to. Imagine taking your foot and bending it to the outside down the middle till it’s kind of at a 45 degree angle. That’s what it looked like. We saw the prints leading off into the dark towards the tall thin tree’s we had come out of.

The problem was, is that these were not here when we showed up. There was deer, and raccoon, and all other sorts of things. But nothing even closely resembling these prints. So in other words, whatever it was, must have showed up while we were out getting our stump.
Well that’s just fantastic! It didn’t take long for me to remember my fun in the woods at the lakes not too long ago. I wondered if it was the same thing that I had seen up there. I actually wanted to leave at that point. We all did. Problem was that we didn’t want to have to walk through the woods where this thing obviously was. That was the only way to get back to the truck.

It was time to crack open the scotch. As cliché as it sounds, but I really needed a good drink. We made the best of the situation. We kept drinking and fishing. The fish however had other plans. They were not hungry at all. We couldn’t catch a damn thing. I guess they just decided to move down the creek or something.

An hour or so later we were feeling better about the situation. We had a little liquor in us, and nothing had happened. So we started talking and joking around once again. That’s the shit that gets you. You put it out of your mind and then something happens. That something was those tall thing trees shaking behind us. I turned quickly and look at them. Something was moving through them. Not running, but more or less, pacing. The light of the fire showed these trees bending then springing back up through about a 20 foot length of land.
Mike said something, I don’t remember what, but when he did, the thing stopped moving. We all were still, not moving. Something caught my ear. It was a sound of heavy breathing. Like a really big dog was trying to pant with it’s mouth shut. We stared into the trees for what seems like a thousand years. Then the breathing stopped and there was just silence.

The silence didn’t last long though, something took off through the trees back into the deep woods, it was big enough to sound like bowling balls being dropped in succession onto the ground. It was a thumping noise. We could hear it running until it just faded into the distance.

“Was that a cow or something” asked Mike.

A cow? That actually kind of made sense at the time. There was a lot of pasture in the area, so a cow getting out and going into the woods was more than possible. It was the only reasonable thing any of us could come up with, so we went with. Not more than 10 minutes later though we hear a howling noise. A very deep howl, sort of like a monkey that smokes 3 packs a day. It was very loud though, and it came from the direction the thing took off in.
Then another Howl, this time from the other side of the river, and a lot closer. Oh shit. There is more than one of whatever is making that noise. At the exact moment I was thinking that, the bushes on the other side of the creek start moving. Then we hear splashing noises. We can just barely make out clumps of dirt falling into the water from the 8 foot bank.

We are then treated to a large black thing jumping or falling into the creek. This made us stand up pretty damn fast. The splashing started as soon as we saw the dark image go into the water, and it was getting closer to us. Whatever was in the water was headed our way. We took off running down the sand bar we were on. I turned back in time to see this huge black mass lunge out of the water and block the complete view of our burning stump. We kept hauling ass along the creek. We reached a point where we had to go back into the woods, so thats what we did. The truck was east of our point, and we had been through the area enough to know how to get back, even in the dark. Or so we thought.

All the running got us turned around somewhere, and we found ourselves lost. I had ran so much, I had to stop and take a breather. The other 2 did the same. We stood there for a minute, trying to get find out bearings. It was really dark now. The sky had clouded over, covering the moonlight that we had come to love before all this shit happened. I still wasn’t sure what the hell that was. Maybe it was just a cow. Sure the howling made no sense, but everything else seemed to. The cow must have slipped on the bank and fell into the water, then started swimming towards shore. That had to be it. I think I was just trying to calm myself at that point.

We started walking after our very short break. Running seemed stupid at the time, since we had no clue where we were running. The problem with walking, is that you’re more aware of whats around you, and your mind tends to play tricks on you. I swear I heard snapping noises in every direction and heard breathing all around us. My imagination was just fucking with me at that point. We had to have walked for a good half hour before we stopped again. This time because of a god damn cliff. Well, an Iowan cliff, it’s nothing impressive, but also nothing I wanted to climb up. The fact that we found this was a problem, because there are none of these around where we parked the truck.

We started making our way around the small cliff type thing, but heard noises behind us now. Not imagination noises like I was hearing before, these were real. Something was tromping through the woods quite a ways behind us, you could just barely pick the sound up. Our walking turned into jogging. We had to get a move on, and fast. By this time, my legs were burning and my lungs were on fire. Being a smoker never helps with running. No matter though, we had to keep going. I’m not going to be the guy on the news that gets killed by a cow so it can lay it’s eggs inside me!
We were jogging along, but that noise was getting closer. Whatever was following us was moving at a faster pace than we were going. We saw what looked like a clearing up ahead. At that point our jogging turned into sprinting. We burst out of the woods onto a dirt road.

“Where the hell did this come from!?” I think to myself. each side of the old decrepit road was the woods. It was running right down them, but I didn’t even know this road existed. Neither did either of my friends. We took advantage on not being in the woods, and made a moderate pace down the road. After a few minutes we realized that the noise had stopped. Nothing was following us anymore. So we started walking once again. Thank God. I was pretty sick of moving around like a healthy person.
We got probably 100 yards down the road, when The thing that was following us burst out onto the road in the direction we were heading.

It turned towards us. It looked like it might be a cow after all! Until it kind of stood up on 2 legs…shit. The thing was probably 150 feet away from us, and the dull light from the cloud covered moon barely illuminated it. But I remember clear as day, how that thing stood up.
We turned around and walked the other direction slowly. No I’m just kidding, we tore ass down the road in the opposite direction of the thing. It had started chase once again. I could hear it tromping up behind us. It didn’t hold chase very long, for soon there was a thump and skidding noise. One look back confirmed what I was thinking. The beast had slipped and face planted onto the road. We took advantage of this and kept running full speed.

The road stopped, dead end. Tree’s once again. What the hell is wrong with this place! Into the woods we go once again. This time however we saw something that we recognized. It was an old rusted out car frame, that the woods had consumed long ago. The truck wasn’t far from here. We ran our smoke ridden hearts out and saw the truck up in the distance. We had made it!
We jumped into the truck and fired it up. Mike tore ass out of there. We had apparently made it just in time. For one look back proved that the thing was still chasing the truck! It wasn’t fast though, so obviously there was nothing to worry about. We pulled away from it soon enough.

20 minutes later, and we had made it to some little hillbilly town. Civilization had never looked so good before. We took our breather there, and filled up his gas tank at the co’op. He had almost no gas in that truck. Thank god it actually started and we made it to a town. We left for home after the trucks tank was full. When we got back, we chilled out at Mike’s place.
That is when the discussions started. We talked and talked and talked about what the hell was after us.

Personally, I thought it was a cow of some kind. Maybe something with rabbis…I wasn’t sure. The howling and the standing up was bugging me too much to confirm my thoughts though.
Mike and my friend both thought it was Iowa’s bigfoot. Granted, there has been quite a few sightings of a bigfoot type thing in the area. That stuff though..I don’t know. I also kept pondering back on the thing that I had seen up at the lakes. That thing however, was silent. It was quite enough to lick my damn hand.

We went back after our stuff in the afternoon, after we got a few hours of sleep. This time we were armed with shotguns. Sometimes the redneck way, is the best way. We get to our camp to find that nothing is really touched. The one cooler is knocked over, and a fishing pole is gone, but thats about it. The ground around it told another tale though. The footprints that we had seen before were now everywhere. Not as neatly pressed into the sand though. They were more shuffled through the sand. It was all pretty messy. I figure it could have been our prints, but none of us emerged from the water.

That’s the story of Dog Creek. To this day I still don’t know if it was a cow. I guess I’ll just let you guys be the judge of what it was. Who knows, maybe those things are in your area too, and someday you can enlighten us with your experiences.

“Who You Gonna Call?”
The last time I spoke of the house I live in, I told of how I was struggling with a temperamental specter. At the time I was trying to weather proof my house for the harsh Iowan winter. The ghost however, thwarted my attempts at low heating costs. It would rip the plastic from the windows, pull nails out of the upstairs door, and just be an all around ass. I conquered over it with the help of my temper and a red sharpie marker though. Or so I had thought. The ghost was not finished though. He had other plans for the winter months.

It wasn’t more than a few weeks after I posted about my weatherproofing that things started to go sour once again. My awesome job of putting plastic over the windows was ruined. The bastard had gone through every room upstairs and tore all the plastic off the windows once again. It also managed to open the door leading to the outside. Not only did he do these things, but something worse! He ruined all of the curtains too! All of them were ripped up, and looked like shit now.
What could I do about it though? I apparently couldn’t stop the asshole from doing these things, so I just decided to say screw it. I sealed off the entrance to the upstairs good and hard.

I had bought some 2x4s, some insulation, and plywood from Menards. I built a frame around the entrance to the upstairs, put the insulation in, and then sealed it up with the planks of plywood. That was all followed by a good layering of duct tape. This way, I wouldn’t have to reseal everything upstairs, and I also didn’t have to worry about cold air getting downstairs. It was the perfect plan! It seemed to work pretty well too. My heating bill for that month dropped drastically. I was happy that my work had finally payed off.

The noises got worse however. The walking upstairs I have more than gotten used to. The scratching doesn’t really bug me anymore. These things I had just gotten used to. They got louder nightly, but once I would fall asleep they couldn’t wake me up.
One night however I did wake up to this odd sound. It was a whimpering from a small child. Where was it coming from you ask? About 3 inches from my face. My bed is shoved against the wall of the bedroom you see. I sort of leaned up and looked at the wall through the dim light, and didn’t see anything. But this noise persisted. I kept staring at the wall, wondering what was going on. Then when I tried to get up to move, I couldn’t. I was glued in place, with my face just inches from the wall.
The wall start to crack, and open up into a small hole. I was glued in place, I wanted to move but I couldn’t. Now all I could do was stare at the hole that had just opened in front of me.

Something started to develop in the hole. A tuft of hair flopped out. Then two pale hands squeeze from the hole the size of your fist, and grabbed the edges. The wall started to bow inward. Something started to squeeze it’s full sized head through the hole. I could hear the bones cracking, and see blood pouring from the head of whatever was trying to squeeze it’s way out. At this time I’m panicking, and trying to move, but I just can’t. The head is halfway out by now. I can make out the chunks of torn flesh hanging from the gruesomely crushed skull. Chunks of hair are torn from the top of the head, leaving exposed patches of bloody skull.
Then with a mighty thrust, the thing flings itself right into my face.

Pain shoots through my arm as I wake up. I’m swearing up and down and sweating like a pig. I scramble for the light switch next to my bed. I turn it on and jump out of the bed. My arm and fist are both hurting, and I don’t know what just happened. It took a few minutes to get my mind working right again. I realize it was just a nightmare. I look over at the wall next to my bed, and see a hole the size of a fist in it. Ah, so thats why my hand hurt. I guess I had punched the wall during my dream. Kinda hit the edge of a stud too, which explains why my hand and arm were hurting so bad.

I glance over at the clock, and it was 2:45 in the morning. I was way too rilled up to go back to sleep, and sweating too much to lay back down anyway. So I went to take a nice hot shower. The water was not hot by a long shot. It was ice cold for some reason. I figure it could be the upstairs ghost fucking with me, but this was the territory of the ghost in the secret room. The actual nice one. At this time I should mention that the shower is in the basement.
I said screw it and showered in the frigid water anyway. After I had dried myself off, I checked the water heater. It felt warm to the touch, so that wasn’t it. The water from the faucet on the main floor of my house was hot too.
After that I think I just cruised around on the SA forums until work.

Work sucked a lot. I was tired from lack of sleep, and pissed that my hand hurt so much. Gripping a welder all day did not help any. I got home after work, and parked my truck. I get up to the house and see that all the doors are open. First thing that came to mind was, “Oh shit, did I get robbed!?”
I ran into my house, and went through it. There was nothing of importance missing, that a thief would take. The house was as cold as a witches vag however.
I got the doors all shut up, and cranked the heat up. It took a few hours to get back to a moderate temperature again.

I got showered up in actual warm water after the house was warm again, and made something to eat. I don’t remember fully what I did after that, but I eventually went to sleep.
I was having a good nice sleep, I remember the dream from that night. It was full of zombies, and zombie bigfeet! How kick ass is that? The dream ended when I woke up though. I don’t know why I woke up. I look over and it’s 2:45 in the morning. I decided to empty my bladder while I was awake, so I jaunted off into the hall, and headed into the bathroom. I go to flip the light switch on, but it wont work. I figure it’s just the cold making my light not work. No biggie though, I know where to pee, and theres still some light from the moon shinning through the bathroom window.

So there I am, peeing in the dark, when the toilet flushes mid-piss. That startled the hell out of me, but I held steady and made sure not to spill a drop. I step back after I finish, and wait for the toilet to refill so I can flush it…again. I glance around the bathroom, but can’t really see much due to the lack of light. The mirror catches my eye though. I stare into it for a short time, and see what looks like my dark image staring back at me.
I hear the toilet finish filling, so I step over to it and flush it again. I catch sight of the mirror as I lean back up, and see that the dark image is still in place. It was only for a moment, but it was still standing there, as if it was looking at the spot that I was standing at. As soon as I really notice whats going on in the mirror, my image reappears in the hunched over state I was in. Ok, then.

I walk back down the hall to my bedroom, and listen to a creaking noise in the process. Old houses tend to creak, but not usually from inside the walls. The wall that was creaking, is solid brick. Alright, thats some fucked up shit right there. When I stop walking, the creaking noise keeps going. I listen to it go right into my bedroom. Well, thats just fantastic! So, this noise is now in the solid wall in my bedroom. The one I had punched was a lath and plaster wall. This was in the solid one, on the opposite side of the room. I stood in the hallway for a bit, deciding what to do.
Seeing as how I’m such a heroic person, I had to do the bravest thing possible. I said, “fuck that room”, and decided to sleep in the living room. I have 2 couches with pull out beds in them, so it was no biggie. I picked the one couch that was pressed against the wall. On the other side of that wall was my actual bed.

I lay down and start to get some sleep, but sadly I didn’t get to continue my awesome dream. I awoke the next morning, and started to get ready for work. I went into my bedroom to get my work clothes. As soon as I got into the room I stopped and stared at the bed. There was the impression of someone laying on the top of my bed. I yell “Out!” at whatever it was, and the impression faded slowly. Guess my stern voice did the trick. I got dressed for work, and pulled the sheets off my bed. I had decided to launder them. The sweat from the previous night, combined with what was just laying on it, gave me a gross feeling. So, I threw them into the washing machine just before I left for work. I figured I could dry them when I got home.

I returned later that day from work. It was a friday, so I had just gotten payed. I walked into the basement to put my bedsheets into the dryer. I opened up the washing machine, and my bedding were not in there. Hmm, thats pretty strange. I went out on a limb, and opened the dryer. There were my bed sheets. And they were dry too. Well, that’s just awesome. I chalk that one up to the cool ghost in the basement. I carried the nice clean sheets upstairs, and into my bedroom. Something is different though. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it at first. But as soon as I went to put the sheets on the bed I noticed it. The huge Rand McNally world map that was on the wall above my bed was flipped upside down.

That map had been hanging on the wall in this room, in the same spot for at least 15 years. Old packing tape had held it’s corners in place. But now it was upside down, and the tape had been neatly placed on the headboard of my bed. I went to grab the map, and it tumbled down on top of me. There was nothing holding it to the wall, but it was still sticking there until I went to touch it.
I look up where the map was, and noticed that the wall was actually whiter where it was hanging. Just goes to show how long it had been there. Right in the middle of the large white mass was scratch marks though. A whole series of them. It was as if someone had been dragging their fingernails over different spots behind the map.
That made me shudder a bit.

A few new pieces of tape later, and the map was back in place. I had decided to just cover the spot back up with the map once again. At least the ghost hadn’t screwed with my kicking rad dinosaur trim from the eighties that went all around the room. That trim is my pride and joy.

I went to the bar after I had gotten the bed made, and had gotten showered up. It was pay day as I said before, so I had to spend some of it. What better to spend it on than scotch and good memories.
I returned home, plastered off my ass, and went strait to bed. I awoke at 2:45 in the morning. (Are you seeing some sort of pattern here?)

I glance around the dark, as I feel the bed spinning beneath me. I was that stage of drunk, where you are just coming down, and you feel like shit. I got up and stumbled into the bathroom for another session of bladder emptying. I figured that I had woken up from need to pee, or from just being too drunk. As I stood there peeing I heard some sort of noise. It sounded like whispering coming from the bathroom closet. The closet itself is not used. It’s a little door that leads into a room under the steps going upstairs. The door handle has been missing for years, and new carpet in the bathroom overlaps the door, preventing it from being forced open.
I listened to the whispering coming from the door for god knows how long. The door started to shake violently instantly. Screaming was heard from the room behind it. The same screams that I had heard from upstairs. At this point the booze really got to me, and I blacked out.

I woke up in the bed the next day with a pounding headache, and a filled bladder. I headed to the bathroom to drain away, not even thinking about the night before. I go to open the door into the bathroom, but am met with a ‘thud’. I glance into the room to see what the door is hitting. It’s the door to the bathroom closet.
What the Christ! I squeeze through the door way to see what the hell is going on.
Sure enough, the door to the closet is wide open. The carpet around the door is bunched up, exposing the linoleum that the carpet was glued to. I flip the bathroom light on, which now thankfully works. Something had forced the door open, and actually gotten the mechanism to work. As I said, there was no handles on the door, but it still held shut with the old mechanism.

Before further inspection there was something that I just had to do. Peeing after drinking all night in my mind, is better relief than anything in the world. Anyway, I moved over to see what the hell was going on with the closet. I then remembered what had happened that night. Even in the drunken state that I was, I could still remember what had happened. I peaked into the closet. It was empty and musty. You could tell that it hadn’t been opened for years.
At this time I’ll talk about the closet. As I said before, it is a little door. I’d say about 4 and a half feet tall. The room itself is located under the stairs, so it goes from about 5 feet tall at one end, down to to nothing at the other. The ceiling slopes with the stairs. There is a solitary clothes hanging rod at the high point, and thats about it.

Like I said though, nothing is out of the ordinary in the closet. I turn around and face the mirror only to see a torso hanging from the closet rod. I whip back around and see nothing on the rod. Another look into the mirror proves nothing. “Am I going nuts here?” I think to myself. This wasn’t the kind of stuff that the ghost had done to me in the past. The ghost I was always putting up with was annoying, and at sometimes scary, but never played mind games on me like this.

I faced the door and shoved it closed. I kicked the carpet back into the place, and stomped on it, till it looked presentable. I left the room, shut the door, and started to walk towards the kitchen. The door behind me shook, then a banging noise echoed through the hallway. I went to open the bathroom door, but what do you think happened. Sure enough, the fucking closet door was wide open again. I said screw it, and went to the kitchen anyway. First thing I see is the fridge door open.
Thank God, I have no food in there, because the condiments that were inside were room temperature. Any real food, would have spoiled. But my beer was warm! Now that is just wrong. Beer that goes from warm to cold and then back to warm tends to get skunky. I was in no shape to deal with any of this. I grabbed some ibuprofen from the cabinet and washed a few down with a warm beer. My head was still pounding from the night before, and now even worse. I felt the beer shits coming on. Don’t worry guys, I won’t tell a poop story to you. I will say, that nothing eventful happened while I was doing my business.

The rest of the morning was spent wasting my life on the internet. I could occasionally hear footsteps above the room. Not stomping, but kind of…like someone was just walking around, doing stuff. An ice cold hand grabbed the back of my neck and squeezed hard. I flip around and see nothing behind me. My neck actually kind of hurt now. One glance in my bedroom mirror proved, that I had red marks on my neck from someone gripping it. You never know when something will come up behind you in the daylight or dark of night, and grab you.
I kept looking over my shoulder the rest of the day, to make sure something was sneaking up on me.

Soon night had hit, and my lights weren’t working once again. The cold does something to the wiring in this house. Not sure why it just affects the lights, but it only does it in the winter. The only thing lighting up the room I’m in is the warm glow of my computer screen. Which is a pretty big glow actually (big flat panel).
I think I was playing Warcraft at the time, when something fell off a shelf behind me. I look back, and sure enough, my Shark in a jar had fallen onto the carpet. Thank god it didn’t break, that’s not something I want to deal with. My parakeets start going ballistic in their cage shortly after that. They’re jumping around in there, making that horrible squawking noise. So now I’m yelling at them to stop, while walking over to pick up my shark in a jar. I bend over to pick it up, and the birds stop instantly. Well, isn’t that just awesome. Right away I hear heavy breathing. I whip around and see nothing, but now the breathing is behind where I was just facing. I turn that way, nothing, but still breathing. Any direction I go, the breathing follows behind me.

I start doing circles, in an attempt to see what is behind me. I can’t catch a glimpse of anything. Something wet slaps against the back of my neck. I practically jump to the ceiling. I run for the door, but it wont open. No matter what, the handle won’t turn. I start shouldering into it, and only succeed in busting the middle panel. It then hits me. Doors open inwards dumbass. My poor door died in vain. I look around the room while still tugging on the handle, and see nothing, that breathing is still following the back of my head though. I was going through such a feeling of hopelessness. Something crumpled over by my bed. I look over to see the map laying on my bed, and the scratch marks behind it. Something really catches my eye. I watched in horror, as 4 new marks were scratched into the wall. I could hear it too. It sounded horrible. Bad enough in fact, for me to cover my ears. As soon as the scratch ended, I grabbed the door again, and it whipped right open, I ran into the hall but ran into something soft and cold. A black figure towered over me. I looked up at it. It looked back down. It then turned around and walked away down the hall, only to fade into the darkness of the 2nd bedroom.

I scrambled into the kitchen, and out the doors to the winter weather outside. I stood outside, and watched as shadows moved behind my bedroom curtains. The light apparently was on now. Ghosts need lights to see I guess. I stood out there for what seemed like ages. Soon the shadows stopped, and I was getting so damn cold, that I just had to go back inside.

I walk back inside, and make my way to the bedroom. I crack open the door. And there laying before me in a grotesque pile on the floor of my bedroom was mello yello cans! All of the can’s that I had kept in a garbage bag in my kitchen, were dumped into a pile in the middle of my bedroom floor.
What in God’s name is going on! Now it’s back to the shit that the ghost upstairs would do to me. Why did this thing dump all my empty cans on my floor? Just to inconvenience me? All of my fears of empty cans laying on the floor had become manifest.

I pick up the can’s, put them back into the trash bag they came from, and set them in the porch this time. Nothing happened the rest of the night, but I didn’t go to sleep either. Come morning I started scrubbing the carpet, in an attempt to make it not so sticky from dripped out mello yello.
The closet door in the bathroom was still open. I still hadn’t closed it yet, so I decided to do that. I start to close it, but take a peak inside and notice that something was inside of the closet. There was something sitting in the deepest part of the closet, where the stairs meet ground level. I should point out that I have very bad judgment. I step into the closet, and crawl to the back of it, where I saw the thing. I reach the back, and finally see what the object was. It’s a shoe box.

I grab the box, and start moving towards the opening, so I can see what is inside of it. I hear a creaking noise. I look up, and see that the door is almost closed. I’m a few feet from the door, so I lunge forward, and stick my arm thorough the gap, preventing the door from opening. As soon as the door touches my arm it stops closing, but something licks my hand! Oh God, I hate that fucking feeling! That’s twice now. I rip my arm back through the door, and slam my body into it, causing it to fly open. I look around and see nothing. I reach back into the closet and grab the shoe box. It feels kind of heavy, so I’m curious of what’s inside of it.
I finished closing the door up, and then head into the kitchen. I use a knife to cut the tape that was holding the box closed. I open the lid of the box, and take a peak inside. A dead rabbit. Oh hot dog! Now, that right there is mighty fucked up. I dumped the rabbit in the ditch, and threw the box onto my burn pile. That was just, too screwed up for me. I don’t know whether to take that as a gift, or a threat.

For the next week I had nonstop nightmares every night. I kept waking up at 2:45, on the spot, nothing notable happened when I woke up those times however. The nightmares were pretty twisted though. I’m a weird guy you see. Most of the dreams I like, most would consider nightmares. Monsters, ghosts, etc.. I love having those in my dreams. When that happens, the dreams are adventurous.
The last nightmare I remember quite well. I was in an old house on the prairie setting. There was all these children spread out on the ground. All of them were tied up and crying. I wasn’t in the dream. It was more like I was a nonexistent witness. Anyway, all these children are on the ground. They are all wearing old time clothes, like you would see people wearing in the 1800s.

The crying instantly turned into screaming. I could see this huge wagon full of decaying corpses driving over the children. The wagon wheels would run over the children hard enough to flatten a path about as wide as your hand through them. It looked like the kids were getting split into pieces, but that wasn’t the case. They’re flesh and bones were crushed into the ground. Whatever was run over would turn as black as tar, and glisten in the hot sun. The children wouldn’t die though. They would just scream and cry louder and louder. I was powerless to do anything, and I couldn’t look away. Soon, I could hear the children screaming my name, and begging me to help them. Here is the very bad part about this whole thing. It went on for about 8 hours. In my dream, I had to watch this for 8 strait hours. It was horrible. When I finally did wake up, I was sweating, and my heart felt like it was going to explode from beating so hard.

I had woken from the dream, at you guessed it. 2:45 a.m.
There was no sleeping after waking up from something like that. I was too terrified of going to sleep and having to witness that hell again.

About 2 and a half weeks ago, the stuff started up mildly again. It had quit after that last horrible dream I had. The only stuff that was going on now, was some noises in the upstairs, and in the basement. The occasional door will open in my house, but not the closet door. The lights still won’t work. Even as I type, they are not functional.

“The Underland”
I live on a farm outside of a city, that currently has a population of around 1700. It’s a small town, that was built along the railroad back in the late 1800s. Most of the original buildings are still standing along main street. Some of them are pretty cool, and over the years I have explored most of them. My favorite, was a large building that was a flower store and phones/service. The flower store took up the entire first floor, while the phones and service used the entire basement. At the time I was around 10 years old, and my father was working with the phone guy over the winter.

After school, I would walk about a mile through the snow, and wait around in the flower shop for about 4 hours, till I could get a ride back to the farm with my dad. I would get extremely bored in there. So, I would come up with shit to do. Usually, I would draw on my sketch pad, or hang out in my little mock office that I had constructed in the back rooms. One day though, I found this door in the basement. I asked the guy my dad worked with, what it lead to. He unlocked it for me, and reviled a very old rope elevator. The kind that you stand on, and pull on the rope, and you go up or down.
He told me to get on it, so I did. He then proceeded to take us up to the upper level of the building. The upper door leads to a hallway with a door at the end of it.

He shows me that the door has a tiny hatch at about adult eye level. I am then told that this place was used for drinking in the days of prohibition. People wanting to get in and drink would have to talk their way in through that little hatch. The room on the other side of the door was huge. It had a long old style bar. There was obviously a dance floor, and other things. There was lot’s of cobwebs and dust from the years it hadn’t been used. This place amazed me. The history of the upper level of a flower shop. That’s what got me started on exploring.

Over the years I managed to get inside almost all the buildings that were located on main street. A couple had been converted to small apartments, so I couldn’t look into those. The upper level of the furniture store was great. It also appeared to be used for drinking back in the days of prohibition.
There was one building that I kept wanting to get into, but never could. That building was the old movie theater. It was located on the end of mainstreet.

The theater was used right when motion pictures came out, but caught fire, and was burned pretty badly. Quite a few people died when this happened also. They did fix it up and try to get movies going in it again, but nobody wanted to go to the shows there. They would rather travel the 20 miles to a nearby city. So, the theater was shut down for good. This was around the late 1930’s I believe. So this thing had sat with it’s door locked for the better part of 70 years. I wanted to get in this building bad. It took me quite a few years to gain access to it though.

Many years later, I was able to get into it. I was older, and ready to give it a shot. The other buildings I had explored, at least were still being used partially, so I would just ask for permission from the owners. This one was illegal to get into though.
I had to wait till about 2 in the morning, when the town was dead. The mainstreet lights go off at 2 also, so that is my chance to get in unnoticed. I use a crowbar to wrench the padlock setup they had on the door off. There was just 1 door in the front, so I had to use it. The door opens up, reveling stairs going down into what I call “extreme” darkness. You know how you can stand in the dark and still kinda see after your eyes adjust. Well this dark, you couldn’t see, no matter what. It was like being in a cave, there was absolutely no light source down there.

Thankfully I had brought a mag light and a lantern, so it wasn’t that big of a deal. I made my way down the steps, making sure to close the door on my way down. I didn’t want anybody to know I was there, since it was trespassing. The stairs led down quite a ways. Soon the hot humid summer air ended, and I was met with cold dank air. It was quite a relief actually. The air was pretty stagnant though. Anyway, the stairs leading down met up with a short sort of hallway, then stairs leading up. It didn’t make any sense to me, and still doesn’t. I walk up those stairs and come to another door. Thankfully theres no lock on it or handle. I simply push it open and walk into the room. The room I was in, was the lobby. A moderately large room, with a booth for tickets, and some old chairs fixed to the floor. The lobby didn’t yield anything interesting so I marched onward.

I walked down a narrow hallway, and came to the screen room. It wasn’t large at all. It was about the size of a 2 car garage. The screen was gone, but the seats were all still intact. There was no projector room that I could see, but a fixed metal stand was in the back of the room. So, I could only assume that the film projector must have sat on it. I looked around in there for a while and found an old wheat penny! Finally this exploration was paying off. I walked back to the lobby to check out a doorway that I had saw before.

The light from my lantern shown a padlock on the door. That must mean theres good stuff behind it! I pry off the lock, and open the door. Inside is a small room, that used to be an office. Theres an old rotting desk in it, a wooden chair, and newspapers laying all over the floor. I tried to look at the newspapers but the years of humidity had gotten to them. There was nothing of interest in the desk, and the only framed picture on the wall, was a painting of a flower pot.
There was another door at the other end of the office though, so I moved onto it. I tried to open it, but it wouldn’t budge. The door was warped pretty bad. I had to shoulder it a couple times to get it to pop open. When it did, I almost tumbled quite a ways. Behind the door was steps leading down. I figure it must be the basement.

I make my way down the creaky old stairs, and walk into a very large room. I’d compare it to a basketball court. Scattered through the room was old brick pillars that made up the support for the building. Some of them were in bad shape, but still appeared to be holding strong. As I’m checking out one of the pillars, I hear the pitter patter of feet off in the darkness behind me. I whip out the mag light and shine it around. I can’t see anything though. I chalk it up to my imagination, and continue my exploring.
I first check out what would be the north end of the room, and see a bunch of stuff under sheets. I pull them off and find chairs stacked up. Not too interesting. Next to the chairs is some boxes with old movie reels in them. I really wanted to take one with me, but I didn’t. I’m not a thief.

More pattering off in the distance alarms me. I call out if anybody is there, but am met with no answers. I had thought someone had followed me into the theater, or that there was an animal in here with me. The mag light didn’t shine as far as it normally would. The light beam would cut out after about 8 feet, so I didn’t have a good view of everything that was around me. I was on guard now, since I knew something was in here. I started walking towards the noise with the flashlight and lantern glowing. I reach a wall, and haven’t seen anything. I don’t know what to think at that point. It’s an old building though, so it could just be random noises that old buildings make. I decide to walk towards the east wall and check out anything that might be over there.

I get there and find a ton of wooden boxes piled to the ceiling, which was about 7 foot high. I start grabbing them off the top and checking the contents. There is nothing inside the boxes though. All of the ones I search through are empty. I get down to about 4 feet and see something behind where I had just pulled the box from. It’s the outline of a hole. This interests me greatly.
I quickly remove the other boxes that are along the wall, and am soon greeted with a large hole in the wall. It is about 4 feet tall, and 3 feet wide. It wasn’t neatly cut out of the wall either. It seemed that bricks were torn from the foundation to reveal this hole.

I shine my light into the hole, and can now see a tunnel of sorts. It is very crudely made. It looked like something you would see in a prison escape movie. Rough walls lined it, and it was kinda circular. The floor of it was flat though. It took me all but a half a second to decide to explore it. A tunnel under a town in Iowa. Hell yes, how often do you find something like this?
I hunched over and stepped into the tunnel. I hear that pattering noise behind me once again. I look over my shoulder and see nothing. I shrug it off and start going into the tunnel.

After about 10 feet the tunnel starts to shrink a bit. It’s now about 3 and a half feet tall. For a 6 foot person at the time, that is quite a strain. I hunch over and start slowly moving onward. I was basically walking with my ass on my feet. About 20 feet in, the tunnel takes a sharp turn to the left. Then another 20 feet I think, it opened up into a small room. Well, not really a room, more like a bigger wider opening. I notice 2 tunnels cut off from this one, and I decide to take the one of the right.
I step into the room and hear crunching coming from under my feet. I look down and see skeletons of all sorts of stuff. I’m not a doctor or archaeologist or any of that, but they looked like cat/rat/rabbit skeletons. This spooked me a little bit. Off on the other side of the room near the right tunnel was a decaying cat. Good times, good times. I could only assume there was another way into this system of tunnels, if animals were getting in.

I walked over the skeletons, and went through the right tunnel. It’s a winding bastard too. Every few feet, I would have to turn one way or the other. I walk a bit further, and feel breeze on my sweaty face. I must have found that opening I was thinking about. Sure enough, there was a chunk about the size of couple shoe boxes missing out of the ceiling. I shine my light up, and see rounded concrete. I must be under a culvert or something. I walk onward, and am soon met with a collapsed section. Well thats encouraging huh. I turn around and start to head back to the bone room, but feel vibrations. I shine the light around, and see some rocks tumbling from around the collapsed section. A roaring noise then echo’s through the tunnel. I recognize that sound though. It’s a tractor. He must be driving on the road, near the culvert. I find it strange that this thing is so shallow where I am.
I hadn’t even noticed that I was slowly moving upwards when I was going down the right tunnel. I walked back to the bone room at that point.

I look down to make sure I don’t step on that decaying cat, but it’s gone. Did I miss something? I shine the light around the little room, and it’s nowhere to be seen. Alright then, what now. I did the only logical thing. I stepped into the other tunnel branching off from the room. Now, this one was really small. I had to literally crawl through it on my hands and knees.
So, I left my lantern in the room and started crawling. This wasn’t fun at all. There was all sorts of sharp little rocks that my hands and knees were going over, and I was wearing shorts.

I crawled about 30 feet in this tunnel, and stopped to take a breather. I was able to sit down hunched over. A minute later, my ears pick up this sound. It was a crunching noise. I stop breathing so I can listen better. The sound is coming from the direction I was heading. I turn the flashlight on and shine it down the tunnel. 2 orange eyes about 20 feet away greet me. This thing…it looks like a hairless skeletal monkey. I let out a hearty “What the Fuck!” It whips up, sees the light, and literally disappears. Like, *poof* gone.
I had seen enough. I quickly shuffle around, and am met face to face with this thing. It lets out this horrible…what I can only describe, as a bark at me. I jump up, and slam my head into the ceiling above me.

I am now writhing in pain, and feel blood pouring out a cut in my head. I must have hit a sharp rock. I start crawling as fast as I can towards the bone room. I get to the little room, and shine the light back into the darkness. About 10 feet away is that fucking thing. It’s licking the ground where my blood had trailed. It keeps licking away, but eyeballs me and growls. Oh isn’t this just dandy! This thing likes blood. I’m getting the fuck out of this place. I try to run through the bone room, but trip, and am now scrambling to stand up in all these dead animals. I run to the tunnel and duck so I can head right into it. I didn’t duck good enough. Pow, my forehead smacks into the wall. That knocks me on my ass. Now my head is in some serious pain. I can’t tell if I’m bleeding from my forehead, because my face is already covered in blood from a minute earlier.

I ignored the pain as best as I could and made haste down the tunnel. I’m breathing extremely hard. This shit is too much for me.
I burst out of the tunnel, and into the basement of theater. I started flinging wooden boxes in front of the tunnel, in a vain attempt to block whatever was in there. I get a bunch piled in front and start hustling for the stairs. Oh no, it’s not that easy though. I get there, and the stairs are gone. It’s just a wall. What in the name of god is going on! As it turns out I had just ran to the wrong wall.
A quick sprint to another wall reviles the staircase. I start to run up it, but hear boxes smashing behind me. I’m hauling ass up the stairs now because right after the smashing boxes, came the sound of loud pattering. Like a dogs paws on concrete. I get into that office I was in and slam the door. I kicked and kicked at it, till the warping did it’s natural locking effect.

Not even a second later the door started thumping as if something was banging into it. Then a clawing noise started happening. I ran over, and shoved the desk in front of the door. I’m doing all this while holding my poor mag light. If I had brought some plastic piece of shit, it would have been dark by the time I scrambled out of that tunnel. I step back and watch the door and desk shudder, as something kept pounding at it. The pounding stopped as soon as it started though. Then there was just silence.

The silence didn’t last too long though. I heard a clicking noise off in the distance. It sounded mechanical. I walked out into the lobby, and the noise grew. What the hell is that noise? It was coming from the screen room. My curiosity got the best of me, even after all of that. I walk to the hallway, and see the glow of light from the screen room. “Is someone in there?” I ask myself.
The second I enter the room I see a huge light square where the movie screen would be. It’s coming from a nonexistent projector. The light just started from midair, and cast itself onto the brick wall where the screen would be. I stood in amazement, watching this unbelievable thing.
Soon I could hear the sound of crying all around me. I snapped out of the hypnosis the light seemed to have over me, and glanced around. There was no one there, but the crying was still happening. It wasn’t distant, or weird. It just sounded like people all around you were tearing up.

I start to walk backwards to the hall. As soon as I reach the door leading out of the screen room, I hear something different. The cries had quit, and erupted into screaming. The light from the nonexistent projector turned blood red, and coated the entire room. That was enough. I ran back into the lobby and towards the way out. I glanced over at the office as I ran past it, and see the door fly open, and desk go skidding across the room. Shit, that thing had gotten out at a bad time. I ran down the steps to the exit. Behind me I could hear a sound that was a mix between a snarl and a gurgle. The thing was chasing me. I soon was running up to the door leading outside. I sprinted up the steps and flew through the door into the outside world. I look back in time to see the thing leaping towards the door at me. It disappeared as soon as it hit the doorway though.

I fell down to my hands and knees, trying to catch my breath. My kneeling turned into laying on the sidewalk. My head was pounding, and my face was sticky from blood. My hands and knees were covered in cuts and scrapes from my rapid exit out of the tunnel. I stood up and shut the door to the theater. Nothing was going to get me to go back in there. I walked back to my vehicle, and remembered that I had left my lantern in the bone room. Oh well, it was a 30 dollar Coleman, easily replaceable. I then drove home and nursed my wounds.

About a year later, the town council decided to demolish a building that was 2 down from the theater. After destroying the foundation, they found a branch to the system of tunnels I was in. It was quite the big discovery, and hit the newspaper soon after it was found. The newspapers said that the tunnels were not even known about by any current living resident of the town. They were old and decrepit. The part of the article that caught my eye though, was their speculation on why there was a modern day lantern in the tunnel. I just chuckled at that. The branch they discovered must have been the one I was heading down when I saw the creature.

The tunnels are still there. The town council decided to leave them be, since they presented no danger to the buildings around them. However, they are now watched over very well, since they don’t want any meddling kids getting into them. That doesn’t matter to me though. I’m not going back in them.

“Camp Hell”
Camp Hell is a boyscout camp in Iowa (Not the Real Name) It is located in a forest area near Des Moines. Being a good christian child, I was initiated into the cub scouts at a young age, and then eventually the boy scouts. I eventually made Eagle, but that has nothing to do with this particular story.

Our troop had decided that our summer trip that year would be to head to Camp Hell. There we could do our lifeguard training, C.O.P.E. which is basically rock climbing, and other random fun things. I think I was 15 or 16 at the time.
We get all packed up and start the long drive down there. 6 hours later, and we reach our destination. We get all our gear out of the vehicles and start to walk down to our designated site. The camp is god damn enormous though. The walk from the parking lot to our site took 45 minutes. Talk about being hard on the arms and legs. We finally get there though, and get to see what our lodgings will be. Our camp site was about the 50 yards around. The tents we would be sleeping in were those world war 2, olive green pitch tents. Throw a couple of pallets in the bottom of them, and you’re out of the mud for the most part.

I opened up my tent and was greeted with an ungodly amount of spiders. The majority were daddy long legs, and wolf spiders. Back then I still had my sense of smell, and let me tell you. That tent smelled like fucking spiders. It took me a good half hour to brush all of them out of it, and get my cot set up. I opened the back of the tent, and look down. It’s on the edge of a ravine. There was a good 30 foot sharp drop off right there. Down in the bottom was a small stream and some rocky outcroppings.
I walked out of the tent and saw everyone gathered around the tent next to mine. I walk over to see what the fuss is about, and take a look inside. Sitting on the ceiling of this tent is the biggest wolf spider I have ever seen. The damn thing looked like a large tarantula. It was about as big as your hand spread out, and boy was it hairy. Someone jabbed it with a stick, and the thing plopped down with a thud onto the pallet. It then ran towards the back, and leaped out into the ravine. We actually watched it glide down into the woods.

So already we have an infestation of the oogly booglies in the camp. What I didn’t mention was the noise. God damn cicadas were going off like crazy. It was one of their big years. There was an estimated 25,000 per acre I think they said. It was so bad, that when I later walked over to a small cabin, I saw that the entire side of it was cicada shells. You couldn’t see a piece of wood on that thing because of all of them. The huge snails were cool though, they were all over the damp woods.
Anyway, after we got all set up, we headed to the main hall for the welcoming to the week of hell. There was some stupid shit speeches and other boring stuff that kids don’t want to hear. We then dined on the finest baked beans and hot dogs.

Later that night we all gathered around this huge fire, in a semi-circle. There was about 1000 of us, so it was a big fire. Behind it was this huge totem pole with a platform at the top. I’d say about 50 feet up. Standing on the platform was some fruit cake in body paint screaming. Then shirtless weirdo’s ran around us screaming with torches. I swear, the boy scouts organization is one of the weirdest in the world. After all the batshit insane stuff had died down, we were treated to stories of the camps history.

The main guy told us of all the people who had died at this camp, and of the weird creatures that lurked in the woods and lakes. The way he told the stories though was so funny, due to his crackly, whinny voice.
I think the stories ended at around midnight, and we were sent back to get some sleep. So, we get back to our campsite, and I’m pretty bushed, so I decide to head to bed. I crack open that tent, and flip a flashlight on, only to see that all the god damn spiders were back! Let me tell you, a week in that place will cure you of all your arachnophobia. I didn’t even bother with the spiders, I just got undressed, hopped in my sleeping bag, and conked out.

5 a.m. rolls around and I hear the blaring sound of reveille playing a few feet from my tent. Since when did I join the army!? I got dressed and headed out for my first day of fun and festivities.
The first thing on my agenda was C.O.P.E. So, I headed down to the designated area, which was a 2 mile walk through the woods. By the time I get there I’m soaked from all the dew. About 15 of us had signed up for cope this year. The first thing we do is go to climb the 100 foot tower, then repel down the back side. No big deal really, we had all done it before. So, we get our swiss seats tied up, and start going up in one by one…eh, it’s nothing really to talk about. Nothing interesting happened on it my first day. So, I’ll skip ahead.

My first day was pretty normal for the most part. Cope, followed by canoe safety, then some other stuff that I can’t remember. That night was once again filled with spiders and 100 degrees plus humidity.
We had to get up the next day at the same time. This day though I had to go to the mess hall and prepare the table for breakfast. Queue me trudging through the woods at 5 in the morning. I noticed that the woods were dead quite for the most part, besides the common sound of rabbits or squirrels. The cicadas hadn’t come out yet, so it was less annoying. It was still dark out, so I had a flashlight with me to guide my way through the trees.

I don’t know what made me look up, but when I shined my light up at the tops of the trees I saw something. A large black image was leaping through the tree tops at a fast pace. It went directly over me, then off in the direction I had just came from. My light didn’t carry on it for too long, but long enough for me to confirm that I had seen something strange. It didn’t make a sound, which was pretty weird. I had already seen some strange stuff in my life at this point, so I wasn’t really scared at all. I just kept moving onward towards the mess hall.
It took me about 30 minutes to get there, and once again I was soaked up to my knees in dew. Setting up the table only took about 15 minutes, and by 6 everyone had shown up and started eating.
After breakfast they sang songs about using the pancakes as toilet paper, and coffee for cuts. Really, boy scouts=weird.

After breakfast it was off to another uneventful day of cope. Then onward to canoe safety. Today during my canoe class, we had to go out into the middle of the murky lake, and sink my canoe. Then attempt to un-sink it. The only thing that worried me about that lake was the unusually high amount of large snapping turtles. Those things were mean too. I didn’t want one of those taking a finger off or a chunk of flesh.
Our instructor demonstrated how to do it properly. He would sink his, then 2 other canoes would pull up and you would work your canoe to the surface, then kind of stack it on the other two so it could drain out properly. It seemed pretty pointless to me. Since if you’re by yourself, you’re not going to get it out from under water.

I waited until my turn, then I rowed out into the middle of the lake. I started rocking my canoe until it flipped and started to go under. The damn thing only sank about 5 feet down, so I was able to stand on it under water. The instructor sent out 2 guys with canoes as soon as mine was sunken. I had a good 10 minute wait though.
So, I stood there on my sunken canoe waiting for those slow ass people to work their way out. I felt the canoe start moving from under my feet, as if a current was pulling on it. I kick my heel over the edge of a support beam in it to hold on. That stopped the canoe dead in it’s tracks. Suddenly I felt something wrap around my ankle and pull me down. It pulled hard enough to submerge me completely, even with my life jacket on. I open my eyes up under the water and see these pale rotting hands fly at my face and grab my ears. A screaming face is then thrust into mine. I could hear the screaming perfectly, even though I was underwater. I start frantically trying to get away. I’m kicking and waving my arms as hard as I can. It seemed like an eternity, but the thing let go of me, and I was able to make it to the surface.

My life jacket bobs me up above the water line, where I proceed to cough and sputter. The guys in canoes show up just as I bob up to the surface, so I start trying to climb into one of their canoes as fast as I can. They won’t let me though. “You have to get yours out before you can come back.” God dammit! I told them something underwater had grabbed me, but they told me to stop making shit up and get my canoe out. So, I did just that while all the time wondering if something was going to grab me and drag me to my death.
I get my canoe out, and floating again, then speed into shore. When I get there, the instructor asked me why I was underwater for so long. I told him of what had just happened, and he said “Oh yah, that happens.” That happens!? What the hell kind of place is this.

I went down to the showers to get cleaned up, but am greeted with a fat elderly man showering naked…so I waited. This place was giving me a serious case of the heeby jeebies.
I eventually got showered up, and walked back to my campsite, where I planned on taking a nap. I layed down for a good hour, but couldn’t get to sleep on account of all those damn cicadas going crazy. So, I decided to hang out with my buddies for a bit. They wanted to go explore the woods, so of course I went with. We all found some nice branches, and made them into walking sticks, and we were off. We found a path down the ravine behind our campsite and took it. We then followed the stream for a while. The stream turned into a small river with some fast current going down it.

I was checking out the little fish that will swimming around in the nice clear water, while my friends walked off further down the path. I was waiting for a friend to catch up anyway. I glanced over at a huge pile of branches that were hung up on a bend in the river. I see something weird sticking out of them. I walk over that way, and finally see what it is. A nice mangled torso slung up in the branches. Intestines were floating out of the eviscerated stomach. And it wasn’t fresh at all. The whole thing was a pale white, and looked like it had been there for a while. I start yelling for them to come look at it. Nobody was coming yet though.
“Don’t” That ‘s what I hear. I look at the torso again, and hear “Don’t” A head then slowly cranes it’s way out of the rushing waters, and stares at me. There is no lower jaw on the head, and the eyes are popped out of it. The lips are huge and purple. It says “Don’t” Once again. I take off like a bat out of hell screaming my head off. I ran and ran, until I saw the friend that I was waiting for. He’s yelling “what’s the matter!” at me while I’m running up to him. I catch my breath and tell him that I had saw the torso caught up in the branches.

We bust ass back to the spot, and take a look at the branches. There’s death there alright, but it wasn’t what I had saw. It was a freshly killed deer this time. Still had all it’s hair and color. He questions me as to why it was such a big deal. I explained to him the whole time, but he would just laugh and tell me to stop trying to scare him. He went on to catch up with the other guys. I just headed back to the camp at a very fast pace. Behind me I could hear the word “Don’t” echoing through the ravine. What does it mean? I couldn’t figure it out.
No one else at the camp would believe me. They said it was either making up stories, or my imagination. Fuck, imagination. Last time I checked, people don’t imagine ripped up torso’s and talking severed heads.

I already wanted to go home. This place was too fucked up for me, and apparently other people had shit happen to them here also. I still had 4 more days to look forward to though.

That night there was a huge electrical storm. I’m talking big. There was so much lightning that it was brighter than daylight out. I was lucky enough to be in the tent 5 feet from the tall metal flagpole. Lucky me. The wind was howling at about 50 miles per hour. Everybody except a few of us had moved into the wooden shack that stored our fire wood. I was one of the lucky people that got to stay in the tents. The wind was so strong that it was untying the double knots that I had made to keep the tent flaps closed. It wasn’t raining at all though thankfully. More and more spiders had decided to get out of the storm. By now my sleeping bag was covered in smooshed spiders from my rolling around at night.
I tried to get to sleep but the thunder was so constant and loud that it was just impossible at first. Then the talking started. “Don’t!” That thing was yelling at me from the river. Over and over it would yell “Don’t” at me. I flung the sleeping bag over my head to stop the noise of the thunder, wind, and talking. It was pointless though, everything got through. I must have eventually fell asleep, because before I knew it, it was daytime again.

Today, was the day I had been at first looking forward to, but now I dreaded it. It was the oh so fantastic “Survival Trial”. We are given a tarp, a sleeping bag, a small shovel, a bucket, a book of matches, and our knife. Then we are supposed to go deep into the woods and make a campsite for the night. This was not a good thing for me, after all that I had went through.
First thing to do was try go find a good spot to set up. I headed over to the huge bridge that went over the ravine, and tried to set up under it. But saw someone else there, and they were getting peed on by people on the bridge. So, that was a no-go.

I tried a couple of other places. I was looking for a good, elevated flat spot, that was away from that river or stream or whatever it was. I found a good area that was about a mile into the woods. I to this day don’t know how they got away with this stuff back then. Sending kids into the woods unattended, it’s so unsafe. But oh well, what can you do. I’m sure they don’t allow it anymore these days.
The spot I found was on the top of a little hill, with a nice big tree. So, if there was rain, it would all go down, and not pool up around me. I dug a small ditch which resembled a shallow grave. I covered the dirt in it with pine needled and dry leaves. I set my sleeping bag in it. I used the tarp as a makeshift tent.
I was proud of my campsite when I was done. It looked pretty damn good. I then went off and gathered a decent amount of firewood. I dug a tiny pit, and lined it with rocks. That was where I would have my fire. I found a nice flat rock that I could use for cooking and set it next to the fire. Then, I went down to the lake and pulled up the lines I had set earlier. The lines had 6 baited hooks on them, and I had thrown them into the water along the shore. Most of the hooks were full with mediocre sized rock bass, but I kept them. Part of the survival course was catching and eating your own food.

Night rolled around and I had eaten my fish that were cooked on the flat rock in the fire. I sat there alone, smoking about a half a pack of ciggs that I couldn’t touch until I was alone. At least that was one good thing about this survival crap. It was a calm night. The storm the night before had blown all the bad stuff away apparently. There was only the sound of crickets and the crackling fire. I sat there, enjoying my fire and nicotine for quite a while. Then I noticed that all the crickets had stopped chirping. Well, isn’t that the best sound ever. When they do that, it means something is about to die. I had this happen later on in life, but that’s part of another story.
I looked around into the dark woods, but my small fire didn’t light up much. I heard the crunching of dead leaves and sticks off in the direction behind me. I figured someone must be out checking on us survivalists. I called out “hello?” and waited for an answer, but got none. The crunching kept going on off into the distance, away from me, and soon faded into nothing. I thought it was someone just being a prick.

I rolled my bag out into my shallow grave…man that sounds bad doesn’t it. I hopped into the bag, and snuggled in. It was actually quite comfortable. I was pretty surprised with how well things were turning out. It didn’t take me long to fall asleep.
I woke up some time later. My eyes opened and I stared into the face of something. I was still very groggy so I just looked until my eyes adjusted. It was some sort of beast. It was just inches from me. The thing had stuck it’s head under my tarp and was eyeballing me…kinda. It had no eyes. Imagine a deformed wolf, with no eyes, or eye sockets. It was huge, and white. It inched closer to my face till it was almost touching. I’m trying my hardest not to move or scream my head off. It starts to smell me. It’s hot stagnant nose breath wafts over my face. The smell is terrible. It smelled like the essence of death. It sniffed for a few seconds then started to growl slightly. The growling got louder, and louder, until it whipped it’s massive head around and looked over it’s shoulder. I move my eyes over and see that it’s looking at something.

What it’s looking at is…fuck I don’t know. It was like a tall skinny human being that was hunched over. By tall I mean about 9 feet tall. It was naked, and had no mouth or arms. It was looking right at me. The growling turned into snarling. I could see the wolf things mouth open. Inside were several sets of teeth, like a shark would have. The wolf type thing turn around roared at this humanoid thing off in the distance. The tall thing started backing up slowly, while the wolf thing was walking at it slowly. I’m laying here with the biggest amount of fear and what the fuck rolling through my mind.
In an instant the wolf thing leaps into the air and slams into the tall thing. The tall thing starts writhing around on the ground. I could hear muffled screams coming from it’s non-existent mouth. The wolf was snapping and bitting at it. I could hear flesh being ripped from bones, followed by the crunching of bones. I fucking black out at this point. I couldn’t take that much shit in one sitting.

I wake up and look at my wrist watch. It is 3 o’clock in the afternoon. Fuck! I had been sleeping for a very long time. I get up and remember what I had seen. Was it all a dream? Apparently not. There is black tar like stuff splattered all around my camp. I could only assume it was blood from those things. There was huge patches of dirt kicked up, and a tree was snapped in half not more than 10 feet from where I was sleeping. It was a tree about the size of a leg.
I decided the shit must have actually happened, so I got my shit packed up and ran back to the main camp.

When I got back I was greeted with a lot of “where the hell were you?”. I explained to them that I had overslept. I found some of the other guys that had done the survival course, and had a word with them. I asked them if they had anything strange happen to them during their stay in the woods. Only one person said that he had seen something lurking around in the dark. He said it was shaped like a dog, only a lot bigger. The other people seemed uneasy, so I don’t know if they were telling the truth about noticing nothing, or if they were hiding something.
At 5 p.m. I headed over to my cope class for the biggest fun we were going to have. That would be the 2nd longest zip line in the world. Or it was at the time, I’m sure there are some bigger ones by now.

To get to the zip line, you have to climb up this wire ladder onto the top of a light pole. Then grab onto one wire, and walk across another wire to the other side, which is another light pole. It’s about a 20 yard wire walk. At that point you get yourself hooked up and take off. I don’t even remember how long it is, but it’s a long damn way to the other end. You fly over the ravine and a ton of forest. At the other end are your fellow boy scouts ready to stop you. Theres a bunch of bed mattresses nailed to trees too. Well, thats comforting.
I had to wait an hour before it was my turn because someone chickened out, and had to be forcibly removed from the pole. It took me 15 minutes to walk to the line start from the end, so that kinda shows how long a distance it is.

I get up the ladder, and make my way across the wire. I get hooked up to the line, and kick off the platform. The zip line takes off like a bolt of lightning. I’m soaring over the land, and it is just kick ass. I look down as I pass over the ravine and see a mass of thousands of bodies writhing around. They are reaching up at me and screaming. I throw up all over myself.
I get to the other end, and am shaking terribly bad as they catch my line and help me off. They pass it off as me being scared, and the rush getting to me. It wasn’t though. I had enough of this place, it was too much now. I waited around at the end for the instructors girlfriend to come down the line. We got radioed that she had started, but she never showed up. What the hell happened to her?

Turns out that she got above the ravine, and her hair flew up into the pulley and got caught. It half way scalped her. That was a very bad thing. She hadn’t tired her hair back and put it under her helmet like she was told to. a rescue guy had to climb out to the middle where she was stranded, and cut her hair so she could get moving to the end. She was passed out from what I would assume to be pain and blood loss. It was all bad, and I’ll never forget it. She lived fortunately.
Later that day, the other instructor fell off the tower, and his line didn’t catch. He shattered both his legs. He was about 40 feet off the ground at the time, trying to show off. Shit was going sour awful fast.
These 2 things happening in one day got cope canceled for the rest of the trip.

I skipped the rest of my courses that day, and just hung around the mess hall. I wanted to be near some kind of civilization, and that was the closest I could get at the time. Night rolled around, and I was back in the tent with my buddies, the spiders. I didn’t mind them by now. They didn’t bite me or anything so it was no big deal. There was something wrong with me the whole trip though, I couldn’t take a dump no matter how hard I tried. It wasn’t constipation, I just didn’t have to go. It was weird. I’m just letting you guys know I was having trouble pooping.

I lay there in bed, wondering what was going to fuck with me tonight. I soon dozed off and was met with nightmares of epic proportions. I don’t remember what they were about, but I know I had them. I woke up from them in a cold sweat. And it was freezing cold in that tent. It was about 90 degrees when I fell asleep, now I could see my breath. I was shivering in my sleeping bag, wondering how it had got so damn cold. I go to flip on my electric lantern, but it wont turn on. Batteries must be dead.
I hear the tent flap behind me head start to open. I turn my head and look over. Through the flap comes the head of the tall skinny thing. It cranes it’s foot long neck and stares right at me. There is black tar stuff oozing from cuts that riddle it’s face. It looks at me for a few seconds then starts talking.
It says “Come with me. You must come with me.” I actually said “No” It’s face moves closer to mine, and it keep repeating it’s phrase.
I’m in absolute terror. The thing suddenly starts howling in pain. Like a man would. It’s then jerked back out the tent. I say jerked because it looked like something pulled it out. I hear thrashing going down into the ravine. Followed by a roaring noise and now screaming. I curl up into a ball in my sleeping bag and close my eyes shut as tight as I can get them.

I must have fallen asleep because I woke up to the sound of the trumpet at 5 a.m. Today was the day we leave. I was so fucking happy to leave that godforsaken place. I had all my shit packed up by 7 a.m. and I was waiting out by the van. I said fuck the ending gathering and waiting in the parking lot. Everyone got back an hour or so later, and we took off. As soon as we left the parking lot I had to take a dump. My bowels knew what was going on.

Plotterboy

I am not a stranger to having scary shit happen to me. I grew up in rural Australia, on a farm which was situated where the local aboriginal populace had their last camp and where butchered by a group of townsfolk one fine Sunday afternoon after church. They where thrown off the tall sandstone cliffs, into the river below. woman, children, everyone. Anyone who survived was shot, and they where left there to rot. This was on the border of my parents farm. Work never stops when you live on a farm, but needless to say, nobody in the area worked near the river on a sunday. But, unfortunately, my memories of the things that happened to me in that place are deeply repressed, so you guys will have to make do with what happened to me when I moved to Melbourne, looking for work.

My girlfriend and I where trying to find a place to live together at the time, somewhere relatively cheap in the inner east suburbs of the city. Long story short, we found a little two bedroom apartment in a block of about 30, in a suburb called Camberwell. Camberwell is one of the ‘leafy suburbs’ of Melbourne, with the streets dotted with oaks and old mansions, with the odd apartment block in between. We found a ground floor apartment being advertised for $150 a week, which was incredibly cheap. Needless to say, we took it, attributing the coolness of the building to the foot thick brick walls. Things went very well for a few months, we got settled in, explored the area, and generally made the place feel like home. After a month or so, we decided to get an ADSL connection and set up a study in the spare bedroom. This was in early July, which is winter here, and it was where the real fun began.

The door to the room opened inward, and I had set my desk up behind it. My Girlfriend was taking night classes at the time and I was working a 9-5 job, so I was often in the house alone. So I would be winding down from a day at work, surfing the web or whatever, and out of the corner of my eye, the door would slowly come ajar, and with painstaking slowness, open until it lightly bumped my desk. My desk being the piece of shit that it was, would wobble, causing me to look up. This was unnerving, but I could deal with it, the doorways in old buildings shift, and the doors don’t always fit well right? Thats when out of the corner of my eye, I would see a hand, with elongated fingers, tapering down into sharp spikes, curl around the edge of the door, and a head of matted black shoulder length hair begin to peek into the room. I was rather scared at this time, somehow I knew that I did not want to see the eyes of this creature, and always turned to look at the door just before it got to that point. When I did this it would pull back in a split second, though I saw it happen with detail. This happened for weeks, and I ignored it, mainly because my girlfriend didn’t seem to have had anything happen to her. It was August the 2nd when the creature decided to up the ante.

I come home from work at about 6, the place was empty, the missus having gone to classes about an hour before. I grabbed a quick drink from the kitchen and went to the computer to check emails or some as such. When I turned on the light in the study, I found thousands of dead flies, all about 1cm long. Huge dead flies, covering every square inch of the room. Being a bit pissed off at this, I went and got the vacuum to clean up. Then it twigged, Its the middle of winter, its too cold for flies here at the moment… I passed it off to myself, telling myself that something must have died under the apartment, and the flies had come in through the vents, or the gap between the skirting and the floor. This didn’t make sense, as there was no smell, but I did not wish to think about the other possibilities.

This happened every day, and eventually, we would come home to dead flies covering the entire house. We fumigated, nothing stopped it. At the end of August, the dead fly plague stopped abruptly, We breathed a sigh of relief and moved on. Then we begain waking up to find the walls of the house covered with condensed water. Everything started to mildew, no matter how hard we looked, there was no evidence of rising damp. So we dealt with it as best we could, wiping down the walls every day, fighting that would appear on everything, clothing, bedding, the middle of the wall. My girlfriend started seeing things shoot past her from the corner of her eye, and a small figure, about 5 foot tall, with hands down past its knees and fingers scraping the floor in the corners of the rooms where the doors where situated. I kept the doors closed in every room in the house pretty much constantly at that point, but they would constantly open when you had your back turned. it became incredibly uncomfortable in that house. You could not do anything without feeling something standing behind you, its burning gaze at the back of your neck, trying to will you to turn around and confront it. We began making excuses to stay outside for longer and longer periods of time. Then came the decider.

It was a friday evening, we had just finished up dinner, Jane was in the lounge room watching some TV and I was finishing up the washing up. I was washing glasses. I dipped the glass into the water, scrubbing the inside of the glass with my sponge. Something in the glass snagged the sponge. I lifted it out of the water, and found that there was a large scratch in the glass that wasnt there before. But it wasn’t ordinary at all. This scratch had been melted into the inside of the cup, in the 3 seconds I had been cleaning it, something had melted a fissure right down the side of the glass. I did what any normal person would do. I panicked, threw the glass into the bin and went on as if nothing had happened. Picked up another glass, dipped it in the water to rinse, pulled it out, and there, on the inside of the glass, was a melted scratch, exactly the same as the last one. We left the house.

That night, we found a new place to stay, and moved out a fortnight later. On the day that the house was to be inspected, some three days after we moved out, I got an angry call from the landlord, saying that the house was a complete mess. Being that we had moved a block away, I came down to see what he was talking about. When I walked in, my jaw dropped. there where drifts of dead flies in the corners of the rooms, black marks, arranged like claws ran down the walls, mould was growing everywhere. A strange yellow goo dripped from the ceiling. The landlord read the panicked look on my face and asked “This was not like this when you moved out was it?” It was all I could do to shake my head. I think it was the look of terror in my face that made him believe me. Somehow, I worked up the courage to help the landlord clean the mess up before the first inspectors arrived, and they managed to rent it out to some other couple. Hopefully, they haven’t had anything happen to them, But I wouldn’t be surprised if they came home to find the place blanketed in dead flies.

AlbinoHagfish

I think the most important thing to state first is that, while as a child it seemed very real to me, I’ve grown up to decide that it was largely imagination and other people reacting to it. However, it’s always a neat story, although one I try to avoid telling most people I know unless I feel it’s relevant.

Anyway, when I was around six I moved into a new house. Nothing really seemed amiss about it, really, although I didn’t like the splintery old brown boards that made up its facing. I remember declaring that the house was haunted, hoping that everyone would agree and move back. I’m pretty sure that was influentual.

We had this old TV, one of the ones with dials on the face of it. One dial changed the channels, and really I don’t remember what the other one did. All it changed was turning off the cable receiving somehow and change the picture into static. A few months after we moved in the second dial started moving. My parents asked if I did it, and I thought a perfectly reasonable response was to blame it on my stuffed rabbit. Of course that shifted the blame to me.

That was sort of a catalyst for the next stage. After that I started having these dreams where I’d get out of my body and fly around the room. They were insanely vivid, I’d explore places I couldn’t normally. They were really cool, and I accepted that they were dreams despite the clarity of them.

After a bit I had to move to a different room, which was when the tone changed from playful to aggressive. There’s a sliding glass door in here (I’m actually in the room now) and nightly I’d hear banging on it, like flat palms striking the glass. I was always too scared to look until one night.

When I turned to the glass door, this thing phased through it and sat in the corner. It was really damn tall, and emaciated-looking. Leathery brown skin, downright skeletal, gaping holes for eyes and no nose. It looked mouthless too until it grinned, revealing basically a fuckton of teeth.

It scared the shit out of me, obviously, but eventually I got used to it showing up and chilling out, and associated it with the flying around at night. I think I was around nine at this point. After that, I obviously told my parents and it terrified my mom.

She started claiming that when she was angry at me, she heard a persistent howling outside the bedroom window all night long. My dad wasn’t aware of this. In addition to that, people would often enter this room and quickly leave, stating that it was uncomfortable or bad.

I guess another important detail is that I live in Southern California on former Kumeyai land. I don’t know if I spelled the tribe name right.

Basically I’ve come to the conclusion that I had a way overactive imagination and people just picked up on the events and ran with it. There’s a logical explanation for everything, but it sticks with me. This is by far the longest and most detailed account I’ve made and it ended up long as Hell.

If that thing existed (a HUGE if), I’d like to know what it was and what was going on. I’ve heard a lot of theories but nothing that seems remotely solid. I think I’m just going to forget about it and move on, really.