Eerie Stuff

Jassdolly

I encountered a shadow person last week. It is not the only experience that I’ve had with the supernatural but it’s the most recent.

My mother had surgery last Friday because her doctor discovered a tumor in her right kidney. Her surgery went extremely smoothly and she’s recovering wonderfully now. The day after her surgery she asked me to drop some of her things off at her apartment that she had brought to the hospital with her. Of course I obliged. She lives on the 8th floor of a fairly new building in NYC. As I was waiting for the elevator I saw someone in my peripheral coming towards me at a very quick pace. It was a tall figure wearing what looked like a baseball cap and the second I spotted him, elevator 2 opened. I’m not a rude person so I held the door and turned to acknowledge him. He was gone. Nowhere to be seen and if you knew the setup of the elevator foyer, there is nowhere he could have gone. No stairwell doors, no apartment doors, nowhere he could have gone period. He was walking briskly towards me but the second the elevator opened he was gone. I pressed the “close door” button on the elevator frantically because something just didn’t feel right. It was the longest elevator ride I’ve ever experienced and the whole time it felt as though someone was standing behind me but I refused to look.

Woapalanne

I woke up this morning at 8:15, took a shower, and then went into the kitchen to start some coffee. Then I hear it.

*knock knock knock*

I look out on the back porch. It’s dim and misty, but there’s no one at the door. I check the front door – no one there. I figure it was just the cat bumping into something, but then I see him cowering in the corner of the kitchen.

Then comes *knock knock* again. I go out onto the porch, and there’s no one in the backyard, and despite the mist, no room for anyone or anything to reasonably hide. So I go back into the kitchen, but along the way, I pass the alcove aside the dining room, and that’s when I hear it louder than before: *KNOCK* *KNOCK* *KNOCK*.

I rush out the front door, run around to each side of the house, and there’s no one, nothing there, no sound, no trees close enough to bump the house. There’s absolutely no way any kids are knocking and running, especially loud enough for me to hear it coming right out of the alcove, and no animal that can run fast enough would be playing a game like this.

Back inside. It’s quiet. I walk back towards the alcove, where my aunt shot herself in 2003 and whose floor is heavily tiled to cover faint bloodstains and unthinkable scratches, shivering like mad and hoping I imagined the sound. Then the knocking again, softer than before, but steadier. *knock knock knock knock knock*

The clock starts to chime the half hour, and then one tremendous KNOCK shakes the room, sending cards off the table and one picture off the wall. Then it’s all quiet.

I need to pack and clean, but I’ll post more about this house when I’m back from my trip.

The plane takes off at 8:30 tomorrow morning.

dazat

I’ve never experienced anything supernatural personally, but I have a handful of stories I’ve heard from my best friend’s mother and grandfather that’ve always stood out in my mind. They’re not as interesting or frightening as some of the stories already posted, but I find them unnerving in a subdued kind of way.

First a little background on where their experiences took place. Basically, me and my friend’s family have lived in the same New York neighborhood for generations. Like a lot of New York, it was known for being pretty dangerous in our parents time with a lot of unsavory dealings and gang-related violence. It was populated mostly by poor Irish and Italian families who all lived in the beautiful but uncared for tenement buildings that have been around since the 1900s (and have since been renovated and are being rented out for an absolute fortune). The majority of these buildings were built close together and with at least one room in every apartment having a window facing an airshaft.

My friend’s grandpa lived in just such a building as a kid in the 1940s, and his bedroom was the room facing the air shaft. In fact, his bed was pushed right up against it. Now air shafts are creepy anyway, the way the wind whistles up through them is eerie and at night when all the lights are off they’re as dark as pitch. So this was enough to make sleeping for him difficult, and things only got worse when he began to be haunted by two recurring dreams.

In each dream he would open his eyes and be in bed, but unable to move. In the first kind his eyes would be drawn to his left, to find a stranger sitting beside his bed. It was an old Italian woman, dressed all in black, like a widow. She would stare down at him for what felt like hours, but because her face was so profoundly sad he wasn’t afraid of her. On the contrary, he’d be so wrapped up by her feelings of grief he’d often awake with tears streaming down his face. When he told his mother, she told him that he was lucky because he’d gotten a guardian angel to look after him. He wasn’t sure if that was it exactly…

But if the woman in his first dream was an angel the thing he saw in his second had to be a demon. He’d dream he was in his bed like always but in this version would find his eyes drawn right instead of left, to the window facing the air shaft. He’d watch as from within the darkness a pale white head, severed at the neck, would come floating up to his window. When his eyes locked with those of the head, it would begin, as he described it, ‘screaming and laughing and crying all at the same time’, as it edged closer and closer to the glass. Just before it would come level with his face he’d awake with a start. I can’t imagine how hard it would be to fall back asleep with the window still right there next to him…

He had these dreams again and again for the whole two years his family lived in this particular building. When they moved out he put the dreams out of mind until many years later, when as an adult he ran into a friend of his just outside the same building. He friend was a contractor and it turned out that they were tearing the old place down because of unrepairable problems with the outdated plumbing and heating systems. “I had some weird as hell dreams in this place as a kid”, his grandfather mentioned, and after he did his friend leaned in to tell him he wasn’t the only one: many people had been complaining of nightmares and other strange happenings for years now, and this was another factor in their desicion to bring it down.

Now for the mother’s stories, which also revolve around the old tenement building she lived in as a young girl in the 60s. The first thing to happen just after her whole family moved in was in the bathroom, which had, you guessed it, a window facing the air shaft. It had long been painted over however and was impossible to open, although her father had tried. On night she awoke needing to use to bathroom, and was sitting on the toilet when suddenly, BAM! The painted over window shot open with a sound like a shotgun blast. Terrified she went rushing into her parents room and sure enough, when they came back to check, the window was open, cold air streaming through it into the now completely silent bathroom.

Although nothing ever happened in it, she also hated her older brother’s room. She couldn’t even go into it for a few seconds, because as soon as she would a suffocatingly heavy, oppressive weight would press down on her shoulders like a ton of bricks. It wasn’t until several years later that one of her sisters shared with her the secret of what happened in that room before they moved in: apparently, in the short time between when the previous occupants had moved out and her family moved in, a man had been chained to wall of that room and gruesomely disembowled. The landlord came in the next day to discover his fresh corpse, and sensing it was the work of the prolific neighborhood gang, had it quietly removed without contacting the police (as it was the gang’s policy to mark for death anyone who squealed and they had a real knack for figuring out who did). This certainly explained the gloomy atmosphere!

Finally there was the basement. This basement she loved. Her father, a carpenter, had set up his workshop there and she spent many days riding her tricycle around while he worked. But at night she would go there again, this time in the form of, much like her father, recurring dreams. In these dreams she had a friend, a girl her age she found sitting perched on a wooden shelf there. The girl was playful and friendly, and my friend’s mother didn’t fear her, despite the fact she was perpetually wearing a black funeral veil over her face. They became playmates and his mother dreamt about the girl for several months; toward the end of each dream, she would begin to become a little curious about the girl’s face, but she’d wake up before she could ever act on that curiosity. Until one day…

One day the dream went on a little longer than usual. Like always, she grew curious about the veil, but this time she was able to reach out her hand toward it. The moment she did she wished she hadn’t. The peaceful mood of the dream changed at once to that of overwhelming fear. Her playmate had gone still, staring at his mother silently with the eyes hidden behind the veil. His mother wanted more than anything to retract her half extended arm, but knew in that abstract dream logic way that she couldn’t, that there was no more choice but to finish what she’d started and remove the veil. With every inch her hand moved closer the more her feelings of dread grew, until finally she’d grasped the veil and was about to pull it up when she suddenly awoke. She never dreamt of the girl again after that… and naturally she steered clear of the basement.

thesargefiles

I used to know a priest who told us a story about his dad one time. His dad (lets just call him Bob) was a higher up in some Church and was approached by two men living together with kids who had reported some strange happenings in their house. For example, urine found in the dishwasher, and the family dog found dead with its neck broken in a room which locked from the inside.

Bob was asked to do a blessing of the house so him and someone else went to the house to perform the blessing. He walked in and the first thing he noticed on a hot summer day in July, was a spot that was freezing cold in the house. We’re talking seeing your breath cold. The blessing was performed and Bob and the other dude left, but for the next week, Bob, who had the house to himself at the time, slept with his light on. He could feel some presence around him all the time and was scared to sleep in the dark.

FluffyBunny

Last weekend my brother told me a bizarre little story of what happened to him about a week ago.

He is currently stationed in the north of England in a bit of an old dilapidated barracks, its certainly seen better days. Due to commitments, most of his guys were out on operations and exercises, which left him as one of the few people left in his accommodation block. Certainly the only one on his floor.

His room is fairly basic, a four man room with only him in it, cupboards/lockers, a desk with a computer, sink and small kitchen area.

He awoke at around midnight to a clicking noise. He was unsure what it was at first, but soon realised it was his Kettle in the corner of his room. So, more irritated than freaked out, he got up and went over to see what it was, thinking that it may be a noise in the pipes or something else. However, when checking the kettle, he found that the water inside had boiled.

I know what you are thinking, wow, just wow. A haunted kettle. But that’s not it.

Figuring that it’s just some electrical surge caused by the old building, he unplugged the kettle and went back to bed, thinking no more of it.

He woke again at around 0330, once more hearing a clicking sound, and also hearing what sounded like the cups on the side clanging against each other. So he got up to investigate again.

And found that the unplugged Kettle had freshly boiled and was still steaming.

Now for the usual disclaimer of ‘I don’t believe in this stuff, and neither does my brother’, but its true. He personally believes that it’s just someone fucking with him, although his room was locked and no-one else was around. I told him it was probably just the ghost of some old English country Gent who just wanted a cup of tea.

Either way, he slept with the light on for the rest of the night.

VampireRobot

in the house that i lived in when i was a little kid, there was a lot of weird stuff that happened.

i get bored reading pages of people starting stories that way and then writing 9 paragraphs of overly descriptive stories of when they felt a weird feeling and got scared and decided there was a ghost around, so i’m just gonna write the one instance that just popped into my mind.

me and my friend were sitting in the utility room (the little room connecting the garage and the house, i guess some people call it a ‘mud room’. it was used for storage basically). we were playing a board game or something on the floor, and all of a sudden this flower vase fell from the very top shelf (since the entire room was lined with crowded shelves all the way up to the ceiling) and landed RIGHT next to me and shattered. Since those shelves were so crowded with crap, nobody had even bothered touching anything in there and definitely didn’t even think about taking more things in there to store on the shelves, in a long time. basically my point is that none of that stuff on the shelves had been touched in months at least. and the creepy thing was that it was this really weird flower vase that my mom had gotten that was shaped like a person’s head. i don’t know if it was an african thing or a middle eastern thing but the skin was painted brown and it was shaped with a weird head wrap on, maybe a turban.

so me and my friend were innocently playing a board game on the floor in the room when a head-shaped (and head-sized) ceramic vase fell off the top shelf and missed hitting MY head-shaped and head-sized head by inches. it could have done some serious damage if it had hit me. when my mom heard the crash of the shattering vase she came in and me and my friend were well trained in this type of situation and so we started off by telling her that it really wasn’t us and we didn’t touch anything and the vase breaking was not our fault! the way my mom reacted was really creepy and telling, because normally she probably would have accused one of us of messing around with the shelves or something, but this time she was way more concerned that neither of us got hurt (that’s not creepy) and also looking around the room with darting eyes as if making sure nothing else was about to fly out and attack one of us. she told us to hurry up and get out of that room and to never play in there ever again.

a few years later when i remembered this story, and thought of how it really stuck out in my mind, i asked my mom if she remembered when that happened and why she wasn’t mad at us. i figured she had assumed one of us was responsible for breaking the vase (and we even though maybe we might have been responsible since things don’t just fly off shelves and smash on the ground unless someone has done something to it). she said she knew that we didn’t do anything to make it fall, because she had seen that vase do weird things before. like she’d leave it sitting on a perch or a shelf or something in the house, and see a while later that it was inched off by the edge of its perch, just about to fall, even though nobody had touched it and nobody was around. apparently that’s WHY she wasn’t using it for flowers or plants and had put it stashed away in the corner, in the back, on the very top shelf in the nasty utility room.

so according to my mom, that vase probably was aiming to hit me or my friend.

Petroleum Jello

When I was in 7th grade, my best friend was a girl named Heather. Later, in high school we ended up drifting apart, when we fell into different crowds. But one of my most odd moments with Heather happened one night when I slept over at her house.

Heathers house was OLD. Not like colonial old, but definitely pre-1950’s at least. We were sleeping on the floor of her living room, and before we actually decided to sleep, spent the night watching Comedy Central. But TV was getting boring, so Heather decided to bust out the Ouija board.

As far as the conversation went, nothing was very amazing or anything. It was mostly vague, sometimes jumbled responses, and we got bored of that pretty quick too. But, one thing freaked me out –the hand I had on the planchet was really cold. Unnaturally cold. It was summer, and we had spent most of the day playing in her pool, and her parents were usually tight on money, so there wasn’t any air conditioning either. But, it felt like my hand had been sitting in ice water. Afer that we decided to turn in.

Mad Jackyl

”Who’s There? Are You Lost?”
I can think of a story that has always given me a strange feeling of mystery when I think about it. I don’t know what to make of this.

I was fifteen years old in the summer of 1997 and part of a 4-day, 3-night canoe trip down Tennessee’s Big South Fork River. There were six of us, maybe 7 that I can remember including my brother and several cousins. My cousin’s dog, Copper, an awesome and really rad Golden Retriever, also came along. Yep, in one of our canoes.

It’s really a great river with medium and sometimes class-4 rapids on which to go canoing or kayaking and at some point joins the New River and runs North up into Kentucky, the state where my cousins were from. This stretch of the river Wikipedia can attest to as being “extremely remote”. No kidding, I don’t remember seeing or hearing any signs of civilization, not a gunshot or distant highway overpass noises barring planes every now and then. We saw no one on the river except the last day when we struck camp late because we wanted to fit in some extra fishing before the final stretch of the river took us home. A single canoe with two occupants asked us for directions on a part of the river ahead and that was it.

We drove down nearly 3 hours and into Tennessee territory, the lot of us in a ragged out family van and rented canoes. You know the kind, no air conditioning and handles like a drunken dinosaur taking up the whole damn road. The river was pretty challenging for someone like me who’d never experienced whitewater, yet alone in a canoe. It was magnificent, boulders as large as full sized houses, absolutely tremendous logs and things you can’t possibly imagine being moved by the forces of nature and woods as dense as I’d seen anywhere. I can’t recall whether it was late on our first or second day of heavy paddling when we all agreed it was time to find a spot to camp. We rowed for another thirty minutes before finding the first remotely suitable place along the river that anyone could camp, but it was getting late and this was going to have to do, so we pulled up on this rocky shoal as the sun was getting low and unpacked. We camped facing outwards towards the river, and less than 20 yards behind us a steep ridge rose up and up and finally was lost in a mess of foliage and enormous trees that hung over our rocky shoaled riverbank spot. Looking inwards at camp from the river, to the right of us was a dense forest of logs and debris that had been washed downstream – I’m talking whole trees with entire root bases and accompanying chunks of ground and various flotsam and jetsam that had collected behind it.

We’ve got the camp fire rolling steady and we’re passing around cigars (my first!) and I don’t know what else uneventful until sometime close to midnight, Copper perks up and sits staring at my cousin’s side off into the darkness behind the camp, into the jumbled clump of uprooted debris which goes back I don’t know how far, exactly. No one pays attention to this, until Copper, a friendly dog, starts making uneasy sounds, kind of a low gurgling growl that resonates from her chest. My cousin Bekah thinks she hears an animal and is just being territorial and protective, so she keeps trying to calm the dog down. “Oh hush. Copper…what is it? Shut up!” That sort of thing. Another cousin makes a comment about what’s up with the dog, and Bekah’s like, “I dunno, there must be something she hears out there.” Time drags on, another 30-45 minutes lapses peacefully and no one is on edge, everyone’s chatting about whatever still. Displaying the single-mindedness of a dog, Copper still won’t turn away from whatever it sensed out there and we make jokes about how good of a guard dog she is. “Let it go, Copper, it’s alright…just deer and skunks.”

We’re jovially poking at the fire, telling stories when my brother sitting across the fire from me suddenly in rude fashion hushes everyone with a great “SHHHH!” Everyone looks at each other and back at him confusedly. Everyone’s silent for all of three seconds before someone begins to protest and ask questions and my brother cuts them off saying, “SHUT UP. I’m hearing like, music or something. Is that singing?” Copper senses that we’re on alert now and begins her baritone growl deep in her belly again and she’s leaning forward into the collar which Bekah has grasped by one hand to keep her from running off after what she hears. Her growl is much more audible by this time. We all stay quiet for the next five minutes, my brother swearing he heard a voice or possibly several voices. My bro is trying to get Bekah to shut Copper up.

Then we all hear it, faintly but surely, everyone hears something. Voices. Out here? They sound far off but sound like they’re trying to commmunicate by yelling out in the dark. Someone out there is calling out as if wanting to be acknowledged, like they’re trying to get a response. My brother stands up and walks away from the fire light slowly to be away from the crackling fire sounds and Copper’s growl to hear better. We wait several long minutes, catching a snatched yell here and there. My brother, standing closest to the massive tangle of river debris suddenly yells at whomever is out there.

“Heeeelllooooo!! Over heeeeeeeerre!” he yells. A distant voice answers him, but only after a few seconds, like there is a slight disconnect such as when astronauts communicate with earth. But nothing can be made out as to what is said. “What?” everyone is scrunching their faces and questioning each other over what the reply was. It sounds like they are just on the far side of the expanse of brush and we can hear branches cracking as they were moving out there in the distance, though they couldn’t have been greater than 150 yards away. More echoing shouts come from that direction but are still indiscernible. “Who’s There? Are you loooost? We’re over heeeeere!” my brother offers, thinking it may be some wayward canoers like ourselves that needed assistance of some kind. What sounds like a pair in unison give a seemingly affirmative yet muffled response. I remember it sounding something like two people yelling “Yeah!” or “Okay!” but slightly out of sync. I’m thinking along the lines of – Oh god, what horrible men are out there waiting to murder foolish canoers such as us?? I begin feeling a little adrenalized, fearing I may have to fight for my life before the night is done if these strangers intend harm. Something didn’t seem right. No, this was not normal, I told myself. Why now, why here and why in the middle of the night? “Where are youuuuu?” my brother offers, trying to lure these possibly injured or disparate river travelers in our direction using his voice.

As soon as my brother finishes saying this, Copper begins barking wildly and no one knows just what the hell is up with her all of a sudden. If you’ve heard two dogs suddenly get into a fight, those are the barks I’m talking about, absolutely teeth gnashing out at the night and straining at her collar. Bekah is nearly pulled off the log she is sitting on and has to hold on to Copper with both hands about the collar. It’s then that we begin seeing what had to be flashlight strobes. They’re wild and bouncing all over, at least two of them, like someone going over extremely uneven ground, just everywhere. Half of the time pointing upwards at angles and even straight up into the sky. Then they wink out and everyone freezes, straining their eyes into the dark and their ears past the sounds of water only feet away. One of my cousins after half a minute of sitting still suddenly gets up quickly and says, “Well you know what, if someone’s coming into this camp, I’m going to make plenty sure I’m ready for ’em,” and goes to fetch the small .22 caliber handgun stashed in one of the empty coolers.

“Are you okay? Heeeeeey!” my brother continues nearby. “Do you need heeeelp?” he yells, and again we hear a muffled reply, sounding to me like one guy was saying, “Yeaaahh” while someone else was saying “Naaaaah” a second later. They still sounded far off. My brother is yelling to confirm if that was a yes or a no and just nondescript, loud, garbled responses are heard for the next few seconds. What is up with these people, what are they baying like sheep out here for on this stretch of river in the middle of the night near a strange camp and not being more forthcoming about what the fuck they’re doing? Where exactly are they? They still sounded as far off as the first time we heard them. Fifteen minutes pass in silence. So we sit by the fire on our guard waiting for whoever to emerge from that clusterfuck ready to put a slug into them if we have to. The dog is barking and my brother’s still calling out if whoever is approaching needs help and what they need. Suddenly, strobes of light, much fainter this time break out and they are RIGHT ON THE EDGE of breaking through to the rocky opening in which we made our camp and we’re all yelling and shouting for them to just follow the light towards the camp fire and Copper is being restrained by my cousin who is practically bear hugging her and holding her collar. No one answers our beckoning. The lights just sort of wave around aimlessly in the sky like someone’s lost and trying to find their bearing, even though they’re JUST on the other side of the last few logs separating them from us. Had to have been a couple hundred feet away at MOST. We can hear footfalls and crackling much closer now. Then as soon as they appeared, the flashlight strobes blinked out. But no one ever steps out. Not another voice is heard. Nor is a single footstep or splinter of wood heard which would indicate they stepped forward or went back the way they came.

No one moved their sights off the firelight that flickered into the shadow of the trees all around for quite some time. Everyone was quite nervous, and expressed this aloud; some preferred to keep quiet and listen. In low voices, we discussed the possibility that someone could be watching us from the edge of camp, waiting for us to fall asleep and sneak into our camp then. We all slept with the partially see-through mesh flaps on our tent zipped and our faces towards the door. We had the .22 and the dog would work better to alert us than any of our senses combined, so with a bit of mystery and uneasiness, we slept nonetheless uneventfully the rest of the night.

The next day, on discussing this among the canoes as we paddled along, I wasn’t very convinced that everything matched up to just being some guy or guys out in the woods stalking us. Things didn’t add up, like the voices coming from a distance, even though they couldn’t have been that far off and the time elapsed between when we saw the first flashlight strobes and the second time we saw them and their distance to us each time. Plus, the relative closeness of the crunching steps. Voicing my concerns out loud, I made it clear that in my mind, no one could have navigated that dense expanse of fallen trees and rocks, probably not even with flashlights the whole way and whatever it was did just that and in the dark most of the way without sound, to which everyone pretty much agreed.

Dropbear

This isn’t mine, I read it on a similar thread on a finnish forum, but it managed to creep me out bad enough to be retold here.

The guy telling it was having a nightmare in which, from what he could remember, a horribly twisted, distorted face of a woman was screaming and wailing at him at the top of her lungs. It had no body, the head was just floating there, and the whole presence was filled to the brim with hatred and malevolence – I can’t remember his description in detail anymore, but there was more than a little just somehow.. just “wrong” with it. He couldn’t look elsewhere, couldn’t bring himself to wake up, and just had to endure the horrible screaming and glaring until he finally woke up, covered in sweat. I imagine that was more of a relief than words can tell.

He managed to shake the dream off and went through his morning routines, took a leak, then went to take a shower to get the sweat off. Some time passed, but before he was done he could hear a faint, siren-like sound.. “Aaaaaaaaaaaa..” which was getting rapidly louder. And louder. And LOUDER. He just froze there, the dream still fresh in his memory, when the same agonized, deformed face shot through the shower wall, and the howling and screeching was back again with the same unbearable pitch. The feeling of pure malice, loathing and evil returned with the thing. He tried to close his eyes, but STILL saw the damned vision – it seemed he was completely powerless to escape from the glaring, twisted apparition and it’s mindless screaming.

If my memory serves, he blacked out about here, and came back to his senses with his mother crouched next to him. She told him she’d heard his cries and found him huddled into the shower room’s corner, crying like a baby, and in a state of complete panic – I think he tried to fight her off, too, at first. It took him a good while to get his broken nerves back together and stop expecting the face to pop back at any moment.

It didn’t. He had never seen the face before anywhere, and his parents’ house where he was then had had no previous hauntings or anything like that. I’m nowhere near as good at telling the story as he was, but his version somehow managed to convey the intense feeling of horror the wailing and glaring thing evoked, and wether it was just some odd dream-remnant or a banshee, I’d hate to experience something like that myself. Brrrh.

There were many other good stories in that thread, but it went to bit heaven a long time ago – there was some website that had it and the other ghost-threads from the forum archived, but damned if I can find it anymore, either.

–more–

The only possibly supernatural experiences I’ve had are from way back when I was a kid and was sleeping over at a friend’s place, and they weren’t really scary in any way – just very odd. The house itself was an old jehova’s witness congregation spot or something and creepy in it’s own right, but to my knowledge it was haunted only with bats – what I experienced had to do with that friend of mine.

A couple of times I woke up at night to see him in the room, just idly standing there or stretching like he’d just gotten up from bed – except I could ALSO see him sleeping right there in his bed, too, which was strange to say the least. The image, or whatever it was, always faded after a while. One could say this was just a sleepy kid’s imagination doing tricks, and it probably was too, but it has never happened anywhere else, only with this guy. He was a real deep sleeper and you’d have to go through some trouble to wake him up – some weird form of astral projection or something? Wish I knew.

Gloot

This was about 10 years ago, when my dad took my older brother and I on a trip with him to France. At one point my dad decided to see an old friend of his, who was an archaeologist in an old town somewhere out in the middle of nowhere. A lot of my not knowing what was going and where we are is attributed to the fact that I was 11 at the time, entirely ungrateful, and don’t speak a word of French.

Anyways, my dad’s friend ended up inviting us to stay at his house for a few days. My dad’s friend, who we’ll call Jean because I can’t remember what his real name was, had specifically moved out to this remote region of France because of its richness in ancient artifacts and tunnels. His own house had actually been built on some old ruins, which he himself had dug up. Interestingly, the door leading to these ruins was accessible through his kitchen of all places. Upon opening what looked like a door to a pantry one would be greeted with a dark, ancient, scary as hell set of steps leading underground.

He had found a few old artifacts down there – some old keys, some old cups and plates, some religious relics, and two skeletons. Yes, he had dug up two skeletons from under his house. Somewhere under the kitchen sink, to be exact. He had decided they were preists, based on the religious artifacts he had found scattered around the room.

So anyways, Jean was a good host and, after a tour of the hell tunnel under his house, showed us our quarters. My dad would stay in the guest bedroom upstairs, while my brother and I would sleep on fold-out couch in the living room. Later on that night, as we were sitting around in the living room, my dad, who had been conversing in French with Jean while my brother and I stared into space, said that Jean had something to show us.

Jean stood up, turned out the lights in the living room, walked over by the front door, and turned on the outside lights. An outside light would shine on a stained-glass window in his living room. One of the pieces of glass in it would project this image on the wall when the light shined through it:

The quality is poor – Jean gave me a picture of it before I left, which was eventually lost through my family moving 3 times. I took a picture of the picture with an extremely shitty digital camera a few years ago, which is all I have left of it. Maybe if you mess around with it enough in photoshop you can see it more clearly.

Anyways, about the image: First off, it was actually silver. I don’t know why it’s orange in that picture, maybe Jean took the picture that way for some reason or another. The image was apparently of a skeleton, apparently wearing a robe, with something on its head (presumably a crown of horns). Some kind of disembodied hand in the corner was making what my dad translated to me as an ancient symbol of divinity – maybe one of you’ll recognize it and be able to say exactly what it is.

The image had started appearing on Jean’s wall a few months after he had removed the skeletons from his “basement”. Somehow he was still convinced it was a “coincidence”. My dad and brother both agreed it was a “coincidence”. Nobody seemed to think it was out of the ordinary. Alternatively, I was shitting my pants knowing I had to sleep in the same room as this thing. Though the skeleton is kinda goofy looking; the robe, arm, feet, and thorny thing on its head are pretty clearly visible – one hell of a coincidence. Jean demonstrated with a large piece of paper how, the closer he moved to the stained glass window with the image shining onto the paper, the more the image began to just look like a big blurred booger – I suppose this was a large part of his skepticism, which I guess sort of makes sense.

Aside from the image on the wall, nothing else strange ever happened. The image never moved or anything. Though I was convinced it was going to appear at night and kill me, neither one of the nights I was there did I see or hear anything strange. If it really was a dead priest attempting to contact the living, he sure picked a shitty way of doing it.

–more–

This story isn’t mine, but I’m going to tell it just because it was so creepy/bizarre. The guy who told me it (let’s say his name is John) was an all-around great guy. Nice guy, big beer drinker, not too bright… but good company. We used to spend our days after work drinking beer and shooting the shit. One night, whilst we were good and drunk, I asked him if he had any ghost stories. His face got kinda strange, and he told me he had a story that he swore was true but didn’t like to tell because he didn’t want people to think he was crazy.

Anyways, when he was around 10 years old, there was a friend whose house he would spend almost every weekend at. John said they lived in what was probably the filthiest house he’d ever been in, with all kinds of junk and old food and toys laying around everywhere. Still, John’s parents were very good friends with this kid’s through the church, and I suppose therefore overlooked the fact that their house was a total dump.

John’s friend had a room at the end of a hallway. At the other end of the hallway was the kitchen, which could be seen from his friend’s room while the door was open. One weekend night at his friend’s house, John woke up in the middle of night hearing something moving in the kitchen. It sounded like cabinet doors were being opened, snack bags rustled, jars popped open. There was a faint light in the kitchen coming in from outside, and he could make out several small figures in the kitchen.

He described them as looking like “the things in the movie Labyrinth”, which I’ve never seen but I’m guessing are the short brown troll things I see on google images. He said they were slightly under 3 feet tall. They were standing on the kitchen counter, “macking out” (his words) on all the old, random food strewn around the kitchen. He said they were especially interested in a bag of old, open, stale Doritos, which they kept sticking their arms down and stuffing Doritos into their mouths from.

He lay in bed, petrified, watching them eating all the random junk in the kitchen until they eventually jumped down and scampered off – he assumes they ran out the cat door, as there were no open windows or doors. Needless to say, he spent the next few hours staring into the kitchen until he later fell asleep. He woke the next morning and did notice that there were Doritos all over the place, along with other random bits of junk food. Not that anybody in the house would have taken notice – the kitchen was always a giant mess anyways. He never told his friend or his family about what he had seen.

He did tell his very religious, very conservative father about it, who surprisingly listened very well and only told him that sometimes kids see things other people don’t, and it’s best for him not to tell other people about it.

What scared the hell out of me hearing it was knowing that John was never one to make up stories for attention or for the hell of it. Hate to say it, but I don’t think he was smart enough to make up such a weird story even if he wanted to.

John’s friend did eventually go on to develop a fantastic case of night terrors, but I couldn’t say that has anything to do with it.

–mores–

Here’s another one that’s not mine, but I’ll recount it anyways:

This was around the summer of ’99, shortly before they turned the Panama Canal over the Republic of Panama. The Canal had provided housing for its workers, usually in little out-of-the-way towns exclusively for American canal employees. Because of the turnover and the majority of the American employees leaving, a lot of the old Canal Zone towns were mostly abandoned around this time.

Anyways, a friend of mine and his other friend were skateboarding around their neighborhood, specifically on a street we simply called “the dead end street”. It was a kind of out of the way street, surrounded on either side by a large field, then thick jungle. All the houses on the street had been abandoned for a few months, and were pretty much just sitting around collecting mold and dust. While skateboarding into the driveway of one of them, my friend, in a just-fucking-around kind of way opened the outside storage closet door.

Inside, curled up in a ball, was a Panamanian police officer. What we refer to as the “Green Suits” – cops in green, military-looking uniforms. Sort of like the SWAT of Panama. He looked up at my friend, stood up, and began saying something to him in spanish that he couldn’t understand (this was in the old days when us panagringos didn’t know a word of spanish and didn’t have to) – my friend said it sounded like the cop was scolding him.

My friend noticed the cop’s eyes were either unbelievably bloodshot, or just flat-out red. There wasn’t a speck of white anywhere in his eyes. The cop just went on talking to him at a mile a minute, sounding angry by now. Eventually the cop stopped talking, walked out of the driveway, went behind the house, walked into the field and then into the jungle where he disappeared from sight. The next day the closet door was locked.

Mr Yuck

My family has always loved black cats. I still do to this day, and would have one, but my apartment doesn’t allow pets. Anyhow, our family had a black cat named Malcolm. Malcolm had been with our family since before I was born and was getting pretty old when I was young. Unfortunately, he developed cancer when I was in kindergarten.

I knew that we would have to put him down, as he couldn’t fight it off when he was that old (about 14 or 15). I pleaded with my mom to wait until I got home from school to go do it so I could hold him before he died.

Unfortunately, the appointment was before I got home so I never got to say goodbye. However, the next day when I was walking home (my school was literally a block away), there was Malcolm by the gate! He meowed at me and walked me home.

When we got to my house he ran out of our yard and suddenly disappeared. I never saw him again, but I was glad he came to say goodbye.

enjoiescher

As for myself, I have lived in the same town my whole life. It’s pretty old so most of the kids I grew up with had more then one ghost story to tell. From creepy old woman walking the stairways to former family members visiting long after they had passed.

Maybe because we had always been around it my friends and I started playing around with Ouija boards and the like at a very young age. It wasn’t till I met this girl Jenny and started playing with this stuff at her house that things really started to happen.

She lived in a converted old victorian. The basement was furnished so there was a bedroom for her by the stairs, and a large open room that was her sister and brothers room/laundry room.

Little things started happening at first. I wasn’t sure weather to believe her or not. So one morning she asks me to come to her house before school and we would walk together. Now her room was sublevel and had shelves on two walls all covered in her precious moments stuff. But also some really creepy porcelain clowns and masks. I never liked those damn things.
I pick her up and the day unfolds normally. Then we get back to her house and I hear static as we get in the door.

“Someone leave the tv on?” I asked.
“No. It’s that thing again.” she tells me and has me follow her to her room.
I was the last one out of that room that morning, and she locked her door when we left so her siblings wouldn’t go in there. When she opened the door I could tell the noise was coming from inside. Sure enough her radio was on, but it was set to a station that wasn’t receiving so it was just static. And the creepy thing was, all her little glass dolls were turned around facing the wall. When we left they were facing twords us.

“Now do you believe me?”
I had nothing to say. I always thought she was just an attention whore with her stories.

Things got worse after that. If I had known that was the tip of the iceburg I never would have gone back to that house.

One night I was staying over and went to use the restroom which was a kiddie corner from Jennys room. Everything came out fine but when I went to open the door it wouldn’t budge. I fiddled with the lock but it wouldn’t open. Then I hear giggling on the other side of the door. I yell at her siblings to let me out and get in return footsteps running around outside the door. I then began yelling for Jenny to come get me out. She comes over bitching about missing the movie and the door just POP opens no prob. I then tell her I’m going to kick her brothers ass for locking me in there. That’s when I was informed he was at his fathers for the weekend with the sister. A similar situation happened to another girl, but when she got out she saw a little boy standing in the stairwell. She told him that it wasn’t funny to scare people like that. I guess he said something along the lines of “shut up you fat fucking bitch”. She gave him a fuck you and went to bed. In the morning she told Jenny that she didn’t like the brats her little brother was hanging out with and recanted the story. Again, Jennys little brother and sister were not in town that weekend.

Now this was all pretty harmless. I mean, whatever that boy was wasn’t hurting anyone. Just pranking us more or less. The last time I spent the night at her house, after many weird things happening with the ouija board (I’ll talk about some other time if anyone wants), it got a bit violent.

There was a group of us girls, maybe six total, having a slumber party. Having a good time, prank calling Taco Bell and talking to boys (tee hee). There wasn’t enough room on the bed for all of us so I made camp next to the bed, with my head about two feet from one of the walls with all the shelving. It was getting late and everyone was getting sleepy so I went and laid down and was listening to my headphones. Just as I was about to doze off CRASH!! Everyone jumps up.
“What the hell was that!?!” someone yelled.

We searched around the room and outside in the house and couldn’t find what caused the loud crash noise. After the adrenaline wore off I went back to my little bed to go to sleep, but something was wrong. All around my pillow I noticed shards or porcelain. There about a foot from my head, a foot away from the wall was a porcelain elephant that Jenny had gotten from her father. Now, this thing was thick and it was just smashed into the floor. Like stabbed into it. We cleaned it up and Jenny was upset cause she didn’t see her dad much and it was one of the few things she had from him. She also couldn’t understand how it happened because A: she had dropped it when she first moved from the same height and it just bounced and B: it was sitting at the back end of the shelf. She showed me the dust ring where it had been. Then it did it again. We all heard giggling and running outside her bedroom door. None of us could work up the courage to open the door. And it was a bit cramped with six girls huddling all night long on a full size waterbed trying to sleep. I never stayed the night there again and I wasn’t the only one. I would go during the day but never after midnight.

–more–

I had a lot of childhood experiences that have lead to my fascination with the paranormal, and more recently, investigations. Really freshman type stuff though since laws and fines are heavy here for trespassing at night. So a couple co-workers and I have done day trips to a few local cemeteries.
Since it’s daytime we really didn’t expect much to happen. We hit two or three cemeteries and decide to head to the bar for a few beers. On the way we hook up one of the voice recorders we were using to my car stereo and started half-assly listening to the tape. Keep in mind it was only girls on this trip and we didn’t talk or even really see anyone else during our trip. Or they were far away from us(We didn’t want to seem dissrespectful)
The scene is this: we are walking into this first cemetery cracking some jokes. Then we see a tombstone that used to be a little lamb but now had lost most of its features. We decide to go look closer. During the walk:

Heather: Did anyone remember the recorder?
Jen: Yeah, I’m recording right now.
Me: Me too.
Creepy deep raspy faint male voice: That’s good.

When we heard that in the car we all jumped up and let out a WTF!! The guy in the car next to me was looking at us like we were crazy cause we played it again and sure as shit heard it again and jumped up like school girls…..again.
Really creeped us out.
Anyways we head to the bar, listening to more. At one point during the walk we were in a section with some graves that were falling down a hill and were sinking into the ground. There must have been a farm nearby because we heard this rooster cawing like nuts, over and over. Must have been a good ten minutes. While that was happening we were cracking more jokes. The obvious cock jokes were being thrown around when the tape got weird. You hear us laughing and leaves crunching under us, then a hard strong wind starts building up, even though it wasn’t particularly breezy that day. I gets louder and louder then just stops and you hear that same voice softly chuckling. Then it goes back to us talking. Hearing that sent shivers down my spine. My hands are ice cold just thinking about it.
I know many people are just going to think someone screwed with the audio or we just have overactive imaginations, but having been with these girls the whole time, knowing the tape was genuine, gah! it just spooks me.
I guess upon reflection I should be glad that voice thought we were funny at least. But it did have that kinda mad scientist Mwah-ah-ah feeling to it. Kinda menacing.

Vaseline Vassal

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?

Donde Esta

”The Exterminator”
If you’ve ever been to Binghamton, NY, and you’re under the age of 21, you probably know that there isn’t a whole lot to do on a Friday night. There’s also not a whole lot to be proud of if you’re from this area, so anything we have, we hold on to it very dearly. One such thing, which surprisingly isn’t very well known to those around here, is that Exterminator is buried in a small plot on the edge of town.

Who or what the hell is Exterminator? Well Exterminator also went by the names of “Old Bones” and “The Galloping Hatrack”. Exterminator was a horse. Not just any horse though, a Kentucky Derby winning horse. With the odds at 30-1 against him, no one predicted he’d win the 1918 Derby by an entire length, but sure enough he did. He went on to live a long and prosperous life for a horse, made the racing hall of fame, and was named #29 in the top 100 horses of the 20th century.

We were driving around Binghamton one Spring Friday night, with nothing to do, when I told this exact story to my friends. Enthralled by the tale, they insisted that we go visit the pet cemetery and pay our respects to Exterminator, despite it being almost midnight. So, we drive out past the edge of the city, where instead it becomes the Town of Binghamton, and pull into the Pet Cemetery.

The grave of Exterminator is right at the very front of the Cemetery, so we didn’t have to venture very far in to achieve what we had went there for. We just chilled near the grave, one of my friends lit a cigar, and we talked horses, racing, and life for a little while. That is, until we noticed that the night had grown eerily quiet since we had arrived.

The night itself was partly cloudy, and of course behind the passing clouds there was a full moon, which would shine as bright as day when it was allowed to. As I had mentioned, it had grown dead silent. The crickets seemed to be non-existent, and the wind had died to a halt. The clouds decided to part and the entirety of the cemetery was illuminated. I still remember the shadows being cast by the trees over certain headstones. As one of my friends mentioned how strange our surroundings had grown, we heard some cracking of branches in the tree line, and then they stopped as quickly as they had began.

We all looked toward the noise and we hurriedly asked each other if we had heard it. While discussing what it might have been, something let out a loud and beastly snort. We all look at each other again, this time with more of a “WHAT THE FUCK” expression, when the noise up and repeated itself. It was at this point we all ran back to the car as fast as we could without mention.

As we were peeling out of the parking lot we’re all mumbling “What the fuck” “Holy Shit” “Oh god, Oh god” when one of my friends belts out over the rest of us “JESUS CHRIST, WE’RE NOT GOING TO OUTRUN THE DEMONHORSE THAT WON A KENTUCKY DERBY IN AN 88 HONDA, WE’RE DEAD!”.

Now, surely this could have been anything, but that snorting noise was distinctly that of a horse. I have deer that live in my backyard, and while they could have made the snapping noises of an animal that large of which those noises sounded, I’ve never heard them make that snorting noise. No other animals of that size would logically be roaming those woods. Needless to say, we’re all still kind of puzzled by what had happened.

Delivery McGee

I haven’t had any run-ins with the paranormal myself, alas. A bit disappointing, considering I spent my youth tromping all over the woods of East Texas, home to a large number of Bigfoot sightings.

One odd thing I remember is when I was little — well, not really, I must have been six or seven because it was in the new house. Or maybe it was the old house and it’s only half-remembered. Anyway, I was sleeping in my parents’ bed, woke up for some reason in the middle of the night, and saw a glowing white . . . thing standing in the bedroom doorway. About the size of a person, just white light.I sat up and stared at it for a few minutes. I don’t remember anything else about the occurrence; I must have brushed it off as a dream and gone back to sleep. It always pops up in my mind when I’m reading ghost stories, though, so I thought I’d go ahead and post it.

To make up for that disappointing story, here’s a strange animal my dad saw:

One time he was driving at night, on the way home from a service call, and saw something move in the ditch alongside the road. The road to our house is bordered by woods full of deer, so he slowed down immediately — he’s had his share of run-ins with deer on the road — and then slammed on the brakes as the animal started to cross the road in front of him, right through the beams of the headlights.

He described it as looking like a cartoon fox: big bushy tail (ludicrously fluffy, like a squirrel’s tail), a face that looked like a dog’s but was far too long and pointy to be real, and it was silver. Not silver silver (which would have been even creepier), but that light silvery grey fur like some breeds of cats have. It was too big to be an escaped housecat or a fox, though, and we don’t have foxes around here anyway. It was coyote-sized or a bit bigger, but was most definitely not a coyote (which we do have), as he’s seen enough of them to know what one looks like, and they’re brown.

It crossed the road and vanished into the trees on the other side, and he continued on his way. He seemed a bit shaken when he told us the story after he got home, which means it must have been a terrifying sight — my dad is not the easily-scared type. Part of the reason I believe Humper_Monkey’s and 50 Foot Ant’s stories are true (if a bit embellished, as all military stories tend to be) is that my dad is exactly that sort of badass.

Either a bit before I was born or when I was a tiny baby, between 1979 and 1983, something huge and black flew over my parents’ house at night, rattling the windows as it approached. Dad went outside and got a good look at it despite the darkness, because it was flying over at treetop level, a darker shadow against the night sky. Not OMG ALIENS; it was obviously an airplane, but like nothing my dad had ever seen. Triangular, wingspan of a B-52 bomber but only half as long, and completely black. The neighbors ran outside to look too, and after it was gone, Dad called the local airport on the other side of town. The airport (then Gregg County, now East Texas Regional or something; code GGG if you want to look it up) is a tiny little general aviation/regional affair, but it has a 10,000-foot runway, so they have military flights, usually B-52s, from Barksdale AFB coming in doing practice landings and such fairly often.

The airport hadn’t seen the mysterious aircraft on radar or talked to it on the radio, nor did they have any military flights scheduled that week.

Dad pretty much brushed it off and forgot about it for five years or so, until November 1988. I know the exact date he remembered it, because I looked it up — that’s when the B-2 “Spirit” stealth bomber was publicly unveiled. It looked just like the plane he’d seen that night years earlier; size, shape, and color all matched. More paranoid than scary when you think about it, probably some super-secret prototype or the like, but why was it buzzing a decent-sized city in East Texas when they have half the state of Nevada closed off for exactly that purpose?

Bumps in the night
When InediblePenguin moved to my hometown, she got a little one-bedroom apartment that was apparently haunted. No reason for it to be; it was one of those complexes built in the ’70s, and there weren’t any murders or suicides or anything there, at least not in her building. (I still lived with my parents at the time; we didn’t move in together until we moved away to my college.)

Sometimes at night, she would hear what sounded like the kitchen cabinets opening and closing. She ignored it, writing it off as the neighbors banging around.

One night, she awoke to the sound of the deadbolt on her door turning. The bedroom kind of stuck out even with the balcony/entryway, so the door was right there on the other side of the wall from the head of her bed. She cowered in bed until morning, then went to look at the door. Sure enough, even though she swears she locked and double-checked both locks before going to bed, the deadbolt was unlocked. The one that didn’t have a keyhole on the outside.

That was the only really creepy thing that happened there. She joked that it was the pirate Jean Lafitte haunting her because she’d stood on his grave on a visit to New Orleans once. Just in case it was, we left a shot of rum on the counter for him when she moved out.

Bumps in the day
A few years ago, InediblePenguin and I drove up to New York (up around Albany) to visit her family for a week. We were staying with her sister, who had just inherited their grandmother’s house after grandma went to the nursing home, and was in the process of cleaning it up. The three of us went down to the basement to dig up things the girls remembered from when they were kids, and pick out what they wanted to keep and what to throw out or sell on eBay. Her sister’s pets followed, of course.

All creatures great and small were present and accounted for when we heard footsteps crossing the living room over our heads. InediblePenguin and I were understandably creeped out, but her sister brushed it off, saying it had happened before. Her sister has told her that similar things have happened since then — nothing scary, just odd noises like that — and the girls’ theory is that it’s their grandfather’s ghost (he died when they were little) hanging out in his old house, just making sure his granddaughter is okay.

Not aliens, just “what the hell?” Well, it could be aliens.
My mom gets on these random health fads. Several years ago (damn, coming up on ten years now), she read that a glass of wine a day was good for you, and decided to try it. During the spring and summer, she’d have it in the evening, sitting at the picnic table in the backyard, looking at the stars. Back then we lived out in the boondocks outside town — there were a couple of small residential neighborhoods, but nothing commercial, so it was nice and dark. My brother and I would go out and keep her company, and we dragged Dad out to see sometimes once we started seeing things.

Keep in mind Mom was the only one drinking, and she only had the one glass of wine.

Most nights, we’d look up at the stars and see some of them moving. That’s what it looked like. Points of white light just like the stars, darting about, staying lit too long to be meteors (minutes at a time), turning far too sharply and accelerating far too fast to be aircraft, all the standard UFO shit, before finally zooming away over the horizon (well, the treeline. They don’t call that area the Piney Woods for nothing). Usually just one or two, sometimes four or more, doing what looked like dogfighting. Airliners and military jets fly over all the time, so we were well-acquainted with what those looked like in the night sky, and we always went out to watch the Perseid meteor shower; our UFOs were none of those things.

We saw them at least a few nights a week all that summer, then Mom gave up on the wine thing and we forgot about the UFOs over the following winter.

Now that area’s so built-up and light-polluted I doubt we’d be able to see them even if they were still flying around.

eletist

The only encounter i’ve had that spooked me out seems kind of mundane. I was walking home from the train at about 2 am. I had to pass through this pitch black passway next to a field of bulls to get to my house, which is spooky enough. But when i emerged, i look to my left and see a startling sight not 50 meters away from me.

I’m not sure if my memory of this moment has been warped a tad by the fear that accompanies it, but this is how i remember it. I saw a huge, black dog standing beneath a streetlight. The thing that stood out to me is that its shoulders seemed noticeably higher than its hips. No collar. The first thing that came to mind was a hyenas body. Its neck and head seemed a little raised, too.

It didnt even seem to notice me, which is strange as it was a very still night. It was walking away from my house. It seemed quite peaceful as it plodded both out of the streetlight and my sight. It still inspired me to run like hell to my door though.

I’ve heard of black dogs being omens of death before, in a few cultures. I’m not sure if anyone died that night, though. Does anyone know of a breed of dog that could have a body structure like that? Perhaps it was a wild dog. It was really weird.

Oh yeah, i had unrelenting dreams of skinwalkers last night. Fun stuff. I could just see their figures and silhouettes walking through some mist, and kept waking up in a daze. I’ve never dreamed about them before. I wasnt really terrified, it was just like i was watching them from a distance and they were unaware. My dog was acting really strangely last night. Fun times.

Ben Talbot

My one experience I can remember is a creepy recurring dream I had, probably from when I was 6 until I was about 10. Obviously since it’s a dream you could probably pass it off as just that but it always stuck with me, enough that I remember it vividly 10-14 years later.

I used to live in this small bungalow in England with my parents, which had a nice sized back yard surrounded by neighbors yards and nice high wooden fences on all sides. For all extents and purposes the house was normal and I never had any actual paranormal experiences in the house.

I started having these dreams in which one side of the yard, where my neighbors should have been, was replaced by this huge dense forest that didn’t let light in more than a few feet past the treeline. I only remember it being on that one side of the yard and not wrapping the whole way around or anything.

However, the forest wasn’t the problem. It was that everytime I’d approach the treeline in my perfectly normal dream-yard, this large black wolf would come out of the darkness to sit just where the light reached, and would talk to me. I don’t think I remember much about it’s appearance other than it was very black with green eyes, and I think it spoke very eloquently.

Regardless, everytime I had the dream, it would try to convince me to enter the forest. I think I knew that it couldn’t leave the forest itself and enter my yard, either it told me so itself or I just naturally knew, but every single time I had the dream it would try to coerce me into stepping into that darkness. It wasn’t constantly “I say, old chap, why don’t you come enter these trees here? We’ll have a ripping good time!”, the wolf would also talk to me about various things while I sat there on the sunny grass in my yard listening.

The dreams were so vivid that I even had a birthday party, in which all my friends as a child were running around playing in my yard and were oblivious to the huge black forest with the wolf sitting watching.

Then one night, I don’t know why after so long of avoiding it, I stepped into the trees. I don’t remember being attacked, I don’t remember anything after walking into that forest. I just stopped having the recurring dreams and haven’t dreamed of anything like that since.

I still to this day do not know whether it was just a whacky dream I had, or whether something more mysterious was afoot.

Mike-o

I was 11 at the time. My mom was divorced from my dad, and both my sister and brother had moved out of the house. She decided to join PWP (Parents Without Partners), trying to find someone to be with and to give me something to do. PWP would sponsor camp-outs, dinners, activities, things like that. They had scheduled a trip out to Twanoh State Park on the Kitsap Peninsula for the weekend.

Now, Kitsap peninsula is the boondocks compared to the Seattle-Tacoma area. Barely any light pollution compared to the city. This afforded us the opportunity to watch a meteor shower, I’m assuming the Perseids. So I, my mom, and a couple of her friends go out into a big meadow in the middle of the forest to watch it. About half an hour of watching the sky we start seeing the same kind of lights that Delivery McGee described. They weren’t streaking across the sky and burning out like a meteor, or steadily flying towards the horizon like a plane. They definitely weren’t satellites either. I thought they were at first, but they would fade in, fly for a bit, and then fade out. More started appearing all over the sky, doing zig-zags. Flying from one edge of the sky to the other in a split second. At one point they started flying around each other in circles, like they were dogfighting. I counted at least 30 during the peak of the event.

Being the young excitable kid that I was, I ran back to the campsite to inform everyone that I had seen UFOs. Of course, they all chalked it up to me being a kid. About a week after the campout I started feeling sick. Just horribly sick, puking and shitting my brains out. My fever peaked in the 100’s. Then I realized that my left hand had swollen to cartoonish proportions. There was a bright red line coming from the center of my hand, following my veins down my arm towards my heart.

I ended up staying in the hospital for two weeks. Doctors told me I had staph infection, and it had gotten bad enough to give me blood poisoning. They ended up operating on my hand to get rid of the giant pus sack forming. It damaged the muscles in my ring and middle fingers to the point that I couldn’t move them anymore, but I eventually regained full control of them. The doctors told me they had no clue how I had gotten it. Might have been from a bugbite, or being scratched or cut. I don’t remember any of those things happening to me.

I don’t know if this is related, but it always bugged me. I never noticed until a couple years after the fact that I had some sort of weird incision/indentation on the shaft of my wang. It’s like someone took a needle, pulled up a bit of skin, and pierced it right through. The two surface points of skin are connected underneath, so it makes this shape like two U’s connected at their bottoms. It also feels like there’s some sort of hard piece of I don’t know what underneath the skin. I’m probably just being paranoid, and it might be something left over from when I was born. Probably from the half-assed circumcision that the German hospital gave me. It still bugs me though.

Azarc

I live on an indian reservation. I’m not sure how it’s done elsewhere, but here when someone dies, the family holds a wake. That is, they build a structure in their yards somewhat resembling a stage with a raised, covered platform surrounded by benches in rough circle. They invite their friends and relatives, as well as anyone else who wishes, to pay their respects. This goes on for 24 hours a day for up to a week, regardless of weather conditions. A sound system is usually set up so people can play music, sing songs, or speak in memory of the departed. Anywhere from three days to the day before the funeral, the remains of the deceased are “brought back” to the house and put on display in the platform stage. Tradition dictates that the body not be left alone until the funeral. At least one family member is always sitting there in the stage with the open casket.

Last year, my mother’s coworker, I’ll call her Linda, had a niece, who I’ll call Rebecca, who drowned. She was in her 20’s, full of life and reckless. Her loss was especially hard on her family as she had children she had been raising on her own. After her body had been brought back, her mother, who I’ll call Virginia, was sitting her vigil when this happened.

Now Virginia is known for being a reasonable woman, a no-nonsense kind of person not given over to meaningless superstition, though she practices the traditional ways. She was sitting in the stage listening to a local evangelist when she starts acting strangely. She turns to her sister, Linda, and asks what was going on. Linda gets a chill and asks what she means. Virginia gets up and goes to look in the casket and freaks out. “That’s me! I’m dead!” she starts screaming. Immediately panic broke out. Virginia is screaming with Rebecca’s voice.

The evangelist tried to tell people to pray, but everyone was too scared. Meanwhile, Virginia, who is not only sounding like her daughter, but acting like her as well, is in hysterics and asking if it’s true she’s really dead. Then she starts asking where her children are. The family didn’t want the kids to see this, but Virginia demands to see them. They finally let Rebecca’s oldest daughter talk to her. Virginia tells the girl she’s sorry, she doesn’t want to leave them, but she’ll have to take care of her sister now.

Mithra6

Yes I believe in ghosts, but I am also very skeptical. There was a series of incidents that stood out and I can’t explain.

Some very good friends of me and my wife’s were going on vacation and wanted us to house sit. The house was pretty large and not creepy at all. We had been there quite a bit previously, so we were very familiar with the house as well.

It was in Chicago, and apparently it was originally a farm house, which gives you an idea how old it must have been, and later in the 30s or 40s, they built an auto body shop in the back, so it was sort of like an old house with a large room in the back. Our friends fixed the place up, so there was no hint of the auto body shop.

The house seemed inexplicably haunted though. People would be awakened by loud thumping on the wall next to them – as if with fists. There were figures. In fact one time a bunch of us (maybe 4 or 5 of us) saw the same figure at the same time. It looked like a lady in white walking. I only caught a brief glimpse, but everyone else saw it better. Lots of noises such as name calling.

So anyway we were supposed to stay a week. Most of the week was uneventful except that both my wife an I would hear a particular door opening and closing. As you know certain doors have a distinctive sound, and we both clearly heard it. One catch – the door was locked. My wife heard me screaming her name once as if I was in trouble. She ran up the stair to me, and I was sitting watching a movie (Logan’s Run I remember :scienceA couple of years ago when I had more time in my hands I would often go fishing to a nearby lake. I have a rowboat and a canoe. When I go fishing alone I take the canoe since it is easier to handle and you get to face forwards. That particular night it was about 9 p.m. when I left – the sun never really goes down in the midsummer where I live so the pikes start to catch the bait around nine o’clock and you can continue fishing up until midnight. And usually with good results: the lake isn’t very popular among anglers so there are plenty of decent sized pikes to catch. The lake is somewhat off the beaten track so usually there is nobody there except me.

On this particular night I caught nothing. Not even a tiniest pike not worth keeping. I kept trying anyway and got a lot of false alarms: something kept pulling the line but when I trolled it in there was nothing there.

Finally, at about ten o’clock I decided to paddle all the way across the lake to a place where I never had to leave empty handed. There is a river that connects to the lake and apparently the pikes like to gather in such places since never did I need to leave that place without a pike or a two. I rarely went there though since it took me about an hour to paddle there. This time I was so encouraged by my misfortune that I decided it was worth the sweat to paddle all the way there.

Finally, I got there and lowered the anchor – which in reality is just an old dumbbell weighing about 10 pounds tied to a rope. It was about eleven o’clock: it was getting darker and the place was perfect. I was in the right place at the right time and was about to catch some huge pikes. With high hopes I began fishing and with every throw it happened: something caught the line and pulled it and everytime I reeled the line in only to find nothing. I changed the bait, made sure the hooks were sharp and kept on trying with the same results. Everytime something would yank the line but nothing was caught. After an frustrating hour of trying, it was nearing midnight. I was cold, tired, and fed up and decided to go home. I pulled the anchor line only to find that the anchor wouldn’t move. Not an inch. I knew the place and I knew that the lake bottom was sandy – no mud, no rocks – so it didn’t make any sense. The dumbbell anchor could not get stuck to the bottom: it couldn’t have been buried in the mud because there was none and it couldn’t have been wedged between rocks since there were none. I pulled the rope with all my strength and it didn’t move an inch. I paddled upstream and tried again from another position. No dice. I let the stream carry the canoe all the time pulling the rope but it wouldn’t even twitch. Had the anchor been wedged between rocks it would have surely been dislodged by now. I was puzzled. Finally, I decided to cut the rope but before that I took one final yank. I pulled with all my strength and the anchor came flying up like it was never been held down at all. I almost fell off the canoe. It was just like someone or something had held the anchor and suddenly decided to let go.

I was still flabbergasted and wondered what had kept the anchor down when suddenly something bumped to the bottom of the canoe. It wasn’t a violent bump but I could clearly feel the canoe rocking and hear the sound of something hitting the bottom of the canoe. And then the canoe started moving. Upstream. I was being dragged upstream the river and fast. I tried to paddle but it was no use: I kept going upstream until the canoe hit a rock and then the canoe started drifting downstream like it should. I was scared and confused and started to paddle downstream towards the lake as fast as I could. Something kept bumping my canoe. When I got to the lake the canoe would suddenly start to shake like someone was rocking it but I kept on going. Suddenly the canoe started shaking really violently and I considered going to shore and walking home but I like to think that I’m a big strong man and not easily to be scared so I just kept on paddling towards home. Also, I was scared to hell, panicking and not thinking straight: I just needed to keep on paddling towards home, towards safety. Something grabbed my paddle a couple of times but finally, about half way across the lake whatever it was gave up and I could paddle back home without trouble.

When I got to the shore I smoked three cigarettes and just sat there staring at the lake for half an hour. I never saw anything. Never did I tell this to anyone but my wife. Never did I experience anything like that even though I returned to the lake but only on daytime. I truly believe there was something underwater that grabbed my canoe and moved it, held down my anchor and rocked the canoe.. That was a strange moment. Other than that, nothing really happened until the last night.

It was one of those nights that you get in Chicago where the day was really warm and the night became REALLY cold with drizzly rain. The first thing we noticed was cold air – very very cold air. No big deal, I figured a window was open I traced the breeze to a hallway with two facing bedrooms. Sure enough the windows in both rooms were wide open. Hmmm ok. I closed them and locked them. About ten minutes later, we felt it again. I went back and both rooms’ windows were open again. Strange – close and lock again.

Then we started hearing the kitchen cabinets opening and closing HARD and relatively quickly. We were only two rooms away from the kitchen, and no ghost is going to scare me into submission, so I walked in there. Nothing. Some of the cupboards were open, but they weren’t moving. Great we’re being fucked with.

There was a furnished attic above us. In fact the bedroom we were using was up there. We both heard the sound of someone jumping and landing with all of their weight coming from the attic. It was so hard everything shook. Of course we checked it out and nothing was there. Oh the dog was freaking out this whole time.

It was getting late so we went to bed. The attic itself was quiet, but let me tell you we heard walking and banging and talking at least until we fell asleep. It was unmistakable. My wife and I weren’t scared, but the dog was going nuts.

When our friends returned the next day, we told them about it, and they asked if there was a large temperature change outside. We said yes, and they said that when there is a big temp change, the house gets a bit nuts. Their tone was as if they were talking about going to the store.

4308

A couple of years ago when I had more time in my hands I would often go fishing to a nearby lake. I have a rowboat and a canoe. When I go fishing alone I take the canoe since it is easier to handle and you get to face forwards. That particular night it was about 9 p.m. when I left – the sun never really goes down in the midsummer where I live so the pikes start to catch the bait around nine o’clock and you can continue fishing up until midnight. And usually with good results: the lake isn’t very popular among anglers so there are plenty of decent sized pikes to catch. The lake is somewhat off the beaten track so usually there is nobody there except me.

On this particular night I caught nothing. Not even a tiniest pike not worth keeping. I kept trying anyway and got a lot of false alarms: something kept pulling the line but when I trolled it in there was nothing there.

Finally, at about ten o’clock I decided to paddle all the way across the lake to a place where I never had to leave empty handed. There is a river that connects to the lake and apparently the pikes like to gather in such places since never did I need to leave that place without a pike or a two. I rarely went there though since it took me about an hour to paddle there. This time I was so encouraged by my misfortune that I decided it was worth the sweat to paddle all the way there.

Finally, I got there and lowered the anchor – which in reality is just an old dumbbell weighing about 10 pounds tied to a rope. It was about eleven o’clock: it was getting darker and the place was perfect. I was in the right place at the right time and was about to catch some huge pikes. With high hopes I began fishing and with every throw it happened: something caught the line and pulled it and everytime I reeled the line in only to find nothing. I changed the bait, made sure the hooks were sharp and kept on trying with the same results. Everytime something would yank the line but nothing was caught. After an frustrating hour of trying, it was nearing midnight. I was cold, tired, and fed up and decided to go home. I pulled the anchor line only to find that the anchor wouldn’t move. Not an inch. I knew the place and I knew that the lake bottom was sandy – no mud, no rocks – so it didn’t make any sense. The dumbbell anchor could not get stuck to the bottom: it couldn’t have been buried in the mud because there was none and it couldn’t have been wedged between rocks since there were none. I pulled the rope with all my strength and it didn’t move an inch. I paddled upstream and tried again from another position. No dice. I let the stream carry the canoe all the time pulling the rope but it wouldn’t even twitch. Had the anchor been wedged between rocks it would have surely been dislodged by now. I was puzzled. Finally, I decided to cut the rope but before that I took one final yank. I pulled with all my strength and the anchor came flying up like it was never been held down at all. I almost fell off the canoe. It was just like someone or something had held the anchor and suddenly decided to let go.

I was still flabbergasted and wondered what had kept the anchor down when suddenly something bumped to the bottom of the canoe. It wasn’t a violent bump but I could clearly feel the canoe rocking and hear the sound of something hitting the bottom of the canoe. And then the canoe started moving. Upstream. I was being dragged upstream the river and fast. I tried to paddle but it was no use: I kept going upstream until the canoe hit a rock and then the canoe started drifting downstream like it should. I was scared and confused and started to paddle downstream towards the lake as fast as I could. Something kept bumping my canoe. When I got to the lake the canoe would suddenly start to shake like someone was rocking it but I kept on going. Suddenly the canoe started shaking really violently and I considered going to shore and walking home but I like to think that I’m a big strong man and not easily to be scared so I just kept on paddling towards home. Also, I was scared to hell, panicking and not thinking straight: I just needed to keep on paddling towards home, towards safety. Something grabbed my paddle a couple of times but finally, about half way across the lake whatever it was gave up and I could paddle back home without trouble.

When I got to the shore I smoked three cigarettes and just sat there staring at the lake for half an hour. I never saw anything. Never did I tell this to anyone but my wife. Never did I experience anything like that even though I returned to the lake but only on daytime. I truly believe there was something underwater that grabbed my canoe and moved it, held down my anchor and rocked the canoe.

EvolveevLove

Way back before I was born, my mom and dad were driving cross-country for some reason. I think they were in Utah when this happened.

It’s the middle of the night, hundreds of miles from anywhere, my mom has been driving for awhile and my dad is fast asleep when the highway suddenly shrinks down to a single-lane dirt road in the middle of the desert. My dad later used this as evidence that mom was hallucinating, but having very recently driven from Austin, Texas, to El Paso and then Austin to Seattle, I know many interstates do this randomly due to construction, or road repairs, or passing through the middle of towns, or accidently ending up on an access road which meanders off a bit.

My mom of course slows way down immediately and is only going about 40 or so when she sees animals in the road ahead. She slows nearly to a stop. My whole family is made up of animal-loving people, so there was no way in hell she was just going run them down.

As she’s crawling along, she notices they’re acting very strangely. Initially she had assumed they were coyotes or feral dogs, because they’re about that size and on all fours, now she sees that they’re rising on to their hind legs for a few moments before dropping back down… and they’re trotting toward the car.

They gradually surround the car as several dozen more materialize out of the desert. She said all told there were about thirty, although that maybe an overestimation that comes from suddenly being surrounded by things.

They aren’t afraid of the car at all, and are doing their absoulte best to block the moving car, all while bobbing up and down on their hind legs, looking directly into her window, looking her straight in the eye. She had no intention of hitting the breaks and said once a few of them had been nudged jarringly out of the road by the momentum of the car, they gave up blocking her, and loped alongside the car for several miles, always peering into the windows.

The closest she could describe them was that they looked like giant weasels. They had long bodies, but not long necks, and did the bobbing on their hind legs thing like weasels do, and weasle-like tails. But they were the size of dogs, lived in the middle of the desert, and their eyes glowed red in the headlights.

My personal theory is either that someone knows about them and feeds them, and they might not actually be scary mutants – or more unlikely, but makes for a better story, that someone else had stopped for them and was never seen or heard from again.

They were completely confident that my mom wasn’t going to run them over. There is just absolutely no reason for wild animals to act that way with a car. Not the lack of fear part so much, as lots of predators can be really curious about strange objects – although if they live along side a road they should know cars are far from harmless – but that they knew a person was in the car and that she could be seen through the windows. This is not something most animals understand unless they have been in cars or have seen people getting in and out, which should not happen in the middle of the desert 300 miles from civilization.

Hekat

I was 11 at the time and my little sister was 7. Our grandma had died and we were staying in her house for a night along with other family for the wake. I guess this in itself is kind of creepy but I don’t remember being weirded out.

Anyway, it’s after dinner and everyone is in the living room. I decide to get something from my sleeping bag (upstairs) and run upstairs to get to it. I’m alone up here (I assume), and I wander into the room my family is staying in without turning on the lights since it’s right by the door and there’s plenty of light.

As I’m getting whatever it was I came to get, I hear a little girl going down the stairs and laughing. I assume it’s my sister, who the sound would have been appropriate for and because she was the only girl her age in the house.

I didn’t think much of it, and went downstairs, thinking I would play with Emmy (my sister), and was a little surprised to see her already in the living room, sitting with all the adults. I thought it odd enough to ask whether she had just been upstairs, and everyone said she had been sitting in the living room for quite some time.

So, yeah, that was a ghost I guess.

This is my actually scary story/encounter, that I trot out for some people.

I would have been in 7th grade or so and my sister is 4 years younger. Mom and Dad are out to dinner, it’s about 9pm-ish, and we are arguing fiercely about whatever stupid things kids argue about. I specifically recall that it was a very heated argument, since no parents were around to be quiet around.

Anyway, we’re screaming, but stop MID sentence/scream because and stare at eachother because we both hear somebody stomping/running full tilt down the hallway on the floor above us. Having grown up in this house, we’re familiar with the way people sound in it, and we both know that the violent stomping person has gone the direction that would take them to our rooms, into and not out of, the house. There are NO exits that way, so whatever we just heard is in one of our fucking rooms.

At this point I am cursing being the big brother. It gets kind of surreal here. Thinking about it, I don’t think we really believed what we’d just heard, because the stomper would have had to just appear in the hallway, they didn’t go up the steps or anything, or open any doors to sneak into the house. We’d have heard that. Something just goddamn ran down the hall. Which is I suppose why I didn’t call the cops which might have been reasonable.

Anyway, instead I decide to be a man (7th grader) and investigate the rooms. I tell Emmy to wait down here and start creeping up the stairs. Look down the hall, turn on the hall light.. still nothing. I move down the hall, when I look back Emmy is at the foot of the stairs/hallway peeking around the corner, with eyes wide. The rest is boring… I inspect every room, every closet, turn on EVERY light, and find no one. We spent the rest of that night playing a board game. When Mom and Dad came back, I dont think we even told them about it. Nor did we talk about it ever again.

Mystery Steve

My last major brush with whatever it was, was back in 2006. My last job was a data telecomms engineer. For about three months solid, I’d been working around Ireland in nearly all of the Tesco stores, installing access points for new wieghing scales for deli counters and wifi points for stock scanners. It was a pain in the arse. Thankfully many of these stores were new buildings. Which made running a cable from the A to B quite easy. However there were the smaller stores, in towns and villages, which were usually three or more old buildings, knocked into one, creating a bigger shop floor.

Myself and my boss arrived there at about 12:30am. I can’t remember the town, we made a mission to finish 3 stores a day, this being our last. This store was built into three very old buildings, I could tell from the shopfront, all glazed and shiny new. Where above the signage were three different styles of brickwork and window. I knew this job would be fun. The cable routes proved to be a challenge, the offices and upstairs being like a maze. The middle building upstairs didn’t have any through ways to the back offices which meant going up and down 3 different flights of stairs to get to it from the offices either side. We thought we’d make a new route by passing from the first building (1st floor) to the middle, third then through the floor to our (G floor) locations. Easy. It was that or follow exhisting traywork zig zagging everywhere adding about 100ft+ to our cable length. So we worked out where we needed to drill and run our cables. We decided to run the cables from a box room though one of the original walls into the middle building. I lifted up the false ceiling tile to be greeted by a scratched sandstone wall with a foot long drill bit sticking out from it. Whoever had the same idea as us had been beaten and robbed of a drill bit. Judging by the growing rust it had been there an age. We brought out the DeWalt and starting hammering away.

I must have been half way through when my boss who was footing my ladder tapped me on the calf. As the the dewalt scilenced I could hear a what sounded like a woman moaning inconsolably for just a few seconds.
“Could you hear that? It sounded as though…”
“-Yeah, it must be somebody outside theres a pub round the corner”

What Dick! I’d tried my best to not think about how creepy this building really was. I could feel it the moment I walked into the stock rooms. As a rule I’d never think about stuff like that on a job (I’ve worked in a lot of creepy places) I’d just concentrate on what I was doing, I thought if “something” isn’t screaming for my attention then I’m not going to give it any reason to give me any. Which worked, don’t be a pussy, just get on with it. We paused for a moment to hear if it was some drunken party or something.
Nothing. I pull the trigger and hammered at the wall. Then it died.
“What the fuck have you done to it?”
I pulled it from the wall and tried again. Nothing.
“Is it the battery?” Stupid question I knew it wasn’t the battery because we’d both made sure it had been on charge at the last store, it was fine. We tried the spare battery then the cord. Nothing. The boss got quite irritated at this. He’d just had it serviced at a DeWalt Dealer. “He must have given you a dud motor?” So we had to settlle for the 110V beast which meant running to the van and back bringing all the 110 gear to power it. I eventually got the better of the sandstone wall. a nice hole half and inch in diameter.

“Right pop next door and I’ll feed you the cable” So off I lumbered out the room down unlit stairwell to the first stockroom thats when I heard it;

“.. N O…”

You know where you heart and stomach and arse leap into your mouth, thats how I felt. Some little invisible irish girl had said NO to me. In an unlit stairwell. In a closed store. There was only myself the boss in the building and one security guard who was permenantly sat in the other stockroom reading porn in his little cube. I’m getting shivers just typing this. I’m surprised I didn’t break my ankles bounding down those steps, I went for the door, and I felt what seemed to be a luke warm hand very lightly holding my right hand. I can’t say I’ve ever had a panic attack but I’m assume thats what I nearly had. I felt beter walking around through the lit shopping isles to the second stock room. The guard waved at me not taking his eyes away from his Razzle magazine. I felt like asking him “WHat the fuck” but I told myself it was just the door making an odd sound as it closed behind me. The second set of stairs were lit and warm I found myself in the room opposite where I’d drilled. My boss spoke over the walkie making me jump.

“Hang on I’m just moving these ceiling tiles boss” And there it was. A blank wall.
“Forget the tiles! Keep pulling the cable your way, its clean!”
“I’m not pulling the cable… I’m staring at a blank wall here.”
“Whatever, keep pulling like that, yeah steady, signal, when you’ve got enough!”

“Boss I swear to you. I am not pulling any fucking cable in here.”

Que a lot of arguing and quick run back to the box room up those fucking stairs with my teeth chattering, I could see it on his face when I opened the door, he was still feeding the cable through the wall. His hands dropped at his sides and the cables became taut slowly dragging their boxes towards the wall then up it.

My boss grabbed at the boxes and started yanking the cables back into the boxroom it came easy at first but then he was beginning to put more effort into it and the sheaving became torn exposing the rainbow colored cores, I got my snips and cut at the cables just to watch the wall slurp them up like spaghetti.

“What the fuck was that? Wheres that guard at?”
“He’s in his cube?”

I can’t remember much of the conversation but I don’t think I’d ever seen anybody genuinly freaked out as much as me. We left the room and got the guard up and told him what had happened. He looked at us and said “you sure?” My boss cut a length of cable and fed it into the hole the three of us watched the cable zip up the wall above the false ceiling. Words failed me. The guard started shouting who was back there. He turned around, “It must be one of the staff fucking about” he led us to the room opposite, again a blank wall. Then the office next to it, The door read Manager.
“We’ll try in here”
“I hope theres a manager locked in here with a lot of cable” My boss grunted. The guard unlocked the office and found nothing. None of us spoke, we trapsed back next door to the only other room left worth checking an office next to the boxroom. The opened it up. It wasn’t noticable straight away. A second glance and it clicked. This room had more depth. We’ had drilled into a void. No way. There had to be something else the guard really wasn’t sure what to do. My boss checked around where this void was. Inside and out. Even scaling the roof of the building to see if it was there, pehaps a seagull had been pulling at the cable? Again nothing. He made me check underneath the room no void. Only concrete.

We all had a coffee and decided to use the exhisting trunking, fuck that room and it secret. The guard spent the rest of the job talking to us and bringing our spirits up, we finished up quite quickly and began collecting the gear. The DeWalt began working again and once or twice I could feel my hand being held by the fingers, only in that stairwell.

My boss and I didn’t speak about what happened it was too fucking weird. I haven’t told many people about this it was just so surreal, I feel like we should have knocked that wall through. But I suppose it wasn’t our problem really.

edit -I’m a terrible writer this is just thought this might help.

Some of you my be wondering Why we just didn’t got throught the other office into the managers, well these were locked off to us and off limits, however by the time we had stopped freaking out and looking for people fucking with us we’d already wasted enough time and the other drill mysteriously broke yet to work again later.

Wookie Fight Night

I’ve apparently seen a Seraphim even though at the time I wasn’t aware of what they are supposed to look like. Before I elaborate I’ll state that I’ve never been very religous and I don’t practice anything now.

So onto the story, I was less than ten years old. I was getting ready to go to sleep. I got comfy in bed and just sort of let me eyes wonder around the room. Next thing you know I notice this sort of bluish outline near the only light source in my room. As I focus on it I realize it is a masculine looking head with two wings attached to either side of its’ head. The “thing” itself looked almost like it was drawn using a blue paint and a stencil cut out to that shape. The thing did not have a flesh tone nor did have very detailed features. I did make out solid eyes, the wings and a mouth. The “thing” and I just stared at eachother for what seemed a while then I freaked the fuck out and screamed like all hell. After that I didn’t sleep in my room for months.

I’ve never seen anything like that again. Unfortunately for many years during my late teens and early twenties I would often have dreams of demons instead of seeing anything that might be considered angelic. The demons in questions were almost always shape shifters and I’ve never seen one in real waking time. Surprisingly in the dreams I would often kill them or tell them to fuck off. Some of the dreams I remember very well and I can still draw (very poorly) the so called Seraphim creature I saw.

LazyDivey

”My friend’s encounter”
A good friend of mine told me this story a few years ago. Him and his friend were about 15 at the time and decided to go camping in the hills across from his house. They set up their tent on the edge of a ridge and had just settled down to go to sleep when my friend saw a shadow of something obviously bipedal walking around the campfire. My friend was petrified because the sillouette of whatever this thing was was huge. Neither of them moved and eventually it walked away. After waiting a while they creeped out of the tent and looked around. One of them shined a flashlight off in the distance…thats when they heard the sound..my friend said whatever it was shrieked and started running towards them…they took off running down the hill and didnt look back till they were back at my friend’s house. My friend described the sound as “inhuman” and like nothing he’s heard before or since.

”The thing in the sky”
This happened to me about 5 years ago, not much to say but Im still not sure what I saw. I had just gotten home around dusk, got out of the car and looked up at the sky when I saw what I could only describe as a translucent thing moving slowly in the sky. It was sort of shaped like a sting ray and I could see right through it but I could still see the outline of it. I kept watching it as it slowly drifted through the sky and off into the horizon

Helmacron

I’ve been trying to write this story for years, and I guess I’m not going to write it yet, as I’m going to keep this real short.

But I was in Thailand in 2006. I met a man who bragged about how he knew a taxidermist on one of the islands, Ko Samoi, in the Gulf of Thailand.

Three bus rides, and a long, burning boat ride later (it’s not that simple), we were on the island. We had to hire dirtbikes, not the normal crappy 150cc motorbikes they have over there, and struggle up bad, overgrown track on the north side of the island, slipping and sliding everywhere because there’d just been a monsoon. And there, in a clearing, was this little shack with a breezy greenhouse shade cloth flapping on poles above it, effectively covering the whole clearing, sort of camoflaging. The ground was covered in that patchy square plastic ground covering that had holes in it and jigsaw pieces on the side so you can hook it up to the next square piece.

Next to the shack was a larger building painted swirly green and brown on the roof and sides, made of corrugated tin, and under cover next to it was mounds of pink fibrous material.

The guy was really creepy, but I won’t talk about him.

We went into the larger building, and it was stunning. You know that feeling when you walk into a room and you see a giant mooses head above you on the wall and it’s a mixture of shock because the current animals are sacred ideology and because it’s just huge, well this was much, much more intense than that. The room was packed full of taxidermy. The walls are insulated with the pink fibrous material from outside and it obviously wasn’t completely done inside, and there was this cheap side panelling you’d find in caravans everywhere, and then there were hides, mix-matched quilt things lining sides.

And I don’t know all the animals that would have gone into making the hide quilts, but I recognized zebra, because that’s real easy, and giraffe, and the rest could have been lions, maybe a jaguar, and I think he might have used smaller, like monkey, animals and sewed two pelts together to fill in gaps. And then the room itself had just… crazy shit.

When you stand outside, you can see a liger’s hindend through the door to the building, and inside, it stretches, I don’t know. Maybe the length of a car, but the building was pretty small, so I don’t know how long, but it was huge and jowly and it’s eyes were close together and it was white in parts. The guy said they don’t survive long. And then further back there was mix and matched animals, like there was sort of a yeti, but not what I’d ever imagine a yeti to look like. It looked more prehistoric human than yeti, but the guy I was with said it was an abominable snowman and the older owner fellow just started to get upset.

And there’s a lot more to describe, but I’d waded through the animals because there was no clear path and there at the back, was a cat with the hands of a… well. There’s a type of animal that is really small, only lives in madagascar and I can’t remember the name of it right now, but it’s got very human like hands, and one type of it has fingers with really long fingernails so it can pull worms out from out the inside of bark on the trees. Those were the hands attached to the cat, and it looked like an ordinary white tabby in every other way, it’s eyes were open with those little cat eye marbles inside it’s head. One of the nails was broken, I remember, on it’s left front leg I think.

And then, behind it, was turned the other way a… another animal I don’t remember the name of, but it’s a breed of cat larger than domestic but smaller than panther, or so it’s hind-end looked, and it’s tail was straight up like it was aroused, and the head transplanted onto it had white dreadlocks flowing around the side of it, merging in with the white of the body of the cat, and as I shuffled my way around to the other side, I saw a black nose, and black cheeks and brilliantly white eyes with intricate red veins running from grey irises and wide black pupils, and it was the head of what I imagine a beautiful black tribal princess would look like, what I imagined reading King Solomon’s Mines. The guy who owns it all, who does it all, has been getting more and more upset as this went along, and at this point, I slid my bag off my shoulder to reach for my camera, and he didn’t so much as yell at me to get out, but tell me in such a way to get out, I felt genuine fear.

So I left. With no photos, just a wierd story.

StaticAxeGrinder

I’ve told this one before and it has cementing in me that I never, ever want to have another paranormal experience again.
From 8th grade until I graduated from high school I live with my parents on the end of the town in a subdivision that was still being built up. This is important because we lived on a hill at the edge of the subdivision, a hill that had been built up with fill dirt.

The house was a duplex and was nice enough. There never seemed to be enough light in the core of the house because we could only have windows on the outer wall, but it was big enough for my parents, me, and the dog. Our neighbors were an old couple that spent most of the year on the Florida Coast, so for the most part it was just us.
Things started out calmly enough. The dog wouldn’t want to be out in the living room, or you’d hear soft voices mixed with the din of the television or a radio at the other end of the house. Nothing too spooky or out of the ordinary. Most of these things would happen out in the living room and the living room because the center of all the activity.

As time wore on, I began to see things out of the corner of my eye. These things were what would be classically called Shadow People. They were tall, thick at the shoulders and deeply black. At first, they were gone with a blink of an eye. Then they started staying longer than a blink. I could turn and look at them, if briefly, before they would disappear. They had no features; they looked like walking shadows. As they started to remain longer in my sight, things began to get worse in the house.

I began to feel anxiety when ever I would enter the hallway. I felt like someone was watching me. The hallway never seemed to have enough light in it and was always dark. This was worse at night which was a pain because my bathroom was down the hall from my room and it would be a constant fight between my bladder and my fear at night. The dog would never remain in the living room unless my mom was there.

Some times I would watch the shadow people walk down the hallway. I never had enough guts to follow and I would remain frozen in my spot for a while after I’d see them. There was a mix of dread, anxiety, and fear in the air whenever I’d see them. It never got cold or hot, just my fight-or-flight reaction would kick into gear. I don’t think I could ever stress how freaked out I would get.

I began to think I was a little nutty. I was going through what all teenagers do, first love, first depression, first real moments of “oh shit where is my life going” and I’m sure that I was just so stressed I was imagining things. Until my friends saw things too. I had two friends stay over one night when my dad was on a job site in California. They swore someone big walked out of the the hall way, through the front door, and back again. They thought it was my dad, only there’s no reason for my dad to drive back from California to just spook my friends. After that event, I began to do everything in my power to not stay home at night. I never told my parents because I was sure they didn’t believe in ghosts or shadow people.

After I graduated, my parents moved to Nevada and I stayed in Oregon to go to school. My dad and I ended up in the moving truck, taking turns driving. Between Susanville and Reno, I began to shoot the shit with my dad, talking about UFOs, conspiracy theories, and other supernatural things. I eventually asked him if he believed in shadow people. “Like the ones at the old house?,” he replied. Turns out he had seen shadow people too, shadow people who would appear in the living room and walk down the hallway. He noticed the dog’s behavior. He also got uneasy at the sight of them. It made me wish I had talked to him about it sooner. His theory was whatever was in the house came from the fill dirt, and I will never forget when he said, “You never know where the fill dirt came from or what was in it.”

The uneasiness and anxiety I experienced made me never want to experience anything paranormal ever again. It was nerve wracking and these shadow people never did anything except watch me in the hallways. I’d hate to experience something that interacted with me. The area I live in has spooky things; rivers damned up to cover towns or graveyards, lynchings in the hills, the playground that ate children …yet I still read these threads. If anyone wants to know about the spookiness of Southern Oregon, I can impart what I do know. Mind you I’ve never gone out to verify any of it. I really don’t want to.

–more–

If you were to drive into the hills of Southern Oregon heading towards Crater Lake, you may find yourself in one of the many small towns which dot the road side, becoming fewer and fewer as you travel deeper into the woods. It is in one of these towns that this tale takes place.

The woods of Southern Oregon have many skeletons in the closet. This unnerves a few people who do not know of some of the area’s more colorful history. Lynching, murders, suicides, and mystery bodies are unknown to the area’s newest residents, but to those who have lived here most of their lives, these stories are whispers passed between family members, friends, and children on the school yard. Vortexes, big foot traps, and haunted areas are also known between locals, though they are mostly brushed off as children turn to adults. Still, many people do not wish to venture far into the woods in Southern Oregon, for not every one is convinced all that has been found is all that is to be found. It’s safe to say these hills have eyes.

There is a playground in these woods, if you know where to look, where death has left its mark. It’s a tragic setting to most who hear of these tales as these deaths were on school grounds, which has sadly become more and more of a site of death in present times. But these events took place a while ago, when death at school was a thought far from people’s minds, certainly the minds of the children who came to learn and play. To some, this school is the perfect place for children to go. It’s far from big cities, the classes are small, and there is plenty of room for the children to play outdoors.

However for some, the outdoors is often cited for reasons to not let their children go. It would be easy for a child to get lost as the school sat right on the edge of the woods. Animals could attack and harm the children. Worse yet, in a rather irrational fear, unseen Mountain Men could snatch children away without anyone noticing until it is too late. Even some believe the school is on sour ground and is an evil place. And perhaps they are right.

Still, most locals will send their children to this school out of necessity but also out of an unspoken pact between those who went to the school when they were children and know of it’s shady past; going to this school is a test, of sorts. The school in the day is benign enough, with a small playground and a large field behind it, running parallel to the forest. During spring and summer, it’s not a surprise to see deer and wild turkeys feeding on grass and bugs in the field. At night, however, the school takes on a different look. The woods create a pitch black box around the school where little light escapes. Snapping twigs could mean someone or something more dangerous than a skittish deer.

It is not uncommon to find dead animals around the school. Mostly small rodents, birds, or squirrels. While nothing out of the ordinary for a forest, these dead animals are all but untouched from the outside, missing a limb or head, but they are usually void of entrails and blood. Most local folks will say it’s the work of pagans in the local area, but there is little sign of any sort of activity on the school grounds, outside of a drinking spot for local teens. What’s more is there is a spot on the playground that is devoid of any grass or other foliage. This is nothing new for a playground, but even the most popular areas of the playground have some growth during the summer or winter when the children are gone. This spot remains bare.

It is at this spot at least two children were known to die, both in horrific accidents. One child had been playing on the merry-go-round, showing off to his friends. In his attempts at glorious feats, he fell and caught his neck, snapping it, and dying instantly. There are no more merry-go-rounds. Another child died of anaphylactic shock after a bee sting on the same spot where the merry-go-round had once stood. While just as tragic, there are rumors that the child had strange marks on his neck.

Still others have been found near the playground. A janitor hanged himself inside the tool shed near the school. A car full of teens crashed while leaving a drunken party in the schools’ field. Hunters have been found dead from an accident or exposure. Some people have even gone missing while hiking around the woods.

To go to the school and stand on the spot where two children had died is a morbid yet enthralling thing to do. How often does one get to walk around where death is so close? Why do these woods often take so many people? Perhaps it is just these woods; often unforgiving to those who do not know how to survive in it. Perhaps it is the area itself. While going through rapid growth, the area still seems a little backwater. A little weird. It could be this perception that is affecting the woods more than people know.

And yes, I’ve stood at that spot. It’s weird, to say the least.

SerpentPower

I never expected to see a UFO. I didn’t really believe in any reports. Then I saw something I couldn’t explain.

I was talking to someone on the cell phone in the middle of the day. It was a long conversation and I didn’t need to be anywhere too soon so I pulled over on a sidestreet to talk without worrying about driving. I lit up a cig and leaned back and noticed a silver sphere on the west horizon. At first I didn’t think anything of it. It could have been a silver party balloon at this point. Soon, however, the person I was talking to was left to ask if I was still there as I stared in confusion. The object retained it’s apparent size and spherical shape while it travelled all the way past the east horizon in 2-3 minutes. There is no way to know how far away it was. But anything going across the whole sky in that time had to have been going very fast. Definitely way faster than any balloon could ever be blown by the wind. And I want to clarify that I was able to make it out well enough to be sure it was indeed circular in shape and not just a far away plane or something. No trails, broad daylight, I just don’t know what to think.

CandyCakes

My old summer camp, the place I went as a child, was a really spiritual camp. It was non-denominational, so it was never really awkward. But I’m pretty sure the people who ran the camp followed traditional tribal doctrine. We had a lot of strange occurrences involving ghosts and other less friendly and more material apparitions. I’m going to tell all of the stories I remember from that place, the last of which is about the Wendigo.

Firstly, we had ghosts. And yeah, every camp has ghost stories, but we actually have this one ghost that shows up in two cabins, the second youngest girl’s and boy’s cabin. It is a man in a long green raincoat, and he pops up about once or twice a year in each cabin. Once, a girl I knew went to the bathroom in the middle of the night and when she came back to her bed there was that man lying in it. So she went to the councilor and sleepily told the lady “There’s a man in my bed.” The councilor freaked out and ran out to turn on the lights, she was just in time to see him disappear. In the boy’s cabin, he appeared to two councilors I knew one year. Charles woke from a dream to see a man in a green coat standing over him. He just went back to sleep. The next morning he told Ben, the guy sleeping one bed over, that he had a weird dream. The exchange went like this:

Charles: I had the oddest dream last night, I ‘woke up’…
Ben: And there was a guy in a green raincoat standing over you?

Both of them had seen it.

The next oddest thing is the boy-headed fish. The camp directors (not the owners) had a son, he was three at that time. And he was sensetive. He ‘saw’ things a lot, freaky unexplainable things. One of the things he saw was at the camp fishing pond. He had been sitting on the edge of the dock and looking into the water when he saw something. He had toddled over to his father who was teaching the fishing class and said “Daddy, I saw a boy -headed fish.” After much questioning had occurred, they came to understand that he had seen a large black fish with the head of a screaming boy, looking up at him. Which is just plain freaky.

That fishing pond never was entirely right. I had a friend who burst into inexplicable tears when she was around it. Also, there was a storm one night, a really bad storm. A lot of trees fell into the pond. I was out there next morning early for a class, and it was the craziest thing. All the trees along the bank had fallen, all of the strong, healthy, LIVE trees. But the dead ones didn’t. One of the boys I was with just kicked one of the dead ones and it fell, but for some reason the storm didn’t knock it over. After that incident, the owners hung up little yarn things around the pond. I think it was for protection.

Ah, but the best story is of our resident Wendigo. We have a trail at camp called the Wedigo, which is just one of the millions of variations of the name Wendigo. When asked, people always said a Wendigo was just a spirit. But the truth is it’s a cannibalistic spirit that can possess people and eat their flesh. How awesome. Well, this trail, it has crosses all along it, and the same yarn thingers hung by the owners. We’re told the first day of camp to never, under any circumstances, mess with either the crosses or the yarn mabobbits. One year, one of the younger boys kicked one over. He was sent home that day and the owners were suspiciously missing from dinner, but they came back later and they were wearing their white clothes, the ones they wear for camp ceremonies. We never had any problems with the spirit, there was even a camp ghost story surrounding it. But ask anyone, and they’d tell you not to mess with that Trail. Don’t hurt anything on it, don’t talk about hurting it. The one time I said “God, I hate this trail.” It was really steep and it was my third time on it that day. I had to apologize out loud, and let them sprinkle salt on me.

Did we ever see the Wendigo? Nope. Is it there? Absolutely. And if you don’t believe me, you just kick one of those white crosses over next time you’re in the woods. You’ll see.

Withdrawal Plans

In the mid-1970’s my brother and a friend went hiking/camping in the mountains of North Central Washington state. They camped at a small lake (Little Eightmile), set up their tent, lit a fire, ate dinner, and went to sleep. At some point in the early morning they woke to the sound of something crashing through the forest. Then whatever it was came into their campsite. For the next 15 minutes or so this thing trashed the area all around their tent. They could hear their pots and dishes being banged around along with other stuff. At one point the thing was kicking or throwing rocks and sticks at the sides of the tents. He said it made a low grunting sound but every once in a while it would make a scream that he said was like an eagle or hawk. After a while it got bored or decided it had made its point and left. When it got light enough to see they opened the tent and found all their stuff strewn around the campsite and into the woods.

ryanarchy

A few years ago on haloween (2001 if I remember correctly) I was hanging out with a few friends of mine. I’ll call them James, Andy and Sandy for the sake of the story. At the time Andy and Sandy lived together in the house that we were hanging out at (this is in a Chicago suburb in northern Illinois to give you an idea of geography). We were all bored because we didn’t have costumes and didn’t know of any parties that were going on that night, so we were just drinking at their house.

Bored, we decided to step outside to smoke as we had our first beers of the night. I don’t smoke, but for purposes of not being bored and alone inside I decide to step outdoors with them. It was a slightly cool night, but also very clear. We are outside for a few minutes when Sandy says something to the effect of “What’s that?” while staring at the sky. James and I immediately look up while our friend Andy stares at his shoes or something.

When I look up I see what looks like a cluster of lights arranged in a triangle or V formation. The points of light were slightly less bright than your average night time star, but they also appeared to be slightly larger. It was strange because if they didn’t move together as if it were one object, I would have probably just written it off as a distant man made satelite. It was hard to judge how far the object was away, but I received the distinct impression that it was relatively close to the tree cover that flanked both sides of the road, which meant that it was quite a bit larger than an average single prop plane that is common in the area with amateur pilots. Also, if my supposition about it’s size and distance from us were correct, it was moving a fair deal faster than any prop driven plane would normally move, as it moved from our sight and past the tree cover quite quickly.

The object we saw was also nearly silent, save for a low quiet humming noise that I noticed while it was overhead. My friends James and Sandy claimed to hear nothing, but my hearing has always been a little better than average.

I never really used to give stories of UFOs much creedence. I always used to view them as little more than entertainment, or stories that people made up to have a fun story to tell, and I think most of my friends feel similar. It was kind of weird after seeing that too, my friend James never really liked to talk about it. I think he thought if he mentioned it, people would think he’s crazy or just making crap up.

Romanshoes

”Gray Eyes Man, or Even Awesome Old Indians Are Eaten By Young Demons”
This took place somewhere in northern Saskatchewan, in a mostly Native American area. A few miles into the woods from the main town, there was a small lake with an island. An old man lived in the cabin on the island – an old Assiniboine named Gray Eyes Man. If he wanted to go to town in the summer, he would canoe across the lake. If it was winter and the lake was frozen, he would snowshoe across. He didn’t go to town much – he was sort of a survivalist, could maybe be considered a hermit. Still, he was very well regarded by the community, mostly because every winter there was a pack of wolves who liked to walk across the ice and chill on Gray Eyes Man’s island. Old Indian guy who doesn’t care that there are about twenty wolves scratching at his door? Old Indian guy who lets those wolves sleep on his rug? Old Indian guy who wears traditional clothing everywhere and is friends with wolves and lives the traditional way and doesn’t talk to white guys on principle? Oh yeah, he gets his respect.

One year, Gray Eyes Man gets the last of his supplies from town, snowshoes across the lake, and closes the door – he probably won’t be seen until spring. The next day, a really bad blizzard whips up. A younger guy, maybe in his twenties, gets lost in the snow. They can’t send out a search and rescue team because the storm is too bad, and by the time it stops there’s pretty much no hope for the lost guy. Honestly, the biggest chance he has of surviving is stumbling across the frozen lake onto Gray Eyes Man’s island, and the chances of that have got to be astronomical. His family has a memorial service.

Winter passes, there are some more bad storms, you can hear the wolves howling, and finally spring comes. The wolves scamper across the remaining chunks of ice, looking thinner than they usually do. That’s weird: usually Gray Eyes Man feeds them like they’re dogs. Speaking of which, where is Gray Eyes Man? He hasn’t been seen in months. Usually he comes to town when the wolves leave. Someone should go check on him. Two guys volunteer to do so.

They get to the cabin and notice first the gigantic pile of firewood. It doesn’t look like it’s been touched in a while. Second thing they notice is the door, which has been pulled down. Oh, man. Either Gray Eyes Man lived the whole winter with no door, or he’s dead.

They go inside to make sure and immediately run back out.

Police come and take the body – the bodies – away. Two bodies. One of Gray Eyes Man, one of someone wearing the young guy’s clothes, the young guy who got lost way back at the beginning of winter. Both of them look like they’ve been chewed by wolves. No, scratch that. Young guy has wolf marks all over him, some of his bones are missing, everything’s been gnawed on. Gray Eyes Man is definitely missing some pieces, but he isn’t a skeleton. He’s frozen, looks like a mummy. And those bite marks aren’t wolf teeth. More like – hey – that…

Gray Eyes Man had been attacked by the younger guy. There are chunks missing. He had his throat chewed open, has fingernail marks across his chest, bite marks.

The young guy had turned into a windigo and killed a member of the pack before the wolves could break down the door.

Moral of the story: Do not let strangers into your cabin in winter. They will eat you.

”OMIGOD A BEAR, except not”
Every summer since I was six, my father has forced my sisters, my friends, and I on a brutal pilgrimage to the moose-infested waters in Algonquin Park. After several hours of canoeing through an endless swamp and carrying a 200-pound canoe for a mile over the stupid portage, we end up in a vast, desolate lake whose name I can’t currently summon. There are islands all over the lake, and after my dad choses the one island that is inevitably the farthest away/the one that involves climbing sheer rock/the one where there is evidence of bear habitation, we set up camp, there to fester in the “great outdoors.” We live through such indignations only because seeing a moose or bear puttering about in the wild is much better than seeing one at the zoo.

Three years ago, my sisters and I endured the journey. After a day or two of recuperating from the nine hours in the canoe, my dad took my younger sister to go fishing on one of the less wretched islands. My older sister and I played a couple rounds of cards before she decided to go out and get some beef jerky from the food back, which was hung in a large tree approximately 15 feet off the ground.

She unzipped the tent flap, got out, stood up, rustled around for the beef jerky, paused, and darted back into the tent with a speed comparable to a peregrine falcon.

“What’s wrong?”

“There’s a bear on the dock,” she whispered.

“What?”

“It’s something big and furry and brown and it’s moving and it’s not a moose.”

Oh Jesus fucking Christ, a motherfucking bear. We’d seen bears before in the lake, but they were usually swimming away from us or ridiculously far away. Now there was one in close range and –

“Fuck, I didn’t put the bag back up,” she whispered, horrified. “It’s going to come up here.”

It was going to eat us.

We huddled at the back of the tent, petrified, as heavy steps appeared and grew closer. Something snorted, grunted, rumbled. It moved near the tree: we could hear it picking through the bag. Twigs snapped, branches cracked as it made its rapacious way through the campsite.

After what seemed like forever, its steps finally got further away. It was going to the other end of the island. Or to the dock. It didn’t matter. It was gone.

We didn’t open the tent flap until Dad came up to the camp, little sister and several fish in tow, and told us to get out and see the fish! Did anything interesting happen?

“THERE WAS A BEAR OMIGOD JULIA SAW A HUGE BEAR ON THE DOCK AND IT ALMOST ATE US IT ATE THE FOOD OH MY GOD THERE WAS A BEAR!!”

He looked at us, puzzled. “What?”

“THERE WAS A BEAR!”

“There aren’t any bear tracks,” he pointed out. “There are just footprints. Our footprints.”

“IT WAS NEAR THE FOOD TREE!”

He sighed and spent a few minutes investigating while we darted back into the safety of the tent.

He came back in. “There are no bear tracks.”

“WHAT?!!

“Were you guys out here barefoot?”

“We weren’t out there because there was a gigantic freakin’ BEAR, Dad, and no we did not go out barefoot, there are way too many branches.”

“Did someone else come here?”

“A BEAR DID!”

“There aren’t any bear tracks.”

“THEN WHAT THE HELL ALMOST ATE US?!!”

Dad pulled us out of the tent and made us look around.

The food bag was on the ground, slightly mussed but with nothing major missing. There was a swipe of mud on the tree, and some hair. No bear tracks, though. Us, chipmunks, bird prints…and a set of huge, vaguely twisted footprints.

And that’s why my family believes in Bigfoot.

Ozz81

”Hole in the Sky”
This happened when I was a kid in upstate NY, about 5 years old. My family lived in an apartment complex arranged in a square, with the front of all the apartments facing towards the center, where a couple basketball courts and a playground were set up. I was playing with friends on the playground, when I happened to look to my right and noticed something…odd.

The clouds were a really dark gray and were swirling around this “hole” that had a bright, yellow light coming from it. Imagine a tornado, but without the funnel cloud…just a fast moving, swirling bunch of clouds all around this hole of light. It was the weirdest thing I saw…I watched it for about 10 seconds, before the clouds swirled counter-clockwise around the hole, and it closed up. Afterwards, the clouds lightened up a bit and dissipated, but nothing was there. To this day, I have no idea what it was, and never brought it up to my family.

It actually goes to 321 Park Drive but I think that’s because my old address, 321 Wright Park Manor, no longer exists. The apartments I lived in are slightly to the west (left) of where Park Drive is, and south of Frontage Road on the map. You can see the apartments I lived in, arranged in a big square, near the river – I lived on the eastern side, the apartment right below the “gap” in the east “wall”. When I saw the above event, I was standing in the middle where the pavement/basketball court is (big rectangular area near the middle of the complex) and looking eastward.

”The UFO Incident”
I remember this more clearly because it was more recent, it happened back in the summer of 2001. I’d taken this girl on a date, and we decided to head back to her place and hang out. It was a perfect clear night out, so we decided to go to the back yard and lay on a blanket and just watch the stars.

We’d been outside for about 20 minutes, and the stars are almost perfectly clear due to very few streetlights around the girl’s house. Anyways, we’re staring at the stars, and we notice a couple of them start to move slowly. One moved in a northwest direction, the other sped up and headed to the east. We honestly couldn’t believe what we saw…both lights just appeared out of nowhere. After that, we decided to head inside and hang for a bit before I headed home.

Pedifile

In ’83-’84, I went on a field trip to the Ft. Worth Zoo. (private school thing) The time there was fairly fun and what happened didn’t “occur” until time for us to leave. The majority of the us kids (we’re talking about 25-30 total) were making our way back towards the front of the zoo, walking along a row of cages/animal exhibits that was elevated a bit from other areas. The direction we were walking along put the nearest animals to our left, with steps leading do to the other areas at various intervals on our right.

I was walking and talking with my a friend of mine, with several (mostly guys) classmates a couple of yards in front of us, and several female classmates bringing up the rear. My friend sees our teacher and some other classmates going into a build that was half gift shop/half eatery. This was “below” us, in that you had to go down some steps to get to it. My friends says that he’s going to catch up with the teacher, I acknowledge him, and off he goes.

I hear the girls that were bringing up the rear, and I turn my head to look back at them for just a second or two. I don’t think I even said anything to them. As I turn back look ahead of me, the guys that were just a couple of yards ahead are now waaaay down this path. Not running. Not doing anything different than they were when my friend headed down the steps. But they seemed to have crossed about 90-100 yards (as I recall) in oh, 3-6 seconds.

“What the…” I turn around to ask the girls behind me if they saw what happened. Even after 20-odd years, I remember thinking that I needed some kind of affirmation to what I was witnessing. Except, the girls weren’t behind me. I turn around, and they aren’t in front of me, either. In fact, no one I knew was in front of me. The guys had disappeared, too. Now, I can imagine that the guys had come to a point where they changed direction and moved out of my sight, but we are talking about another 2 seconds or so.

Well, maybe they got past me and went into the gift shop building, like my friend. I know I saw him walk up to the door, and had seen the teacher and the students with her enter that building. And, as we are now closer to it, it makes sense that someone I know will be in there.

Nope.

Now, the actual gift shop was pretty minuscule. It could hold maybe 15-20 people before you couldn’t move easily. I went up and down each isle just to make sure I wasn’t missing someone crouched down, but no luck. I went across the little hallway that connected the sop with the eatery and looked to see if there was anyone there.

Nada.

So, I spend the rest of the next hour or so kind of backtracking and walking around the immediate area looking for sign of someone I knew. I didn’t head for the exit, as I wasn’t sure who went where, and I figured that someone would head back my direction looking for me. After that time had passed, I hear someone on the zoo’s PA system page me to the front gate. Hallelujah! Maybe now I can get some answers.

When I rejoin the group, everyone seems glad to see me. Of course, I get the “What happened to you?”/”Where’d you go?” questions…which really threw me. I didn’t go anywhere! “Yeah, we looked all over for you, but couldn’t find you.” I mean, I stayed in a relatively well-traveled, fairly wide-open area, and they couldn’t find me? No one could explain it.

All things being considered, I do believe they did a basic “sweep” of the zoo, even though they should have easily spotted me, or me/them. And, I probably should have made contact with a staff member to let them know that I was seperated from my group (why I didn’t, I’ll never know). I’ve not ever experienced any other missing time, either before or after this. Of course, all my friends approached me soon after my return to the group wondering where I had gone. I told what I saw, and they each looked at me with that “Huh??” look.

Good times.

stereobreadsticks

The house I grew up in has, in addition to the main building that’s been around since the ’50s an extra room that used to be carport but was enclosed in the ’70s. At one time or another it was my brother’s bedroom until he moved out, my sister’s bedroom until she moved out two years later and then, since it had no further use, my toy room as a little kid, essentially it was a spare room that my parents didn’t mind me making a mess in because they didn’t have to go in there very often. The room connected to the laundry room, which dated back to when the house was first built in the mid-50s and I would usually leave the door between the toy room and the laundry room open when I played back there because my parents liked to be able to sort of keep an ear out for any problems that might arise.

Anyway, whenever I’d play back there for more than 30 minutes or so I’d start to get nervous, nothing too bad, just a little uneasy and I’d wind up playing while sitting with my back to the wall and facing the door to the laundry room. Once in a while I’d see what looked like an old man dressed in a black suit standing in the laundry room watching me. I’d see him out of the corner of my eye, then when I’d look he’d be gone. I would have assumed it was just my mind playing tricks on me but I’d also occasionally see him from the couch in the living room, from which you could look back through the dining room into the laundry room, and when I’d see him from the living room he wouldn’t disappear as soon as I looked at him, instead he’d fade away after about ten seconds or so. I stopped seeing him at about the age of 15 or 16 though. I’ve asked my family if they ever saw anything weird and apparently my brother and sister both claimed to have seen the same guy when they were using the back room as their bedroom and my Dad claims that he still occasionally sees the old man when he’s sitting in the living room watching TV. All three of them claim to have only ever seen him standing in the laundry room quietly watching the people in the other rooms of the house. We don’t know who he is or whether there’s any backstory to the house (though it’s kind of doubtful since it’s just a lower-middle class tract house in Fresno that was built in the ’50s) but yeah, everyone but my Mom (who thinks we’re all just letting our imaginations get the better of us) agrees that there’s an old man in the laundry room.

I’ve only ever had one other potentially supernatural experience that I couldn’t really pass off as just my imagination getting to me. This was after I’d gone away to college at UC Santa Cruz, some friends had an apartment a couple blocks away from an abandoned, supposedly haunted house called the Rispin Mansion (apparently it’s in the process of being refurbished and turned into a bed & breakfast, it’ll be interesting to see if there are any stories from visitors after it opens). We decided one night after consulting with our life coach Jose Cuervo that it would be a good idea to do a little exploration of the mansion before the building was restored. So we found a first floor window that was boarded up but seemed like it would be fairly easy to get open and while we were standing outside working on it I happened to glance up and saw what appeared to be a bluish glowing human figure standing in a second story window overlooking us. I pointed it out to the other people there, who all acknowledged that they saw it and it stayed there, watching us until we got in. We didn’t see anything else in the house but it was a little strange that, even though we didn’t set off any alarms, or notice anything that looked like it might be connected to an alarm system, on the ground floor about halfway through out exploration of the second floor an alarm went off as soon as we entered what looked like a large bathroom. Needless to say we ran like hell and got out of there before the cops showed up so even if there were any other ghostly goings-on we wouldn’t have noticed them.

Ensign_Ricky

My grandmother’s ghost haunts my mother’s house. It’s not a scary haunting, my mom will sometimes smell my gran’s perfume, lights are mysteriously turned off, stuff moved around prankishly. My mom will be looking for something she was just using, while muttering under her breath “Goddamit mom!” It’s not really the sort of thing one would call the ghostbusters about.

Cue up about a year ago, my fiancee wakes up with a scream. Now I had not told her very much about my gran. She knew that she had been killed in a car crash about 10 years before, that’s it. She tells me she just had a really scary dream about some woman she’d never seen before, some old woman with an accent she couldn’t quite place, telling her to say hi to me. What was also peculiar was that my fiancee’s step-father (who died in a car crash a few years b4) introduced her in the dream, said the old woman’s name was Peg.

I just about keeled over from shock.

My grandmother’s name was Peggy.

And she was British.

DaysOfThePhoenix

”Shadow Man and Rebecca”
The first time I really had any deal with ghosts or whatever was in the fourth grade. As a kid, I quickly started sleeping with my bedroom door shut because I could swear I’d see vaguely human shapes peeking into the bedrooms in my house, and it’s terrifying when you’re 5. But when I was in fourth grade, a couple of weird things happened.

I caught chicken pox from my little brother and was stuck at home for a week. I had been sleeping on the couch and my mom would wash the sheets every morning. When the contagious period finally wore off, my parents offered to let me keep sleeping on the couch or I could sleep in my bed. Now, the couch at the time was pretty comfortable and I was going to say I would just stay on the couch.

As I was saying this however, I looked behind my dad. I saw this figure a little taller than my dad, and he was black. I don’t mean like African-American, I mean he was like the color of the night sky, or that fuzzy shade of gray your shadow might be on a bright summer day. And he had these piercing eyes. All I could do was stare at these terrifying red eyes as he started to shake his head, and I shook my head back at him. My mom said, “So do you wanna sleep in your own bed, sweetie?” The shadow man nodded slowly, and still staring at him, I nodded too. Then he smiled smugly and in a blink he was gone. I slept in my own bed that night.

On that very same night, someone broke into our house. The thief rummaged through the basement and stole a Super Nintendo and a ton of games. But more importantly, he came upstairs and stole my mom’s purse off the coffee table, which would’ve been less than a foot from me if I had slept on the couch.

I would see Shadow Man several more times, usually he would appear in a place I needed to look for important reasons. I even saw him once standing down by the front door. When I looked closer, the door was unlocked.

Shadow Man also had a female counterpart I met at around the same time. I saw her less often but heard her more than Shadow Man. A few nights after the burglar broke in the house, I was awake in my bed, crying softly. Not only did my body still ache somewhat from the pox, but some jerk had just stolen my video games and I was upset. I know I felt a presence in the room, and a hand graze my cheek. Then a woman’s voice said, “Shh, everything will be ok, just sleep.” And almost instantly I fell asleep.

In the morning I told my mom thank you for coming into my room last night but she just stared at me and said, “I didn’t go in your room.” I thought this was weird so after attempting to figure out what happened, I eventually was able to make this thing talk to me, though only in limited bits. It was also incredibly difficult to make any kind of conversation with her. I always knew when her presence was around because this aura of comfort would just spread over the room, and I would get unimaginably sleepy.

I ultimately named her Rebecca, and when I was upset or angry, she was always sure to bring her presence and let me get some rest.

I’m 21 now, and I’ve gone a long, long time without seeing or hearing either Shadow Man or Rebecca. It’s probably been 8 or 9 years. But I know they’re still around. Sometimes, I catch Shadow Man in the corner of my eye, and if I leave my door open sometimes I see those vague figures checking on the rooms.

When I was 14, my great-grandmother died. In her will, she left some land to my grandpa. Well, Middlefork, Kentucky is a good, old-fashioned backwater place, and my grandpa had to sort of scout the land. He didn’t want to do much with it, but he intended to level off a spot and just drop a double-wide trailer. It’s a pretty place if you’re looking to get away from the big city for a couple days, though the area is scary as shit when the sun goes down, and probably 80% of the people are addicted to oxycotin, but that’s neither here nor there.

Like I was saying, my grandpa wanted to scout the land. I went with him over spring break my freshman year of high school, and we stayed with his sister. Two other people I am distantly related to were also staying there. They had just been married, the lease on their apartment ran out, and they were staying there for a couple weeks while the closing procedures finished on their house. The couple had just given birth to a pretty cute baby girl.

From what I’d heard, it was kind of a complicated birth, and the baby was put on an incubator right away. My great-aunt said, “Oh, actually, I took this picture of the child in the incubator, you should see it.” Not really expecting much, my grandpa and I waited while she fished the picture out of a stack. I was completely stunned by this photo.

In the incubator, you could see the baby, hooked up with all these wires and stuff. But the way the flash reflected off the incubator was what really made this picture. The reflecting light formed an almost-perfect silhouette of a person with wings and a ring above the head, holding a hand over the incubator. I wish I could show this picture, I really do, but that was seven years ago, I see my great-aunt once ever five years if I’m lucky, and the last time I inquired about it to my grandpa, he said he’d try to see if she had it still but he never responded.

I Are Internet

There’s an area south of Pittsburgh called South Park. It’s mostly scattered suburban plans with a huge chunk of woods in the middle. In the daytime it’s a really nice place to drive around, have a picnic or relax in but at night it has a much darker side.

A friend and I were on a high-ride one night and we ended up on the winding roads through the woods of South Park. A few miles down we had to take a leak so I pulled over to the treeline that was about 100ft off the road.

Right around there…

I’m standing next to the trees while my friend is on the other side of the car at a different spot in the trees. We’re probably close to 500 feet apart, at the least.

As I’m pissing, I start to hear a bunch of really loud cracking and crunching in the woods ahead of me. At first it’s way in the distance but it quickly gets closer till it sounds like a large animal is snapping the branches off the trees right in front of me.

I start to get scared of this unknown monster 10 feet in front of me. I can’t run cause I’m in mid piss and feeling really vulnerable. I try to hurry up when i start to see flickering in the moonlight coming through the trees, as of there was a large shadow less than 10 feet in front of me blocking out the light. Shit, I would have pissed myself if I wasn’t already pissing.

I finish quickly and tuck my shit back in when this shadow in the woods lets out an unearthly growl. I say unearthly because I have never heard an animal growl this loud in my life. It started low and raspy and ended high and ear piercing.

Fuck this, I’m gone.

I haul ass back to my car. As I’m running, I see my friend tearing ass from the opposite direction toward my car. We both dive in, roll up the windows and lock the doors. I turn to him to see what’s up, the conversation went something like this…

Me: Dude, what are you running from!?
Him: I heard a crazy ass growl, it was really loud, like it was right next to me. What were you running from?
Me: A really loud growl that was right in front of me.
Him: We should leave.

Nuff said. I turn my car on and spin around. I was tempted to turn my headlights on before I left but I was too terrified to illuminate a horrible beast standing mere feet from where I was just pissing to do it.

We haul ass through the grass and back on to the road and punch it till we get out of the woods.

I don’t go there at night anymore. I have also heard from another friend about his experience with a loud growling monster in the treeline while he was walking home from work in South Park. He described it to me before I had ever told him about my experience.

Stay the fuck out of those woods at night kids.

pogmothoin

Every time I’m on leave I hang out with this one girl just to make sure she’s doing alright. Since high school she has been everyone’s community service project. Her latest fad was hunting the paranormal. In Algonquin, IL there’s a graveyard that everyone knows because everyone’s best friend’s brother’s ex-girlfriend’s cousin has seen something there.

We walk in, me being a jack ass because there are much better things to do on a Friday night, and start to get to the middle of the graveyard. She stops to light a cig and I keep walking. About five feet later I get this overpowering feeling as if someone just suggested to me that I stop walking. About 20 feet ahead of me, there’s someone else. It’s not a someone you can see, but it’s the subconscious feeling you have when you actually see someone and recognize that a person occupies that specific location at that specific time. Immediately there’s the sound of shoes turning in place and I jump back a good shit load.

I jog back to where she is still trying to light her cig and tell her that I probably just experienced the coolest thing ever. We start to leave one of the two ways and at the last curve, where it’s the darkest thanks to overhanging trees, there is a man wearing a white tuxedo (oddly enough, like Col Sanders outfit) just standing there and smiling, waving us towards him. We turn around and there are the shadows of two women, like they’re waiting to see what we do.

Well what they saw was us run flat out for the road via the second method of escape. Once there we are walking along the road to the car and she’s still trying to light that damn cigarette. We hear chains, dragging in the ditch next to us, keeping pace with us. I look to the other side of the road and there are three shadows…only two of us. We get back to where the cars are and there is a bright flood light next to them lighting up the water tower. The chain sound stops right next to where the light hits the grass and all of a sudden there is this unearthly scream.

Fuck. This. She got in the car and I’m throwing my jacket in the trunk. I slam it shut and look up over the top of the car and this half-shadow, half-mist ‘girl’ comes running out of the graveyard straight at me before she just freezes at the point where she would’ve entered the light. At that moment, I was immediately thankful that her car was pushing 300 horses as we tore off towards downtown Algonquin.

I now spend my leave periods in brightly lit locations.

There’s also this that I posted in a bastard thread by accident:

I was on Outward Bound, not the half-assed Disney ‘documentary’ trip, in the North Cascades just following my freshman year in high school. Half way through we all went on our solo. The solo was a 48 hour period of time where each of the students goes off to various parts of wherever you are a couple hundred yards from the instructors’ camp. I happened to be on the side of a fairly small mountain facing a valley.

I had slept away the first day at this point and as a result I was having trouble sleeping so I threw on my headlamp and started to read a book I brought. I’m a couple chapters in when this strong wind starts to blow from my right, I have my back facing up the mountain. The wind begins to transition until it’s direction is from downhill right in front of me. I look up and turn off my lamp (I was using a red lens so I didn’t have any imprint on my night vision) and I just tensed up. About 100 yards away is this red glow. Imagine one of those Nerf footballs that light up, it looks like that sort of glow but there’s nothing physical to explain its source. The glow hangs around for a few minutes before it begins to move across to my left, the wind with it.

After that it moves out of my field of view and I’m left sitting there not quite sure what I should do. I didn’t tell anyone because they promised to kill my parents a lot of the students had stories about midnight monsters which turned out to be animals sniffing around their tents because everyone was too lazy to walk a short distance to piss. No one had any mind altering anything because they searched our bags before we left and as for me, I was well hydrated and fed so it wasn’t something my mind made up.

Here’s another one I didn’t quite feel like sharing at first because it’s my brothers’ and my truly what-the-fuck story. This thread convinced me that it was time.

I have two brothers, Jim and Patrick. At the time, I’m about 16, Jim is 15 and Patrick is 11. We’re at our house in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for the summer on Wildwood Lake. For anyone wanting to know where that’s at, it’s just outside of Iron River, MI. This is how it goes…

Jim and I are on the ‘sail boat’ that our aunt and uncle had given us, probably because they needed room in their garage. It is no more a sail boat now than a plastic rowboat due to the incident where I had paid Jim 5 bucks to jump into the lake and as soon as he did I began to move the boat about ten feet and he’d try to swim to it and then I’d move it again. In the course of moving the boat it became stuck. Jim got to the boat and started cussing up a storm at me. I put the 5 bucks in his jean pockets which were still in the boat and he was happy after that.

I said to him “Jim, I’m caught on something, can you see what it is?” He grabs on to the side of the boat and swings his feet underneath it and shouts “Oh shit! I kicked a fish! It’s huge!” to which I respond “hey, awesome, so what are we stuck on?” He swings his feet again and says there is nothing there. This is backed up when I throw the sail up again and the wind starts moving the boat. I grab Jim’s hand and pull him into the boat. We’re cruising back now at a wonderful 3 feet an hour because the wind is almost non existent; for kids our age we were having the time of our lives.

Off the bow we see that rise in the water you get when there is a large upward disturbance underneath the surface. Without any warning, these disturbances are approaching the boat faster than we’re moving forward. Something slams into the bottom of the boat where that little fin is underneath and starts shaking it. There’s a giant cracking sound as the boat tilts sideways. I fall out, come up again and see Jim holding on for dear life. I see the fin splinter because the boat is almost horizontal and the boat flips with my brother still on it. He doesn’t come up, which is nothing creepy because he freaks in water, and so I swim over and lift the boat enough for him to swim away from. We look towards where our house is and a couple hundred feet down the shore, the fin goes flying out of the water away from the lake…imagine a kick off at a football game. What the fuck.

We get back to the house and after telling our mom, dad walks in. Of course we start yelling at him because we think he’s trying to get back at us for the prank we pulled the week earlier. He was fixing the bench in the REAL rowboat and we took the paddles out, kicked the boat out onto the lake, and shot bottle rockets at him for a good 20 minutes while he through tackle back at us. We’re Chicago Irish and sanity is really in the eye of the beholder. However, the biggest thing our parents have to say is that we better find a way to fix the boat because the fin is gone and the pole for the sail is bent from when the boat flipped over.

After dinner that night, us three boys are sitting by the fireplace watching a movie on those old 9″ TV’s you used to be able to buy for your car. Patrick hears this huge knock on the front door. Jim and I don’t hear it and tell him it’s probably his mind because of his ‘jump’ earlier in the day. His ‘jump’ was us talking him into a sleeping bag, and then putting that sleeping bag inside of another one that we stuffed with pillows and then dropping him off the loft. He was fine but our mom was pretty sore. Then we hear the knock. It honestly sounds like some WWF dude is trying to bust our door in. We look out the window and no one is there. Then there’s the knock again. Fuck this. We open the door and there’s no one there, however, on the front step is the biggest goddamn spider we’ve ever seen. This was solved with a shovel from the winter closet.

The next day we decide that we want to ride to Crystal Falls on our ATV’s just because we can. By ATV I mean a Polaris that we bought with a combination of the swear jar and money we’d saved from mowing lawns, guess which source contributed more. By ATV’s I mean the other one was an older Honda mini-bike that our aunt and uncle had given us probably for the same reason as the boat. I’m on the bike and Jim is on the ATV with Patrick. We get going down Old US 6 to Wildwood Rd where the trail head is at, just past some hunting shacks. We’re cruising down the trail when the bike suddenly slides out from under me. I’m wearing a Carhart and a helmet so it really wasn’t a big deal, easily taken care of with four letter first aid. Jim and Patrick are behind me and just barely stop in time. I walk up to the bike and here it is, just short of a pine rattler. Don’t you fucking tell me the DNR got rid of all them because I know exactly what I saw. Jim pulls the ATV around and runs the snake over (they’re poisonous).

I get back on the bike and we get to a portion of the trail where it is lined by fenced in yards. The bike suddenly dies because of my fall, it had loosened a cable (I don’t know what for) that had come undone because of the rough trail. I tell Jim and Patrick to keep going because they’re running on fumes. As I’m kneeling over putting Slot A back on to Tab B, this gigantic mutant dog starts pummeling the fence. It’s trying to climb over, chew it’s way through, anything to get at me. I trace its leash with my eyes back to a dude sitting in a chair. “Hey, dude, hey! Can you pull your dog in?” he doesn’t respond so I chuck a rock at his chest and it bounces off. Sweet, no response. I figure that if I move the bike down a bit, I can work on it in peace. Not so. The dog jerks on the leash and the guy falls out and rolls so I can see the other side of him…HOLY SHIT! His fucking ear is missing and there is blood running down his face from where it was.

Somehow, I manage to get the cable back on and start the thing up. I think that if I can get to town, I can tell the cops what I saw. I get to the gas station where my brothers are waiting. We call the cops from a pay phone and I tell them what I saw. When the cop leaves, Jim goes “I thought they were going to ask where that blood on your jacket came from.” I look down and sure enough there is specks of blood all over my jacket, dried up by the trail’s dust. Cue me throwing up in every direction because I know where that blood came from. Patrick is terrified. This kid is never afraid of anything, either. He says that at the trails head, opposite the gas station, he can see something that looks like Kaos (our own dog, a German Sheppard) pacing back and forth behind the bushes. We call our mom because there is no way we’re taking him back down that trail towards home.

Mom shows up and is entertaining our ‘imagination’, secretly pissed that we made her drive 30 minutes for our ghost stories. I get on the ATV because after throwing up, Jim doesn’t trust me to ride the bike. We figure, alright, we’ll just gun it the whole way. I’m in front because he hates dogs and if there is anything so much as one of those little rat dogs that serve no purpose, he’ll run or kick it. We pass the house and the dude that had fallen is up walking around, trimming the hedges. We stop and I ask him where his dog is. He says he doesn’t have a dog he was forced to put his last one down for its ‘aggressive nature’. I decide then that it wouldn’t be good to bring up his ear because there is a fully healed scar where it should be and none of us can test the blood on my coat for DNA.

Whatever. We’re heading down the trail again and the bushes next to the trail in between me and Jim are moving. I blow it off as being the wind. The ‘wind’ runs out of the bushes, separating me and my brother, and keeping pace with us…at about 40 mph. It’s the same dog. You know that look animals have when they want to kill you? That’s it right there. Jim slams on the brakes to avoid hitting the thing. He is terrified and he is yelling. There’s a yell among brothers that when you hear it, you HAVE to do something; there is no excuses for not doing anything because it comes down to a very basic idea, someone needs help and you are that someone’s brother.

I spin the ATV around and fly back to Jim. This creature has him trapped. It’s circling the bike and every time he hits the gas the slightest bit, it jumps in front with its paws on the handlebars snapping at Jim’s face. The thing sees me headed right at it, full throttle and dives back into the brush. Jim takes off. I spin again and the thing is blocking my path, so I gun it again. For the next four or five miles, Jim and I are riding side by side with this thing chasing us, sometimes, getting just in between us until I hit the brakes and try to ram it. Five miles of this. Every time I swerve at it, it ‘screams’. This scream is so unearthly. Imagine the sound of tires squealing mixed with absolute rage. Every time it screams, a bloody, chunky sort of fluid flies out of its mouth.

Earlier that week, Jim had told us that some kind of wild cat had stalked him while he was out riding but that it never got any closer than about 10 feet. It just paced him and watched him and when he left the trail, it turned around and walked back into the woods. At the point where the trail reaches the dirt road that runs past the hunting cabins, a wild cat leaps out of the woods and tackles this dog thing. We don’t run. We stop and cheer and throw whatever we can find at this dog thing. Eventually the fight stops and the cat runs back into the woods, leaving the ‘dog’ behind. We walk up to its body and kick some stones at it. Its fur is pretty sparse and its eyes are wide open. Suddenly its eyes roll back to look at us and it starts quivering and snorting and that blood shit is flying out its nose and mouth. We pick up this huge rock and chuck it at it before running back to our ATVs and high tailing our asses home.

My mom thought the blood on my jacket came from when I fell. We hadn’t told her about that but she coerced Patrick to tell her everything about our trip with a stop to the ice cream store in downtown Crystal Falls.

That night, Jim is in the shower, and the sliding door to the little storage room is suddenly open. He gets out of the shower and closes it. I go in the bathroom to shower and while I’m showering, it’s somehow open again. To describe it, the bathroom is on the loft so the roof slopes there. To maximize usable space, there is a thin wall where the roof is about 3 feet off the ground and you can get into there through the sliding door. The storage space is about 10 feet long. Before I can shut the door, I see something in there. I get dressed real quick and yell to Jim to bring a flashlight to me. Inside this little ‘closet’ is something that had gone missing the day before…the fin to the sail boat. We decided to sleep on the main floor that night.

There we are again, watching a movie with the fire going. Jim goes to the kitchen to grab a drink of water. He yells for me to come to the kitchen and points out the window. There is the fucking wild cat. It’s just staring at the house. We’re freaked so he grabs a hammer and I grab the biggest knife I can find. We head back into the living room…cue yelling. On the other side of the glass door to the balcony is the dog. Just standing there, staring at us. Then we hear the wild cat scream outside the house. The dogs runs off the balcony, we run to the kitchen window. It’s death match, take two.

The cat finally grabs on to the dogs neck and just lays there for awhile, killing the dog, before dragging it off into the woods. We never saw the dog again and eventually got enough balls to go back into the woods the next spring when we made some trails for the mini bike. Jim actually found a dogs skull out there and crushed it with some rocks. We never saw the cat again either but every night for the rest of the summer we would sneak some kind of meat out onto the front step and every morning it was gone. I wish I could’ve gotten that cat as a pet because I swear it was a guardian angel or something.

The only other creepy thing we ever saw up there was at Camp Batawagama when there were ‘floating torches’ behind our cabin. Our counselor said it was because of the Indian burial grounds but we know it was probably just other counselors being dicks. I don’t really know how the fin of the sail boat is related at all but I thought it was worthy of mention.

After we told our parents and they thought it was from being up to late I guess we both just decided not to tell the story anymore. After that, I only went ATV’ing with a pistol in the saddle bag. Not so much for the dog, but for all the creepy dudes that would be parked along side the trail and would look at me when I rode by.

–more–

This story is from last summer at the same cemetery in Algonquin. I’m with a girl, Amanda, who was just fucking in love with me (and the tangent to this should be posted in the unsmooth moments thread). I’m also with my buddy Branden who wants to go to the cemetery. This time we take a digital voice recorder.

We pick up Amanda and go to a restaurant called Around the Clock to grab a quick bite first. I pull out the recorder and test it to make sure it works, sure enough when I play it back you can hear me go “Test, test, cue Branden saying something awkward…” followed by him making a joke to the waitress who didn’t find it funny at all followed by us laughing.

We go to the cemetery and walk to the very center. I shush everyone up and turn it on for about a minute. Roughly 20 seconds in, Amanda is getting creeped so she starts making jokes about how stupid it is that we’re there before she immediately hushes up and looks like someone slapped her. We don’t even finish the minute and she’s already holding my hand and tells me to play the tape, it’s been long enough. I have to play it from the beginning because I can’t see the display due to the lack of light. We hear the scene at the restaurant. Amanda for some reason shoves her other hand in my pocket and now has two good hand holds to start tugging me with. This is when the recording goes to violent static. There’s the calm white noise that everyone can fall asleep to and then there’s this.

We all put our heads right next to the speaker and listen closely. The first thing I notice is that we can’t hear Amanda when she was joking while we were recording. I say the thing must be broken and I turn it off. The sound continues, we’re still listening. All of a sudden a raspy voice is heard saying “LEAVE, YOU ARE NOT WELCOME. THIS IS OUR PLACE OF REST!” The thing still will not turn off. So I shove it in my pocket, the static continues for a few more seconds and then it goes quiet. Amanda is practically pulling my pants off as she tries to drag me towards the exit. I will admit that I can be freaked by things, almost scared shitless, but because of my childhood and everything, I never panic about anything. I haven’t panicked about anything in about 15 years…including the time I was flying a Cessna 172 from Rockford to Monroe and my engine cut out (read the bottom of the post for that story because I just remembered it).

We get in the car and decide to take Cary Rd to Rt 14 so Amanda can have some time to unwind and so I can have time to hang out with her. No sooner had we pulled on to Cary Rd did the worst rain in 3 or so years kick up. The sky had been totally clear only moments before getting in the car. This shit is bad. I have maybe 200 feet of visibility…when I’m under the trees over the road. After we turned onto 14. we’re passing Blockbuster and there’s something moving in the road. It’s a dude…and a turtle. I swerve, miss them both and park the car at Blockbuster because this dude is gonna get hit if someone doesn’t talk him out of the street.

Amanda and I run back and the dude is gone but the turtle is still there. This thing is staring down traffic like “I dare you to hit me. I dare you.” I grab a branch and lure it to the side a bit by pissing it off and getting it to chase the branch. Then it stops because he does not want to be fucked with. We swipe a cart from the grocery store there and force this thing onto the sidewalk where it looks at us as if to say “fuck you” and starts off down the sidewalk away from us. Almost immediately, the rain clears up.

We keep going down 14 because Amanda is “still too freaked out to go home” (again, my unsmooth moment for not picking up on what she really meant). We park at the same restaurant and Amanda and I are sitting there flirting, holding hands, and Branden in the back feeling awkward. Amanda decides it’s time to go home because I’m not getting her signals. We drive back to her house.

As we pull into neighborhood, her phone rings. It’s a call from her ex. He says he’s waiting at her house so we drive to the opposite side of the subdivision. She’s screaming at him to just leave her alone, she doesn’t want any of it.

I grab the phone and ask him, “where ya at bud?”

“Amanda’s house. Did you guys just drive by in a Lexus?”

“Yup”

“Ok, well I’m at her house.”

“Alright, sit tight, we’ll be there in a second.” (I’ve had the worse ass kicking of my life once I joined up and went through some mandatory ‘combat’ classes, so I’m not really afraid of anyone anymore. No one could give me a whooping like that again so I’m I don’t worry about it.)

We pull up, he’s not there. I say “you let me down man, I thought I was going to meet Joe the Infamous Jackass”. Apparently he had seen us at the restaurant so he knew the car we were in…mommy’s btw. He says he’s on his way over. I take this time to not go the I’m super awesome route and go the sensible route (yes, this drama is getting somewhere). Pretty much I ask him why he is punishing himself over constantly spending time thinking about his ex, Amanda. This lasts a total of about 2 minutes and he agrees that he doesn’t deserve the torture he’s putting himself through. He never harassed her again.

We leave and we’re on Edgewood Rd headed back to my house. Down where Edgewood meets Walkup we see this huge brilliant flash of light. It looks like a Chinese fan but made out of light and it bursts green, purple, blue, green over and over in that sequence and then goes out. We get to the intersection and a transformer had been hit by lightning. The pole is down across the road and a power line is laying on the side of the road. There’s a scorch march diagonal across the intersection where the cable broke and swung across, through the space where our car was parked. It took us about 2 minutes to get from where we saw the burst of light to the intersection.

To this day, Branden and I maintain to this day that had we never listened to the voice on the recorder, we never would have left when we did. Had we never left when we did, we would have never seen the turtle and spent time moving it out of the road. If we never spent that time moving it out of the road, we never would have been with Amanda, we never would have spent those two minutes where I talked to him and calmed him down. Had I never spent that time calming Joe down, I would have been in the middle of the intersection when the line broke and swung through it. Branden and I did the math that night over a beer and by the time we were done, the numbers had us convinced. Listening to the voice that night and respecting its wishes to be left in peace had saved our lives.

Sure you may say, well what about this and what if this had happened? The bottom line is that the what if’s and how about’s didn’t happen. What if we had never gone to the cemetery? Well we did. What about the time spent flirting at the restaurant? We figured that in too. We were only there for a couple of minutes and the time we would have arrived at the intersection was the same. I’m telling you straight up, I’m lucky to be alive thanks to a surreal voice one Summer night.

People say that ghosts and beings of such may have evil intent. Bullshit. They’ve lived there life and have no reason and nothing to gain by punishing us in ours.

”The Plane Story”
Referencing the story with the plane. I was on a cross country just to maintain my efficiency when the engine suddenly died. I did everything I was supposed to; checklists, common sense, even some what if’s. My electrical went dead too, so I couldn’t make my calls. This black, blurry, cloud type thing whips across my windshield at least a half mile ahead of me. When it was beyond my view, the engine suddenly kicked back to life. The folks at Monroe said it was probably my gas and sucked everything out and gave me some new fuel, charging it to the airport I was renting from. I finished my flight without incident.

”The Robbery”
This story is almost exactly like that other shadow people story. I was home on leave. After sleeping on a rough bed for the past 6 months, the couch was a lot more comfortable than my bed. I fall asleep with the light on and a movie going. My dad wakes me up and in a half daze I turn off the TV and the lights and head downstairs to my bedroom. About half an hour after I passed out, I wake up the sound of the front door being kicked in. I roll out of bed, unlock my gun case, and grab my .45 that I had been cleaning earlier that day. I turn on the foyer lights from downstairs (thanks to the OCD electrician that worked on the house, I probably could turn on the lights in my neighbor’s house from my bedroom). As I’m creeping up the stairs, I load the pistol and chamber a round as loudly as I could. By the time I got upstairs, no one was there and everything, except for the door being open, was as it should be.

My dad rushes and eyes me there with my pistol clearing the kitchen and the hallway to my brothers’ rooms and asks we what the fuck happened. I told him that someone tried to rob us and that I scared them away by charging my gun as loud as I could. He grabs his 9mm from the gun safe downstairs and we finish clearing the house. After that he told me he thinks he has nothing to worry about when I’m home. I told him I would have been in a bad situation had he not woken me up to go to bed 30 minutes ago. My dad sort of tilts his head and says “What? I’ve been asleep for the past two hours! There’s someone else here?” I realized right then and there that the silhouette that I saw wasn’t him and whatever it was probably saved me and quite possibly my family.

I seriously think I have some sort of guardian angel that looks out for me. If you read my previous posts, I’ve been saved by a voice, a wild cat, and this silhouette. Since then, I still get freaked out by the supernatural and I’m still wary of their presense, but more so, I’ve been thankful for their interactions into my life. I was also saved by an ungodly gust of wind back in 7th grade as it knocked me off my bike into a ditch moments before a Jeep Cherokee flew through the spot I had just occupied.

agonytuesday

my story is about another lake.
I go camping on Lake Champlain every year, and have done so since I was born (my family has for 53 years now). Lake Champlain supposedly has a monster not unlike “Nessie” in Loch Ness. Its nam is Champ, and the myth has been perpetuated by Lake Champlain’s “bathtub effect”, when cold water from melting snow flows south from Canada and displaces the less cold water on the bottom of the lake, stirring up debris and driftwood that has become waterlogged on the bottom. the waterlogged wood comes to the surface after being worn smooth, and looks like the head of some prehistoric creature sometimes.

my experience happened when I was five or six years old, but it has kept me from swimming anywhere where I cant see the bottom of the lake ever since.
I was out boating with aunts, uncles, parents and cousins when my mom decided it would be funny is she tossed me in the water when I wasnt expecting it. when I was underwater, I opened my eyes and because I was facing down, I could see the shadow of the boat I was on cutting through the otherwise reasonably well lit water. as I was looking down, I saw a grey backbone of what I though was Champ moving about 20 feet under the boat in and then out of view. If I was in the ocean, I would have thought it was a whale, because I dont know how else to describe it. I didnt see a head or a tail because it was too far away, but it seemed like it would have been about 30 feet long and 5-8 feet wide. I was underwater with my eyes open for about 6 seconds, but it seemed like eternity to me.
when I came up, I got out of the water faster than I would have if I had seen a school of sharks coming towards me, and I havnt been in deep water since.

Piearesquared

The Nicholson House
(huge post sorry)
http://lakewoodhistory.org/nicholson.htm ~ here are some pics to go along with the story ~

I moved out of my parent’s house right when I hit 20. I did not get along with my father and I needed my space. I landed a job as the caretaker of the oldest house in my town. My duties as caretaker were to do all of the gardening, raking, mowing and landscaping, as well as to set up and clean up after parties that were held on the bottom floor. I was given free rent, heat, water and electricity for my services. I lived here for three years.

This house was built around 1835 and an attempt was made by the Historical Society to keep it looking like the period it was made in. My apartment however was nice and modern, kept separate from the rest of the house by door. The door was small, black and you had to stoop through it to enter the rest of the house. It was like a portal into the past, walking from a modern living room to the top floor of the oldest house in town. The door scared the shit out of me. Many times when I would be entering my apartment through that door I felt as if something in the dark was coming up behind me, to drag me back into the antiquated portion of the house.

It was a large yellow house, with old black shutters and a creepy, nasty basement. The basement was stuffed with random junk. It was soggy and smelly. Often times the windows of the basement would fly open and leaves and debris would fill the corners of the basement. Small animals would regularly get in through these windows only to be trapped inside the cellar and starved to death. I remember that one of the main supports of the house in the basement was actually an old tree trunk. There was even one of those old cellar doors that you see in movies, like “The Wizard of Oz”.

All of the party materials, such as tables and chairs were stored in this basement. To set up for a party I would have to carry heavy chairs and tables up the rickety basement stairs to the first floor. This helped keep me in shape, but often wrecked my back. I remember countless times lugging stacks of four or five chairs up the narrow stairway, and looking up to the doorway to the first floor. I remember several times seeing the silhouette of a man for maybe 1/10th of a second, and my brain kind of entering a hazy, light-headed state. Some times, I would see the same flash of a figure at the top of the steps leading to my apartment, looking down at me. I chalked this up to lack of air from physical exertion, or lighting, but it was unsettling all the same.

I refused to set up for parties at night by myself. I was a grown man, afraid of a nasty basement in an old house. Reading that now seems silly, but when I worked there, I knew that I did not belong in the first floor of the house at night. There was this feeling that I was constantly being watched once it was dark, perhaps by the vintage paintings on the wall, or by the unblinking antique dolls in the china cabinet. Or some unseen entity was secretly hating me, watching me.

The house made noises like any old house will, but sometimes the noises were just odd enough to raise my heart rate. The decorations on the walls consisted of some stuffed pheasants, ancient black and white pictures of children, a collage made up of old newspaper drawings and portraits of people long dead. To add to the atmosphere, at the front entrance to the house was a single red light in a globe that hung from the ceiling. It cast a sinister light on the main hallway.

My guests would all comment on how creepy the house was, and many said they would not be able to do the job I did because of the house. For a time, however, I lived there with my buddy Dave. We split the duties for the house and shared the apartment. Somehow, we both determined independently that there was a ghost cat “living” in our apartment. I remember seeing in the corner of my eye the shape of cat, many times. I would be studying something closely, and I thought several times that I had seen a cat in the corner of my eye. I told Dave about this jokingly once. To my surprise he said he had experienced the same thing several times. Once you would look directly at where the cat should have been, there of course was nothing there.

The house had this huge rummage sale every summer. The locals would bring all their garbage that they didn’t want any more and sell it to the same people who got rid of their garbage in the first place. I found this particularly annoying because my workload would double during this time. What made it worse was that all of the old, donated antiques and junk would fill up the basement for the week of the sale. The creepiness of the house was reinforced by random items of all shapes and sizes for the sale. Dave reported at one point during a sale that he and a friend were heaving some junk up the basement stairs, and they both felt a rush of wind coming behind them accompanied by footsteps. They ran the hell up the stairs and slammed the door behind them.

During the long winter months I tend to get a bit unhinged. I get depressed and especially cranky right around January. One year, during this season, I was particularly anxious, and began blaming the house for lots things. If I dropped a plate or tripped, or if I didn’t sleep well, it was definitely the house’s fault. I was becoming paranoid and truly believed that the house was haunted. I began to feel this weird connection to the house, as if I was part of it. I hated the house, despite being its caretaker. I felt that the house held animosity towards me as well.

One dark evening, near midnight, my friend Jason and I were watching American Psycho in my living room. About half way through the movie, there was a forceful knock at the door that led to the old portion of the house. My heart skipped.

Jason said, “What the fuck was that?”

My mind raced, and in an act of stupidity, I decided to defend the house that I did not own. I grabbed a large butcher knife, and my trusty sidekick Jason grabbed a large metal pole that was lying around.

I approached the door and, trying to sound manly yelled, “If you there is someone in the house you have to leave now, I’ve called the cops!”

I waited and listened. The benefit to an old house like this was you could hear anyone moving in any section of the house. We heard nothing. I kicked the door open, hero style, and we entered the old portion of the house. It was pitch black, cold, and I could hear nothing. I don’t think I had ever been that scared in my life. We searched the downstairs and found that all entrances were closed and locked. We searched the perimeter of the house but could find nothing.

I was happy that a friend was there to share the experience and confirm that I wasn’t losing my mind. If I had been alone I probably would have just left the house for the evening. We tried to blow off the incident as a mere settling of the house structure, or some other equally logical reason. What I could not explain was the heightened sense of awareness, the feeling that something was happening that does not happen on a regular basis. It felt like something was angry at us.

I moved out of that house eventually, and it felt like a huge burden had been lifted from my shoulders. I have never experienced that same amount of anxiety since. My outlook on life changed completely. I was happier. I graduated from college. I could explain the change of heart as part of growing up. I could blame my anxiety on genetics or the stress of working through college. But I don’t. I blame the house.

boobookitty

My husband’s grandmother has been in poor health for a while. She was a smoker for most of her life, and it eventually caught up with her. She could no longer take care of herself, and her husband is in poor health as well, so she was moved to a care center so they could help her deal with her metastatic cancer.

Dottie stayed in the care center for quite a while. We even had a party at the care center for Christmas in one of the rooms that you could rent out.

A couple of weeks ago, we went to go visit her and my father-in-law, who was in the care center for a bit while his cellulitis was being managed. When we went into Dottie’s room, I got a feeling that death was near. Now I’m pretty good at figuring things out health-wise, but I haven’t ever really thought that someone was going to die soon. I mentioned this to my husband, who relayed it to his mother and sister. Their responses were that “she has good days and bad days.” I, however, knew that it wasn’t the case this time. Having experienced my own grandmother passing a couple of years back from leukemia, I knew when a person would have a good day or a bad day. I don’t ignore my intuition.

Early this week, we heard that Dottie’s liver stopped functioning and she was in renal failure. That further supported my earlier suspicion. As such, we decided to see her once again yesterday. When we went into the room, she was hardly functioning. Yeah, I thought that death was coming before, but now it was imminent. I could feel it–it would be less than a day now, maybe a matter of hours. My husband’s aunt was there, who just explained to us that his grandma was pretty much in a “coma.” She was quite sleepy and spoke very little. The thing that she did that really set me off to her being so close to death was her hand movements. I can’t explain why that set me off, but it did. She was moving her hand around kind of spontaneously in the air.

We spent some time there speaking with his aunt, but we couldn’t really do much with his grandma due to her condition. We had our 3-year-old daughter say goodbye and that she loved her.

My husband’s aunt walked us out. I asked if her mother was speaking to people who aren’t there. She mentioned that she hadn’t yet. As we were walking out, my daughter was talking to my husband’s aunt. I didn’t listen in, but he was.

When we were out of hearing distance from my husband’s aunt, he asked if I had been listening to what our daughter was saying to his aunt. I replied that no, I hadn’t. He said that she was talking about angels. His aunt asked her to clarify (sometimes, as a parent, you realize only you understand your children). Our daughter replied back that “angels came to see Grandma.”

Dottie died at 5 a.m. this morning.

Bajee

The house I’m living in right now was built in the early 1900’s. The house was built by a fairly wealthy family, so it has lots of features that rich people were all about in those days. The third floor of the house functioned as a servant’s quarters. Theres a small bedroom, a large bedroom, a storage closet, and a little bathroom, at the time these events happened I lived in the small bedroom.

One summer day me and a couple of my friends decided to go up to my room to smoke a bowl. To get from the second floor to the third you have to go through a door and up some stairs, to make sure the landlord didn’t walk in on us smoking I locked that door leading up to the third floor, as well as my bedroom door. I had the only key for both of these doors and the only people on that floor house were in my room with me. We are about to spark the bowl when BANG, something smashes into the outside of my bedroom door. We all jump, then freeze up and just stare at the door. Suddenly we hear a sound like someone running towards the door and BANG, something hits the door louder and harder then before. It really sounded like someone just ran shoulder first into the door. BANG BANG BANG, the door is getting hit so hard that it looks like its going to tear off its hinges.

At this point we are all scared absolutely shitless. we sit there frozen with fear and watch as the doorknob slowly creaks and turns. The doorknob starts to rattle and shake as the door begins to bulge inward, like someone is pushing as hard as they can right into the center of the door. Finally it stops. We sat around for about another five minutes frozen, with no idea what to do. We eventually get our balls back and decide to search around the floor for what was causing this, but not without a loaded SKS carbine. We look everywhere, even checking the creepy ass crawl spaces and the hidden room that they lead to. There’s nobody anywhere. I check the third floor door and it is still locked. I wish I could convince myself that it was just a strange gust of wind that did all this, but they way the doorknob so slowly and deliberately turned makes that impossible.

OptimusShr

I was in high school at the time and did my usual routine when I got home: turn on PC, do homework, dick around online.

So doing my usual thing everything is normal when I hear something, I stop typing and listen to what it is.

it’s a voice, mumbling and hard to understand, but it’s there. It’s male and the only time I could make out anything was a sentence that sounded like: “What re you doing?” or “How are you doing.” Like I said it was hard to make out. It was coming from my right, possibly from my father’s room.

Now I must admit, the above incident was the second time I heard a voice, the first time was the day before this incident, and it scared the shit out of me.

Again, I was dicking around online when I heard a female voice whisper my name. And I could definitely tell its source.

It was coming from my left. To my left are two sets of plastic drawers with a little over one foot gap between them and a window. I live on the second floor so no one could be.

I also hear rolling sounds from above me which is where the attic guest room is located. Although these sounds occur infrequently so there may be a natural explanation for that.

TheChaplain

Black dogs have always been a part of my life. For most of my childhood my family had a black lab who was the most clever dog I have ever known. As a very young child I had nightmares of shaggy black dogs finding me. Occasionally, I would catch glimpses of black dog tails rounding corners when they caught the corner of my eye. Perhaps that’s why I love English/Irish fairy tales… there are The Rules. Plain and simple rules dictate how everything works. You’re a super natural? You can’t cross running water. You’re a traveller? Walk that road three times. Sit where those flowers grow at the roadside. Don’t eat dog meat. Don’t refuse hospitality. Sorry, but them’s the rules.

Off the top of my head, the only thing strange I’ve ever seen happened driving home from a girlfriend’s house in high school. We’d spent the evening messing around on the couch upstairs, probably watching AMC. Far too late to make curfew, I hopped in my car and headed home. I can still recall how good I felt, young, in love and smug. A few miles and halfway though my trip, I made the left onto Zellers Road, a rather rural stretch of the back-way home. I slammed on my brakes.

On the very edge of the light from my headlights I saw something very large. It was blond and shaggy like a golden retriever, but MUCH larger. I’d guess it was at least 5 feet at the shoulder. Like many other Dog Stories, it too had very tall front legs with lowered hindquarters. It was galloping away from me, so I couldn’t see it’s face, but underneath the flowing hair the dog rippled with muscles as it ran… and vanished in moments into the dark. I went from giddy from the evening’s earlier activity to petrified, staring off into the night. I drove home, fast, trying to think of any rivers I could cross… just to be sure.

SlowlyChoking

It was somewhere around 1992 and we were living in a ‘newer’ farm house. By ‘newer’ I mean built within the last 70 years or so. Compared to the previous house we lived in you can tell they did quite a bit of remodeling. Aside from the house the only feature that proved there was ever a farm was a lone silo about 15 yards behind the garage, so it seemed like a normal house to me and was never creepy in any way. That didn’t last for long,

For some reason my parents decided they were going away for a weekend. This is strange because my parents never went anywhere and if they did, they always brought us along. Since my sister was 16 they decided on letting us stay there ourselves. This was a dream come true for me, a ten year old and a huge fan of ‘Home Alone’. The thoughts of jumping on beds, eating junk food all day, staying up until 3am and thwarting robbers rushed into my head.

The first day was a blast. I spent the majority of it eating popsicles and running around outside with my dog exploring. By the time it was dark the plans for my all night party was completely forgotten because I was exhausted. We decided to sleep downstairs in the living room on our massive wrap around couch since we were both a little nervous about being home alone.

I fell asleep almost immediately and slept soundly until something woke me up. It was strange because normally when I whenever I woke up it took me 5-10 minutes to really become fully awake. This time as soon as I opened my eyes I was awake, almost as if I was never sleeping. I laid there staring at the ceiling for about five minutes, and then I heard it. Footsteps right above me slowly exiting my parent’s room, walking into my room and slowly walking across to the stairs. At first I assumed it was my sister so I looked over and she was there, sound asleep. Then I looked for my dog and she was sitting at the bottom of the stairs looking up them and whining.

Let me side-track a bit to tell you about my dog. My parents got her as a pup when I was just a one year old. She was a mutt, part black lab and a mix of countless others. This dog was my best friend and from the age of 1 to 13 she rarely left my side. So the idea that anything in this house was making her whimper instead of barking like a demon and tearing after whatever was up there is what made me go from startled to down right petrified.

I was about to wake up my sister when I heard the footsteps again, this time from the stairs to my sister’s room and then back into my parent’s room. I jumped off the couch and started shaking my sister. I told her exactly what I heard and about Cinder’s(my dog) reaction. She grabbed me, grabbed the cordless phone and we ran out the back door. We stood in the yard checking the windows as she contemplated calling the police. To this day I am not sure why she didn’t, but I assume she was afraid of getting in trouble with our parents who were extremely strict.

We continued to walk around the house seeing if any of the windows were broke or doors were ajar. After about 10 minutes without seeing/hearing anything, we went back inside. Cinder was still sitting at the bottom of the steps and refused to move. We went into the kitchen and my sister grabbed a large knife and I grabbed a baseball bat from the front porch. I don’t know how or why we decided to do this but we decided to check the upstairs. We flipped on all the lights, checked every room and closet and found nothing. Cinder was acting normal again and there was no sign of anyone breaking in.

We went back downstairs, made sure all the doors and windows were locked and played Blitz until the sun came up. We never told our parents what happened and to this day I am not sure if my sister really believes I heard anything.

This seems childish in comparison to some of the other stories in these threads, but it still creeps me out thinking about it.

Clarington Grey

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.

strong>”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.

medicin77

To contribute, I have a simple story that isn’t super scary, but was enough to make me believe that there are things in the world that can’t be explained. There’s a nifty little restaurant near the border of CT and Mass off of I-84 that’s like a combination eatery and bookstore. I forget the name of it, but there’s a big sign you can see from the highway that says “Food and Books”. I was on my way to summer camp with my mother and little brother when we stopped there to eat.

The really cool thing about the place was that you got to pick out a few books from their library to take with you for free after your meal. They had a bunch up where the food was, and a basement area full of bookshelves. I was down there looking for books and in general just walking around and enjoying myself. (I was a bit of a bookworm as a kid) I remember the place being set up with a central aisle, and shelves on both ends that went up against the walls on either side.

I’d walked up to the open part of one pair of shelves, near the central aisle, and was looking at the books right about eye level. I felt a kind of prickly sensation on my right hand side, kind of like when someone else is in the room with you, even though I was pretty sure I was the only one downstairs. I looked over, and saw a woman standing near the end of the aisle near the wall and also looking at books. She was middle aged, had brown hair up in a bun, and was wearing a dress that looked old fashioned, like from the 1800’s or something. It was that kind of place though, so it didn’t seem odd to me. She looked completely solid and real.

I probably stared at her a few seconds or so before she turned her head to look back at me. Being the shy kid I was, I turned back to the books so I wouldn’t meet her gaze. I looked back after just a moment, and there was nobody there. There was nowhere she could have gone, and if she’d moved by me I’d have felt it. I, of course, freaked out and ran upstairs. My mother tells me I was white as a sheet, and asked if we could leave “right now”.

les poissons 666

Questhaven is a little town which is known for paranormal experiences. There is an abandoned insane asylum there, rumors of Satanic rituals at night, and an old midget town. Supposedly midgets or dwarfs, whatever they like to be called, used to live there in a little area built just for them. Apparently they relocated to a place in La Jolla but I guess some of the mini buildings are still in Questhaven. Theres also no cell phone service there and the people who live there are rumored to be very unfriendly. I know people who have gone down there and their cars have broken down when they go down there at night, Questhaven is known for doing that. There are also rumors of ghosts down there and it gets incredibly spooky at night. I’ve been down there a lot during the day but have yet to go there at night. I’ll tell you all about it when I get down there and see what trouble I can run into.

Also, in the midst of all these weird happenings there, there’s a self realization retreat. Its hidden back in the woods behind bars and you can’t see it from the road, but it’s very large. A lot of the ghost sightings have been seen behind the bars at night. I have no idea why someone would want to put a place of worship and serenity there, but they did. I’m going to go down there, I’ll let everyone know what happens. Sorry that this post doesn’t have a story to it, but I’ll have a story soon.

Chupopopopo

I’ve had paranormal experiences since I was a child, the most memorable one being when I was in kindergarden. I was asleep one night, and woke up. I looked in the corner between the closet and the window, and there was this impossibly tall, skinny female figure in the corner, staring at me. She was completely black, and seemed to stretch from floor to ceiling. I can’t accurately describe her, so here is a sub-par paint rendition:

I couldn’t move from fear, and I couldn’t muster up enough of a voice to scream for my parents. The figure then moved, and pointed at me with a long, sharp finger, and screamed, “I’M YOUR MOTHER NOW!” I finally was able to scream and my dad came rushing into the room. The scary lady was gone, and it took me a long time to be able to sleep without a nightlight.

Most recently, I’ve moved into a haunted house. I was moving boxes one day by myself, and sat down on the couch. I then heard a man’s voice to my right say, “well, hey, honey!” Then, when my friend and I were getting the rest of my stuff moved in, the doorbell went nuts. It rang 10-12 times. After the first few times opening the door and seeing nobody there, I left the door open and watched the doorbell button as it was pushed. It turned off my satellite radio if it was left on the stand-up comedy channel, but left it alone if it was the ’50’s or ’80’s. My kitchen cabinets are open sometimes when I come home, and I hear footsteps in the hallway. The freakiest instance though, was last week; I’ve been really sick with this space flu that’s going around, and I was laying in bed. I felt something jump onto the bed, and looked up thinking it was the cat. Nothing was there. I called for the cat, and he meowed-he was already in bed with me, buried in the pillows on the other side. I laid back down, and felt a fist press on my hip-If you’ve ever gotten a professional massage, you know the slight press I’m talking about-and it started rubbing in a circle down to my knee and back up. I said, “please stop,” but then it pressed harder. I told it to stop, more firmly this time, and it did. It’s going to be interesting to see what else happens!

hazrdousmaterial

I finally have a story to contribute. Since it didn’t happen to me, I’ve been trying to get the details from my friend it did happen to. About ten years ago, while we were in high school, my friend had an old television in his room he used to watch tv and play SNES on. It was old, but probably expensive when it was bought, because it had the knobs on the set to adjust color, picture, tint, etc but still had a remote control which you could only use to turn it on/off and change the channel or volume.

He had another friend spending the night with him and I’m pretty certain this is before of them started drinking so they were definitely sober. The two of the go to sleep and are awoken a couple hours later by the television turning on to a channel of all static. My friend thought nothing of it as he figured he had rolled onto the remote in his sleep. He turned the tv off and set the remote in floor so he wouldn’t do it again.

An hour or so later, the television turns on to the same static. My friend wasn’t really bothered as the tv was old and did this on occasion. He tried to turn it off with the remote, but it wouldn’t work. So he lumbered up out of bed and pressed the power button on the tv itself. Still no good. He figured the old set had finally become just a piece of scrap and unplugged the damn thing so he could sleep. After he unplugged it, the damn thing was still displaying the same static-y channel.

NCentralPositronics

I haven’t seen anything about voodoo in this thread, so if that’s not something you all are interested in, just let me know. I do have a couple of haunted house stories, and one about an accidental EVP I caught, if anyone is interested. The following happened when I was about 17, and it’s something I cannot, to this day, quite wrap my mind around. It’s not exactly scary, but it sure stuck with me.

I have been interested in spooky stories and occult type things for as long as I can remember, but when I was in high school I found an awesome book about Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans, and was so fascinated by it that I started researching voodoo. I even did a report on the basics of voodoo for my world religions class, which wasn’t received super well (Catholic school), but I was just hooked. My parents thought it was a little weird, too, but they were used to my creepy proclivities and decided that our next family vacation would be to New Orleans. I was over the moon, for sure, and made my mom promise that she would take me on one of those voodoo tours, even though we would look like total tourist dorks.

As soon as we got into the French Quarter, I was smitten: by the city, by the people, just by everything. It was wonderful, and New Orleans is still one of my favorite places in the world. By the time we went on the voodoo tour, I was feeling like I’d lived in the city my whole life. We went to the cemetery which has one of the places Marie Laveau is supposedly buried (if she ever actually died, which some people don’t really believe). There was a tomb which has become a shrine to Marie, where people leave gifts, or notes, or scratch an “X” on the tomb with brick dust. I didn’t have anything to leave, but I felt very strongly that I needed to do something, so I kissed the tomb as a sign of respect, snapped a picture, and tried to catch up with the tour, which had left without me. I was feeling a little “off” at this point, and my mom asked me if I felt alright, which I said I did, even though it wasn’t exactly true. Everything seemed brighter, and I know how lame that sounds, but I remember it very vividly. I figured I was just overheated and having an overactive imagination moment. But the feeling didn’t go away, and I started to wonder if something odd was going on. Since I had done quite a bit of research on voodoo, I knew that some bizarro shit can happen to people and was seriously hoping I hadn’t pissed off Maman Marie.

After the cemetery, we went to one of the oldest voodoo temples in New Orleans, which was in an old house on the edge of the French Quarter. We met the priestess, Maman Miriam, and she talked to us a little about the practices and explained to people that voodoo isn’t evil and all that jazz. Throughout her whole speech, my heart was just pounding. I was blushing like mad, which is my knee-jerk reaction whenever I get upset or excited. After her speech, the maman led us through the house, past all of the various shrines piled with gifts and candy and booze. I felt like I was going to pass out, and my mom was getting worried about me, but I told her that I was fine and just to keep walking. We got to a room that was devoted to Marie Laveau, and when I walked past her picture, I felt like all of the sound had dropped out of the world, and I FELT someone kiss me, very lightly, right on the mouth. I cannot emphasize how real that feeling was. I actually looked around for whoever had just snuck up and kissed me, but of course there was no one. I looked over my shoulder, and standing about four feet behind me was the priestess, watching me. Now, the room was full of people, all milling around and chatting, but I felt like the room itself was very far away. Maman Miriam smiled at me, and nodded, and I nodded back, and tried to smile, but I was shaking like a leaf. The rest of the tour was pretty boring, and I wasn’t paying attention at this point anyway. I didn’t say anything to my family about what had happened. They had heard my stories about ghosties and ghoulies before, and I didn’t want to seem like the girl who cried ghost or whatever. I knew that something strange had happened to me, but I didn’t feel confident enough to spout off about it (like I am now!).

The clincher came when we developed the vacation pictures. My dad was looking through the pack of them, and found the picture I had taken of the Laveau tomb. He said something like, “Well, that’s weird.” My mom went over to look at it, and then they both called me over. The tomb was there, and coming out from the bottom of it was a rainbow. It was sort of shooting out from the base, right in the middle of the picture. Now, I’m not about to say that it couldn’t have been something natural, but it was very weird looking. None of the other pictures had any sort of anomalies.

I don’t practice voodoo, never have, but I really do think there’s something to it. Even if it’s all in the mind, there’s still something to it… I may just be a superstitious Irish girl, but you couldn’t pay me to screw with that stuff.

Reverend Gnome

A couple of years back I was living in a lightly forested town in a pretty decent neighborhood. The wildlife isn’t particularly varied, unless you count squirrels and birds. On a few occassions I’d notice the shape of a bird flying down to the branch of a nearby tree. Upon glancing over, though, there would be a little black squirrel instead of a bird. Trick of the light and peripheral vision and all that, right? Right. But then I kept noticing it happening. Sometimes it’d be in a yard with a single tree and no nig branches to jump from. Shape swoops in with wings flapping, comes to a landing on a branch or on the side of a tree, I look over to see a squirrel just chilling out; no birds in sight.

I thought it was a pretty funny occurence and slightly weird that I’d keep having the same illusion, so I started telling my friends (jokingly) that there were weresquirrels in Grand Haven. They laughed it off, as was expected, and I kept seeing the damn things. Sometimes I’d see a squirrel climbing up the side of a tree, start to turn away, and then see a bird take off from where the squirrel was. In other words, occassions where it wasn’t just a blur before being confirmed as another type of animal. First squirrel, then blur, then bird. I’ve shrugged it off as perihperal vision weirdness and maybe that faulty memory deja vu type stuff.

The strangest part though is that once my friends knew about them, they started seeing weresquirrels, too. I think I may have poisoned their brains somehow.

Badger Pudding

But my family on my dads side always had really fucked up shit happen to them. This house that my Aunt, my dads sister, lives in has been in the family since their parents bought it way back in the 40’s or 50’s. It had a dirt basement floor when they bought it so let’s assume it’s old. The creepiest thing I always found about this house was the setup. If you stood in the middle of the stairs that went to the second floors and turned completely around, you’d be faced with a wall with a window in it that went into one of the bedrooms. So anytime you ever went upstairs it felt like someone was watching you. My great aunt killed herself in that room so that just makes it extra scary. I’ve only been up there once and I plan on not doing it again.

Did I mention that the whole time my grandmother lived there she went upstairs about three times? In like, 50 years? And apparently she saw ghosts too. She died when I was six of Alzheimer’s, and in the end I was the only person she knew anymore. Even though I was only six and couldn’t understand what was happening, I knew she was dieing.

Anyway, back to the point. My dad would have his girlfriends over when he was sixteen to listen to his (now) busted ass old record player and they would say “Gee your mom sure does do a lot of housework around here” and he would just calmly tell them she doesn’t come upstairs and it must be a ghost. Everyone in the house had things like this happen to them.

The scariest thing that I ever heard about happening in that house was when my Aunt was about 20ish. Her boyfriend (now husband, and they own the house now), was out for the night as was everyone else except her sister, who was asleep. She went to bed and had this dream where they were in his truck together and there was some black figure chasing them. She woke up and was all sweaty and all the good stuff you get after having a nightmare. She sort of sat there for a second and heard something running up the stairs, really fast for a really long time. There aren’t very many stairs to go up, I’d say only about 7 – 12. So she just closed her eyes and told herself it was a dream and when she opened them there was the black figure from her dream standing at the end of her bed.
She freaked out and ran into her sisters room, on the way touching it and getting frost bite on the part of her hand that touched it.

According to my crazy-witch-grandmother, they’re called spirit-runners. And only come when someone is either going to die or be born. If it’s at the end of your bed then someone dies, and if it’s at the side of your bed then a baby is born.

Needless to say someone did actually die, a great aunt or something of that sort. No one close anyway.

kicktd

”The crayon circles”
When I was about 9 or 10 we lived in the typical old military naval housing in south Texas that had been around since who knows when, but we were told it had been around since at least WWII so alot had happened in those homes. Nothing really seemed to happen till the last 2 years we were there and during those last 2 years I remember I could see out my door and I would see “shadows” moving and playing out in the hallway . I just passed this off as my typical imagination playing tricks on me, even the time I swore I saw a “black mist” coming into my room that just seemed to float along.

So one morning my brother and I awake to my mother furious at us! We couldn’t understand what she was so angry at us about we had done nothing wrong, until we started coming down the stairs. Our stairs were laid out where you go up there is a little landing and you have to turn on the landing to go up or down the 2nd floor. Me and my brother round the landing and there is our mom furious at us, “Ok which one of you two did this to the wall?!” so we look at the wall and there is a circle in crayon about the size of a quarter on the wall.

We both said we didn’t do it and we went on our way. This happened a few more times and each time my father would paint over them, again and again but they kept coming right back through the paint. Not bleeding through or where you could see them under a coat of paint, but coming right back out to the top layer. Finally my mom got tired and hid the crayons. The next morning after she did that, a new crayon circle appeared except this one was about 9ft up. Not too long after this while going up the stairs my mother felt a cold air drift over her feet and then felt a hand on her ankle and heard a little girl tell her “Don’t go” and this was right before we were to move.

When it came time to move out we were pulling all of our stuff out of a storage space near the stairs, all over the walls behind boxes and other heavy stuff were circles on the wall in crayon that had not been there when we first moved in.

lemon shark

”The Guardian Angel”
A few years ago my cousin and I rented a tandem kayak on the beach and went out to see what we could see. It was a very lovely day and the ocean was very calm so once we got out pretty far we decided to kick back and chill out. Now as you can imagine this was a terrible idea. However, before we drifted off into history a magnificent burp rang out across the waters. We screamed and jumped bolt upright, nearly tipping the boat over, and looked to our right to see … a man in an elegant white kayak, with a black paddle. It was a very fancy kayak. He was a very fancy man as well, wearing an eye-searingly white tuxedo, white kidskin gloves, and a white ten-gallon cowboy hat. Altogether he was nearly blinding in the reflected glare of the sun. As we stared in shock and confusion at this apparition, he laughed and gravely pronounced,

“Whoops! Too many beans!”

Upon which he stuck his paddle back in the water and blithely sailed away. My cousin and I exchanged a silent ‘what the fuck?!’ glance, and then paddled our asses off after him. We neared shore and he rounded a narrow spit of land. My cousin and I reached it only seconds later, and … he was gone. The beach was as flat and empty as the sea, as far as the eye could see. We paddled back, wondering where the man had come from, where he had gone, and why he had been out kayaking in a brilliantly white cowboy hat, tuxedo and gloves. Finally we reached the little stand on the beach where we’d rented our kayaks and asked the owner if he’d seen the kayaker. He said he’d seen us drifting off near the place where the riptide begins, and had been about to go off after us himself when suddenly we jumped up and paddled frantically away for no reason.

I don’t really know what the hell happened there, or how to describe it. But if guardian angels really do exist I’d like to think that mine is the kind of guy that would swan around in a gigantic, ridiculous hat and complain about eating too many beans.

xezton

This requires a little bit of explanation.

This happened years ago (I’d say it had to have been close to 1999, maybe 2000).

A friend of mine and I used to love to be big dorks and try to record stupid videos of us doing stupid shit (who doesn’t when you’re young and equipped with a camcorder?).

One thing in particular that we did was record ourselves making really really terrible versions of Star Wars scenes (using such great special effects as bedsheets and paper with markers, and sometimes if we were really into it, fireworks) and give each other our tapes when we were done so the other person could laugh hysterically at the terrible rendition of the Death Star exploding (an egg hanging in front of a black bedsheet with a firecracker stuck into it), or whatever scene it was we were doing.

One day, my friend, we’ll call him J, was trying to record a scene of some “transports” leaving some sort of space station. J decided he would go outdoors at night when it was really dark (he lived out in the middle of nowhere, Indiana, so it got very dark), set up his camera on a tripod on his porch, just in front of his front door, and record fireworks shooting off to the side of the picture. So he was going for the effect of these bottle rockets and stuff shooting off and looking like “transports”. Yes, real mature and dorky. I know. But that’s not the scary part of this story.

In the middle of his recording, after he says, “The last transport is leaving.” and shoots a firework, out of nowhere, you hear this unbelievably terrifying sound.

When I asked him about it later, he said that the sound shook his head, and felt like it was coming from every direction (even from in his skull). It sounded like a demon, its wavering tone moaning away in the darkness.

It scared the shit out of him, needless to say. You can hear his footsteps running back to the house, when suddenly you hear the sound “laugh” in the background, as if it was taking pleasure in scaring the life out of him.

He runs back towards the camera, screaming, “OH MY GOOOD, WHAT THE HEEEL IS THAT???!!!”. He pulls his front door so hard the latch doesn’t have time to actually come out, and so he basically rips the door open. He’s running to his mom.

The sound happens again, this time he’s inside and he asks his mom (who is apparently oblivious to the sound and when later asked said she heard NOTHING), “CHRIST, WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?” obviously out of breath.

You hear his mom, wondering why the hell her son just ripped the front door off, scream, “WHAT?!”

J heads back to show her the sound and says, “C’mon!”.

Having apparently not heard the sound, her immediate reaction (since she knew her son was just outside shooting fireworks) was, “Did you catch something on fire…?”

“No.” he says, as he grabs the camera and shuts it off so he can show the sound to her. After that it’s muffled and you can’t really hear what he says.

I don’t want to give away J’s exact address, but it happened basically within this area: http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&amp…037208&z=15

It took me a while to get J to give me the tape. At the time I had no way of copying it on to a computer. J had a video capture thing (an old one) but he said he wouldn’t do it because it scared him so much. That and all you see is basically pitch black the entire time (except for the fireworks shooting off).

He agreed to at least record the sound for me and did so. He then put the tape somewhere and I’ve never seen it again. When I ask him about it he tends to just say, “Oh yeah.. I have no idea where that is.”

To this day, we have no idea what on Earth that sound could have been. He never heard it again (and probably tried to avoid going outside at night so that might be why).

He has said that his house was “haunted” though, as his house has shaken before, for no reason, apparently knocking pictures off the wall. We don’t get many earthquakes in Indiana (lol) but that’s the only explanation.

As for the sounds… we’re clueless.

redheadgeek

My husband’s grandmother’s house was once an inn from the 1750s through the mid 1800s, going through quite a few renovations, additions, and demolitions in the process obviously. They used to hear the sound of female voices laughing and talking and the sounds of metal clanging in one area of the backyard. When they were doing work on the backyard, they found the foundation of what used to be the summer kitchen right at that spot. After they excavated it, the sounds stopped.

Another time, a woman in a period dress and apron walked into the dining room while they were eating through a door and out through a wall.
There is what was once a small back spiral stairwell that lead to a door in the kitchen and a trapdoor upstairs. It was sealed over in the 60s and the bottom few stairs were removed and made into a pantry. They frequently hear (and I have heard as well) footsteps going up and down the stairs and the now non-existant trapdoor opening and slamming.

They have all the paperwork for the building dating back into the early 1800s, including house layouts etc, so there’s no reason why none of these references the huge room in the basement they found in the 80s which no one knew about before. It even has its own fireplace (the chimney is connected to the chimney of the fireplace in the upper room). The only other thing in the room was a chair and a bucket.

Not paranormal, but there’s a bullethole in the woodwork from the days when it was an inn. Apparently, two tenants got in a disagreement, and one pulled a pistol on the other and fired, barely missing. He then fled to town before he was caught. Prior to the Revolution, a tollhouse down the road was robbed by a man with a musket and bayonet, who then stole a horse and fled down the road. He was caught outside the inn, but had managed to ditch both the loot and the money by that point. Jump forward to the 1930s, and my husband’s great great grandfather is plowing a new field across from the house. He turns up a musket, bayonet still affixed, in remarkably good condition, which he sells for $100.

Hotdog Farmer

”Bigfoot”, OR “The screaming children in the woods”
A little backstory first.
I grew up in the Kooteny mountains of British Columbia, a high-level spotting point for peoples claim of seeing Bigfoot or affirming its territory. The town is called Revelstoke, it’s got 8,700 people and small as hell. Was one major section to get by a hundred years ago for the builders of the railroad that spans the entire country.

For hundreds of miles it’s just surrounded by boreal/temperate rainforest. Just think “loads of trees” and that’s pretty much all you get in any direction. Many of these woods are homes to the final resting place of Chinese railroad workers whom died building the rails for the country. They’re now just small clusters of mounds and collapsed grave holes scattered about various sections of woods in the town. Most people won’t even come across them if they’re not looking hard.

My friend Travis and I would take our toy guns to these small forested areas around the closest elementary school to hunt cats. No Pet Island thrashing here, we just pretended we could track them, and pretended they were cougars.

When summer came around we decided on a bigger expedition. We were going to hike the base of one of the mountains with our dogs and just mess around with our game. We set off in the afternoon and only made it about 400ft up the side of the mountain when the trees became more dense and the light filtering in was darker. Picture in your mind the forests of Oregon; light streams coming down from the hood overhead, moss covering everything and light fog about chest high just circling through the conifers. The mounds shaded differently depending on the depth you’re seeing them in the fog.

We’re peering over at the neighborhoods we can see from our vantage point when the dogs go crazy. They’re barking, growling and taking an incredibly offensive stance towards the same direction. Travis and I don’t see anything but we could hear the sound of stones clicking together as they tumble from a slope somewhere near. When out what seemed to be nowhere, the dogs cower and heel at our feet, letting out low growls and nervous twitches.

That’s when we heard the noise that will always cause my blood to run cold when I think of it. It sounded like what a feral dog barking would sound like mixed with what I can only describe to be similiar to children screaming. The two sounds at once, mixed into some grotesque high-pitched scream/gutteral growl. Seriously, children screaming and dog growling. Fuck that.

We bolted down this small rock face with our dogs in front of us and ran through a trailer park until we got home. I explained the whole thing to my dad whom didn’t say much about it, but he said that he had been up there as well before but never had anything out of place happen. He offered to take me back to where we were and I followed him like a scared little bitch.

I was 11 give me a break. As we got over the rock face and onto the moss beds on top my dad stopped dead in his tracks. I got up to where his feet were eye level I could hear the sound of flies buzzing. I crested the hill myself and got up next to my dad only to see the creepiest shit I’ve yet to see.

At the treeline where the trail begins, where Travis and I had passed an hour before was the carcass of a cougar nailed to this tree about 7 feet off the ground by a small chunk of rusted re-bar. It had been almost mashed against this tree via a length of tree root that had been wrapped around it several times and so tight that the flesh molded around the root that was tied around it.

My dad and I left pretty much immediately and I was told I wasn’t allowed to go up there anymore.
//////////////

Kind of an end story to this which isn’t related but is interesting. I worked at the Revelstoke Times Review newspaper building in the AM with a few other people for the summer after, stuffing newspapers with flyers.

On my breaks I spent a lot of time in the basement going through the various articles from the beginning of the towns newspaper to current. I remember finding an article in one of the papers somewhere in the 20s in which they had found the body of a kid up in the same area we were. He had apparantly went out there with a rifle, sat down on a log and shot himself in the head. I’ve always found it interesting that that was the same spot pretty much that we were.

Alowisney

”The Buck Creek Wildman”
We had the legend of the Buck Creek Wild Man where I grew up. I thought it was just bullshit to scare us to keep us from messing around in the woods at night. My mom’s best friend, Elane, who is a witch (not like pagan/goth, more like country witch, which I’ll explain later) said that she was out fishing alone on Buck Creek when she heard what sounded to her like a cow coming through the woods. She just sat still and watched as a thing came out of the woods.

She described it as looking like a very tall man covered head to toe in Spanish moss. It bent down and took handfuls of water from the creek and drank them. She sat there watching as it drank for a minute or so, then it just turned around and walked off back into the woods. I would’ve dismissed it as her just messing with me if I hadn’t heard another story from my best friend’s dad.

I used to hunt with my best friend and his dad on a hunting lease that ran along the Flint River which Buck Creek empties into. It was a choice place to hunt that had some big deer and hogs. I asked my friend’s dad one evening when we were heading back home how he got this hunting lease. I knew a hunting lease like this would’ve been very expensive and they were by no means wealthy. He told us that the guy that owned the land used it himself for hunting for a long time and wouldn’t let anyone else go out there except a few friends. Then, one evening when they were leaving they got into the truck and started it, turned on the headlights and there was a bigfoot type creature standing right in front of the truck.

They freaked out, put the truck in reverse, and hauled ass out of there. After that the owner never went hunting out there and neither did his friends. He decided to make a little money off of leasing the land instead of just letting it sit there but he warned the people leasing it to always leave while they still had enough light to see.

The only experience with what might have been the Wild Man was when I was riding down a country road with a friend of mine. We were passing some dumpsters that appeared to have a big pile of white trash bags in front of them when we both saw the trash bags stand up into a very tall man looking thing. My buddy stomped the gas and we just looked at each other, wild eyed. Feeling adventurous we decided to go back and see if it was still there. It wasn’t and what I thought had been trash bags weren’t there either.

–more–

Here’s an odd story I had forgotten about. I grew up close to Ideal, GA. It’s a small town of about 600 people. You know the population because they paint it on the water tower. They have to climb up and paint the water tower every time someone dies or has a baby. That town has a very weird vibe to me. When I’d have to go there I’d always get the creeps no matter the time of day.

My automotive teacher in high school was from there and he told us a story about when he was a logger around there before he became a teacher. The loggers were working kind of close to the road where there is a big curve. They had stopped for lunch and while they were eating they heard a loud crash. They took off to see what had happened and when they got to the road they saw a propane truck turned over on its side. The driver had gone too fast around the curve and turned the truck over. He climbed out and was standing around talking to the loggers when a naked black man walked out of the woods. He went to the truck and picked it up and pushed it back upright. He then walked back into the woods without saying a word. When my teacher was talking about this he got this far away look like it still bothered him.

I don’t know if he was just messing with us or if that’s what he thought he saw.

Ideal is also where a circus train turned over in the early 20th century and some black panthers escaped from their car. Those panthers were never caught and people still report seeing their descendants from time to time.

”Country Witches”
”Ms Elane”
My mom’s best friend Ms Elane is a country witch. She can read your cards, tell your fortune, and some other crazy things. The craziest part is she’s always accurate. She’s told me some stuff that I laughed at at the time but came to pass in less than a month.

She and my mom worked together in the sewing plant on machines right next to each other. My mom told me that sometimes she would just be quiet for a few days and didn’t say much while they were working or while they ate lunch then suddenly she’d lean over to my mom and say “If you wanted to kill somebody here’s what you do…” and commenced to tell my mom about the way you’re supposed to go about doing it with a squirrel skin and a lock of hair. She also told us about shaking a bag of pennies at the full moon to get some money coming into your life, which surprisingly seems to work. There were a few other country magic type things she told us about that my mom does and she swears by them.

Ms Elane’s first marriage was an abusive one. He was a very mean drunk and he drank as much as he could. He knocked out several of her teeth in the time they were married and was just an all around shit heel even aside from the abuse. She decided that since he just wouldn’t allow them to get a divorce, under the threat of him killing her, she had to do something else. She didn’t want to kill him but she did want him to go away. She made a wax figure and cut out a picture of his face and put it on the head of it. She was going to torture it but chickened out at the last minute and just put it on the top shelf in her closet.

Her husband didn’t come home that night or the next night. That wasn’t completely unusual. He’d go on binges and stay gone for a few days then come home to rest up to do it again. Thing was though, he didn’t come back after a few days. He didn’t come back after a few weeks either. He just stayed gone for a few months. Ms Elane was cleaning up around the house and found the wax figure. She took his picture off of it and destroyed the figure. That night he came home and was sober. He wouldn’t talk about where he’d been and apologized to her over and over and granted her the divorce.

”The Little Old Witch”
Dirt roads outnumber paved roads where I grew up. On those dirt roads you’d find old shacks that looked as if they were about to fall down, but old people still lived in them. I knew where all the dirt roads close to my house went because my friends and I would ride on them all throughout the summer months on our motorcycles and ATVs so I knew which of these old houses old folks lived in and which ones should be empty.

I was out riding by myself one afternoon after school and was passing by what I thought was an empty old house. Just as I passed the driveway my motorcycle sputtered to a stop. Being an old clunker anyway it wasn’t unusual to have that happen. I started working on getting it back going and as I tinkered with it on the side of the road I felt like someone was watching me. I stood up and looked around and behind me at the old house. It didn’t look like anyone had lived there in a hundred years. Nobody was around so I went back to work. I began feeling like someone was watching me again, this time more intently so I stood up and turned around and there was a very old little black woman standing behind me, smiling.

I nearly stumbled over my bike and she laughed at me. She said “Brian, that bike should start back working now.” She reached up and patted me on the arm and started heading back to the ancient house. I stood there and watched her reach the door, look back at me and laugh, then go inside. I hopped on the bike and it started on the first kick. I headed straight home.

When I got home my mom was already there so I told her about what happened and asked about the old lady and if she knew about her since my mom had grown up around there. She said “Oh, Mrs Tooks? She won’t hurt you. She’s an old witch, but not the bad kind.” Not the bad kind??? I told her that she knew my name and all my mom could say was “Huh, that’s peculiar.” She went on to say “Well, you made her laugh and she kind of gave you her blessing, so you don’t have anything to worry about.”

Stabby The Clown

”The Little Men”
About seven years ago I was at my aunt’s house for the weekend while my parents were on vacation. I was excited because she was an awesome cook, but had never been to her house before. Things were going pretty well, but after the first few hours I noticed a kind of white noise going on. I passed it off as a fan.
We were about halfway through dinner when I heard a loud thump from upstairs, which made me jump. I asked her what that was, and without looking up from her plate she just said “Oh, that was the little men.” I asked her what she meant, but she refused to answer and told me to finish my dinner. We heard the thumping a few more times during dinner, and each time I jumped. She never did, though, as if she was used to it.
Later that night I was watching tv. She came into the room and saw me lying comfortably on the couch.
“I’m heading off to bed, make sure you don’t fall asleep in front of the tv.”
“Ok auntie, night.”
As I continued to watch tv into the night I noticed the white noise getting louder, but I still just ignored it. Soon I felt my eyelids grow heavy.

I woke up with a start. The tv was still on, but I wasn’t sure what was on. The reception was a little distorted. On the screen, staring back at me, was three small old men, with long, scraggly grey hair. As I gazed at their expressionless faces, I was seized by terror. I threw my hand out for the remote on the table and hit the power button. The tv was off, but the image remained, as if it was burned into the screen. As I ran upstairs to the room I was staying in, I noticed the white noise had gotten louder than ever before, and I could make out faint voices. Oddly, when I got to my bed, I had no trouble getting to sleep.

The next morning at breafast, my aunt looked at me and said “You’re pretty quiet today.” I nodded. She said “You saw them, didn’t you?” I looked up at her. “Yeah.” “I told you not to fall asleep in front of that tv,” she explained, “they like to hide in there.”
For the rest of my time there, the white noise continued, but never got as loud as it did that night. The thumping continued as well. Safe to say, I was pretty happy when my parents came to pick me up.

Molly Bloom

Gettysburg. During the day the town itself is pretty cute. Anyone with half a brain knows that place is pretty fucking wonky. You know why it’s fucked? Because it spent time being filled with people killing each other. Then it spent more time being filled with people rotting in the streets and fields the middle of summer.

The wheatfield. I am talking about the fucking Wheatfield, where the pigs supposedly came and ate you at night. While you were still alive.

Anyhow, we stayed at a haunted hotel, a place that billed themselves as haunted, because my father was into his ghosts. They followed him. Everywhere.

For example, when he was working as a mover in college he was at the very top of a house in San Francisco. You know the sort of house: three or four floors, very narrow stairs. Owned by the sort of people that can buy a piano and hire college students to get it up there for them and then get it back down again when they decide that little Madison needs a bigger back yard and a school that teaches Mandarin AND Arabic otherwise she’ll just never get into kindergarten. He’s got the back end of the piano and there’s no one, no one at all, on the left on the floor behind him., He’s the last one out.

A hand on his shoulder gives him a shove down the stairs.

So with this experience, we all check into a haunted hotel, The Farnsworth House Inn, my father, my stepmother and myself. I decide I’m having none of it and just tell the room that I’m tired and there better not be any shit. I go to bed.

In the morning we rush down to breakfast because they are about to stop serving. They haven’t slept at all. Every time they have started to go to sleep something, someone had jumped on their bed. Something had jumped up, curled up between their legs and rested there. As they were, at the time, the owners of three cats, I assumed that they were merely accustomed to the motion of the cats coming and going in the night. But they had both been awakened at the same time by the action, repeatedly.

They had also seen the quilt depress, as if something invisible was walking or crawling across it.

They would have dismissed these incidents entirely had it not been for the second and more disturbing set of awakenings:

My father had also been a heavy snorer. Part of the lore associated with the room, which we found out afterwards, was that the ‘ghost’ associated with the room did not like people who snored / suffered from sleep apnea as she was a nanny who had a child die. She expressed this by grabbing my father’s leg or arm and shaking him – physically shaking him – whenever he dozed off enough to snore.

As a coda, when I returned to the room to have my shower before we checked out. I guess the place wasn’t through with us because half way through the lights decided to turn off. I’d like to blame it on bad wiring, but the switch managed to flick itself quite firmly down.

So….if you you’d like a little taste of something…that’s my recommendation for the evening.

lt_kennedy

Mum has told me some interesting stories over the year, this one’s the most relevant.

This one she told me as we were driving at dusk to my aunts house and watched the toads scamper out of the way/die under the wheels. Back when she was a wee lass back in El Salvador she knew this bloke who according to her was a bit of a stoner. The guy claimed that, that day he was straight and sober he was coming home from university and saw two men who he recognized as shaymen/witch doctors walk across the street towards the woods.

As they passed by he said he swore them stoop down and turn into monkeys. He freaked and recounted the story to his friends and family and the older members said simply “Yes, the witch doctors turn into animals at night, didn’t you know?”

Some Random

Well I have something to add, that happened just 2 days ago. It probably doesn’t sound very scary from reading it, but it scared the living shit out of me thats for sure. If anything at least it will keep this thread going.

This house has always been a bit weird at times, little things here and there that I have tried to just brush off as random, with some reasonable explaination. Because it usually feels fine, you know how some places just ‘feel’ haunted? Well most of the time, this place feels fine, but weird stuff still happens.

Anyway I had just put my 8 month old down for a nap, and walked out to the kitchen to make myself a coffee. I was pretty relaxed, wasn’t thinking about anything in particular, when behind me the fire alarm went off, for no apparent reason at all. (I have had a history of them doing that when Im around for no apparent reason O_o) I ran over to it to try and shut the fucking thing up, as it was blaring loud and it woke my daughter up because its right outside her bedroom door. Me being a short ass, am jumping up trying to knock it off the roof, with little sucess. So I turn around in a huff, just in time to see the pram/stroller that was near the front door, move backwards and then fowards by itself.

“oh WHAT the FUCK” I yell, I suddenly started to feel very fucking dizzy and pretty scared shitless too. At this point the fire alarm stops, but I shit myself and run outside regardless. I can hear my daughter crying from her bedroom, so I took a deep breath and mother instincts kicked in and I stormed inside and screamed for whatever it was to fuck off and leave us alone.

After that all was fine again, no more occurances since then, house has felt fine.

Very weird.

Solitary Dinosaur

The first story was an experience my mother had while she was in college. She grew up in and around Austin, and went to school at the University of Texas in the 1970s. She and her friends lived in some kind of campus-sponsored housing, a dormitory on or near campus. Now, somewhere close by, (though I’m not sure how close), were the beginnings of a housing development that for years had been nothing but acres and acres of empty desert. Because of its distance from any city or street lights, and the fact that the ground was nothing but sandy, bone-dry dirt and rocks, locals and college students referred to this area as “The Moon.” It was thought to be the ideal place to catch shooting stars. Or UFOs.

One morning, a security guard named Leo caught my mom on her way to class, and asked if she and her (female) friends wanted to join him on a trip to The Moon that night to watch a meteor shower. Giddy at receiving such attention from an attractive older man, my mom quickly accepted. (She made sure to impress upon me nearly a dozen times how completely stupid she was to have done so.)

So that night she and three of her friends loaded into Leo’s car and headed down the road towards The Moon. The night was uneventful for the most part. Leo didn’t do anything notably creepy, and they had a great view of the meteors. Sometime as they were about to leave, things started getting strange. The car’s engine and radio were both turned off. But suddenly, static began to pour from the car’s speakers. Everyone jumped in their seats and Leo tried to lower the volume–to no effect. The car’s occupants simply stared at each other in stunned silence as the static began to die down, and was replaced by something much more unsettling.

Voices–but not human voices–were coming through the radio. She says they were creaky and gurgling, “the way you would expect a frog to sound if they could talk.” There were multiple voices, obviously speaking to one another. As suddenly as they started, the voices cut off, and the static picked up again.

Now–outside the windows, there were small, circular lights tracing patterns all over the ground. My mom says it looked like someone was sitting in the trees above them shining dozens of flashlights all over the ground–except they were in the middle of nowhere and completely alone.

And just like that, it all just stopped. The car fell silent, and the lights vanished like someone flipped a light switch. Before anyone had a chance to breathe a sigh of relief, the entire sky lit up in a bright green flash–there was no noise, just a blinding light.

Apparently as they were leaving, Leo made a comment like, “Next time I’m bringing my gun,” which scared the fucking hell out of the girls. They checked the paper the next day and didn’t see anything at all about the flash, and no one they asked seemed to have any idea what they were talking about.

My mom still doesn’t know what to think of the whole ordeal. A part of her wonders if it was an elaborate setup by Leo to take advantage of the girls somehow. She says his reactions to the events and something about the way he had been acting since the beginning just didn’t feel right. She’s told the story to very few people, and it always creeps me out when I think about it.

My second story comes from my boyfriend, who told it to me sometime last week. His entire family lives in Hong Kong, and his aunt works in an office building that is notoriously haunted. No one seems to know how or why, (or who), but it is simply a fact that is accepted by everyone who works there: The place is haunted.

My boyfriend’s aunt was working late one night last month, and was one of the last people to head out for the night. She was standing in one of the rooms when she heard the door open and close behind her. Someone was rustling papers and shuffling things around on a nearby desk in a very normal and non-creepy way. She turned around, completely expecting to see a fellow coworker, but there was no one else in the room.

Shaken, she finished up quickly and left the room. She went back to grab her things and then started down the hallway to the exit. She was about ten yards from the door when she realized she’d forgotten something, so she turned around to head back to her office. As she walked she became aware of someone following directly behind her, even occasionally brushing against her back. She froze and the stalker froze as well–but she felt its breath rush down her shirt, as if he was much taller, looking down, and let out a soft, “Ahh…”

I guess she figured she could survive a night without whatever it was she had forgotten, because she simply closed her eyes, held her breath, and spun around, darting down the hallway to the exit as fast as she could.

She made it to the door and never looked back.

Personally, I am a tad skeptical of this story, but my boyfriend and his family are very spiritual and superstitious, so I tend not to press him for specific details when he shares things like this. His family treats these happenings as facts of life–they don’t really search for “logical explanations” or try to disprove what they experienced. I think it’s kind of neat, actually–sort of takes the terror out of the unknown.

Fascist Funk

My UFO story:

This happened a few years ago. I was working in a restaurant, usually not getting home from the dinner shift until midnight. But I’m a night owl anyway, and would often go for a run in the early hours of the morning. There was a high school near my house with a track that I would sometimes use for this purpose.

The high school was in an urban area, but field was kinda spooky, isolated by tall trees one one side, high concrete ledges on two others, the gothic school buildings on the fourth, and poorly lit. But I liked the solitude, and would sometimes lie on the top bench of the bleachers and stargaze.

When I first got to the track that night, there was a guy walking his dog, cutting across the field. He greeted me amiably and asked what I was doing there. “There’s supposed to be a meteor shower tonight,” he added enigmatically before continuing on his way. I never saw what he looked like; he was a black silhouette with the orange spark of a lit cigarette at the end of one arm, and a rattling dog leash at the end of the other.

I like to stargaze anyway, and the meteor shower sounded like a great added bonus, so after my run I settled in on the top bleacher to watch.

I don’t know how long I was lying there. What I do remember is that at one point I looked down, and saw something approaching very quickly from the east. As I was lying on my back it appeared to be rising up at me.

This neighborhood is directly under a flight path used by the nearby (international) airport, and there are passenger jets going overhead every few minutes. However, as long as I have lived in this area I have only seen jets flying north-south. I have never seen a passenger jet fly east-west in this area.

There is also a US AFB about 50 miles away, and fighter jets have been known to cruise the area.

This, however, did not look any jet I had ever seen, or heard of. It was round, possibly disc-shaped, with nothing resembling a wing. The surface was metallic, seeming to reflect the ambient light. There were at least two lights on it, one red and one blue. These lights were not flashing.

It seemed fairly low to the ground, though of course estimating the size and distance of objects in midair is a fool’s game. What I can say is that there were some scattered clouds in the sky, and it was definitely traveling below them.

As I was thinking about anything but UFOs, I didn’t immediately register what I was seeing. My awareness took a couple seconds to travel the spectrum from “hmmm, what a weird-looking airplane” to “HOLY SHIT IS THAT A SPACESHIP?!?!”

By this time it was almost directly above me, and seeming to move faster by the moment. I jerked up into a sitting position and spun around on the bench, expecting to track it as it receded into the distance.

There was nothing to be seen.

It was much cloudier on this end of the horizon, and I suppose it–assuming it existed in the first place, and wasn’t some strange trick of my imagination–could have risen up above the level of the clouds.

There was not, nor had there ever been, any sound.

I also never saw any meteors.

”The Bag”
This was probably within a year of when I saw the UFO described above. I was living in a studio apartment in an old brick building that had been built shortly after the turn of the century. In the ’20s it had been the home to a notorious jazz club, and it is listed in the city’s historical register.

Up until I lived in this place, I had never experienced something I would call supernatural, and didn’t really have any belief or interest in ghosts. The night I was unpacking my things, however, I turned around in the kitchen and noticed that a cupboard I could have sworn I just closed was now standing wide open, and it gave me pause.

Over the next couple years, things like this would happen: subtle and minor enough that I could easily have done them myself and then just forgotten, though they still made me wonder. Things disappeared, then reappeared where I was 99.9% sure I would not have put them. Several nights in a row I came home from work to find that the antenna cable had been unscrewed and removed from the back of my TV. Stuff like that.

One night I went to a rock show. I usually wear earplugs, but that night I forgot them, and returned home that night with severely ringing ears. I turned in semi-drunk.

Sometime early that morning, I slowly came awake. As I said, my ears had been ringing when I went to sleep. But now I was having the dawning realization that I was hearing more than that, that there were voices in the room, unintelligible yet emanating from right near my head. Also it seemed strangely breezy in the room.

I opened my eyes and beheld some sort of ball-shaped plasma, purplish-white in the dark room. It was suspended about two feet or so in midair above me, and it appeared to be rotating.

I reacted probably the way anyone reacts when there is suddenly something unwanted next to their head: I tried to get it away from me. In other words I punched it from under the blankets.

There was a crackling noise. Blankets covered my eyes momentarily when my fist went up. When I was unblinded again, the ball was gone.

I sat in the dark for a second, trying to reason what had just happened. The thing had been roughly the size and shape a plastic grocery bag might be if it were puffed up with air. Maybe one had gotten caught in the breeze in the room?

That sounded logical … except that, contrary to my impression when I’d first woken up, the air in the room was perfectly still. The “bag,” from what I’d seen, did not have a logo on it. And, most critically: there were no grocery bags in the room.

Somehow I actually got back to sleep that night, I’m not sure how.

When I searched the apartment the next morning, sure enough, there was not a loose grocery bag to be found.

”The Web”
This happened last year. It was again in an apartment, but one in a different part of the country.

The apartment was the upper two stories of a two-apartment house. I shared it with two roommates.

I never felt threatened by whatever, if anything, was in the apartment detailed in the preceding story. This house, by contrast, had a very malevolent feeling to it. It didn’t bother me during the summer or winter, but during both autumns I spent there I was constantly spooked. This would happen to a lesser extent in the spring.

As with the previous apartment, there isn’t anything hugely dramatic I can point to as incontrovertible evidence of a haunting. But there were quite a few incidents.

Several times I heard footsteps in the attic above me, and in the apartment late at night, when I knew for a fact that there was no one there. One night I heard a conversation in my room that, acoustically speaking, had no conceivable earthly source. When I was in the living room I heard the kitchen sink turn itself on and off when I could see for myself that there was no one near it.

We had blackouts once every few days in the fall when the fuse for the bathroom and all three bedrooms would spontaneously flip itself over. Granted, it was an old house. But in the summer I could run my air conditioner 24/7, in tandem with my computer and stereo, without incident.

My hairdryer would very often stop working after a couple seconds of use, even early in the morning when it was the only thing drawing on the fuse. Sometimes it was because the fuse had flipped. Sometimes I went down in the basement to find the fuse was fine and there was no explanation at all. Again, this only happened in the fall.

Several times the doorknob to one roommate’s bedroom was completely dismantled, screws and all. (She refused to entertain the possibility of ghosts. Her explanation? A former roommate, who she believed had a grudge against her, was regularly scaling the exterior of the house and coming in one of the attic windows–this was four stories up, mind you–and doing subtle things to fuck with her.)

I never brought up the subject with the other roommate, though I thought it was telling that after a while he started putting night-lights everywhere.

Probably my most hair-raising experience happened when I came home late one night. The back door to the apartment led to the landing of a stairwell, with one set of stairs going up to our apartment’s kitchen, and one set of stairs going down to the house’s shared basement. There was a door separating the landing from the basement stairs. I usually left this door open but we had a new roommate who always shut it.

I came into the stairwell, flicked one light switch, then the other. Nothing. Okay, both fixtures burned out, no big deal. There was only a tiny amount of light coming in, from a window in the door I had just closed, and from a window in the door at the top of the stairs, which led to the upstairs porch. I set about trying to re-lock the deadbolt, which was notoriously difficult.

From the basement door next to me, I suddenly heard a sly scratching, like someone running their fingernails on the other side. If it was an actual person, they must have been just hanging out in a pitch-black basement. (No, no one in either apartment had pets.)

I slammed the lock home and booked it up the stairs to the kitchen.

This all culminated about a month before I moved out. It was spring, and again the strange incidents, as well as the general malevolent feeling in the apartment itself, were reaching a crescendo.

I went to bed one night consumed with feelings of dread and despair, and a constricted sensation, like I couldn’t breathe. At some point in the morning I woke up to find some sort of dark ropy mass filling the air above me–like a cobweb, only with strands that were much, much thicker. Like bare tree branches.

I reacted pretty much the way I did with the bag/ball several years ago, only this time I swept the blanket through the air like a wing, like I would have done if it were an actual cobweb.

When I looked again, of course it was gone.

Uranium Phoenix

”The Creature of Camp Cake”
Camp Cake doesn’t sound nearly as intimidating as it should. No, that’s obviously not its real name. The name came from some kid telling us the first day we were there that it was his birthday, then demanding a cake. Well we’re maybe hundreds of miles from civilization stuck in an old-growth forest at the base of a mountain. There are no stores even remotely close, and under no circumstances would the stockpiled food we had ever be crafted to resemble a cake even with a top chef working on it. This guy demanded his cake though, so we gave him mud cake with little sticks poking out of it someone lit on fire.

You can probably guess where the name came from now. That was the first day. The first day was the best one, because that was the only day anything good happened in that forsaken place.

They stuck us in this shabby wood cabin that was not built with comfort even as an afterthought. It didn’t have a front door, just a corner you had to go around, and the wood floor had weeds coming through the cracks. It was furnished with a table made out of a decaying tree stump (we think they were just too lazy to move it so they built around it) and a chair that no one dared sit on. Well we complained, but there wasn’t much we could do. It was either a shabby roof or no roof, and the clouds were threatening rain. I got stuck near the door, so all through the night I could not only hear the undiluted wail of the wind, I could feel it.

The first night, I dreamed about a girl wandering the woods, lost. She was looking for something in the towering pines, maybe a way out. Then I heard heavy breathing, and I woke up.

Somewhere just outside our cabin, a horn was going off. I quickly dismissed the dream and got dressed with the rest of the drowsy crew and we headed out. They gave the dozen or so of us the basic lecture of safety. Don’t do anything stupid. Don’t get lost. Don’t go wandering around without the group. We start hiking.

The forest is one of those pine forests where the trees soar above you and the ground is covered in drab needles, brown, and the occasional burst of shrubbery. The hills were strewn with boulders and rocks that had been weathered so that their jagged edges were almost gone. I noticed, as we traveled, that there was not a single squirrel we saw, nor a single call from a bird. Besides our soft conversation and the occasional gust of wind that sighed through the trees, it was silent. At first it didn’t bother me, but then I began to notice it more and more. The rest of the group noticed it too, and after awhile the dry chatter faded to nothing more than the pattering of feet. The rest of the day was somber as the gray clouds slowly stirred over us.

That night I don’t know how I slept. The howling wind and the deluge of relentless rain should have kept me awake, but it didn’t. So I dreamed. Immediately I realized something was wrong. The dream started where the last had ended, and this time the girl wandering the forest stopped and looked directly at me. Her piercing blue eyes drilled into me and stripped me bare until I wanted to run. Then she spoke, and her small, confidant voice held me firmly rooted in place. “You have to find me,” she said. “Otherwise, no one will.” Off to my left, something growled, a deep throaty growl that swept through the trees and lasted far longer than it should have. The girl turned and looked at where the noise came from, then turned and fled. Behind a wall of shattered rock and giant ferns, something sinister moved.

I woke up with a start, chilled to the bone but sweating profusely. Someone had screamed, I swore it. Most of the other people in the tight packed cabin had heard it too. We looked around nervously in the dark. The rain was still battering the cabin. Most of the guys dismissed it as the wind, but I knew what I had heard. I didn’t go to sleep again that night.

The next day we worked on some of those ridiculous team-building exercises and the occasional game. For some reason though, my mind wasn’t focused on the activities. My friends asked me if I was okay, and all I could do was lie and tell them yes. Every chance I got though, I would stare at the woods to the north. Each time I would almost see her, but as soon as I looked she was gone. The hike after dinner was one bathed in a surreal twilight. The forest had a misty gray feel to it that was only amplified by the sinking sun and the slowly swirling clouds. We crossed a stream as we traveled, and as we did I saw two blue eyes staring at me from the hill. We looked at each other for what seemed like an hour before someone bumped into me and broke the gaze. She was gone when I looked again.

That night she was there again, and I heard screams. The girl was standing next to me, and together we watched as something crawled through the bushes. Its flesh was black, and it looked like it had been cooked alive by fire. Its lanky body had a strange gait to it, and in a clawed had I saw it carried a pale corpse, covered in blood, that stared lifelessly with two glazed, blue eyes.

I woke up, but it was night. The girl was sanding over me. “This is our only chance,” she said. “You have to come.” I did, though why I’ll never know. The full moon had splintered through the clouds like crevassed lightning, and with it I could see clearly in the night. She took me past the stream we had crossed, up a hill and through a maze of plutonic and volcanic rocks. Finally, we came to a dark cliff that clawed at the heavens and reached up at the very moon. A vertical crevasse ran up it, and when we approached I saw that it was a cave. I was terrified to look, but the girl pleaded at me with such soft and innocent eyes that somehow I found the courage to step forward and peer into that abyss.

The entire cave looked to be a malicious obsidian that had been warped and stretched in the dark places of the earth until the black glass resembled screaming faces and maddening patterns. I don’t know how far back the cavernous maw stretched, but the unsettling breeze wafting from that dark place gave me chills that were nearly paralyzing. On the floor of the cave was a yellow slime that smelled both of sulfur and rot. Scattered about it were gleaming white bones that seemed like they were slowly being consumed by that glistening ooze.

Then movement caught my eye. The pale moonlight behind me reached deep into the cavern, and in the shadows I could see it. The black creature, its lightless body charred and burnt, had thin, sinewy arms that ended in terrifying onyx claws, and it stood just beyond the glistening bones. I could see the sunken pits where its eyes should have been on that twisted, featureless face. I could hear its ragged breath echoing off the despicable cavern walls. Its jaw opened, and I wish I hadn’t seen it. It was split into four pieces, each which moved separately from the others, all of which were lined with rows of serrated fangs. The deep breathing turned into a low rumble, then a growl.

To this day I don’t know if it was me who screamed or some infernal screech that the beast let out, but even before the sound had began to echo off the walls I was running. The terror that gripped me at the very core of my being gave me nearly inhuman speed. “Run!” I heard the girl say to me, but she didn’t need to tell me. I sprinted through the trees at breakneck speed, the needles hardly having time to crunch before I was past them. I leapt over boulders and dodged through trees. Suddenly I was back on the trail. The stream came into view, moonlight glistening off the ebon waters, and without even thinking I leapt completely over it and hit the ground still moving. I heard a growl behind me as I ran, but I didn’t look back.

When the clearing and the cabin came into view I almost collapsed in relief. The heavy breathing and the hellish growl had faded, and I could see dawn breaking through the pine spires. I entered the cabin and screamed. Mangled corpses and limbs were scattered across the room, dark blood had pooled and begun to seep into the cracks in the floor. Bones protruded from rent flesh and piles of intestines were strewn everywhere. Behind me, I heard heavy breathing, and the start of a deep, vicious, growl.

This time, I know who screamed.

***

They tell me I went a little bit crazy. They tell me it was all a nightmare, some sort of hallucination, but I know where the primal terror had come from. I woke up in a hospital with a crowd of concerned people staring at me. They told me I had been asleep for two days, that I had been writhing and shouting in my tormented sleep about it. About the creature. I told them about the creature, I told them about the girl. No nightmare could be so vivid. I told them about the corpses in the cabin, and they told me no one had died. They brought in the people from the trip so I could see they were alright, and I couldn’t explain it. Later, one of the people from the camp told me how I had come into the cabin that night and screamed, my bare feet torn and bloody and a madness in my eyes that nearly made him shit himself in fear. Then he told me how the rangers had found the cabin broken into the next day—the day after they had all left. The windows had been shattered and the walls torn at with alien claws that simply were too big and too numerous to be that of a bear. He told me he believed me, that he believed I saved their lives. I haven’t spoken to him since.

They released me after some time on some medication I never bothered taking. The park rangers never found the cave, and Camp Cake has since been shut down for good. I found the article I was looking for deep within the archives of the library, a news article from ten years before my experience. A little girl had been abducted on a camping trip, torn away from her parents who were sleeping in the same tent. The authorities had said it was a bear, but the grief-stricken parents had known otherwise. I went to see them in the asylum, and I listened. They told me of vivid nightmares of a black creature with burnt-looking skin that starred at them with sunken sockets that had no eyes. I told them of their daughter’s slime-coated bones.

Fredus

Anyway here is my pretty crappy story that I’ve never posted because I don’t usually get to the end of these threads or it feels so blasé in comparison to other stories.

Of the 3 houses I’ve lived in 2 have been haunted and thankfully it is the one I’m in now that isn’t. This story is about the second house my parents owned because I was too young to remember the goings on of the first house.

The house was always a bit weird for me. When I was younger I was an early waker, often up in time to see the end of those light night religious programs before the cartoons started. Sometime when I was the only one up sound would go odd around me. Everything would be really silent and the sounds that did occur would be really crisp and threatening. I know that sounds ridiculous but I’ve never come up with an explanation as to why that happened. Maybe it was just something to do with me growing up or something. Anyway on to the real story.

The house was a Californian bungalow that my father had renovated extensively. One part of the renovations was the addition of a downstairs basement type area with a staircase going up to the rest of the house. The stairs (oddly given that it was new) was the area my sister and I felt most uneasy. Whenever you walked up those steps from the basement you felt as though something was right behind you.
The stairs fed onto a hallway which connected the main hall to the dining room. The dining room had open walls either side and was sandwiched between the living room at the back of the house and my parent’s bedroom at the front.
At the time my story took place I was home alone sick, sitting on the couch in the living room watching midday TV. For some reason I looked up into the dining room and saw on the glass door that leads into the hallway the shadows of two people walk across the door. I remember immediately lifting my gaze to look through my parent’s bay window to see if anyone was walking by on the street and of course there was no one. Even if they had been I very much doubt they could have cast a sharp edged shadow from the street that was 30 meters away.
The worst part was that it took me 30mins to get up the courage to call my mother from our home phone which was in the hallway that the shadow people had come from.
A few years later I learnt that the previous owners were two old spinster sisters that had died there.