Everyone else does it, why shouldn’t we? Tell us your stories of the paranormal and creepy! Remember, ghosts are totally real and not-real.
Sidenote for Californians, which will be repeated verbatim on the Friday Open Thread to ensure better attendance: Our non-paranormal San Francisco meetup is going to be from 7-9pm on Monday, November 4th, at the BART-accessible Thieves Tavern in the Mission. Mallory says it’s divey and low-key and quiet and has cheap drinks and you can dress like you’re at home watching Netflix.
Likelihood Nicole will wind up demonstrating correct Lady AND Tramp Pushup technique on a sticky floor? High.
Who’s volunteering to bring nametags and a Sharpie?
Tags: ghost stories, meetups, open thread
I lived in an apartment that I am pretty sure was haunted by a (non-threatening?) ghost. I had the bizarre sun-room at the end of our very long apartment and our cat loved lazing on my bed in the many sunbeams. Every once in a while, though, she would sit bolt upright and burst out of the room. Cats do that sometimes, right? It was probably no big deal. And then there were the weird times where I would be inexplicably locked in my bedroom, and no amount of yanking or lock-twisting could get me out. I just had to chill and wait until whatever was locking me in was done.
But the eeriest thing happened on my bed (lolsex) which was one of those awful metal frame futon affairs that bowed in the middle so if you sat on the end the whole thing lifted up with a KACHUNK. So guess what would happen once a month in the dead of night? KACHUNK! But no one was there. Just a creepy, watched feeling that I ignored by putting my covers over my head and planning my outfits for the next week.
you know it’s an actually literally fact that cats are sensitive to demons and dogs are sensitive to ghosts. so.
NOOOOooooOOOOOooo I can’t unread this!
Holy shit. Are you saying I had a demon on my bed? No amount of smudging is going to make me feel ok tonight.
I have never encountered a ghost in my life. Only Ghost.
GHOOOOST!!!!
I kind of want and don’t want more texts from a ghost. The ending to the second installment was so perfectly bittersweet.
…you rang?
The third one really tied it up, though; idk how I would ever continue that series!
Me neither, and I have stayed in a (purportedly) haunted B&B – for the express purpose of being haunted! I love ghost stories as long as they are not scary or harmful, just the ones that are like, “and then the lady in blue smiled at me and walked down the hall and in the morning I asked my host about her and he said she died a hundred years ago”
I stayed in an allegedly haunted castle in Scotland that had been turned into a hostel, and I experienced nada in the way of ghosts. I suspect it was because the “castle” was built in 1907 and therefore doesn’t really count as a proper ancient castle with lots of gruesomeness. (Though Wikipedia does mention its “ghosts”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbisdale_Castle)
Yeah, but Ghost was (is?) enough.
The town I grew up in was famously haunted and was home to FAMOUS GHOST HUNTERS The Warrens and their horrifying museum/house. My friend grew up in an 18th-century house and my OTHER friend said he kept seeing a man in a top hat outside the window, so I refused to go there at night.
We also had a dead town witch, who cursed the town after someone killed her beloved rooster. Her grave, even though it was 150+ (I think) years old, was still clean as a whistle and was mysteriously creeping away from the cemetery it was part of and down a hill towards the road. New England!
Anyways ghosts aren’t real and are still a top-10 fear of mine.
Wait… the gravestone MOVED?
i mean, it was sliding down a hill, little by little. Still creepy!
Ed and Lorraine Warren! I went to a purportedly haunted church in CT around Halloween one year with my mom and her boss, and attended a seance the Warrens were holding there. A radio station recorded the whole thing. I don’t remember anything particularly paranormal happening, but it was a lot of fun.
ETA: I just looked up their museum on the internet, and now I think I have to go see the murderous Raggedy Ann doll they have there.
That thing was spoken about in HUSHED TONES for my entire childhood. I have never seen it and I don’t ever want to.
“Ghosts aren’t real and are still a top-10 fear of mine” pretty much sums up how I feel about the whole thing. Knowing they don’t exist does NOT make me any less afraid.
My grandmother’s house was pink and large, and very, very haunted, by something that couldn’t be seen properly but walked a lot at night when the cat was on the end of my bed. I was told, growing up, the haunt was the cat, but the cat disagreed. He liked me, for one, and the haunt didn’t.
The haunt didn’t like anyone – it loved or it hated, in that big pink dark house. The thing under the bed was especially unkind to my father, firestarter, and it loved my aunt too dearly. It was always bringing her things, like a chandelier to crown her in the dining room, or a broken ankle on salted stairs in winter. It liked her, you see, very dearly, and it wanted to keep her, but we were selling the house and the haunt with it and hoping for something better. So it shoved, she fell, and we nearly lost her to hypothermia. An unrelated guest found her in the bushes and she got over it, eventually.
None of us were altogether unhappy when the new owners razed the building.
We don’t visit the cottage on stilts, much. Everyone who marries in thinks it’s creepy.
HOLY SHIT.
PURE FREAK-FLAG CATNIP, THE WHOLE MONTH OF OCTOBER.
I was working a late night position with a local film festival quite a few years ago. It was a mostly boring and lonely job so I decided to sometimes go around the guys delivering the films to the projection booths in the building. One night my boredom lead me to follow the guys I was working with to drop off some film prints. I went ahead of them to see if the stage door was unlocked so we could gain access. They were a few meters behind as I made my way down the hall and turned to go down a few steps into the very dark alcove that lead to the stage door. Suddenly I was overcome by the overwhelming sense that I WAS NOT WELCOME. I was terrified – yet I still turned the knob and opened the stage door. It gave way and I peered cautiously around looking for the source of my terror. Nothing. Not one sound or weird fleeing creature of the night was to be seen. Startled and still terrified I made my way back to the guys I was working with and let them know the coast was (somewhat) clear. I went with them back down the hall and through the dark alcove and into the most beautiful and frozen in time theatre I’ve ever seen. Funnily enough as soon as I stepped through the stage door and into the theatre proper I felt my terror diminish and eventually disappear altogether. I was fine and felt safe for the rest of the night – what with the 24 hour security and all. It was only when I got home at 4am I remembered that wave of sudden terror and had to sleep with the light on. The history of that building is marked with quite a few tragedies. It’s said that it is haunted by a man on the restoration crew who fell to his death from some scaffolding….
Thank goodness I was productive thus far at work today, because nothing else is getting done.
Is it weird to go to a Toasty meetup by yourself?
Ghost stories:
1) After my grandfather’s funeral I saw a spectral, shimmery silohuette of him outside his house. He was waving.
2) I was hanging out with my brother during summer late at night/early morning in high school. He left the room for a minute and I saw someone out of the corner of my eye run up the stairs. My brother comes back in the room after I see this. I say, “Hey I thought you were upstairs.”
“What do you mean? I was in the garage.”
I am strenuously telling myself it’s not weird, because I too will be coming to the meetup by myself. (Since it’s at 7, I actually have a high likelihood of getting there on time if I jet out of work at 5 to drive to the Pleasanton BART! I wonder if I’ll be coming from the farthest away.)
I don’t have any ghost stories to contribute, un/fortunately–even fairly mundane ghost stories creep me out. I remember being at a high school Halloween sleepover and listening to a friend’s Evanescence CD through headphones super-loud so that I wouldn’t have to listen to the scary stories. I am not made of very stern stuff.
nah, go nuts!
It is most certainly not weird to go to a Toasty meetup by yourself! Based on discussions in Friday’s open thread, there are quite a few Toasties who’d be going on their own. I myself will be attending on my own! Just remember – you may not know anyone there when you arrive, but then you will meet us and we won’t be strangers any more.
Oh! Oh! Are any folks BARTing in from the east bay? I’m going solo, but I’d rather have a BART buddy or two because GAH public transport at night.
I’m very excited to meet you. I’m desperate for the approval of others.
I was sitting around the kitchen table at my group house with the landlord, trying to work out some issues, and she explained that her troubles in finding good contractors were because the house was haunted. Her family had owned the house for some time and some family members used to live there.
First, a son had pushed his mother down the stairs to her death.
Second, there was a little girl who lived there and kept asking other people what the woman in the blue dress was doing, but no one else could see the blue dress woman.
D:
!!!!
My best friend grew up in a haunted house in Maine. Everyone who had ever lived there reported seeing a ghost. A few of her stories included hearing a man’s voice calling her name in the middle of the night, waking up and finding her bedroom lamp halfway down the stairs, and having kitchen drawers fly open when she needed something in them.
I could use a ghost who opens and closes drawers for me in a helpful fashion!
One: can we talk about how funny (but really SAD if we do a close reading/but funny if you have close dude-like friends of Mexican descent who are irrationally scared of booohooooing winds coming down your alley) La Llorona is as a ghost story?
Two: Not so much a ghost story as how ghost stories will bite you in the ass. I went to a lady college out West and there was a cemetery on campus, old buildings, scary basements, dorm rooms where ladies may or may not have gone crazy, sophomore to first-year ghost tours (if you were there 2006 I’M SORRY WE WERE SUCH DICKS).
Anyway, one night we were all a drinkin in our dorm room and someone got the bright idea to go explore the basement underneath the abandoned dining hall attached to these dorms. Out we all trek and they climb in the window but I’m all like hell no! its dark and there is tetanus in there and someone has to keep lookout! And anyway, the reason they went in is because they heard people kept their servants there, there were human bones, etc. I can sort of start to see the fuzz start up the hill so I knock on the window like, y’all, get out of there.
Knock. Knock.
And then because drinking gives me superhuman strength and 19th century windows are bullshit, my arm goes through the window, everyone in the basement loses their shit, I start yelling GET OUT OF THERE and run up the hill. They all get out and are like DID YOU SEE ANYTHING? and I say NO, WHAT HAPPENED I WENT TO GO LOOK AROUND THESE TREES WHAT? SOMEONE BROKE THE WINDOW? A GHOOOOOOST?
For real everyone thought a ghost had broken this window to scare them which I was going to let them believe if only to stop my dumbass friends from sneaking into dangerous basements, but then someone overheard me tell the truth, and I got snitched on.
The end. Lady college ghosts are scary, though, FOR REAL.
My husband is still somewhat afraid of La Llorona. We live in (and he grew up in ) New Mexico where that story is still told. I never really though that La Llorona was too scary myself, but when I’m out in the arroyos alone at twilight, I can very very easily start to freak myself out.
I mean, when I hear the story, I completely understand the fear, and how it is built in sadness. BUT I also have friends who are irrationally afraid of: women crying, ghost women, vampire women, etc. Additionally on a bad night I spent crying in the shower I got a text from my best friend/roomie who said, the next day, I’m glad you’re ok. I thought La Llorona was in the shower!
My uncle had a ghost. He looked up one day and saw a man looking out the attic window at him and flipped out. He lived alone in the middle of nowhere, by the way. And there was a graveyard nearby. For a couple of years he had weird experiences, like he’d come home and the furniture would be moved, or sometimes he’d hear it actually moving while he was home. There were other things, but I can’t remember them all….however, when he moved from that place and listed it, the real estate agent told him he was obliged to disclose if there was a ghost!
What if.. someone actually was living in the house with him, just very cleverly hidden?
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
The “ghost” stories that end this way are ALWAYS the scariest ones of all.
The man looking out the window is some Turn of the Screw-type terrifying shit..
You guys know my ghost stories.
My mother also has a story where she was chased around the room by a card table after using a Ouija board with her friends, but I’m not totally sure of the details.
I’m suddenly reminded of the amazing scene in Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers, in which Miss Climpson is trying to get the nurse to show her Mrs. Craig’s will by indulging the nurse’s obsession with spirits and mediums. During the “seance” she rocks the table and presses a clicker with her knees to convince the nurse how attuned she is to the Other Side.
“You’re a wonderfully strong medium,” said Miss Booth.
Miss Climpson, surreptitiously flexing her ankle, was inclined to agree.
On the way to the town where I went to college, there was a big ol’ house at the junction of two roads. The rightmost window on the first floor always had its shutters closed, always always always. Apparently there was a creepy-ass reason for this, but I never got a straight answer for why. Creepy old houses at crossroads! (Well, kind of crossroads.)
Found the story! “As the story goes, a young bride and groom were given the house as a wedding gift. The
groom was called away to serve in the Civil War and the bride told him that she would never leave the window until his return.
Upon the groom’s return, he was informed that while his wife was waiting, she became ill and died in her sleep. He immediately went into the room in which his wife was waiting and closed the shutters. He
died shortly thereafter, of what was claimed to be a broken heart. The intersection on which this house lies also supposedly has very bad and frequent automobile accidents as a result of the ghosts.”
Edit: MORE!
“There is another story about this house. In the same room that the couple died, the hearsay is that a young child died in that room and it became haunted. When the room is opened up or being used strange things happen–you can hear a child crying, sounds of a rocking chair rocking, things like that. When the room is closed up and left alone—the “hauntings” stop. A little girl supposedly hung herself in the room. People say if the shutter is open you can see the little girl`s image in the window hanging from the rope. The reason the shutter is closed is because the state made them close it, because there were automobile accidents as a result of the image. ”
KENTUCKY, never change.
Man, if the first story were true, that would be pretty assholish of those ghosts. Why cause car accidents?
(Also, I know this is not you because you copied and pasted, but it should be “hanged” not “hung” in the second story.)
DRAT, missed it, and I can’t change it now. Thanks for the catch though!
And yeah, ghosts, what gives?
(As someone who went through that intersection probably hundreds of times, I never had any issues there, BUT the shutters were always closed. Hmm hmm hmm.)
Ooh ghost stories!
I grew up in the house my great-grandparents had once lived in. My parents slept in the master bedroom, obviously the room my great-grandparents had used as well. They also slept in the same bed (or bedframe/headboard), at least. Once my mom woke up in the night to a strange electric feeling in the air. Her (long since passed away) grandmother was standing in the doorway, looking in. My mom describes it as being a very peaceful experience.
My great-grandfather died three days later. We figure she came to welcome him to the spirit world or whatever, no?
When I went to a Korean Buddhist monastery, I learned that at mealtimes they provide water for the hungry ghosts. That is a term that I see a lot but I think is misused. The ghosts are hungry and thirsty but they are burning inside. They also have tiny mouth holes, so they can’t eat. I’ve read that both food and drink burn and turn to ash inside them, but the monks where I was said it’s water they need. Nothing like hearing that while skulking outside a monks’ dining hall in the predawn darkness!
D:
yeah, my dad is Buddhist and I also heard this story. I think the ghosts are supposed to represent desire / the suffering that desire causes. At some point my dad used the expression “do not choke the hungry ghost” I think to mean like, finish all your food on your plate so I always assumed the ghosts lived in the sink drain.
I don’t have a ghost story, but I did go to a halloween movie night at a local bar on Monday, and we watched possibly the best movie of all time: Roller Blade. It’s about a bunch of nuns who spend a lot of time naked for no discernible reason (I think the word gratuitous may have been invented for this movie) in a dystopian future where everyone gets around on roller skates (not blades) or skateboards, and who fight evil in leotards and heal people with their knives using the power of the Cosmic Order of Roller Blade. Also, everyone talks in this weird fucked-up “Olde English,” where they mix up thee and thou (“Is thee all right?”), and the marshal says things like “yea, verily” and “skate not from this place!” It makes zero sense and is spectacular.
Added to the list to watch POSTHASTE. Is it on Netflix, maybe?
I have no idea, but I really hope it is. They actually got it on VHS from a video store & burned it to DVD from there, so I don’t know about digital options. But really I just need everybody to watch it so I can yell “Skate not from this place!” on the reg.
I am even having a hard time believing that such a movie was ever made! It sounds fanTAStic.
It sounds amazing. Alas, it’s not on Amazon!
In college I lived in an apartment that was the second floor of an old old house. It was a dump after years as a student rental but it was still a pretty cool house. You could see from the outside that it had a huge attic, there were multiple windows up there and everything, but the only entrance to the attic was a little door in the ceiling of our kitchen that was painted shut. This obviously drove me and my roommate nuts, so one day we climbed up on a table and chipped the paint away with a screwdriver. It was one of those pull-down ladder attics and when we got the ladder down, decades worth of dust and rat shit came down with it.
So we get up there and it’s just piles and piles of boxes, boring clothes and stuff that looked like it had been put there in the mid-80s maybe? (this was 2010). But then we push all the boxes aside and there’s a wing of the attic that’s mostly empty and strangely clean. And right in the middle of it is a child-sized bed. With blankets on it. AAAAHHHHH
I wish I could say that once we opened the attic the evil was released into my apartment and crazy shit started happening, but the result was mostly that I spent a lot of time describing it at parties and then saying “you guyyys, I don’t think it’s a good idea to go up there if you’re drunk.”
I stayed in a supposedly haunted hostel in Dunedin, NZ (Chalet Backpackers). I did not experience any ghosts, just a couple having sex in the dorm room.
I also have TWO ghost hunting apps on my phone. They find a lot of ghosts.
What, you think ghosts don’t have loud sex?
Not quite a ghost story, but when I was about 10 two friends and I were playing with a Ouija board inside a sheet-fort (for atmosphere). We were all in Catholic school and the girl whose apartment it was, was particularly pious and freaked out by the whole getup. So I reached outside the fort and at the opportune moment tossed a stuffed flamingo at her.
With all the girl-screaming and subsequent running around I stubbed my toe and tore off like half the nail. The very Catholic mom saw it, saw what we were doing, and promptly blessed my toe with the bottle of Holy Water she had in the kitchen. You know. For First Aid emergencies.
Totally worth it for the look on my friend’s face though.
Are you serious about the nametags? I can bring some from work, if you are.
Mallory says, “yes that’d be amazing”. She is busy being haunted by her phone at the moment. I’ll steal the sharpies from work; 1 blue and 1 black.
Okiedoke. I had been planning on being fashionably late so as to not seem like an overeager nerd, but now that I have An Important Assignment maybe I’ll just be on time and save myself awkwardly walking around the block 10 times first. 😀
It’s not overeager. it’s respectfully punctual. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been the first to arrive and the last to leave.
I am hoping to force myself to not be a socially awkward hermit and go to the meet up, so perhaps I should also be punctual and tuck a sharpie behind my ear to signal other toast-folk.
If I remember correctly, Thieves also has a $5 whiskey+can-of-beer special featuring Bulleit whiskey. This. Is. Trouble.
That is one fancy beer and shot special.
The beer is probably PBR, though, so the bar is surely still making plenty of money off the deal.
Well, there goes my Tuesday morning, I guess.
If I remember correctly, Thieves also has a $5 whiskey+can-o-beer special featuring Bulleit. This. Is. Trouble.
Something is wonky when signing in, that is my excuse for repeating myself. Anyways I will try not to get too drunk but I’ve said that before and I never try THAT hard.
Here’s a ghost story.
My husband’s grandmother lives in huge, old house in rural Illinois. We go there sometimes for family events. The basement is only partially finished, and there is a small door that goes into a eaves-like storage area. The door is approximately 1/2 of the size of a normal door and the storage area is small and is only about 5 feet high, max.
He told me that, as kids, they would go into this storage area and play. They had set it up with some toys, including a table and those plastic magnetized letters. One day, he and his younger brother were playing down there and noticed that the letters had spelled out a question. He couldn’t remember what it said, but something simple like, “What is your name?” Anyway, they had this back-and-forth with whatever it was for a few days. Then, they lost interest in it and went to Chicago for a few days. When they got back to his grandma’s house, the toy play area was trashed- all of the toys and books they had dragged back there had been thrown around.
My husband tells me this story and my eyes are bugging out of my head, and I mention that it was clearly a ghost he was communicating with and then got pissed when they stopped playing with it. He and his brother had never thought of that possibility, even though they have no idea who it was and it hadn’t occurred to them at the time.
But, like, that was clearly a ghost… right?
That was most definitely a ghost.
I logged in just to say Ghost. No question.
You guys, I just mentioned this story to my husband and he DOESN’T REMEMBER IT AT ALL. He said that he didn’t remember the small door and the storage area. I have seen it with my own eyes! I feel like the ghost has some mind erasing powers. But, I cannot even begin to explain how bizarre and scary his grandma’s basement is.
WHAT
how could you forget being CLEARLY almost murdered by a ghost
I just logged in to say Erasing Powers. No question
Yeah, cue Shaggy from Scooby-Doo saying “G-g-g—GHOOOOOOOSSSSTTTT!”
Ok, so, this person I worked with lives in a small community where her family is quite successful, and since haters gonna hate, she says this means that witches are always trying to do things to them (and is why she has so many good creepy stories!). She was home one night with her two kids, when the local police came by.They said they had seen someone creeping around the corner of her house. He told her to stay inside while he and his partner checked it out. A few minutes later, the cop comes back with his partner, and he’s white as a sheet. He says his partner went around one way, he went the other, and he saw someone standing in the bushes near her kitchen window. When the figure turned around, it had no face just “a horrible thing” where a face would be. It turned the corner of the house just a second or two before his partner came from that direction, but his partner saw nothing. He said he had no idea what it was or what happened, but that maybe she shouldn’t stay there that night. She didn’t.
no no no no nonononon on ono no
I live like five minutes from the Winchester Mystery House which is more sad than creepy and actually pretty cool. I get freaked out easily though so I have never gone on one of the flashlight Halloween tours they do every year. I do go to the movies next door and across the street all the time though. No ghost sightings thus far.
I also used to live by the haunted Toys’R’Us in Sunnyvale. I shopped there once or twice but again, no ghosts. If you’ve got to be a ghost a toy store is probably a pretty sweet gig though.
I would come to the meet up but 1. Y’all are way too cool for me and 2. I have choir practice (see #1).
That Toys-R-Us is haunted? I did not know that…
I have a bunch of microfiction about horror in/around Chicago here: http://www.brigidkeely.com/secretchicago/ if people are interested.
My favorite personal ghost story involves the 2nd apartment my boyfriend (now husband) and I got. It was a real shit hole and if we’d been more experienced/wise we would never have rented it. PROTIP: if your landlord is too busy to show up to walk you through the place, your landlord is too busy to do shit like make sure the walls extend all the way from the floor to the ceiling, fix the heat in January, etc. We had a verbal agreement to do work around the apartment (it needed a LOT of work) in exchange for rent, but then the owner sold the building to someone else and we were paying full rent AND living in a shit hole. There were no lights in the dining room. We had to hang interior doors ourselves because they’d all been removed for some reason.
Anyway, we showed up for the very first time and the building manager wasn’t there and also wasn’t answering his phone. But the actual current tenant saw us through his window and came out and walked us through the apartment and talked about the neighborhood. It was near Western & Armitage & areas around it were being gentrified but most of the buildings on the street were still pretty run down. The guy who lived there mentioned that he was moving to Evanston (nice) and into a studio so his jerk friends would stop asking to crash as his place. The apartment we were looking at was technically a 2 bedroom, although the smaller bedroom was smaller than some walk in closets I’ve seen. There was a bathroom with a step up and an enormous pantry that apparently someone had turned into a child’s bedroom because there was a primed-over but still visible mural of Dragonball Z characters on the wall. The pantry window had been sided over, and windows in the kitchen and small bedroom had been nailed shut and then boarded over.
As I said, it was a shit hole, but my husband used to work as a general contractor so we figured we could do a lot of work on the place and make a nice home for ourselves. On our second look over, we talked to the property manager and signed a lease… which he had a hard time returning to us in a timely manner. For some reason we walked through the apartment again and the current tenant was still there. He asked if he could leave some furniture and pick it up later (he never picked it up) and casually mentioned that the apartment was hella haunted.
He said this like it was no big thing, kind of looking at us sideways like he expected us to laugh at him. Then he said that he’d never been hurt, but that’s why he’d taken all the doors down (what?).
So we moved in, painted a few of the rooms, discovered that the place had been sold and also that our kitchen sink’s water pipes weren’t connected but rather propped in place with plastic cups and bowls (WHAT), and settled down.
The “big” bedroom was long but narrow and our full sized bed barely fit in it, and there was no closet. We put my beautiful antique wooden bedframe into storage so we could clamber into bed over the foot of it, and tried to install some wire shelving on the far wall. This was made difficult by the large dent in the plaster and lathe wall. It looked to most people like someone had taken a bowling ball or something and slammed it into the wall. But it looked like something else to me.
I went to a really small and fairly fucked up private, religious school. The 7th grade teacher, a gross specimen of a dude who talked a LOT about how sexy Paula Abdul was and how much he liked her tits IN CLASS, had lost his shit one day and attacked a student, slamming the kid’s head into the chalk board. The school was in what used to be a convent, a building erected in the 1900s, with plaster and lathe walls. The “chalkboards” were just sections of wall painted with chalkboard paint and then framed and given a chalk ledge. The dent that kid’s head left in the wall was the same size and shape as the dent in our bedroom wall.
One could well argue that given the previous tenant’s comment and my personal experience of seeing what a head slammed into an old wall looks like, I was very primed to feel ~~SPOOKY~~ in the place. I’ve always had very vivid dreams, but while living there I had recurring dreams about a small boy with dark hair and eyes, about 4-6 years old. In the dream, I’d feel someone watching me, and I’d turn to find him standing by the side of the bed staring at me. Sometimes he didn’t have a mouth. I’d wake up, jerk over, and find nobody standing there. Duh. Of course. But over and over and over I dreamt about that kid.
Those dreams all stopped when we moved.
Oh God, gaagh. Where was this, so I may avoid it?
And thanks for linking to your blog! I’m a recentish transplant from London to Chicago, and around this time of year I like to read ghost stories. However, in London it was easy to find spooky stories set in surroundings like the one I was in, but I’ve struggled to find similar in Chicago. This was just what the doctor ordered, so thank you. (And btw, your second page is broken for me?)
I was in high school. It was around 6am and winter, I had started the car to warm it up and was heading back into the house for something. While I was walking in front of the car, I looked over the headlights. Sitting in the driver’s seat was this figure with the most hideous death’s head skull. And I had this overwhelming sense that this thing wanted me dead. I convinced myself I imagined it, and got in the car. During the drive, every time I looked in the rear-view mirror, I would see it in the backseat. The figure showed up quite frequently after that, almost always when I was driving at night or early am.
And then the car started acting up. Every single time I was near a ditch/ravine or crossing a bridge (and I lived in an area with a lot of them), the steering wheel would jerk hard, causing me to nearly drive over the edge. Then occasionally, when my foot was on the gas pedal, the brakes would slam on, always whenever there was someone close behind me, and how I didn’t get hit, I don’t know. One night coming into the house from the car, I felt this immense evil presence closing in from behind. I can only say it felt like if it caught up with me, I was dead. I ran inside as fast as I could (and then yelled for it to leave me alone once I was safely inside, cause that was going to work).
It always seemed to be situated around the car. But after several weeks of this (parents didn’t believe me/were no help), I was home alone with the radio on. I was in the next room, and suddenly hear the buttons beeping on the stereo as the radio stations kept changing, like someone was standing there pushing the buttons. This was an older stereo, and the only way you would get that beep, was if someone physically pushed a button–you didn’t get it if the scan was turned on, or were using the remote to change the stations. I was terrified to move–the room I was in, you had to go past the living room where the stereo was to get outside or to anywhere else in the house. And I did not want to see what was in there. For about an hour, the stations kept changing while I waited. And then I could hear footsteps like it was moving around the room. Finally, it stopped. And then whatever it was never came back. (I don’t know, maybe disappointed in the music selection?)
I’ve never had an active imagination, always been very practical, never believed in ghosts or the supernatural. Still not sure what I believe, all I know is it happened.
NO NO NO. I am so afraid of seeing things behind me in mirrors, and everything about this story is frightening.
WHY WOULD YOU GET IN THAT CAR
The first time it happened, I tried to convince myself it was shadows playing tricks on me, I was tired or imagining things–and when I finally got the courage to go back to the car, it seemed to be gone. After that, it was mostly necessity/desperation. I had to have a car to get from school to work (small rural town with no public transport, friends lived too far away to ask for rides, etc), and my parents while generally awesome thought I was just being silly and needed to suck it up and weren’t about to drive me all over because I thought the car was haunted. Plus, it didn’t seem quite fair to try to switch cars with them, “hey how about you take the angry dangerous demon car for the day, while I take the safe inanimate one?” Although in hindsight, maybe they would have finally believed me…
Man, my brain is basically the nope-topus gif right now. NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE.
my face is actually doing this D:
Man, you guys are just GREAT and I am loving all of your stories and am very sad I have no ghost stories of my own. All I wanted as a child was to experience just one really good haunting.
I am very scared to read the comments because I am a little baby who is terrified of the paranormal, but I probably will anyways…
Tomorrow, when it is light out and ghosts can’t hurt me.
During September, when I was seven, I was raking leaves outside of my house when I heard a noise. I looked up and I saw a little ghost girl running through the woods about 30 feet from me. I dropped the rake and ran inside so I could tell all the adults I could find. Eventually my dad and I went out to look for footprints, but didn’t find any.
There is no reason why there should be a ghost in those woods and no one else has ever even thought there might be one. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I certainly did that day when I was seven. I sometimes still wonder about what happened that day: it’s possible that it was something I made up, but I believed it so fervently at the time that it doesn’t seem likely. If I had invented it, I doubt I would remember all these years later; the memory is strong, detailed, and persistent. There were no other children in the neighborhood at that time, so it’s hard to believe that someone was testing out their Halloween costume and happened to run across my property.
A building at my old university is purportedly haunted. Supposedly, it’s one of the most haunted college campus buildings in the US. While I was working on the student magazine there, some of my coworkers tried doing a story about the haunting, half-jokingly performing a seance. They talked to the building manager for permission, but she gave them a stern “no”—no seances, no ghost, silly students need to stop with their silly rumors. Except that weekend, they ran into her at a bar. She was clearly a few drinks in, but she recognized them. She apologized for not letting telling them the truth. “Look, off the record? Administration tells us not to encourage rumors. But let me tell you, there is some weeeeeeeird shit that happens in that building.”
Not a real ghost story, I suppose. But I always thought it sounded like the start of a novel, and that doesn’t happen much in my life 😛
My family briefly (a little over a year) lived in a perfectly average house in a perfectly average middle-class neighborhood in my perfectly average Southern hometown. The house was only about 20 years old and wasn’t creepy at all at first glance. Nobody had died it in or anything.
However, some weird shiz happened in that house. My baby sister, who lived there from about age 1 and a half to 2 and a half, always talked about a “shiny man.” She would sometimes stop whatever she was doing to stop and stare at nothing; when asked what she was doing, she’d say that she was looking at “the shiny man.” One time she was laying in bed with my mom in the dark, and she reached up and pointed at the ceiling and laughed and said, “What’s the shiny man doing up there?” It was creepy as hell, especially because she never really demonstrated other imaginings. She never mentioned any other “imaginary” friends and hasn’t had any at all since then. She also didn’t mention him all the time, but only every few weeks when she’d stop and stare at nothing and say that the shiny man was there. My family initially thought he was imaginary; when it didn’t stop some of my family thought that maybe she was seeing her guardian angel. Eventually they decided that whatever was in that house was definitely not an angel.
My grandma thought something was wrong with the house from the moment we moved in there, but she was never specific about what made her feel that way. My stepdad also felt weird and unsafe in it, and he isn’t superstitious at all.
I personally didn’t like coming home from college because of stuff that would happen late at night. I would stay up until around 3 or 4 in the morning and eventually come downstairs to get a drink before finally heading to bed. I always got weird prickly feelings in the back of my neck whenever I passed by my sister’s room, and several times I heard voices whispering in it, even though she always slept with my mom and so no one was in there. One time I got enough courage to check it out, and a touch-activated toy on the other side of the room came on and started making noise, even though she was sound asleep in another room, like I said.
My oldest sister who was also in college and who shared a room with me at home said that she sometimes saw me standing quite still above my bed at night, looking down at my bed. Unless I was sleep-walking (no history of, and I’ve always shared a room), it was definitely not me. She could’ve been dreaming, I suppose, but she doesn’t have a history of recurring dreams.
As soon as we moved, my baby sister stopped mentioning the shiny man, and my mom forbade any of us to mention him. My mom seemed scared, and she implied that more happened than just what I’ve said here, but she won’t tell anyone about it.
AAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
I somehow find these stories creepier when they are in super normal, average row homes and not in like old creaky things where the realtor is fidgety and seems to not be mentioning that nobody lives in the house for more than a year or that people died there or whatever (like the realtor in the first season of American Horror Story, for example).
I know, right? My own ghost story (below) happened in the new wing of a hotel, not old or spooky at all. But who knows what history that site holds? Or the site of any average, newer house? History is long, and many many people have come and gone from places that show no (physical) trace of them.
I live in this little town in South Carolina and this is their ghost story (here’s the link to the story http://uniondailytimes.com/news/home_top-news/275… : “The ghost dog is said to roam up and down what is now Brazelmans Bridge Road, near the cemetery located on the site where Ebenezer Methodist Church stood from 1784-1974…the earliest sighting of the hound happened in 1855…William Hardy sent a young slave to the home of Dr. George Douglass to bring the doctor back to look at a sick man (Note: Both Hardy and Douglass were buried in the Ebenezer Church cemetery). The young boy claimed he saw the biggest, whitest dog he had ever seen, and it would not leave his path as it stared at him.
The website also states Dr. Jim Coefield saw the animal years later and was never able to give a rational answer for what he had seen. Dr. Coefield had a dog of his own, and the dog would walk with him until they reached Ebenezer cemetery. Then, the dog would whine and disappear into the woods until Coefield had passed “Happy Dog” territory, and only then would the dog rejoin his master.
There are numerous local residents who have also reported “Happy Dog” sightings.
Brenda Bogan said she grew up hearing stories about the hound from her father and grandmother, both of whom lived in the area, but she never believed them — until she saw it for herself.
“It was the day after Christmas in 1967, and my daddy and mama were riding with us,” Bogan recounted. “We came around a curve, and a big dog came around the bank. Its eyes looked funny, like they were glowing or something.”
i’m not much for believing in ghosts, but still a creepy story! this road is real rural and isolated, too, so i avoid it, in case of ghost dogs!
I’ll tell someone else’s ghost story. I’m a skeptic myself (and I highly recommend Oliver Sacks’ book “Hallucinations” on the topic of strange visions, etc.). However, somehow I like the idea of ghosts although they can stay out of my house, thanks.
When I was in my early 20’s, my roommate and I shared a flat with a lady in her late ’50’s whom I’ll call Jane. She’d taken us in as renters when we got kicked out of our illegal sublet; we stayed for a few months, probably past our welcome. At the time, Jane was an executive secretary to a partner in a Wall Street brokerage and quite good at it, too. She had a lot of side interests, let me move in with my kitty cat despite already having two of her own, and was just someone good to have in your life.
One day Jane and I got to talking about ghosts. She told me that when she was first married (1950’s-’60s), she and her then husband rented an apartment in a midtown pre-war building. At that time her infant/toddler son was still in a crib in their bedroom. One night, she woke up out of a sound sleep to see a mist hovering over her son’s crib. Out of the mist emerged a child’s face that looked back at her with utter hate. Then her husband woke up, saw the thing too, and stretched out to put his arm through it. At that point it disappeared.
The next day, Jane’s son nearly fell off the fire escape; he would have been killed by the fall. (Last I heard he was alive and well and living somewhere in California.)
As she told me this story, she was choking up with fear. So either she was trying out some serious acting moves or she’d really perceived what she told me. YOU BE THE JUDGE.
Happy Halloween, everybody!
I know, right? My own ghost story (below) happened in the new wing of a hotel, not old or spooky at all. But who knows what history that site holds? Or the site of any average, newer house? History is long, and many many people have come and gone from places that show no (physical) trace of them.
My college has a couple good ghost stories, but my personal favorite is the one my RA told me happened to her specifically in her own freshman year (but you know….who knows). In her first week there she went back to her room from lunch and tried to swipe into her room with her keycard. The green light clicked and the door handle turned, but she couldn’t get into the room; the door itself wouldn’t budge. She called her roommate and the roommate said she’d been out of the room since leaving for breakfast. My RA called security, thinking it was maybe a problem with her key. Security dude came and couldn’t do anything, either. The door simply would not move. Finally they got someone to break into the room through a window. When the security guy got in there, he saw that both full dressers of clothes had been pushed up against the door.
Apologies if you’ve already read this story on the ‘Pin, but I’ll reshare it anyway. I was staying in the new wing of a hotel in Tbilisi, Georgia, as part of a Peace Corps training event. I was in a room alone thanks to an odd number of female volunteers. That night, I turned out the light and rolled over to go to sleep when I felt compelled to roll back onto my back and open my eyes. Hovering over me was a vision of a white woman–just the head and upper torso. She was sort of featureless, but I somehow knew it was a woman. I just looked at it in bemusement and confusion and even reached my hand up, which passed right through the vision. Suddenly, sheer terror seized me and I jumped out of bed and ran to turn on the light. I was so scared that I didn’t turn on the light next to the bed, I ran all the way to the entryway light right by the door. When I turned around, the vision was gone. Needless to say, I stayed awake and with the light on the rest of the night.
In retrospect, I wonder if I had actually fallen asleep and it was a dream, but I never, ever dream that vividly or accurately about my actual surroundings. All I know is that nothing like that has ever happened to me before or since, but I really don’t know what to make of it.
Apologies if you've already read this story on the 'Pin, but I'll reshare it anyway. I was staying in the new wing of a hotel in Tbilisi, Georgia, as part of a Peace Corps training event. I was in a room alone thanks to an odd number of female volunteers. That night, I turned out the light and rolled over to go to sleep when I felt compelled to roll back onto my back and open my eyes. Hovering over me was a vision of a white woman–just the head and upper torso. She was sort of featureless, but I somehow knew it was a woman. I just looked at it in bemusement and confusion and even reached my hand up, which passed right through the vision. Suddenly, sheer terror seized me and I jumped out of bed and ran to turn on the light. I was so scared that I didn't turn on the light next to the bed, I ran all the way to the entryway light right by the door. When I turned around, the vision was gone. Needless to say, I stayed awake and with the light on the rest of the night.
In retrospect, I wonder if I had actually fallen asleep and it was a dream, but I never, ever dream that vividly or accurately about my actual surroundings. All I know is that nothing like that has ever happened to me before or since, but I really don't know what to make of it.
When I lived in Ottawa, we went on the Halloween ghost walk on year, and we went to the Old Jail, which is now a hostel. But the top floor is still kept the same as it originally was, so all the scary, dark, tiny, cells are in there. It’s super creepy up there. I did not like it at all. The noose is also still there, and it’s like, half inside the building? It’s hard to explain, it’s like, sort of like an elevator shaft within the walls, but there are openings so people could watch. And when we went to look at it, the latched boards that were there to hold the hanged person up came loose and banged really loudly and scared the crap out of EVERYONE. Still not sure if it was rigged up to do that or not.
When I lived in Ottawa, we went on the Halloween ghost walk on year, and we went to the Old Jail, which is now a hostel. But the top floor is still kept the same as it originally was, so all the scary, dark, tiny, cells are in there. It's super creepy up there. I did not like it at all. The noose is also still there, and it's like, half inside the building? It's hard to explain, it's like, sort of like an elevator shaft within the walls, but there are openings so people could watch. And when we went to look at it, the latched boards that were there to hold the hanged person up came loose and banged really loudly and scared the crap out of EVERYONE. Still not sure if it was rigged up to do that or not.