Ghosts!! Post your stories here, please.

[MagicalSilverKey]

Halloween isn't very far way. I would love to hear about your very own true-life ghostly encounters and inexpliclable eerie phenomena. No fiction, or urban legends, please. As the saying goes, "truth is often stranger than fiction"

Here is something that happened to me, in fall of 99.

I was out bicycling late one night and wanted a soda. It was around one o'clock in the morning, when I stopped at the pop machine in front a liquor store. This store is on the corner of an intersection, which is very busy during the daytime. However, at this time of night, there was no traffic, no pedestrians, no sign of life anywhere other than myself.

As I stood in front of the pop machine, trying to decide what I wanted, I was startled by a voice that shouted, "HEY!". I heard it come from behind, about 30 feet or so away. I whirled around, and as I did, I saw a black silhouette-like figure in the shape of a human, run behind a utility pole and vanish. This was a bit un-nerving, since people can't disappear behind poles. Wondering what, or who it was, I started to walk towards the pole to make sure it wasn't someone fooling around.

I made about 5 or 6 steps toward the pole, and saw there was nothing/no one behind it. As I made my next step in that direction, the payphone on the corner of the liquor store parking lot began to ring. It was was a very bizarre distorted sounding ring, almost as if the phone were underwater.

I walked over to the phone, and when I got directly in front of it, what I saw creeped me out even further. The receiver was hanging off of the hook, and broken in half, with the ear end missing! How was the phone ringing? What was the shadowy figure I saw seconds before? I toggled the hook of the phone, and it kept on ringing. All of the above happened within about 45-60 seconds. Pretty strange to be simple coincidence. I immediately got the hell out of there, and never did get my soda. The creepiest part of all, is that across the intersection, there are two cemeteries, which I wasn't even thinking about at the time. That didn't occur to me until after I had left the area.

That's not the spookiest thing I have had happen to me, but it's the most recent.

[Homer]

Sweet mother of GOD, it's 2:30 am, and I live in a haunted house, and you made me read that? You should be shot.

Ref: Demon molestation

--Tim

[Aglarond]

When I was probably 11 or 12, I was spending the night at a new friend's house. They had just moved to the area, and it was only like their 3rd week there. We were wathching TV real late in the living room when the living room lights flickered on and off a couple of times and we heard a noise. We looked around, but didn't see anything. So now, there's two 12 year old boys huddled in a corner waiting for something to attack them. It didn't happen and we went back to the movie. About 20 minutes passed and it happened again. This time we heard a noise on the stairs and immediately ran to the foot of the landing. We could see up the top half of the stairs when standing at the front door and we saw something at the top. We freaked. I didn't say anything, but Stephen screamed, waking both his parents up. They told us we were imagining things and to go back to bed. So now we're two 12 year old kids huddled in a corner in sleeping bags. A few noises later, Stephen just yelled 'stop it' and the noises stopped. We didn't get any sleep that night, but actually got used to wierd things happening around the house. His parents said it had to do with faulty wiring in the house, and they'd get around to fixing it when they got a chance. We never heard any noises in the middle of the night after that, but if you entered a dark room, a lot of times, the light would come on and then go off as you were leaving. It always freaked the shit out of me when it happened, but Stephen said he got used to it and he's developed a hbit of saying thanks everytime he left.

I'm still not exactly sure what I saw at the top of the stairs. We were never able to describe it to each other, because we really didn't know. About the best description I could give would be a 6 foot tall shadow like thing. Not particularly scary, but scary enough, considering it shouldn't have been there. Welp, that's my story. 100% true and the first time I've ever talked about this to anybody but Stephen.

Other than that, there was the time that there was a glowing ball of some sort about the size of a softball we were chasing. We were on our bikes at the edge of a field chasing a glowing ball through the air. The ball of light was actually over the field, so we could only get so close. We followed it peddling as fast as we could, then it just dropped out of site. It could have been a play of the light. It was probably about 11pm, and I recall a full moon. There's no telling for sure on that one, though. OK. Who's next?

[MagicalSilverKey]

[*]The Tell-Tale Heart Incident: circa 1978A.D.

When I was eight or nine years old, I awoke in the middle of the night, for reasons I do not recall. (most likely, I had to pee) While lying awake in bed, I became aware of a faint, odd, rhythmic sound. It was indistinct, at first, but quite noticeable. With each successive rhythm, the sound grew louder. About thirty seconds into this montage, I realized what the sound was, or at least, what it sounded like: a human heartbeat! The sound was coming from the basement, directly under my room!

I scurried out of my room, in terror, and awoke my mother, then told her about the sound. It was still beating, louder and louder. She got out of bed, went to the top of the basement stairs, and listened. She heard it too, and it gave her quite a startle. Of course, there was no way my mom, or I, was going to actually go downstairs and see what it was. My father was sound asleep, and we didn’t try to wake him up, since he wouldn’t have cared about the sound anyway, and more than likely would have become angry for waking him up for something so “trivial.” My mom and I each went back to bed, and went to sleep. How I made myself go back to sleep I will never know. I do however, seem to recall scrunching a pillow over my head so I couldn’t hear it so much.

We never did find out what the heartbeat sound was, or exactly where it had been coming from, in the basement. It only happened that one time. I have no siblings, so it could not have been a practical joke. The oddest part of this story is that my mother has nearly no recollection of the event. She recalls something spooky happening but not the details, thereof. Apparently, she seems to have blocked it out from her memory. This would make sense, as my mother is very uncomfortable with potentially paranormal phenomena.

[*] The Parasol Lady

This happened around the same time as the “Tell-Tale Heart” thing. I always used to sleep with my bedroom door open. My room opens into the kitchen. I was lying awake in bed one night, and I clearly saw the translucent figure of a woman, dressed in 1800’s style clothing walk past my door in the kitchen. She was wearing one of those big frilly/lacy hoop dresses, full-length gloves up to her elbows, wearing a big brimmed white hat, and carrying a white lace parasol over her shoulder. All of her clothing was white. I didn’t see her face clearly behind the big hat, but what I could see of her skin, was a pale blue color. I never saw her again after that. The odd thing is, my house is only 70 years old. So why would an 1800’s ghost be here?
[*]Count Dracula Visits My House

Again, I was about nine years old. In the summertime, my parents would let me stay up as late as I wanted, and I would often be up ‘til about midnight or one, watching the late movie on local TV.

One night I was watching a vampire movie, I seem to recall it may have been one of those Hammer/Christopher Lee ones. Anyways, the movie was getting too scary for me, so I wanted to turn the channel and watch something else. I got up, and turned the dial on the TV. Click, different channel, same movie. Try again, click, different channel, same movie. Mind you the channel couldn’t have been simply stuck, as this was one of the old turn-the-clicking-channel-dial TV sets. Ok, keep trying, click, click, click… all the same horror movie, and at the same part of the movie, on every channel! This happened during the scary part of the movie too! I couldn’t take it anymore, so I pushed the off button. Click, power off, movie is still playing! Click click click, it won’t turn off! I had to pull the plug from the wall, to make it go away!
[*]The Shooting Star

A lot of things happened to me when I was around 8-9 years old, and this, was one of the scariest of all for me as a child.

It was summer, and my bed was aside the window. I was lying awake looking out at the stars, when I saw a shooting star fleeting across the sky. I had never seen one, so I excitedly got up to look out the window at it. That’s when IT happened…

The windows of my room face the neighbors’ house, which is only 12 feet away. The neighbor’s house has a room on the rear corner, with two very large plate glass picture windows. These windows are about 4 feet high x 3 feet wide and do not open. At the time, the people who lived there never drew the curtains on these windows, so one could easily look in and see nearly the whole room. There was a rocking chair sitting directly in front of the window facing my room.

As I attempted to see my shooting star, and make a wish on it, I noticed something moving in that window. I looked over and sheer terror struck me. The rocking chair was rocking by itself! These people had no kids, no pets, and there was no way it the wind, as the windows did not open. There were no lights on over there, so I knew the people were probably asleep. I stood and watched the chair continue to rock by itself, for almost a whole minute, before I ran away.

I ran to my parents’ room, and woke up my mother. I told her about the chair rocking itself, and she got up and looked. It was still rocking! We each went back to bed after my mom calmed me down.

The next day, I made my mom ask the neighbors about it. They said they didn’t know what it was, or could’ve been, and that they were in bed when it happened. No one would talk about it beyond that. I’m not sure why this incident scared me so badly, but it did. Maybe because it was my mom saw it too, and I knew I wasn’t seeing things.
[*]The Warehouse

Fast forward about eight years, to when I was about 16-17. I have always had a thing for bicycling late at night, and this was around the time I first began doing so.

I was riding around late one night, in a neighborhood I wasn’t familiar with, when I found this warehouse. There was nothing particularly interesting about it, other than the fact I had never known it was there.

This building is a square-shaped structure, somewhat resembling a horseshoe. In the center of the “horseshoe” is a large parking lot. Curious to see what was inside the lot, I rode my bike inside. Immediately after crossing the threshold, I began to feel very uneasy. I saw a window with a light on inside. The window was painted over or covered with something, but light shone through. I was going to go try to look through it, but my uneasiness, turned to sheer fear for my life. Something inside of my gut said, “DON’T go up to that window! Get the fuck out of here, NOW!” And I did just that. I hopped on my bike and pedaled as hard as I could. It would be about a week later, before I found out why I had this horror strike.

A week or more had passed, and I was watching the local TV news. They were doing an expose on local occults. They named the very warehouse I had been at, as “Satan’s Hollow” and that it was home to one the largest and most notorious of the Satanic cults in the area. No wonder I had such a feeling of terror strike me. If I had went up to that window, and been caught by one of the cultists, who knows what would’ve/could’ve happened to me!
[*]Spot

When my parents separated, my mom and I went and lived at my grandmother’s house for 4 years. After the divorce was finalized, my mom and I got to move back home, and dad went to an apartment.

It was after we returned back home, that Spot showed up. No, Spot is not a dog, cat, or any other pet. What is Spot? Well, keep reading.

Ever have that feeling that you’re being watched? The feeling is so intense it almost penetrates your soul? Well when you get that feeling in our house, you know Spot is nearby.

I first noticed Spot while lying in bed one night. I was laying there, belly-flopped, in bed, thinking about stuff, when suddenly I got “that” feeling. It made me very uncomfortable. I rolled my eyes, to look behind me, and I saw Spot. Up near where the wall and ceiling meet, looking down on me, were two blank white spots. It is almost like the cartoons where the lights go out and only the characters eyes are still visible. They are eyes. There are no irises or pupils. Just blank white spots, the exact distance apart of a humans eyes, and same size. It vanished as soon as it knew I had seen it. Spot likes to play games. He likes hide and seek. If he knows, that you know he is there, and have seen him, he immediately vanishes every time.
I didn’t think much of it at first, nor did I say anything about it. Spot would visit me from time to time, uninvited, for many years to come. It wasn’t until about a year after my initial sighting of Spot, that I talked about him. I mentioned it to my mom, the feeling of being watched, and seeing the eyes behind me. She admitted that she too, had encountered the same thing, and that Spot had visited her as well. She even said the same thing about Spot showing up at the wall/ceiling point.

I haven’t seen Spot for years, now. That’s fine with me. I keep a night light on in my room, even though I am 30 yrs old, to keep Spot away. He only shows up in total darkness. The other bad thing about Spot is, if you talk about him in the house, he will show up shortly thereafter. Therefore, mom and I make a point of not discussing Spot in the house.

I have many more stories to tell, but I digress. One in particular, is so frightening, that I try to discuss it as little as possible, however, I am surprised to hear that others have had similar experiences.

[struuter]

MSK! You're back!! Hurray! Big hugs, buddy.

Oh my, but you and I could scare the pee-waddin' out of each other. I've only had a handful of supremely spooky stuff happen to me, but I've heard so many cool stories from other people throughout my life.

When I was in college the first time, I roomed in a huge, old, spooky dorm just dripping with atmosphere. It was great. The stories I could tell...

But one thing you might be interested in happened just down the hall from me. A girl had a room to herself. Not because of her--she was nicer than a person has a right to be--but because of the weird stuff going down in her room. Why didn't she move? She felt safe.
Okay, here's some stuff that I witnessed myself.
We'd go for lunch with the girl--she had the only key to the room--and the window would be down/locked. We'd come back--yup. Window open. This happened nearly every day. Sucked in the winter, I can tell you.
She'd turn off the light in her walk-in closet. Within moments it'd be back on. Kept her up for weeks until she just learned to leave it on at night.
We'd go out somewhere with her and upon returning there'd be an impression of a person on the upper bunk. She was so freaked out that she MADE us check the bed before we'd leave so she wasn't imagining it when it appeared upon our return.
My roommate didn't believe in any supernatural stuff--perfect person to have around in this type of situation. She couldn't figure it out either. We even went so far as to have the maintenance man come and look at the window to see if it was doing it by itself...nope. He just smiled and said that stuff like this happened occaisionally. Thanks, big guy. We'll sleep real peaceful-like now...
We thought that maybe someone was breaking in and fiddling around just to scare her. We were on the third story so no one could come in through the window. As for the door...we did all kinds of stuff like putting cereal on the floor inside the door so we could tell if someone broke in. Nothing.
Aside from being 'visited' all the time, the girl didn't feel the least bit endangered.
Other stuff happened too, but this is going on WAY too long. sorry for the length.

[DuhMan]

OK.. let me see if I can remember my story correctly. This might be kind of long, but bear with me.. I'll keep it as short as possible...

A bunch of us are hanging out at my cousins house.. there were 5 of us, three of my cousins and a friend who was hanging out. I was about 13 at the time, and spending the night at my cousins on the weekend. It was the middle of winder, and the snow had just fallen. The group of us (all guys) were sitting around watching Tales from the Crypt.. a silly horror show on HBO.. im sure most of you have probably stumbled across it at one point or another. The show ends and we continue to talk about "scary stuff".. much like this thread. There had been some other weird occurrences in this house before, and we were basically rehashing all these old stories.

Time rolls on and we all begin to get tired.. two of my cousins slept in one room, on bunk beds, and my other cousin (the oldest) had is own room next to that. I was sharing the bottom bunk with one of my cousins that night as well. All of us in the one room go to bed, leaving just my one cousin and friend in the living room. Off to dreamland I go...

About two hours later I awake to find the lights on and my oldest cousin standing the doorway arguing with the cousin I was sharing the bed with. He was begging him to get up and come out in the living room. He swore that something was knocking on the walls. Mind you, the apartment is on the 2nd floor, and this is physically impossible. I wake up and decide i will help him.. as this argument progresses, we all hear the knock on the wall.. several times from the living room.. very eerie sound.

We go out and look around, we hear it a few times, always a few feet away from where we are standing at the time. At this point, one of my cousins is still sleeping.. and after checking outside for footprints in the snow.. we thought someone might be throwning snowballs at the house.. we decided we should wake my other cousin. We all are standing around him.. shakin him vigorously trying to wake him up.. he partially awakens, and we proceed to tell him the story.. he thinks we are all full of shit and basically blows us off to go back to sleep.. at that EXACT moment, came the loudest knock.. right on the wall next to my cousin's head. I have never seen a human get out of bed faster in my life.

The noises stoped after that, and we all eventually went back to bed.. but very little sleep was gotten that night.

[SoMoMom]

I have had some experiences that are so freaky, I don't tell anyone because I don't want people to think I'm crazy. But here are a couple of tame experiences.

I was a teenager (14-ish) at my friend's house. (Her brother had died, but she told me these weird things happened before he passed and they always blamed it on their grandpa. Personally, I think the way her brother always teased me, that if it was a ghost it was him. It doesn't really matter.) When I knocked on the front door, my friend called for me to let myself in. I was walking from the living room to my friend's bedroom at the end of the hall, about 10 feet. As I stepped into the hallway (which I had traveled hundreds of times before) a picture fell off of the wall. "Hmm, that's odd." I bent over and picked it up and hung it back. My friend came to her doorway facing straight down the hall so she had a perfect view. I walked the few steps to her doorway and as I did pictures fell off of the wall, each one in front of me, so that I COULDN'T have knocked them off. When the second picture fell, my friend told me to just leave the picture and just keep coming, so I left all of the rest. (This happened much faster than it sounds by telling it.) I got to my friend and she looks down the hall and says, "Grandpa, you leave her alone. She's not used to that stuff." I saw other weird stuff happen in that house, but that's the only one that happened to me.

Then: When my daughter was born, she constantly looked over my shoulder at something while I had her on the changing table. Then when she could smile, she would look the same way and smile. Then when she started babbling she would look the same way, smile and babble "Bobo". Then when she could point she would look, smile, "Bobo", and POINT right over my shoulder. As she developed a baby-sized sense of humor, sometimes this Bobo was funny, "Bobo funny". (In this house the cat would also look like she was staring at something that we couldn't see but that was before SoMoKid was born.) My husband and I would just say, "Hi, Bobo." I mean, it doesn't hurt to be friendly, just in case. Sometime after this was happening, I got an idea of who Bobo might be. I found out that my dad's oldest brother, who had died shortly after graduating from high school, had ridden the bus with my husband's grandmother. He was older than her and always saved a seat on the bus for her (and from the look on her face when she was telling me this I think she had a crush on him). If he also had a crush on her, he might be drawn to the child that is his grandniece and her great-grandchild. Well, it's a theory.

Also: When my father was on his death bed he would talk to people that weren't there. That could be a side effect of the pain medication, but we would all look in the direction that he was, just in case there was something to see.

[Aglarond]

This has reminded me of something that happened to a friend of mine recently. When he told me this story, he was really freaked out, so I may not have all the details right. He was over at a friend's house and they got into what I believe was a theological discussion. He was arguing with her(I don't know the details or what her beliefs are), and she asked if he wanted her to prove it. He real smuggly said he would and sat down on the couch. Suddenly, all the lights in the apartment went out, leaving only a little bit of light shining through the blinds over a big window. There was just enough light that he was able to make out the girl he was arguing with in the middle of the floor, somebody crouching in the corner, and green(I believe) lights appearing and disappearing arounf the room. The thing crouched in the corner looked up at him and he saw a light reflection out of both eyes. Upon seeing this, he bolted as fast as he could toward the door. He ran outside and saw that his truck was covered in dew, even though there was almost no humidity and no other cars were covered. He jumped in his truck and realized he couldn't see out of any of his windows. He turned on the wipers and cleared a spot to see. He suddenly felt like something else was watching him, and he flew out of the parking lot as fast as he could. He finally decided he was safe. He leaned over to roll down the passenger side window so he could see out, and saw writing across it. He decided to leave it and show it to me. He found me at a coffee house I used to frequent and showed me the markings. I recognized most of them. I wrote them down and went to my apartment to grab a couple of books on runes. I couldn't figure out their origin. I gave up after a while and told him to go see his mom. She alway's been real good at figuring out what these things mean. To this day, neither he nor his mom will tell me what they found, but he seemed better after talking to her. Speaking of which, I think I'm going to go nag him about it again. I'm really curious. I'll also check the details of my story to make sure they're correct.

[Rosebud]

There's a small porch on the second floor of my parents' house. It used to stretch all the way across the front of the house, but at some point most of it was covered and used to make the master bedroom a little bigger. My mom's lived in the neighborhood her whole life, and was friendly with the family who lived there before she bought the house.

One of the girls in that family insisted that several times she'd seen a "Lady in Gray" at the end of the upstairs hallway, right by the door to what remains of the porch. And, of course, rumor has it that a previous elderly female resident had died out there, in her rocker. The girl, my mom says, was really unwilling to talk about what she saw.

I once woke up in the middle of the night to what looked like a male figure, also in mostly gray, dressed like some kind of Revolutionary War soldier, tri-corner hat and all. He was standing next to my bed with a hand held out toward me... I screamed and he was gone. I've always kind of written that one off as a dream, though I have no idea why that kind of image would have been floating around in my head. My parents do live in a fairly historic area of New York State but at the time I had no recollection of having recently studied or otherwise discussed that era. At any rate, it was super creepy at the time.

[magdalene]

Good thread, MSK! You are also very brave to post in this bastion of skepticism.

Right after I graduated from college, I lived in this old house on O Street in D.C. with 3 other roommates. Our living room, kitchen, and my room were on the ground floor. You had to cut through my room to get to the stairs to the basement, where the 2 other bedrooms were. We had a bead curtain hung across the bottom of the stairs, because there was no door. The curtain was a great privacy warning measure - you would hear the bead curtain and know someone was coming up the stairs so you had time to warn them if you were in a state of undress or flagrante delicto, but if you were asleep it wouldn't wake you up the way knocking would.

Admittedly, 2 of my housemates did A LOT of drugs. So their credibility on sights & sounds was a little suspect. They'd lived in the house for 2 years, and claimed that during Prohibition it had been a speakeasy and a brothel, that someone had been killed there, and that sometimes they heard knocking in the walls that had no discernable origin. They claimed it was a ghost, and I would come home to find them huddled on the couch or talking to "the ghost", but I would never hear anything.

One night I was in my room and my housemate Angie was in her room downstairs. I heard the bead curtain move at the bottom of the stairs, and called out a greeting to Angie. A few minutes go by, I can still hear the beads rattling, but no Angie. I got up to look, the strands of the curtain were swinging as if someone had just passed throught them. But no one was there. I figured Angie had started to come upstairs but changed her mind, so I sat back down.

A little while later, I hear the sound of something coming through the bead curtain again. I got up to look, and the beads were swinging as if someone had just passed through, but no one was there. By this time I was getting a little annoyed and weirded out, so I walked downstairs to Angie's room and knocked on the door. She was in bed, watching tv, under the covers. I asked her if she'd started to come upstairs a few times and mentioned the curtain - she looked at me funny and said "I thought I heard it, but I thought it was you coming down here." I sat on her bed and we watched TV for a little while, and after maybe 15 minutes, we BOTH heard the curtain move as if someone was passing through it. We tiptoed over there, watched the beads swing back and forth, looked at each other, shrugged. It went on all evening, and she slept in my roommate's bed in my room that night.

We had no open windows in the house (air conditioning) and there was no one else home, doors were locked. Her thinking was that the knocking ghost had discovered the joys of 1960's decor and was playing around with the curtain for fun. I still don't know what happened.

[Sunshine]

The guest bedroom at my Aunt's house has a ghost. The bedroom used to be my cousin's when he was a kid, but after all the stuff that happened to him in there, they moved him out of the room and now it is only used when someone stays over.

The first thing that happened was that members of the family would see, out of the corner of their eye, a shadowy man come out of the room and go down the hall and into another room. They never caught him directly, it was always sort of a "who was that?" This started 25 years ago and still happens. A lot of times when the whole family was downstairs, they could hear what sounded like someone walking down the hall and then trotting down the stairs.

One night, my cousin went to bed with a bowl of ice cream. When he was done eating it, he set the bowl on his side table and went to sleep. The whole family awoke in the middle of the night to a loud crash. When his parents rushed in to his room, they found the ice cream bowl shatterd on the floor across the room and ice cream dripping down the wall across from the bed. His sister said she had seen the "man" going into his room that night before she went to bed.

My cousin used to always suddenly wake up at night, feeling as if he were being watched--and he would see white eyes staring out at him from a pitch black spot.

The last straw was that, a lot of mornings, he would wake up with bleeding scratches down his cheeks. They assumed at first that he was doing it in his sleep, so they put mittens on him at night but he still woke up with the scratches. They figured he must be taking the mittens off while sleeping and not know it (he usually woke up with them on), so then they tried duct-taping the mittens to his wrists. He still kept waking up with the scratches so they finally moved him out of that room.

Nowdays, when people stay there they often report the white eyes thing and having something broken when they wake up, and of course, seeing the "man" walking from room to room.

Needless to say, I've never been an overnight guest there.

[Vestal Blue]

1978, a week before Christmas, late in the evening over in England. I was working night shift in the Jet shop, which was next to the perimeter fence. Across the field from the fence was an old boarded up country church, complete with small graveyard. I was taking a smoke break and looking out at it when I saw a light in the window of the steeple.
It was largish, and dim yellow. It move from right to left, and then back again, before winking out.

The next day (Saturday), I drove out to it and walked around. It really was a pretty little church, but it was tightly boarded up, and there were no footprints or tire tracks but mine around the place in the snow, with none having fallen the previous night.

As an interesting side note, I walked through the graveyard, looking at the headstones, and the oldest one I saw in there was dated in the late 1700's. Guess that church stood there awhile!

[RonA]

This happened when I was about 11-12-13-ish. I was asleep in my bed and I woke up when someone sat on my bed. I could feel the bed move as they sat down and I could hear the bed creak. I rolled over, thinking my mom or dad must have come into the room for some reason. As I rolled over, I saw a man sitting at the foot of my bed, and it wasn't my dad. He then turned, looked at me and grinned. I was too scared to scream, so I threw the covers over my head. When I looked, he was gone, but I could see several pairs of eyes looking at me from the darkness.

[MagicalSilverKey]

It's nice to know that I am not the only who has a "Spot" in thier house. However, I hope that my Spot doesn't learn any new tricks from Sunshine's. If anything that weird starts happening, I am gonna freak out.

"I see dead people." - Cole Sear, The Sixth Sense kid

[HeyHomie]

Wow, my "encounters" are tame compared to what you people have gone through!

The Hornet Spook Light

This is one of those inexplicable balls of light that appears in a certain locale and behaves as if it's guided by some sort of intelligence. This particular one is near Joplin, MO. Saw it with a group of friends one night while I was in college. Very eerie, but I wouldn't say I was terrified or anything. Anyhoo, my best estimation is that I was about 200 yards away from it. It looked similar to what a lantern might look like from that distance. It hovered on one side of the road for a few seconds, slowly crossed the road and arced downward then back up, and then hovered at the other side for a few seconds, and then repeated the whole process. It moved slightly faster than a man carrying a lantern might have moved.

And no, I don't think it was a man carrying a lantern, because said lantern would have illuminated the man carrying it, and I saw no such thing.

It's still there to this day. I ran a thread about it last fall. I don't feel like doing a search right now, though. It's entitled "Spooky Lights Near Joplin, MO" if you're interested.

The Susan Laurence Dana House

This is a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house in Springfield, IL. The woman who had it built, Mrs. Dana, went a little loopy toward the end of her life and got into spiritism and such. Often she hosted séances and other such goings-on in the house.

The house is now a tourist attraction, and many people report feeling weird there. No sightings or anything, just "very vaguely creepy" feelings. A local psychic was brought in once and she refused to go into the library (where all the séances and such were held). I've been there twice, and each time I felt like I was being watched. Of course, I probably was being watched, as that place is chock full of priceless Victorian artifacts and I'm sure I had several pairs of eyes on me.

IMHO, there's an extremely bad mojo in that place. It's too bad, because the house is really beautiful.

My House

It's a 1997 mobile home, so there's hardly been any time for any presence to inhabit it. That doesn't seem to deter my cat, however. He loves to sit in one particular corner, stair intently at the walls, and whine and scratch at them. I'd like to find out what it is that's got my cat so interested....

My $.02

[rjk]

And of course, there's this:

http://www.cwcm.net/vegas/rjk1.jpg

You've all been to http://www.cwcm.net/vegas/, I hope.

[ladybug]

I don't think I can top anything in this thread, but I did have one experience when I was in high school.

I was about 16 or 17 when it happened (can't remember exactly) and I was home from school because I was sick. I left my room and went into the kitchen, and out of the corner of my eye I saw a white light in the shape of a person run from my sister's room and disappear a split second later. I was pretty scared at the time because I was by myself, and it was hours before I could get myself to go back to my room. Later on I dismissed it as something I had imagined.

A few years later, my brother and I started talking about haunted houses and ghosts for some reason. I started telling him that I thought I had seen one in the house (I hadn't told anyone about it before). Before I could tell him any of the details, he asked me if it was the one in our sister's room. I asked him what he had seen, and he described a white or light-colored shadowy figure running through the hallway.

We stopped talking about ghosts after that.

One more thing: several relatives have reported seeing my grandfather watching them around their homes shortly after he died. My mom says that she and my aunt were in the kitchen (different house from first story) and they both looked up and saw my grandfather standing in the hallway, watching them. My brother and my cousin claim that while they were playing in my aunt's house about 15 years ago, they saw my grandfather watching them through the window.

I probably won't get much sleep tonight after reading this thread. It's times like this that I really hate living alone.

[Yossarian]

About 14 years ago, my family was visiting Palacios, Texas, where I was born and from whence my family originally came. We'd dined one night in the "big city" of Bay City and were heading back to Palacios when my dad decided to take a detour to a cemetary near Blessing where his mother and sister were buried. We were in two vehicles--my dad, my little brother (then 12), and myself were in the lead in a pick-up; the rest of my family was in the car behind us. As the truck made the turn into the cemetary, I saw in the headlights the figure of a woman wearing a long green dress cross the street. I shook my head, blinked, and she was gone. Neither my father nor my brother said anything, so I figured that it was just an illusion and tried to forget about it.

We pulled up to my grandmother and aunt's plots for my parents to pay their respects and the rest of us (another brother and a sister were in the car behind along with a couple of other relatives) just wandered about the cemetary. It was dark, and I decided to screw with my little brother that was sitting beside me by spooking him with what I'd seen.

I walked up to him and quietly said, "David, I don't want to scare you, but just as we turned into the cemetary..." David interrupted me: "Did you see her, too? The lady in the long green dress that was crossing the road?" [Note: I'm getting goosebumps right now remembering that night!] We grabbed each other, ran back to the truck, jumped in the cab, and waited quite impatiently for everyone else to finish up and get us back to Palacios.

And that's my story of The Haunting of Blessing, Texas. Swear to thermodynamics, it's totally true and David and I still tell the exact same tale.

[racinchikki]

Well, I have two little tales to share... one substantiated, the other quite possibly a figment of my youthful imagination. I'll let you decide about the second one.
[list][*]The Fairly-Guaranteed One: circa 1988
When I was born in 1983, my parents and sister, six at the time, brought me home to live in a haunted house. Since I was a thought, fetus, or baby during most of the happenings, I can't tell you all the details -- my mother and sister don't feel like sharing. But I can tell you what I do remember.

I was about 5 years old and all the racinchikki family womenfolk had gathered around the tv in our living room to watch "ALF". Suddenly my sister, then 11 or 12, turned down the volume on the tv and silenced my objections (read "whining"). "Listen," she said. "She's at it again." Now, I remember at first thinking that Tina was talking about the dog, Sheba, but our friendly ol' husky was lying at my feet with her ears straight back, looking around. Then, as I watched, Sheba looked straight towards the hallway that connected the living room to the kitchen. So did my mom, sister, and I. Something vaguely blue ran through the kitchen and into a wall. I was too small and curious to be really scared, until I realized that my sister seemed quite frightened, and then I was almost scared to tears.

Asked around once I was old enough to understand what the hell had happened (and long after we had moved out of the house), and it turns out that was a common occurence -- not really nightly, at least not that they noticed, but that was neither the first nor the last time that vaguely-blueness ran through our kitchen.

What bothers me about it is that the house was built in the 70's and my parents moved into it in 1981. As far as any of us are aware, there was never any death or other amazing emotional traumas that would logically lead to the advent of a vaguely blue runner. Of course, the area it's located in has been settled since the 1640s, so it's possible that somewhere in the 360 years that people have lived on the property my old house is now located in and older settlers from before it was built caused the vague blueness.

In any case, I haven't been back there since I was 6.
[*]The Not-So-Certain One: 1987
My father is a trucker. When I was a little girl and we lived in the above-mentioned house, he was a long-hauler, and would be away for weeks at a time. When I was between 4 and 7, the highlight of my year was the two weeks during summer vacation when Daddy would take me with him in his sleeper truck and we'd live on the road together for one of his runs down the coast.

I only became really homesick once, around the first weekend of that first-ever trip. I was desperate to see Mommy, but because of the logbook and timing, we couldn't even pull over to let me call her at a payphone in a truckstop or something. Finally (and I don't know where he got THIS idea) my dad handed me a fake plastic car phone. (How do I know it was fake and plastic? He had it up until two years ago. Oh yeah, and at that time we were WAY too poor to afford a car phone.)

At any rate, my dad handed me this toy phone and tells me to talk to Mom on it. I, of course, believed him it was a real phone and talked into it. And was answered. Now, it wasn't Mom, but it was a woman, and we had a short conversation. Dad remembers sitting there wondering who the hell I was talking to.

Ok, so I was four, and maybe it was just my imagination. But that's the way I remember it.

[racinchikki]

Well, I have two little tales to share... one substantiated, the other quite possibly a figment of my youthful imagination. I'll let you decide about the second one.
[list][*]The Fairly-Guaranteed One: circa 1988
When I was born in 1983, my parents and sister, six at the time, brought me home to live in a haunted house. Since I was a thought, fetus, or baby during most of the happenings, I can't tell you all the details -- my mother and sister don't feel like sharing. But I can tell you what I do remember.

I was about 5 years old and all the racinchikki family womenfolk had gathered around the tv in our living room to watch "ALF". Suddenly my sister, then 11 or 12, turned down the volume on the tv and silenced my objections (read "whining"). "Listen," she said. "She's at it again." Now, I remember at first thinking that Tina was talking about the dog, Sheba, but our friendly ol' husky was lying at my feet with her ears straight back, looking around. Then, as I watched, Sheba looked straight towards the hallway that connected the living room to the kitchen. So did my mom, sister, and I. Something vaguely blue ran through the kitchen and into a wall. I was too small and curious to be really scared, until I realized that my sister seemed quite frightened, and then I was almost scared to tears.

Asked around once I was old enough to understand what the hell had happened (and long after we had moved out of the house), and it turns out that was a common occurence -- not really nightly, at least not that they noticed, but that was neither the first nor the last time that vaguely-blueness ran through our kitchen.

What bothers me about it is that the house was built in the 70's and my parents moved into it in 1981. As far as any of us are aware, there was never any death or other amazing emotional traumas that would logically lead to the advent of a vaguely blue runner. Of course, the area it's located in has been settled since the 1640s, so it's possible that somewhere in the 360 years that people have lived on the property my old house is now located in and older settlers from before it was built caused the vague blueness.

In any case, I haven't been back there since I was 6.
[*]The Not-So-Certain One Which I Posted In Very Vaguely Creepy Already, So Skip It If You've Heard It: 1987
My father is a trucker. When I was a little girl and we lived in the above-mentioned house, he was a long-hauler, and would be away for weeks at a time. When I was between 4 and 7, the highlight of my year was the two weeks during summer vacation when Daddy would take me with him in his sleeper truck and we'd live on the road together for one of his runs down the coast.

I only became really homesick once, around the first weekend of that first-ever trip. I was desperate to see Mommy, but because of the logbook and timing, we couldn't even pull over to let me call her at a payphone in a truckstop or something. Finally (and I don't know where he got THIS idea) my dad handed me a fake plastic car phone. (How do I know it was fake and plastic? He had it up until two years ago. Oh yeah, and at that time we were WAY too poor to afford a car phone.)

At any rate, my dad handed me this toy phone and tells me to talk to Mom on it. I, of course, believed him it was a real phone and talked into it. And was answered. Now, it wasn't Mom, but it was a woman, and we had a short conversation. Dad remembers sitting there wondering who the hell I was talking to.

Ok, so I was four, and maybe it was just my imagination. But that's the way I remember it.

[elelle]

Oooohh, Yikes, I've got three vivid ones:

1: At age eleven, my family lived in a big old house in Maine. One day I was home alone (in a family with six kids an unusual occasion), and heard footsteps in the attic. Being young and stupid, I went up to see what was up. I lifted the door and sat up there; nothing for a bit, but then I saw something that terrified my little butt for quite awhile. A pretty concrete spinning wheel (as in the apparatus to spin wool) appeared, and in back of that, a woman, bluish, almost in negative, who was speaking, directly to me, but I couldn't hear what she was saying. I'm a wuss, so I fled downstairs and outside 'til my family came home. It flipped me out so badly that I refused to ever be home alone in that house.

A few months later, I started to spend time visiting an elderly woman down the street, Mrs. Hilton. Turned out she had lived in that house in her youth. I told her what I had seen, and she seemed particularly intrigued with the fact that I had seen a spinning wheel. She said that there was a real spinning wheel stored in the attic when she lived there, and that she'd also heard footsteps in the attic, but had never never been brave enough to go look. I dunno, sounds like a cliche story, but really flipped my little butt out at the time.

2: I was going through a rather rough adolescence, and living in an apartment with four roomates. I was in bed, nodding off, but wrestling with all the shit you wrestle with at 21. All of a sudden, a calm came over me, and I made a very conscious vow to accept whatever was my lot in life. The next part is quite vividly embedded in my mind: ( and I was very sober) African drums began to beat, in an incredibly powerful sonata. At the point they were most intense, I saw a blindingly white *whatever* descend through the ceiling, yowling down through the floor. It made a Whooooshing sound. Again, I'm a wuss. So I ran to turn on the lights, and then ran back to pull the covers over my trembling self. At that moment, one of my roomates roused himself out of bed and opened my door. " What the hell is wrong, L, you look like you've seen a ghost!" His exact words. And here's the weird part: for two months afterwards, the door to the apartment, bein' in the South, left open for air, would often slam shut, with *footsteps* heard by all, leading toward it. "*L*s ghost", they'd laugh, but I hated it, and begged it to stop. It did.

3: My husband's grandfather died a few years ago, right after Christmas. We made the trek up to Chicago for the funeral. We stayed in Papa's house for the visit, and D and I stayed in the bedroom the boys were raised in. Late the night before the funeral, I felt a strong tug on my big toe. I ignored it, but a few moments later had the same feeling that my big toe was being jiggled. I sat up, and had a strong feeling of Papa in the room. I got a message, loud and clear, even though he wasn't my blood relation.

I didn't say anything about that experience during the funeral. On the way home, in a restaurant in southern Illinois, I told D about the toe-tugging, He got the most misty-eyed I'd ever seen him. After a long silence he said, "That's EXACTLY the way Papa would always wake us up as children; He'd jiggle our big toe." He, nor anyone in his family, had told me that before. It was a complete surprize.

Yipes, and Yipes again. All I can say, MSK, is it's a word weirld, and perhaps there's something to the Strange Attractor theory. I've seen enough to have the generosity of plausability.

[chique]

Ugh!!

I got about 3 posts into this thread and now I have to stop - shit like this freaks me out when it's dark outside. I'm coming back during daylight hours

[MamaHen]

My most frightening experience came just a week or two ago. My husband was up in WA on a buisness trip and me and the kids were here alone. The day we took my husband to the airport we found the kids window screen on the floor on their room. Now we live in a 2 story house and my kids were spending the night with my folks. Their window has an alarm on it that goes off if the window opens and it didn't go off at all during that night but there was the screen in the floor with the window still locked and closed. I didn't think much about it and went ahead and made sure every window in the house was shut and locked. After I dropped my husband off and picked up the kids I came home and my bedroom window was wide open and it's screen was in the floor. I fixed the window thinking I might just be getting senile at 28 and went out to the garage to unpack the car. Both the kids were sleeping in the frontroom. Well sitting in the pasenger seat of my car was the screen from my kids bedroom window. I know for a fact it wasn't in there just minutes before while we were out and no one else is in the house. So I take the kids upstairs and take a nap. I turned on the alarm first and checked to make sure the window was shut. ( Yes the kids napped with me that day before you even ask) I wake up feeling something heavy on me and on my feet is the screen to my window. By this time I am starting to panic but I had no idea what I should do. My parents live 3 hours away so it's not like I can call my Daddy over to check my house out. I fixed my window again, shut it and took the kids downstairs. Everything was fine until it was bedtime. I go upstairs and the bedroom window is open again. I put the kids in my bed really scared when suddenly my son says "look mommy a man" and he's pointing to the foot of the bed. There's no one standing there. My son suddenly starts talking to this "man" about things like chocolate milk and ice cream trucks. Now my son will repeat what you say to him but these words are not a part of his vocabulary. He was laughing and having a ball talking to this "man". Being the type of person I am, I asked this "man" to not hurt my kids and suddenly I got a peaceful feeling and felt everything was ok. Well I went downstairs for some water and suddenly I felt really rushed to get back upstairs. Going up the stairs I felt like something was pushing me faster. I get upstairs and my window is open again but there's a bluish light all around it. Now that window overlooks a huge hill and there's no lights around that area. I heard a voice say "Turn on the damn alarm" So I ran and turned it on. I sat on the bed and felt something almost touching my shoulders and suddenly my alarm started to go off. Whatever was touching me was gone, I turned off my alarm and heard police sirens everywhere. Turns out a woman up the street was raped that night and someone had forced my kitchen window off and broken into my house and was in there until my alarm scared them off. Since that night my "friend" has done some things but nothing as bad as that first day. Doors are left open, my clothes get put into the dryer without me or my husband switching them, things like that really. It doesn't feel threatening, it feels like it's taking care of us now.

PS...if my typing is messed up excuse me, I had surgery on my right wrist and am typing one handed.

[Space Vampire]

This is tame compared to most, but it's about the scariest thing that's happened to me; I was about, I don't know, 12? I'm trying to sleep, when I think I hear the stereo turn on for a split-second downstairs. Weird. Then I hear what sounds like a single key being hit on our piano. Just when I think I'm in the clear, I hear another note. This continues for several minutes, and I'm poised at the top of the stairs with my baseball bat waiting for an intruder but too scared to go downstairs. We didn't have a pet at that time, though I did have two young siblings who might've for SOME reason made noise in the middle of the night. One of their rooms was right across from me, though, and I would've heard him; and I doubt the other would be able to walk around without me hearing her footsteps. I'm not entirely convinced that I didn't imagine real sounds to be something scarier, or that there isn't a mundane explanation for what I thought I heard, but it was pretty terrifying at the time.

[DuhMan]

MamaHen.. let me be the first to go on record as saying HOLY SHIT! I think I would have took off running long before most of that stuff happened! Thank god you have a "good" ghost!

Duh

[Kiki]

I had a few freaky things happen between the age of 12-18. We moved into an old house when I was 12. I think it was built in the early 40s. My dad used to mow the yard for the old woman who lived there. Her name was Virgie. She died in the house about a year before we moved in and I later found out that she died in my bedroom!

Strange things were always happening. The stairs would creak, doors would close, lights would go on and off and my bedroom was always cold. It became so common for these strange things to happen that we used to tell Virgie to knock it off. The one thing that freaked me out the most happened when I was about 14. I was standing in the dining room looking out the window for my school bus. All of the sudden the stereo in my bedroom came on, full blast. It scared the shit out of me. I was the only one in the house and we didn't have any pets at the time so Virgie must have turned on the stereo. It scared me so much at the time that I grabbed a big butcher knife from the kitchen before I went back to the bedroom to turn off the stereo.

Another time, my mom woke up in the middle of the night and said she saw a large glowing lady walking into my bedroom. She had her hair in a bun and was wearing one of those old lady moo-moo dresses. (My mom just let her walk into my room too, she didn't try to stop her or anything!) That really freaked me out when my mom told me that the next morning. Well, a few days later, Virgies great nephew (and my friend from school) Jeremy, came over and I was telling him about my mom seeing a ghost walk into my room. He told me that one of Virgies friends had just passed away a week earlier. When I asked him what Virgies friend looked like he described her as a fat old lady who always wore her hair in a bun. How weird is that!

Now this is what creeps me out the most. I moved out when I was 18 and moved into an apartment about 5-6 miles away from that house. Well, I came home from work one day and went to the kitchen to get something to drink and when I opened the cabinets, all of my dishes were turned over. My plates were upside down, my glasses were turned over, my bowls were turned over, my silverware drawer was all messed up... everything! It only happened that one time but it's as if Virgie came home with me to let me know she was still there and still watching me.

[SkySlash]

Make sure he puts a dryer sheet in there and cleans the lint trap...

My damn ghost always forgets the friggin dryer sheet!!!

-SS

[SoMoMom]

Originally posted by sandyr
Ugh!!

I got about 3 posts into this thread and now I have to stop - shit like this freaks me out when it's dark outside. I'm coming back during daylight hours

Sandy, hon, my experiences happened during the day. The pictures falling were right after I got off of the school bus. My daughter would talk to Bobo any time of day or night. Happy reading!

[SoMoMom]

Originally posted by MamaHen
It doesn't feel threatening, it feels like it's taking care of us now.

Sounds kind of like a jokester uncle or grandfather (like my friend's).

[MamaHen]

I could have left it hanging making it seem like I had a ghost maid or something but the sad part is... the clothes are put in the dryer but it's not turned on.
Right after my encounter with the "man" my whole family came for a visit. I had told everyone what had happened and there were alot of jokes made. My brother-in-law, a Staff Sgt in the Marines, was the loudest about making fun of me and thinking I had lost my mind. Well the morning after he and my sister got here we were sitting downstairs and heard him yelling really loud. Turns out that he was sleeping and thought my sister was covering him with a blanket, he would remove the blanket and say he was hot but he kept getting covered up. When he finally woke up enough to realize he was alone in the room he started screaming. By the time my sister and I got upstairs to him he was very freaked out. Not only was the blanket on him, it was tucked around him and the window screen was on him. I had to laugh but he swears he will never spend another night in my house. They left that day with him terrified.

[Lute Skywatcher]

rjk, that picture reminded me of some Christmas pictures one of my sisters took. For whatever reason, every single picture on the roll had colored lines in a seemingly random pattern. We decided that the lines had something to do with the Christmas lights on our tree, but exactly how the lines got in the pictures, we don't know.

I once awoke to the sensation of something sitting on the foot of my bed, but didn't see anything there. However, I did see a white shape up near the corner of the room.

When I first moved to this area, I lived in my brother's apartment for a few months. One morning, I heard him yell for me to get up - he was on business in Denver at the time!
After my suicide attempt, I moved back in with him. Didn't last long, one day near the end of March he came home early and caught me using a computer which had been promised to one of his customers. He kicked me out that day and I ended up in a Salvation Army shelter. Around Thanksgiving, I was in my bunk and the only one in the room when I heard a voice whisper "second". On December 2nd, I learned I had been accepted into a group home.

On a side note, I've also had precognitve dreams on and off up until I was 17. I now think that the dreams and voices, along with those colored lines, might have something to do with my uncle who died in an industrial accident in '75.

[Lute Skywatcher]

rjk, that picture reminded me of some Christmas pictures one of my sisters took. For whatever reason, every single picture on the roll had colored lines in a seemingly random pattern. We decided that the lines had something to do with the Christmas lights on our tree, but exactly how the lines got in the pictures, we don't know.

I once awoke to the sensation of something sitting on the foot of my bed, but didn't see anything there. However, I did see a white shape up near the corner of the room.

When I first moved to this area, I lived in my brother's apartment for a few months. One morning, I heard him yell for me to get up - he was on business in Denver at the time!
After my suicide attempt, I moved back in with him. Didn't last long, one day near the end of March he came home early and caught me using a computer which had been promised to one of his customers. He kicked me out that day and I ended up in a Salvation Army shelter. Around Thanksgiving, I was in my bunk and the only one in the room when I heard a voice whisper "second". On December 2nd, I learned I had been accepted into a group home.

On a side note, I've also had precognitve dreams on and off up until I was 17. I now think that the all this might have something to do with my uncle who died in an industrial accident in '75.