We have a big ol’ Morris chair in our living room, a relic of the Better Half’s college days. It’s one of those chairs with the adjustable back, with the big flat wooden arms that are very handy for holding cups of coffee.
However, every time La Principessa comes into the living room with food and sits down in it, and puts her food on the arm of the chair, it spills. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a plateful of dinner or just a cup of Kool-Aid, over it goes.
Finally, I told her, “Look, it’s just that the arm of the chair is slanted, and you’re not paying attention [princesses don’t have to pay attention to where they’re putting their food, they have people to do that for them]. Either stop sitting in the Morris chair, or pay more attention to where you put your food down.”
Madame, however, has another explanation. When a little friend came over the other night for a slumber party, I heard her tell the friend, quite matter-of-factly, “Don’t sit in that chair–it’s haunted.”
So, does anybody else have an article of furniture that’s haunted or evil? My mother has a special chair in her kitchen that I swear has had a curse put on it–with what it does to your butt and back, it ought to be in a Freddy Krueger movie. When we all go over to her house, it’s like Musical Chairs in reverse, to see who doesn’t get stuck sitting in the Evil Chair.
Every year I got to Abbott’s Magic Get-Together in Colon, MI and I camp out there. I stay in this small camp ground owned by this old lady who is really nice. Anyway, every year on Friday evening, we have a bonfire. The area where we have this bonfire is very sheltered and great for bonfires, but there is this (and I’m not kidding) Man Eating Bush. It’s a large shrubbery (Ni) that is about 10 feet in circumference, and about 6 feet high. Every year we warn people about it, but every year it somehow manages to get somone to trip into it. I am not kidding about this. Every year without fail, somone falls into this bush. I swear it is possesed!
My coffee table has it in for me. I cannot navigate the livig room without having a corner of the damn thing jump out and stab my calves/shins. At any given time, I’ll have at least one bruise from this. My husband says people must think that he beats me. I think when I redecorate, I’m going to get a round table.
One night years ago, when I lived in coastal New England, there was a terrible storm at sea. The following morning we found a baby’s cradle washed up on the shore near our home.
It was a good cradle, oak and strongly made, so we brought it inside and used it for the baby.
The odd thing about it was that, on some nights, particularly those when the wind was high and a storm was coming across the sea, the cradle would rock itself. We didn’t know what to make of this, but the child seemed to like it, and after some months we got used to it always being that way.
One evening my wife’s sister was visiting. We were all in the kitchen, and the baby was sleeping in the cradle, near the fireplace in the living room. The sister came in and asked us who was the woman rocking the cradle.
“There’s no one,” we said. The cradle rocked itself.
“No, there’s a woman there. She has long black hair and a pale sad face, and she’s leaning over the baby as she rocks the cradle.”
My wife didn’t say anything. Just went straight to the other room and gathered up the baby. Later that night she had me break up the cradle with an axe and burn it in the fireplace.
As the oak slowly burned to ashes we could hear, far off at sea, the sound of a baby crying; crying and crying for its cradle.
Well, I can’t beat Ike’s “Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep” tale, but I do have a Kuan Yin who must be appeased.
She’s a four-foot high statue of Kuan Yin and she weighs a TON. I have secret hopes that she’s packed with gems a la The Maltese Falcon.
Anyway, she has killed three times: My Uncle Bob got her—no one knows how or when—in the Orient. He died of a heart attack shortly thereafter. My grandmother inherited her, and came down with a fatal brain tumor. By this time my father was leery of her but took her in anyway—and was soon dead.
So I’ve got her now—but I talk to her, dust her regularly and apologize if I bump into her. Thus far she has spared my life.
My late grandfather apparently haunts a crack in the ceiling in my parents’ living room.
Shortly after he died (he was living with my parents then) his 3 year old great-grandson stared up at the ceiling and exclaimed “I see Grampa!”
We thought nothing of it of course, until the littlest great-grandson age 18 months, started pointing up and saying, “Hey! Hey!” (My grandfather’s name was Harry, the little guy called him “Hey”)
Okay, kids say hey a lot.
Then came the thing that seriously freaked me out and I saw it with my own eyes: the DOG would sit there staring up at the ceiling! For minutes at a time! On several separate occasions!
I’m a Skeptic with a capital S, but this is totally freaking weird.
My mother was once threatened by a spinning wheel.
It’s the late 1970’s, and the whole world is a little spooked. My mother wakes up one night and sees a spinning wheel in the door of her bedroom. She closes her eyes and wonders if she really saw that. She looks again, and it’s closer. She closes her eyes, then looks again. It’s by the bed now. She closes her eyes and doesn’t look anymore. It’s not there in the morning. My mother has never in her life owned a spinning wheel, and hasn’t known anyone who did. She still thinks it was a ghost.
There was a spot on the wall that could never be painted over in that house. She thinks that was a ghost, too. I love Mama, but between this and the love of pork rinds…
Tangent: re. the kuan yin statue. . . I study japanese art as a minor field, and this is interesting because I have little background in chinese art and wasn’t aware that Kannon (Kuan Yin) is a girl in China (in Japan that boddhisattva is a boy, more or less).
Learn somethin’ new every day.
Uke Ike-- great story. Hadn’t heard it before (if it’s not an old story, even better). Also, dig your screen name-- just found out who it referred to at a vaudeville show recently.
I bought an old slide projector that produces sparks and smoke. I think this might count, more possessed than haunted, though.
I am a Swedish national living in Ankara, Turkey. Poor as I am at times I opted to bring up a vitrine from the basement of our apartment building. It had missing shelves, missing doors and it was mighty dusty. I was just happy to have something to put some of my books and electronic shit in. The vitrine had a large mirror in the back. Writing this, I’m sure that it wouldn’t have let me share this with the world, had it still been in my possession. I’m not joking. This is a TRUE story. It gave me a weird feeling just two days after bringing it up from the basement, and after a month or two my whole apartment felt gloomy and dark. Shit, just writing this gives me goosebumps!! It had a burn mark on it and overall it just made me feel like someone had tried to get rid of it before. Everytime I looked into that mirror, I felt like someone was observing me or was about to come out of it, or make my own image smile an evil smile. Finally I felt how it was sucking energy out of the room and me. I said to myself that if it is haunted, one of my rabbits will be targeted and killed by the entity, and sure enough, one of my two rabbits died from a broken neck in his cage. Circumstance, I’m sure, but the rest felt so real, I just cannot explain it away. I turned the vitrine towards a wall and waited for a friend to help me take it back to the basement. The gloom ceased the moment the vitrine was back in the basement. The whole apartment felt brighter and more positive. This was all Before that horror movie about the haunted mirror. I wanted to share this story so you know that these things actually happen. I imagine all the stories that don’t come to light, and I myself want to know other’s experiences.
First in with a joke about how the vitrine was probably haunted by zombies.
Next time, test for the presence of an evil entity by challenging it to spill coffee on a library book, or something, and leave your poor little bunnies out of it. They didn’t do anything to you.
Today I learned that the tall glass cabinets I keep all my Hard Rock Hurricane glasses in are called “vitrines”.
As to the zombie-OP: my mom once rented a room in an upstairs apartment of a house. The owners had an old-timey hatstand/mirror/seat thingy in the foyer. I don’t know why that thing creeped me out so much, likely just my overactive imagination. I used to run past it up the stairs.
The opposite of the OP: when I was 9 my parents and I went to a huge used furniture store because they needed a new bed and we were poor. I was wandering around the warehouse and came across an antique vanity dresser - the kind you sit at with drawers on either side, a cupboard in the middle and a large mirror. I fell right in love with it. I ran and got my parents and showed them. Apparently my mom said to my dad “Screw the bed. How many 9 year olds fall in love with a piece of antique furniture?” and they bought it for me. I always felt safe and relaxed in front of that dresser. It just had a peaceful aura about it. I would sit and stare in the mirror for ages as a teenager working shit out in my mind. I sold it to my then-boyfriend’s mother when I moved out at 17, and I still miss it.
I have to say I get along very well with all my furniture, all furniture, in fact; but I can easily accept that things, as well as places, have genius loci.
After an object reaches 100 years since it was made, it acquires it’s own soul according to the ever-reliable Japanese. Becoming one of the numerous types of Youkai, in this case, Tsukumogami.
*Abumi-guchi – A furry creature formed from the stirrup of a mounted military commander that works for Yama Orochi.
Chōchinobake – An animated lantern, also known as Burabura.
Kurayarō – Animated saddle
Morinji-no-okama – A possessed tea kettle. Another variation is Zenfushō*
etc…
However whilst the concept is pleasant, I have a difficulty with the idea of reward for age, and all the objects destroyed prior, losing out; and the same way I never understood religion’s stance on animal souls, pretending humans are different: you either have a soul though Being, or you don’t. Some pretended animals merge into a group-soul — as some sects have as repulsive ultimate destination for humans, and some pretended an individual animal could acquire individuality and immortality by association and love from a human. Both delusions grant an inordinate virtue to being human.
