Since its Halloween does anyone have any special (but true) experience with ghosts or hauntings?
No.
My favorite was here, somewhere, about an abandoned farm building that had lights on but there were no tracks in the snow and no evidence anyway was there or could even have been there. Purported to be true, and if it was, it was damn creepy. I could not find it in a search. but it stuck with me.
Does anyone remember that?
The scariest story I’ve ever heard was here on the SDMB. I don’t remember who posted it but they said it was true. It was about how they chose not to stay over at a friends house and instead went home knowing they’d be in trouble for breaking curfew. That night everyone in the friend’s house was murdered.
We bought land in the early 90s, the land had been in the family for decades. It came with its own grave yard ( I am not even kidding ). We built a house and settled there. Come to find out the last person who lived there, a family member, was killed by her mentally slow daughter. She was chopped up and scattered over a couple of acres (we bought 90 acres). Any way they never found her head. When my children were in school we used to have Halloween head hunting parties every year. The kids loved it, no head was ever found. One year my son made a fake head and scared the hell out of everyone. Fun stuff!!
I just heard a good one last night.
My husband’s coworker was expecting a baby this year, so he bought a new (bigger) house in preparation. The house had a bit of a history; a woman who had lived there around 30 years earlier was T-boned and killed as she was turning out of her driveway onto the street one day.
When they moved in, some strange phenomena started happening, and the husband and wife believed the house was haunted. (I wish I could give you specifics, but I forget what they were!) The baby was born in early summer.
So the baby is now a few months old, interacting with his environment but not talking yet. He has these certain verbal mannerisms that he will adapt when interacting with other people, and only when interacting with other people – never when playing alone.
Well, just recently, the couple had lain the baby down in his crib, and were elsewhere in the house, when they heard noises coming from the bedroom. The baby was making the same sort of verbal noises that he does when he’s interacting with another person. The wife tiptoed into the bedroom to see what was going on, and the baby had his eyes fixed on a certain point in space, as though he were making eye contact with another person.
The couple was so creeped out that they went out and bought a new house the very next day.
Yes, the story is true.
Plus, thanks to the wonders of technology, I can actually show you where it happened.
Assuming I did the link correctly, you’ll see the main house on the west side of that little cluster of buildings—it has an upside down Y-shaped sidewalk on the south side of the building. The east side of that house, where the large concrete patio is, was the kitchen.
Now zoom out enough that you can get an idea of the grid-like layout of the property lines. On the far east side of that same section you’ll see a small pond. Directly adjacent to that pond, to the east, you’ll see the shack that we saw the light in. That pond is part of that coulee, you can clearly see the stream bed on the satellite image.
Today that property is owned by a distant cousin of mine. I’ve spoken with him about going back and visiting, but I’m not sure if I want to. I have lots of good memories of living there… and one really bad one.
Here’s my favorite ghost story, which is completely true and comes complete with a twist ending.
Thank you!
It’s still a creepy story!
It’s the best “ghost” story - no rational explanation, and yet, it happened.
As an aside, that’s way up there. You can practically see Canada from your window as well. I have a coworker who has a wheat farm in Havre. You’re practically neighbors.
I’m surprised they didn’t tear down the old shack. Very creepy.
Not exactly a ghost story, but I dream about my father from time to time (dead 20+ years ago). At some point in the dream, I realize, “Hey, wait! We thought you had died!”
My girlfriend and future wife saw my father in a dream, or as a ghost, she says ghost.
Dad died in my childhood home about 30 years ago. He had missed work all week and I went out to check on him, we worked at the same plant. Mom was out of state visiting family. Dad wouldn’t go to the doctor but said he would in the morning, he just wanted to rest, so I was there sleeping on the couch to make sure he went. As you can guess I woke up in the wee hours and he had passed.
Years later my mom was struggling to keep the house and I had just got divorced and needed some help with child care, so I moved in and took over the bills and mortgage and everything was fine. Later mom moved in with my sister and I found a new girlfriend.
Girlfriend was napping one sunny afternoon when she says she saw a man standing in the bedroom doorway with a hat on, smiling at her. She says to me “I think I saw your father today.” I hadn’t yet got around to digging out the family photo albums to bore her to death with, but I got one out then. There is a picture of dad mowing the lawn, smiling and wearing a fedora, his favorite hat. Before it was hipster-cool to have a fedora.
I show her and she says “that’s him and that is the hat!” I swear she hadn’t seen that photo before.
She still says the encounter made her feel warm, good, and that he approved of her being here in the house. Wife v3.0 and I just had our 10 year anniversary. Still in the same old family home.
What? You wanted a scary ghost story?
Mentioned it on the Dope before …
I had issues when I was preK, to the point of having a kiddy shrink see me several times. Ended up being diagnosed high functioning autistic but the kicker was that I had an imaginary friend. We were in base housing in K-Town Germany, never been back to the US since birth. My imaginary playmate told me stories [apparently my favorite was Goldilocks.] Having given the guy a detailed description [or as detailed as a 4 year old can manage] he was talking with my Dad, who recognized my description as my well-deceased great grandfather … of whom there was a single photo of back at my Grandparents house. He seems to have vanished a couple years later, after we had moved back stateside and I was surrounded by a flock of assorted cousins and friends. I guess I had enough going on around me that he figured I was good to go.
There’s that story currently making the rounds of those videos of strange happenings at that school in Cork, Ireland. Weird stuff.
Oh wait a minute . . . Snopes has a few words to say about that . . .
More ghost horror movies should use this as the twist ending.