no doubt there have been countless threads asking the same question but i thought i would start a new one. has anybody here had any paranormal experiences, seen ghosts, communicated with the other side etc. so dont be shy share your creepy stories with us people. 
Gunslinger and I took a trip to New York this past March to spend Spring Break with my family. While there we stayed with my sister, who lives in what used to be (and is still legally) my grandmother’s house. At one point we were all in the basement of the house… and I do mean all… me, him, my sister, her dog and both of her cats. There was not a single living thing in that house that was not in the basement with us.
And we all distinctly heard footsteps crossing the living room floor above our heads.
Since this is the Straight Dope and we’re all skeptics and la di da, I’m sure tons of people are thinking “It was the house settling!” And of course that’s what I want to believe, too. I won’t say it was a ghost, I won’t say it wasn’t. My mom thinks it was my grandfather… but my mom’s kinda screwy…
Anyway, even if it WAS just the house settling, I never want to stay in that house alone if I can avoid it. Just to be on the safe side.
I’m not one to put too much stock in things that cannot be measured, verified, or in some way proved to exist, but the following experience has made me wonder more and more about whether there’s anything to ghosts:
My SO moved into a restored one room school house that was built around 1890. The school house was located on the estate of a prominent land owner in the county where I worked, and I was very good friends with the family. I had spoken to the family many, many times and always found them to be on the up and up, serious people who were not given to such things as mysticism, spooks, etc.
While sleeping at The Little Yellow Schoolhouse (as we came to call it) one night, I got the distince impression that there was someone standing by the bed. Normally I’m a very sound sleeper. I can fall asleep in a minute and sleep like the dead through nearly anything. That being said, I just KNEW that someone was standing there. I sat bolt upright and, naturally enough, there wasn’t anyone there.
Over the course of several weeks this happened a disturbing number of times. As the phenomenon continued to happen, I began to become aware of what I can only describe as a shadow that was darker than the surrounding dimness in the corners, by the dresser, or where ever I happened to sense a prescence. It was almost as if I would sit up in bed and catch a glimpse of something out of the corner of my eye. I then started to sleepwalk (something I hadn’t done since I was a teenager). SO woke up one morning to tell me that I had gotten up out of bed, gone to the corner of the room, and knelt down as if to talk to someone - a child.
Several nights later I did the same thing (getup out of bed, sound asleep, go to corner, kneel down), but this time I said the name “Laura.” When SO asked me about it the next morning I told her that I had a “dream” about a young girl with long braids, in a sort of jumper and woolen stockings. I said, “She looked like “Laura” on Little House on the Prairie.” The next week a similar incident happened and SO told me the next morning that I asked 'Laura" to please leave us alone and stop visiting.
By coincidence, SO and I had dinner with the members of the family that Sunday. She asked me to tell the family my story. Before I could finish, the patriarch of the family said, “The little girl’s name is Laura. She and her sister (who would have been this man’s great aunts) died in a diptheria epidemic that hit the County in the around 1910. They went to school in the schoolhouse.” My SO and I looked at each other with one of the most unique expressions I’ve ever seen two people share - I can’t describe it to you at all.
Evidently Laura took my request to heart because she never visited again while SO lived there.
And that’s my true ghost story.
The house I grew up in had something against glass. Glass objects would just randomly shatter for no reason, two occasions in particular come to mind. The strangest case was in the bathroom. There were three people in the house, myself, my mother and my aunt. We all heard a very loud crashing sound and ran to the bathroom to figure out what it was… as it turns out it was the light fixture. Now the light fixture was attached pretty securely to the very center of the ceiling of the bathroom and if it fell or broke there should have been glass everywhere on the floor directly below but there wasn’t. Every single shard of broken glass was placed in the bathtub which is a built in affair along the far right side of the room. The tub curtain was also half drawn, further decreasing the likelyhood of such a thing happening. The second really memorable thing involved me and a big thick glass mug I had filled with coke… I was just sitting there watching TV when I hear a muffled pop, I looked around and saw that my mug… although still maintaining it’s shape was cracked into hundreds of little tiny bits of glass and my coke was slowly leaking through the cracks onto the table. The instant I touched it, it fell apart into a pile of glass. I’ve never really been able to explain either of those things.
No. No one here or anywhere else has ever proved this conclusively. And FYI, this is primarily a skeptical site.
EEEEEEEEE! I LOVE ghost stories!
I’ll just link to Very Vaguely Creepy, which is probably my favorite thread ever. Great stuff in there.
Here’s my ghost story, lame as it must be.
When I was a kid, I lived in a house that I always thought was haunted. The back of the basement and the upstairs hallway especially had a very creepy feeling to them; if I walked down the hallway by myself, I got the distinct impression that someone was following me. (My bedroom was at the end of the hallway.) If I went down into the basement, I felt that something was waiting for me there.
One night, I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and turned on the lights and the radio. There was a print of an old painting in my room, and I ended up standing there looking at it. In the reflection of the glass part of the picture frame, I could see someone in a hooded sweatshirt standing right behind me. As soon as I noticed it, it turned to the left and walked off, in the direction of the door.
I sat awake in that empty room until dawn, just knowing that whatever it was wasn’t in the room anymore, but was out in the hallway.
Come to think of it, I can’t remember any of our pets ever being upstairs in that house. Weird stuff happened, like a hamster falling down an open heating duct and being found six weeks later in a couch cushion in the basement.
I was pretty glad when we moved out.
UncleBeer - being a skeptic and loving a good ghost story aren’t mutually exclusive. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I don’t have an explanation for things like the above story, apart from “I probably imagined it.” (Most likely, I did.)
I don’t think the OP was asking for proof of the existence of ghosts. The “share your creepy stories” comment seems to be wanting to start another thread along the lines of Very Vaguely Creepy.
Bumping the thread. I hope it doesn’t fizzle out!
This one comes c/o my cousin…
When my cousin was three years old, he used to play in a shed in the backyard with model trains all the time. When my aunt asked him if he ever got lonely out there, he said no because there was “a train man” named “Paddy Ellspeth,” or something like that, who always showed up whenever he played with the model trains. She asked him more, and my cousin described an old man wearing an old-timey engineer’s uniform, and who had a slight problem speaking. My aunt figured at that point he had just invented an imaginary friend to go along with the model trains.
Eventually my cousin grew up and stopped seeing the old man. Years later, my aunt got heavily into genealogy and the history of the Midwest. She discovered that a major train line in the 1880s had been routed directly through her backyard, within 50 feet of where the shed was now.
Now it’s entirely possible that my cousin could have made the whole thing up, but the name “Paddy Ellspeth” is just a wee bit too accurate for my comfort zone. Besides, my three-year-old cousin gave a pretty perfect description of a person who’d had a stroke, without ever having seen someone who’d had one.
And by the time he was fifteen, my cousin had cleaned out the shed entirely and used all the available floor space to build a huge, multi-leveled and fully operational model railroad. It had over 200 moving pieces, he’d hand-made every piece of the landscape the rails were built on, and it was really amazing. I always wondered where the idea came from. 
Ooh! Ooh! I have one! My friend lived in a house with a ghost. She ran into him one day while vacuuming. She would see him from time to time, and since he seemed pretty non-annoying, she didn’t worry too much about him, until one night after tucking her daughters into bed and retiring to watch TV in the family room. Her daughters (then ages 3 and 4) would not stop giggling and settle down. She yelled up the stairs a few times to no effect, then opned the door to their room. A bunch of toys were on the floor, where they had NOT been when she put her kids to bed. The kids were mad at her, and the four year old said “You made him go away!” She asked “Who?” and BOTH daughters replied “The man who was making the dolls dance.”
And I lived for awhile in a house that had a ghost dog. I truly thought I was imagining things until I had a poker party one night, and just as I saw the dog, three other people in the room looked at me and said “When did you get a dog?”
Well, this isn’t a very EXCITING “ghost” story, in fact, there isn’t even a ghost in it, but I’ll tell you what it was…
As a child, before moving to the country, I lived in a nice little house in the suburbs for five years. Normal enough place, if a little older (Built maybe in the 50’s or 60’s.). My parents had a bathroom connecting to the master bedroom by a little hallway. Now, for years, no one (especially me) had any problems with this area of the house. But about a year and a hald before we moved, something seemed to…change. I’d just get a very “Creeped out” feeling whenever I went in the master bathroom (And I had the feeling that I REALLY shouldn’t look in the mirror in there, for some reason.) That was bad enough, but the area where I’d get the “feeling” slowly started to spread, first to the little hallway, then to the entire master bedroom itself.
My parents got the feeling, too. Especially in the little hallway, but the creepiest part was…the cats seemed to be reacting to something there, too. A couple stoped even going INTO the bedroom area, and one of them developed the habbit of sitting by the bedroom door and making a vocal “Chittering” (Cat owners should know what I’m talking about) at something at the ceiling or the corners of the ceiling, just like he’d do at birds outside the living room window.
At about that time, we moved (For unrelated reasons). I’m still kinda glad we did.
Ranchoth
okay i’ll re-phrase the OP.
has anyone ever experienced something that they cannot explain?
Yes, I have. Several times. However, I’ve already posted my experiences in (the linked to) Vaguely, Vaguely Creepy thread, and in another one in IMHO.
I have skeptic inclinations, however, I did have one experience that creeped me out.
**Exposition: **
My former landlord has issues with one of the rooms on the second floor of his house, as well as doors on the second floor. He renovated a little and my SO and I moved into the second floor which was now a lovely apartment [sub]sigh… miss that place[/sub].
The issues he used to have with the one room (my bedroom!) was that for awhile, he had it locked, never used it except for storage. He’d come home late at night, look up at the window to see the light on. Used to drive him crazy, because he’d have to go and hunt for the one existing key, unlock the door, turn off the light, and lock the door behind him. A few days later, it would be on again. He’s a contractor and thoroughly checked out the wiring to be sure there wasn’t some malfunction. Couldn’t find a problem.
Adding to his aggravation was the occasional sound of footsteps from the second floor (particularly that room), when he was home alone.
There also seemed to be “something” that didn’t like the doors on the second floor left ajar. Wide open – fine. Closed – fine. Ajar – no! That kinda bugged him too.
My part of the story
If I left my door ajar, and I was clacking away on my computer, out of the corner of my eye (my computer desk was along the same wall as the door), I’d see the door swing all the way open, or all the way shut. Never could it stay ajar. No big deal – old house, lotsa drafts, whatever.
As a joke, I’d always say “sorry, ghostie!”
One day, I was home alone, working on the computer. My door was ajar, I heard my SO come up the stairs. In my peripheral vision, I saw my SO lean into the room (dressed head to toe in navy blue or black – work suit, I thought), grab the door by the knob, and shut it firmly and pointedly, as if annoyed. Then I heard footsteps going down the hall toward the bathroom (hardwood floors… not at all discreet). “Sorry…” I said, kind of wondering what the big deal was. It’s not like a type loudly enough to annoy.
About 10 minutes later, I heard a car pull into the driveway. It was my SO just then arriving home from work and wearing a khaki coloured outfit. Then I realized that the person I saw peripherally was taller than my SO, with shaggier hair.
Gave me the creeps!