Ghost Stories!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

All of you have some interesting stories. As I mentioned in my post above, I have an interest in all sorts of unusual happenings, so I think about this kind of stuff often. Ghost stories really do raise some difficult scientific and philosophical questions. I will freely admit that, from the basis of our understanding of human biology and science in general, there is no reason to suspect that any form of consciousness should remain after a person’s death. However, the anecdotal evidence (and personal experience) indicating that ghost incidents, or a phenomenon resembling them, actually take place is overwhelming.

I am not really a religious or “spiritual” person, and I understand why many others like me are not even interested in these stories, because there does not seem to be room for them in science. However, I cannot in good conscience dismiss every one of the stories I’ve heard, or the events that I have personally witnessed. This field is a tough nut to crack, because it falls into the category of things that shouldn’t happen, but apparently do.

Keep posting the stories.

-Andrew L

22

No, these things can’t be explained by science, but the world, and the human condition are so vast that I wonder if there will EVER be a time when we’ll understand it all. Surely, as complex as it all is, there is room for the idea that there’s a whole bunch of stuff we still don’t know about.

23

Back in November of 2000, my ex and I went to London. Late one afternoon, we decided to visit the Tower of London. The tour was nice but uneventful and of course we stopped at the gift shop, since on top of buying souvenirs we were also shopping for Christmas gifts.

Now the Tower’s gift shop is a long rectangle with 3 or 4 “semi-circles” on each side. Each semi-circle has a particular theme or type of item - for instance, one semi-circle has videos, another has kitchen stuff. Anyway, I was sort-of bent over looking at something when I felt someone bump up against me. I turned around to say “excuse me” and saw… no one. In fact, as it was nearly closing time, there were only 3 or 4 other people in the shop and with the exception of my ex (who was a good 20 feet away), all of the customers were at the other end of the store.

I looked over the area carefully, thinking that there might have been a vent in the floor that just came on that pushed air into my coat, but no. I thought that I might have accidentally bumped into a rack or something, but as I was holding something in my hands - a book I think - I would have needed to have 6-foot long arms to bump into the rack behind me and pick up the book at the same time.

Not much of a ghost story, but to this day I can’t explain it. For the life of me though I wasn’t imagining it, and it wasn’t a “brush” - it was a “bump”.

Rex

24

I have a story

The first happened at my parentfs home in Oregon. This house was the original farmhouse in that neighborhood, and stood on a large plot of land with no other homes for miles. It is old and sneaky with a small dirt floored room in the basement that we called the bat cave. Also, in the basement was the big room, furthest from the stairs, where there was a fireplace, which had a damper with a chain that hung out of a brass plate just under the brick mantle. There were five other rooms in the basement, and the walls were made of rock plastered over with mortar. The walls in the big room were known to weep on stormy days forming puddles of black water in the corners. This is where the story ends.

There was an small room on what we called the back porch, but was more of an extra room since it had been walled in, this was right by the kitchen. This room was always cold and dark like a cellar in which old farm women would put things to keep: so they wouldnft rot and start to stink. We used it for this also. There was usually a crate of apples or pears in there that we snacked on after school.

I was in six or seventh grade, I had just got home from school and had had to use my key to get in the back door, which was a sure sign that I was alone. But, my family, four brothers and four sisters as well as my fatherfs mother, all ran on different schedules, so usually someone was around at any given time. If this someone had come in the front door, which house rules required to be locked, they wouldnft have bothered to open the back door, which was halfway down the basement stairs anyway. I went into the little room off the kitchen, and then further off the old back porch, so that I was in the most inaccessible part of the house, other than the big room in the basement, and got an apple. There I was, alone, when I heard a walking noise somewhere in the house.

No problem, someone else was home, but who? I took my apple and went through the kitchen, dining room, looked into Granfs room, shot a glance up the stairs and into the front room, where I expected to find mom with a load of groceries or something. Nothing.

The noise came again. This time directly below me. In the big room, in the basement. Cold chills went up my legs in waves and passed right through the top of my head, and probably kept going right through the ceiling and out the floor of my parentfs bedroom. Still it was probably just my brother, after all the workbench and all kinds of other stuff were in that basement.

I went down the stairs, passed the backdoor through which afternoon light cast itself down the stairs and into the basement darkness. The lights were off. Through the main part of the basement, the workbench was messy, but not being used. Now, I can definitely feel something. Someone is in the big room. All the lights in our basement have strings hanging down from them to turn them on and off and are in the ceiling in the center of the rooms. I called out, gHey Dave?h I could see under the door that the lights were off, but maybe he just turned them off and was on his way out. I waited. He didnft come out. I opened the door. It was dark. The string was three steps away. At the height of my forehead or thereabouts. I went in with both hands raised and a cold hole in my gut. I never got the light on. I ran out of that place and up the stairs and straight out the back door and all the way to the neighbor-across-the-streetfs house and pounded on the door. No one was home.

25

I lived for a while in a very old, very large house in South Dakota. There was a fairly long hallway in that house and it always seemed to me that the hallway was colder than the surrounding areas. I am absolutely positive that something in that hallway touched me on the face and on the back of my neck several times. At the end of that hallway was a room that had been built as a library. I used to sit in that room to read and I often felt that I was not alone in there.

There was also a room in the basement of that house that I was completely unable to enter. The moment I opened the door to that room, I felt a sense of foreboding that rapidly changed to terror. The instant I closed the door, the terror abated and I felt “normal” again. I used to force myself to open that door every now and then and my reaction was always the same.

The real kicker happened on a stairway. I was going upstairs and was about half-way up when my ex called my name. I stopped, turned to see what she wanted and a moment later, I felt a hand between my shoulder blades. The next thing I knew, I was lying on the floor at the bottom of the stairs. My ex said that it looked as if I suddenly decided to dive face first down the stairs. Strangely enough, that incident seemed to dispell whatever animosity the ghost(??) seemed to feel for me and I was comfortable in that house from then on, even though the touches on the face and neck continued. I still couldn’t enter that one room in the basement, though.

26

I’ve had just a couple of weird things happen to me from time to time, mostly when I was a teenager. I used to think I saw a person in the doorway between my room and my brother’s room. I always just glimpsed it from the corner of my eye, never directly. I think my brother told me once he’d seen the same thing. It was never scary, just weird.

Once my brother and I were standing in the hallway arguing – he was saying he thought our house was haunted and I, in typical older sister fashion, was pretty sure he was just trying to scare me. I said something like “Don’t be an idiot; there’s no such thing as ghosts.” The words were barely out of my mouth when a family picture fell off the wall next to my head. I hung the picture back up and kept my opinions to myself after that.

The only other thing that’s ever happened to me occured when I was in college. My roommates and I were planning to move out of the dorm and into a house over Christmas break. During the last few weeks we were in the dorm, I kept thinking I heard someone call my name in our rooms. Several times I asked my roommates about it and they denied calling me. Several other times it happened when I was the only person home. Thankfully, it stopped after we moved.

27

I’ve got a mildly chilling one. I was sitting in front of my computer, this very one i am typing at right now. In front of my i have this desk lamp with some glass flaps on either side of the light, each flap being about 4 by 6 inches. Sometimes, i’ll get lazy and set glasses or bowls on the top of it. One day i had a a couple of glasses and a bowl sitting across the top (they had been sitting there for a couple of days).

I was just sitting there typing away when something caught the corner of my eye. It wasnt something that startled me, but something that made me look up, like when you look in the direction of someone calling your name. I just looked up in time to see all three of them get pushed off my lamp. Now, this lamp is sitting right up against the wall, so nothing could have fallen and knocked them off and it’s pretty sturdy and PLENTY deep to hold a glass. Its giving me the chills just thinking about it.

I also have a dandy that my best friends mom was telling me about. We was up in northern Arizona, payson or something, for a camp (musical or acting type thing.) Before she went she was told that the camp she was staying at had had some pretty odd things going on, and her cabin was probably haunted. She thought nothing of it, until that last night she was staying there.

On the last night of camp, the whole group was to have this going away party type deal where husbands/wives could come up and be part of this dance thing. It was about 7pm and she was getting ready. She had just gotten out of the shower and gotten her bra and underwear out of her bag and set them on the bed. She then went to blow dry her hair. When she returned to get dressed she couldnt find her stuff on the bed. She searched the whole place (under the bed, bathroom, everywhere). the last place she checked was her bag, because she knew she had taken them out of her bad and set them on the bed. But, somehow they had gotten buried at the very bottom of her bad. This creeped her out a little.

Well, after this dance thing, she was getting ready to go to bed. She usually has 3 Tums or something before bed, so right when she got into the cabin, thats the first thing she did. But she set them on the bedside table. This little table isnt a solid table, its more of a picnic table that has slots in between the thin panels. So, she set them on the table, and turned around to get a glass of water. When she turned back around, one of the Tums was gone. She looked all over and somehow it had fallen and rolled across the room. She thought this was kinda odd. She picked it up and put it back, and also set her glass of water on the little table.

She then got her night clothes and went to into the bathroom to put her hair down and get changed. After all ready for bed, she was ready for the Tums. She went to reach for them, but something crazy had happened. All three of them were still there, but somehow they had been crushed to a fine powder. If that wasnt crazy enough, what was really weird was how they were crushed. When you hit something hard, to smash it, it kinda spreads out a little from the impact. The Tums however were pressed to dust, and pretty much retained their circular shape. She freaked out and booked it out of the room, and stayed with one of her friends in another cabin

28

I have had a number of strange experiences…I’ll post two here…if anyone wants to hear more, let me know. I don’t know if these two count as ghost stories or not, but here they are:

When I was about ten years old, I had a horrible dream in which I was driving this little red car down the road, and when I tried to cross some train tracks, the car stopped and I felt like I had been strapped down, and couldn’t move. I heard a train whistle, and looked to my left to see a train barreling in on me…and then there was a huge fireball, and I was on top of the train, running away from this horrible charred skeleton, as the fire consumed the tracks. The next morning, I was really shaken up, and came upstairs to eat breakfast. I noticed that my mom was acting really weird too, so I told her about my dream, and she got very pale. Turns out she had a dream that was nearly identical, and it had frightened her very badly.

That afternoon, my aunt called from across the country to let us know that her son, my cousin, had been killed early that morning when his car, a little red Datsun, was hit by a train.

The second ghost-like story I want to post happened in high school. Paco, a good friend of mine, and I had a bad falling out, and as a result, had stopped talking to each other. He had tried several times to patch things up, but being a stubborn and prideful person, I refused to have anything to do with him. One day, he went to my friend’s house (across the street from mine), and tried to get me to come talk to him, but again I refused. The next morning, he was hit by a car and put in to a coma.

I felt horrible. I felt worse than horrible. I began to realize just what an ass I had been, and how wrong I had been to not try and patch things up. I was torturing myself emotionally for not taking the time to heal up a wound with someone that at one time I had considered more a brother than even a friend.

A week later, I went to sleep for the night, and then while I was still mostly unconscious, I heard a pounding on my front door. I opened my eyes groggily, looked at the alarm clock, and saw that it was 3:27AM, and I wondered who in hell would be knocking at the door that early in the morning. I got out of bed, put on my robe, and went upstairs to answer the door.

There was Paco, standing on my porch. I was so overwhelmed with happiness to see him that I threw my arms around him and hugged him. I cried and cried and told him I was so sorry for being such an ass, and that I was so happy to see that he was okay. He smiled, returned my hug, and pushed me back a little.

“Yeah, I’m okay now,” he said with a warm smile, “I just wanted you to know it. All’s good between us.”

I was still crying, but I was smiling, and I told him how glad I was to see him, and asked him to come inside. He shook his head, and looked at me sadly.

“I can’t, I have to go. But I wanted you to know it’s all right…I’m going someplace where I can fight every day (we were both heavily in to medieval recreation), and I’m not coming back.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, confused.

“Just remember,” he said, “It’s all ok.”

Then my alarm went off. I woke up, and was thoroughly depressed to learn that it was all a dream. I got up, went upstairs for breakfast, and then the phone rang. It was one of our mutual friends, calling to let me know that Paco had died during the night.

I shit you not about the following…

He had died at 3:27 AM.

29

Bull. Just because you can’t readily imagine a natural explanation that fits a given anecdote, does not mean that “these things can’t be explained by science.” To leap all the way from an unexplained event to conclude the existence of a supernatural cause violates logic, reason and the law of parsimony.

30

You must be tons of fun at parties, UncleBeer. :smiley:
Bryan - who doesn’t let logic get in the way of fun.