Ghost Story

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

First I must assure you that I am a rational person. I do not believe in bogeymen or fairies. But this story is absolutely true:

One night I returned home near midnight after a long evening of inventory at the store. I was exhausted and headed straight for bed. My girlfriend/roommate was out of town so I began shucking off my clothes as soon as I hit the hallway. I plopped down in the middle of the bed after leaving a long trail of socks, shirt, jeans, etc. and pulled the spread up to my chin. Somehow I managed the strength to roll over enough to turn off the light.

Just as I was beginning to drop off I felt a tension in the spread as if it was being pulled tight. I blinked myself awake and froze. The tension increased and the spread slipped from my fingers as if something was at the foot of the bed pulling it down. After a surge of adrenalin I switched the light on but nothing was there. I attributed the sensation to grogginess but there was no doubt that the bedspread was now at my waist. I pulled the spread back up to my chin and clenched it slightly before deciding to close my eyes again.

Before I fell asleep the tension started again. I froze like before and a chill went down my spine. I could feel the bedspread sliding over my chest and down my stomach. But I could also feel the pull at the other end, a definite force overcoming resistance. When the spread reached my thighs I sprang out of bed and threw on the light. I raced to the foot of the bed prepared to fight an intruder. But there was nothing there. I cautiously moved the covers so I could see under the bed but still there was nothing. I made a quick survey of the apartment before I could convince myself that I was alone and was only experiencing strange effects of exhaustion. Still, I fell asleep with the light on and with my attention on the foot of the bed.

I woke up late the next morning with no other spread tugging events. But something was there. As I rolled over and stretched on awakening I felt my foot bump something. I sat up to see what it was and I was shocked. All of the clothes that I had stripped off and carelessly discarded were now neatly folded, perfectly folded, from my jeans on the bottom to my dirty sweatsocks on top. A perfect square bundle of clothes sitting at the foot of the bed.

The windows were latched, the doors were locked, and a call to my in-laws informed me that my girlfriend was still visiting two-hundred miles away.

2

ok…if this story is true…HOLY SHIT.

I always love a good ghost story. I believe in ghosts as I’ve experienced some before. ugh, still can’t sleep in the dark by myself hehe.

I don’t know how you went to sleep even with the lights on. There is NO WAY.

3

It sounds like you had an encounter with the Louisiana Snuggler.

No kidding, that’s the first thing I thought of when I read your story. If you were an LSU campus coed I’d say that it’s a slam dunk it was this guy.

Who you gonna call?

4

Far out. Just … far out.

Do you sleepwalk, Ex Machina?

5

Some time after my firststrange experience there was a sequel of sorts.

Being young and foolish, I decided to play around with shorting out the 5-volt power supply on my Commodore computer. (Do NOT try this at home.) Eventually it stopped working and resisted my every attempt to revive it. :smack:

That night as I was half asleep, with my sheet pulled up over my head (which I used to do back then :o) for some reason I was moving my outstretched palms around under the sheet. Suddenly, something smacked against both of them simultaneously. I froze, not sure what to do next, too scared to go back to sleep.

After a minute or two, I opened my right eye and looked all the way to the right to try to see what was going on. I saw what looked like an incandescent light, out of focus, but because of its focus I could tell that it had to be within a few inches of my eye. :eek: Next to my bed on that side was about 3 feet of empty space and then the wall; there was nothing that belonged there that could possibly have gotten so close while I slept.

Don’t ask me how I got back to sleep but the next thing I knew, several hours had elapsed and it was just starting to get light outside. I opened my eyes and for a minute I was fooled into thinking I had seen the daylight through the window - never mind that the window was too far away, too big, and the sky too blue to be what I saw. And strangely, the covers on my bed were now neatly tucked in which was entirely uncharacteristic of me.

But the really strange thing was, when I got up and turned the computer on it worked.

6

Dang it! Why can’t I have a ghost to clean my house?
Probably because my lack of housekeeping skills ran them off. :dubious:

7

GREAT OP … I love these stories, even if they do scare the bejesus outta me (and make me look under my desk to see what’s lurking, unseen, waiting to grab my feet.) Now for my own true story …

When I was about 10, I was in the living room of my parents’ house, practicing the piano. (This was one of the original rooms of the house, an old farmhouse built ~175-200 years ago.) I had the books I had already practiced from on my right-hand side on the bench, neatly stacked and squared off on the bench. On my left-hand side were the books I hadn’t played out of yet.

As I was playing, the books on one side slid completely off of the bench … not as if I had knocked the top one of the stack off and a couple others slid off, but rather like the entire stack slid to the floor. I stopped playing, looked around, then went back to my practicing. A moment later, the other stack slid to the floor … again, the entire stack. I stopped again and looked around, but didn’t see anything. I went back to playing once more, but stopped of my own accord after a moment … turned around … and there she was.

The best way I’ve been able to describe her is like a shadow, but with features … she was wearing a long, flowing gown … lacy sleeves … and was facing perpendicular to me (facing the front of the house.) I shook my head and stared at her again, and then she started moving … not walking, but rather drifting in the direction she was looking … and then she was simply gone.

I left the room and went to find my parents in the kitchen. I asked them if they knew about any ghosts being seen in the house (cmon, with a house that old, ghosts are a GIVEN, aren’t they??) The house was built by a great-great-grandfather of mine (on my dad’s side), and has been in the family ever since, but my father was not aware of any ghosts being seen before. I didn’t go back into that room for about a week, but I’ve never seen her again, and I don’t believe my siblings ever saw anything in the house, either.

8

No. But I don’t discount the possibility that I may have on this one occasion.

I have had only two experiences of this nature in my life. Both occurred in the same apartment within a year. There is a word, hypnopompic, which refers to a state of semi-wakefulness preceding being fully awake, and maybe there is an overlap of the dream state. This might explain hallucinations of this sort. Here is the other incident:

I was alone on a balmy summer day and decided to take a nap on the sofa. I had the patio door and windows open to get a breeze. With those conditions I was sacked out in no time. After a while something caused me to awaken. As I opened my eyes I was shocked to see a little blonde-haired girl at the end of the sofa. I could see nothing but her head, her chin resting on the sofa arm. Her expressionless face, just inches beyond my feet, was staring at me. It caused my heart to race. We locked eyes for a moment. When I popped up to see what she was about she vanished.

When my pulse finally returned to normal I chalked it up to that hypnopompic condition. But now, many years later and after thinking about the other incident it makes me wonder. Maybe it was the same little girl who folded my clothes and tried to steal my blanket. (Do ghosts get cold?)

Maybe I should try to find out if any little girls died there before I moved in.

9

[disclaimer: I do not attribute things I do not understand to ghosts or other supernatural phenomenae, but the eerie WTF feeling seems to be identical]

I am one of those people who read and reread books, and I sometimes go to books I’ve read just to reread favorite passages.

Once I wanted to reread a descriptive sequence in a mystery book – I had a distinct memory of how it was worded, but I wanted the pleasure of rereading it anyway. Flipped through and found the place and started reading and the sequence of paragraphs was in a different order, some specific phrases were missing, and some new ones present. Like opening Gone With the Wind and finding Scarlett proclaiming “O God, witness me this, hear my oath! Never shall I go hungry again from this day forth!” when you clearly remembered it as having been “As God is my witness, I shall never go hungry again”. Or opening up The Stand to reread the sequence where the car slowly ploughs through the gas pumps at the gas station in Texas and instead reading about a high-speed impact with gas pumps in Tennessee culminating in a huge fireball that burns off all of Stu Redman’s hair.

In perplexity, I flipped through pages, finally convincing myself there was no possibility that there was a parallel passage on a different page that I was remembering. Reread the passage a couple dozen times, committing to memory the way it was actually written, and then walked around the rest of the day musing over my odd and obviously mistaken memory of the passage.

Next morning, this still on my mind, I picked up the book and read it again. Nope, it wasn’t back to the way I originally remembered it. But neither was it the way I remembered it as having been worded when I’d read and reread it over and over (Scarlett: “I hate being hungry. By God, I hate being hungry, and I’m never going to be hungry like this, ever again”. Stand: The car bounces over the curb, rolls past the pumps and slams into the side of Stu’s gas station and the car explodes as Stu runs to see if the driver is hurt).

I dog-ear the page after rereading it four dozen times in self-astonishment. Obviously I’m just not remembering it right, got to be human error, memory glitch, but it’s eerie enough to creep me out. Of course next time I read it, it will read the same way, supposedly “supernatural” things don’t continue to happen once you take careful notice of them. So I go eat lunch and then come back to the book, saying to myself, “OK, now, if something weird were going on with this book, it would be different again, but if it was just my imagination and bollixed up memory it will not do it again”.

Holy shit. (Scarlett: “God, how could you let me go hungry like this? I swear to you, God, I will never forget. I will be your witness. Do not let me go hungry ever again.” The car stops at the gas pumps and the dying guy gets out as if to pump gas and then collapses, the fuel running all over the tarmac and then bursting into flames as it runs under the car’s hot tailpipe). It did, it did it again!

::cue Twilight Zone theme music::

10

Disclaimer: I do not believe in ghosts but I loves me a good ghost story!

This happened when I was 20 or so. My father had passed away a few years earlier from throat cancer. Can you guess where I’m headed? :slight_smile: One night I was woken up by what sounded like someone clapping their hands loudly. (My father couldn’t talk from the throat cancer and this was how he would get your attention.) My bed at that time was in the corner of the room and I was sleeping facing the wall. I very groggily looked over my shoulder and saw a blurred person standing in the middle of the room. I’m near-sighted so the blurring was expected and I assumed it was my mother who was the only other person in the house. I turn back to the wall and mumble “What d’ya want?” No answer. After a few seconds or even a minute I feel like someone is watching me so I look again. The figure is still there and raises it’s arm and points at the closet. At this point I realize “Oh shit! That’s my dad!”. I was naturally spooked by this but was so tired that rather than deal with a “ghost” I pull the covers over my head saying to myself “I’m too tired to deal with this”.

The next day I asked my mother if she had been in my room and she said no. Nothing unusual in the closet either.

I’ve never had any other experience like that. It was probably a very realistic dream or that hypnopompic thing Ex Machina mentioned. It sure felt real!

11

So what book was it, actually? Just curious.

12

I teach a class called Theories of Irrationality, in it we discuss the psychological factors to believing in the supernatural, superstitions, fallacies and the like. Most students love it, and I get a lot of seniors in the class as their last class of their college career…It is always taught in spring semester. Anyway, per the OP - I have several things to mention about sleep states first. There are usually five sleep states in the normal human circadian rhythm. The first is very short, you go into a state of wakefulness right before you fall asleep, then you enter REM sleep. Where your body is completely catatonic, you could not move even if you tried. Even the lightest sleeper dozes to this state, it just lasts a shorter period of time* we will get back to this.
So for someone who has a routine their circadian rhythm is quite set in stone, and when something happens to that rhythm they can expect odd things to happen such as “very vivid dreams, nightmares, sleep walking etc…”
This is not to say these things can not happen at other times in a normal cycle, it just means the propensity is higher when a cycle is changed…even slightly.
Your experience, EX, is classic for this explination…not to say there wasn’t some residual self image floating aruond your room vying for your attention, just that you could very well have dreamed what happened. And slep-walked the rest.

Folks, I do not want to high-jack this thread but has anyone ever been sleeping and all of a sudden awoke in your dream…not moving mind you, just suddenly became aware of what you were dreaming? Bad or good…That is a lucid dream, and they can be quite scary. Especially the lucid dreams where you feel “someone or something” pushing down on you or your covers…this is a very common lucid dream. And it has even been tied to the alien abduction scenerios people describe…sometimes there is a white light, pressure etc…etc…many abductees say they feel these sensations.
Again, I am not saying this is an answer to people getting abducted telepathically by little bug eyed grey men, I’m just saying it has a biological fram that the scenerio can fit into.

13

You teach all the cool classes, Phlosphr.

14

I dunno if this counts, and it wasn’t scary, but when I was writing all the time, I could find myself getting bored with a dream, and fix the plot.

“Hey, this isn’t working. Let’s have her come over here, and change the clothes, and see if he looks over… and we should be able to fly, too… OK, let’er roll”

More fun than frightening.
I was born to be a director, if it weren’t for the unfortunate fact that I hate working with people.

Living people.

15

Oh, fnit, I have had one! I totally forgot! Sorry, phlosphr!

It was before I was a forensic pathologist. I was a second-year resident in general surgery, on the rotation in which we worked the major receiving room for trauma in the county hospital for Brooklyn, New York (Kings County, for anyone who knows it). Hell of a place. I was always totally scared there, awake or (very rarely) asleep. The sleep cycle of surgical residents back in those ancient days was so messed up that I was never in a normal state of mind.

At 0540 one morning it was quiet enough for me to get 15 minutes of sleep. I climbed up onto one of the gurneys in C-1 Trauma where countless patients had passed through in the last week, and went to sleep. Within minutes I remember dreaming I was awakened by a faint sound. I looked up from the gurney and saw, advancing on me, in a circle completely surrounding me, all the trauma victims who had died on that gurney. All of them, starting with the ones from the last 8 hours. Coming closer, zombie like, gnashing their teeth.

I bolted awake, and sailed through the air, to land on the ground 6 feet from the gurney. Headed shaking for coffee. Vowed never to go to sleep in the trauma room again.

16

Sultana I have heard of an obscure syndrome affecting resident staff at large volume hospitals…a form of walking PTSD, and when getting off a full on 24 hour shift, having the most disturbing dreams and feelings, often resulting in a breakdown of some sort or another. Fully temporary I’m sure…though very scary at the same time.

17

smoke:

I assume you mean me.

It was actually A Fighting Man of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, one of the books in the “John Carter of Mars” series. And the mysterious self-rewriting section was one in which there’s an old old city and an even older catacombs beneath it with an evil really ancient man-shaped creature living there who lulls visitors to sleep and stores them until he gets around to eating them, and among the lulled-enchanted visitors are some who date back to when there were mighty oceans on Barsoom. After the creature is killed they come back to life and get into arguments (each of them unaware that the Barsoom they remember is of the distant past – in some cases dozens of generations more distant and in others, with our current-era heroes of course perceiving all of them as incredibly ancient relics of a long-dead past). The sequence of events, the things said by the creature to lull the hero to sleep with the others, the things said by the resurrected folks from the past, and their behavior when they come out to see the place where the ocean used to be, all kept shifting on me each time I reread the passage. Weird weird weird.

18

Thanks, ** AHunter3**. “Weird” is right!

19

I had a bizarre experience last Friday night. I was lying on the couch watching TV at about 10:30. My husband was lying on the other couch, which is perpendicular to the one I was lying on. The only light source was the TV itself.
I was wide-awake at the time. I caught movement out of the corner of my eye down by the end of the couch and sat up thinking my daughter had gotten out of bed. What I saw looked like the top half of a human figure, about the size of my daughter (she’s 8), walking around the end of the couch into the living room.
When I sat up, however, nothing was there. It was gone. Certainly wasn’t my daughter unless she suddenly developed the power of invisibility.
Naturally, I gasped in a completely frightened girly-girl manner, at which point my husband sat up and said,

“Did you see that too?”

:eek:

20

Wow Greywolf, that’s pretty spooky. It’s a lot easier to rationalize things when you’re the only one that sees it, but when someone else sees the same thing, then it gets creepy.