Heat and poor electrical contacts in the circuitry?
Or the Ghost in the Machine … Possessed by the ghost of a dead washing machine, so it’s pausing before going into spin cycle?
Stereo’s going kaput?
I want an invisible kitchen gnome named Phil…possibly Rubert…
You never heard these?
The cough drop tale
Well, there was this kid who’d been sent away to camp. He was 10. He was not a real healthy kid, you know, he was the kind of kid who had allergies, and asthma, wore glasses, and was always sniffling, or had a cold, or a cough, and when he got older, he’d need braces, and have acne, and so on. So of course, some of the other kids at camp would tease him.
Eventually, they dared him to spend the night in an old, haunted house over the hill. They said they’d stop teasing him and be his friend if he did. They were lying, of course, but he didn’t know that. And you can’t have a flashlight, they said. Just these matches. And they gave him exactly five matches.
Well, after it was dark, and everyone had gone to bed, they snuck out, and went through the woods and over the hill to the house. The kid walked up alone to the house, carrying nothing but his five matches, inhaler, cough drops, and tissue for his runny nose. The door was in front of him. The knob was gritty, and it was old, and strange looking, and as it turned it even felt gritty, it didn’t feel the way a doorknob should. He pushed the door open. His heart started pounding. He was scared. Ahead was darkness. Behind lay his own bed, home, electric lights. He cautiously put a foot in, and then quickly darted inside. Just as quickly, he lit a match. Long shadows flickered across the walls.
With some light, the house didn’t seem too bad at all. It was all dusty, there was no furniture, and everything was old. He was in some kind of living room, the kitchen was the next room, and there were stairs going up and stairs going down. He decided not to be scared and went down the stairs into the basement. The match burned down to his fingers so he lit another one. The basement was empty except for a few odd-looking jars, some pieces of dark wood, and a large oblong wooden box, about 2 feet wide, by 1 foot high, by six-and-a-half feet long. He wasn’t sure why there’d be an oblong box like that in the basement, but his match was running out, so he went back upstairs, and used another match to find a good spot to sit down.
He waited in the dark. His eyes adjusted to the dark, and there was some moonlight, so he could see a little bit Time passed. Occasionally he’d hear a creak, but he knew it was just a normal creak from an old house, nothing more. That’s what he told himself, anyways. But then around midnight, he heard a thump. And another, much louder, THUMP. THUMP. THUMP. It was coming from the basement. THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.
Only one thing in the basement was big enough to make that loud a THUMP. That oblong box. THUMP. It sounded like it was coming up the stairs now. THUMP. THUMP. He cowered in the dark – it’s dark, so if I hold real still, it won’t see me. THUMP. THUMP. But when he saw the box standing upright coming up the stairs, he panicked, and ran up the stairs to the second story instead of running outside. THUMP. He lit a match. THUMP. He looked around. He was in a room. There was a window, but it was mostly boarded up. THUMP. It was coming up the stairs now, he was trapped. THUMP. THUMP. THUMP. Now he had only one match left. THUMP. THUMP. THUMP. The box was coming down the hallway to the room. THUMP. THUMP. It was in the doorway now. The lid started to open. It kept coming forward. An arm started to reach out …
The kid took out his cough drops, and threw a cough drop, and it stopped the coughin’.
[It’s a good story for kids.]
Actually, this one might not be so common, since unlike the cough drop story, it’s true(?).
The ivory soap tale
One of the camp counselors canoed on the lake, in the evenings, and nights. One night, as he was paddling along the edge of the lake, he thought he heard a voice calling out in the night. It sounded like it was coming from the middle of the lake. But there was no one else on the lake; at least he hadn’t seen anyone before it got dark. He stopped paddling. He listened. He heard it again, a faint, eerie calling coming from the middle of the lake. He paddled to the middle of the lake. He listened for a while, but heard nothing. Eventually he went home.
About a week later, he was paddling at night again, and heard the calling. He’d been paying close attention, this time – he knew that there was no one else on the lake. He waited. He listened carefully. He heard it again. Now he knew he had really heard it, it wasn’t just a trick of the wind, and he wasn’t hearing things. It was definitely a voice calling out in the night. Slowly, very slowly, and as quietly as he could, he paddled toward the sound. He thought he saw something in the distance, but when he got nearer, he didn’t see anything. And the calling had stopped.
He came out the following night. He waited. Again, he heard the calling. He paddled his canoe toward the sound. He got closer. He could make out the words now. It sounded like “It floats. It floats.” He paddled closer. “It floats. It floats.” He saw something in the water. It was a human head! “Ivory soap, it floats.”
–
It turned out to be some person that lived nearby, who liked to swim and float in the lake at night, chanting, “It floats. Ivory soap, it floats.”
Note: If anyone has heard the Ivory Soap tale before, please tell me where you heard it, and who you heard it from.
Pleasant dreams.
Oh that. Yeah, I’ve heard that one, most recently in the Horrible Jokes thread.
So what’s the Ivory Snow story?
:smack: Woulda seen it if I’d previewed. And I have not heard that one before!
I’ve posted this before, but I’ll repeat it here: I lived for a while in an old (late 1800s) house in South Dakota. There was a presence in that house that only I could feel. My ex-wife and son laughed at me because they never felt it. I was touched on the back of my neck by something quite often and I often had the feeling of being watched. The house had a very large and ornate flight of stairs and once when I was coming down from the second floor I distinctly felt a hand on the small of my back. The next thing I knew, I was face down at the bottom of the stairs. My ex saw it happen and used to say that it looked as if I suddenly decided to swan dive down the stairs. That was the last time I ever felt a touch, and we lived there quite a while afterwards. In that same house, there was a room in the basement that I absolutely could not enter. As soon as I would open the door to that room, the hair on my arms and the back of my neck would stand up and I would be covered with goose bumps. I could take one or two steps into that room and no more. I would be absolutely terrified of something and would have to back out of the room—I knew beyond any doubt that turning my back would be a very bad idea. That’s my ghost story and I’m sticking with it.
I am the ghost
When my friend moved into a new house, we (he and the gang that helped him move) went on a walk way past his back yard into the woods and found a bunch of big bones. Of course we start teasing him about ghosts.
I would move stuff around when he was not looking for about two months after he moved in.
If you do a search on these types of threads previous, you’ll come up with some very vocal opponents to the idea of the paranormal. I’m not saying that’s bad or good - that’s just the way it is around here.
Have you got a cite for this statement?
Is there not a difference between saying ‘something doesn’t exist’ and ‘there is no evidence that something exists’?
The both of you can take it elsewhere, please.
If I were to hazard a guess about your comment, I’d say you were a Zorker.
It took me forever to figure out how to get the key from that damn unicorn. :mad:
If I were to hazard a guess, I would say she had read her Thurber.
Here is my story from another thread on this subject.