Yes.
But I am not going to elaborate (for obvious reasons).
I guess I’ll be the first to admit, yes. I do. And I’ve seen one, or at least the “presence” of one.
When I was about 8 years old my family lived on a large wheat farm in northern Montana, just a few miles south of the Canadian border. This is the great plains, and the land is very very flat.
The farm we lived on was divided into “sections,” or plots of land that were a perfect square one mile on a side… kind of like a checkers board if viewed from the air. The farmhouse sat on one edge of a section, and an old homesteaders shack, long abandoned and disused, sat on the edge of an adjoining section ~ 1 mile away.
One night in October (naturally!) my mother was in the kitchen doing something or other and suddenly cries out for my dad to come in there. My dad (and me and my brother) come into the kitchen to see what the fuss was. Mom was standing at the kitchen window looking east, and in the distance we could see the old shack—or, more accurately, we could see a light in the one of the old windows in the shack. There was no electricity in the shack, no fireplace, the woodstove that had originally been there had been pulled out decades earlier. The light had the yellowish glow of a Coleman lantern, and my dad theorized that a hunter had gotten himself turned around in the snow and somehow stumbled upon the shack and had decided to hold up for the night.
Now of course this was October in Northern Montana. “Cold” doesn’t begin to describe it. The idea that someone was holed up in an old shack with no door and broken windows was unacceptable, and my dad immediately headed to the garage. His plan was to take his old F-250 4x4 and go get whoever it was that was in the shack. There was nearly a foot of snow on the ground and it was continuing to come down, but lightly. He wasn’t going to let someone say outside in weather like that.
Now, despite the land being flat there was small coulee that ran across our property, and it happened to run between the main house and the shack. This meant the access road dipped down into a little draw made by the coulee before rising up again. I don’t remember why, but I accompanied my dad as he headed out to rescue whoever was in the shack. As we left the house and followed the access road along the section lines, we could clearly see the glowing window off in the distance.
However, as we dipped down into the coulee, the old shack slipped out of view. Even though it was dark we knew where it would be on the black horizon when we crested the little draw again.
Except… it wasn’t. Dad was taking his time driving through the snow on a small, one-lane dirt track across the edge of a wheat field, so we were in that draw for maybe a minute or 90 seconds. But when we finally got back onto the flatland the light was simply gone. It was dark out, and I mean dark. We couldn’t see anything other than the scattered snowflakes in the headlights.
Dad continued down the section line until he could turn and follow another one to the shack, maybe another quarter mile on. When he pulled up to it we could see that there was nothing there. No vehicle, no footprints… nothing.
Dad reached under the seat of the pickup and pulled out a big 4-D cell MagLite and hopped out of the pickup. I remember rolling down the window and sticking my head out, watching him walk toward the shack. He was wearing big rubber Wellington boots that somehow seemed to be extra loud in the snow. Dad hollers out every few steps, seeing if anyone answers. I’m sitting in the cab shivering, hoping dad will just walk up the doorless shack, get whoever is inside outside and take him back to the house for a hot coffee and a warning not to trespass on our land again. But dad doesn’t do that. Instead he makes a big circle around the shack, his footsteps fading away, then getting louder as he makes his way closer to the pickup… then away again as he circles the shack.
I finally see him shine the light into one of the widows and look in the building. He stays that way for maybe thirty seconds before walking back to the pickup. He climbs back in, tosses the flashlight on the dashboard, and turns the pickup around, heading back for home. I ask him what he had seen, but he simply hushed me. I remember listening to the windshied wipers as we made our way back, sans passenger. My dad never spoke a word on the way back, and the ride was silent except the crunch of snow under the tired, the hum of the engine and the windshield wipers. There was no wind, no storm, nothing else… just black silence.
When we got home my dad told me to go to my room and shut the door. I did so, but laid on the floor listening at the crack at the bottom. I heard dad give my mom a play-by-play recap of what we had done. He then said that when he walked up and shone the light in the window, the shack was completely undisturbed. Decades of dust, dirt, animal nests, broken mason jars, and all manner of junk still littered the floor, just as it had for years. There were no tracks inside, no wet footprints, no undisturbed snow. The shack was as untouched as it had been since the last occupants had left in the 1940’s.
Yet not half an hour earlier all three of us had seen a gas light flickering in the window. We did not hallucinate it. Someone, something, had been in that shack.
Yes. I have a friend who I’ve known several years now. One day, when we were still fairly new friends, I was over at his house, standing in the living room talking. Over his shoulder, I could see the kitchen, and suddenly, there was a man standing there for a brief moment, then gone. I did kind of a startled double take, and my friend asked me what was wrong. I told him I had just seen a man in the kitchen, and he told me, “Oh yeah, that’s Tewksbury. He’s been here a long time.”
I also saw a very dear friend of mine, after he passed away. His wife saw him too, and he spoke to her. He said, “It’s okay, baby. Life goes on.” His wife is not remotely fanciful; daughter of a career man in the Navy. Strong and practical woman.
I can’t say for sure that these were ghosts. Depends on your definition of “ghost,” I guess. They certainly weren’t wearing like sheets and going “wooooooooo.” But neither was I asleep or on drugs.
Never even had a spooky experience you could mistakenly attribute to a ghost.
I have heard some fascinating ghostly anecdotes (and also about UFO sightings), but that’s a meaningless claim. Anecdotes are not data.
Ghosts are invisible so no one has ever see one.
So if someone said they saw fairies, you would accept it and wish you could see them too?
Thanks for the tale, Lancia. I’ve always loved ghost stories. Sadly, I’ve had no ghost experiences and don’t expect any.
I really feel silly posting this since I am about the last person believe in ghosts. And I didn’t see anything, but I have 2 stories that took place at a century old house I used to own.
The first story was told by the previous owners after we bought the house. They claimed they saw an old woman in a rocking chair in the front parlor. When they mentioned it to the elderly neighbor (who had lived there for 60 years), she told them that was the spot where the original woman of the house always rocked (she was deceased). And a short time later, she came over and told them that she had just heard that the original owner (husband) of the house had died in his retirement home on the same day the vision appeared.
The next one I contributed to myself, sort of. This house had originally been owned by a well to do Colonel. The grounds were dotted with overgrown gardens with unusual plants (quince was one of them, along with a small vineyard). I cleared a part of the back lawn for vegetable gardening. A large rock poked out of the ground right in the middle, so I decided to remove it. Well, it turned out to be nearly as big as a bathtub.
I dug down and made a sloped ramp and we used a come along to winch the rock over to the side of the yard. Under the rock, and only in that spot, was a neat bead of smoothed river rocks. I remember thinking, “Indian graveyard”.
About 10 years later a friend was visiting with her daughter and the daughter’s girlfriend. It was dusk and the 2 girls came running out of the back yard exclaiming they had seen a ghostly spirit rise out of the ground. I asked them to show me where it was, and they pointed…you guessed it… right to where the boulder had been.
I will mention that all these people who saw things were rather religious Catholics. The previous owners of the house left a full sized statue of the Madonna standing on snakes in the dining room for a week or two until they retrieved it.
And the friend and her daughter were the most outspoken Catholics I had ever met. I dated her for awhile and moved on from utter frustration at trying to deal with her guilt trip whenever I tried to touch her (outside of wedlock, yah know). It is kind of inhibiting to have someone pray for forgiveness at letting someone touch her.
None of this bothered me. It was a very peaceful house to sleep in, right from the start.
Dennis
That is my position stated perfectly.
Quote:
Originally Posted by movingfinger View Post
Writer Edith Wharton, when asked if she believed in ghosts, said, “No, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’m afraid of them.”
Yup, my position as well . . .
We live in an older house (100yo) that the former owner is adamant is haunted by a little girl’s ghost. We’ve had some very weird things happen, but confirmation bias and all that.
One night I got up to use the potty and there, at the end of the hall at the head of the staircase, was a little girl in a dress. I screamed and slammed the bedroom door shut and made SharkWife come out into the hall with me – nothing there, of course.
So, it was a half-asleep hallucination. But now I try to get all peed out before bedtime so I don’t have to walk down the hall in the dead of night . . Mwhahahaha :eek:
I’ve heard them but not seen them that I can remember
Me, too.
I’ve made a point of telling people when you die, DON’T come and visit me.
No, and I’m not sure I believe in them. I do, however, think that there are things still in this world that we do not fully know about or understand and that there are still a great many things that cannot be answered with simple scientific answers or facts.
I have had mysterious things happen in houses, sometimes, which could never be explained, at least not by any way I or others could see… I’m sure there IS/ARE perfectly sensible reasons behind these mysteries, but damned if I’m the person to figure it in some of the past circumstances I’ve experienced.
Let’s just say I’m keeping an open mind about it, as I do with pretty much everything, in all walks of life.
Can’t be answered with facts? That’s quite an achievement.
If you would say angels and demons count then yes.
This can be quite damn unnerving the first time it happens.
Explain the popularity of the Kardashians.
Great story!
It’s so great, I hate to ruin it.
But it seems to me not that “something had been IN that shack”.
It seems more likely that “something had been reflected off the window of that shack.”
A car’s headlight, moonlight, I dunno.
But it was only visible from a certain angle, and as you ascended from the coulee* at a different angle, it disappeared.
That’s what a reflection does.
*Thanks for teaching me a new word:
From dictionary dot com: usage is “Chiefly Western U.S. and Western Canada” : a deep ravine
I’ve never seen one and don’t believe in them (but fear/respect them) but my street is full of them according to all the neighbor’s stories.
The neighbor up the street has seen them on multiple occasions in his house. He claims a young child has run across his 2nd floor landing a number of times. He saw a man holding a young child about 15 feet away from him in his living room then they disappeared. This went on for years and his wife saw them too.
Across the street another family claims to have “felt” a ghost in their house. They claim it was their recently deceased grandmother.
A few doors down the family actually had an exorcism due to various unexplained things (e.g., appliances turning on and off by themselves).
Another neighbor was sleeping and heard loud talking downstairs and thought the TV or radio was on. When they went to investigate but nothing was on.
The only weird thing we had was right after we went to bed one night, just outside the hallway leading to the bedroom we heard the distinctive sound like ice clanging in an empty glass. I don’t know how to explain that but it happened just that one time and never again.
The street is about 16 years old and all these things happened in the first few years. I haven’t heard any stories lately.
Did you post this story before? It sounds very familiar.