This is a topic I like to bring up every year at Halloween.
Over the years I’ve read some very amazing stories and I’ve come to the conclusion a true haunting is something few would want. The experience often leads people traumatized with severe PTSD. When and if they talk about it its only when the lights are on and people are around. Or often its only after some drinks.
But then there are other times when the experience is not a “haunting” designed to terrify but is to provide comfort especially if the person feels its from a benevolent spirit like a beloved relative thats died.
Many years ago, when I still smoked and my wife and I lived in an apartment, I stepped out onto our second-floor balcony to have a cigarette.
It was Halloween, and eldritch spirits seethed in the gloaming. As I stood on the balcony, I couldn’t help but notice that the wind chimes outside the apartment below me were tintinnabulating wildly, while at the same time noting that there was absolutely no wind!
I called my wife out, and she confirmed my observations; wind chimes clamorous, wind becalmed, and it was, indeed, All Hallow’s Eve.
It was quite spooky, and the icy chill that quickly enveloped my soul was just as rapidly dispersed when the Eastern Gray Squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis) that was scrabbling atop the wind chimes in an effort to reach a bird feeder abandoned his efforts and leaped away, making himself visible to me for the first time.
I had just gotten out of the shower late one night and was getting myself ready when I suddenly felt this strange sort of freshness in the air. I seemed to feel more alert, and then noticed a whispy shape moving in the air as if it was actually part of the atmosphere itself. I then looked at the fogged up mirror and saw the letters slowly emerge…
B… E…
S…K…A…R…D
That’s when I realized that my “Real Ghost” was actually an Oxymoron.
It was a dark and stormy night and I heard footsteps wandering down the hall in my parents’ house. I yelled “Who is it?” but got no answer, for I was the only one in the house.
This happened several more times. Then one day my dad said “Am I going f------- nuts?!” He’d heard the footsteps too.
We ultimately assumed it was the floorboards expanding and contracting in a way that mimicked footsteps–but when my mother had the hall carpeted I yelled “Mom! You’ve killed the ghost!”
I have a reverse banjo clock from 1916 that belonged to my maternal grandparents. It has two keyholes for winding, one for the clock itself and the other for the chimes. I was in the habit of only winding the clock itself, as the chimes were rather loud. At the time in question, the chimes had not been wound or rung for weeks if not months.
The mechanism of the chimes is that it would chime once on the half-hour, and chime the time on the hour. It would only chime on the hour or half-hour, not at any other time. The last piece of info is that if the chimes spring had mostly unwound, the chiming would be very slow and “draggy”.
As I returned to the house from my father’s wake, the clock started chiming. It chimed very clearly, not dragged out at all, and it chimed 10-12 times (I was so stunned I didn’t start counting), and was heard by my wife and daughter. It was 10:43. I’ve had enough math where I understand the power of coincidence, but the clock should not have been capable of chiming at that time. I have tried to partially wind the chimes, let them run down, move the clock to between the hour and half-hour, move the clock, shake the clock, etc. I’ve never been able to get the clock to chime at a time it shouldn’t.
My father was the type who loathed religion, but always felt that there might be something past death. I feel the same way, especially now.
A few more facts, for whatever they are worth -
I have a BS in Physics and Astronomy (back in '78, but still…)
I’m not convinced of the existence of ghosts, even with the above occurrence, but I am more than a little weirded out by it, and am more inclined that there may be some part of us that survives.
I tried like hell to reproduce this by varying the amount of winding on the chime spring, playing around with the position of the clock, banging on the wall, etc. My last try was to move the hands of the clock past the half hour mark, fully wind the chime spring, then move the clock around, bang on the wall, open and close doors, etc. The clock would not chime except on the hour and half hour.
The first Christmas my husband and I were dating, he gave me a windup music box that played a Christmas carol. Every year after, it got place of pride on the coffee table. We wound it and played it for years until it would no longer play. I still put it out anyway, though, for the memories.
The first Christmas after my husband passed, I was sitting on the couch with one of my sons when the music box began to play. It tinkled its way through the song, once, then stopped. We couldn’t make it play again, no matter what we tried. And it has never played again.
Perhaps it released some type of stored energy or tension that caused it to play, but I will always wonder if there wasn’t something more to it.
Visiting my grandmother’s house as a little kid and got up to use the bathroom in the night. House is dark except for the moonlight (or streetlights, whatever) shining in the bathroom window, enough to illuminate the shape of a large, dark, shadowy figure suspended above the bathtub.
Ran down the hall and jumped into bed with my mom, shaking with fear. She woke up and asked me what was wrong. Turned out the ghostly figure was my grandmother’s long winter coat that she hung on the shower rod to dry.
I cannot have ghosts because I have cats. That weird noise in the night? Cat trying to get into something. That crash? Cat. That eldritch howling? Cats fighting.
I like these kind of stories. Just a bit of supernatural. The right balance of creepy and rational. There’s no obvious way it could be faked*. It’s a one time thing that could have happened. And why would someone lie about it?
*unless it’s totally made up. But that takes the fun out of it…
I’ve told this story here before, but it remains my favorite. Many strange things have happened over the years at both my parents’ and my sister’s houses (they live on the same street, but this one took the cake.
My mom operates a business out of a small office that was built as an addition on the back of the house. One evening she was in her office entering information from index cards into her computer, and as she finished each card she would rip it in half and throw it in the trash can next to her desk; eventually there was a pile of randomly-thrown-away halves of cards in the trash. About an hour later, she heard a commotion from the kitchen. She found my dad in there, holding a bag of potato chips in one hand and two halves of an index card in the other and demanding to know what the hell was going on.
He had opened up a brand new, factory-sealed bag of potato chips, reached in, and pulled out one of the index cards that my mom had thrown in her trash. He had not been in the office and is not even remotely the stealthy type, so there is no way he could have popped in, grabbed two halves of the same index card out of the trash, and pop back out. He is also not in possession of the best poker face in the world- he was genuinely freaked out, not ‘I’m playing freaked out to prank you.’ The bag was sealed, so there’s no way my mom could have set the gag up. No one else was in the house.
This incident is what moved me from being a weak atheist to a strong agnostic. I’m glad others heard it, otherwise I’d end up questioning my own memory.
We used to sing that in Boy Scouts. Note that the clock in question was my mother’s parents clock originally, not my father’s.
It’s probably the oldest thing in my house - it was a wedding present in 1916.