Share something creepy/spooky/eerie/scary.

In My Humble Opinion
21

Ok chikki, this actually happened when my husband and I were living with my parents.

Out of the kindness of their hearts, my parents opened up my childhood home to my husband, me and our infant son. The house was enormous–a three story farmhouse they’d gutted and remodeled to suit a big family, so there was plenty of room for us.
Ironically, my son just wouldn’t stay in his crib in the beautiful room we’d decorated for him. No matter how we tried to do it, that little boy would not stay asleep in that crib.
…until one night.
We’d had a birthday party earlier that week for my niece, and she’d left the mylar “Happy Birthday!” balloon in the livingroom. My son loved to watch it, bat at it, coo at it…and had tuckered himself out but good–my husband got him into the crib without waking him (a true feat), and we snuck downstairs for a quiet evening with my parents.

My mother and husband were in the kitchen doing the crossword puzzle.

My father and I were watching tv in the livingroom–remember, this is a big, old house–and out of the corner of my eye, I could see that mylar balloon bobbing up and down around ceiling. It was moving pretty chaotically, until it got to the door frame leading into the hallway…then my dad said, “Man, I need to check the windows…This damned house is so drafty.”
I agreed.
Then the balloon bobbed up and down one more time…and bobbed under the frame and out into the hallway. Instantly, my father and I jumped out of our chairs and followed it.
Let me say right here and now that even though I might have a penchant for the eerie and spooky, my father does* not.* He’s absolutely no fun when it comes to ghosts or anything like that. Everything has to be explained logically.
That said, he was interested in finding out about the drafts in the house (and how it affected the utility bill); I was interested in where the balloon was going.

We followed the balloon up the stairs. The best description of how it looked is to say it looked like someone was hanging onto the string and walking up the stairs. There wasn’t anyone there…but…you get the idea.
At the top of the stairs, the balloon turned and continued down the hallway–until it reached the end–where it moved into the room where my son slept.
It moved around the partly-opened door and came to rest above his crib–behind the door.

He was fine. Sleeping like…a baby.

My dad and I snuck out with the balloon. I went into the kitchen to tell my husband–who also likes creepiness–and my mother–who is a chicken of true form. They were spooked.
After a few minutes, my father appeared in the kitchen door and said he’d been trying to get the balloon to replicate its trek with no avail. To this day, he maintains it was a quirk of drafts in the old house.

I don’t know what to think. Of all the weird experiences I’ve had–or thought I’ve had–this one is the only one I know I remember exactly.

22

My Americorps team stayed in the St. Patrick’s-St. Anthony’s church in Hartford, CT for 2 months, in the old convent section. My teammates kept reporting strange occurences – Rose found an old doily that had somehow made its way into her dresser, Sara said she heard heavy breathing in her room at night, etc.

So one night I’m walking down a long hallway downstairs. The lights are on in the hallway, so I flick them off and punch in my code to turn on the security system. I start up the stairs to our bedrooms, when I see something strange out of the corner of my eye. I come back down the stairs and sure enough… the lights are back on. It’s 1 in the morning, my teammates are all asleep, the friars are in their friary, no one was in that hallway with me. How did the lights come back on?

23

I want you all to know that this thread gave me nightmares last night.

Good stories, people!

24

I’ve had any number of strange events happen to me, beginning when I was around 7 or 8 years old. How do these grab you?

Stonehenge: We lived in England between 1968 and 1972; sometime during that time period (probably around 1971), we went on a tour to Stonehenge. This was back when you could walk around the circle as you pleased. It was a very foggy day–the kind where you could only see a few feet in any direction. I got a little separated from the group, and as I was walking forward saw a huge stone looming up in front of me. The voices around me seemed to fade away, and it seemed to me that I was hearing the sounds of men calling to each other in a language I didn’t understand along with the sounds of wood creaking. Sadly, the experience wasn’t repeated when I went back on my recent trip.

Blanked signs: Another foggy experience, this time at night. I was driving home from somewhere, and every traffic sign I passed (speed limit, keep right, that sort of thing) was completely blank and a pearly grey in colour. The next morning they were back to normal.

When I was younger I thought that I might have psychic powers. These days I don’t know if I even believe they’re possible, but I did have some odd experiences when I was exercising them.

Describing Sites Unseen This happened several times when I was exercising psychometry.

The first time I got a smell, though, not a sight. Someone had handed me a folded piece of paper, and all of a sudden I got this whiff of incredibly strong sweat, which no one else in the room smelled. It turns out the paper was a deed to a piece of land that used to have a factory of some sort on it. BTW, I sniffed around all these people afterward, too, to make sure it wasn’t one of them I was smelling. They were all clean.

Another incident was when I described to a friend the sight of a large house burning down, viewed from a hill. I said it was in winter. He said it was actually in the summer. This confused me, because none of the trees around the house had leaves. He told me the trees had been dead for years. I had not seen this house or the fire, nor had I known (prior to describing what I’d “seen”) that he had seen this.

A third incident happened at music camp, when I accurately described to a girl I had never met before that camp a room in her house. I mentioned that I got the strong impression of cats in the room. It turned out the room was her grandmother’s favourite room, and her grandmother had kept cats. The object I was psychometrizing was her grandmother’s ring.

The LAST time I ever psychometrized was a friend’s key ring. At the time I couldn’t give him anything, but I got very upset and went home early. He called later on and asked me what had upset me, and I told him the only thing I could get from the key ring was death. Questions from him elicited that it was someone close to him (I didn’t know who) and that it be soon. Three days later his girlfriend, the mother of his child, tried to commit suicide.

I’ve not only not tried to do this sort of thing since that last incident, I have deliberately tried to NOT let it happen. That last one kinda freaked me out, and considering that the more often I did it the more information I was getting, I didn’t want to see where it would go. Note that it was very rare for me to get anything when it involved people I knew pretty well. It worked best with people I’d only just met or hadn’t known for too long.

To this day, I still haven’t figured out what I did or how, and I’m unsure what to believe. It’s not like you can measure this sort of thing, and I’ve never tried to test it in a controlled environment. Did I do what I thought I did, or were all these people trying to get me wound up somehow? I may never know, and I’m not sure how I feel about that.

25

Receiving a blow job? Seems like a dark parking lot, where you know all the businesses and offices are closed would be a good place for that sort of thing. Not that this theory makes your story any less creepy.

26

[hijack]
sofia’s story reminded me of this hilarious old thread, which deserves to be taken out and dusted off from time to time:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=160851&highlight=helium
[/hijack]

My own creepy stories all involve animals. Here’s one.

When I was an undergrad, I had an apartment with a suspended ceiling in a 100-year-old house. One night I was awakened by my dog barking maniacally in the living room. I went into the LR, and saw that he was barking at the ceiling. I managed to calm him down, then I heard the flapping of wings between the false ceiling and the real ceiling. Occasionally there’d be a loud BONG, and then the flapping would continue. I finally decided to look and see what was going on up there, so I got my stepladder, lifted one of the ceiling panels oh so gingerly, and shown a flashlight into the void. The light fell on a pair of eyes, looking straight at me, and then the bat (for that was what it was) took off and flew straight towards me. I dropped the panel back into place as quickly as I could. It kept flying around, occasionally hitting one of the suspending wires (the BONG), while I wondered what the hell I’d do about it. I eventually decided that, since it had found its way in, it could find it’s way out, so I went back to bed (by this time the dog was bored with the whole thing, so he didn’t go back to barking). Next morning the bat was gone. I never could find the hole it came in through.

27

Come on now. If you suddenly discovered you could reproduce images on paper with uncanny accuracy would you deliberately avoid becoming an artist? If you could run a three-minute mile, would you avoid footraces?
We all have different abilities we can utilize to make our contribution in this world, yours may be unfamiliar in your culture, but no less valid or important.

I hope you take some time to get some training, and some reassurance that what you are doing need not make you afraid. I recommend checking with the Institute of Noetic Sciences; they do not do training, but they are an excellent clearinghouse for serious inquiries into explorations on the frontiers of human consciousness. Don’t throw away a gift.

Contact them here.

28

Do they normally last 2 hours? (If so I’ve been doing something wrong.)

29

One night I was returning from a weekend away. I glanced up the small hill to my house and noticed the living room light was on. I knew I had left it on, so that was ok. Then when I got out of the car with my bags and looked at the house again, the light was out. Very weird, and very scary. I called the police, who came and looked through the house, finding nothing. Later, I found that the light bulb on the light I left on had choosen that moment to blow. Oops.

30

Well, the first thing that comes to my mind is my grandparents’ house in La Marque, Texas. Whenever we visited, all the kids would have to sleep in the upstairs right room. The boys would have no trouble, and fell asleep easily and peacefully. The girls always had a sense of dread and uneasiness; if we did fall asleep, we had nightmares. Girls never did feel comfortable in that room. Later on, after my parents divorced, my mother, brother, sister, and I lived with my grandfather for a while in the same house. Sometime during that year or so, we learned that the previous residents of the home had a very disturbed son, who was frequently locked into that room by his mother. Seems he really hated women. I’m not saying the room was haunted or that it was not, but I do know that his hatred of women was something that could be felt by girls and women who tried to sleep in that room.

Another time I was working on a Twilight Zoneish story about a doll who came to life. I had only gotten about the first page or two written when I wanted to go to sleep. As I lay there, I kept seeing the doll I had mentally created, and was unable to sleep until I got up, tore up the story, and threw it away.

And one other time I was driving home down some back roads from a town about an hour away from where I lived. It was late and fog had rolled in. I had this instant nightmareish vision about someone who was traveling a road like this, in the fog, and never got anywhere; she just kept on driving and driving and driving the same stretch of pavement forever. The fact that it was a good 30 minutes before I saw anything but a seemingly interminable stretch of road and lots of fog added to the creep factor.

31

LOL. That would be embarassing. Too funny.

32

you guys finally jogged this loose from the ol’ memory banks. under the uber-creepy-at-the-time category:

i’ve been a BIG-time fan of horror movies since i was a wee tot (as in at least second grade). if there were monsters or scary things on screen, i was there. carry forward for another decade or so…

so the set up: i’m now in my early 20s, asleep in my bedroom in my parent’s house. i’m awoken in the middle of a very dark night by the sounds of growling from my faithful Siamese cat. normally this is a fairly laid-back cat, not given to alarums of so dire a nature. since i can feel that she’s up on the bed with me, i deduce that something must be in the room that she finds threatening. naturally, i reach for the lamp on my nightstand, to shed some light on the subject.

it doesn’t turn on. :eek:

in disbelief, i try it fruitlessly several more times. still nada.

the cat continues to growl. :eek:

rational brain and monster-conditioned brain are having it out at this point.
MCB: “THERE’S SOMETHING IN HERE!!!” (insert appropriate number of EEKS)
RB: “It’s probably a mouse. Twinks (the cat) is such a wuss, she’d stay up on the bed and growl, rather than chase it. Or it could be a snake.”
:eek: (copperheads were not unknown in our area)
MCB: “THE LIGHT WON’T WORK!”
RB: “… Well, maybe the bulb just burned out.”

cat? still growling.

the options seem to be down to either sitting and listening to the cat growl, possibly until dawn, or making a leap for the wall switch to the hanging lamp above my dresser. i nerve myself up (cat’s still growling) and lunge out of bed, intent on touching as little floorspace as possible until i’ve actually reached the goal of the light switch. within a bound-and-a-half (the wall is about five feet or so from the bed), i scrabbly blindly for the switch. i find it. i flip it on.

the light does not come on.

now we’re getting into hair-standing-on-end Twilight Zone territory.

cat continues to growl, having moved into a sliding scale effort. starts on a high note, then does a quick drop through the octave to a long drawn out low-note rumble.

the good news is, the light switch is right next to the doorway of my bedroom. since i KNOW bad news obviously awaits inside, it doesn’t take much convincing to get me to vacate. i try the hallway switch for the stairwell hanging lamp.

we have no “and the light was good” happening here.

it’s still the middle of the night. it’s still pitch black. the cat is still having a cow. but things have obviously moved more to the comedy end of the spectrum at this point, or else my panic mode setting has fried out by now. i reason that we must be having a blackout. an incredibly badly timed one (or extremely well-timed, depending on your point of view), but hey, we’re in a rural area, it’s not unknown. i resolutely blunder my way to the nearest flashlight location and arm myself. and steel myself for the return trip.

i’m on full-scan mode on the way back upstairs, searching for any signs of errant snakes or other (gulp!) intruders. (snakes i can handle–no problems there. mice? the only concern is how to catch, preferably without making a mess. monsters? … )

i’m back in my bedroom, without finding anything unusual on the return trip. the cat is still unhappy with current events, still on the bed. the focus of her ire seems to be aimed at the space under my dresser. i bravely turn the beam of the flashlight towards the hiding space. (bravely, because it requires getting down at floor level to see whatever may be lurking within.) my light then reveals the presence of

(man, i am SOOOO tempted to write “To Be Continued” right now. :D)

the BARN CAT!

somehow our barn cat, who resided ONLY at the barn, and who had never until now seemed to express any particular interest in the house, decided to slip into said casa for the night.

she was given an undignified escort to her primary domain.

i assume i started sleeping again, at some point in my life.

33

To say that I am an easily frightened man is an understatement. If I have to go upstairs to bed in the middle of the night, in pitch black, it is a freaking nightmare. I am very capable of moving around familiar places blind, but have you ever noticed how thick darkness seems when you’re walking up the stairs, almost like someone could be standing right there in front of you or waiting by the stairs ready to claw at your feet. (like I said, I get easily frightened). The big problem with me is that I don’t get scared when I should. When I was 10 I went on my first trip away from home, across all the way to Wales. We were staying in cabins in the middle of freakin’ nowhere, it was about 2 in the morning and I need to go to the toilet, the toilet about 50 yards away on the other side of this group of cabins, which was on a hillside surrounded by trees. I put on a jacket and trainers and off I went, no problem.

But anyway, back to the weird moments:

My mum once took part in using a Ouija board at a community centre with a couple of her friends. She doesn’t talk about it much but I have heard enough to know that during the course of the event, they were locked in their room, from the inside, and a nearby window shattered near them. Like I said she doesn’t talk about it much but I have been made to swear on my life that I will never use one, ever. I guess that means something. :eek:

Despite my paranoia I can’t think of a single occurance in my life that is really up to the same standard as the rest of these stories. That kinda bums me out, in a freaky way. :frowning:

34

khadaji, it was embarassing, especially since when they didn’t find anyone, the police seemed (understandably) a bit “you wasted our time.” I didn’t figure out about the bulb until after they left, when I checked the lamp.

35

Well I was going to reply anyway, but now if I don’t I wouldn’t be sharing my experience which is something in the way of irony.

Background: sitting at my comp typing up a creepy story for this thread

I get up to go into the other room (one with no windows). I light a candle cause it’s nice and it’s kinda getting dark in the house. The power goes out. Because I was just reading this thread and not scared, I was thoroughly frightened for 3.5 seconds.

My story (retyped cause the computers shut down with the power outage).

Background: Living home for the summer after (14th grade) college. I make my old room my fortress. Small town = nothing to do and bed time with the parentals.

So I’m winding down from the day and my parents go to bed a bit after midnight. I listen to music in my room and am shutting the blinds in my vampire-can’t-see-the-sun-in-the-morning kind of way. I get to the last window and notice a bat between the shut window and the shut screen. Ok … sigh … I have to let it out. I go to open everything but before I do I notice a whole swarm of bees next to the bat, inbetween the shut window and screen, and they are making a nest. I can actually see the nest. Time? 1:00AM! Huh? So I get the parents out of bed, so that I’m not completely crazy. They look and are baffled. By now the bees are attacking the bat and the bat is eating, yes I said eating bees one at a time. My stepfather (carefully) opens the window and the screen just enough to let everything outside if they so choose to leave (and shuts the window again).

Morning comes and there is nothing there. No trace. No dead bee, no bat dung. Nada. Weird.

36

One of my acquantances had an experience similar to mine. Dreampt that a man was in his house and found the front door open. He called the cops and wouldn’t go sleep in his house until he had the locks changed… the cops were a little annoyed with him too.

37

When I was still living with my parents, the house was on a relatively dark and quiet suburban side street. It also had plenty of large windows that my parents loved to leave uncovered at all times, and plenty of yard/driveway space on all sides for potential lurkers. So every now and then I would get really creeped out imagining who could have been staring in.

Especially at the back of the house. The kitchen back door was very insecure even when locked, as I can attest to since my weakling self busted right through the deadbolt late one night when I was locked out. I think we put it back together with toothpicks and Elmer’s glue. The other back door was made of transparent glass, with no covering of any sort. So that room was always plainly visible from outside. As well as parts of three other rooms.

Well, one night when I was the only one home, I was upstairs. Suddenly I heard the unmistakable sound of somebody pounding the crap out of the kitchen back door and my blood ran cold. Our little jumpy half chihuahua dog was also terrified and I think I quickly crept down the stairs, lifted her over the gate and took her back upstairs.

There we sat totally still and the pounding stopped in a few seconds. Had they seen me on the stairs? The bottom of the stairs was within the view of the glass back door. Oh, and also of the bay window directly in front of them! Even though I could not go back down the stairs without being seen, eventually I did. I slunk to whatever lights were still on and prayed that nobody was looking as I turned them off.

Then my dog and I sat totally still downstairs for about an hour. No further intrustion attempts, and we eventually fell asleep.

In the morning I found a busted mylar balloon on the floor. It had been WHAP!ed to death by the ceiling fan.

I am now that much closer to becoming a Foley artist.

38

I was in San Diego in May, visiting The Whaley House, among other places. People send in oddities that show up in their photgraphs and I got a couple of weird things in mine as well. A couple of pals say it’s just a lens flare and that could be true, but I’ve just never seen this stuff before in all my years of taking photos with several different cameras. It’s the bedrooms that seem most affected. I didn’t stay long in the back garden either, as I was traveling alone.
I plan to go back there later with a pal and another camera to see if it happens again.
I don’t have any place to post the photos but I have them stored as .jpgs.

39

Dig this Victorian photograph spotted in an antique store this afternoon

http://fff.fathom.org/pages/gunslinger/other/wtf_small.jpg

closeups:
http://fff.fathom.org/pages/gunslinger/other/wtf1.jpg
http://fff.fathom.org/pages/gunslinger/other/wtf2.jpg

40

I have posted this story before, but it still kinda freaks me out.

In junior college a woman I knew, I will call her Susan, was rather plain looking an chubby but really a fun woman to be around. However, she was into the occult and at any party, Susan had the Ouija board ready for someone to go off in the corner and see the future.

OK, so Susan grabs me and I go off and next thing I know Susan is asking:

Susan: “Will I ever get married?”
Ouija: “Yes”
Susan: “How many children will I have?”
Ouija: “30”
Susan: (a bit perplexed) “How many children will I have?”
Ouija: “30”
Susan: “Lets try this one more time. How many children will I have?”
Ouija: “30”

So Susan seemed a little bent out of shape that Ouija wasn’t working and that was it. I think she was thinking I was to blame.

Fast forward 10 years. I had moved to Europe and came home for a brief visit. I ran into some friends from the junior college and was catching up on who was doing what and so on. I said, “oh, how is Susan?”

“Susan? Oh, she married Bob shortly after you moved to Europe.”
“Great. Do they have any kids?”
“No…she had three miscarriages.”

I totally freaked out.

“How many children will I have?” and three times the Ouija had pointed to Three and then to Zero. It didn’t mean 30.