Share Your Creepy House Stuff

In My Humble Opinion
21

Cool! I can finally share my house stories without fear of mocking!

Last October I bought a 260 year old salt box in Maine. I love the house and it has a great feeling but there is definitely something weird going on. One evening in December, I came home from work and flipped the switch for back staircase lights and nothing happened. Before going outside into the creepy dirt-floor cellar (where spiders the size of canned hams dwell) where the fuse box is located, I walked up to the top of the stairs and flipped the switch there too. Nothing. So then I walked around the landing to third switch and before flipping it said, “Enough! Will you please quit dicking with the lights?” And the lights came on. This has only happened the one time but other things have occurred. The floor lamp in the guest room turns on by itself in the middle of the night (no timer) and the TV *and *cable box (which are plugged into different outlets) in the bedroom turned on by itself Tuesday morning. My dog (and other visiting dogs) will watch something walk across the living room (I can’t see anything) – it’s actually really amusing to watch the synchronized head-turning. He’ll also watch something on the second floor landing outside the master bedroom sometimes. I’ll also occasionally hear three sharp knocks on that same landing that sound like they’re coming from outside -but there’s nothing there to cause them. It’s always three very distinctive, sharp, evenly-spaced raps.

The freakiest thing though is the phantom cat. I was lying in bed a month or so ago and I distinctly felt a cat jump up on the foot of the bed and walk up towards the head. I sat bolt upright and immediately turned on the light because I don’t have a cat. My poor dog was cowering in the bathroom and took quite a bit of coaxing to get out. And then Wednesday night, as I was sitting in bed watching the Hawks win the Stanley Cup (Yay!!), I saw the shadow of a cat on the wall walk across the room (the bedroom is on the second floor and there’s no window sill for a cat to even walk on if one was so inclined to scale the outside wall). That’s the only thing that has freaked me out (although the knocks will startle me because they usually happen at night around 11:00). I’ve convinced myself I must have been imagining the whole thing but I’ve named the cat Shadow just in case. The dog was outside so there was no animal corroboration that time.

I totally love the house and feel comfortable in it so I just go with flow. The people I bought it from and with whom I’m still in contact recently said the same sort of things happened when they lived there. They never experienced the cat thing but it turns out that they had to have their 15 year old cat put down right before I bought the house…

22

AFAIK, a loon sounds nothing like a coyote.

23

Back in the days when phones had cords, I used to keep the cord to the wall phone looped up over it because my toddlers liked to tug on the hanging cord, pulling the handset off the cradle and possibly down crashing onto their heads. One time the cord slipped off. My 18-month-old daughter stood under the phone, tugging up and down on the cord. I turned around just in time to see the handset fall off toward her head, falling straight down…and then abruptly reverse direction in midair and fly around a corner, landing on the floor, exactly as if someone had knocked it aside as it fell.

24

Bahhg, amateurs. In grad school my art studio was in an old mental hospital. I was at Ohio University (Athens), and my studio was in The Ridges. Look it up.

I would hear music often when I was the only person on the floor, I kept hearing somebody say my name when nobody else was around, and one time I walked into the bathroom and saw a guy in the mirror, but the place was empty.

So I just played my stereo loud and stayed in my studio until other students showed up. I was usually more upset at other students than at the ghosties.

My current house was built in 1800, and nothing weird has happened. Go figure.

25

My younger sister and I have different fathers. DoperSis’s dad was less than a perfect guy, to put it nicely. Toward the end of his life he was an alcoholic, heroin addict, and an all around ass. He was banned from seeing us but became obsessed with buying DS gifts for Valentine’s Day. So he showed up at our apartment the Feb 13 while Mom was at work. He insisted on taking DS out to dinner. He was clearly very drunk so we refused. He threatened DS with physical harm so we had no choice but to go. It was the scariest night of my life and resulted in Mom filing for a restraining order the very next day. DS’s father died the following August, alone, high, and miserable.

Shortly after strange happenings started to occur throughout the house. First was the TV. I am a ridiculously light sleeper. I had a friend spending the night so we decided to camp out on the living room floor. We awoke to find the TV pulled out from the wall at a bizarre angle. This TV set is so heavy it took three grown men to carry it out of the apartment when we moved. It was also old and very creaky. I would have heard it being moved and woken up. The only other people in the apartment were my largely bedridden mother and my DS, way too small to have moved it herself.

Next came the spray bottle nozzles. Being a household of three women, we had a ton of beauty products, many of which came in non-aerosol spray bottles. Over the course of about a month all of the nozzles went missing. At first I thought it was a prank being played by DS but her bottles were included in the heist. Even bottles that were found months later, buried under stuff in my closet were missing their nozzles. This stopped after a while to my relief but it was creepy as hell while it happened.

The worst was the smell. DS’s father was well-known for wearing a very distinctive masculine cologne. He would wear so much we used to tease that you could smell him before you saw him. One night DS and I came in to the apartment after being out for a while. Mom was at work so we were alone. When we opened the door we were instantly overwhelmed by the smell of his cologne. It was as if someone had gone through out apartment and poured bottles of this stuff everywhere. It scared us so badly that we turned right around and left. We went to a neighbor’s apartment until Mom returned from work. When we went back in a second time the smell was gone.

When I was much younger we had to give away our beloved cat because my Mom and sister were both terribly allergic. Some months later I climbed into the lower bunk of my bunk beds and slid under the covers. I heard the unmistakable creak of my cat climbing up onto my dresser and then onto the top bunk. I was so terrified I actually lost my voice. I tried to call out to Mom for help but nothing would come out. I finally got up the courage to run out of the room and into Mom’s room. The next morning I went to check the bed. What did I find but several of my cat’s hairs on what had previously been a clean comforter. Everything had to be meticulously cleaned after the cat left to remove all dander, cat hair, etc. Yet there they were, right where I heard him land the night before.

26

I had an apartment in an 1840s building that had been, among other odd uses, a mental hospital. I expected creepiness. Sadly, all I got were owls outside, which, in that context, did sound unusually spooky.

27

I also have to frequently change light bulbs but only in the living room. I have no problem with the other light bulbs in my apartment.

Thankfully, I haven’t experienced anything as creepy as the experiences of some of the above posters. I frequently get glimpses of someone out the corner of my eye when I’m alone but I attribute that to my over-active imagination misinterpreting a tree branch moving outside the window or a curtain moving in the breeze. I also tend to hear creepy sounds like someone whispering when it gets real quite at night but those sounds could come from the pipes or from the wind outside. I’m usually too scared to investigate the source of the sounds so I just turn on the TV to drown the little sounds at night.

28

Welcome to the board, Seven. Love the name!

29

When I was younger, my sister and I used to sneak into each other’s rooms to scare each other in the middle of the night. So we both took to locking our doors before we went to bed. Even after my sister went off to college, my door would often unlock itself and open, scaring the living crap out of me. Sometimes the lights would turn off and on like strobe lights. And the whole time, our dog would be cowering under the covers, snarling.

Our mom would also frequently come out to yell at us for walking around on the upstairs landing at all hours. My sister and I would wake up, confused, having no idea what she was talking about. She still hears those footsteps and she lives alone.

Other than that, we’ve had things fly across the room when we had company over. Candles, tableware, etc. And dishes and glasses sometimes move by themselves, though not very far.

30

Years ago, my cousins and aunts were gathered in my late grandfather’s house (we were moving the furniture out and cleaning up, as the house had been sold, about a year after my grandfather’s death). It was bittersweet…our last meal together in the old house. We were sitting around the table, reminiscing about the good times…then the light went out…it was grandpa, reminding us it was time to go!

31

My parents’ house often makes eerie sounds, exactly like someone is walking around upstairs. But it’s not ghosts. It’s shoddy 1980s construction.

32

Thanks for the warm welcome! I’m just one of the teeming millions who’s also a Star Trek fan. I’ve been a fan of SDMB ever since I read the Spatula scandal on this board. :slight_smile:

33

That sounds both really cool and kinda creepy.

My husband and I bought his late grandmother’s house. She died in the house. My husband couldn’t stand the thought of sleeping in the room his grandma died in, so we have the medium-sized room. The creepy thing is, we lived here before we got married, and I would frequently be awoken by things like the blinds being opened, even though neither of us did it, etc. However, since we got married, it’s stopped…

34

Does non-ghost creepiness count?

My mom shared a house with housemates for a period of time. One night the housemates were all traveling for holiday, bu when she came home to the isolated house in the woods, there was an unfamiliar car in the driveway.

Nervous that some stranger might be in the house, she called us (adult) kids. I went over to the house at once. After calling out as we entered and getting no reply, we began searching the house systematically.

It was an older place, shared by several “arty” types, and there was a lot of weird stuff in the house, like papier-mâché heads, shifting mobiles, and big piles of items to use in future projects. Also, the garage had an opening in the ceiling big enough for someone to crawl through into the attic. The search took some time.

My mom got nervous during the search and she picked up the telephone to call someone – either my brother or the police. There was no dial tone – the phone was active. She thought she could hear breathing. “Hello?” she said.

The line went dead as someone hung up.

It was exactly like the old horror cliche “we’ve traced the calls and they’re coming from inside the house!”

There were several phones in the house, on different floors. We ran from phone to phone trying to find someone, but did not find anyone at all.

I left someone to guard my mom and went back to searching, now thoroughly spooked. The back bedroom seemed empty, but had a closet with a sliding door. I slid it aside nervously.

A giant skull was staring at me.

A real one…a huge cow skull with horns and all was hung on the wall in the closet, taking up much of the closet space. Who keeps a cow skull in the closet, but mounts it on the wall as if for display?

We eventually retreated to the driveway and DID call the police. Two tall young men with bulging muscles showed up and very politely went through the house with flashlights, finding nothing.

I now believe the phone line being active was not someone inside the house but some kind of function of a weak signal and/or an older “party” line shared with some neighboring houses. My grandfather worked in the telephone industry in the early days and told many tales of improperly grounded phones generating a ring or lines getting crossed and people hearing each others’ conversations.

Later that year, a tree in the woods surrounding the house fell directly on my mom’s cat, killing her.

That doesn’t have anything to do with this story, but it was a random creepy-sounding thing to add.

35

Grandma was happy he made an honest woman out of you? :stuck_out_tongue:

36

My house isn’t that old, 60’s vintage, but it is isolated and near a Civil War battlefield.

I hear things falling sometimes but sometimes can’t pinpoint what fell or why. Weird sounds outside occasionally, one sounded like a woman calling for help but finally figured out that was a fox. Heard another weird loud sound a few weeks ago right outside my front door but haven’t identified that one. I think a rabbit was getting attacked or something.

There was one mystery I think I’ve solved. We would hear someone upstairs when there was no one up there, the wood floors would creak like someone was walking around. We finally figured out that after someone came downstairs the upstairs floors would flex or creak about 10 minutes later. I guess walking on them bends them slightly and they gradually bend back and make a creaking noise a while later.

37

That was a good story but the ending sucked. I thought they’d find someone in the attic for sure. And you didn’t say who the car belonged to. As I was reading it, I realized that I looked like this: :eek:.

Anyone remember who posted a story about almost staying over at their friends house but going home instead and everyone in the friends house was murdered that night?

38

Roman Polanski?

39

I can’t believe I found it. I really suck at doing searches.

40

Wow. Thanks for digging that up.