Tell me your local scary story, true or not!

In My Humble Opinion
1

I was just talking to a friend of mine and she told me she was doing some research on an abandoned old house. Supposedly, some kids were murdered there about 8 years ago. While she was telling me this I knew the story wasn’t true (why wasn’t it in the paper? Why would the house still be there? etc), but I like stories, so I let her tell me about it. Later on when I was mentioning it to my mom, she told me she actually went to the same house as a teenager because she’d heard a story about it too. This one, though, was about a man who went crazy, killed his kids, then hung himself. On asking other people I found at least 3 more stories, all variations about the same house, and none of them true (I assume).

Everyplace has a local story like this that changes through time about a house, a cave, tunnels, graveyards, etc. Anyone want to share theirs?

2

My local story was The Legend of Sleepy Hollow… not that anybody believed it was true!

Actually, given the large number of homes built in the late 1600s through the late 1700s in my hometown, there were probably plenty of “this house is haunted!” tales, I just never heard any.

Except for one, which I heard from my mom… she had a friend who lived in a big brick farmhouse, built around 1800, within sight of the trailer park I grew up in. Mom claims that she went to dinner at her friends’ house sometime in the late '70s and saw the ghost of a little boy in a dress. (Which is what small children would have worn about the time that the house was new.) Whether there was any more to the story or not I don’t remember anymore.

3

Some people believe the bridge on Old Alton Road near Denton, Texas is haunted by a man with a goat head. He was supposedly hanged there many years ago. It is said that if you go there on Halloween night and honk your car’s horn twice, Goatman will appear, apparently just to scare you away.

According to my sister, who is about as credible as the Goatman legend, a girl was raped and murdered there about eight years ago. She also says there is a community of midgets living near the bridge who live in minature houses.

I’ve never been there, myself.

4

I grew up in the city of Holland, Michigan. Anyone who has spent any significant amount of time in that town in the past ten years or so has probably heard the strange tale of the Melonheads. (cue scary music.)

One of the towns bordering Holland is Saugatuck, and in Saugatuck I believe there used to be either a state or county mental facility. According to legend, this was not the highest-quality mental hospital, and the patients were routinely beaten, abused, and even experimented on. All this abuse went unnoticed by the law and continued until the building’s destruction sometime in the mid- to early-1990’s.

Before the building was destroyed, some of the inmates who had been experimented on escaped to the nearby woods. Nobody knows what kinds of drugs they were given during these experiments, but they must have been pretty “out there,” because the inmates’ heads grew to the size of - you guessed it - watermelons. It also made the crazy people even crazier … and gave them a lust for human flesh!

These days, when hiking through those very woods in the dead of night, you can hear whipsering, footsteps, and other noises that can’t be written off as woodland creatures. (and of course, assuming there are other hikers would just ruin the story, and that’s no fun for anyone.) Some people have gone hiking in the woods after dark and have never returned - victims of the Melonheads’ cannibilistic tendencies.

Variation: The “original” Melonheads were a brother and sister, or male and female cousin, or some sort of close biological relation who, upon escape, began inbreeding, causing their heads to grow to melon-like size. They ended up going crazy, turning to cannibalism, etc.

And that is why I moved out of that town. No, I wasn’t afraid of the Melonheads - I was scared by the fact that so many people over the age of 10 believed that story!

-Dirty Earthworm

5

Er, um … causing their offsprings’ heads to grow to melon-like size.

-D.O.

6

There was this creepy rich guy, good-looking as Satan, who lived in a big old house with a small family and some servants, and sometimes he would shoot guns in the house, and then one day he died and they buried his body in the backyard!!!

Wait a minute, that was Elvis at Graceland, here in Memphis. And lest anyone misinterpret, I am a serious, devoted Elvis fan.

7

When I worked at the youth centre, one of my co workers lived out in the country.

So… the story goes

She was driving home from work around 11 p.m. Behind her this car was flashing his headlights, honking his horn and altogether scaring the crap out of her. This went on for about 20 minutes until she pulled into a gas station. As she got out of the car to run, the man in the car pulled in and grabbed her. The gas station owner ran out to see what was happening and when they looked at her car, there was a scraggily looking man in her back seat with a knife.

The fellow in the car behind her was trying to warn her the whole time.

8

I live about 10 miles from Plainfield, WI, the home of Ed Gein. 'Nuff said.

9

Hey… I used to live in Argyle, and drove across Old Alton Bridge nearly every day to go to Denton. Never heard about it being haunted, though. The only negative connotation I have about that bridge is that when I was a sophomore, two students who were going to an MUN meeting at Denton High School sped over the bridge and the car crashed into the woods…

I learn something new every day… :slight_smile:

10

There was a school by my house that was abandoned for years because a little girl was killed in a freak accident with one of those huge gym doors that can open or close off sections of the entire gym. For years the school was in disrepair and local kids would break into it. Once friends of mine reported seeing “ghosts” there when they went in at night. The school has been revitalized though, and is now open again, so that has come to an end more or less.

11

In New Jersey, we have our own magazine for urban legends and other spook stories. They have a website, WeirdNJ, so you can order some back issues, which I highly recommend, at least to Jersey people.

There is an abandoned tunnel that stretches from Fairview to Edgewater and ends up by the Hudson River, which was once part of the railway for the Susquehanna & Western Railroad company. I live in Fairview and people joke that we are the town made up of cemeteries and no high school. It is also said that there is another cemetery underneath a cemetery as well. Anyway, the cemeteries lie above this tunnel. The railway itself hasn’t been running for 40 years or so. Legend has it that a girl was hit by a train there and nobody noticed the body until reaching Pennsylvania. Since the shutdown, the tunnel has been used by devil worshippers where they performed rituals.

12

New York City has hundreds, if not thousands, of scary stories. This is one of my favorites…it goes back as far as streetcar or horse-drawn bus days, but this version is similar to one that Alexander Woollcott told over the radio back in the '30s.
A pretty, young, lower-middle class girl from Brooklyn landed an office job at a big Manhattan company. After she’d been there for a few weeks, some of her co-workers invited her to a party in the Village. She had a wonderful time, so much so that she didn’t notice how late it was getting, and it was well after midnight when she left to make her way to the subway station (a taxicab would have been well out of her financial reach).

The train was almost deserted when it pulled into the Myrtle Avenue stop, and three ruffians entered. The man in the middle seemed so drunk that his companions were practically carrying him.

Our heroine soon nervously realized that the man in the middle had fixed one bleary eye on her. And shortly after, she became aware that the two others were staring at her, too.

Her station was two stops away; would they follow her as she left the train? Looking up and down the car, she saw that the only other occupants were an elderly gentleman and his wife, who would surely be of no help if she were to scream. Besides, they were getting up to leave at the next station.

Without looking at her and without moving his lips, the old man said, as he passed, “Follow us off this train.”

In another second she found herself on the station platform, the door closing behind her, the train lurching off and carrying the three dreadful men with it.

The old gentleman addressed her again. “I apologize for ordering you off, but there was no time for ceremony. Did you notice the men who sat across from you?..I didn’t like to leave you in the train with them. I am a doctor, and I couldn’t help noticing an odd thing about that little group. Did you observe anything peculiar about the man in the middle?”

“He was very drunk,” the girl said.

“Perhaps he HAD been,” the man said. “But when they carried him into the train, the man in the middle was dead.”

13

That’s a good one, Ukelele Ike. The only thing I can think of is this one very odd story about a local summer camp. Here it is, as best I remember it:
A girl and her friend were staying at Camp Cosby sometime in the 70’s or 80’s, before it was completely set up. For brevity’s sake, we’ll call them Sarah and Anne. The dining hall was way across the camp from the cabins, and it was quite a long walk. Anyway, Sarah and Anne go and eat dinner and then make their way back, alone for some reason. My memory gets fuzzy here. Sarah and Anne are seperated for some reason, I think because Anne had to go get something she left in the dining hall. Sarah continues on alone when she hears footsteps behind her. She whirls around, but doesn’t see anything. She keeps on walking, and the footsteps start up again. She stops and they stop. Paranoid and frightened, she does what most any kid would do in this situation: she runs like a demon to her cabin. She hears running behind her, but is too scared to turn around and look at her assailant. When she gets to the cabin, it is dark and empty so she runs to the closet and shuts the door. Whatever or whoever it is follows her in and tries to open the door, but she holds it firmly shut. It then starts scratching and pounding wildly at the door, sometimes making weird rasping sounds. After a while, the noise stops, but Sarah stays put. After a few hours, she opens the door cautiously and finds Anne lying in a pool of blood on the floor with her throat torn out.

It’s a standard children’s horror story: long, drawn out, and completely illogical. I know tons of others, but they weren’t set here specifically.

14

Here’s a post I wrote last fall about a place that some of you might recognize as it was featured in the David Cronenberg movie The Dead Zone:

15

In Murfreesboro Tennessee, in the years between the Revolutionary War & the Civil War, there was a trapping & skinning industry. Murfreesboro had a tannery called the old Mink Slide, the name derived from the way unwanted carcasses were disposed of, a shute leading to a swamp.

Several times, a monster resembling a giant weasel, mink or wolverine was seen in the area of the tannery. It was said to be the size of a large alligator or somewhat bigger. Occasionally, it was seen in other areas, and at least one man was attacked, later dying of his wounds.

It hasn’t been seen lately.

16

Great stories! Giant weasels? Melonheads? Dead people on the subway? Yeesh. Makes a haunted house look tame in comparison.

Another local legend we have is one about a gravedigger named John Baptiste. He was kind of quiet, but was a nice guy and a hard worker. One day the brother of a local man who was recently buried came to exhume the body. He was from someplace east, and wanted his brother buried in the town he was born in. When they opened the casket, they found the man naked and face down.

The officials started investigating, and kept the cemetary under close surveilence to see who was stealing clothes from corpses. After another burial, Baptiste was seen pushing a wheelbarrow from a storage shed to a freshly opened grave. Authorities stopped him and found a pile of clothing hidden in the bushes. The corpse had been removed from the grave, his clothing removed, and was now being moved from the storage shed in the wheelbarrow.

Baptiste was arrested and his home was searched. In it, they found stolen clothing from over 350 corpses. He had used some of it for drapes and furniture covers, and in the cellar a large vat was placed for boiling the clothing of the dead. The clothing was taken to City Hall for identification. On checking the pawn shops, they found the gravedigger had sold large amounts of jewelry. He was tried and convicted of grave robbery, branded, and exiled to Antelope island in the Great Salt Lake.

A few weeks later police returned to the island to check on him. They found a small shelter and the remains of a fire, but he had disappeared. Some say he killed himself and others say he built a raft and escaped, but no one every saw him again. It has been said that Baptiste still haunts the shores and beaches of the lake today. The stories claim that he has been seen walking along the southern shore of the water’s edge, clutching a bundle of wet, rotted clothing.

17

Oh, that’s . . . tacky. That’s really tacky.

18

Dirty Earthworm: No way! I’m from Grand Rapids MI and spend a lot of time in Holland, Saugatuck, etc. in the summer, and have never heard about the melonheads. Cooool.

Saugatuck, here I come.
What kind of melons? Cantaloupe-heads would actually be pretty small.

19

This one is true believe it or not.

Bendigo was part of Victoria’s Gold Rush back in the 1800’s. Millions of people came from eneryewhere to try their luck at the goldfields, thought the sad truth is that most died there with nothing.

So, we have a lot of dead people buried in weird and wonderful places. One cemetery borders on a main road with no fences, you almost run over graves whilst driving which i find rather distrurbing.

But the one that grossed me out the most:

In what is now the centre of town there was a cemetery full of (what else…) dead bodies. Well, times change… urban sprawl… HEY! let’s move the cemetery to make way for… hold on… a veledrome! yes. I think the consecrated resting place of thousands of souls would be better suited as a sports staduim! of course :rolleyes: but… (here’s the good part) we’ll take all the headstones away and leave the rotting bodies there… no-one will ever know.

So, if you travel to Bendigo and visit the Tom Flood Sport Centre, i wouldn’t go digging around the running track…

20

I love to share this story. It’s so horrific because it’s very very true. This happened to someone my aunt knows:
This friend of my aunt had a daughter who babysat for a couple out in the country. One night she went to babysit, she had put the baby to bed and was sitting, reading a book. She suddenly heard a strange sound coming from the basement, so she went to the door and listened. It stopped, so she just shrugged and went back to her book. Then she heard it again, but it stopped again. It happened a third time and she suddenly had a very eerie feeling. So she silently went and got the baby and slipped out the front door. She went down the road to the closest neighbour’s house and called the police. The police searched the basement and here is what they found:
A crazy looking man, hiding behind the clothes drier, holding a butcher knife! He told the police he had been turning the drier off and on so that she would come down and investigate. :eek: