Tell me your personal stories of unexplained, ghosty things.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I know the majority of dopers are not keen on the existence of ghosts but I’m not starting this as a debate as to whether or not there are other spirits in this world…I just wanted to create a topic to read about ghostly happenings.

Ever have something unexplained happen in your house? Has a pet of yours ever freaked out at air? Ever hear weird things or think you saw something in your room? Have inanimate objects ever done weird things like turn themselves on or off?

Please, if you’re only replying to this topic to say “All of this stuff can be explained”, then save it. Please don’t crap in my thread. : p I already know most things can be explained, but right now all I hoping for is tales of what is was that happened.
I remember awhile ago a similar topic was made and I remember a poster talking about how they were sitting on their couch and their cat went by them and started looking in a room that nobody was in, but the cat started acting like someone WAS in there. Scared the hell out of me, yet it hooked me in a way and I found I wanted to hear more tales like that.
Do you have one?

2

Lately I’ve heard laughter, a low chuckle, when no one else is in the house. Sometimes it’s very close to me, sometimes in the next room.

I hate when the cats stare at nothing, all wide-eyed, hackles up.

3

Not so much ghosty, but definitely unexplained.

April 12, 97 I was nodding off after dinner while my 4 year old son was watching a movie. He got the bright idea to see what sticking a piece of paper into a candle flame would do, of course it caught fire so he quickly threw it away. To a four year old, the trash can is the ultimate Away, right? It quickly flamed up, catching the underside of a counter bar right away and climbing the wall.

I smelled smoke and woke up just as the boy was running to get me, I grabbed him and ran him outside to put him in the truck with specific directions to stay put. I noticed a man parked across the street doing something in the trunk of his car. Didn’t recognize him but asked him if he happened to have an extinguisher in his trunk. He said he didn’t and asked if I needed help, I figured my one measly extinguisher would handle it so I said no.

In those 3 minutes or so, the fire had caught serious hold of the entire corner of the kitchen, the plastic trash can was melting and giving off way toxic smoke so I had to belly crawl back in and just aimed the fire extinguisher stream at the mostly likely area since I couldn’t see any longer. Emptied the extinguisher and gave up, grabbing my car keys and the cordless phone to run outside and call emergency services.

Mr.Trunk guy had already went into my back yard and was unrolling the garden hose to bring inside. He interrupts my coughing and hacking to ask where exactly the fire is, I manage to sputter an answer but cautioned him against going in there. He told me to wait for the fire truck and drug the hose inside.

The neighbors are gathering by now, alerted no doubt by the wailing of my four year old in the truck, and they announced that they’d already made calls to 911 because Mr.Trunk alerted them. As they offer my son and I blankets to huddle under, I ask who’s house Mr.Trunk is visiting. No one knows who he is, everyone assumed he was someone visiting me. It’s a small dead-end street so everyone knows or at least recognizes everyone else but before we can ponder this mystery, the fire trucks pull shrieking up and Mr.Trunk comes stumbling out.

He’s smoke-blackened from head to toe and coughing so hard he started vomiting in the yard, but managed to gasp out that he thought he got it all. The firefighters go in with axes and hoses and proceed to destroy anything that might be lingering. The paramedics are checking me and my son over quite thoroughly, I keep trying to point them to Mr.Trunk but they keep slapping an oxygen mask back on my face.

The general chaos settled within about 15 minutes and I finally got someone to listen to me and look around for Mr.Trunk to check him over, he suffered way more inhalation than I did after all. But he’s gone, no one saw him leave, his car suddenly just wasn’t there even though the fire trucks were completely blocking the only way out. The neighbors saw him come out of the house but no one saw him leave, no one ever found out who he was or what he’d been doing there in the first place. I never even had a chance to thank him.

Maybe he drove through someone’s yard and none of us noticed? Maybe he had warrants out and didn’t want to give his name to any authorities? We never figured it out, and he never returned to our street, but he was there at the right moment and pretty much saved our home after I gave up and dove out.

If he were a ghost, he was a damned substantial one, and it’s remained a mystery ever since.

4

Definitely ghostly of the poltergeist variety. My dorm room back in the 70s was in a converted older hotel in Kenmore Square in Boston. One night I woke with a start from a very unpleasant dream just as a burst of papers exploded in a swirl around the room. Might have been a dream but those papers were all over next morning.

5

Lived in an old house with my boyfriend (we were boarding). Both had horrible headcolds. Boyfriend woke up in the night, saw a headless figure in the corner of the room. When we woke up, both of us had hankies in our hands, but hadn’t had them when we went to sleep.

Asked the house owner who told us the house had been owned by a husband and wife - the wife had died in the house. Owner’s son had quite often come looking for the owner in the house, claiming his mother had called him when she hadn’t.

6

Man, reading the replies so far, I’ve already have the major heebie-jeebies.

7

Here’s one from me.

Years ago, when I was about twelve, my father was out at his night job. It was around Christmastime and the neighbor next door used to stand outside to smoke often.

Anyway, I was in my house and in the living room and I thought I heard, from time to time, strange noises coming out of my bedroom. They scared the bejesus out of me but I never went in there to look at what it was. It wasn’t anything very loud or big… just things like little creaks and tapping and stuff.

Anyway, my dad finally came home and our neighbor came over and talked to him. Dad told me later that our neighbor said he was outside smoking for a bit and thought he saw a glowing face in my bedroom window for awhile, but that he thought it was me. He said it looked like what faces look like when you hold a flashlight up to them or when a candle is lit under one. He said it startled him a bit and was wondering if I was playing with fire or didn’t have any power in my room.

My dad told me all this later that night and let me tell you, I was scared to sleep in that room for a long time after…but eventually it faded.

Still, it’s unexplained. I was never in that room at any time when my dad was at work, so I have no idea what it is my neighbor saw. My dad always told me he was probably just trying to scare him (my dad) and myself, but from what I knew of him, he wasn’t the kind to tell stories.

8

Wow. So I could list a lot of unexplained things. We have even named our “poltergeist” – Bob.

You see, as long as I can remember, there were unexplained things happening around me. There was the time when I was 3 and told my mother that the Green Man at the Front Door wanted her to answer the phone. The phone started ringing a few minutes later. I was told to never talk to the Green Man again.

There was the time at age 6, when I had the dream that I was being kidnapped. When I woke up, I was outside on the ground, covered with my blanket. The front and back doors were both locked (a regular lock, a chain lock and a deadbolt on both doors), and since it was winter, all the windows were shut. I had to beat on the doors and scream my head off to wake anyone up to come let me back inside.

Skipping ahead to a different house, when we lived in town a few years ago, we had a dining room. Since we have more books than dinner parties, we converted the dining room into a library. One night, we had a friend over and were hanging out in the library talking when he looked over at one of the bookshelves and started getting a bit panicky. Of course, we all looked at the bookshelf just in time to watch one shelf (with mostly paperbacks on it) slide forward about an inch and crash to the floor. Said friend never came over again, despite being “pagan.”

At our current location, Bob is especially busy. His favourite game is to make my alarm clock go “twink twink twink” – this sound is made by pushing the snooze button. If you happen to be in the room when he does it, you can see the button going up and down.

We often hear him puttering about the house, wandering around in the kitchen, then in the attic. He has moved furniture, turned lights on and off and well, just makes himself quite annoying. Of course, we are all accustomed to the whole thing, and you might hear my daughter yell out in the middle of the night “Knock it off, Bob, I’m trying to sleep!”

I even have a picture of Bob. There are supposedly a bunch of them, but my mother took 9/10 of the family photos with her when she left, so I only have the one. In the picture, there is a face that looks a lot like the Green Man of my memory – only in the picture, he isn’t green. It is just a disembodied head in a picture of the 4 of us (my siblings and me) – not a double-exposure, and although I do show the picture often (because it is actually the only picture I have of myself at that age – when my hair was still blonde), I have never pointed out the face – people see it right away.

Meh. I don’t try to explain these things, and the fact that I relate them does not imply that I believe in the paranormal, just that I have had unexplained things happen to and around me my whole life. I have had many odd experiences in my life, but those can mostly be explained.

9

I’m so hard-headed and pragmatic that it’d take a ghost standing on my chest to make me believe anything that went bump in the night wasn’t just one of my cats. :smiley:

10

That’s pretty much how I am. For years, I refused to use the term “poltergeist” because it implies that I believe that this is some sort of paranormal activity. I finally yielded to use of the word when I realised that there simply isn’t another 1-word definition for unexplained noises, disorder and movement of furniture.

People who know me and know that I enjoy no belief structure (I have no religion, I am not athiest, I simply don’t bother with any belief structures) are often surprised at my calling this phenomenon Bob. The thing is, though, that many of the events I posted about were mutually observed things – obviously, the Green Man incident, while standing out vividly in my memory, was not observed by anyone else.

To be honest, I deleted my post several times, due to the fact that it is a bit embarrasing to actually put it into writing – you guys don’t know me day-to-day, only what I am on a message board. Do not get the impression that I am some tree-hugging, dirt-worshipping, belief-stricken moron who thinks that everytime the wind blows and makes a funny noise, it’s a ghost, goblin or other paranormal thing. Ah, I feel much better now that that’s been said :smiley:

11

Here’s a long one for ya!

When I first went to college nearly twenty years ago, I rented a one-person studio apartment on the top floor of a shared house - a big Victorian terrace in Cardiff. One of these houses, in fact. It was a sucky place, really cold, with only a one-bar electric heater. By November it was so cold that the insides of the window were covered in ice, and all my clothes went moldy.

Perhaps because of this, and because I was living on my own for the first time ever, I never felt good there. I had bad dreams at night, and I was jumpy during the day. There was a bicycle outside in the back yard, and someone had put a life-sized papier maché mannekin on it, that, the first time I saw it, made me shriek and leap out of my skin. One day I locked myself out of the apartment with a sandwich in the sandwich toaster, and had to borrow a ladder to let myself in and rescue the carbonised sandwich before it burned the place down. Another time I made a full pot of coffee with my filter machine, but forgot to put the jug in place, and six cups of coffee went all over the floor. When I ran into the living room to retrieve the jug, I stepped on it and smashed it…

Anyway, I called it home for a while. Apart from the feeling of unease, there was nothing particularly untoward about the place; it was just depressing, though I did note that between the kitchen and the bedsit room, there was a section of the wall that was about two feet wider than the rest - presumably an old chimney breast - next to the head of my bed - which made me wonder what the hell was in there.

One day I came home from college, and found the only two plugs - one for the heater, and one for my little black-and-white TV - were lying next to each other in the middle of the floor on their backs (this is what British mains plugs look like) with the wires stretching parallel to each other, to the wall, very neatly. I assumed the landlady had been in without my permission, and done it for some weird reason. I plugged them back in - the sockets were on the ‘chimney breast’ part of the wall - and thought no more of it.

The next time I spoke to the landlady, I asked her if she’d been into my apartment, and she swore blind she hadn’t - she was adamant that she was scrupulous, and would always give me 24 hours’ notice in writing. She was a nice enough woman, and I believed her.

A couple of days later, I came home again, and the same thing had happened. This was starting to perplex me and make me feel even more uneasy. Again, I plugged the things back in, and carried on going about my business.

When I walked through the door a week later to see that it happened a third time, I started to freak out. But this time, there was something different: there was a terrible smell of smoke, and the sockets were blackened. I called the landlady and she sent round an electrician within the hour. He dismantled the socket, then hacked away at the plaster and found that the sockets had spontaneously ignited, and set fire to a load of newspaper that had been stuffed into the internal gap in the wall sometime in the 1950s. The fire had spread about five feet up inside the wall, but thankfully it had gone out of its own accord. Neither of the fuses in the plugs had blown, so he reckoned it must have been a mechanical short circuit that caused it. He replaced the burned socket and left, and I stuck the wallpaper back over the hole in the wall.

So, even though it was mighty bizarre, I assumed then that a persistent fault in the wiring was causing some kind of electromagnetic repulsion that had been driving the plugs out of the sockets, and the same fault had eventually caused a fire.

After three months there I had secured a place to live with roommates, so I was packing up to move. I was carrying boxes from the apartment to the car, when a girl I’d met a couple of times, who rented another apartment in the front of the same building, knocked at my door. “Are you moving today?” she asked. I confirmed I was. "In that case, do you mind if I ask you something?

“Did anything weird ever happen to you in this apartment?”

I was a trifle unnerved by the question. "I’m only asking because you’re moving out, and I didn’t want to worry you in case everything was fine.

“See, I used to rent this apartment up until about six months ago, but I got so freaked out that I asked the landlady to give me the first option on any other apartment in the entire house, as long as it wasn’t this one.”

I asked her what sort of things she had experienced. Electrical stuff turning itself on and off. Strange knocking sounds from inside the walls. Stuff moving around when she wasn’t in the room.

"But the final straw came one night when I was lying in bed, and the door to the room opened. I thought it was the landlady breaking all her rules and using her keys to come into my room without my permission - at night, while I was asleep.

"But it wasn’t the landlady… Someone else came into the room.

“A man. He was tall. Maybe over six foot tall, and he was dressed completely in black. I could see his silhouette and he was wearing a long black coat, or a cape. He came up to the side of the bed and just stared at me. I couldn’t see his face. He stood over me for about three or four minutes while I lay there in terror, then turned and walked out without making a sound.”

The hairs on the back of my neck were prickling. I thanked her, confirmed what had happened to me, and got the hell out as soon as I could, never to return.

12

Why, oh why did I open this thread???

Well, my story is short and not quite so scary.

For several years I lived in the basement of our family home. I slept in the same room that my great-grandfather had slept in before he died. Yes, he died in my room. Occasionally, without any movement or strange drafts of air the monitor for my desktop computer would turn itself back on out of it’s power saving condition.

Also, if something strange happpens in the house, we blame it on this same grandpa. Nothing else too strange, just a few strange noises here and there and the occasion door shifting. Eh, there is one other slightly peculiar thing. For awhile my mom had to get up at 3 in the morning at work. Occasionally, and always at 3:30, the light on the phone would light up as if someone was using it.

Nowadays, Grandpa Waggoner travels with Higgins, our dearly departed dog.

13

My other house (hasn’t sold yet) had a lot of strange noises and happenings. There was knocking in the walls, usually before a sad or stressful event would happen and usually at 5am. Someone/thing wrote my partner’s name in the dust on a sideboard and we would hear footsteps upstairs when we and the dogs were all downstairs – it’s an old house and the hardwood floors are very creaky.

Several times my SO’s keys would disappear and reappear in odd places several weeks later (toilet tank, etc).

My mom owns a former “school for juvenile delinquents” that was built in 1910 and abandoned in teh 1970s. They’ve been renovating for several years and funky things are always happening. The house, which is huuuuge, has several floors that are unused and are where the “bad kids” were housed (think asylum-like conditions). The kids who were being punished were sometimes chained up in the attic and they spent their time carving their names and swear words into the walls and moldings. Kids who died of the 1918 flu and an epidemic of the plague in the 1930s are buried in a little cemetery behind the house; I’m sure there are also children buried there who died of mal-treatment at the school.

The freakiest place on the property is the old hospital dispensary, which has several surgical rooms and an enormous black x-ray machine in the basement. It is a really spooky place even in broad daylight.

Anyway, electrical appliances turn themselves on and off, there are running footsteps heard upstairs when no one is there, and voices that reverberate through the pipes and can be heard in a few of the rooms.

14

My mom said one day when my sister and I were still in school, she heard a sound as if a child had entered the house and gone into one of the upstairs bedrooms, crying. Assuming it was one of us, she followed upstairs and found – no one. However, the cat followed her and when it got to the bedroom, would not enter, but instead bristled its fur. The cat refused to go into that room the rest of the day.

15

The house we owned in Virginia in the late 90s wasn’t all that old - no more than 10 years - and not built on an ancient burial grounds as far as I know. Still, there were a couple of weird occurrences, one that I figured out, another that I haven’t.

When I was alone in the house, I’d see movement out of the corner of my eye, but when I’d turn to look, nothing was amiss. Turns out it only happened when I was sitting at the breakfast bar, and the front door was to my right about 20 feet away. It had a large decorative leaded glass insert with lots of beveled glass pieces. What I was seeing was the refracted light from cars driving by. Till I figured that out, it really weirded me out.

The other, I’m not so sure about. Again, when I was home alone, I’d hear a soft voice calling my name. It wasn’t frightening or disturbing, just odd. I never experienced it in any other home we had - just that one. Pretty benign, huh?

16

I had a strange thing happen New Years Eve. Kiddies were at my parents so dh and I were the only ones home. I was picking up around the house, dh was working in his office. I came in to the kitchen to find the dishwasher going. I hadn’t turned it on and neither had dh. Its was only 1/3 full and I cram it full before running it. I opened it while it was running and it had soap suds in it. My dishwasher can’t accidently be started either as it must be locked before running. I have no explaination for this. I don’t believe in ghosts though so there must be some other logical explanation. Another thing that happens occasionally is that a gas fire place in our bedroom that has a remote will come on by itself. We will wake up in the middle of the night and it will be on…

17

I know I’m less skeptical of the paranormal than most dopers, but there are definitely things I’ve seen and can’t fully explain.

When I was a kid, we used to half-joke that the house was haunted. Only half-joke because strange things did happen in the house:

  • Things had a way of disappearing and showing up unexpectedly, as if a naughty little kid delighted in stealing things like menus and eye glasses. One time my parents tore the house apart looking for a newly filled prescription. Being a kid and fully uninterested in the hunt, I eventually got bored of really looking and promised to “double check” places that had already been looked in. One of those places was the medicine cabinet, which I’d seen a parent grumblingly check before. When I check it, the bag flew out at me, like it had been pushed. It took up a 3rd of the interior, how could it have been overlooked?
  • Sometimes voices could be heard as if from other rooms. It was always two voices, one male, one female, holding conversations no one could ever quite make out. I’d of dismissed it as “house settling” if not for it being two separate voices in the cadence of conversation.
  • When the house was quiet, you could hear someone slowly walking around in the attic, and hammering at other times. My dad was convinced that someone had broken into the house the first time he heard the footsteps. He had gone up there to throw whoever it was out, even going so far as to make sure they hadn’t climbed out onto the snowy roof to escape. The hammering usually happened at night, and the footsteps could be heard any time of the day. The former owner had been in the middle of finishing the attic when he died… These noises mostly came to an end when we finished the attic for my room the last year we lived there, politely refraining from making noise when I was in the room.
  • We fed a pregnant stray we named Katie when I was in the 8th grade. We had another cat with kittens at that time too. One day I got home from school and went to check on the kittens. Cinnamon was there, all four kittens were playing in the yard, and Katie was under the picnic table washing her paws until I called hello to her and made her look up at me. Except she wasn’t under the table. Not two minutes later the boy across the street yelled that there was a dead cat in the road. Cold and stiff, there was Katie, the only tortie in the neighborhood…of course when I ran back to the picnic table to prove it wasn’t her since I’d just seen her, she was gone.

There was something strange about the whole neighborhood, though. My friend Chris lived down the street and told me about waking up one night to see a little boy in her bathroom, pleading with someone unseen not to be hit again. I dismissed it as probably sleepy imagining, until one day the bus stopped at her house, and waited a bit for her to come out it was determined she was sick. While the bus was parked there, I noticed a little blonde girl in her yard. I thought it was a bit strange that the kid was wearing a pink jacket in warm weather, but she seemed ordinary otherwise. Until she managed to disappear in what was literally the blink of an eye.

The family who’d lived there before Chris had a number of little blond children, and from that point on I always wondered if anything had ever happened to them before they moved away.
I had something strange happen at work one summer, too. We were painting rooms in what was widely reported to be a “haunted dorm” and virtually everyone dismissed that as silliness. Except for several sets of furniture inexplicably disappearing from the 3rd floor that summer, that is, which always struck people as strange. If someone was breaking in to steal it, why would they have taken things down from the top story, rather than steal what was on the ground or basement level floors?

Anyway, we were expecting heavy rain one day, so another girl and I went from room to room on the third floor checking that all the windows were shut while other people did likewise on the other three floors. Halfway through our task we discovered an oddly shaped room - it was shaped like the interior of a barn, or like my room and the room of her boyfriend. We checked the window (it was closed) and admired the room for a moment before going on to other rooms along that side of the hallway.

We were about four rooms away when we became away of a rhythmic banging noise. C-r-e-a-k BANG. C-r-e-a-k BANG. C-r-e-a-k BANG. Wondering what the hell it was, we ran out into the hallway and discovered that the door to the room we’d liked so much was opening itself slowly and then mostly closing itself rapidly. I was sure we’d checked the window, but if the wind was doing this, clearly we hadn’t. Feeling nervous, we walked into the room long enough to determine two things: 1. the window was shut 2. there wasn’t anyone hiding behind the door playing a trick.

At that point we ran back to the first floor, the other girl in hysterics. After that people told all sorts of stories about how weird the people moving furniture into the building found it (someone whistling in the bathroom heard a whistle in response once she’d gone quiet; supposedly someone from housekeeping had a conversation on a disconnected phone) and it was claimed that that very room was where a girl had hung herself when her fiancé had died in war. That story was sort of true, by the way - there had been a suicide in the building, but the room in question was turned into a lounge across the hall from the room we’d had trouble with. It was mostly silliness, but what had caused the door to act like that?

18

I have posted it before, but the house my parents owned from 1949 through 1966, and then sold to a family that became friends was originally built by my great grandfather in 1895. The only extant picture of my g’grandfather was in Forida, at my grandparents house, and I had never visited there until the christmas I was 9. My imaginary playmate was the image of my g’grandfather. He used to tell me stories and sing to me. He was very distinctive looking, with a small birthmark on one side of his face.

Because my dad was army, my mother lived alone in that house when my dad was stationed overseas and it was not allowed for her to accompany him and only had day maids until the 60s. One evening when she had been out to dinner with my grandparents and one of my aunts and uncles they returned and found every light in the house turned on from attic to basement. She had been in the habit of leaving the attic door locked, and even though there was a master light switch panel it only covered the hallways and none of the bedrooms [and certainly not the attic or basement] My grandfather, uncle and several cops spent about half an hour searching the place from top to bottom. Doors that had been locked were still locked, no sign of anybody entering the house, and nothing missing or moved. Still absolutely no explanation for that.

When we had sold the place to the new owners, after a year or so they turned the attic into a small studio apartment for trading room and board for cleaning [they were both college professors and it was a big house, and a lot to keep clean.] When my g’grandfather had built the house, the attic was his private area, with a full bath, walk in dressing room with a huge cedar closet, and an office that was fully half the attic floor, and there was a neat little storage area that he kept a set of books for the family business in that was inside the tower roof [a classic victorian monstrosity with a wrap around front porch and round tower on one corner of the house, making the first floor library have a round section to the room, and a matching bedroom on the level above it.] They could not keep anybody for more than a month or so, because they would hear the bathroom door open and close, footsteps in the short length of hallway, and the bedroom door open and close, and occasionally the small turret door would open and close.
Pretty much I was the only one that could sleep uninterruptedly in the attic - so it was sort of my default guest bedroom when I visited.

We also have an ‘elf’ that likes to rearrange things, and make things go missing for a while. We keep him at bay by bribing him with a glass of rum put up on one of the beams in the livingroom last thing at night. It is always empty in the morning, and whatever vanished always shows up immediately. Once back in uni, i had my BF living with me, and we had a flat full of friends staying over because we had partied and I didnt think most of them were safe to drive home. One of the people visiting had seen something run past the living room archway and go into the bath room, and in the bathroom several bottles of perfume had been dumped down the sink from the ditty bag that my friend Jen had brought with her. Apparently he didnt like her [or maybe her choice of perfume, it was wind song and I always thought it reeked horribly]

19

Another strange thing thats been happening the last few weeks is that light bulbs are burning out around the house one after another. It seems like every time I flip a switch the bulb blows. And these are those flurescent ones that are suppose to last. This of course is just odd, not really spooky. Also, both dh and I have alarm clocks each of our night stands. I never set mine, but it will occasionally go off by itself, usually in the middle of the night.

20

That would freak me right the hell out of my house. Srsly.
**Auntie, ** do you live in an older house? Any suspect previous owners who might have stuck around? Have you ever (gulp) gone looking for the source of the sound? What about running a tape recorder or videocam to see if you can capture anything to listen to/watch later and get some more insight?

Details, details, please! :slight_smile: