A little Halloween poll. Ghosts. Do they exist or not? What are your thought on the subject?
Please feel free to include any true encounters you may have had with the paranormal. :eek: The spookier the better.
I have a real life ghost story I will share if you’re all very good.
I know for a fact that ghosts exist…
There is a cemetary in my town that’s been around since 1812 and is haunted by it’s former caretaker. His name is Logan Wrather and he tended the cemetary for about 40 years from the late 1800s to the mid 1900s. He was eventually buried in the same cemetary in an above ground crypt. Well, the story is, Logan loved apples. And if you go out to the cemetary and place an apple on his crypt and wait a few minutes in the dark you will hear him take a bite out of the apple. It’s really spooky.
I believe in ghosts, but I’m not supposed to say so, because they made me a Moderator, and I have to be all scientific and stuff now, and if I say that I believe in ghosts David B comes out here and hits me with the Bad Mod Stick.
Anyway, my house in Brooklyn is haunted. Sometimes, on Whiskey Nights, the ghosts of Aaron Burr, Lester Young, and Jumbo the P.T. Barnum Elephant stop by when it gets real late. I always put out a bowl of peanuts, and we chat, and sometimes we play cribbage.
aztec, does the apple then have a bite missing?
Absolutely not. And I’m so damn sick of hearing people I know that claim they do exist saying that they have “special powers” that I don’t because I’ve never seen a ghost. Yeah, right. Like Ed Wood said in Plan 9: How do you know it’s not true that flying saucers exist if you never saw one?
I notice a lot of people that I know who claim to see ghosts don’t have much going on in their lives, and it’s a great way to call attention to yourself and have something interesting to say about yourself when you claim to be psychic or see apparitions.
My wife insists we have the spirit of a now deceased former resident of the house wandering the upstairs, and of course she can see him but I can’t. He only gets active when we make changes to the house, she sez.
Personally, she needs to lay off those gin and tonics.
Ghosts . . do . . NOT FUCKING EXIST.
Ghosts made you a Moderator? Now that’s a story!
Ooo Vinnie you are absolutely no fun. I’m going to have a seance right now and send a spook to haunt you but good.
I’ve never seen a ghost, or heard anything particularly creepy. However, I’ve done Halloween stories for the paper, interviewing people with haunted houses. When I was a reporter, I usually taped my interviews.
Well, after listening to a pretty spine-chilling tale (about an evil presense that haunted a back field of a farm), I took the tape home and my husband and I jumped into bed, turned out the lights and turned on the tape.
Just as we reached the climatic scene of the story (the presense chasing the female farmer back up the house; she trying to outrun him on the tractor as the sun sinks below the horizon) … there was his horrific, horrible WHUMMMMP from the back part of the house. We were living in an over-100 year old house, on the second floor. The owner lived downstairs, but he wasn’t at home. Muhahahahaha…
Well of course we both shrieked like 14-year-old girls and waited to be possessed or something. We weren’t so, being newlyweds, we cackled some more, then made wild whoopie. 
When there are four of you there wouldn’t it be more practical to play hearts or euchre?
Hmm, no offense to Vinnie, but I’d say ghosts exist- yes, there’s one in my house.
He (she? it?) isn’t all that terrifying- moving things to out-of-the-way places is generally the extent. However, I have heard footsteps going down the stairs or up in the attic when no one else was home, and have twice been awakened by the tugging on the bedframe (and no, I wasn’t dreaming; in the morning, the bed was substantially further from the wall than when I went to bed).
If that ain’t a ghost, I don’t know what is.
rancinchikki, when I did this I heard the bite and ran like hell. I know none of my friends there did it cause they stayed by the gate of the cemetary, and it was fall and i would have been able to hear them walking. Plus, I was so scared I wouldn’t go back and see, and neither would anyone else. I’ve heard a couple of stories from somewhat credible sources that have said there’s always a large chunk of the apple missing. I don’t have an eye-witness account myself though.
I don’t believe in ghosts, but I do believe in trying to earn a bit of extra cash. So three years ago I took a part-time job on the London underground. Towards the end of this stint, in early November, I was assigned to Euston station. For a while all I did was just attend the ticket barriers and help out the occasional tourist wanting directions.
There was quite a lot of shift work involved, and for 10 days I got allocated the late evening shift. The new station supervisor came over to me and asked me to go over to Kings Cross station to bring back some boxes of blank tickets. He asked if I could do it fairly quickly. This involved a trip down one of the connecting tunnels not open to the public. It was badly-lit, but I didn’t mind.
When I got to my destination, there was only one attendant there, waiting for the overnight cleaning crews to arrive. I asked about the boxes of tickets I was supposed to collect. The attendant gave me a completely blank look. He explained that no blank ticket stock had been kept there for years, not since the 60s, and in any case that’s not how the system worked - the ticket stock was delivered and installed by the company that made the ticket barriers. I was naturally very puzzled. The night supervisor asked me who had sent me, and I gave him the name of the station supervisor back at Euston who had sent me over: Mr. Fallon.
He said he’d never heard of him, and he even checked a list of personnel… no Fallon. I mentioned what had happened to one of my co-workers. She agreed that there was no Mr. Fallon around, and she couldn’t remember anyone of that name.
I thought no more of it until about a year later when I was chatting with a friend who works in publishing. She was working on the pre-publication of a book co-authored by a man who had worked on the underground for about 25 years. The book’s working title was “An Anthology of Haunted London”. It featured the story of a murderer who had escaped from the police one evening, and to evade re-capture he had apparently hidden in Euston underground station for a few hours - he even managed to pass himself off as an ancillary worker. Unfortunately for him, the police managed to track him down, and he tried to run away down one of the tunnels the trains go through. He fell on a live rail and was killed instantly.
The date? 7 November 1956. The murderer’s name? Arthur Fallon.
:::shiver::: Delicious thrill, ianzin!! Now waiting for Candlemas’ contribution …
I believe in ghosts. We moved into a different house when I was 12 and there was a ghost in it. The old lady who occuppied the house before us was Virgie Pride. Her nephew, John, lived up the street from us and I was friend’s with his son Jeremy. One night my mom woke up and saw a glowing figure walking down the hallway toward my bedroom. She rubbed her eyes and sat up in bed but she could still see it and she watched it walk into my bedroom. She didn’t even bother to get up to check it out… she just went back to sleep and told me about it in the morning. We told Jeremy (Virgie’s great-nephew) about it and told him that the figure was a large woman in a dress with a bun in her hair. He said that Virgie was a short thin woman so that couldn’t have been her. About a week later he came over to bring me an obituary of one of Virgie’s friends that had died a couple of days before my mom saw the glowing woman in the hallway. He said that this lady fit the description to a T. Now that really freaked me out!!
At night you could hear the basement stairs creak like someone was walking up them. The cupboard doors would often open and shut on their own. My room was always the coldest room in the house and, come to find out, Virgie died in my bedroom.
One day while I was in the dining room looking out the window for the school bus, my stereo suddenly came on with the sound up full blast. I was completely alone in the house and I never listened to my stereo loud like that. I was so freaked out I went into the kitchen and grabbed a butcher knife and walked back to my room to turn my stereo off. Also, after I moved into my own apartment I got a visit from Virgie. I came home one afternoon to discover all of my kitchen cupboards open and all over my dishes turned over. They were still stacked… just flipped over. It was really bizarre.
I just moved into a new house this month and we’ve discoverd a ghost in this house too. I awoke one morning to a loud banging noise. I thought one of my kids was up and going through the cupboards in the kitchen. I got up to investigate and both my kid’s bedroom doors were still shut. My kitchen cupboards had been banging. (What is it with ghosts and banging on my cupboards?) Also, my SO was sitting on the toilet one day and the curtain beside him fluffed out all by itself. There are no air/heat vents on that side of the bathroom and the window was closed so something made that curtain move!
I have a few more stories but this post is getting long enough already. Maybe I’ll post more later.
Wow! I don’t know if I can top ianzin’s post, but I’ll give you my story anyway.
My best friend in high school (I’ll call him Chuck) due to some family problems lived with his grandparents. They were this great old couple originally from Hungary. They spoke almost no English, were about 5’ tall, very kindly, made fantastic goulash and we all affectionately called them “nagyapa” and “nagyama”, grandpa and grandma. Although they were just grammar school janitors, they lived in a huge mansion in the old part of town. This house was amazing! It was 4 stories tall with 2 kitchens, 4 and a half bathrooms and several fireplaces. It was filled with the most beautiful antiques I have ever seen. There was even a guesthouse out back where Chuck’s uncle lived.
Knowing that Chuck’s grandparents were of limited means I once asked him how they could afford all this incredible stuff. He explained that since his grandparents worked in the evening, they would commonly spend theit days visiting shut-ins through their church. By shut-ins I mean poor old folks in the twilight of their lives that were either sick or disabled. Most of these people had no living relatives or worse yet, their families had just forgotten them. Sometimes, Chuck’s grandparents were the only two people these folks saw during the last few years of their lives. They would bring them their prescriptions, listen to their stories, get their groceries, fix stuff around the house, anything you can imagine. Many times, when these people passed away they would include nagyapa and nagyama in their wills. When they received objects they accepted them and kept them in their home, when it was money they donated it to the church. Their home had in fact been bequeathed to them by an old woman they looked after the last few years of her life.
Chuck’s room was on the top floor with sevreal other beautiful bedrooms, but for some reason his grandparents never left the basement level. Now I know why. Once while spending the night I got up very early in the morning to go to practice. I didn’t want to wake Chuck so I got my clothes together and stepped out on the landing to get dressed. As I pulled my pants on I heard a loud thud at the bottom of the stairs. I froze. I called out for nayapa, fearing that he thought I was a burglar and was going to shoot me by accident. It was still dark. Nothing, no response. I shrugged it off and continued to get dressed. I began to descend the stairs to the third floor, their was another small landing and a bend in the stairs about two thirds of the way down. As soon as I rounded that bend I distinctly heard the sound of footsteps directly behind me. I stopped in my tracks, and the footsteps stopped. I called out again for nagyapa, still afraid that he was going to clobber me by accident but I got no response. I started to walk again and the footsteps started again. Try as I might, I couldn’t ignore them so I stopped again. This time something different happened. The steps shuffled, as if someone were following too close behind me and had to shuffle step to avoid bumping into me when I stopped suddenly. The back of my neck felt a blast of cold and that is when I started to haul ass. I broke into a run that could have set records. The worst part was yet to come - as I ran down the third floor stairs to the second foor I heard the unmistakable sound of shoes on hard wood. I had previously been on carpet but had to pass through a kitchen with hardwood floors to get to the stairs. What ever was behind me was now following me (albeit much slower than I was moving) through the house. I grabbed my shoes at the front and bolted to my car. I didn’t calm down until I made it to practice.
I mentioned the incident to no one, but about 6 months later, Chuck told me that he didn’t want me to think that he was crazy but that he was pretty sure the house was haunted. I was blown away. I told him the whole story and he said that the same thing happened to him almost daily for a month. He said that he sometimes awoke to the sounds of someone walking up and down the landing outside his bedroom door. A certain chair in the dining room was always pulled out. Lots of other freaky stuff. We finally asked nagyapa about it and he got very angry and in his thick accent said, “Don’t you talk-a me-shit in dis house!” He never cursed, so we knew never to ask again.
Believe it or not, I’m still not sure if I believe in ghosts. I’m a pretty rational guy and I don’t scare that easily, but whatever the heck happened to me that morning sure scared me silly. I’m not above knowing that my mind can play tricks on me. But I know I was awake and fully alert. Who knows? Maybe there’s something to the whole ghost thing.
I don’t know of any evidence for ghosts, so I don’t believe in them.
I know houses can creak, and people who wake up in the night can believe dreams are real, but it’s not evidence.
If I live in America, I’d put an apple on the tomb though.
And film it.
I’m with glee here. About 20 times I have stayed overnight (usually around Halloween) in supposedly haunted houses, theaters, two cemeteries and even a prison, and yes, there have been weird noises, but the buildings are generally old which I have found lends itself to being creaky.
Most of the times when I file my stories, they imply that there might well be “something” there, but I write it that way for effect. For myself, I would love to find a “real” ghost. It would make a great story, but as was posted earlier, until then, “Call me a sceptic.”
TV
No offense, Rachell, but your mom’s reaction was: “Oh, look, a glowing undead spectre is going into Rachelle’s room. Ho, hum, back to sleep for me.”??? :eek: :eek:
First off, I enjoy the hell outta spooky stuff; love The Haunting of Hill House, much prefer Halloween to Christmas, cut my teeth on The Twilight Zone, cheesey Creature Feature late night stuff, etc.
I live and work in old buildings. There are deliciously weird creaks, groans and weird things that happen. F’rinstance, the heavy chain across the abandoned and blocked book elevator that suddenly swings for no apparent reason. But the critical word is “apparent”. Not immediately recognizing the physical forces involved doesn’t translate into a leap into paranormal explanations.
Sure, there’s an enjoyable frisson of nerves but THAT’S completely attributable to self-programmed funk. It’s sure not evidence. The plain fact is there’s not the slightest credible evidence supporting the paranormal. Enjoying the long cultural mythology of ghouls, ghosts and things that go bump in the night doesn’t have to include believing one bit of it.
Veb
So, TVeblen and I were driving along a country road in Western Illinois, or possibly Vermont, one windswept dark night a few years ago when we came to a cold, lonely crossroads. A young woman was standing there, dressed only in a light blue party gown.
Well, Veb and I had no idea why a girl would be way out there in the cornfields, or forest, on such a cold, lonely, dark, windswept night, so we stopped to give her a ride. The woman got in and gave us an address several miles down the road; that was the end of the conversation.
Once she said, “Oh…I’m so cold!” And Veb passed back her extra shawl.
When we arrived at the cold dark lonely farmhouse, we were amazed to see that the girl in the back seat had vanished.
We knocked on the door, and a bent old woman opened it. We explained that we had met a girl giving this address, had driven her here, and had lent a shawl.
The old woman pointed to a framed picture on the mantel. “Yes, that’s her,” we said.
“Mamie was my daughter,” the old woman said. She has been dead for fifteen years."
“But we brought her home!” Veb said. “I danced every dance with her last night!”
(…hang on…I think I’m mixing up my variations…)
“But we brought her home!” Veb said. “I lent her my shawl!”
“Mamie has been dead for twenty years,” the old woman said again, quietly. I elbowed her in the ribs. “Fifteen,” she corrected. “If you do not believe me, you can go look at her stone in the graveyard.”
So Veb and I crossed the lane to the windswept, cold, dark, lonely graveyard. There, on the last path, was a small granite stone. And across it lay **TVeblen’s **college blazer.
Shawl.
BoogieboogieBOOGIE, and a Happy Halloween.