I’m a good, highly skeptical atheist, but I live in a house built in the 1870s, I’m home alone and this thread is really freaking me out.
Just me?
Lately, we set items down only for the items, when wanted again, to be not be where they were set. So we end up searching for them and they eventually turn up, sometimes even in plain sight, in a location that had already been serached.
I’m still wondering what happend to a pump adapter. I set the pump down with the adapter still attached; picked the pump up again within minutes and the adapter was no longer there. Practically tore the room apart in that area and the adapter is nowere to be found. This thing is about 3" long with a ¼" inside diameter so it should be easy to find.
This adapter is actually a replacement for another adapter that had gone missing from its home. Fortunately, that one had been found in the valve where it had been used last. Odd thing is, that valve was the first place I looked; the adapter wasn’t there until the third time I went back to that valve.
Neither of us has been moving pump adapters or anything else.
Probably just kid stuff. When my daughter was about the same age she told us she had a sister (she’s an only child) who lived behind the door to the upstairs in the living room. The door was leaded glass so was 90% transparent. It could close off the stairs to the second level but was kept open. So the “sister” actually lived between the door and the wall. She would go in behind the door and talk to her “sister” for 10-15 minutes at a time.
Pretty freaky to watch but just the imagination kicking in for the first time.
My Grandmother lived alone in her house until she was admitted to the hospital, and then moved to an assisted living home where she later died.
During the time she was in the hospital and in assisted living, the family decided to go in and take what they wanted to remember her by before having an estate sale and selling her house.
She had a cu cu clock that I always was amazed by as a child. I told the family if no one else wanted it, that I would love to have it…so a few days later, the cu cu clock was hanging on my wall. (I was living alone in my house with 1 cat after my divorce)
I hung the clock on the wall, adjusted the time to the correct time, listening to the chimes every 15 minutes, pulled up the weights and started the pendulum. Nothing. just swung until there was no more momentum…repeat three or four more times that night and gave up. Repeat the same every day for the next two weeks, and nothing…finally gave up.
A few months later she got really sick, and I again tried to get the thing to work, failing every day, until the day she died, when it suddenly started ticking normally when I tried it and has worked perfectly ever since.
At no time did anyone else try it, it was never taken off the wall and put back on, so nothing was adjusted…still can’t figure it out, but I look at it as her last gift to me.
I can’t decide if this is terrifying or hilarious. I can imagine your sister being all, “Ain’t my ghost…”
Possibly a big raccoon. At my old place I went outside to find a massive pile of shit beside my front door - I was certain that a crackhead had taken a dump on my porch. I posted a pic to FB and a friend told me that she’s had a raccoon leave those kind of piles.
Back to the thread…
Shortly after my parents got divorced my dad rented a room from his best friend. I was visiting him one night and nobody else was home. The cats were in the room with us and the dogs were downstairs. We heard sounds from the attic directly above us that sounded like boxes had fallen or were being moved around. As soon as my dad opened the door the noise stopped. He went upstairs and said nothing was out of place. He said he’d heard that noise a few times since living there, along with footsteps downstairs when nobody else was home.
When I was a kid (6 or so), my twin brother and I shared a room. One night I was laying there in bed, hours after my bed time, and I snapped awake. I looked over at my brother and he was sound asleep. Then I heard the voice; I remember it like it was yesterday. It said in a hushed, sinister choke, “I’m going to chop your head off and make it bloody.” That was it. I was scared to the point that I couldn’t move. I couldn’t call my parents, couldn’t wake my brother. I was absolutely mortified. It happened a couple of more times and then just stopped. As I got older, I just assumed I was half asleep when I heard it, but I never really found out what it was…
…until about two years ago when I was at my parents house at a family dinner with my brothers and my sister, and our families, and I told the story. My sister almost fell out of her chair she was laughing so hard. She said she’d forgotten all about it but she was the culprit. She’d gotten a tape recorder for Christmas, and decided to make the recording starting with about three minutes of silence. That was just enough time for her to crawl under my bed, press the play button, and get out of the room. She said she did it a few times, but since I’d never mentioned it, she assumed I was sleeping through it and stopped going through the trouble of trying to scare the ever-loving shit out of me.
The house I’m living in now seems to have a benign ghost couch potato. If I’m home alone and the house is quiet, I can occasionally hear what sounds like a faraway TV set. I’ve gone outside to see if I’m overhearing a neighbor whose window is open or something, but … nope, never.
Here’s the thing: the Other Shoe also reported the same thing. However, it was only if one of us was home alone – we never heard it at the same time.
Here’s the bigger thing: for a while, a now-ex-friend was crashing on our couch. When Shoe offhandedly mentioned our house ghost, the guy literally started crying in relief. He’d thought he was losing his mind.
The ghostly TV wasn’t always tuned to the same channel, either. Sometimes it sounded like a newscast monologue, sometimes like conversations, and often it sounded like a soccer game narration. (Never did hear a ghostly GOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAALLLLLLLLL though.)
In my more rational moments, I figure it must have something to do with the ductwork. That doesn’t explain why I’m more likely to hear the house ghost when the A/C or heating are off, though…
In my house I have now (the one mentioned above) my dog would abruptly sit up and “watch” something/someone cross the room. Occasionally, she would curl a lip. There was never any sound.
Well, you all are thinking, she heard something far away, superior doggy hearing etc. To which I agree.
Except it only happened in that house. In the house I build from scratch, nada. On the road, nada. Staying with friends in their new house. Nope, nuttin’.
Get to the old house on the civil war battlefield, creepy dog behavior staring at stuff that wasn’t there.
I may have told this story before, but when I was in college, my dorm room was super creepy. It was like a suite, two bedrooms, one bathroom on the second floor, staircase down to the kitchenette plus tiny living room on the first floor. Me and the roommates heard footdsteps on the stairs at night. In the bathroom, you felt as if someone was watching you. And the doors – heavy metal doors – would swing open and closed on their own.
One night I’m sitting with my roommates in their bedroom. We’re discussing the creepy things that have been happening when a Bible goes flipping off the shelf, flies halfway across the room, and lands, page open, in the center of the room. We screamed bloody murder. The shelf wasn’t broken, and everything else on it was untouched. Just that book came flying at us.
What page was it open to?
We have four cats. When something weird happens, we just blame it on the cats, because that’s usually how the weirdness occurred.
I have to admit that I frequently blame Charlie, the younger male, for things that he didn’t do. For instance, I tell my husband that Charlie volunteered to load the dishwasher and set it going when, in fact, it was me who didn’t get around to it.
I’ve interviewed over a thousand people about ghost experiences, and my findings are something like:
99% occur at night
95% in the bedroom
80% involve a physical sensation, like chest constriction, chill, etc.
My conclusion is that it is probably a vivid dream that occurred before they were fully asleep and they were tangled in the sheets or something, which woke them up. Its virtually the same as when you dream you are falling and your limbs jerk.
My advice is if you hear the trifecta above, dismiss it.
Air in the pipes? This happens at my parent’s house, and it’s only 30 years old or so. Sometimes happens at my 80 year old house, too, but I don’t notice it as frequently.
I’ve lived in my (relatively new) apartment for a bit over four years, and never had anything odd happen in it. My boyfriend moved in earlier this year, and he insists that the washing machine will open on its own. He says he’ll put his laundry in, and come back later to find the lid up, but it had to have been down earlier because the clothes are clean, and he swears he hasn’t touched it. I just tell him he’s crazy, because it’s never happened to me.
In college I was very involved with the theater… its almost like I lived there. 
Theater folks are quite superstitious, and the building had an assemblage of resident ghosts, some said to be friendly, others malevolent. Althea, the founder of the program, was a friendly, said to haunt the building rendering aid to theater folk in need.
Anyway, most years I picked up christmas cash by staying past finals to run the follow-spotlight on a local production of “The Nutcracker.” One year the production had a particularly bad run with technical problems, personnel problems and just straight up bad luck.
It was getting near to opening night and there had already been a fire, a vandalism incident, the heat was accidentally shut off, and problems with both the snow and the fog effect. So we’re setting up for rehearsal when we hear a loud rattle in the ventilation system, which is audible in the audience and on the stage. Facilities came by – twice – and inspected the HVAC, the fly system, the stage lifts, and anything else that could make a mechanical noise but couldn’t find anything that was rattling. During rehearsal you could hear it over the music and it was very distracting for everyone. As we cleaned up the stage afterwards, us techies were telling the director abut the bad and good ghosts in the building, including Althea. In frustration over the noise, she spontaneously yelled, “Oh, Althea, please stop that noise!”
The rattling noise immediately stopped, and was never heard again.
Our house was built in 1942. We bought it from the son of the builder. The father died in the hospital, but the mother died in the second bedroom. The son rented the house to one of his mom’s friends after. She, too, died in the second bedroom.
We hear things in the basement and the attic, but it’s an old house, it creaks. Things fall, but, rarely break.
Of course, after we finished the basement and started spending time there, we would hear footfalls in the main part of the house. We’ve come to attribute any odd noise to “Mrs. Evans.” She’s never malevolent. In fact, there are times I’ll hear an unexplained noise and suddenly feel happy.
There was a bush just outside the dining room window that I was trimming one day. I suddenly just hated it, ended up tearing it out. When I went inside, I could see the lake through the window where the bush had been. Somehow, I knew Mrs. Evans wanted the bush gone, so we could enjoy the view.
I always hated staying on the second floor in my parent’s house. Too bad that was where our bedrooms were…
Strangely enough, I don’t recall anything weird happening at night or at least nothing that couldn’t be explained. For instance, my younger brother claimed that one of his earliest memories was seeing two featureless silhouettes in my bedroom one morning. He was probably still half-asleep.
But I recall the feeling of dread that I would experience during the day when I was up there. I would be playing or reading and everything was fine until… It’s really difficult to explain but it felt as if something was slowly descending on the room, as if the air became thicker. It “fell” like a curtain and once it settled I just couldn’t stay in the room. I felt I was being watched and the “watcher” didn’t want me there. I would drop whatever I had in hands and rush downstairs almost in tears. There was a small landing after the first four steps then the stairs turned around forcing me to face the entrance of the bedroom. Of course, I always avoided looking in that direction and kept my eyes down. As I grew older, I became more defiant. I would still get the feeling but I would always finish whatever I was doing, sometimes even saying things like: “OK, I’ll leave but you’ll have to wait until I’ve finished reading this page/listening to this song”. I would walk out of the room slowly, just to make a point :D. I never told anyone about this, thinking they would laugh at me.
Yes, it could have been my imagination playing tricks on me. But there’s the part that I’m really not sure how to explain.
When I was about 16, I was listening to some music with my brother. It was dark, probably around 10 pm. At one point, he got up and said that he was going downstairs to have a drink then started walking towards the stairs. I was feeling kind of uneasy, so after a pause I got up and told him I was going to go with him. He looked at me and said knowingly: “So you don’t like staying here alone either.” I said: “What do you mean?”. “Well, you know, that feeling…”
:eek:
I didn’t answer. We had never talked about it before and never talked about it after but we had just realized that both of us knew.
We rent a townhouse. The unit next to ours used to be owned by a lovely older woman who moved out and sold it, due, in part, to failing health. The lady she sold it to moved in and all was well until she had a massive stroke on the front lawn one night (she had a large dog who was VERY protective - she called the ambulance from inside her house then went to wait outside for the paramedics - the dog wouldn’t have let them inside if she hadn’t). Afterwards, her family moved all of her stuff out of the place, got rid of the dog (none of the relatives would take it), and then rented the townhouse out. She survived the stroke - without the dog who loved her so much - and was put in a nursing home. The first renter was the lady who had a stroke’s nephew. He committed suicide in the living room one night. He also had a lovely dog who was taken by the family and put to sleep too - none of the relatives would take him either.
After that, there has been a parade of renters in and out of there - no one will stay more than six months. From our side of the shared wall, we hear doors slamming, and a dog barking - the people who have rented it have said they hear the same things there and know it isn’t us - sometimes we’re home when it happens and sometimes we’re obviously not home which is why they know it isn’t us. The door slamming can’t be explained - the closest door to our wall in that place is the door from the garage to the kitchen - and it has one of those slamming supressor hinge arm thingies on it (like this)- it CAN’T slam. In that unit there are only three other doors - the front door, the bathroom door, and the bedroom door - none of which are anywhere near our shared wall - and when the slamming happens, it rattles stuff on my wall - so we don’t know where that all is coming from.
So yeah. The house next door is weird. And it isn’t the neighbor on the other side of them - that place is vacant.