That's Unusual!

I will in the morning, I've got to ask him for the tiny details.

 

my mom said once when i was about three she was putting me down for a nap and i stood up and kept insistently repeating that we pray for a woman in our church. she finally did so i would calm down and not ten minutes later she got a call that the woman had been in a car accident.

another time, when my sister was being born i was spending the night at my great grandparents and i told them they were going to name her sara elizabeth. they called the next morning and told my ggparents that they had decided to go with sara elizabeth instead of what there were going to b/c "it felt right". according to them they hadn't told me the name,but i don't really remember either way b/c i was young.

my friend tonisha has this one story about how she was about to fall asleep one night and she felt the bed dip like someone was sitting on the edge, and she looked and no one was there. she even looked at the bed and it was dipped as if someone was sitting there. she ran to her parents room and they ofc thought she was making i tup and made her go back to bed. she said she laid there and tried not to think about it but then someone started running their fingers through her hair and she ran to her parents again and refused to go back to her room.

i can't really think of any more, besides my mother saying i was constantly complaining about the black, firey dogs in my room when i was three and four, and i stopped once they got their pastor's wife (who's my great aunt) to bless the room while they took me out for ice cream.

besides my friend's story i don't really remember ANY of that so. idk. creepy bullshit.

 

Ok so
A few years ago - back when I was in middle school, I guess? I was off trick-or-treating with a group of friends. Specifically in one friend's neighborhood, since she actually lived in a neighborhood with a lot of houses in close proximity. Anyways, we were all walking along, enjoying the night, and we walked past a house, and there was a diverging path to take. We took one side... And ended up in a section of the neighborhood my friend swore up and down she had never seen before. Her parents and brother didn't think it was new, but nevertheless she was utterly confused (and inasfar as I can tell she has no memory brainweird, so IDK.)

The next year, we were once again trick-or-treating in her neighborhood, and once again we walked up to that same house, but this time we took the other path... And ended up on the opposite end of the neighborhood. Literally the other side entirely.

I still have no idea how that happened - that road is not particularly circular, and I rather doubt I could find the house again (dark + memory brainweird + 4-odd years mean my memories of how we were walking there are fuzzy) but it's still one of the weirdest things to happen to me.

 

@Fish butt this one's for you.

So, as you can prooobably tell by now, between this and the wix thread, my family has had some... interesting experiences. And most of what I've been sharing has been my dad's side!

Anyway when my dad was pretty young, he and his parents lived in an old barn that had been converted into a house. It had two floors, with the bedrooms on the second floor, and the kitchen had a door to the dining room proper on one wall and the a door outside on the other. The barn was full of activity, and actually was what got dad interested in the crafts: he remembers playing in the kitchen and watching the pots and pans stack themselves. This was a semi-common occurrence that my grandma has independently confirmed.

The other most common activity was the doors. Every night, starting at the door farthest from the stairs on the second floor, the doors would unlock and open, with the front door being last. My grandpa grew up in LA and ALWAYS locked the front/back door. Every morning they would be unlocked and open. If they stayed up they could hear the doors opening, sometimes with footfalls.

Sometimes the doors would open during the daytime. My grandma was washing dishes in the sink, with the walkway between both kitchen doors behind her. She'd closed both doors, since dad was playing on the floor behind her and she didn't want him escaping outside while she was busy. (He was, I dunno, 3ish?) Then the dining room door opened, and half a minute later the outside door. She turned around to scold grandpa, but he'd been outside the whole time. So she closed both doors and went back to dishes. A little while later it happened again. She closed the doors and went back to dishes. Wash, rinse, repeat about five more times. Finally, she's fed up, doesn't even turn around but grumps "I don't mind you coming and going but closed the damn door behind you!"

The dining room shut. And then the outside door.

Iirc the nightly door-opening continued, but she never had a problem while she was in the kitchen again.

 

@Lazarae Thanks!

I moved a lot for most of my life. So I've lived in all kinds of houses and apartments, and my mother has a theory that the place you live in has a character that you should respect. Some places are gentle and fun when you get to know them, others have a rather uncomfortable or inhuman vibe. I believe in this theory too, and I find it very important when you're moving into a place to create room for yourself, but at the same time respect the character of the place you've moved in to. So don't paint the walls a certain colour unless you're certain it'll be okay with the place you're in, don't break down that wall unless you're sure it'll contribute to the place, etc. You're not living there alone, not really, but living in the histories and legacies of the people before you, and that influences the building's character. It's made me wonder if some hauntings are the result of a clash of personalities: the place/apartment and the people living inside of it.

So anyways, I've had pretty good relationships with most of the places I've lived in, and most of the stories about them are kind of boring (except in Venezuela, but that was because nature was bonkers, not the house - the tarantulas in the kitchen, or the mangoes crashing through our roof).

My most interesting story really has to do with the place I moved into when I first started living alone. It was an old house from 1700-something, and for an 18-year old student, big as hell, and really conveniently close to my music academy. It was in a medieval city in Bumfuck, Nowhere, the Netherlands. The place had been rebuilt a few times in its history, and I think it had burnt down twice. In any case, on the first floor the original blackened beams were still in place and I had to be very careful because the wood was so dry that if I tried to drill in it, it would start to burn. As you can imagine, candles were not allowed! The house had four floors, three of which were for me, a TINY spiral staircase from floor to floor, and got older the lower you went. The ceilings were REALLY low, barely higher than my five feet five, and a lot of my Dutch friends complained how they could barely stand up straight in there. :) The roof was fairly new, with a shitty boiler, and the house was terribly drafty. I remember when I moved in how NOISY it was. I couldn't sleep for three nights because I kept on hearing something walking/stamping in my living room and I was terrified of going down and checking it out. I'm pretty sure it was just the house settling, and I got used to it pretty easily.

I did a pretty good job with the interior, and I managed respect the atmosphere of the house while at the same time make a very cute, liveable space for myself. I had the living room on the lowest floor and while it was very gloomy and dark, I had some really nice paintings and colourful furniture to contrast that, as well as some photographs of long-dead family members to hang on the wall. (also a photograph of Stalin to mess with people) Overall, the house was nice to me, but the vibes in the living room (the oldest part of the house) could get really oppressive in the evenings, and I had to move up to the study/kitchen on the second floor to relax and get work done. My bed room was on the third floor, and that was nice to sleep in, but I couldn't help but feel being watched there if I hung out there late at night. Can't tell you why. I can tell you that I heard very clear footsteps from my bedroom when I was working in my study, and with the floors being so low, I could almost feel the weight of them right above my head. Of course if I checked there was nothing. You can imagine I was paranoid about keeping all the lights on! I don't think I had a single dark place in there.

My friends noticed it too. A friend from the music academy refused to stay alone in the place because there was 'a man' who kept staring at her from the living room. She once did stay alone while I ran out to get some food, and I came back to find her really distraught and telling me that the 'man' kept on following her. I couldn't see anything of course, and later she tried to pretend that she was cool with it and there were no ghosts there. My art academy friends loved the place, but staying over? No way! The only place guests could really sleep in was the living room and everybody refused that.

I've lived there for seven years, and the only time the place got to me was when I was busy working on my thesis in the living room. There was a floor below me that was used by a restaurant for their kitchen, and the people there were very noisy, of course. They could work until one or two in the morning, and then they'd leave, slamming the door behind them. I remember working at three (very normal for me), the house silent because the kitchen was closed, and all of a sudden hearing pots and pans bang around downstairs. First I thought that the cook had come back because he'd forgotten something, but IT KEPT GOING ON. I started worrying that a burglar may have come in (even though the cash register was in another building) and I went downstairs to look through my peephole. The house fell completely silent, but when I went back up again the noise started, louder than ever. It was so loud, I could feel it through the floorboards. I went back down, silence.

No matter how quietly I went down those stairs, it would always get silent. I was freaking out, because what if there was a burglar? But what if I phoned the cops and there was nobody there? Was there a burglar. I very quietly opened my front door, walked past the kitchen door, stood outside and tried to look in the window to see if there was anyone. Empty. I finally went back in, and the clatter started again. I held watch at my living room window to keep watch on the street, because if anybody was in there, they would HAVE to go outside, right? At sunrise I could hear the front door finally open and slam really hard, shaking the whole building, but from my window post, nobody came out. It was weird as hell, and continued for four nights in a row, until I finally decided to do my work in my study.

So, that's the story of my first apartment/house.

 

Im always looking for stories that are...i guess not specifically paranormal so much as just straight up weird? Like, its not a ghost or a zombie or a ufo or bigfoot, its a "idkwtf just happened and im scared." Timeslips sometimes work for this, or some of the vortex stuff--have any of you guys read Hunt for the Skinwalker? Its GREAT--or some creepypasta. Dyatlov pass. Weird shit coming in over the radio late at night while driving. I want things that make no sense and have no explanation. They are an absolute BITCH to search for though, since it kind of by definition resists search terms.

Anyone know of that kind of thing?

 

just gonna pop my head in and say that I fucking LOVE the story of Dyatlov Pass. *shudder* like, damn.

 

And so im not just asking for stories, how about the Town that Wasnt There?

A couple years back I was on a roadtrip with my sister. The southwest US is basically one big fuckoff desert, and we'd been driving all day so i dont even know what state we were in when this happened but it was utah or new mexico or somewhere down there. It was getting on sunset and we were driving down the highway and there hadnt even been a gas station for like two hours. So when we saw an exit for a little town, we figured itd be a good place to pull over and spend the night.

Ok, so we take the exit, and pull into this little tiny dusty town and it was just /creepy/. It wasnt even fully dark yet, but the place looked abandoned. There were cars, but no one in them and none of them looked newer than ~1965, but not junky old. They looked new. The buildings also had that mid-sixties look, also weirdly new. We slowed down going through the main street and there was a diner that looked stolen from the set of Grease, all lit up, food on the tables, no one inside. There was a bowling alley, with the doors chained shut.

Eventually we found a motel "do drop inn" i stfg, and by the time we pulled in an saw the empty receptionist desk we just looked at each other and went "do you actually want to be here when it gets full dark?" "NOPE.JPG" and we didnt even get out of the car, just pulled back into the main road and looped back into the highway.

Now, we were back the direction we'd come, like made a little loop back, so when we got back on the highway we should have seen the original exit pretty soon, but there was nothing. After a few minutes we flipped a u and drove the other way. It was dark by now, and the land was flat for miles; we should have at least seen the lights, but nope, nothing.

An hour or so later, we finally came to a real town, and checking into the hotel we mentioned what happened, sort of briefly? The woman behind the counter made a sort of wtf face and asked if we were lost. "Sweetheart, there's no other towns out that way. Theres nothing for miles."

 

ehehe okay I'll tell you about my friend plunderpuss's house ghost:

so my friend lived in this really old creaky house, I think it was built in the 1920s? And both he and his boyfriend have reported seeing a ghost chilling in their hallway--it looked an awful lot like a young version of plunderpuss's boyfriend, to be exact. They've seen it standing in the doorway between the hallway and the library, they've seen it standing at the end of the hall, and once plunderpuss was lying in bed and the bedroom door was halfway open with the light from the hallway spilling in, and he says he glanced at the door and saw these arms, like someone was crouching just behind the door and waving them around to get his attention, but when he looked there was no one there.

this was infuriating to him, because plunderpuss doesn't believe in ghosts. he refuses to. and it makes him really mad that one is revealing itself to HIM and not any of his friends. (or at least somebody who -wants- to see a ghost)

and then once I had the worst UTI ever, and I was sprawled out miserably on the couch in the living room. The hallway has a door opening into the living room too, and this door was mostly open, but from where I was curled up, I could only see the door and not into the hallway at all. Plunderpuss went to get something from the other room, and then I heard him go "GOD. DAMMNIT." and he stomped back into the living room to inform me that he'd just seen the house ghost again, and if the door had been all the way open, I would have seen it too.

I did notice that my computer bag was arranged differently from how I'd had it--instead of being -in- the chair, the strap was hanging looped around the -back- of the chair, and nobody could have moved it that way without me seeing it.

I never saw the house ghost, though sometimes I told plunderpuss to say hi to it for me. X)

 

Back in the day when i used to hang out on/x/ a lot, i was a total shit about dyatlov pass. People would start a thread and i would be one of those guys who'd just immediately spam it all up about PARADOXICAL UNDRESSING ISNT PARANORMAL YOU SHITSTACK LERN 2 CRITICAL THINKING FUCK!!!!!

Then i bothered to actually read more than the wiki page and suddenly holy hell there are a lot of creepy little details. Now i love it. And also am super glad that most of my meltdowns happened on anon and ive since learned how to keep it to a minimum.

 

I apologize in advance but I ran into some pics of people with Steve Buscemi eyes shopped onto their faces and my perverse little brain made me do this:



It kind of creeps me out.

 

My dad has a theory that people are more sensitive to the paranormal as children.

My own story sort of seems silly, but I have a cousin once removed whose kid got really freaked out during Obon one year because he swore up and down that one of our relatives was at the door. The relative was deceased at the time.

I was pretty sure I used to hear ghosts at my mom's place when I was a kid, though. It could have been the neighbors talking loudly. I did have an unusual number of nightmares featuring my mother's house as some kind of haunted hotspot I was stuck in but that's probably just coincidental.

 

Did the hearing things only happen in the dark/after sundown, by any chance?

 

Okay so, I was reading through the posts in here and debating adding my thing, because I wasn't really sure if it counted as fitting, and when I decided I was going to I got this weird, cold feeling all the way from my head to my toes, not a negative thing but like the feeling was glad I'd made that decision? So, here we go.

I used to go quite regularly to a camp for teenage Christians, which I was at the time (and still am Christian, just not teenage,) and we'd have a sermon and music and prayer every morning and evening, for I think four or five days. One time, I think the last time I went, when we were having the prayer session (think more prayers for spiritual and physical healing than sitting in pews) I started sort of, seeing these moving shapes, sort of half out of the corner of my eye and half not physically there but just inside my head, floating around the huge tent we were all in and just kind of, helping out with the prayer healing that was going on (I can talk about that more too if anyone's interested?? It was pretty cool.) I drew a few of them, as best as I could, although it was pretty hard to get anything close to accuracy given that I was working with a biro on notebook paper and they were these three dimensional, constantly moving things, but yeah that's my story of how I saw some angels. I can hunt around my room for the pictures if anyone wants to see? It'd need some digging though.

 

I honestly don't remember. I have a vague impression of the lights being on and hearing people talking that weren't my parents, but the walls were also kind of on the thin side. I beat the Elite Four in Pokemon Red version one Easter and got excitedly loud and I guess at the Easter party next door a couple people cheered with me lol.

We did have a super creepy like folded up tent or something in the corner of the living room that freaked me out for years until it kind of mysteriously disappeared one day, though. I asked my parents what it was and neither of them remember anything like it, though it probably doesn't help that I haven't been able to describe it very well.

 

Where my mother's family is from has a lot of ghost stories, because there are a lot of bridges and haunted forests and beaches and such.
my dad is convinced he saw his grandfather's ghost.
he was in the old farm house and saw the figure of his grandfather in a nightshirt holding a candle.

 

Near where i grew up, in Big Sur down to ~Ventana, there are stories going back to native times about the Dark Watchers in the hills. Campers and hikers and whatnot would just see these little dark sillouettes standing still watching them from across canyons or following them through redwoods. Usually, the thing to do would be to pretend you dont see them and keep walking, and thatd be the end of it. Sometimes though, they'd mess with you or very occasionally take someone.

A friend of my grandmothers was a cop, years back, and used to go hike pretty much every weekend. He told me this as like an 80 year old man. One day when he was young he was hiking, and had been seeing the Watchers off and on for a while and keeping his distance as you do. Suddenly he looks up and, despite living there his whole life and hiking all the time, he didnt know where he was. He said it was like looking up in your living room and not recognizing anything. Eventually he found a dry riverbed and started following it downhill--its right by the coast, you're gonna hit beach eventually. He keeps seeing Watchers and hearing these weird little fox yips (we dont have wild foxes) doesnt find anything, the sun starts to set. He beds down under a fallen redwood, and eventually despite the sounds of people moving unseen in the bushes and the continuing fox noises he manages to fall asleep.

The next morning? He wakes up on top of a goddamned cliff. He had no climbing equipment, he couldnt have sleepwalked. You could see the fallen tree and the riverbed where he'd gone to sleep hundreds of feet below. The search party had to use a helecopter to get him down.