I'll try to get around to telling these and other stories in more depth at some point. Stories I need to do: -Full story about the library ghost (confirmed with witnesses) -Full story about the tunnel ghost (hearsay, but multiple witnesses--don't forget to mention that thing about the chains because it's an interesting rumor even if I didn't verify it because heck no I was NOT going in there) -Full story about the child in the chapel (hearsay, but from a very reliable witness) -Full story about the attic library ghost (hearsay x2; don't forget to mention the silence because the source was very specific about that part) -Full story about the graveyard ghost (hearsay with lots of circumstantial evidence--campus rule to avoid + ghost hunter visit) -Ghost in a boys' quad (hearsay, but from a reliable source; involved a Ouija board, so maybe less believable because of that; cutest ghost story I know) -Red eyes on the wall (very famous rumor on campus; mention the room number change; maybe mention that the room ended up being a couple doors down from one of my dorm rooms even though that's not super significant? [you could see outlines of what the old numbers used to be]; note to self: ask college friends what dorm number it was before the switch) -Theater ghost (hearsay from the theater majors; I don't know a lot about this one (ask college friends who he was again); the ghost hunters devices went crazy in the theater [probably because of all the wiring in there tbh]) -That ritual in the graveyard by the highway (not really about ghosts, but still eerie) -The two family ghosts from the fire (proof that some of my family members learned nothing for horror stories + proof that my acceptance of ghosts as daily life when they show up could be genetic) Disclaimer: I didn't really go looking for any of these stories aside from the one about the library ghost since it effected me directly. Some of them came from well-known campus rumors--mostly about red eyes and library ghost (I mean, she had enough victims. Why wouldn't she be talked about? Non-work-study people thought she was only in the "Q" section, though. lol). It was kind of an unspoken rule on campus that you didn't talk about these things to people who hadn't had an encounter. I had friends who loved ghost stories. They dragged me along to the ghost hunter thing when that happened, which was how I first heard about the attic library ghost and graveyard ghost (both locations were off-limits to students and a guide took the hunter there without us). My experiences haven't lessened my fear of ghosts at all, and I still really don't like ghost stories. I like to talk about my experiences and the stories I know in humorous ways so I don't get scared because I am a big sissy about this topic.
I just realized that my college blocked off two of the haunted places because asbestos. It's probably coincidence and really about asbestos, but it would be hilarious if that was the sisters' codeword for "haunted" (btw my college is owned and operated by a sisterhood whose convent is connected to the college via underground tunnels...because reasons). "Why can't we go into the tunnels?" "Asbestos." "What's in there?" "Just asbestos." "Why can't we go into the attic library?" "Asbestos." "But the head librarians go in there and the ghost hunter went in there." "They wore protective gear." "Ghost hunter." "He found nothing but asbestos." "ಠ_ಠ" [This conversation was made up for my amusement.]
Oh, wait. Correction: The library was made in the 70s. The work-study program isn't that old. I can't remember what year it started. Sorry for mixing that up and for not remembering how long she actually haunted the place. The 70s thing was only significant because it debunked a campus myth about her origin story--that she was a sister from back when the college's students had to wear habits and that she hung herself in the library. Debunked because habits were no longer mandatory by the time the library was made. This doesn't explain why people who see her see her in a habit, but my guess (and the head librarian's guess) was that it might have had something to do with the GRAVEYARD FULL OF DEAD SISTERS BEHIND THE FREAKING LIBRARY.
Chronological outline of library ghost story done. I'll look it over tomorrow and try to add anything I might have forgotten before I start working on the final draft.
Oh boy! So like, I lived with my grandparents through highschool. I mean, mom and I did. My bedroom was upstairs, in what was an old 'toy room' for the kids. Creepy enough in of itself, but at the particular time of recall I didn't have any furniture. I simply had a blow up bed and a little table and chair to be on my laptop at. I didn't like the room at the time, it creeped me out. We're talking full on cold spots and little whisperings in my ear. I've always been 'sensitive' to paranormal aspects, which I firmly blame on my history. Now, the house was cursed. I knew it was cursed, we all knew it was cursed. Which at first is all I blamed the cold spots on, because I didn't think... Well, okay let's explain the curse. My great grandmother hated my grandmother. She hated that her son had eloped with my grandmother, and she hated even more that they would get the house. My grandmother says that sometimes my great grandmother would do odd things, and everyone thought she was a devil worshiping heathen. I'm not sure of the last part, but I do know she cursed the house. On her deathbed even, she said: "I curse this wretched house and all who inhabit it. I curse any Cathey or spawn of the Catheys to have horrible lives so long as they live in this house. I want them to suffer and hate as I hate." So, now with that in mind let's go back to me sitting on the laptop. I was like 16 at the time I think, and I was getting into the occult on my own. I wasn't really looking up occult things at the time, just meandering the net which is why I ran across a 'music box' song. When it started playing, though, a rocking chair in the corner began to move. I couldn't look away, you know? Too scared to. Especially when I started to see a young girl 'appear'. Not real looking, see-through, and she just stared at me with these vicious eyes. Hungry eyes even, like she wanted to eat me alive or something? I was fucking spellbound even as she got up and started walking forward. There was a point, I think it was when she walked through the air mattress as if it wasn't there, that I jumped up and away from her and the computer. She laughed then, managed to corner me, and leaned up. "Get out." It wasn't as vicious as I'd expected but it was pretty fucking moving. Didn't go into my room for a whole night, and never played music box songs while I was in there. Turns out, it was probably the ghost of my great grandmother. Looked just like her, and that room had been her bedroom. I'm not sure why she wasn't... vicious?? To me?? The more I think, the more I feel like it was a warning, you know? 'Get out because you need to' not 'Get out because I'm about to whop your sorry ass'. But that's my biggest 'what' story. I've got a few others but most are from young childhood and who knows with that shit.
As I've mentioned, my dad is both Crafty and interested in ghosts ever since the barn incident I posted before. We've talked about ghosts and hauntings and stuff because we share interests and he's a walking encyclopedia. Dad has this theory that not all hauntings are actually ghosts in the way we think of them; not spirits or even aware entities but rather an imprint of a person like a snapshot. Dad calls them echos. Basically it's like hiking/game trails. When you first walk that way you leave a little bit of a trail- a few broken twigs underfoot, some branches pushed out of the way. As people/animals keep walking that same path it becomes more and more of a visible trail. Echos are like that- people leave behind faint imprints everywhere they go but usually they stay faint because there's variation. But when it comes to routine over a long period of time the imprints become layered and more... tangible I guess. Example: the Coffee Cup Thunk in our house. It's exactly what it sounds like: sometimes the counter makes a sound like someone setting down a coffee cup, but there's no-one there and no cups have been moved. It can happen at any part of the day, but usually happens at certain times: early morning and mid afternoon. Sometimes it happens in the evening or late at night, but mostly happens at expected coffee times. It's happened ever since we bought the house. Dad's theory is the previous owner was, naturally, a coffee drinker. And so they'd come into the kitchen and set their cup down for a refill, and it happened so many times that the imprint of that person getting coffee has layered over so many times we can hear it. There's plenty of ghost stories of dead people appearing doing expected things at expected times- sometimes the echos are visible instead of audible, sometimes both. I'm bringing it up because we realized today we've been in the house long enough to leave echos of our own. Everyone in the house has a computer and we're all pretty much glued to them. We're also all gamers, including my grandma. Most games can be pretty heavy on the spacebar usage, and the keyboard she had for a decade (only recently swapped out) had a very distinct spacebar sound. Earlier today dad and I heard it from grandma's computer (in the family room) but she was in her room and no-one else was by it. We've been in the house for almost two decades so it's not surprising. (I'm not sure I believe the imprint thing. I think places have memories. I had a native american friend in high school who went with his dad to another res out of state, and when he went for a walk in an open field he had a very vivid vision of a curbstomp battle between the settlers and the locals. He went back pretty distressed and was told it's a common thing in that part of the field, it mostly affects native americans but people of other races have experienced it as well, just not as often. A place will obviously remember a traumatic incident, like wars, the way we remember major events- happy and horrible- in our lives. But there's also the mundane things we remember because they happened so often, like the standardized testing and elementary school multiplication bookmarks. We're not really remember one event but all of them at once. So I think if a thing happens often enough then the place remembers that, too. I've heard stories of historical buildings being repurposed and people seeing the previous inhabitants going about their business. Because [for instance] it was a nunnery for so long that the building remembers being one, and sometimes people pick up on those memories. Which is why a lot of those stories it's not specific inhabitants, the actual person/people seen might be different each time. Because the place isn't remembering specific people, but having a certain kind of people around.)
Somewhat less important, but when I was younger, I misunderstood that "Suppose I tell you that I flipped a coin multiple times and got 75% tails" thing about probability and thought it meant that coins landed on the tails side more often in the first few tosses. Starting from that point, and until I actually learned about probabilities, this is exactly what happened every time I flipped coins. It was actually kinda useful.
So this is an experience I had as a child which received an odd continuation not that long ago. @Vast Derp I don't remember if I told you about the recent events, I think I did. Anyway I wrote it out in spooky style as a kind of therapy. Spoiler: Long, so under spoiler button When I was 5 years old my family lived in Turkey. For me it wasn't much of a change. At my young age everything was weird and inexplicable. In Turkey it was weird and inexplicable with pistachios. During this time my parent's marriage was going through a rough patch. They were thoroughly disillusioned with the idyllic picture of marriage which religion and society had prepared them for. Instead they were in the trenches of raising 3 ADHD children; children they couldn't afford in terms of money or energy, with no conventional wisdom to help them in the pre-dawn of ADHD diagnosis. They were on the other side of the world from their family and friends, and my mother had just given birth to a fourth child. At the time the air was tense, tired, and sad. My apartment felt stranger than the entire strange country beyond the door. Despite being raised in a strict Christian denomination, even at 5 there were tales of ghosts and devils to be scared by. Solemnly we were told that these were dark forces that were jealous of the light of our goodness and faith, so they were not to be invited in on physical or metaphysical levels. They sought cracks in our armor, places of sadness to feed on and grow. Being cheerful and sweet didn't just carry social obligations, but was an act of battle in the unending war of Heaven and Hell. This dramatic viewpoint was supported by folktales of miraculous occurences by the faithful, and terrible fates for the faithless. My parents believed all this, and the pressure it added to keep up appearances was strong. Such was life. My parents were angry or exhausted, devils were literally after me and listened to every word I said, and it all fell into the misty backdrop so I could focus on my young concerns: checking out fairy tales from the library, trying to climb the large gnarled tree by the apartment, and sitting on the roof of the house by the drive-in theatre. Those were the anchors of reality, and the rest were just distant storm clouds. The hallways in our apartment formed a T. At the top of the T were the children's bedrooms: one shared by my older sister and I, the other by my brothers. Down the stem of the T, near the end of the hallway, was my parent's room. One night, I'm not sure when, I woke up in the dark of the earliest hours. Without conscious thought or will, I got out of bed and walked down the hall to my parent's room. The headboard of their bed was against the wall opposite the door. I stood in the doorway and saw that my Dad was sitting up in bed and had just turned on a bedside lamp, his hand still on the switch. He and my mother were both awake, staring at the foot of their bed. In the space between their bed and the door, so between my parents and I, was a black figure. This figure was so black that I've never seen its match. No light reflected off of any feature, it was a true absence of light. If it was two-dimensional I wouldn't have been able to tell. Its edges were jagged, as if someone had drawn a body outline for a homicide victim and then scribbled it in as sharply as possible. It was adult-sized, and was stopped in mid-action. The pose was cartoony, like it had been sneaking across the floor one large step at a time. Its arms were held up, and its torso twisted at the hips in mid-turn. All this I could see from the outline. The inside was completely featureless. I saw no depth, no face, but despite that I knew the back of its head was to me, and it was facing my parents. My dad put up his arm in at a right angle, like the Boy Scout oath but with palm and fingers flat, and ordered the figure to leave this house in the name of Christ. Without turning or bending limbs in any way it flew out the window in a blur of black motion. My father looked past where it had been and said "Go to bed, girls". I looked up and saw my older sister behind me in the doorway. We went back to our room, and I went to sleep as peacefully as if I'd never woken up at all. The entire adventure had left no emotional impact on me whatsoever. In the morning, nobody mentioned it. We eventually moved back to the States and over the years a lot of the family tension faded. We have a few weird ghost stories and this became one more that I could tell when the topic rolled around. I'm not sure at what age I realized how terrifying the experience should have been and started to wonder at my own complete lack of emotional reaction. From the moment I woke up to when I went back to sleep I had no thoughts, no will. I was like a mechanical doll as I got out of bed and went down the hall. By the distances of the rooms I was out of bed and on the move before my parents woke up. Why, I don't know. Even now, that memory doesn't feel frightening. A few years ago I brought it up with my parents, and they told me their side of the story. They had awoken abruptly in the middle of the night to a sense of dread. Heavy and oppressive terror hung in the room. They turned on the light and saw nothing, but the feeling was so strong that my dad said his prayer. The terror lifted and that's when they saw their daughters in the doorway; they didn't see the black thing at all. We all marvelled, and decided not to bring it up with my sister. "She doesn't talk about things like that", my mom said. Two years ago my little brother, the one just born when we moved to Turkey, was stricken with a sudden and serious illness. It came very, very close to killing him, and his survival stunned his doctors. Unfortunately, this happened a week after my mother had moved to another state where the climate was better for her own health condition. The rest of the family was going to join her in a few months, but as my brother's illness was so sudden and so severe he moved back home and my mom moved back to help care for him in his slow recovery. Her own condition worsened, took a sudden turn, and this summer she passed away. While I was looking through her things I found the journal she kept during her move. I skimmed it, trying to find the entry that she would have made about my brother's illness. As I moved through it chronologically and read her entries about feeling better in the new climate, my sense of morbid dread built. The morning of my brother's illness she wrote that my father had called her. The night before he had woken up with the same feeling of oppressive terror as that night in Turkey. He again ordered the unseen thing out of the room. Her entry describes how awful it must have been to experience alone, reminisces about Turkey, and then there's a gap. In the next entry she had just received news of my brother's hospitalization and was writing religious comforts to herself in shaking, frantic handwriting. I couldn't read any more. I have never asked my sister what she saw that night, if my moving had woken her up or if she woke up like me; empty and mechanical. I haven't asked my father about his second experience with that black thing. My brother is recovering, slowly, and I haven't told him about it. My mother's journals I collected and put with some of her other things. It's an odd collection of ringed supermarket notepads and bound floral journals. The pages are a mix of journal entries, meditations, and to-do lists. None are marked on the cover or spine. It didn't seem right to hide or disfigure the entry about the unseen thing so that journal sits with the others, where it could be found if desired. I have some pieces of this story, maybe someone else in the family has others. I know it'd be easier to ask, but the asking is hard. It's hard to want to know the answer when the answer could be unthinkable. I don't want to say we're haunted. I don't want to think that something's waiting for the right moment to flap its wings. The superstitions and fear of my youth which I'd set aside and grown out of was waiting for me. All the fear I didn't have as a child was patiently, patiently waiting for me.
oh rain, ten thousand hugs. ;_; maybe this is presumptuous or awful of me to say, i don't know, but it kind of feels like your mother traded herself for your brother.
Thanks for the hugs :) It's okay, you're absolutely right and she was pretty up-front about it. Mom knew her health would improve outside of that humid climate and she was taking an awful risk when she moved back, but she couldn't live with herself if she didn't do everything she could. We had some discussions about it. As a post-script to any readers who don't know me too well: Don't worry, it's okay. I wrote all the scariest parts of the story because it is scary and I don't like it, but the timing could have been a coincidence. If it wasn't .. I don't know :) It's scary but it's not everything. I'm not very religious but I also don't think that people are powerless when it comes to stuff like this. I just don't think that the spirit/being/thingie-guy could do something to my brother despite the awful timing. And like someone on the internet used to say: Even if you draw a bad hand, you're still in the game and can decide how to play.
FOLKS HEY DO YOU HAVE A STORY ABOUT AN ANIMAL GHOST? PLEASE COME HERE SO I CAN ADD IT TO MY PILE AND ROLL AROUND IN IT PLEASE. I am an excitedly spergy researcher, love me.
I wrote you mine, and since it's written out all nice, I guess I'll put it in here too. I think I will entitle it... A Ghost Horse Bit My Ass There was a ghost horse in my basement when I was a kid. What I'd heard from my folks was that the whole neighborhood used to be an apple orchard for the one big house up on the hill, back around the Civil War. There were a few ancient apple trees left -- a couple of them are still standing now, actually. Now, this is in Minnesota, so the Civil War wasn't happening anywhere nearby, but a lot of guys still joined up and went off to fight. One guy from the farm (son? farmhand?) took his big sturdy plowhorse with him when he went. They both came back from the war alive, but "That horse came back mean." It couldn't do a day's work anymore, and it attacked people, and spooked all the time and kicked out barn walls and whatnot. So the guy had to shoot it. But he knew it was his fault the horse was like that, for taking the horse to war, so he supposedly buried it with military honors. Far from putting the horse's spirit to rest, that just gave it delusions of grandeur. Ever since, people would see a zombie horse or a skeleton horse out in the orchard at night, and workers would have their ladders and buckets knocked over and occasionally get bitten. Generations passed, the farm was divided up lot by lot and houses built around the place, and guess whose house was built on the spot where they buried the mean horse? Yep, you betcha. If there's anything weirder than seeing a skeleton horse (with shreds of empty skin hanging on the bones) standing in a dark corner of your dad's basement workshop, sort of occupying the same space as the tablesaw, it's probably being used to seeing a skeleton horse etc. My brother wouldn't go down there if he could help it, but my mom is fae as fuck and could banish the thing for days with just a mean look, and my dad and I are stubborn jerks. So we saw it all the time. It wouldn't usually do anything, it'd just stand there. If you wanted to go to where it was, you'd avoid looking at it, but don't quite turn your back on it, and turn on lights as you go, working your way back to whatever dark bit it was lurking in, and it'd be gone when you got there. If you confronted it directly, sometimes it'd go -- especially if Mom had been stern with it recently -- but sometimes it'd test you. It'd get realer somehow, until you were seeing it with your eyes a little as well as your mind, and it made your eyeballs feel gross just from seeing it. And the sense of dread and doom and rage and incomprehending panicky vengefulness and utter murderous arrogance would grow until you backed down. If, on the other hand, you turned your back on it, sometimes it would bite you. The bites left bruises that lasted minutes or hours. It was the only physical thing the ghost horse ever did. It didn't rattle doors or knock things off tables, it just existed at you, but the bites were pretty painful. Okay, so long about 1980, when I was eight or so, I go down to the basement for whatever reason, and I am in no mood to deal with bullshit. I get whatever I came down for, and as I'm going to turn out the light, I spot the ghost horse out of the corner of my eye. I'm getting this feeling like he's gonna test me, but I just do not feel like going through the whole rigamarole of backing up, smacking the lightswitch, scooting out the door and slamming it -- hell, I didn't even turn on the stairway light, I just did not give a fuck. I was a mean little smeet that day. In fact, I thought I was probably at least as mean as the ghost horse. So I do a little babyface Clint Eastwood squint at the horse's corner and I go, "Make my day." Then I turn my back and stomp out, leaving the door standing open. Halfway up the stairs, I feel what I was pretty much expecting: great big horse chompers on my butt. At that moment, I spin around and hammer-fist as hard as I can right where the head of such a bitey creature would have to be. And I hit something! Pretty hard, too! Flush with victory, I pointed vaguely in the direction of the horse's corner and in my dog-scolding voice I went, "NO. GO HOME." Then I went about my business, feeling very pleased with myself. I saw it less and less after that. No dog we ever had would go down there, but I didn't even have to do the turn-on-lights-in-order dance. Apparently my prepubescent fury was something it didn't want to tangle with. Either that or my mom got extra fae at it after I told her the story. Anyway, that is the story of how I punched a ghost horse in the head.
@jacktrash That is a story I will be proud to include in whatever rambly dissertation I ever construct out of this. And you are FAR braver than I. -doffs hat-
you know how every dog park has that one chihuahua that challenges rottweilers for dominance because it simply doesn't understand it's tiny? that was baby me. i'm sure it was tedious for everyone. :D
When Wife and I went on a walking tour in Gettysburg, I got tired and leaned against the stone fence outside one of the cemeteries. It was late summer and my tits are unruly, so I had some pretty deep cleavage going on. The tour guide talked, and it felt like the night was getting colder. Like somebody who'd been out in the sleet was leaning on my back, that heavy humid cold. I started to smell sweat and smoke. This happened slowly, so I didn't notice right away. When I did, I looked around for whoever was smoking to warn Wife, who has asthma. And that's when I felt something brush my cheek, like a hanging lock of hair. Like someone was leaning on my back, their cheek to mine. I bolted up and went to stand by the tour guide, because NOPE, and that was the end of it. TL;DR: I think a ghost got a nice look down my shirt. Kudos, Casper!
Small weird shit has happened to me over the years. I think I might be a weird shit magnet, but the most recent one was on a camping trip I took with a friend last week. Okay, first thing was the campsite itself. It was one of those caravan-and-tent dealies, with very neat manicured grass, gravel paths, a playground and facilites... and also not another damn person in sight. Not even the reception was manned, and although there was a sign telling us which plots were unreserved and suchlike, there was no pricelist. We were tired, and it was late, and we decided to do the brave thing and set up our tent and pay whatever in the morning. We parked up next to a big bank on right on the edge of the campsite, a bit paranoid about being randomly kicked out during the night. We were right up against a thick hedge with a barley field on the other side of it, and after a quiet BBQ dinner we went to sleep. Well, my friend did. I had managed to forget my sleeping bag, so I slept fitfully in my onesie over my clothes and thick jacket. Around four in the morning on my phone, I decided to get up and go out to make myself a hot drink on the little propane stove we had brought. It was pretty windy, and after a couple of tries lighting the stove I decided to sneak through the nearby gate to see if the wind was a bit broken by the hedge. It was, and after a moment I was hunched around the stove keeping warm while my water boiled. Then I heard a scream. Every kid who grows up in the british countryside knows exactly what the fox says, and it sounds like someone yelling in pain. I looked up, expecting to see foxes or at least some movement on the other end of the flat field - it was dark, yeah, but there were lights on in the campground and I have good night vision - and I shit you not, there was someone standing in the middle of the barley watching me back. I didn't - I couldn't be sure in the dim light, but there was something about his head that really, really freaked me out. Something about the shape of it? Suffice to say, I turned the stove off and legged it back to the tent with my semi-hot milk and shivered there until morning, expecting at any moment to be followed, for the tent to unzip and something to come inside.... -shudders- Anyway, I told my friend in the morning when he woke up and we both went and looked at the field. Nothing weird, and certainly nothing that could account for the figure - no farm equipment, no scarecrow or anything. We still hadn't seen any of our fellow campers, however, so we bolted down our breakfast and pinned a £20 under the door of the reception with a note and left as soon as the gate was unlocked. Anyway, that is the story about how Mal Went Camping In Wayward Pines And Got Freaked Out By Creepers. (Also in this thrilling saga - the time I saw a UFO. The time me and my dad saw a UFO. The time I may have seen a Kelpie. The time me and my brother scared something weird out of the loft and mum saw it too. Tell me if any of those want elaborating on ^^;;; )
