Jezebel has their top 10 reader horror stories up here. Meh. I think we can do better, Juicers. Anyone got any true-life tales of terror to tell this Halloween? I’ll start us off, even though mine isn’t really all that scary. I’ve alluded to it briefly before, but here it is in detail:
My maternal grandmother is from the Carolinas. She was a schoolteacher when my sister and I were growing up, so she had summers off, and she’d take us on road trips to go camping, see historical sites (she was a history teacher) and visit relatives.
One of her cousins had inherited the old family manse, which was built in the 1820s (I think):
Everyone assumed Cousin Howard was gay because he never married or had a girlfriend that anyone ever heard about, and he was a natty dresser with a flair for decorating. Back then, people made those kinds of assumptions.
(Now that I think back on it, Cousin Howard’s speech and mannerisms were somewhat reminiscent of Senator Lindsey Graham’s, another confirmed bachelor from the Carolinas. So maybe things haven’t changed so much after all, as far as assumptions go.)
Anyhoo, even though we lived 500 miles away, the old family house figured prominently in our lives since Grandma and Cousin Howard were close. He was an uncle figure to my mom and her siblings as well as to the kids of my generation, and we visited back and forth.
Cousin Howard had lovingly restored the old house and decorated it in antebellum style. The beds all had high, carved wooden headboards, and the rooms featured heavy, imposing furniture. We’d grown up hearing stories about this house being haunted, and it looked the part.
One of the ghost stories we’d heard over the years involved sightings of the translucent figure of a Civil War-era female relative, who was seen frantically rushing down an upstairs hallway and entering a bedroom to hide her jewelry from marauding Yankee soldiers, who were approaching via the river across the road from the house.
One summer, Cousin Howard was hosting a large family reunion, and Grandma, my sister and I went up a week early to help him prepare for the big shindig. My sister and I were around 11 and 12 years old at the time — prime age for getting freaked out by ghost stories.
We refused to sleep in separate rooms since we were scared shitless. In fact, I don’t think either of us went upstairs without the other the whole time we were there, day or night. It was a creaky old house, and we frequently heard what sounded like footsteps on the stairs and in the hallway.
One night when we couldn’t sleep but had nonetheless been banished upstairs, we sat on the big bed playing crazy eights. I had my back to the door, which opened out into the hallway, and my sister was facing me.
Along the wall to my left was a tall antique breakfront writing secretary with its swing-down desk surface closed. I’d used it earlier to draw and write letters and had shut it, even though it was customarily left open, because I kept running into the corner of the desk.
My sister and I were engrossed in our card game when suddenly we heard what sounded like footsteps running up the stairs and toward us down the hall. We froze, looking at each other, terrified. I was too afraid to turn around, but I could see my sister looking past me toward the door and seeing something that scared her so much that she dove under the covers.
The hair on the back of my neck and arms was standing up, but I still would not turn around. I bowed my head and stared at the cards on the bed between myself and the trembling lump under the covers that was my sister and kept repeating to myself, “It’s not real! It’s not real! It’s not real!”
I heard the steps coming behind me, then the creaking noise of the desk surface on the secretary being lowered. Even though I didn’t want to see it and didn’t turn my head, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a figure at the secretary. I closed my eyes and screamed, which set my sister off, so we were both shrieking like banshees.
That brought Grandma and Cousin Howard upstairs at a rapid clip. We told them what happened — my sister’s account of the figure she had seen before she hid under the covers generally matched mine: an indistinct, misty figure in a floor-length dress with her hair in a bun on top of her head.
The secretary desk was closed, but Cousin Howard asked me if I saw what the figure did when she was at the secretary. I told him no — I’d only caught a glimpse of her before closing my eyes and screaming.
Then Cousin Howard opened the secretary and showed me that there were two compartments built into the structure of it and cunningly hidden — you could own the thing for a hundred years, use it daily and never know they were there. He said that’s where our Confederate ancestor had supposedly squirreled her jewels away.
So did we see a ghost? I don’t think so. We were a pair of kids hopped up on M&Ms and supernatural stories. I think it was a combination of a creaky house and the power of suggestion, honestly.
Many years later, Cousin Howard died, and he left the antique secretary from the old house to me. It stands not 15 feet away from where I sit writing this now. As far as I know, the ghost did not follow it. Perhaps she roams the hallways of the old house even now, looking for it.
Your turn!
GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)
So awesome!
jharp
My scariest memories are of The Exorcist and The Omen.
Both movies scared the hell out of me as a young teenager.
delosgatos
Almaden-Quicksilver, just South of San Jose, is today an open space preserve criss-crossed with hiking trails, but from before the gold rush until the mid-20th century was the largest Mercury mining area in the Americas. Thousands and thousands of miners and their families lived and died there, scratching a living out of miles of dark, narrow tunnels descending deep into the earth below. The mine shafts are closed off now, but the first open segment of one, the San Cristobal Mine, has been left accessible.
I made my way here on a very nice day, but the clouds darkened up ominously as I made my way along the back side of Mine Hill. I was hiking alone, and the light was already a bit gloomy with a coolness settling into the air as I approached the mine entrance. I thought my iPad mini (aka my camera) might have a light on it but I wasn’t sure how to turn it on, so I made my way into the mine and took some pictures as best I could in the dim light struggling to reach in from outside.
As I passed the point where the tunnel roof enters the hillside the oppressiveness of the earth above my head pressed down on me. The air turned muggy and I could smell the dank mustiness of the long abandoned shaft. I moved further in, to the end of the last shoring beams where the raw tunnel took over. A solid iron grate blocked further access to the depths of the mine ahead. The light was too low for pictures so I started to put the iPad away when, out of nowhere, a disembodied voice resonated from the walls of the shaft around me.
“Sorry, I cannot take requests right now. Please try again later.”
Of course, it was Siri. I had held down the home button on the iPad while putting it away. In the couple of seconds it took to realize this, my pulse went through the roof.
scuffletuffle
Terrific story. And hooray for the Uncle Howards of the world.
bemused
Is the old house still occupied by someone in the family?
p.a.
My true life tale of terror: The Atlantic has an article on how to FIX Iraq/Syria. And guess what? It involves identifying, arming, and training moderate forces!
We’re saved!
WereBear
Big family reunion in a creaky old house, but I’d never been there before. It was my stepmother’s family.
I got an upstairs room that was usually storage, with a simple bed and lots of dressers with misty mirrors staring at me. I had a big electric flashlight since we’d had a power failure.
I closed the door, and I could not turn the flashlight off. I mean I could not make my hand do it. It was just such a spooky atmosphere, I needed that light. I sat up most of the night, keeping a grip. Knowing it was a creaky old house during a lightning storm and power failure and that was undoubtedly working on my mind. I finally convinced myself that, now that the lightning had stopped striking, I could sleep, so I shut the flashlight and dropped off.
Woke up feeling weird, but once again, was sure it was just the disruption around me. But it was different, that’s all I can tell you. I don’t spook easily, and I was spooked, no question.
So much so that when we all got home that night and were having dinner, I mentioned that the room they put me in had an extremely weird vibe. My stepmother shrieked and dropped her silverware.
Apparently her brother had slept in that room once and never did again. Because a “ghosty lady” had come in the room and freaked him out.
Don’t know what story might be, because no one had one. The aunt and uncle had lived there for decades without a single whisper of a problem.
So it doesn’t mean anything. Nothing happened. Just feelings and the possible nightmares of a child.
And it was a skeptic’s coincidence that both these things happened in the same room.
OzarkHillbilly
I don’t have any ghost stories. All my true life horror stories involve the near deaths of one or the other of my sons. Not pleasant.
p.a.
I like the horror-movie Geico? commercial: “let’s escape in that running car.” “That’s crazy. Let’s hide behind those chainsaws.” “Good idea!”
Successful art doesn’t = good commercial; we focus on the art, not the product.
BGinCHI
In 1998 or 1999 that movie the Blair Witch Project was out and scaring the shit out of everyone, including me. I was living in Ithaca, NY, and commuting on weekends to teach a Saturday class in Buffalo. I saw it on Saturday night with a friend and then on Sunday drove back home.
That night there was a huge storm. A good friend of my girlfriend’s called us to say her power had gone out and she needed someone to check the fuses in the basement. I don’t know why she couldn’t do it. I think she was from NYC and had never done anything resembling home repair or manual labor. She lived in a big, old, shitty building, which is a feature of upstate NY.
It was cold and blowing a gale but I went over there. I assumed she had at least one flashlight so I didn’t bring one.
She had a candle. One candle.
We got to the top of the basement stairs and she said, “It’s down there somewhere.” I was pretty pissed at having to do this, and the worst part is that I was scared shitless from the goddamn movie. You remember the basement scene in the end, yes? Holy fuck.
So I go carefully down the stairs with my lone candle. The floor is dirt and it’s cobwebs and dust everywhere. I get halfway to what looks like the fuse box and the candle goes out. I have no matches.
My heart is jumping out of my chest and if someone had touched me I would have had a coronary.
I made my way by feel back to the stairs, up for matches, then down where I replaced the fuse. Lights on and everyone fine.
I don’t like scary movies.
JPL
By way of the NYTimes, I found this video. There was heavy flooding in the Austin area and a man calmly takes pictures of his car floating down the flooded area. He calls a TV station and mentions he’s up a tree.
KVUE
If it were me, my language and voice would be different. Does anyone know what type of auto it is?
Watch the newscasters faces…
Thoughtful Today
…
I woke up to Rachel Maddow telling me that Republicans now think that FOX is too left-wing….
Scary?
Skin-crawly?
Campfire funnies?
My coffee hasn’t kicked in enough for me to decide.
HinTN
I moved into an old house in 1971 and several friends moved in shortly thereafter. The house sat on a rise in front of a cave from which issues adv everlasting spring. Airhead are found in profusion in the fields around the farm, which sits at the base of the Cumberland Plateau. Clearly it could have been some sort of sacred space for Indians. One night several folks went off to town to do what late teen early twenty somethings do, leaving me, my girlfriend and another young man in the house. Having retired for the evening, we were all abed when something very strange happened. The night was calm and yet I experienced the event as some sort of great wind our every circling round and round the house. It served to go on for an eternity. When it “departed” I clearly sensed that it had gone to the cave. I sat bolt upright in bed and said some profound thing like, “what just happened?” My girlfriend, uncoached by Abby description from me, said something was trying to come through the front door to get her. The other fellow said he had experienced some power or energy that he could not describe. We were all awake and jazzed from it when the others came home an hour or so later all beered up and laughing at us. I figure the spirit of the cave had judged us acceptable to live in the sacred space.
donnah
My sister and I had an Ouigi board and spent hours conjuring imaginary souls with it. My mother told us it was nonsense, but in her childhood she remembers her great grandmother having one, too. Great Grandma Irena had a touch of spookiness herself, as Mom said relatives recalled that she had demons who pitched dishes right off the shelves, crashing them to bits on the floor.
Our spookiest tale growing up was more home invader than ghost. We heard the sound of someone moving around in the kitchen. Our house was a new brick ranch, hardly conducive to scary tales from the past. But we heard my dad pull out his rifle from his Marine Corps days, and as he walked down the hall to the kitchen, he said in a deep voice, “Who is in the kitchen?”
My sis and I were petrified, holding our breath, as Dad stepped into the kitchen and flipped on the light.
“No one is in the kitchen,” Dad said aloud. My mom hurried out to see for herself.
My sister and I were positive we had summoned a ghost from the grave, but we never did find out who was in the kitchen. And we teased my dad about it forever, mostly whenever someone entered the kitchen.
SFAW
Is the Rethug Presidential field not scary enough for you? Is “Speaker Paul Ryan” not scary enough? Jim Inhofe in charge of Senate Environment Committee?
Don’t need “supernatural” stuff to be scared, these days.
Gimlet
http://assets.amuniversal.com/f4c9d53061eb01331634005056a9545d
Betty Cracker
@bemused: A 3rd cousin whom I haven’t seen or communicated with in decades, but I’ve thought of finding him on Facebook to compare notes!
BillinGlendaleCA
I don’t have any ghost stories, but apparently the new camera I bought to take picture in infrared is also know as a ghosthunting camera.
Mack
Lived in Sacramento after my dad died. I had my best friend as a roommate. Very late one night, I answered the phone (had to trek all the way into the kitchen to do that) My dad’s voice very clearly said “take care of your mother” and then said my name. I woke up in a cold sweat, then convinced myself I had dreamed the whole thing. About an hour later, my roommate looked in my room and asked, “so who called so late?”
bemused
@Betty Cracker:
It would be interesting to know if the house was kept the same, furniture and all.
Pinacacci`
I moved to a rural area within a farming community. The driveways are long and houses set well back from the road. There are no street lights. The street that the mailbox is on (300 yards from the house) is a tunnel of live oaks, shady in the day and very, very dark at night.
So, not too long after I move in, I go check the mailbox around 10 at night. It’s pitch black. As I am checking the mail, a beat-up pickup comes slowly down the street, stopping in front of my driveway and just idling in the middle of the road. I can’t see the driver or anything else, just the headlights and the rumbling pickup.
The driver’s window rolls down and a deep smoker’s voice says, “It’s mahhhhhty DARK out here…”
I chirped “IT SURE IS!” Then I casually walked around the truck and headed back up the (dark) driveway. A few seconds later the truck slowly rumbled away.
And that is when I decided I needed a dog.
Germy Shoemangler
True-life tale of terror? Okay, here goes:
It was 1979. I was 21 years old. I was working full time in a publishing company. We were busy, but we weren’t overworked. The company regularly posted job openings on a bulletin board. That’s how I got my first promotion: I’d seen a job in a different department I was interested in and applied for it. The company offered to help pay for college tuition, so I could become even better at my job.
There was no balloon-juice back then. No crooksandliars, lawyersgunsandmoneyblog or Matt Taibbi column. But I read other progressive writers, and found out that an actor I remembered from some corny old B-movies was running for president.
I remembered him because the National Lampoon used to mock him as the worst and silliest governor of California that state had ever seen. I knew he spoke out against medicare, and was a spokesman for GE, a major polluter.
A chill ran up my spine as I opened my morning newspaper the day after election day. The hair on my neck stood up: He’d been elected president of the United States.
Soon after that, the publishing company changed. The tuition assistance disappeared. There were layoffs. We were all told to work 110%. “But that’s mathematically impossible,” I remember thinking.
Some co-workers in my department tried to form a union. Next thing I knew, the ringleaders of that movement were laid off, and the rest of our department was physically moved to a different building about 100 miles away. “They want to cut out the cancer” someone told me.
After I was finally laid off from that job, I worked in a series of other companies that treated employees the same way. Lower pay, “work 110%”, no unions, longer hours, more mean and nasty bullshit.
Sometimes on dark nights, I can see the ghostly figure of John Mitchell, climbing into a ghostly limo. Before he closes the door, he tells a ghostly reporter: “This country is going so far to the right you won’t recognize it.”
Ken
I don’t think I’ve ever felt terror in real life, but when I was younger I got absolutely freaked by Zenna Henderson’s short story “Hush”.
Botsplainer
In the fall of 2002, we were traveling back from a week of DisneyHell by way of I-75. My wife had arranged a stay at an Orvis-affiliated golf and tennis resort north of Atlanta. It was centered around the ruin of a plantation house. Guests mostly stayed in new cottages, but there was one unit which was original, and next to the plantation ruin, far away from the other accommodations and bar/restaurant.
It had been the head overseer’s dwelling. It was two stories, about 1800 square feet, very nice. Rack rate at the time was $1500 a night, so it was a luxury accomodation.
I’d put the kids to bed in an upstairs bedroom, had a fire going in our bedroom, and locked both the front and back doors (these were deadbolts – they hadn’t installed key cards on that unit yet). Anyway, I’ve turned out the lights in the living area, closed the bedroom door and am getting undressed for bed and good times. All of a sudden, there’s a loud noise.
Wife says “what was that?”. I lie and say “beer cans shifting in the ice in the sink.” She said “that did not sound like beer cans. It’s something else, isn’t it?” My response, “you’re right”. I knew exactly what I heard.
She says “you want to check that out?”, to which I respond “no, but I will anyway”.
I cracked the bedroom door, snaked my hand around to the light switches, flip them all on. When I step into the living room, everything looks in order, except both the front and back doors are not only impossibly unlocked, but standing wide open. I looked out each path, didn’t see a soul, groaned in understanding and re-locked both doors (left the lights on this time.
I laid in bed a couple of hours listening to little noises of things shuffling around in the living room. Had it been louder, I’d have just sat out in the living room watching Sports Center really loud, but sleep finally claimed me.
The next morning, the doors were unlocked again. The girls reported hearing a loud crash in the night, but no noises upstairs.
When we got home, we looked up the place – it’s famously haunted. We also developed film that had weird shadows all over, and something that looked like a face in a window.
Culture of Truth
@JPL: Just listened. Amazing. “Oh don’t mind me. I’m fine. It’s a very nice tree. I may retire here…”
Hawes
Once we’ve compiled the John Cole Manuscript, we need to get the Betty Cracker Anthology up and running.
Elizabelle
@Hawes: Agreed. Someone will have fun putting together the suggested blogposts.
And the illustrations. The wine foil art. The chickens. The kids in roach costumes. Where to begin.
HRA
I was 7 years old when I had an experience I can never forget. It was the middle of the night and everyone had gone to bed. I woke up with the light of a candle at the door. I first thought the power had gone out and my Mom had come in to check on me. As it came closer I saw an old lady dressed all in black with a scarf on her head. I felt like I was paralyzed and could not move as she came closer to me. She came right up to my face, smiled and she was gone. I never told my parents or older sister. My mother got a letter from her brother in Europe months after my experience about my grandmother’s death. Mom brought out the photos she had of her mother. Still I never said a word about the night of my experience. Could it be since I was the only grandchild my grandmother had never seen that she had to visit me?
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone :)
Off to swim and run errands.
JPL
@Culture of Truth: If I can’t see the road, I stop. Decades ago, I was caught in a flash flood but not like that. My son was four and my mom had a cast on her leg. Before the car lost power, I rolled down the back window of the station wagon. Someone waded and helped us out of the back window.
It was nothing like that though. I want a car that floats.
also, most would find that video a true life tale of terror, but
obviously not the guy
rikyrah
The scariest tales- movie wise for me, have always been the ones based in Biblical stuff : The Omen, The Exorcist, The Seventh Sign.
But, I shall not lie… I didn’t take a shower for months after seeing Psycho as a kid.
And, my sisters scared me with Dracula – never wanted to go into our basement alone.
bemused
@donnah:
Friends and I played with a Ouigi board when we were around 12 years old. Nothing unusual happened but just the pulling feeling of the indicator creeped me out and I never did it again. I’m a midwestern Scandinavian sort but I still would not want one near me.
geg6
Meh. Don’t believe in the supernatural nor am I scared by stories or films about such things. But I will tell about the supposed ghosts on my campus. Before it became a campus of PSU, the campus was the site of the old county tuberculosis hospital. When PSU acquired the site, the morgue was converted to a maintenance building and the hospital building became the administration building (both have been gone at least a decade now). Story was there was a male ghost dressed in late 1800s dress that wandered the old morgue and a female ghost dressed in turn of the century white that wandered the hospital halls. My first office there was in the second floor of the old hospital and I worked late there many an evening and never saw anything, but co-workers claimed they did.
Culture of Truth
This isn’t particularly scary, but once I stayed in Gettysburg in the hotel closest to the battlefield. Essentially, on the battlefield. I checked in and went out walking around town and had dinner, and when I came back late at night I could not get in the room. It was one of those hotels where the doors were in the open, and it was cold, so I went to the lobby to get it fixed. It turned the door was deadbolted from the inside. They had to call a locksmith to saw right through the swinging bolt. Weird.
Adding to it was Gettysburg is replete with ghost stores and “ghost tours,” and it was Halloween night.
bemused
@donnah:
I made a negative comment on the O board that didn’t appear. Coinkydink? I think not.
Matt McIrvin
I had a dream last night that I was back in grad school and Donald Trump came to give a lecture about the quantum field theory of a charged scalar particle.
Poopyman
An un-ghost story:
It’s been nearly two decades now since we bought this old place. Middle part built around 1805, front part antebellum and moved by ox cart to join the old part around the turn of the (last) century. It’s sort of a farmhouse in a village, and was owned by an old guy until the 1960s, when he died and the estate was contested. It sat until 1974, when a young family bought it, added water, electric, and the newest, crappiest wing. Nothing remarkable about the place, except I slowly realized that there was something special about the front bedroom. Far from being spooky, it is the quietest, most serene place in the house, different even from it’s sister room next to it. I find it’s the best place to just lie and relax and think. It’s now our bedroom.
A couple of years ago, through an odd set of circumstances, I happened to meet the (now elderly) grand-daughter of that old farmer. I asked her about that room, and it turns out it was her grandmother’s room.
So. I never knew my own grandmothers, but I like to think that’s the feeling I’d get from them. Although it makes me wonder if I’m sucking the aura out of the room. Am I adding my own aura as the years roll away? Makes me feel kind of sorry for future owners.
Poopyman
@Matt McIrvin: And that particle is YOOOGE!
BOO!
mtiffany
“And that is how much it will cost for Maggie to go to college!”
Gimlet
Was walking around downtown Charleston in the early evening a few years back on Halloween when a “headless” horseman in early American dress came galloping down the cobblestones.
Whatta place!
Bobby Thomson
You should be using this as background noise. You won’t want to leave it on for long.
Mike J
Pretty scary for Jose Mourinho right now.
Germy Shoemangler
Some writers tried to see who could write the scariest (and shortest; two sentences or less) horror stories. Here are some of them:
A girl heard her mom yell her name from downstairs, so she got up and started to head down. As she got to the stairs, her mom pulled her into her room and said “I heard that, too.”
My wife woke me up last night to tell me there was an intruder in our house. She was murdered by an intruder 2 years ago.
I always thought my cat had a staring problem – she always seemed fixated on my face. Until one day, when I realized that she was always looking just behind me.
There was a picture in my phone of me sleeping. I live alone.
I begin tucking him into bed and he tells me, “Daddy, check for monsters under my bed.” I look underneath for his amusement and see him, another him, under the bed, staring back at me quivering and whispering, “Daddy, there’s somebody on my bed.”
I awoke to the sound of the baby monitor crackling with a voice comforting my firstborn child. As I adjusted to a new position, my arm brushed against my wife, sleeping next to me.
Elmo
Not scary, but weird:
When I was in college, a group of friends and I went hiking in the White Mountains in New Hampshire on Columbus Day. It was lousy weather for hiking, wet and cold, and we soon discovered that our planned circle route was much, MUCH too long and difficult for the conditions. (Pro-tip: stay away from a trail called “Flume” when it’s been raining all day.)
So we were still deep in the woods when night fell. Very cold and wet. Couldn’t stick to the trail because we couldn’t see the blazes. Instead of doing the smart thing and hunkering down (Harvard idiots) we struck out cross country using a penlight and compass.
There was a large, fast creek across our path, and two of our party were swept a good bit downstream before we managed to cross. Hypothermia was setting in for all of us, and one guy actually started hallucinating and screaming in terror. When we eventually found a road, several cars roared past us despite desperate standing in the road and waving.
It was literally life and death at that point. So the guy in the pickup who stopped probably saved all our lives – I know that I personally collapsed when we stopped for gas on the way back to Cambridge.
I stumbled into my room at 4 am, beyond exhausted – and the phone was ringing. I couldn’t understand it, but I picked up. My then- best friend, who is now my wife, and who was in California and had no idea I had even gone hiking, said over the phone, Oh thank god. Are you okay?
She had gotten a bad feeling, she said, around 8 pm her time, and started calling. She had also called the university and the Mass state police, along with calling me every 15 minutes from 8 her time to when I answered at 1am.
8 her time was about when we were crossing the creek and our two guys got swept downstream and hurt, and when “shit got real” as the kids say.
I don’t usually believe stories like this, but the damn phone was ringing at 4 am.
Bobby Thomson
Seriously, there are scientific explanations for hauntings.
Satby
@Germy Shoemangler: I have a similar true life horror story. Probably half the country does. And we can’t quite wake up yet, because the zombies are still after us.
Elmo
@Germy Shoemangler: those are GREAT. I’m particularly creeped out by the phone one, and it wins for shortest!
Amir Khalid
@Mike J:
Never mind Chelsea’s performance in the league, Jose’s appalling behaviour this season has been reason enough to sack him. He’s dragged Chelsea FC’s good name through the mud.
Gimlet
@Elmo:
Cat did it.
Germy Shoemangler
@Gimlet:
I’m pretty sure a cat would rather take a selfie.
Oatler.
There are plenty of great movies from the 70s that had Cultural Signifahooie, like The Exorcist, Don’t Look Now, Carrie, etc. Will TV be showing any of them this weekend? No, the undead spirit of Bad Ronald (Reagan) possesses the cable channels and we’re stuck with Halloween, Friday the 13th and Christine.
NotMax
True stories?
Takes a lot to get me anywhere close to the outskirts of the neighborhood of scared, even as a kidlet, but the time the family (and only us) was held hostage at gunpoint for a day and a night (or slightly more) by the Guaraní Indians while near the border of Brazil and Paraguay was pretty nervous-making. (Not making this up.)
Used to know someone who lived in an old five-story house with no electricity, sporadic gas lighting or candles and heavy Victorian furniture stuffed to the rafters, plus about a dozen assorted pianofortes and fortepianos. They named it Chill House. It was intentionally spooky.
The Maui Paintball Club goes all out on setting up a haunted house.zombie.shooting paintball attraction this time of year. Pix, no doubt, are on their Facebook page.
You’re on your own finding that; Homey don’t do Facebook.
Cervantes
@JPL:
It’s a Ford.
WereBear
So my grandmother’s house is where I spent my summers as a kid, and it was a very weird kind of place, the only area where I felt safe was the spring porch, a three season porch on the side.
There were no pets and no windows open the morning I, alone in the house, fixed my toast just the way I liked it, went to get my current book, and when I came back, the toast was gone. Just flippin’ gone.
WereBear
@Oatler.: Yep. I agree. Though Halloween is a classic… so I’m surprised.
NotMax
@Oatler.
Can’t bring up the 70s and spine-tingling films without mentioning Play Misty For Me.
An underrated gem.
Trailer.
Made me a Jessica Walter fan for life.
Germy Shoemangler
more SHORT horror stories:
Don’t be scared of the monsters, just look for them. Look to your left, to your right, under your bed, behind your dresser, in your closet but never look up, she hates being seen.
The grinning face stared at me from the darkness beyond my bedroom window. I live on the 14th floor.
I woke up to hear knocking on glass. At first, I though it was the window until I heard it come from the mirror again.
“Growing up with cats and dogs, I got used to the sounds of scratching at my door while I slept. Now that I live alone, it is much more unsettling.”
They delivered the mannequins in bubble wrap. From the main room I begin to hear popping.
It’s been watching me for hours now… Sometimes I catch glimpses of its reflexion on the computer screen, but I dare not turn around…
Gin & Tonic
Funny you mention Cousin Howard. When I was a wee lad, I’d sometimes go for a visit to the home of one of my parents’ best friends. He had a roommate by the name of Bill, who was from Charleston, and had that (now that I recognize it) old-old-money Charleston accent. The place was always immaculate, with books and art objects and gorgeous furniture. I, of course, had no idea.
Bill, I guess, had come to NY because his family didn’t approve of him; he was troubled, drank way too much, all that. I’m not sure how that ended up. But years later I recall asking my mother, just to confirm, if they were gay. She was, I think, appalled that she’d raised an idiot.
gelfling545
Back in 1978, when I was in the last stages of pregnancy with my oldest (she went 3 weeks past due) some friends were trying to distract me by taking me to the $1 shows that were being held nightly at a local movie theatre that was going out of business. One night the movie was Carrie, not a movie I’d have chosen to see but, hey, it was $1. The cemetery scene at the end lifted me out of my & right into labor so two horror stories for the price on one. Mine had a happy ending, though.
NotMax
Halloween is a perfect opportunity to inflict a favorite groaner joke. Always – always – the first time someone hears this there is a 3-second pause before the proverbial light bulb illuminates and they chuckle.
A skeleton walks into a bar.
“What’ll it be, bub?”
“Gimme a beer and a mop.”
Mike J
@NotMax:
I remember hanging out with one of the other jocks, watching it on TV in the control room on an overnight shift.
Germy Shoemangler
After struggling desperately to move any part of his paralytic body just to alert the doctors that he was conscious before they made the first incision, he was relieved to see that one of the nurses had noticed his pupils dilating from the bright light. She leaned in close and, in a whisper that tickled his ear, said “you think we don’t know you’re awake?”
WereBear
@Germy Shoemangler: There’s always the science fiction classic by Fredric Brown:
The last person on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door.
pat
@Elmo:
The under-the-bed one does it for me.
I always thought there were lions under my bed.
NotMax
@pat
Nott lions,. it was the missing lynx.
:)
Gian
@Mack:
My father had a dream like that when he was in viet nam.
the news came later (not his mother) of the death of the relative
Being a bit of a prankster when I watched the ring movie on dvd with my wife I hid my cellphone and called the home phone as the movie ended. .
Germy Shoemangler
@WereBear: There are times when I’m alone in this old house, and the cat will suddenly look up and stare intently across the room at something I can’t see.
The irrational part of my mind tells me “she can see the ghosts.”
The rational part of my mind tells me “probably a mouse in the walls.”
“When all is dark within the house, Who knows the monster from the mouse?” (James Thurber)
WereBear
@Gian: And she let you live?
Southern Beale
This happened to a family friend. They bought a piano in New Orleans and had it shipped to their home. One night he swears he heard the piano playing. He went downstairs and saw a ghost of a woman playing the piano. He said as long as he had the piano he saw the ghost of the woman standing by it several times. Don’t know that he ever heard it play again.
p.a.
@WereBear: It’s with the mustard. YAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaa…
currants
Betty Cracker, you’re such a good storyteller!
Southern Beale
Several family stories of newly-departed relatives wreaking havoc on home electronics. After my dad died everything went on the fritz. The stereo went kablooey, would turn on by itself (my dad was a huge audiophile and nobody could ever figure out how he had the stereo system rigged anyway), and lamps turning on, stuff like that. After a while it got so common we’d just yell DADDY KNOCK IT OFF!
Iowa Old Lady
I’ve never even had a hint of a supernatural experience. I’m missing the gene.
Southern Beale
@Germy Shoemangler:
AAAAAGGGHHHHHH
WereBear
@Germy Shoemangler: For you:
Dear Pammy, Why does my cat stare at nothing?
Germy Shoemangler
@WereBear: Thank you.
I read recently that mice sing. But in a frequency too high for us humans to hear. Cats can hear them. I find that oddly comforting.
Headline: “Mice sing just like birds, but we can’t hear them”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2015/04/01/mice-sing-just-like-birds-but-we-cant-hear-them/
FortGeek
It was 1975. The big Summer Blockbuster was “Jaws.”
I was a couple months shy of 8 years old.
The family went on a trip to New Orleans. I vaguely remember baguettes in a restaurant next to the Mississippi, which looked impossibly wide to me.
Somehow, it got decided that we’d all go see “Jaws.” Great idea!
In that scene where Hooper dives to investigate this guy’s apparently-abandoned boat and finds a hole, I screamed and ran out of the theater when the guy’s head floated into view.
For months afterward, back in our house in Fort Walton (FL), I was terrified of our bathroom after dark. I kept imagining that guy’s head rolling into view in the pebbly, frosted glass of the bathroom window, which looked like a dark hole.
pat
When The Wizard of Oz came out I must have been about 5 or 6 and we went to see it… I hid under the seat every time the Wicked Witch appeared.
bemused
One of our cats passed away at age 19, one of our sweetest kitties ever. We had no other cats at the time. I got up to read in the middle of the night when I couldn’t get back to sleep. The house was quiet as could be, no one up and awake but me when I heard a creak on the basement stairs. There was one step that creaked when anyone stepped on it, humans or pets. I got up from the sofa and checked but of course, nothing there. I choose to think she was paying a visit.
WereBear
@Iowa Old Lady: I wonder if that is so, because here’s my next story:
My best friend was a gay man who was with his longtime lover of several years when two things happened simultaneously: their apartment lease ran out at the same time his partner’s parents were ready to embark on a trip of several months duration. So it was decided that the couple would house-sit for the parents and save up for another, better, apartment.
Their stuff was stored in the basement and the parents, who had lived in this house for decades, went off on their trip. Shortly after they had moved in, my friend invited me over for a chat, as was normal.
But it didn’t take long for me to set down my soft drink and ask if there was a window open or something… that I felt a draft. In Florida. With the AC going.
“Maybe we should go outside,” he said. So we did and we wandered around a nicely landscaped back yard, though nothing exceptional for the area, and I finally said, “How the heck can I be cold outside in early summer?”
“I know!” he said. “XX (his partner) feels it too.”
“Is that normal?”
“His parents say they have no idea what we are talking about. And he didn’t grow up here, they bought it after all the kids moved out. So the place is kind of new to him, he’s just been here for dinner and stuff like that.”
As the summer spun on, so did the tales. Things mysteriously falling off counters when they had been set further and further back from the edge. Room doors slamming with all the windows shut. Snow suddenly hitting the cable TV and then as suddenly clearing. They started out light-hearted and jokey but a month in they were quarreling like never before and slept with the lights on.
Then one night they heard a door rattling down the hall. They opened it to see if something was loose or it wasn’t shut tightly, and the room filled with scary, halting, rattly breathing.
And that was it. They left with the clothes they were wearing and stayed at a motel. They only visited the house during the day and couch-surfed until they found an apartment.
The parents came back and were very puzzled. Because nothing like that happened to them. Before, or after.
Germy Shoemangler
@bemused: I remember after our last cat died, I kept seeing him out of the corner of my eye, brushing past me.
This lasted for a few weeks, then it stopped. I still miss him.
Morfydd
@rikyrah: @rikyrah: @rikyrah, when I was about 12, the local children’s theater put on Dracula and I slept wearing a rosary for months after seeing it. :)
That was also when I learned about my father’s short-lived college boxing days, which he’d quit after taking a shot to the jaw and losing his four front lower teeth. He always wore a bridge, so I never knew, until for some reason he had taken it out, and smiled at me, right before we started a long car ride alone. Let’s just say I hugged the door handle for the first hour, after seeing those fangs…
TaMara (BHF)
That was a great story @Betty Cracker. I’m bookmarking this page so I can enjoy everyone’s stories later today.
bemused
@Germy Shoemangler:
That happened to me too a couple of times! I could see her out of the corner of my eye going into the kitchen.
She was a wonderful kitty. We finally adopted two kittens from shelter 3 years later. They are great and filled the hole.
Scott S.
@WereBear:
Or the slightly shorter one:
The last person on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a lock on the door.
schrodinger's cat
@Morfydd: I was petrified after reading a comic book version of Dracula when I was 12. It kept me up at nights for a whole week. Actually ended up waking my parents more than once if I had to go to the bathroom or go get water.
ETA: I was seriously considering keeping some garlic next to me but didn’t because I was afraid that my brother might make fun of me.
JPL
@Cervantes: Thanks .. I couldn’t read it. My son thinks it could be a Ford Freestyle…
raven
Getting off the bus for basic at Ft Campbell 49 year ago next month.
WereBear
@schrodinger’s cat: Isn’t that always the way?
Losing one’s immortal soul vs sibling getting something over on you…
bemused
@WereBear:
In the 70’s we were on a road trip late Aug or Sep and stopped at Custer’s Last Stand which is what it was called then. The park was pretty barren looking nothing like it does today with tourist upgrades, buildings, paths.That day we were the only people there and it was so quiet with only a soft wind blowing through the long grass as we wandered around. It felt eerie to me and I didn’t want to linger very long. I was relieved to leave. Antietam battle site had a heavy feeling to me too.
schrodinger's cat
@WereBear: A younger sibling too, horror of horrors!
SFAW
@FortGeek:
I empathize (or sympathize, or both).
I was about that same age. I was watching Twilight Zone, the episode was “Terror at 20,000 Feet.” The scene where Shatner, unable to fight his “curiosity,” and rips back the curtain covering the airplane window, scared the shit out of me. I wouldn’t look out my bedroom windows at night for about two years
WereBear
@bemused: I got the same feeling on a trip to Gettysburg. Many, many, ghost stories there.
Trabb's Boy
@delosgatos: Cannot stop laughing!
ellie
My bachelor uncle died at the hospital and I was staying in his house while my parents worked on getting it sold. It was winter, several months after he died, and the house was closed up against the Ohio cold. I had just come down the stairs into the front hall when suddenly from behind me there was the strong smell of the aftershave he wore. I was alone in the house. I broke out into goose bumps and turned around. No one was there and then the smell dissipated. Freaked me out a bit. I never smelled it again.
My mom, sisters, their spouses and my husband and I were sitting around the dining room table once at my mom’s house talking about old times, especially my late dad. He loved birthday parties and celebrations where we would all come over. He liked having his kids together. Suddenly the cold water turned on full blast at the kitchen sink. No one was around it. There were no plumbing problems. My mom got up and shut it off and we all looked at each other and said nothing but we knew he was there.
FortGeek
I don’t usually have nightmares. The closest I get, really, are dreams where I’m in a house or something like a hotel–there are several variations. The place is mine, and maybe I’ve just moved in and am exploring. There’s always one room–a detached garage, a room on the 3rd floor, or whatever–which fills me with ice-cold dread like I’ve never felt when I’m awake. I always seem to know where this room is and always know not to open the door. My rational mind wants to know what’s there…but my emotional mind just gives me a “NO EFFING WAY.”
These are always more interesting than scary–but I can always feel the cold.
The really aggravating dreams have nothing to do with terror. I’m in a school, college, university, a mall, some big place with lots of hallways and rooms. All I want to do is find a restroom. I know there’s one right down the hall…nope, it’s moved. Well, then there’s the larger one in this other area, I can see people coming and going…yet when I go in there there’s a maze of low stalls without doors and weird-looking fixtures. Made several back & forth laps of the mall, the parking garage, several stores…and sometimes I even find a place I can use, but still can’t go.
…and I inevitably wake up having to go to the bathroom.
brendancalling
My mom died on 9/26. She had stage 4 lung cancer, and the dominoes fell quickly. We were there for her as she died, which took 90 minutes. While she died, I told her I wanted her to visit me. I meant “visit me in dreams”, but she didn’t take it that way.
On Monday 9/28, I had to get up at 6 for an 8 am call (I do AV and stagehand work). Around 6:30, after showering, getting dressed, and drinking coffee, I learned the gig had been postponed, and went back to bed. By this time, I was wife awake and had trouble getting back to sleep. That’s when I heard the breathing: loud, heavy, labored breathing. At first, I thought the awful shit head next door that screams at his grandmother all the time had broken in, and I began searching the house, freaking out. But there was no one but me. The breathing was confined to my bedroom. I checked under the bed, but nothing.
That’s when I realized my mom had come to visit. I told her she had to go, that there were things she had to do and she couldn’t linger/get stuck here. “I’m going to try to go back to sleep, and when I wake up you need to be gone,” I said. I got in bed, fell asleep, and when I woke up the house was quiet.
This was last month. Fucking freakish thing I’ve ever experienced.
WereBear
@FortGeek: I’ve heard those are incredibly common; the mind’s way of dealing with the urge while we are not yet awake enough to get up and relieve it.
In my own case, I’m rather astonished at the sheer invention my mind comes up with to deny me what I’m dream-seeking.
ellie
@bemused: When I was 12 (in 1977 or so) my parents and little brother and I went to Antietam. It was the summer and we just got there as the visitor’s center was closing so we were the only ones there. It was a surreal experience to walk around the battlefield alone in the late summer sun. That whole area is beautiful. I have resisted revisiting because I don’t want my memories ruined.
The Battle of Greasy Grass (Bighorn) was surreal too. I had a heavy feeling I couldn’t shake and none of my photos turned out either (this was before digital cameras).
caroln
Several years ago, we took a family vacation to Hawaii and boarded our dog at the vet. On the way home we stopped by to pick him up. My husband went in to get him, while we waited in the car. It took so long that I went in to see what was going on only to find out that our dog had died. It was awful. They had saved his body but we didn’t want to see it.
The next evening when my husband came home from work with all the usual commotion walking in the back door, he says “Hi Duncan”. I believe he came back just so he could greet his master one more time.
There may be evil spirits but there are good ones too. Sometimes, clear as a bell, I will hear my mother say my name.
FortGeek
@SFAW:
I don’t think I saw that one until I was older. But windows and I didn’t seem to get along when I was a kid. After I saw “The Car” as a TV movie I was afraid of headlights on the wall at night.
Ridnik Chrome
@FortGeek:The scene in the book “The Shining” where Danny Torrance finds the dead woman in the bathtub in Room 217 scared the daylights out of me when I was a kid. I would have been about 12-13 when the book came out. Never seen either version of the movie, the book was scary enough. Even now I’ll sometimes get the jitters when I get up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and the curtain around the tub is closed…
The Fat Kate Middleton
Let me preface my story by saying this: When it comes to the supernatural, I have always been a thorough-going skeptic. I’ve always enjoyed tales of the supernatural, but could never believe in any of it one whit. Which made my experience even more unnerving. Some 25 years ago, I was in the bathroom off our master bedroom, getting ready for work – brushing hair, putting on lipstick – in that totally mindless state when doing that sort of thing. Suddenly, I was absolutely flooded with despair and fear, accompanied by the strong odor of a campfire. I knew, in a way I couldn’t ever explain, that the campfire was at my in-laws’ mountain home, and that something was terribly wrong. I stepped out of the room, and said to my husband (even more of a skeptic than me), “I know what you’re going to think of this, but I really, really think you should call your parents. Something is wrong.” He didn’t have to call them – they called us an hour later to report that a very dear cousin, one who was more like a sister to my husband, had been attacked in her home by an intruder. She was asleep when she was hit on the head and right arm with a heavy implement of some kind, and was near death. She lived – but she suffered permanent brain damage and
injury to her arm. The last time we had seen her – we were sitting around that campfire in the mountains, visiting with her late into the evening. It was never learned who her attacker was, by the way.
FortGeek
@WereBear:
“…it’s just around the corner…it’s just around the corner…”
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@WereBear:
IF there is such a thing as ghosts, I also tend to think that only certain people can hear or sense anything. I do not appear to be one of those people.
A really good movie along those lines is “Stir of Echoes,” with Kevin Bacon. There’s a spooky sequence where the ghost is following Bacon’s wife around the haunted house but the wife isn’t “sensitive” so the only thing that happens to her is that the bathtub water goes cold before she can get in.
Gindy51
No ghost stories, sadly mine are premonition stories. The worst is knowing when those I love are going to die soon. Talk about a suck ass sensitivity. Works on pets as well as people, which is really bad and why I have narrowed the pet population down drastically. It doesn’t’ matter how far away they are, the damned thing works which is why I am SO glad mostly everyone I love has already passed on.
I knew two months before my mom was going to die, I heard it in her voice as I was over a thousands miles from home. Same thing with my dad, two weeks out. I “get” to mourn early so it looks like I am some super woman when it comes to people dying. Most folks don’t know I already mourned them when I found out they are dying soon. Pets is worse because they go so much more quickly and often than people. Ever pet I have ever had I knew when they were going to pass, never more than a week out too. Sucks to be me some days.
On the fun side, I can know who is on the phone when it rings. Scares the shit out of people ALL the time and is great for political seasons when you get those stupid mid meal calls from pollsters!
FortGeek
@Ridnik Chrome:
Books are better at scaring me than movies. I read “Jaws” in the early ’80s. I had to put the book front-cover-down when I tried to sleep. I read Peter Straub’s “Floating Dragon” about 10 years later and it messed me up for a week or so. 25 years later, it’s still a favorite horror novel of mine.
CaseyL
For years, I wouldn’t look in a mirror if the lights were off. I was sure someone other than me would be looking back. I still get the heebie jeebies when I go to the bathroom at night, have to force myself not to look away from the mirror when I’m washing my hands.
Not sure when or where it started, but I have a vague memory of seeing some spooky show on TV (Outer Limits? Twilight Zone?) where a young girl looks into a mirror and sees a monster looking back. There’s also the excellent, under-appreciated made-for-TV suspense-horror movie from the 1970’s called “Fear No Evil,” where seeing things in mirrors figures prominently.
shell
One night when I was eleven, I pulled out our copy of Collected works of Edgar Allen Poe. ‘The Raven’? Meh. Ooh, ‘The Premature Burial’ “This should be fun to read before I go to bed,” thought I.
Big mistake.
bemused
Aug 17, 1974 on another road trip, we had been in Yellowstone Park and by the time we got to West Yellowstone, it was getting late. I wanted to find a motel there but my husband wanted to push on. He was a maniac about driving as long as he could before stopping for the night. We were driving along a windy riverbed when I exploded and we had an argument about turning back to West Yellowstone. My point was there were probably many miles before we’d even see a motel again, let alone find one with a room available. I won, we went back to W Yellowstone and got the last room left there. The next morning as we retraced our route and got to the spot of our big fight, we saw there was a tourist center with some kind of monument, so we stopped to see it. This was in Madison Canyon where an earthquake had caused a whole mountain side to come down and bury more than 2 dozen campers also shifting a river creating a lake. We were stunned to find out that the earthquake had happened on Aug 17, 1959 at 11:37 pm, 15 years to the day and almost to the time at same spot of the epic fight where we turned around.
bago
Well, I only had a few friends die in a mass shooting. I’ve only had one roommate die on me. So yay?
shell
@CaseyL: There was , of all things, an episode of Green Acres that featured a local ghost that could only be seen in mirrors . I still remember that.
I just goggled it. The episodes called The Ballad of Molly Turgis
FortGeek
@CaseyL:
Ever see “Candyman”?
Germy Shoemangler
Stephen King’s novel “Bag of Bones” scared the poop out of me. They made a movie out of it? I won’t see it.
bemused
@Gindy51:
Having premonitions of people passing has to be difficult.
I sometimes know who is calling but not all the time as you do and it’s most often friends, not strangers. Suddenly I will think of a friend and decide to call her. I pick up the phone (landline) and she is on the phone before I have punched in her number. She’ll gasp, start laughing and say she was just going to call me and hadn’t punched in my number yet either.
Someone will pop in my head that I haven’t thought of in a long time and soon I will run into that person.
WereBear
@Mnemosyne (tablet): that is an absolute favorite of mine. Very well done and yet so obscure.
Germy Shoemangler
Here’s the very first Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoon from 1945
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw7AipHHBXE
WereBear
@Gindy51: I agree that is a tough thing to have.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@WereBear:
It had the bad luck to come out the same time as “The Sixth Sense” and a lot of people wrote it off as a pale imitation. I especially like that it’s set in working-class Chicago, which is not where you would normally see a haunted house story.
Avery Greynold
Not a ghost story. My adult son was in bed dying from a brain tumor in home hospice, and for months he had the muddled mind of a child. But the next day was his last birthday and his partner had everyone over. That morning my son awoke as his old self, fully cognizant. Tempting to say miraculous. During the party, I stepped outside by myself. I always look at clouds, but lack the imagination to see things. But directly above, clear as a painting I saw the faces of two people. One was reclined and the other upright behind him. I looked away. I looked back. I tried not to see, but I saw. The clouds gradually dispersed, just as clouds do. My son worsened and died a week later. I still believe there is nothing there, but in a lifetime you too will likely see or hear “it”.
cckids
The creepiest thing ever to personally happen to me isn’t a ghost story, just eerie. It happened the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. I was woken up around 5:30 a.m. (PCT) by my 6-year old daughter screaming. And I mean screaming, terror-filled shrieks that sent me running into her room. She was thrashing around in bed, crying & screaming but not awake.
As I tried to calm or wake her, I heard a sound from across the hall & looked to see my son (8), in his room, curled into a ball in the corner of his bed, hugging his knees, eyes wide & frightened. Both of them had wet the bed (something that hadn’t happened since they were 3 or so). I picked up my daughter, which quieted her screams but not the crying, and asked my son if her noise had scared him. He said “No, I had the worst dream ever. I can’t talk about it, it’s too terrible to talk about.”
I got the two of them cleaned up & tucked into my bed with the spouse (figured he deserved it for not getting up), and went out to check on my oldest son & start the coffee. He, too was wide awake & staring at nothing, which was unusual. (He’s non-verbal). I turned on the TV just in time to see the 2nd plane hit the towers.
Like most of America, I spent the next hour or so staring, frozen, at the unfolding events on TV. The two younger kids got up around 8 & wandered out, hand in hand (unheard of) just in time to see one of the many re-runs of the plane hitting the tower.
My daughter said “Why don’t they show what’s happening on the airplane?” When I said that it wasn’t a movie; it really happened & there was no camera on the airplane she looked confused & started to say something, but my son stopped her & said “But you know, Mom, it wasn’t an accident. The people flying those airplanes did it on purpose”.
This is my detail-oriented kid, who could ID airplanes by sight, whose favorite uncle is a pilot in the Air Force. If he’d meant “pilots” he’d have said it. Plus he said “airplanes”, plural, when he’d only seen one crash.
Neither of the kids would ever talk much about the dreams that had woken them up. My daughter said “It was scary, everyone was screaming and falling”, and my son would only repeat “It’s too terrible to talk about’. Today neither of them remembers it at all.
Bex
More than a few years ago Mr. Bex and I would sometimes go on picking expeditions with a friend who is an antiques dealer He knew all the farms in the area that that had things to sell. We stopped at one on a nice summer Sunday afternoon and went to the basement of the house where the “shop” was. As soon as I started down the stairs, I had a panicked feeling that I needed to stay out of that basement. Fortunately there wasn’t anything our friend was interested in buying and we left quickly. I held it together, but was never so glad to get away from a place. Mr. Bex and our friend said they didn’t notice anything unusual.
schrodinger's cat
I have just the right lol for this spooky thread, Happy Halloween!
CaseyL
@FortGeek: No, and I don’t need more reasons to be afraid of mirrors in the dark, thank you!
The thing is, I’m not a big fan of horror movies. Mostly because most of them are really dumb. The few that I have seen and liked (the original House on Haunted Hill, The Skeleton Key, to name two) do haunt me.
tybee
@Cervantes:
and missing the shifter knob
jl
Over last two years a had to spend a lot of time helping with oldster’s hospital stays. And spent untold hour upon hour in hospital and clinic waiting rooms. The TV always had CNN, Fox News, Springer or Povich on. And…
No.. .it’was too awful… I can’t even…No, I have to banish the horror from my memory… can’t talk about it..
bago
A random guy with a second amendment stash showed up ay my friends house party and murdered a few of my friends before eating his own shotgun…
greenergood
Went to the Hudson River Museum with my Girl Scout troop in, when?, 1969? it was in the autumn and the light was fading when we were shouted at to come down to the front hall to leave. Just before I came down the stairs, I saw a woman standing in front of the window, sort of gauzey light behind/through her, in old-fashioned dress and hair style, who looked at me and then turned away. I went back to the museum last year for the first time in 40+ years and jokingly said to the woman at the counter that I’d seen a ghost there many years ago, and her face blanched and she asked if I’d come back to the reception desk at the end of my visit and she’d have some photos for me to look at, and sure enough, the woman in the the photos (late 1800s) was my vision – I recognised her immediately, sort of viscerally; apparently she was a very troubled person, and she’s been seen by a few other people too – a bit weird since I keep telling myself I don’t believe in ‘all that stuff’. But Halloween/Samhain is supposed to be when the divide between the living and the dead is just a flimsy curtain, and there are glimpses of those who’ve gone before. Maybe they are glimmers of the energy that is released as people die and their molecules join the rest of the universe, where energy never diminishes but just takes on other forms. Maybe some of those molecules just take a bit longer to adapt to a less defined form. Hell of a lot easier than dealing with a vengeful God, which, by the way, I think is a perversion of Christian-ness.
SteverinoCT
It being Halloween and all, one of my earliest memories is being in bed trying to sleep, but afraid of the decorations (particularly a witch head) on our house windows. We moved from that house when I was four, so I must have been three at the time.
Original Lee
Not Halloween any longer, but here is my story anyway:
I was at college and my roommate was away for the weekend. I had made a quiet night of it and went to bed relatively early. Around 3 AM, I woke up suddenly and all at once to see a dark man shape, wearing a hat and an overcoat, standing at the foot of my bed. I know it sounds stupid, but I said, “Excuse me! Excuse me!” really loudly, the way you say it to someone who is in your way and you want to get past them but they’re totally ignoring you. He just stood there, so (again, really stupid sounding), I hid my head under the covers and eventually went back to sleep. There were no noises or anything, just a figure and a sense of presence. My bed was in the corner of the room with the wall with the door in it to my right, the foot of the bed ending a few feet before the door. The light from the dorm hallway usually streamed under the door and across the floor from right to left. There was no light on the left side of the room when the figure was standing there.
Helena Montana
I have some involving my brother, who passed away two years ago, but they’re kind of meh, as ghost stories go, so I won’t relate them. Well, just as I finished the foregoing sentence using my Chrome browser, my Firefox browser launched itself, so I guess he wants me to tell them.
First one: The day after my brother died, my son and I drove from DC to Roanoke to do the things you have to do when you are the only living relatives of a person that died. We spent the day figuring out the state of his affairs, and when it got dark, we left to go out to dinner. We ended up at a Chinese restaurant, and the hostess said brightly, three for dinner? We said,um, no, two. She looked really confused and said, oh, of course, and led us to a table.
Second one: The following Christmas I visited a friend who lives in St. Pete, FL, and my son and his wife and kids, who live not far away in Palm Harbor, joined us at a rental house on Anna Maria island for Christmas week. My brother, in prior years, had always joined us for this annual gathering. Anyway, one morning my son and I were on the deck behind the house, which had a beautiful ocean view, and we were talking about how much David (my brother) would have loved the house. Just then, one of the outdoor chairs went flying across the deck.
That’s a couple of them. Nothing very dramatic and there could be other than ghostly explanations, but I know.