Ghost stories?

[Toddy]

We don't exactly have a campfire here, but it's that time of year again, so I thought I'd ask if anyone's got any scary stories to share. Surely I can't be the only one who starts reading ghost stories in October.

Here's mine:

The apartment I rented in my last year of university seemed normal when I first checked it out, but things started disappearing the day after I moved in. Just little things. First my watch, then a ruler, then some PC manuals that I'd left in the top drawer of my desk. Most of these items vanished within hours after I'd last seen them, or overnight. The watch, for instance, was lying on top of Sunday's Toronto Star on the couch when I went to bed, but was gone the next morning. I lived alone, and like I said these things disappeared at times when nobody else was in the house but me.

As the fall went by, other strange things happened. My clock radio in the bathroom started turning itself on every morning just after 6. The cellar door started opening on its own. The switch for the security light in the parking lot was turned off one time when I was away for a couple of days and nobody was in the house. Finally, one night I was reading in bed and this, well, apparition appeared right beside me. It sort of winked on and winked off. It was white and about four feet high, but it was gone before I could really focus on it or see any features, etc. I looked all over the house right after this, checked the plug-ins, etc. and found nothing amiss. By this point I was wondering what was going on, though I wasn't thinking about anything out of the ordinary; I was mostly concerned that someone was sneaking into my place, particularly because I'd been ripped off by a landlord the previous year. Still, this didn't explain everything, not least the weird thing I saw. I remained comfortable in the place and had no trouble sleeping.

Then I locked my keys in the house one day in January. I went to the end unit of this old triplex to use the tenant's phone to call a friend to whom I'd given my spare set of keys. I made the call, she made me a coffee--and then proceeded to shyly ask me if anything "out of the ordinary" had happened in my place since I'd moved in. I played dumb and said no, but she went on to tell me about all of these things that had gone missing at her place over the six years she had lived there, how the neighbor in the middle of the building had had the same problems and had a boyfriend who wouldn't stay overnight anymore because he ran into something in the hallway one night en route to the bathroom, and how they both would hear someone running up and down the stairs in one unit while they had coffee in the other. She also said that the previous tenant in my unit left because disturbances there got too bad to live with any longer. This got me thinking, so I asked my friend with the keys if he'd noticed anything odd over Christmas, as I'd gotten him to feed my fish while I was gone. Whereupon he told me that different lights would be on and off every time he arrived. He stopped going over, and his wife was so freaked out she wouldn't go near the place.

From that point on, I was a little spooked. But I stayed in the apartment until the following June, and little else happened. I had the feeling like I was being watched at times, my upstairs closet light used to turn itself on when I went out at night (which was actually pretty handy, as I stored my hockey bag up there and needed the light on most nights), and the cellar door used to open up all the time on its own, even when firmly latched. A few nights I woke up, convinced someone was walking up the stairs. Some of this could've been because I was overly sensitive by this point, though.

I left the apartment without finding any of the items I'd lost, or seeing anything again. The tenant in the end unit left that spring and a young couple moved in there, shifting to my old place immediately after I left because it had been redecorated the previous summer. Yet I noticed on an August visit to see some friends that the couple had already moved out, breaking a lease. It was empty three years ago as well, and was also vacant last fall. That doesn't really mean anything, of course, but the place was rent controlled because of a provincial loan that the owner got to renovate, so it was cheap. And it was clean, pretty big, and in the middle of a town with a university and a college, so places like that rarely stayed empty for any length of time.

There's my contribution. Now someone please add more so I don't look like a complete lunatic...if I don't already for posting the above.

[Desslock]

Here's mine:

I used to be Brett Todd's rent-controlled landlord, and out of bitterness that I couldn't raise the rent I'd break into his house and steal little knick-knacks, and set the clock radio that for some weird reason was in the bathroom just to muck with him.

[Met_K]

I want to live in an apartment where ghosts are simply there for my convenience. I mean, can you imagine how nice it is of them to turn on lights for you, and open doors for you? And how about removing pesky objects you don't need anymore?

Such nice ghosts. I'm sure their feelings are hurt. :)

I'll post mine later. I'll beat you as being a lunatic easily.

[T Elhajj]

I used to be Brett Todd's rent-controlled landlord, and out of bitterness that I couldn't raise the rent I'd break into his house and steal little knick-knacks, and set the clock radio that for some weird reason was in the bathroom just to muck with him.

Don't rent control rules allow you to raise the rent every time new tenants take over? Ha! It probably was just a plot to cycle people through the apartment.

I went to Hunter College in NYC and scored a room in the dorm, which was right next door to Bellevue hospital. At one point, I believe the building used for the dorm was actually a wing of Bellevue hospital proper. There were lots of stories about it being a haunted building, spirits of interned psychopaths, etc., but for a private room at $200 a month in midtown Manhattan nobody really minded.

[Slothrop]

Here's mine:
Reminds me of a Ramsey Campbell ghost story (the English setting) except you didn't end up insane...OR DID YOU? :shock:

[Jupiter Jones]

I've had many things like that happen. Here are 3 that occured while using my Atar 1040ST back in about 1989-1990:

1. I was playing the HP Lovecraft based adventure game "Hound Of Shadows". Thiswas on an Atari with no internal clock, and modem or other "online connection". When I got home from celebrating New Years late Jan. 1st, I decided to play the game a bit. It was about 2:00 AM. Just as I was mixing the proper agents to create the "doppleganger", out of no where, the game anounced as a text message:
"Happy New Year." First off, the game never just "blurted" anything out, and it was no where enar Jan. 1st in the game. It was just creepy an unexplainable.

2. About 2 months later I was playing "Dungeon Master" on the same computer, and listening to a tape on my Ghetto-Blaster, o nthe otherside of the room. Just as I started fighting the final dragon in the game, my tape abrubptly stopped. I got-up to see what was wrong, and noticed the tape counter had stopepd at exactly 666. Furthermore, that tape never played correctly again. It somehow plyed both side-one and side-two at the same time, to a very bizarre forward/backward masked effect. Almost like it had been fused under intense heat.

3. Soon after, I woke up early in the moring because I heard typing o nmy computer keyboard. As soon as I looked at the Atari ST, it stopped.

[wumpus]

Ghost stories involving computers: not so much scary as just plain lame.

[Met_K]

I once passed out on my computer desk, which at the time was at the stairs of my loft. It was late at night, so, naturally, all the lights were out.

Next thing I know, all the lights are on, there's a dark figure standing at the sink, and someone's coming up the stairs. I was scared shitless until I realized it was simply my robe hanging from the mirror and my dad coming up the stairs.

Seems he decided to walk in and make himself at home. That's about as close to a ghost story as I have. Well, aside from the time I was molested by E.T.

[Aszurom]

Which hopefully doesn't involve your dad and a bathrobe again.

[Met_K]

Which hopefully doesn't involve your dad and a bathrobe again.

Are you kidding? E.T. would never wear a bathrobe. Though, once he found my thongs, you just couldn't get 'em off 'em.

Edit: And I notice you're not so much alienated by the fact that I was molested by E.T. (molested by E.T., alienated, get it? hahahaha) as the fact that I had a bathrobe out and my father was walking up the stairs. In my weak attempt of defending myself, I'll simply say that my family is French.

[William Harms]

Lots of weird and unexplained things happened in the house where I grew up. (My mom still lives there.) The house was built in the 1920s and a man lived there with his three daughters and son. The son died in the basement, which was then a root cellar, when he was 13 and two of the three sisters died in the house as well. My mom lives in Nebraska, but was born and raised in San Francisco, so our house was Fort Knox in terms of locks, so this stuff wasn't caused by people breaking in.

Here's a quick and dirty summary:

1. When my brother Don was born, my parents loaded up on baby food. We went to the store and came back, 15-20 minutes later, and all of the baby food was gone.

2. Came home one night to find the TV on, a fresh pot of coffee, and a cup of coffee sitting in the living room. (This is actually happened several times.)

3. Pounding on the walls, roof, etc.

4. One afternoon I heard scratching at my window. I looked out and saw the screen moving, but no one was there.

5. Our dog would go up to an interior wall and growl and bark and then start to whine and back away.

6. A couple days after Christmas one year some of my parent's friends came over. All of the boxes from the presents were on the back porch. All hell broke loose back there and my dad and the other adult men ran back there; no one was there but the boxes were shredded.

7. My mom saw the ghost of a woman standing in the back yard.

8. My mom and I saw a ghost of a little boy running through the kitchen.

9. A hanging light (with a cord) turned on by itself. I saw the cord go down, like someone was pulling on it.

My mom says nothing happens anymore, but my wife has heard weird noises while staying there and so has my brother (within the last four years or so). I hate sleeping there and usually stay with my brother.

As an interesting side note, many states have "haunting" disclosure laws that say if a buyer asks if a house is haunted, or has shown "weird" activity, the buyer must tell them the truth. I remember reading about a case in PA where the buyers asked, were told no, and the house was haunted. The seller was ordered by the court to rebuy the house.

[voltaic]

I'm not trying to bust on your story or anything dude, but I think ghosts are horseshit. Just like aliens.

[Bub, Andrew]

I'm what you might call a cynic. I want to believe - I'd happily stay in a haunted house just to experience anything like what Harms is talking about here - but I've never encountered anything odd or untoward. Even when staying in the same room as someone who was claiming to see a ghost right at the same moment I wasn't seeing a ghost.

I saw nothing. Nothing moved. I thought he was nuts. He then explained to me that a "closed mind" is "immune" to paranormal phenomenon. I told him that was "awfully convenient" and that maybe the people who see ghosts are really the people who "want to see ghosts badly enough to then, you know, make ghosts they can see." Sort of a chicken and egg thing, but then again not.

No offense to anyone here.

Put simply, I'd love to stay the night in Hell House, Amityville, The Overlook, Hill House, whatever (even William Harm's Nebraska homestead) if it meant I saw just one paranormal thing. It's rare one has a life changing experience and my skepticism runs so deep it would ... well... change everything I know.

[Anonymous]

I'm the same as Bub as far as 'paranormal' stuff goes,but from the time I was five years old till I was sixteen,I lived with my family in a very old house in the country in Ohio,and I always felt spooked anytime I was alone,either in the house or the barn,as if I were not alone.I admit I never saw anything unusual,but it was still odd how my flesh would crawl in that house,since I did not experience it anywhere else.

Then,when I was sixteen,we moved into a house that my father built,and I felt completely comfortable alone there,as I have anywhere else ever since.

Nothing concrete,but going by my experience and a couple of intelligent friend's experience,I no longer discount out of hand stories like Harm's.

[Kool Moe Dee]

Put simply, I'd love to stay the night in Hell House, Amityville, The Overlook, Hill House, whatever (even William Harm's Nebraska homestead) if it meant I saw just one paranormal thing. It's rare one has a life changing experience and my skepticism runs so deep it would ... well... change everything I know.

Umm...trust me, Amityville's not particularly exciting.

The house is just another house on a suburban street.

[Toddy]

Great story, Mr. Harms. Anyone else? Come on, guys; it's almost Hallowe'en.

I've always kept an open mind about these things, although I've always found all that psychic stuff to be ridiculous. I don't know what to think about these things. My own experience makes me think that there's something to it, but hey, Houdini never came back. And neither did my mother, and I asked her to pound on the walls or rattle some chains for me. Still waiting.

Anyhow, here's another semi-lame story from my university. Trent U. in Peterborough, Ontario, if anyone cares. My college there, Catherine Parr Traill, is in the middle of town and built around four or five mid-19th century mansions. All of them have ghosts attached, especially Stewart House, which was a turn-of-the-century orphanage and later a home for the destitute. Strange things happened there on a regular basis. One of my friends was the don there one year and every so often when we were up late in her room we'd hear the sound of little children in the hallways, clear as could be, or light footsteps running up the stairs to her third-floor apartment. She had a loft, so there was no reason for anyone to go up there, and nowhere to hide if someone was playing a prank. Anyways, there was never anyone around when we looked. Other odd things took place with doors opening, etc.

Scott House, across the street, was supposedly haunted by a woman who died in the upstairs loft. One of my old roommates lived there for part of a year, though, and never saw or heard anything. I had more direct experience with another neighboring house, called Langton. My former girlfriend lived there and I stayed over a lot of nights. I never saw or heard anything, but strange events were happening there all the time. Just little things, though, like electric tea kettles sliding across the counter. My girlfriend had this happen to her numerous times. She'd plug in the kettle, turn away for a second, then turn back to see the kettle sliding into place at the end of its cord. A girlfriend of a good friend of mine lived there the previous year and she was apparently seeing apparitions all the time, as were a couple of the other girls. They were the only ones to see anything, though.

Oh, and Trent also supposedly has Canada's only haunted university pub. It's a big part of the marketing, so maybe that's the reason that staffers supposedly see things, but I've known a number of people who've experienced really frightening occurrances on the upstairs floor when cleaning up late. One friend of mine was on cleanup crew one night downstairs when he suddenly heard all the taps turn on upstairs. He went upstairs to shut the taps off, did so, and then ran into an angry old woman as he was on his way back downstairs. Nobody else was in the building at the time, so he took off down the stairs and peeled out of the place, never bothering to lock up. He refused to work cleanup after that. The thing with the taps coming on happened all the time. I guess there are some big laundry tubs up there that have been in the building forever and sometimes they just turn on by themselves. There have been a few flooding incidents, I guess.

Trent's now selling off all of its older buildings--along with its charm and identity--so this sort of thing doesn't seem to have any place there now. Too bad, because it seems like every half-decent school has a few ghost stories.

[Met_K]

I bet A&M has plenty of ghost stories. Especially during bonfires.

Oh, that was in bad taste, wasn't it?

[wumpus]

No, it was just stupid.

[Met_K]

Well, aren't we the pot calling the kettle black.

[Anonymous]

Are you kidding? E.T. would never wear a bathrobe. Though, once he found my thongs, you just couldn't get 'em off 'em.

Wacky+Weak=painfully weak.

[Met_K]

Wacky+Weak=painfully weak.

Please don't feed the trolls.

[William Harms]

Put simply, I'd love to stay the night in Hell House, Amityville, The Overlook, Hill House, whatever (even William Harm's Nebraska homestead) if it meant I saw just one paranormal thing. It's rare one has a life changing experience and my skepticism runs so deep it would ... well... change everything I know.

I don't know what causes these kinds of things to happen. Maybe it's ghosts or residual "memories" from things that had happened in the past. All I know is that this stuff started in 1975 or so and, as far as I know, continues off and on to this day. Several neighbors and/or friends witnessed a lot of this stuff happen, so it wasn't just a family thing.

(Some more history: My mom read the diary of one of the sisters who lived in our house and they were angry, bitter people. The rumor around the neighborhood (we bought the house from the people behind us; it was willed to them when the last sister died) was that the sisters locked their brother in the basement when he was sick with pneumonia. I do know that he was found dead in the basement (which then was nothing more than a dirt fruit cellar), so maybe that's true. After all, why would someone with pneumonia be in a fruit cellar?)

There are a few other haunted places in the town where my mom lives. There was an upscale resturant called the Steeple House that was haunted--people would see ghosts, things would move, there'd be weird noises, etc. A good friend of my dad worked there part-time as a bartender and he saw lots of weird shit. The original owner of the building hung himself in the steeple and a couple other people died there as well.

There is also a park with a haunted bandstand. People drive by at night, hear music playing and there's no one around. I know there are more examples, but I can't remember them right now.

[William Harms]

Let's hear some stories!

[Jim Hoffman]

OK a couple stories.
1) Once upon a time. I was around 7 or 8 years old. I slowly woke, facing the wall next to my bed. As I lay there facing the wall, someone waved their hairy hand in front of my face. I guess that my Dad was checking to see if I was awake. So after the person removed the hand from in front of my face, I quickly sat up and turned around, saying "I'm awake Dad!" I was surprised to find no one there. I remember giggling briefly, thinking Dad was playing a trick on me. Irrationally, I looked under the 3" of space under my bed to see if 6'2", 250lbs Dad was hiding there. Then I heard him snoring in my parents' room.

2) The first apartment my wife and I lived in together. My wife and I just got home from work, were kicking back on the bed, joking around about our day. I think I was lying on my side, or stomach. I saw out of the corner of my eye, right next to my side of the bed, a hooded guy/figure/shape lunge at me, hand out in front like it was going to choke me. I could've sworn I felt hands around my throat. I yelled "OH SHIT!" or mabye just "AAAAIIEEE!" and jumped up out of bed. Of course, no one there, except my wife sitting up on the other side of the bed, looking extremely suprised. A couple other things happened in the following 11 months we were, there, tho none so dramatic.
The cable box changed channels a couple times.
At various times, my wife and I independently thought we saw someone standing in a certain place, in the hallway at the junction of the bedrooms and bathroom. Again, corner-of-the-eye thing, then you look right there and there's no one. (We actually only compared notes on this one just after we had moved out).
Once I was GM'ing a game of RoleMaster (Shadow World) for.. 4 or 5 friends. The cupboard door opened all by itself. Slowly. Creaked and everything. We all said "woooOOOooo!" in unison :)

3) This one's the most tame,from high school days. In the town where I grew up, there was an urban legend about a certain drainage ditch (you know, the big concrete "caves" that run underground, under a street or something, and come out again elsewhere) where some grownup chased a kid, "Billy Barnes" and killed him. They say that the conrete had been newly poured, and you could see trackes of tennis shoes AND dress shoes.
So on Halloween, after playing some D&D (man, am I a geek or what) we decided right around midnight to go check out this ditch for ourselves.
So me and two friends drive over there. First thing we see, sure enough, is the 2 sets of tracks.. kid's sneakers and adult dress shoes (smooth sole, well-defined heel, etc.). The wet concrete (it'd been raining) made the prints look fresh. My friend Scott refused to go into the drainage ditch.
So me and the remaining friend, Brian, went in. It got dark fast, and stupid us, we forgot to bring a flashlight. Also the standing pools of water started getting deeper the farther we went in. It also started to stink. Suddenly, a rythmic splashing began, from way down the tunnel. It sounded like it was coming from just around the corner, about 50 feet up ahead. Sounded like someone taking big slow steps. Or a frog jumping very rythmically. Brian yelled out "Biiilllyy, your mother's calling!" and the splashing stopped. We couldn't make it around the corner to see what was there, because the standing water was getting too deep. We decided to go back up, cross the street, and find the ditch on the other side and enter from that way.
The scariest part is when we entered the tunnel from the other side...It was the home of a ton of mud swallows. They make their mud nests on the concrete sides of the tunnel. Anyway, we didn't notice this until we set foot inside the tunnel, and they all came blasting out at us at once! A couple actually ran into me. Ouch!

4) Another time on Halloween, in college, me and a couple friends decided to scope out the alleged site of a satanic cult. It was on the edge of town. We found what we thought was the site, and parked on the road. The house/ranch was well back from the road, and shielded by trees, which were all backlit by a red glow. Probably just a Halloween party, right? Well, we discussed walking up there and asking for directions,etc., and finally just chickened out. So we sat in the car, lights off, spying in with binoculars, undecided what to do next. One of the guys says "Uh oh" and we hear an engine starting up. There had been a big ol' 4x4 monster truck,obscured from view under a tree, watching us the whole time. Time to go! So a chase ensued, for about 5 miles, when I finally lost him.
So if it was just a party at the ranch, why was there a "guard"?