Ghostly Encounters?

[GlindatheGood22]

Posted: 4/24/08 at 11:07pm

I'm a sucker for a good ghost story. Anybody ever had any supernatural and/or ghostly experiences?

[ShbrtAlley44]

Posted: 4/24/08 at 11:15pm

This is kind of convoluted but I'll try to explain it as clearly as I can. I was at home alone during the summer a few years ago eating breakfast before work. I was sitting at the kitchen table reading the paper, and I wanted to know what time it was, so I looked up toward the television, which sits on the counter nearby and has a clock atop it. The television was turned away from me and I didn't want to get up to turn it around so I could see the clock, so I just dismissed the idea and went back to reading the paper. Five minutes later I looked up and the television was facing me. I just looked around and said "Thank you..." since I couldn't think of anything else to do.

[Marianne2]

Posted: 4/24/08 at 11:19pm

Yeah, the camp I used to work at is totally haunted. We know you never ever walk down the chapel road after dark all by yourself because really creepy things have been known to happen. I forget who exactly, but it was someone important to the Boy Scouts who was down that way one time, and he ended up having a heart attack and died there. So he haunts that side of camp really really bad.

Oh yeah, and there are just so many different instances. Mine was really scary. A group of us were watching a movie in the office there, and we all fell asleep during it. I woke up, and decided out of stupidity, to walk down to my sleeping quarter all by myself at like 1am. Everything was fine, except for me being along down there that night. I was getting ready to go to sleep, when I heard metal dragging on the back porch. I was sooooo scared that I looked out the window, but didn't see anything. I locked the door thinking it would help. But with ghosts, of course that was dumb to do. LOL! Well, the next morning I looked outside to see if maybe there was just an animal out there, but there were absolutely no traces of metal cans or anything out there. Not even all over the ground outside. And people told me after that incident, that the metal dragging was a sign of a ghost around camp.

We also thought we heard someone in the office while we were in there another night. We just got really weird chills that we weren't alone, and in the camp director's office we smelled women's purfume, which made no sense because he had been gone for awhile, and no lady had gone in there that night.

I know there are other stories, but I can't think of them right now.

[tommyboy]

Posted: 4/24/08 at 11:23pm

A friend of mine was on a flight from Chi to Dal and they encountered a severe thunderstorm -- the plane was a'rockin and a'rollin -- the lightning was like me and 8" doing it -- friend takes pic, looking for lightning on film -- gets image of JC -- yeah the big guy -- plane lands easy -- film develops, everyone flips -- I saw it --COOL BEANS

Updated On: 4/24/08 at 11:23 PM

[george95]

Posted: 4/24/08 at 11:31pm

I loooooove ghost stories.

When I was about 6 years old, my cousins and I had a sleepover at their house. We slept with the door open and the hallway light on. As we fell asleep, we all saw a tall man standing in the bedroom doorway wearing a fedora hat. We asked each other who it was, and none of us knew. We didn't talk to the man, and none of us felt scared by him.
The next morning at breakfast we told our grandma about the man, and she got all teary-eyed and told us that the man was our dead grandfather's ghost (but she said it in a way that didnt scare us as little kids). She said he always wore a fedora hat like the one we described and he was very tall. He died about 20 years before any of us were born.


The high school that I teach at is in a 101 year old building. There is a statue across the street from the school in the park of the priest who had the high school building constructed. Everbody always talks about how he haunts the 3rd floor late at night. My classroom is up on the 3rd floor. Its things like footsteps and lights turning on and turning off. As many of you know, I have lots of trips with my students. So when we come back to the school late at night, it is very creepy because the whole campus (high school, grammar school, rectory, convent, church) are all built in the Gothic style which lends itself to a supernatural atmosphere, especially in the dark of night. And sometimes kids need to go in the school after the trips to use the bathroom, get to a locker or something. After just a few minutes in the building, even the most thugged-out kids want to run out of the school saying how they just felt a really ominous presence and couldn't be in there a minute longer.

Updated On: 4/24/08 at 11:31 PM

[Dancinqueen123]

Posted: 4/24/08 at 11:44pm

The college where I am is supposed to be really haunted. Nothing has ever happened to me personally, but of course there have been countless stories. One of our theaters is haunted, our old gym is haunted, some of our greek houses are haunted, and one of our dorms is haunted too. If you're really interested in stories that people have told about our school, you can go to this site.


Haunted Millikin

[ThankstoPhantom]

Posted: 4/24/08 at 11:58pm

For some reason, I've always had a tendancy to experience the supernatural in different ways. I've always been very sensitive to my surroundings...it's worn off a bit as I've grown older, but there are times still that I do experience something.

***
When I was 3 years old, my parents and I moved into a new house that had had one previous owner, a widow. My new room was apprarently the widow and her deceased husband's old room. He had died at least three years before I was even a thought. Well, at the age of 4, after my brother was born, I began to see an old man sitting in the rocking chair of my room nearly every night. After the first night, I told my mother that there was a man in my room the night before. At first she thought it was a dream, but consistently, night after night, he returned to see me (he was not scary in the least...especially because I thought he was alive). Well...eventually I was asked to describe him, and neighbors confirmed it was the widow's husband visiting me nightly. He stopped visiting when my brother moved into the room with me, but I'll never forget it.

Later on, from the ages of 6-8, I was very afraid of sleeping, for I could hear people's voices in the night talking and calling my name...hence my sleeping position makes me look like a bound madman.

One more distinct story from this house...once I had my action figures all over the floor and I threw them on top of a bin when I left it for lunch in the kitchen. I am still 100% sure no one left the kitchen until I returned to the room...there to find the toys standing upright on the opposite side of the room.
***
At 11, my father moved into a 145-year-old house. He refurbished the basement, which became my bedroom. About 2 years ago (4 years after it became my room), I began to see women's dresses and feet running up the stairs at night. My stepmother did something to staircase to send them away, she tells me. My room is abvoe the garage now, so I haven't experienced anything down there since...these apparitions only came at night.

This same house belonged to my great-great aunt, who died in 1999, 3 years before the birth of my little half-sister. She told us at the age of 4 that "Alice" said hello...

We also hear knocking on the doors sometimes, and there is nobody there...

Another of my own experiences here...I was having a difficult emotional time in my life and I prayed on my knees for strength in desparation in the middle of the living room. I looked up and saw white mist for the briefest moment.
***
My high shcool is haunted by a nun. She's been seen walking through the old living quarters of the sisters who once taught there. Me and my roomate during a retreat slept in one of the rooms and distinctly saw someone's figure in the corner of the room...we had trouble sleeping, for sure!
***
When my mother was a kid, she shared her room with her older sister. One night my mother "woke up" to see a younger, healthier version of her own mother (the differences were too significant for her to have been their real mother) in the bedroom, with some kind of light backlighting her from the window...she came up to my mother and told her, "I'll be back", and then she left the room. My aunt had seen the same thing at an earlier hour in the night. To this day, my aunt and my mother are still trying to figure it out.

Updated On: 4/25/08 at 11:58 PM

[Mekroth]

Posted: 4/25/08 at 12:12am

Oh, I have so many stories. I live on the navajo reservation, so there's always something crazy and supernatural going on. Gladly I have not experienced as much as my friends, but i've experienced crazy stuff.

For instance, take the old church at my school. Since the new one was built, the old one has become the theatre (meaning I sort of own the place.) I spend a lot of my time here, during choir, directing the play, and making movies. Unfortunately, this building was built in the 1920's on sacred land. The construction of this building angered many people, and a shaman placed a curse upon it.

Fast-forward to now, and what we have is a demon-infested building which is slowly sinking into the ground. Every time I lock up the building, I need someone else with me so I don't take a Lovecraftian descent into madness.

The worst cases were when I was filming for a documentary about our choir's tour to Germany last year. I did interviews with various choir members (why there, you ask? well I used a blue screen for the interviews, and it wasn't just a screen, it was a flat I had painted blue and couldn't haul home.)

After filming for exactly fifteen minutes on each interview, we'd hear footsteps going down the basement stairs(which are obscured by a partition.) These were loud steps, and shook all of us up.

After reviewing the video, the steps are completely inaudible, which is strange, because they made a booming echo throughout the building during the interviews.
Also, I've got this picture of the church. Look in the upper-right corner, between the fan and the light.

[Mamie]

Posted: 4/25/08 at 12:16am

About the time I started high school, my family moved into a big old house in Virginia. It had an attic that you could reach by pulling open a latched door in the ceiling and then pulling down some folding steps. There was one bare light bulb in the ceiling at the top of the stairs but to light it you had to climb half way up and reach around for a long extension cord that had to be plugged into an outlet on the top floor landing. SO - one afternoon after school I decided I needed something up there and pulled the stairs down and then climbed half way up to get the cord. As I was reaching around for it I looked up and into the darkened attic and saw a man standing a few feet ahead of me. He was gray from head to toe and was wearing boots, a long open coat that went almost to his feet, and a wide brimmed hat. He had a beard. Other than that, I can't say because it scared me so much that I fell down the stairs. My heart was beating so hard I thought it would jump through my chest. I got to my feet and ran downstairs to the first floor and fell into a chair in the living room. My mom came into the room and saw me and asked what was wrong. I started telling her and she stopped me before I could describe him. She said "did he look like this..." and then she proceded to describe him to a T. It turns out that about a year before this she had seen the same figure down in the basement when she was doing the laundry. She never told anyone because she was afraid we'd all say she was crazy.

Late at night we all could hear two men's voices in conversation. Very, very low - so you couldn't understand what they were saying, but the cadence made you believe that a conversation was going on. This went on almost every night. We all said we'd heard it but my father said we were all crazy and refused to even let us talk about it.

Years later my parents sold the house. My brother and sister were still living at home and they didn't want to move so when a couple arrived who were interested in buying it, my brother told them the house was haunted. He figured it would scare them off. Instead it made them REALLY want the house. After the family was all moved out, my dad finally admitted that he could hear the men talking too.

[Marianne2]

Posted: 4/25/08 at 12:39am

I thought of a couple of more.

This one has to do with camp also. When we did lost camper drills at night, I never liked checking my outside area by myself because it was scary going up there by myself. Well, I found out that in the 1970s, some kids up there were around a flag pole or something, and got struck by lightening one day. So now they haunt up that way. Like you can hear kids screaming in the woods, but there is nobody there.

And the basement of my freshman year dorm is probably haunted. Someone got murdered down there, but I don't know when. But that is the reason why the campus always has the haunted house there each Halloween.

[george95]

Posted: 4/25/08 at 12:53am

At our summer camp, we made up a story about a deranged killer named the Weasel Man. There was a bar across the street from the camp entrance named Weasel's.

My grade school would take a week-long trip to the camp each summer. There was usually about 75 kids from 5th grade to 8th grade, and then about 25 high school kids who came as counselors for the younger kids(but were really there to drink and party and stuff).

So when my group got to become counselors, we made up a story about the Weasel Man. We told the 5th and 6th graders that a few years earlier, a drunk from Weasel's bar stumbled down the road into the camp, and he came into the dorms and he murdered a couple kids in their beds. We said that he was never found and he still hides in the woods that surround the camp. We said that he only comes around at night, and that he taps on the window near the bed of the kid that he's going to kill next.
So, of course, one of the counselors would always choose the most scared little 5th grader, and then go tap on his window. Sure enough, the kid would scream and cry and say that the Weasel Man tappes his window. We would get all the counselors to pretend to freak out and run around the dorm in flashlights, telling the kids to stay away from the windows. Then we'd go outside and scream and be like "there he is there he is! get him! get him!" And the kid would think that we actually saw the Weasel Man.

We never told the kids that there was no Weasel Man, and I'm sure that somewhere tonight, one of those 5th graders is telling the story about the killer Weasal man at his summer camp.
Hmmm I guess this story was more about a serial killer than a ghost story, but oh well.

[Kasie]

Posted: 4/25/08 at 3:16am

Mekroth- either that's photoshopped, a drop of water or dust, or insanely creepy. I can't tell.

[verynewyorkcurious]

Posted: 4/25/08 at 3:20am

I'm going to bed soon, and it's really dark and quiet out right now, so I'll check out the picture tomorrow.

[verynewyorkcurious]

Posted: 4/25/08 at 3:23am

Okay, I opened it anyway..and I have no idea what's between the fan and the light..but I got chills just looking at that picture.

[nitsua]

Posted: 4/25/08 at 3:42am

If it's not a reflection, it's an orb. Perfectly normal. Nothing to be scared about.

Even though I grew up near a cemetery, I've never seen a ghost.

[Weez]

Posted: 4/25/08 at 6:31am

Urgh, I am SUCH an agnostic when it comes to ghosts. I mean, I love reading and hearing ghost stories, and I'd like to see a ghost, and I've felt really quite uncomfortable and nervy in places for no discernible reason. But when I hear ghost stories, my brain sits and goes "HA! WHAT A LOAD OF BUNK! HONESTLY, WHO'D BELIEVE THAT?!", and comes up with all sorts of rational explanations for things. So if someone ever asks "do you believe in ghosts?", I can't honestly say "yes" or "no". It doesn't work like that for me. Which is probably why I'm so keen to encounter a ghost; it'd be nice to be able to have a definite answer for once, as not encountering ghosts doesn't seem to have provided anything definite for me.

Apart from photographs of "orbs", of course. Ain't NOTHING supernatural about those, and I get annoyed by people who treat them as "proof ghosts walk among us!". If I want to see photos of ghosts on the internet, then I want to see photos of GHOSTS, not little specks of dust reflecting light at the right moment. :P

[Patronus]

Posted: 4/25/08 at 9:29am

Orbs aren't always dust, but they aren't ghosts either. Orbs are balls of energy that could or could not be paranormal.

[nmartin]

Posted: 4/25/08 at 10:02am

This is absolutely true. I used to own a 1929 bungalow in Memphis. I woke up one night and saw two men at the foot of my bed (no jokes please). I thought I was seeing things, so I turned on the light. They were still there wearing workmen's clothes and caps. They were staring at me and started towards me and then faded. This was not a dream. During my Christmas party that year, I told the story and a local historian told there was a terrible trainwreck in the 30s. Many of the workers lived in the bungalows in my neighborhood. He felt sure what I saw were two of the workers who died.

[ThankstoPhantom]

Posted: 4/25/08 at 11:25am

I have another story, but this is someone else's encounter that I know.

A family friend's brother died over 20 years ago. His widow remarried a few years later and had a little girl. They moved into a house near the town elementary school. The little girl told the mother that she often saw her first husband walking around, and she also saw cows in the basement and in the backyard. The historical society informed them that there had been a slaughterhouse on the property back in the 40s. I know...cow ghosts....sounds nuts, but it is true.

[EVIE]

Posted: 4/25/08 at 11:58am

nmartin that story is terrifying! I don't know what I'd do if I saw something like that....probably hyperventilate.

[nmartin]

Posted: 4/25/08 at 12:17pm

Evie, after that it was several weeks before I would stay in that house alone.

[EVIE]

Posted: 4/25/08 at 12:27pm

What makes it even more terrifying is that they were still there when the lights were turned on...yipes!

[Marianne2]

Posted: 4/25/08 at 12:53pm

I just remembered another one. My friend at camp told me that he actually saw the ghost of the guy who died on the chapel road at camp in the dining hall one night. So yeah, you are brave if you walk around there at night all by yourself.

And this isn't real, but I'll just share it because it's just hilarious. This only happened because of all the strange and scary after dark encounters the one summer at camp. This was a night I was down in my sleeping quarter all alone for the night because my roommate was required to stay up in the office for the night because of part of her job. I had to go to the bathroom really bad in the middle of the night, and couldn't find my flashlight. When I finally did, it didn't work at all. So I took my chances going to the latrine (out house) near the building all alone without the flashlight. Biggest mistake ever.

First, the door was wide open, which it never ever is. So I got really scared that something was in there. I was reluctant to go in, but did anyway, and was glad that there was nothing in there. Well, because I was sooooo scared, I scared myself into believing that spirits or some animal were going to come to me and do something and get me. Oh yeah, and I was afraid that nobody was going to find me until the morning and that I was a goner. So, as soon as I finished my business, I got out of the latrine as fast as possible and went back to my sleeping quarter still paranoid. I got back to sleep, but not until I convinced myself that nothing was going to come in. I think this was the other night that summer that I locked the doors to the building. The air conditioner scared me though because I really thought I kept hearing the door opening, but it wasn't. It was just a sound it sort of made. I can't explain it.

[ShbrtAlley44]

Posted: 4/25/08 at 1:33pm

I've always wanted to actually SEE a ghost.

[CJR]

Posted: 4/25/08 at 3:19pm

We had a bit of a thread on ghosts before (and Im sure there have been several others....)

Here is my story though:

An old apartment of mine was haunted. I didn't truly believe in hauntings till I lived there. There was a man, a woman and a child... to this day, I believe they lived (and died) in my apartment (which was a 3 story house, turned into 3 apartments) waaaay back in the day. I went to the Government Center here to search the public records for my address and all records of ownership before my landlord bought it (in 1985) were 'nonexistant.'

Things started out small... I would sit at my desk in my bedroom, working on the computer; the way my room was set up I had my back to the door when sitting there, and my doorway looked down my small hallway and right into my kitchen. There was a small mirror above my computer and every once in a while I would feel like there was someone watching me... I'd look up and I'd see the glare of a white light floating in my dark kitchen. When I'd turn around, the light would be gone. Sometimes my doorbell would go absolutely wild, ringing out of control but nobody would be anywhere around.

When sitting in my bedroom (which was at the front of my 3 bedroom apartment) I could hear cabinets in the kitchen open and close, glasses move around, the chairs slide and then the glasses slam down on the counter. I would come home from work at night to find things in the sink that I'd left on the table and glasses on the counter that I'd never put there. Sometimes I'd come home and smell a woman's perfume or I'd smell food cooking. The second you'd walk into the kitchen (everyone complained of this, as a matter of fact) you'd get an instant chill which stayed with you all around the back of the apartment. In the back of the apartment was the kitchen, the other two bedrooms and the bathroom. The furthest bedroom would NEVER get warm, no matter how high I had the heat set. I had people come out and check my heat, I had the landlord there incessantly trying to fix it, but everyone told me the same thing: There was nothing wrong with my heat.

The longer I was there, the worse the problems became. One night I walked out of my bedroom to use the bathroom and 'standing' in my kitchen was a shape of light -- a man looking much like a bouncer, with his arms folded across his chest. As an instinct, I turned to go back into my room but after a moment I'd realized what had just happened and turned around to look. He was gone. Whenever I'd put my phone down in the kitchen (to go into a room in the back of the apt to get something -- the phone was sketchy at best back there) people would hear a woman talking. Everyone always asked me if I had the TV or the radio on and my answer was always no. Every person to be put on 'hold' in the kitchen heard a woman having a conversation with someone, though the other half of the conversation was never heard. As I was getting ready for bed one night about a week after finding the 'man' in my kitchen, I heard my home phone ring. I was already in my room (and the only extension was in the living room) so I let it ring into voicemail figuring I'd just retrieve the message from my cell phone which was in my room with me. I was laying in bed waiting for my voicemail to pick up when suddenly the phone cut out, and then came back with a woman's voice. "Are you getting ready for bed?" She asked me. I replied "Excuse me?" She went on "Are you going to bed? Are you getting ready for bed now???" It went back and forth for a few minutes until I finally got incredibly creeped the hell out and hung up.

That same night I was woken up at 4am by a BRIGHT white light in my bedroom. When it was night and I shut off the bedroom light, the entire room was pitch black. Not that night. I focused on a large white orb hovering in the middle of my room and as I rubbed my eyes to look again, it disappeared. Needless to say I did not get back to sleep that night. The following night I was washing the dishes (this caused me to have my back to the hall for the other bedrooms) and as I turned to the table to get the last dish, I saw a small orb of light go from the back bedroom, diagonally across the hall to the other bedroom, hover there for a moment at the door and then disappear.

As more time went by, I wouldn't just hear the cabinets open and shut, I would hear them slam open and slam shut. I'd hear dishes crashing in the cabinets and on the counter and things go flying across the room. Of course I never SAW anything move because once I'd open my door, all the noise would stop. I tended to stay in my bedroom with the door shut quite often. lol It made it worse that I lived there alone... Yeah, I fled to my parents house MANY times in the duration of time I lived in that apartment.

I had the apartment blessed by a priest, I kept holy water in each room, I splashed holy water on an almost daily basis and nothing ever stopped. I finally moved out. I have never in my life been so happy to move out of an apartment.

Also, after my dad died, we were sure he was "causing trouble" in our house. We would find the thermostat turned all the way up (on days when nobody had been home to touch it), the iron plugged in and basically burning.... It had been on for at least a day and nobody noticed cause we hadn't been home (and it hadn't been used). We'd find things moved... lights would turn on and off (we'd go out, leave a light on, come home and find that light off but a floor lamp on and other things like that). I'd open the freezer and bags of frozen veggies would fling out of the freezer at me. No, they wouldn't fall out, they'd legit catch air and fly out of the freezer and land part way across the kitchen.

Updated On: 4/25/08 at 03:19 PM