Seen Resurrection Mary? Been to the grave of Marie Leveau? Felt a poltergeist? Heard from a dearly departed one? Tell it here. (I'll tell my ghost stories when others tell theirs and in doing so confirm I'm not a weirdo. Yes, yes I am a coward.)

-- Anonymous, June 18, 2000

Answers

My man had a poltergeist in his late teen years. Opening cabinets, taking out food, turning on tvs, unlocking doors. Footsteps on the 2nd floor when no one was up there, dog barking at things unseen. One of his friends, after spending a nite, said he never wanted to stay over again, he was so scared.

It got to where they would check everything in the house before they left, making sure they weren't leaving anything out, on or open..only to come home and find things rearranged and wide open. His mom and sister say they also saw shadowy figures out of the corner of their eyes.

One afternoon he and his mom heard the gasps and moans of what sounded like a dying person in the ventilation shaft...it went on for ever, slowly dwindling and diminishing until it gave it's last rasping breath. After that, there were no incidents.

What makes it all creepy, is the fact that my man is Mr Scientific and doesn't believe in ghosts...but he knows these things happened and can't explain them....hey, kinda like Scully!

-- Anonymous, June 18, 2000

Wow, this is nothing compared to Ann's story, but a tad spooky nonetheless. One night after tripping acid my boyfriend took me home as it was late and I had to work the next day. I'd had a perfectly fun night but after I was home alone and still tripping I started to freak out really, really bad. I needed someone grounded to talk to but I didn't feel comfortable calling him because it was early in the relationship and I didn't want to seem clingy. Anyway, I wanted to call my mom but it was 5 a.m. and I didn't want to wake her up and make her worry about me. So I sat there for about ten excruciating minutes and debated with myself and freaked out some more. Finally I decided I had to call anyway. When I did, she picked up on the first ring, even though there is no phone in her room and she should have been asleep. She told me that she had been sleeping but was awakened suddenly by a voice saying "Hello? Hello? Hello?" over and over. Then the phone rang and it was me. It was like, even fast asleep and a hundred miles away, my mom knew I needed her; she felt me reaching out to her before I even picked up the phone. She and I talked for a bit and I soon felt better. I guess this is not really a spooky story; it actually gives me the warm fuzzies. But it's still pretty weird and paranormal.

-- Anonymous, June 19, 2000

Jill, a similar thing used to happen when I was a baby. My mother tells me that I'd be asleep in my crib in her bedroom, and she'd start thinking that she should get up and check on me, when I'd yawn or turn over or something. Every single time. Also, to this day, we'll be at opposite ends of the house and I'll hear her call me and I'll come out and say "did you call me?" and she'll say that she didn't but was about to. Weird, eh?

-- Anonymous, June 19, 2000

This is sort of spooky but also heartwarming.

When I was 22 my mother was very ill with cancer and living in a palliative care unit for about 6 months. She did have a tv and would go crazy with her credit cards and order things she thought we needed over the phone. She passed away on labour day 1990. Three days later on the morning of the funeral a package was delivered to our house. It was a set of books for me - with a card signed - Thinking of you, love Mom xo. It made me lose it then - but it's a very very dear memory for me. Oh dear - me thinks I'm getting a little misty right now.

-- Anonymous, June 19, 2000

I think I was about 8 years old and my bedroom overlooked the driveway. One night it was super windy and the noise woke me up. I looked out my window and saw a mist on the driveway, in the vague shape of a sphere. I thought that was strange because if that was fog, why was it sitting there so static while it was so windy outside? It freaked me out a bit, but I went back to bed. Never saw it again.

From 1994 to 1996 I did a lot of housesitting. One house was very historical and the owners chose to have the lights very dim, if any at all. The kitchen was very old and antique looking, with a fireplace so huge I could walk into it, and loads of rocking chairs. I woke up around 2 AM one night because I could hear music. I got out of bed and followed the sound until I got to the kitchen. A small radio that I had never used before was on. The alarm wasn't on and the time it had been previously set to didn't match the time I started hearing the music. I turned it off and went back to bed. When I retold the story to some friends they freaked out.

Ok, my stories are pretty lame. So I'll tell you a friend of mine's. My friend Antony was living on Tresco Island in the UK doing a horticulture internship. He lived in an old house with other interns. One night he woke up, the room was near pitch black, but he could make out a hunched over form sitting up in the bed, right next to him. The form shuddered, like it was sighing. Then it slowly rose up the wall and disappeared into the ceiling. Antony was meanwhile shitting himself, but was too scared to move. The form reappeared through the wall opposite him and slowly made its way towards him, its arms still covering its head/face. It got right up to Antony, then suddenly lifted its head and opened its arms and disappeared through him. The next morning Antony told the story to his flatmates and the woman who lived in the bedroom above his paled. She said a dark form had entered her room through the floor and moved through her room before disappearing again through the floor, supposedly at the times the form had gone through Antony's ceiling. Eerie!

-- Anonymous, June 19, 2000

Once when I was alone here at night, the TV came on by itself several times in a row. It would come on, and I'd turn it off and walk away, and it would come on again. But it had come on once the week before and Paul had some rational explanation for it, so I wasn't really scared. It was kind of funny, though. I was like, "Is this fucking TV trying to scare me by cranking on lame commercials?"

-- Anonymous, June 19, 2000

Our TV used to do that too. I'm sure it was an electrical short or something, because once we got a new TV it stopped happening. But it was pretty freaky at the time, we'd be in another room, hear the TV click on then go up full volume. I remember trying to turn the knob to the 'off' position, and there was this strong physical resistance. I had to really fight the damn thing.

-- Anonymous, June 19, 2000

I spent the night once at a friend's house, in her boarder's room because he was away on a trip. Most of his furniture was in storage, but it was still "his" room. So in the middle of the night I wake up and hear what sounds like a myriad of voices whispering to me. They were definitely trying to communicate something to me, but it was like they were speaking in a language I had never heard. It was pretty disturbing, but strangely, instead of getting the hell out of there, I went back to sleep. In the morning I told my friend about it, and she startled and said, cryptically, "did you have the bathroom door open?" Um, yeah, so? "Well, you know what Majed (the boarder) is always saying about that, don't you?" No, I didn't. Apparently Majed believes that spirits live in his bathroom, and so he keeps the door closed at night, or else they come out and talk to him and wake him up. !!!

-- Anonymous, June 20, 2000

In 1983 I was home for the summer from college, partying and working, when I got a call from my boss at my college job as a newspaper typesetter. The girl who replaced me for the summer was killed in a car wreck, could I drive over and work one night while they looked for a replacement?

So I worked all day, drove an hour and a half to Athens, worked till like 2 a.m., and then prepared to drive home in my mom's '72 Chevy Impala (aka The Deerslayer), with its fine features such as a tempermental alternator and AM radio. It's hot, I'm tired, it's foggy because it's August and the humidity will strangle you in Georgia, and I just want to go to sleep. Which I proceed to do, despite the fact that the car is still moving. In those days the Athens-to-Atlanta trip was very rural, not the continuous strip-mall it is today, and when I awoke I was still driving but very disoriented. It didn't help that somehow the radio station had somehow switched from a local one to some weird-ass Christian talk station out of Minnesota. In the middle of a "What the fuck wrong turn did I take?" thought, suddenly the only thing I see ahead of me are two glowing red eyes in the fog. I slam on the brakes and come to a dead stop in the road. The deer scampered off to safety while I about puked waiting for the Mother Ship to land. It never did, but the adrenaline managed to keep me awake for the rest of the drive. I still don't know how I managed to pick up that creepy radio station.

Sleep deprivation. Cheaper than drugs, but not as safe.

-- Anonymous, June 22, 2000

I've never had any encounters (outside of my crayon incident, but that's another story for another day), but my great-aunt claimed to have had several. However, you have to keep in mind that she could drink anyone under the table. Anyway...

She used to live in this house that she claimed was haunted. She once said that she saw this old lady dressed in 1800's style clothing sitting in a huge spiderweb in the corner of the room.

A friend of hers had died and my aunt was unable to attend the funeral. She said this lady came to her that night. The next day, she saw the deceased's daughter and told her that her mother looked very lovely in what she was wearing, which she described. The daughter was shocked because 1) it was a closed casket and 2) she wasn't there.

She's also claimed to have seen several UFOs outside her bedroom window, but the family was convinced that that was the booze talking.

-- Anonymous, June 23, 2000

So my boyfriend at the time and I had this basement apartment, and when you turned the light out in the bedroom, you literally could not see your hand in front of your face. I woke up screaming one night, and I saw what looked like a black circular object with tendrils, like a sun or maybe a spider, hanging over me. I was trying like crazy to get away from it. My boyfriend jumped up, turned on the light, then immediately ran out of the bedroom to look for an intruder. When he came back to bed, and before I told him what I had seen, he said that he had seen the form of someone standing over me in the darkness. I was pretty creeped out.

-- Anonymous, June 25, 2000

I don't see things like ghosts but my mom does. The weirdest incident (which she only told me about recently) occurred way back in the day when she was doing screen-writing work out here in washington, in some abandoned speakeasy. Well, she was in some cellar or basement I believe. She got tired, and decided to take a nap. She woke up with this screaming, heroin junkie-esque prostitute in a flapper dress standing over her, and trying to strangle her. My mother says that the woman indicated that some men were coming to kill her, and that she would get one of them first. Apparently the woman would not shut up, so my mom told her to "walk into the light" or something to that effect, and repeatedly played "Ode to Joy" very loudly on a record player. Apparently junkie ghost woman went away.

-- Anonymous, June 28, 2000

One night when I was about 12 I was woken by the sound of the TV. The living room was next to the bedroom my sister and I shared. I lay in bed and could make out the Rockford Files and commercials word for word. I figured my brother Chris had come home from college for the weekend and had gotten in after I went to bed. After a bit I decided to go in to say hi to him and get the TV turned down before it woke up Mom and Dad. I had to go through the dining room to get to the living room and it wasn't until I got to the door that I realized that I couldn't hear the TV anymore and that it was dark behind the door. I thought that maybe Chris had heard me coming and shut off both the light and the TV in the few seconds it took me to get there. I went into the room, it was cool and I knew noone had been in there. The TV screen was cold and didn't have the afterglow that lingered forever on TVs in the 70's. I was puzzled and went back to bed. I fell asleep and woke up again to the sound of the TV playing the Rockford files and I went to the living room again, the sound again having stopped almost when I got out of bed. I looked around again, this time really curious and beginning to get a little scared but went back to bed again only to wake up a third time to the same thing. I was really scared and debated for a bit before going to the living room again to check it out but I didn't know what else to do. That was the end of it and it never happened again. The only neighbors we had close enough by to consider were an elderly couple, and I had never heard a sound come from that house. This entire time my sister was sleeping next to me and my parents in there room on the other side of the dining room and they slept through the whole thing.

-- Anonymous, August 03, 2000