more ghost stories please!

Answers

Not fair, Ted. You have to go first (at least that was always the rule at the girl scout camps I went to!)

-- Soni (thomkilroy@hotmail.com), January 18, 2001.

Did I miss the first thread about ghost stories?

-- Julie Froelich (firefly1@nnex.net), January 18, 2001.

Yes, there was several ghost stories on the misc...site. Actually what my ghost story is: my friend has a retarded Irish setter. Looks and acts retarded. Took her a YEAR to teach her to go to the bathroom outside...she has the equilvalent of Down's Sydrome in dogs. Really sweet (just like people who have DS) but you can tell she looks different. In any case, she was at a friend's old house and started to really bark at a room and refuse to go in there. My friend and I were spending the night there. She decided to sleep in that bedroom and that poor puppy refused and slept with me. Later my friend came screaming that there was a ghost. I just said "Now you see why she was barking and refusing to go in that room." and went back to sleep my friend who owns the house said it was so old that there were ghosts there but they were harmless. My friend refused to sleep in that bedroom! :) IT wasn't a situation in which I felt creeped out. Now that's my story :) :) Yours?
Ted

-- Ted Hart (tedhart71@hotmail.com), January 19, 2001.

These stories really spook me but I find myself drawn to reading them.
Julie, you got the first thread. That was where you told us about your beagle. Is he still around now?

-- Dee (gdgtur@goes.com), January 19, 2001.

Here you go Ted. The house that we currently rent (for the last year and a half) surely has other occupants. Since we first moved in, I have the feeling often of someone standing in one specific spot (hallway, looking into kitchen and living room). This house is only about 30 years old. After about 8 mos. of living here, I met the father of my 4yr old's school friend. We chatted at our backyard fence, while the kids played. He told me of the couple who had lived here several years back, his father's best friend. Apparently the wife had cancer, and died. Shortly after, the husband was discovered to have some type of brain tumor. He shot himself in the unattached garage, but did not die immediately as his best friend arrived for a visit right as he shot himself. I often turn around while on the couch watching tv, because someone's watching me. My cat will often be watching the same spot as I. As well, there have been two places I've been to where I feel overwhelming dread and will not approach. One is a waterfall area in my hometown...since learned many have drowned in the swimming hole area of the falls. The other was the barn on the farm where my previous significant other grew up. He and his mother told me the ghost stories of the home, and how their old dog would react. I, however, could go nowhere near the barn. Just like the falls, I felt nothing but pure evil emanating from there...and I'm not religious. Then they told me that's where the cows were slaughtered.???
Finally, about 12 years ago, my 12 year old cousin drowned in water churned up by a power plant, in front of about 20 people who could do nothing. We drove yearly to pick him up, so he could stay with my grandmother for the summer. It was during one of these visits when he died. The next time my mother was travelling the route (over the Mackinaw Bridge in MI) we used to take, she looked out the window and saw him on a sail boat in Lake Michigan waving to her. How's that for bizarre?

-- Rheba (rbeall@etown.net), January 19, 2001.

I have a friend who lives in north TX at Lake Possum Kingdom and I frequently go up there to work on her old house. It is a woodframe farmhouse that was moved onto the land where it is now, back in the 1920's. The house itself apparently dates from some time in the 1880's. It is always in need of some repair or other and my friend is, bless her heart, quite helpless (by design, I sometimes think!) and has no one to do things for her, so I go up and 'help' her out (ie do it for her). Anyway, last April, I had gone up there to build a new front porch and porch deck for her as the old one had fallen in. I had gotten up there late after driving six hours, and we were lounging in the living room watching tv, about 10 pm. We decided we wanted some goodies, so she went to the store to get them and was gone for about 20 minutes. I was lying on the sofa, and about five minutes after she left, I heard loud, clomping footsteps coming from her kitchen, which is right behind the living room wall. I jumped up, thinking someone had gotten in the house. I carry a handgun in my purse, so I grabbed it out of my purse and crept to the doorway between the kitchen and living room. All the while these heavy footsteps were going all around the kitchen, kind of back and forth, real fast, and scuffling every now and then, like whoever was walking was doing something or looking for something. I had my heart in my mouth because I just knew a man had gotten in the back door. Whoever it was sounded big and heavy, and was wearing what sounded like hard soled boots or shoes. When I peeped around the corner, the footsteps stopped, instantly. Nothing. No one there. I stood there for several seconds, thinking, "Now what the hell?", and I knew whoever it was couldn't have had the time to get into the other room or the back hallway, because the steps sounded like they were right behind the wall. So I slipped around the corner into the kitchen and crept, swat-style, to the hallway. Nothing. Long story short, I ended up checking the entire inside of the house and heard nothing else and saw nothing else. All windows and the back door were still locked, from the inside. Still thinking somehow that someone had gotten into the house and back out again (!) I got a flashlight and went outside, all around the perimiter of the house, looking for footprints in the deep red sand. Nothing but my friend's tiny little size 6's. While I was standing out on the porch wondering if I heard a ghost or an intruder, my friend pulls up. I told her what happened, and she went real white and said she had heard the sound before, and when she heard it she left and went to spend the night in town at a motel. We spent that night sitting up in the living room! Next morning we went back out, thinking we'd see something in the daylight--nothing. Nothing but her footprints and mine.
Occasionally her house has transient odd smells. Some kind of cologne smell, something like old cloth, smoke when there's no fire, and a really nasty unwashed B.O. smell, like a man who hasn't bathed in a while! I have noticed this when by myself or with my friend, and no, it's not us! I think she's seen and heard more than I have because she gets really frightened when I ask her about it. One time she burst into tears and said she can't afford to move or she would and that no one would ever buy the place because it has a reputation.

-- Hannah Maria Holly (hannahholly@hotmail.com), January 20, 2001.

I forgot. I was going to include this with my other post.
Years ago I was with my now ex-husband, and we were at one of his friend's houses. Out behind his house, in a junk pile, was a Jenny Lind iron bed frame, just going to ruin. I saw it and asked if I could buy it. The friend said I could have it because some old woman friend of his mother had come to visit a few years earlier and had died unexpectedly in the bed, and no one wanted to sleep in it anymore. Didn't daunt me, so I hauled it out of the pile, my husband did a little braising on it, and I sanded and painted it and put it in our spare bedroom with a new mattress and box spring set. It's beautiful, but none of my guests will sleep in it. I never told anyone about the old woman dying in the bed (the frame, not the bedding) but the same friend who lives in north TX spent the night once and when I got up she was sleeping on the sofa. She said she heard a woman say her name in the night. So I never told my other friend about it, and she says she just can't get to sleep in that bed, says the room is too cold and creepy.

-- Hannah Maria Holly (hannahholly@hotmail.com), January 20, 2001.

Oh. Okay, that thread. The beagle did eventually move on to the other side and didn't scare us much anymore. Gramma -- who was apparently haunting this house -- also has quieted down and seems happy with me living here now. No more nighttime noises, rattling door knobs,or footsteps anymore.
Rheba's story however put me in mind of the time that I took a tour of the Tower of London when I was over there. If you don't know, The Tower, as it is called, is actually a number of buildings within a walled fortress. No one knows how many hundreds of people have died there, but you may be walking in the armoury and look down to see a plaque dedicated to twelve people killed on that spot a decade or two earlier by a bomber. Or walk into a chapel that had so many people buried under the floor that their bones were sticking up through the paving. Neither of those two sites particularly bothered me until we were walking into another area that I didn't really know what was inside, but I immediately *could NOT* go inside, even tho it was quite cold and starting to rain outside. I got terribly bad feelings from whatever was inside and told my friends that I would wait for them over in the ladies rest room instead. I found out later that was was inside was a display of torture devices and the head block where they had chopped off people's heads. All I knew at the time was that I was getting mega BAD VIBES off of it and that I didn't want to get any closer to whatever it was. I don't know that I would have called it pure evil, but it was a whole lot of plain old BAD.

-- Julie Froelich (firefly1@nnex.net), January 20, 2001.

Not ghost story per say, but bad vibes - I can't go into my husbands "shop" (a barn across the yard from the house) for very long without getting the distinct sensation of wanting to leave quickly. Seems that this barn, in a previous tenent's incarnation, was an unlicensed bar and drug den. Even had the money-taker's booth, with the cut-out hole in the floor to drop the drugs through in case the cops showed up, still standing when we got here. Don't know if anyone ever died in there (no telling, but no stories as yet), but the vibes are just overwhelming. Doesn't bother hubby, but he's so depressed most of the time that I'm not sure that anything that subtle would get through.

-- Soni (thomkilroy@hotmail.com), January 20, 2001.

For about ten years I owned a six-unit apartment place. One day one of the tenants commented to me about the women she saw several times near her baby. When the woman saw her, she would go into a wallway and just disappear. Knew a women at the time who was an amateur ghost hunter/communicator. Had her come over. I wasn't there, so this is third hand. After a couple of minutes of sitting quietly, she started talking to someone in a one-way conversation. After it was over she described the woman appearance and that the woman said she loved babies and would take special care of it. I didn't think much of it until I told a neighbor about it. Even before I got half the description out, the neighbor said that would be Mrs. So and So. She lived in the building and her son would show up once a month to pay the rent and not even visit her. Said she indeed loved children and was a free babysitter to any other tenant. I don't know if she every showed up again.

-- Ken S. in WC TN (scharabo@aol.com), January 22, 2001.

Ken , how sad the poor old woman had so much love to give and her son was so stupid .

-- Patty {NY State} (fodfarms@slic.com), January 22, 2001.

I got shiver's reading these. When i was very young my Mother and Father rented a big old house, because it was cheap. I always used to sleep walk so the first few days my Mother paid no attention. One night i was laughing and i woke up my Mother. When she walked into the room, she could see me turning cicles on the floor as if i were dancing. She calmly asked what i was doing and i said "we are dancing". I told her that a little boy came to visit me at night and sometimes we would play and other times we would just talk. This went on for month's. One day the landlord came for a visit and my mother said the house gave her a funny feeling. He told her a little boy had died upstairs, in you guessed it my room. My Mother told the landlord about me and what had occurred. She said i called him Johnny. He told her the little boys name was Johnny. My parents moved a few month's later when my Father got a job in another town. I never talked about the little boy after we moved. It freaks my Mom out to this day. I don't remember a thing, i think she made it up. Giggle!

-- Shau Marie (shau@centurytel.net), January 23, 2001.

Moderation questions? read the FAQ