Late, but .. .


boating is a very popular pastime in the town where i grew up. Many people have cabins on islands "out the bay", one of which is called Swan Island.

Swan Island was once inhabited by Beothuk Indians, all of which were killed by diseases or murdered by white people. There is a confirmed Indian Burial ground on one side of the island.

When i was seven years old, my family and i were staying withe my Uncle and his family in his Cabin cruiser, which was tied to the dock in Swan Island harbour. About 3 or 4 o' clock in the morning, we all awoke to the sound of footsteps walking across the deck, inches above our heads. The footsteps walked from the bow of the boat, over the flybridge, down the ladder, and across the lower deck to the stern. Thinking it was a late-night caller, my uncle put on his boots, went up through the wheelhouse and out to the lower deck where the footsteps were last heard.

The fog was so thick outside that it took a couple of seconds for him to get his bearings. He first noticed that there was no one on the lower deck. Then he noticed that we were nowhere near the dock in Swan Island Harbour, but were drifting out to sea. He had no idea where we were, in which direction we were going, or why we were drifitng away. He moored the boat in deep water and kept watch 'til the next morning when he dicovered that we had drifted for miles, towards the burial ground side of the island. The bowline that had previously secured us to the dock was slashed with what must have been a very dull knife. No other boats were nearby.

We all went above deck only to find, disappearing in the morning dew, fading footprints --- bare feet --- in an almost-straight line from bow to stern.

Plasticmojo

Any more stories?

I NEED MORE!

/good story

When I was eleven, a friend and I were playing with a Ouija board. It was about midnight and there was one lamp on in the house for light. He asked the Ouija board who his best friend was. It started to spell out my name and as it came to rest on the last letter the lamp went out.

We sat there freaking out quietly for a minute and then I reached up to turn the lamp back on expecting to find out that the bulb had burnt out. It was in the off position and switched back on like normal.

I'm pretty sure that my friend did not set this up. Although I don't believe in ghosts, to this day I have no explanation.

I was 17, living with my dad and younger sister in a house we'd only been in for a year or two. I was at that age when you want to stay up late, drink, and all that stuff, but Dad's house just ain't the place to do it. So, at first, the only time I was ever home at night was when I was sleeping.

I had recently had a change in hours at my job, this yuppified cafeteria place. They now had me working closing shifts on weekend nights, which meant I wouldn't get home until after 1 in the morning. Naturally, I would be too alert to go right to bed, so I'd hang out on the back porch for a little while, smoking cigarettes and reading.

One night, after this had just started to be my weekly habit, I was sitting on the back porch watching a big moth fly around near a back window, when I heard the front door slam. Hard. It had to be our front door because the storm window shook a little. I thought it might be my dad up and about, maybe pissed off that I'd woken him up when I was in the house earlier, so I stayed put. Watching the window. I could hear heavy, deliberate footsteps moving from the front of the house, down a hallway through to the back of the house. I could hear them getting closer to the window I was standing at, and I leaned forward to get a good look inside (no lights were on) because I couldn't figure out why my dad was walking funny.

Finally, the footsteps stopped. Right on the other side of the glass. What did I see? Nothing. I stayed frozen for I don't know how long, just waiting and listening. I eventually got over my fear and ran back inside to check things out. Everyone was sound asleep, Dad snoring like always. So, I just went outside and sat back down. I thought I'd just forget it ever happened, just some kind of... weirdness. Sometimes, unexplainable things happen, right? It doesn't mean there are such things as ghosts.

It kept happening, though. It was always around the same time, on a Friday or Saturday night. Sometimes the footsteps would walk up to the back door instead of the window (for some reason this was a million times worse).

I never did figure out what it was. I spoke to someone else who had lived in the house, and they said they never experienced anything like that. I have no explanation, I just know that it happened.

True scary story!

I was humping a dead dog in front of a day care, and ghosts dressed like cops descended on me and I ran and hid in an attic. They still found me and my girlfriend dumped me shortly thereafter.

THE END.

True:
When I was a kid/teenager, I often had "out of body experiences" in which I felt like I was floating out of my body. This only happened as I was falling asleep at night, and although it freaked me out, I did some research and chalked it up to brain chemistry. There was one episode, however, that defines scientific explanation.

As usual with my episodes, I began slowly drifting up out of my body. I floated up by the wall, and, with my hand, I could feel the posters and pictures that were hanging up. When I reached the ceiling, I bounced gently against it. I turned my head, and I saw 2 very friendly looking blob-type creatures. They were floating next to a friendly looking vortex-type thing, and were beckoning me to come with them. They said "come with us." I was scared but I let them take my arms and I floated into the hole. I changed my mind and said "no, I can't go now," and they let go of me and said goodbye. I floated back down to my body, and was completely freaked out. I was about 16 at the time. This is a COMPLETELY TRUE story.

Also, it's Halloween. If any of you hosers think I'm going to click on any of your links and get the shiat scared out of me here at work by one of those look-for-the-ghost-and-a-scary-face-jumps-out-at-you prank things, you need to think again.

I don't open email or click links for a week on either side of halloween, thank you very much.

Someone here at work sent one of those out the other day and about every ten minutes up or down the hall I'd the scream as someone fell for it. It was cracking me up.

Once when I was scuba diving I came across a heavy shiny metallic box about the size of a cigar box.

It had no latch or lid but one of the seams was big enough to wedge my knife into. I thought for sure my retirement was inside this box full of jewels or gold. There was a plastic bag inside w/ white gravel. I emptied out the gravel from the bag (which made a HUGE cloud of dust in the water)

At the bottom of the bag there was a small fortune cookie fortune size piece of paper that had a name, a date and the name of the Crematory Co.

True story.

Free Radical owes me clean underwear.

jack31081:Halloween is a bizarre celebration. Does anyone really understand the mythos that underlye it?
It's kind of like the Christmas Tree, everyone knows they have to put one up, but no one really knows why- or what it has to do with Christ, etc.


You get a CHRISTmas tree in order to reenact Jesus getting nailed to the cross by the jews and then decorated with thistle, ornaments and candles. DUH!

Two days later on Sunday I was at Fright Fest in Six Flags America. Rode the Superman ride, got off, and my phone was gone.

Not spectacular but it's all true. I remember the number and don't want to call it.

Save the cheerleader. Save the world.

I'm not a believer in any sense of the word, however I have had one very strange experience that I cannot explain.

About two years ago I went to Germany, Austria and Switzerland. I went with my German class from highschool, as they had offered the trip package. We went around doing the average tourist stuff. This included a visit to Dachau. Most of the original buildings had been destroyed, but the gate was still intact. One of the only original buildings was used to house special prisoners in solitary confinement or quarantine. It was summer when we went and that particular day it was about 95 degrees outside. When I entered the solitary building the temperature dropped to what felt like 40 degrees. I could literally see my breath steaming in the air. It was creepy and strange but probably explainable.

P.s. Jack90210

You are the worst human being in the world for not letting your kids go trick-or-treating. What harm is it going to do? You afraid of razor blades in apples? you realize that only happened twice and it was done by relatives of the children. So there. trick-or-treating is a good thing, its fun and kids get lots of candy. Its like the best time of the year.

/please tell me you still let them carve a pumpkin.

Got a pretty recent one here. Just moved into a new house in New Brunswick for the school year that is unbelievably old. Always when I would be in the house on my own (fully knowing no one else was in the house) I would hear distinct footsteps from the floor above traveling from one end of the house to another (very different from the usual house setteling noises). The sounds of doors opening and closing would radiate through out the place, and there would always be that off feeling that someone else was indeed in the place from time to time. The event however that convinced me this place was semi-haunted was one night in the middle of a completely normal dream, it was suddenly interrupted by an older man with grey hair and a terribly malevolent look on his face. He then gave a snarl and I heard nothing but loud cackling laughter. It rocked from my sleep and the second I woke up my entire DVD rack (with about 100+ movies) slowly tipped foward and fell throwing all my DVD's everywhere.

Suprisingly I wasn't that scared. More pissed than anything because earlier in the week I had just put them all in alphabetical order.

I did this one last year. My apartment was haunted. If anyone has the link to that story, that would be cool cause I dont wanna re type it again. Yeah, i suck at this.

It's not a strawman, Watchman, because the context is ghosts. People believe in them, yet there has never been a single shred of empirical evidence which supports that belief. It is exactly the same as the invisible dragon in the garage metaphor. The idea that ghosts exist further requires proof of an immaterial human "soul", yet another thing for which there is not a single piece of empirical evidence.

Your claim about discounting possibilities is a specious argument. It may appear philosophically true, but it comes back to the fact that you're using it in this context to support the notion that souls and ghosts may exist, which is a wholly unsupported and unfalsifiable position perfectly analogous to the invisible dragon in my garage.

Nice try, though. You get a silver star for effort.

Never told this to anyone.

Couple of years ago when my daughter was one year old, she used to sleep in our bed between the two of us. About 5:15 am I was awakened by a voice that I distinctly heard, "Hi Amelia." I instantly sat up and whispered to myself, "I actually heard that." Knowing that my grandmother was suffering terminal cancer, I wondered to myself if she had died that night. Sure enough, my mother called me at 8:00 am to tell me the news that she had passed a few hours earlier.

ChadM89, I understand your disbelief. However, I feel that using a lack of empirical evidence as your only justification is ill-advised, simply because there is no telling what we will be able to discover empirically through refining of methodologies or discoveries of entirely new technologies.

That's just my opinion, of course. If you don't believe as a matter of principle, or on philosophical grounds or what have you, I completely understand and respect that.

For what it's worth, I'm hesitant to dismiss the existence of things that are outside of our range of perception. Even if you assume that 99.9% of the stories that float around out there are easily explained, the sheer number of stories makes it difficult (IMO) to dismiss everything out of hand.

/$0.02
//soapbox

I've had one experience my entire life that defied all rational explanation, and it was with a ouija board.

Long story short, two blindfolded friends worked the board while I wrote down the results as fast as I could. After some interesting conversation, it became apparent that the entity with whom we were communicating was able to read our thoughts. Being the skeptic, I decided to put it to the test. I told it that I was thinking of a 5-letter word, while in reality I was thinking of an 8-letter word. My still-blindfolded friends immediately spelled out exactly the word I was thinking (I had just held onto the first thing that had popped into my mind).

EditorialJoe


I always play the part of hard-line skeptic to mask the fact that I'm interested in this stuff.

I love the idea of the paranormal, but I've never had an experience that I can't chalk up to me freaking myself out.

/more's the pity
//ghosts are cool
-------------------------------------------------
I'm completely with ya, Joe. I'd love to see a ghose, but I'd freak the fark out, I'm fairly certain.

I was helping my in-laws clean out a house for an estate sale (they're antique dealers). I was working on the stairs leading to the attic, where the owner had a narrow path up the middle with stuff stacked on the steps on each side. The stairs made a 108 u-turn, and I was crawling up the stairs on my knees, handing things back to my wife behind me, when I swore I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a furry medium-sized black dog just around the edge of the 180-turn, leaning downward in that doggish "what'cha doing on the floor?" pose that dogs are so good at. I turned my head, and it seemed to me that the dog turned and went up the stairs; I stood and looked further, and saw nothing on the stairs, and the door at the top of the stairs was closed.

All I said to my wife was, "I thought I saw a ghost," but nothing else for fear of spooking my daughter, who was helping.

Later, as we were going through boxes up in the attic, pulling out personal items from the sellable stuff, my wife suddenly exclaimed, "Oh! Look at the picture of this dog!"

Sure enough, the dog was a dark, furry dog, about knee-tall to a person, and a darn close match to what I saw on the stairs. The dog's name was 'Curly,' and based on the several photos we found he had been a very beloved part of the family. On one picture, they even wrote when Curly died: March 1943.

You can see some of the pictures here -- the family didn't want Curly's photos, so they let us have them.

This is my only brush with the possible supernatural...

Home from college, I was visiting a friend who had a co-worker whose house was supposedly haunted. We were invited to go back to their place to chill and hang out. The home owner's daughter said that they had numerous odd occurances in the house, including billiard balls smacking together in the middle of the night on the basement pool table.

Then she opened a photo album and produced a Polaroid photo of a group of people dancing in their dining room during some hoilday party they had. It looked as if someone had stood on the living room couch and shot the photo above the crowd of a dozen people in blurry mid-moves. Projected clearly in the back of the crowd, on the panes of glass of a china cabinet was the bust of some bearded hippie dude with glaring eyes, semi-tranparent. He was hovering and staring right into the camera. Pale and deliberate, it made the hair stand on the back of my neck.

This guy was never at the party. Turns out that back in the early 1970's a guy who fit that description had hung himself in the attic of the house.

Since 1984 I've had that visage burned in my brain, and that photo was either a total hoax or the real thing. The owners were adamant that it was real and that they weren't lying.

Not scary, but one of my younger brothers was born on the morning my Grandpapa died in a plane crash, so they named him Bjorn after & in honor of him. He's 16 years old & acts just like him, walks like him, rides horses just like him, likes the same foods, likes little old ladies [just kidding], like I said, not scary just odd. Bjorn,IV is the only member of the entire family that doesn't like flying.

Have an older sister that says she can sense when one of us siblings is in danger or having a stressful day. She'll call or email us in the middle of the night. Have recommended she get some help....even if I'm in trouble or had a near one, I tell her everything is great just to piss her off.

Neat stories, enjoyed reading some of em.

I sat in a delayed airplane the runway at LaGuardia for four hours in the immediate vicinity of someone who had mastered silent and deadly farting, and apparently also just ate a dozen soft-boiled eggs.

I believe the farts themselves were tiny ghosts, because they haunted my nose all night.

tkdan28 - I don't know if you were trying to make a joke, but that is so sick it can't even remotely be considered funny.. I mean, we're talking about October in Massachusetts, it's way too farking cold to be doing that sort of thing outside!

/not really gay.
//not that there's anything wrong with that.

Prank call

Man, that's just the web equivilant of a c0ck-tease.

In 1974 at Orlando's Disney World, I was trapped in the "Its a Small World" ride for 45 minutes because of a breakdown.

I was nine years old, so I thought it was cool then. True Story.

Check this link out, Sqube.

See also: Flying Spaghetti Monster, Invisible Pink Unicorn

Prank Call of Cthulhu - quarter hour? Try the reciprocal for a more accurate estimate.

Totally good story though. Freaked me out good and proper and that is far from easy.

Bah, "ghose" should be "ghost". I should read my posts.

Last weekend my husband and I celebrated our 12 anniversary by spending the weekend in Estes Park and spending most of Saturday at The Stanley Hotel. We took the ghost tour then had lunch. Sadly, we saw nothing unusal, but heard some good tales!

One time I was on the toilet and I was dropping a fierce duce. This was a big one and my farts sounded like screaming banshees. When I stood up and turned around, the toilet was empty!!

/has nothing else to contribute
//came from the thead a few years back.

joan of fark

your story scared the be-jeebus out of me. i need to be held.

;'

ChadM89: Check this link out, Sqube.

See also: Flying Spaghetti Monster, Invisible Pink Unicorn

"The lack of good nature is strong in this one, Luke"

I love teh scary stories. Mine... not too scary. Just a bit harder to explain. I was at a friend's house when I was about 19 years old. I've always been into the unexplained and stories pertaining to it; and true to form, I coaxed out of him how his place was haunted. He and his mom, there at the time, were going on and on about coming back from vacations and seeing the dishes stacked on the counter, and how with no one else home the phone would stop working just after a phone call because the bedroom phone was now off the hook, etc. etc.

So, we break out the Ouija board. Our rules were thus - rest the board on the knees of two sitting people facing each other, fingertips on planchette, no resting hands arms on the board (no table!), eyes closed. Anyone could ask a question, and the question could be repeated, but don't ask a smattering of questions until one gets answered. A third person would write down what the board said.

It was obvious they were in cahoots. The mom started first, with my buddy doing the writing; and I could feel her pulling the planchette fairly forcefully along. I struggled to keep my hands on the damned thing... it wasn't moving super fast, just firmly and steadily, but with sudden turns. The suspected spirit was some girl/young lady who lived there before cars. I don't know about this. I know the general area was supposed to be orchards or some such in the 1800's but it seemed pretty fishy. At one point, I'm ready to call bullshiat, and ask to see the notes. I knew my friend was a bad speller, and sure enough, bad spelling. The mom says she's tired of sitting there. They switch and now he's pulling that thing pretty hard. I sometimes peek to look surreptitiously at him, and he has a look of concentration, but his eyes are closed. So we're going along, and I'm irritated by their shenanigans when suddenly their beagle starts barking. It startles us both, because he was right below the board and barking loud. We both look at him, our hands not on the planchette, and he's staring straight at the board barkin. We look back and the planchette is still moving, no contact with either of us, at the steady pace. We look at each other, put our hands back on, and keep going.

Teh Weirdest thing I've ever seen.

Growing up in a small country town Walkersville Md. I had a friend living in an old old city home. *chimney/fireplace in the middle of the house* His sister was into wicca and played with the ouija board with her friend for fun. There was a person that talked to them so they claimed on a regular basis. An older man but very little detail about him was ever given when asked. Sonja had asked many different times that the "spirit" reveal himself. Nothing happened and the board was put away... I thought that it was all bullshiat and went back to watching the Redskins game with Kenny.

It was getting late the game was over and Sonja was in her PJ's as she was getting ready for bed. Ken and I were just shooting the shiat and She come running out of the bathroom creaming like sometihing out of a horror movie and crying.

We were all shocked and her step dad calmed her down enough to tell us that while brushing her teeth a man appeared in the mirror...

Her fear was real and this story still send chills some 25 years later.

My Grandmother and Great-Aunt rented a house during WWII that they swore was haunted. My Great Uncle was a spy/interpreter so he access to some things it was harder for the average GI to get...like silk stockings. Anyway, Alice & Grandma Helen noticed that things were missing (like the stockings and their grocery money) pretty often, so they locked them up..in a box only the two of them had keys to. No dice...they'd open the box and it would have been cleaned out. Then they started hearing heavy footsteps in the night going up and down the stairs and through the hallway, cold breezes where there was no explanation for them, etc. They did a bit of research and learned that there had been a murder/suicide in the house and promptly moved out. Suddenly they realized why the house had been such a good deal and why no one stayed there very long.

Grandma Helen passed away in January of this year at 101 yrs. old. My Mom went to visit her in the hospital when she was in her final days and happened to hit a time when she was very lucid (she lived by herself until 3 months before she died and she was never senile or otherwise batty except for the last week or so before she passed away in which she was in-and-out of it). Anyway, in a very lucid moment she told my Mom how the father of my cousin-by-marriage whom she'd only met once or twice had come to visit her and told her that it was ok to move on to the "other side." In Grandma Helen's trademark logical way she went on to say to my Mom, "Well, at first I couldn't figure out why the "Other Side" didn't send your father or even Bob (my Dad), but then I realized that I probably would have thought I hallucinated that. Uncle Jack though? I barely knew him. Random." It seemed to ease her mind though, which was nice.

I kinda like the idea of an emissary being sent to usher you off to your next plane of existence. I think Grandma Helen did too. She was pretty psyched to get the fark outta here by the end and see what was next anyhow.

Prank Call of Cthulhu (or anyone else that read the Ted the Caver story:

Does the story end before Ted and Joe go back to the cave for closure? I can't get the page after that to load :(

The scariest thing in the world would be if they gave Sinbad another TV show.

/obscure?
//freaka-me
///freaka-you

A couple things having to do with my wifes grandfathers death. It's a lot of incidents, but worth the read:

He had a heart attack while driving from his home to his farm, where he worked every day. He ended up going into a persons yard and running right into their willow tree, and was found with his tires still spinning when someone drove by (home owners were at work.)

Wierd thing was, the passerby shut off the truck to stop the wheels and see if Ron was ok (of course, he wasn't.) He swears up and down that he never took them out of the ignition and the sheriff attests to the same. Yet, they were missing, along with the garage door opener (which he and grandma used instead of the locked garage door on the side.)

Well, they just assumed that someone must have snatched them, but no body new when. People were around the truck the whole time. But, still, no big deal. Grandma changed the locks and got a new garage door opener, to make sure whomever had these items never tried to rob the place.

Well, about three months later, Ron's cell phone is still sitting in a drawer, and has been deactivated since a couple days after he died. Grandma's phone rings, and whomever it is hangs up. Not knowing how to check the last call made, Grandma has her daughter in law check for her. The last recieved call was Rons old phone number, recieved not five minutes ago, and the number had been canceled for the last three months. Everyone goes white in the face, and Grandma runs over and pulls open the drawer with the phone only to find the keys (HUGE farmers keyring with every key he's ever owned on it) and the old garage door opener sitting next to it. The phone doesn't even turn on due to a lack of battery power.

But, even before that, my wife and daughter went up to his funeral (I had to work, so I stayed in Virginia and didn't go to Michigan with them.) My daughter wasn't even a year old yet, but she decided to take her because she figured it would help her Mom and Grandma to have something cute to focus on.

Well, Grandpa (Ron) had a weird habit of blinking hard. Meaning, he squinted and contorted his entire face when he blinked (blunk?) Maybe all the years in corn/bean fields and automotive shops caused it, we don't know. But it was something we had only seen him do.

Well, upon arrival at my mother-in-laws house, my nine month old daughter starts doing this weird, hard, squinting blink, and smiling every time she does it (like someone is playing "peek-a-boo with her.) NO ONE else in the family has this habit, so she didn't pick it up from any of them. But she kept doing it the entire time they were in Michigan, and for about a week after they got back down to Virginia. And I can tell you, it was the exact same way Ron always used to blink. She had never done this before, and has never done it since.

Ron was a stubborn old coot, that's for sure. To stubborn to go without letting people know he was still around and kicking, I suppose. Freaked us all out, to be sure.

When I was nine years old I was on a camping trip with my class in Yosemite(no, not band camp). I brought a ouija with me for fun. It was four or five kids to a tent and the girls in my tent were all for playing with the creepy thing. As is typical of 9 year-olds, the novelty wore off quickly and no one except me wanted to continue playing after about ten minutes. I had heard you should never play with one alone, but I wasn't done and by golly it's just a game! No sooner did I ask it a question then the light hanging from the top of the tent was hit very forcefully by something and the light went out (the girls were all in their sleeping bags when this happened). I've never touched a ouija board since.

When I was about 15, I was sitting at home alone watching TV on the couch. Behind the wall where the couch sat was the kitchen and dining room (all cheapie linoleum). All of a sudden I heard what sounded like a bowling ball drop on the floor of the kitchen and roll towards me, as it grew closer I could feel it and it eventually slammed against the couch very hard, just as a bowling ball would do. It was not uncommon in that house to hear sonic booms or to have earthquakes, but this was nothing of that sort. I am sure it was some kind of explainable Phenomenon, but it freaked me out at the time.

My aunt's house that she use to live in was haunted. She told me there was a guy who use to walk around the outside of her house... he had white hair, white overalls and a hat. She thought he was a neighbor until one night he walked in front of her car and vanished in thin air.

When she got married, my uncle commented that he tried to talk to "the neighbor" but the neighbor wouldn't talk back. He described the guy and my aunt said "Oh, him... yeah apparently he's dead"

I went there several times, unfortunately I never saw a thing.

rickythepenguin: The Shine told me her purse was in the store. And it was.

What does the Shine say about my San Diego Chargers?!?!

thank you ronin, for wasting 5 minutes of my life...

groan...

Great stories - LarsThorwald and ReleasetheHounds nearly made me cry!

Can I please take this opportunity to point out that Samhain is NOT pronounced "SAM HANE" like Dr. Loomis in Hallowe'en thinks it is??! It's pronounced "sow-ann" with the emphasis on the "sow".

(The full Irish phrase for Hallowe'en night is "Oiche Samhain" which sounds like "ee-ha sow-ann")

Good to get that off my chest - I love that film, but that bugs me every time I watch it.

Free Radical: Footage of ghost child (pops)

Very convincing and appropriate here in this thread.

Happy Halloween!

Free Radical wants to party like it's 2001!

I'm just out of of a haunted house, where I've been living the last two years. Crazily haunted. Every person I ever had visit me--and this includes entire parties at once--has had something happen to them. I'd have friends over, and they'd say "Oh, I didn't know you had a cat!" I don't. But nearly every person who came into the house would see a lovely little chocolate-brown kitty. She'd run down the stairs and disappear, or twine between your ankles for a moment, or sit on top of the couch and look at you one second, and then be gone the next.

The basement was horrible. Each floor was haunted differently--the basement was malign. Sometimes there would be the sound of mens' voices chanting and singing, sometimes there would be laughter. The lights would flicker and dim, though that's easily enough explained away in an old house. I had one friend in particular come to my house for a birthday party(Halloween is my birthday), look very frightened and then leave; the next day, she informed me that she'd been dreaming of my house for years without ever seeing it before, and that something in the basement, in the dreams, always wanted to eat her. She described my basement flawlessly, down to the number of bicycles in the right-hand room, and the broken washers, and the stack of forty-year-old Playboys.

The third floor was where I lived, the attic space. Whatever was in the attic space was benign, and a lot of fun. She looked a lot like a fourteen-year-old girl, redheaded, and she had a physical form at times--at the same party the other friend took off from, she crept up behind one of my guy friends and squeezed him on the ass, and giggled. And when people bedded down for the night,too tired or drunk to go home, she slid into bed with one of them and let out a happy, happy sigh right into his ear. She liked to open the bathroom window when it snowed.

Two years of this stuff going on got a bit tiresome, though. I miss Upstairs Girl a little, but the other two floors were...not nice enough to stay, when I had somewhere else to go.

Years ago I used to work at the Seelbach hotel downtown. And the top floor is only used when the rest of the hotel is booked, so it goes a long time between uses. It's mostly ballrooms/meeting rooms, and maybe ten regular rooms total up there. I had been sent up to do some "freshening" before a big party booking, and was working alone. Typically roomskeepers work in pairs. I was straightening beds, spraying air freshener, and dusting, that sort of thing. I was sort of on my guard already because I'd been caught watching TV in the rooms and gotten in trouble for that. So my nerves WERE a little on edge already. Anyway- I kept feeling like someone was watching me. Kept thinking it was my supervisor trying to catch me with the TV on again. (I didn't have it on.) This one room, at the corner, is laid out differently than the rest. In that room, the mirror is opposite the door to the hallway, not next to it as is normal in all the others. I was making the bed and I got that feeling of being watched, again. So I look over my shoulder- Nobody there. I turn around to pull on the bedspread (straighten a wrinkle) and there, in the mirror in front of me, I can see a woman standing in the doorway. All I could see was her head, over my shoulder. White woman, light coloured hair, bland expression- no malice or anything. But the room got freezing cold and I had the awfullest feeling. I turn around, and look over my shoulder into the doorway- and she wasn't there. But turn back- she was still in the mirror-doorway. I could not get out of there fast enough, all the skin on my whole body was crawling. It was so weird, because I'd always thought I'd be fascinated if I ever saw something like that, saw a ghost, whatever- but at the time, the physical experience was like that of taking sick, sudden, and dreadful. Couldn't get warm, and had the whole Flight or Fight thing going on.

Apparently apparitions on the tenth floor are not unusual, but they're not harmful either. I didn't go back up there that day, they had to get someone else to finish my rooms, I was too shaken up.