FARK.com: (10605004) Gather around, Farkers, it's time for Fark's 16th annual spooky story thread. Get into the Halloween spirit and share your true ghost/scary stories. 👻 Farkers who bring up politics get thrown in the dungeon ☠

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		Gather around, Farkers, it's time for Fark's 16th annual spooky story thread. Get into the Halloween spirit and share your true ghost/scary stories. 👻 Farkers who bring up politics get thrown in the dungeon ☠ (fark.com)		122
		More: Creepy, Figure It Out, Existential quantification, hard time, closest thing, Good thing, lifelong friend, last year, first time

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1393 clicks; posted to Main » and Discussion » on 31 Oct 2019 at 9:05 PM (1 year ago) | Favorite | share:

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Squid_for_Brains

2019-10-31 11:19:50 AM

33 votes:

I'm a curious skeptic, and an atheist-with-benefits; I know that the natural world is far stranger than we realize, and also that I don't know everything.
That being said, I might as well be psychically deaf. I've lived in several spooky old houses, hung out in graveyards, been 3rd shift security for two museums housed on old grounds or in old buildings, been ghost hunting, and to this day I think I've accidentally been the cause of more ghost stories than the recipient.
Another example: I've been camping in the same woods with the same fool friends for 30 years. We're nice people, but we're...an acquired taste. And our annual camping date used to be around Halloween.
So, around 2015 my husband and I were giving motorcycle camping a try, up the ridge from the usual spot. We are completely alone in a deserted campground...nowhere near, I might add, the Northwest Coast. In fact, we're slightly south of Indianapolis. So imagine my surprise when an all-black suv (with blacked-out windows) roars up and steps right in front of us. An older couple get out, looking this way and that, and hand me this card:

They haven't even said hello. I'm pretty much speechless in mutual embarrassment, because after a moment of questioning, I discover that these south-of-Indianapolis Sasquatch sightings go back roughly 20 years, about the time my 6'4" idiot friend discovered Ghillie suits and insisted on wearing one every year:

I pulled up the photo and tried to explain, but their eyes glazed over, they turned around, got in their creepy suv, and roared off without saying goodbye.
Seriously, folks, I'm not trying to yuck anyone's yum here, but Bigfoot doesn't live south of Indianapolis. I apologize for my idiot friends and any confusion we might have caused.

This guy, however:

Catsquatch is out there. And if you don't fill up his mug with butt drugs, there's no telling what he might do.

💀

Witchyman

2019-10-31 6:29:00 PM

26 votes:

I used to drive tractor trailer for a large 'salty snack' company. I delivered to the guys who deliver the stuff to the stores.

So I catch a run I've never done before. Up through Western Massachusetts and into the sticks Vermont. I start at midnight, knock out Massachusetts and head for Vermont. The place I'm delivering to is a huge building. Paperwork says how to get inside and that I should back the trailer into the building to make it easier. As I'm unlocking everything I notice that the part of the building not being used for chip storage used to be a crematorium. Still has faded signs and stuff. So I back the truck in and start the delivery.

After about five trips in with a hand truck full of chips, I start hearing bangs and slamming noises coming from the other part of the building. It's winter so I am trying to blow it off as the wind in an old building. As I keep working I still hear the noise. It's loud, and while I'm a pretty brave dude I'm starting to get a little spooked.

Leave the hand truck and start walking to the other part of the building. There is a waist high wall separating the two sides. I get to the wall and lean in, trying to see what I could see. Whole area is dark as fark.

And then the horse that is stabled there leans over and snuffles my hair. Damn near pissed myself and died of a heart attack.

Calypsocookie

2019-10-30 4:14:10 PM

24 votes:

I told this story in a thread a couple weeks ago asking why Walmart is so eager to hire more teenagers. I know why and you should all know too, please protect your children.

Here's my story:

Worked for 3 months at a local Walmart when I was 16. That's all it took to crush my young soul.
I go visit the remains when I shop for frozen peas.

That's where they keep the remains of the souls you see.

In the pea section of the freezer.

Squid_for_Brains

2019-10-31 10:18:48 AM

22 votes:

It's the late 1990s. Imagine you're a sheltered, trying-to-be hippie girl out on a summer night with her teenage friends. They have some weed and a few hits of weak acid, but nowhere to go that is quiet, private, and dark.
Then one friend mentions that he knows of an old, old cemetery on a bluff above the river. The woods are thick and it's undeveloped except for some bike trails. It sounds scary, but you grab your tent and go. You have to hike an abandoned field and climb a hill to get there. And even in the sunset, it's spooky as hell: old gravestones are everywhere, at every angle, some only nubs of stone and most bearing the same two surnames. There has been no burial there for a century.
Your friends build a small fire while you pitch the tent. You start to feel better. No one will find you here: it's time to party. You take your dose and pass a joint as darkness falls. One guy starts a round of ghost stories, of course. You laugh, but with the first mild acid-tingle and the firelight flickering over the canted stones, that tingle becomes a chill.
Someone says he sees faces. You tell him it's the acid. He repeats himself, with urgency. You look, to humor him.
And you see them too.
Just beyond the stones and on the periphery of the firelight, two ghostly faces. They fade, then appear again. Your friend is freaked and now you are too. Hallucinations aren't shared. Someone else whispers: "What the fark...?" and just like that, terror.
One figure seems to be a woman: old-fashioned spectacles, dark hair parted in the center, long black dress. The other is a man with sideburns and a cravat. They seem to fade again.
Someone whispers that people who died in the Civil War are buried here. You want to leave, right now, and never come back.
But then the faces return, along with a voice:
"Uh, hi!"
And you realize, as you start laugh-crying in relief, that you've been staring at a goth girl (me) and her boyfriend who came to drink wine like pretentious assholes, found our spot occupied, and stood there awkwardly in the dark while we decided to advance or retreat.

mikaloyd

2019-10-30 3:23:39 PM

22 votes:

Pass.
Too many wet blanket atheists in here to share my ghost or UFO tales again

Resident Muslim

2019-10-31 6:05:50 AM

21 votes:

The Irrelevant Gamer: I'm a bit of a skeptic, but I do have one creepy, possibly supernatural story.

The house I grew up in had a loud knocking sound for as long as I can remember. It was usually late at night, but sometimes it happened in the middle of the day when I was home alone. I was a night owl, and sick a lot as a kid so I was up late or home sick pretty often. I heard the knocking all the time, and was used to it. I never regarded it as supernatural. I just figured it was pipes, or the house settling. It was an old house.

The only strange thing about the knocking is that it always came in pairs. It was loud and clear, and sounded like two distinct knocks on my bedroom wall. It was always the same place on the wall, and always the wall that had the stairs to our unfinished basement on the other side.

Two other details of my parents' house might be relevant. My bed was pushed up against the wall in question so I slept against it, and at the foot of my bed was a closet. It used to be a door to another room, but my dad converted it to an extra closet because there had been a weirdly small hallway between the rooms.

In my late teens I began experiencing sleep paralysis, which is creepy, but not necessarily supernatural, depending on what you believe. Being a nerd, I had researched it, and thought it was just a medical condition.

One night I woke up unable to move, but on that night I saw a figure standing at the foot of my bed. My room was completely black, but I could see a deeper black shape in the darkness. It looked like a tall, skinny woman with a huge mass of hair. I felt like she was staring at me. While I watched, she raised her left arm to the wall, and knocked twice. I heard the familiar sound, and let out a breath as I was suddenly able to move again. I blinked, and she was gone.

I've gone back over that night in my head a million times, and I still don't know if what I experienced was supernatural, or just some weird combination of sleep paralysis, and the knocking. I could write it off as a typical case of sleep paralysis hallucination, except how did my mind known when the knock was going to come?

I never saw the figure again. I still get sleep paralysis on rare occasions, but nothing like the regularity it had back then. The knocking never stopped. My parents still live in that house, but converted my bedroom into a laundry room. Nobody sleeps there anymore.

I am glad that you are fine and came out of that experience unscathed, because it is obvious that you broke the ritual.
The appropriate response to hearing those two knocks was to ask in a loud voice: "Who's there?"

Resident Muslim

2019-10-31 7:04:18 AM

20 votes:

The Irrelevant Gamer: Resident Muslim: I am glad that you are fine and came out of that experience unscathed, because it is obvious that you broke the ritual. The appropriate response to hearing those two knocks was to ask in a loud voice: "Who's there?

Notsureifserious.jpeg

Ok, it seems I wasn't clear.
Let me initiate the ritual and follow with me...
Knock, knock..

steklo

2019-10-30 3:21:49 PM

19 votes:

I don't have any spooky stories. All my stories involve sex and granted I'm a scary looking guy but I don't think that's what they want.

Fark_Guy_Rob

2019-10-31 2:22:06 AM

17 votes:

My house is haunted. I'm not trolling or writing fiction... It really is haunted, as far as I'm concerned.

My wife and I moved in about three years ago. A nice 3 bed, 2 bath in the suburbs of Chicago. Big 1/2 acre yard. Quiet street. The house was sold by the previous owner's estate...a sweet old lady who died. I met her two of her children (probably around fifty years old if I had to guess at the closing). The guy even gave me cell number to call if we had any problems.

Nice family. Nice house.

Everything was great until the first night. There was something wrong with the master bedroom. It's hard to explain, but I just felt...bad... In that room. If you were ever a bad student and you knew your report card was mailed home, but you didn't know when it would show up... That feeling of dread in the back of your mind. It was like that.

I couldn't sleep. I would wake up in the middle of the night. I had bad dreams. Sometimes I thought I heard noises, and I would get up and look out the windows, but there was never anything there.

I'm not religious. I don't believe in aliens. I didn't believe in ghosts... But I wondered... Did the lady die in this room? Was her spirit keeping me up? It was just so weird.

Sometimes I would sleep in the couch. No problems in the living room. Just the master bedroom. As silly as it sounds, I hated living in the house.

Here is the thing I forgot to mention, my backyard has a 10 foot easement, followed by another 10 feet on the other side of the property. That twenty feet is all trees and bushes, like a tiny forest... the entire length of the property.

After those 20 feet of trees, there is a parking lot. It's actually a local energy company. You can't see it at all, you can't hear it... Or can you?

As it turns out, I have much better hearing than my wife. She did not feel the presence of the old lady, and the master bedroom is the room nearest this building... And it had the worst windows.

Barely audible sounds were f***ing with my mind.

Got new windows last year, never had a problem since. Or... Maybe... The old lady's soul was put to rest because she finally got new windows for her bedroom......

You be the judge.

Resident Muslim

2019-10-31 12:38:32 AM

15 votes:

Fine. I get it. Those sounds of steps behind me as I walk down this dark alley are just the echos of my own feet. That's why they stop when I do and start again when I walk.
But WHY the snickering?!

RPG_Guy

2019-10-31 4:05:27 PM

14 votes:

I joined the high school debate team back in 2001ish. For those of you that don't know, in Oklahoma, debate tournaments typically happen on Friday evening. They'll run from around 3 pm until 9-10 in the evening. Each round is approximately an hour long - maybe more depending on the format, and you travel across the whole region to go to different tournaments.

This particular tournament took place at Bethany High School, which was about two hours away from home. I was kind of grateful, because that meant that we got out of class around noon, and then we got to go on a trip. So that was great. It was November, so all the leaves had fallen off the trees. It's my time of year. Being the resident fat kid, cool air is kind of my thing, but anyway... So, our last round ended at 10, and we started back to my hometown, which is another tiny Oklahoma town with about 2000 or so people in it. Of course, since it's November, it's already dark when we leave. Did I mention I forgot to go to the bathroom before we left Bethany? Yeah... I'd been holding it since around 8 PM, so the whole time I'm sitting there needing to go, and my debate coach was kind of a douche, and didn't want to stop anywhere. So I hold it...

We get back to our school around midnight. No one is around but the debate team. We crowd around the door with our evidence boxes, waiting for our slow-poke of a debate coach to open the doors so we can call our parents, and put our debate equipment away for the night. On the way to the bathroom, I duck into the speech room, and place my evidence box on the stage, and start heading for the bathroom.

I get to the intersection of the two big hallways in the main high school building. Now, mind you, it is dead quiet in this hallway - though I can hear some murmurings from back toward the speech room. I look down this highschool hallway, toward the restrooms, and it's just this long empty hallway and at the end, there is a single light on at the end. I don't know why, but there's something about that hallway - late at night - that just raises the hackles on the back of my neck. I decide that I can wait until Mom comes and gets me and takes me home because I REALLY don't want to go down this hallway. So, I start back toward the speechroom. I get half way back to the speech room, and my bladder lets me know that there is no freaking way that it is going to wait until I get home. So, I turn back.

I get back to the intersection. I take a deep breath and steel myself for the lonesome walk down the darkened hallway.

It's not a very long walk - relatively speaking - from the intersection to the men's room, but there's got to be some obscure law of metaphysics that time passes slowly when you're worried. A thousand stories flash through my mind. Stories that I've heard about what happens in this high school late at night. The rational part of my brain is telling me that they're just stories. Some of them aren't even well written. No, no one tied up some outlaws in the school's boiler room just after the civil war and left them to starve. The school isn't nearly that old. But supposedly, a janitor died in what is now the copy room a few decades back.

Again, I want you to understand, that at a guess, the walk from the intersection to the bathroom is maybe 30 feet, but as I carefully tread down this hallway, time seems to flow at a sloth's pace. I remember a story about how a stack of chairs randomly flew across a room at a student after hours in the band room which was just behind me. I'm not sure how much stock I put in this story, but your mind does funny things when you're alone in a darkened hallway at midnight in November.

Finally, I get to the door. I take a deep breath, and open the door. There's a window on the other end of the restroom, and it lets a little sliver of moonlight snake in. The bathroom lights are off, but by the light of this single beam of light, I see a figure. This figure is totally shrouded in shadow, and it is standing directly in front of the sink, and for a moment, I just stare at it, and then it notices me.

"Oh...!" I said a word that my mother wouldn't be very proud to hear me say.

The figure tilts its head, looks at me, and then utters a phrase that I will remember to my dying day:

"Ummmmmmmmmmm...... I'm telling Mrs. Smith!" and with that, Thomas bounded past me, down the hallway and back to the speech room in search of someone to tattle to.

smokewon

2019-10-31 10:50:39 PM

12 votes:

When my daughter was two we lived in Phoenix. I worked in the morning, her mother and I both went to school and then her mother worked at night. After school my daughter and I would nap out on the floor for an hour or so where it was coolest. One afternoon/early evening I awoke to an overpowering aroma that I couldn't recognize but it was chemical. Just stinging the nose and watering the eyes overpowering. My daughter was nowhere in my immediate vicinity but looking around as I shook off my nap I started noticing little red smears of a thicker substance here and there around the apartment, all around a toddler's height. Smears on the stereo cabinet, smears on the divider bar, smears on the walls and on the floor. Panicked I shouted my daughter's name but got only silence. The smell seemed suffocating in the heat. I staggered up to my feet and into the hallway where I found her, frozen stiff with fear from having gotten caught playing with nail polish.

Fightin' Helmfish

2019-10-31 3:06:02 PM

12 votes:

My little ones used to claim there's a "grandfather" that lives in the attic, but so far as we can tell the house isn't haunted. The master bathroom has a low flow toilet though, so it's kind of the same

szyska

2019-10-31 12:51:39 PM

12 votes:

Not exactly scary but I grew up in New England close to one of the oldest cemeteries in America. It has headstones going back to the late 1600's to about the mid 1800's. It has this one above ground crypt (low level rectangular brick with a granite lid) that every few Halloweens gets broken into. Some kids will try and push the cover off thinking they'll see a skeleton or something not realizing that what ever was originally put in there turned to dust long ago. My mother is on the local historical commission and over the years said commission has tried to stop this activity. I suggested that they rig it so the top opens easily and put a little note inside explaining things and/or on Halloween have someone in there ready to pop out. But that's just me.

SansNeural

2019-10-31 12:47:41 AM

12 votes:

Resident Muslim: Fine. I get it. Those sounds of steps behind me as I walk down this dark alley are just the echos of my own feet. That's why they stop when I do and start again when I walk.
But WHY the snickering?!

They say you walk funny. *shrugs*

Keeve

2019-10-31 1:45:31 AM

11 votes:

RogermcAllen: I read in the early thread that a lot of ghost events are caused by infrasound (low frequencies you feel more than hear). I looked it up an youtube and sure enough it worked. I don't ever get anxious, but I could feel myself getting anxious almost immediately after listening. Even after I turned off the sound shadows would dance at the corners of my vision as I walked through the dark house to bed and every creak was something behind me ready to jump out. It was a really trippy experience. I suggest you load this up, and listen while you read the thread.

I've heard about this too. The theory is that this sound resonates with the brain in a way that triggers the "fight or flight" response.

Or it could be that this sound frequency attracts demonic spirits which attach themselves to the closest living spirit (usually the person listening to the sound), thus haunting and tormenting them forever.

But that's probably not true...

Resident Muslim

2019-10-31 12:59:11 AM

11 votes:

"...and that's when I realized I had given her my real name and number!"

/I'm going for shorts this year, it seems :)

Devo

2019-10-31 4:55:16 PM

10 votes:

No Ghosts in here in SF. They can't afford the rent.

ifky

2019-10-31 10:03:42 PM

9 votes:

About ten minutes ago the hook holding a picture to the wall failed. Startled the hell out of me.

Tharkin

2019-10-31 4:52:04 PM

9 votes:

Today at work I got a Facebook message from a name I didn't recognize. It read simply " Were you Tharkin on Fark?" Well yes, I was, and still am I guess though I probably haven't posted in most of a decade. That feeling of "oh no, what did I do?" was probably the spookiest thing that's happened to me today (so far!)

Turns out she was following up on a story I posted in this very thread like 7 or 8 years ago. Pretty cool! I'm about to take the kids out for trick or treat, but I'll check in later to read up on everyone's spooky stories this year.

SansNeural

2019-10-31 1:22:06 PM

9 votes:

DisseminationMonkey: Here are all the previous spooky story threads from each year since it started:
2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018

Going by "Smart" votes, yours is the 13th scariest story in this thread so far.

Honest Geologist

2019-10-31 11:42:24 AM

9 votes:

And of course, the sp000kiest place of all:

Non Sequitur Man

2019-10-31 7:18:03 AM

9 votes:

One night, I went to Dissemination Monkey's place and Drew was there, and they had a creepy Bo Burnham doll and....

Oh god! Why am I still up?!?

Dick Hammer

2019-10-31 10:00:30 PM

8 votes:

Ok not really a ghost story, but the closest thing I have.

I once got lured into visiting family that I hadn't seen in 20 years, for the promise of a bogus job-prospect. While there I was trying to avoid my relatives as much as possible so I spent many days just driving aimlessly around the rural parts of the state. One one such trip I was gripped by a sudden painful need to urinate. There was nothing around but farms and woods, but enough traffic that I didn't feel comfortable just stopping & going on the roadside; I had already been stopped three times in one week in different towns by the same bored state-trooper, so I was trying to keep out of trouble. Finally I rounded a bend and saw a puny little old cemetery by the roadside. The urge to urinate was desperate, I pulled in and tried to pull to the back for privacy from the road but I stopped and hopped out at a random spot when I knew I couldn't hold it anymore, ducked behind a stone and whizzed. Walked around to the front of the stone and it was my Great Grandmother & Grandfather's stone. They both had very unique names and though I'd never met them, I'd never forgotten my mother telling me their weird names when I was little.

Coincidence? Yeah, probably. Or my psychic-telepathy-spirit-urine, you decide.

ObscureNameHere

2019-10-31 8:40:35 PM

8 votes:

namegoeshere: Also it is pouring rain, thunder and lightning, windy as hell, I'm alone in the house, my kid is out doing Halloween stuff, the power keeps browning out. and the Emergency Broadcast System just went off. Someone please come hang out with me.

No psychos though, please.

*turns around dejectedly, kicks the sand in frustration *

boyvoyeur

2019-10-31 4:39:31 PM

8 votes:

This one time in 1991, I got married.

That's my scary story.

LawrencePerson

2019-10-31 11:06:27 PM

7 votes:

True Halloween story from tonight.

After I turned off the strobe lights, I leave a bold of candy for any stragglers sat on a chair outside my front door.

When I came home from walking my dog, one of the little bastards had stolen my bowl...

SansNeural

2019-10-31 1:37:26 PM

7 votes:

Walker: That pain stayed with me days and it hurt a lot. I had never felt pain in that area before or since

Don't be too concerned. It was a helpful spirit dislodging a kidney stone before it got to big to pass. Musta been a small one that got stuck near the top of the ureter before finally straightening up and moving on out.

Non Sequitur Man

2019-10-31 1:29:01 AM

7 votes:

Can I be thrown in the dungeon and not mention politics?

That might be fun.

Non Sequitur Man

2019-10-31 1:08:13 AM

7 votes:

Wendigogo: Non Sequitur Man: I am SO tempted to get thrown in the dungeon.

/Tru....
//nope nope nope
///eeek! slashies!

[Fark user image image 425x208]

Jake Havechek

2019-10-30 9:17:26 PM

7 votes:

I remember when my relief showed up I said, "nothing to pass on, quiet night, no issues". Then I got the hell out of there.

Mock26

2019-10-31 10:44:22 PM

6 votes:

About 8 years ago my friends lived on a busy street just about in the heart of a big University campus here in Chicago (DePaul University, on Fullerton). They were going to be at a party the night scheduled for trick or treating and asked me if I wanted to hand out candy for them. I agreed. I showed up wearing this massive black monk's cloak with a cowl that completely covered my face. I borrowed some string and an 8-inch fake spider they had and strung it up over the sidewalk and ran the string to the railing on their porch and put a loop in it. the spider naturally hung about 5' off the ground and if I pulled on the string it was about 9' off the ground and partially hidden among the shadowy branches. I then sat on the porch, bowl of candy next to me, wine skin full of wine on the other side, with the loop on my finger and the spider pulled up. With the porch light above my head I looked like a dummy. I scared more than a few people coming up the steps. But, the best part of the evening was letting go of that string and having the spider drop down about 4 to 5 feet in front of people walking on the sidewalk. I got a lot of screams that night!

One of my favorites was a group of university students walking and one guy happened to see the spider from a ways off and he was mocking the spider, calling it fake, saying it would not scare anyone. And when he got close he stopped, looked right up and the spider and I dropped it. He screamed like Janet Leigh in Psycho and fell on his ass as he tried to backpedal away from it. Then his friends proceeded to mock him! Another was not when I managed to scare one young woman but when she came back a little later with her friend and behind her friend's back waved and got my attention and signaled me to drop the spider for her friend. Then there was the one little girl who screamed when I accidentally dropped the spider in front of her (I had planned on only scaring people who were clearly adults or at least older teenagers). She literally jumped backwards as she screamed. She then started laughing and said, "Again! Again!" And every time she screamed and then started laughing. After about 5 or 6 times her parents told her it was time to move along (after they came up the stairs for candy). We were both disappointed about that. But I did get her one more time as she went down the stairs. It was a great night. Sadly my friends moved away before the next Halloween rolled around else I would have done it again. It really was the perfect location for such a set up.

Honest Geologist

2019-10-31 10:33:37 PM

6 votes:

Brainsick: Astorix: Another weird reincarnation story. My ex sister in law, when she was a little girl, around 4, used to describe in detail houses and events that nobody else in the family ever heard.

Her mother asked her "when did you do (or hear this)

She said "when I was a boy."

They laughed and made fun of her until she closed her mind off to it.

I wonder if when we are little kids we know more but learn to close our minds off to it. Just a thought.

My daughter is three, and very loquacious. (Go figure)
The other day she looks at my wife and says "I don't like it when the bad baby follows me. Because it's a sneaky baby and a bad baby."
0_o

/We live in an apartment complex that's the definition of boring architecture
//also live near plenty of infrasound sources
///and in the SeaTac flight path... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

We were playing in the leaf pile and the front yard the other day, and my 3-year-old decides that the path to the house is "the ugly land, the yucky land", and we had to hide behind the leaf pile like Sam and Bilbo from the eye of Sauron. I asked her why, and she said "there's a guy there that will make you eat yucky foods, like honey lemon."

Rev.K

2019-10-31 4:39:34 PM

6 votes:

I've been on Fark for 14 years and I'm just finding out this thread is a thing?

What is wrong with me?

/cool stories all

kdawg7736

2019-10-31 2:22:29 PM

6 votes:

Once upon a time there was this man and a big hungry giant. The hungry giant caught him and said "Tell me a scary story for my amusement. Afterwards, I will eat you." The man stood up in the giant's hand, cleared this throat and said...Once upon a time there was this man and a big hungry giant. The hungry giant caught him and said "Tell me a scary story for my amusement. Afterwards, I will eat you." The man stood up in the giant's hand, cleared this throat and said... Once upon a time there was this man and a big hungry giant. The hungry giant caught him and said "Tell me a scary story for my amusement. Afterwards, I will eat you." The man stood up in the giant's hand, cleared this throat and said... Once upon a time there was this man and a big hungry giant. The hungry giant caught him and said "Tell me a scary story for my amusement. Afterwards, I will eat you." The man stood up in the giant's hand, cleared this throat and said...Once upon a time there was this man and a big hungry giant. The hungry giant caught him and said "Tell me a scary story for my amusement. Afterwards, I will eat you." The man stood up in the giant's hand, cleared this throat and said... Once upon a time there was this man and a big hungry giant. The hungry giant caught him and said "Tell me a scary story for my amusement. Afterwards, I will eat you." The man stood up in the giant's hand, cleared this throat and said..._{Once upon a time there was this man and a big hungry giant. The hungry giant caught him and said "Tell me a scary story for my amusement. Afterwards, I will eat you." The man stood up in the giant's hand, cleared this throat and said... Once upon a time there was this man and a big hungry giant. The hungry giant caught him and said "Tell me a scary story for my amusement. Afterwards, I will eat you." The man stood up in the giant's hand, cleared this throat and said... Once upon a time there was this man and a big hungry giant. The hungry giant caught him and said "Tell me a scary story for my amusement. Afterwards, I will eat you." The man stood up in the giant's hand, cleared this throat and said... Once upon a time there was this man and a big hungry giant. The hungry giant caught him and said "Tell me a scary story for my amusement. Afterwards, I will eat you." The man stood up in the giant's hand, cleared this throat and said...}

ghettodwarf

2019-10-31 12:09:16 PM

6 votes:

Jake Havechek: Correction: glass wall was on my right side when I was facing the TV.

well now I don't believe any of it!!11!

Wendigogo

2019-10-31 1:00:29 AM

6 votes:

Non Sequitur Man: I am SO tempted to get thrown in the dungeon.

/Tru....
//nope nope nope
///eeek! slashies!

sherpa18

2019-10-30 11:38:26 PM

6 votes:

Bathia_Mapes: Woot, my favorite thread of the year! :)

One of mine too! I just hope that for once people will just link to and not post the same damn story they do year after freaking year. And that the non-believers stop posting their 'true stories' that are obviously bullshiat.

LineNoise

2019-10-30 4:23:34 PM

6 votes:

So 2 things mods:

1. i think this stretches back a bit further, and i think i started it, and want some name brand recognition on it.

2. I'm to lazy to post, so go check out my story in previous threads

BolshyGreatYarblocks

2019-11-01 12:02:26 AM

5 votes:

mikaloyd: Pass.
Too many wet blanket atheists in here to share my ghost or UFO tales again

Now I'm thinking about Richard Dawkins having nocturnal emissions; thanks pal.

embers of summer

2019-10-31 10:36:50 PM

5 votes:

My three year old just fell out of bed and we have to start bedtime all over again.

feanorn

2019-10-31 10:16:35 PM

5 votes:

Not spooky, but coincidental.

Having counted down the register, I finished closing down work around 10:15 pm. As I left the office, I managed to be clumsy and run into the door, bending up my glasses and leaving me with a nice little cut between the eyes.

After depositing the night bag into the bank drop (right across the parking lot, thankfully), I wandered home to my shared apartment. My roommate and his girlfriend were there, as expected, and they leapt up together, visibly excited, when I came in the door. Questions spilled out of them: "Did anything strange happen ten minutes ago? Did you feel or see something?" "I ran into a door," I answered. They both laughed, and went on to explain that ten minutes or so before they had both experienced a very strong personal feeling, one of anger and pain, and were trying to figure out what had gone on. Our conversation turned to some other, close friends of ours, and the next day we discovered that their relationship had ended just about the time my roommate and his girlfriend felt the sensation and I ran into the door. If there is any psychic connection here, the sort of thing that might play out again in the future (and I truly doubt that there is), I am not keen on the idea that I would get the stick to the knee while everyone else gets chills and odd sensations.

a particular individual

2019-10-31 4:43:54 PM

5 votes:

Rev.K: I've been on Fark for 14 years and I'm just finding out this thread is a thing?

What is wrong with me?

/cool stories all

Dude. I don't know if I'd admit that.

Keeve

2019-10-31 3:44:45 PM

5 votes:

gunshellmav: I don't know what he ever did with it, but every now and again, I bring up the 'hate book' to my wife to check if we're still cool.

Finish the story. What volume is she on?

Trik

2019-10-31 5:12:27 AM

5 votes:

OneFretAway: mikaloyd: Pass.
Too many wet blanket atheists in here to share my ghost or UFO tales again

Dang. I bet you've got some good ones.

My sister swears the house my parents lived in when she was in high school (after I left for college) was haunted. She used to hear footsteps and doors opening on the second floor routinely when nobody else was home. I didn't year any of it, and never heard this from her until a couple of decades after we moved out.

My kids swear that my 100+ year old house is haunted. I'm not saying that it is, but some of the things they point to have been on the weird side, like a light that switched itself off when nobody was in the room, strange noices, and once my younger daughter swears they say me walk past a window when I wasn't home. They came in expecting to find me there, and I showed up a minute or two later coming home from an errand.

The closest thing to an experience I've had was sitting up late at night and hearing someone audibly whisper my name in my ear. It's easy enough to pass it off as an auditory hallucination from a tired brain, but it sounded real enough for me to turn my head expecting to see someone there. I've been very happy in the house for 6+ years, so if there are ghosts we seem to get along very well.

My ex-wife had an experience with a Oija board that spelled out "Richie's dead." Minutes later, the phone rang and her parents learned that her uncle Richie had passed away that same day.

You don't have ghosts. You have deeply inbred people living in your walls, attic, under stairs.

Fightin' Helmfish

2019-10-31 2:45:05 AM

5 votes:

mikaloyd: Pass.
Too many wet blanket atheists in here to share my ghost or UFO tales again

Nah, the wet blankets are the ones that move immediately to post about sleep paralysis instead of sharing that one time their flesh goosepimpled and they can't explain it and don't want to say how often they think back on it.

if you like this thread check out some of the early ones. we're still waiting to hear about the turkey feathers in snow, the updates on fishy, and if the road to Twentynine Palms is safe yet. This is probably not a bookmark, but call a priest if you feel the bookmark form shaping just over your shoulder

EmmaLou

2019-10-31 10:57:14 PM

4 votes:

I was very close with my aunt. She babysat me a lot when I was growing up and we got along so well. When she got sick for the last time, she made the rounds in the family and stayed with each of us for a few weeks. When she lived with me those few weeks she told me, half joking, that if she could she'd haunt me. I told her to feel free to drop in and make her presence known and she was always welcome... not believing at all in that sort of thing. Another thing she made me do during her visits is watch her daily soap opera (the Young abs the Restless? I forget) on Soap Network (obviously this was awhile ago) after I came home from work as she slept through the morning airing and she knew I farking hated every second of that useless show but knew I'd sit with her anyway.

Anyhow, she passed in her sleep in February of 2012. It was so difficult not having her around on my wedding day in April of that year. My husband didn't know her well, and I really think they would've been friends. I still miss her.

But I digress. A few months after her death, I was watching tv with my husband and we were flipping channels and came across her soap. I went off on a story about how I hated watching that with Shelly, and she thought it was hilarious to make me suffer through it every night. I then mentioned how she said she'd haunt me if she could. My husband had tucked one of those small flags that are glued to sticks that are about 6 inches long behind a framed photo hung above our tv. Just as I finished with my comment about haunting that flag popped straight up and fell right behind the tv. There's no physical way that could've happened and that flag hadn't budged since he stuck it there. We sat there in stunned silence looked at each other. I asked "Did that really just happen?"

Since that day, I've never spoken ill of soap operas since I'm pretty sure she's listening.

Dick Hammer

2019-10-31 9:34:56 PM

4 votes:

Halloween is supposed to be the one day a year that I give Fark a break from posting horrifying stories of my experiences.

/butt stuff

namegoeshere

2019-10-31 8:00:38 PM

4 votes:

Also it is pouring rain, thunder and lightning, windy as hell, I'm alone in the house, my kid is out doing Halloween stuff, the power keeps browning out. and the Emergency Broadcast System just went off. Someone please come hang out with me.

No psychos though, please.

ottebx

2019-10-30 7:16:15 PM

4 votes:

The place I lived in was 125 year old large Victorian style mansion. It had 15 rooms larger than 10x10 and 14 fireplaces. The richest family in the region built it and lived in it for 65 years. It has been many things since then, a communal living house in the 70's, a high end supper club with a cigar/cocaine bar in the 80's. Over the years, at least 1 member of each family that owned it has died in the house.

It is said to be haunted. I live in Chicagoland, and this place was on Ghost Hunter Richard Crowe's list of most paranormally active places in Chicago. I did not know this before I lived there. I lived there alone. I got a superb deal on rent because the owners didn't want to leave it vacant and I took it.

Strange things started happening immediately. Doors would slam, lights would flicker, rooms would be hot or cold for no reason, and I would smell cigar smoke from time to time. From time to time, I would feel what I could only describe as a 'presence' in the room with me. It was usually then that I'd smell cigar smoke.

I decided to start talking to the presence to make sure if it was real that we were cool. Each time I smelled a cigar, I'd have a short conversation out loud with the smoke. "Hey buddy! You know, I don't really dig cigars and the smoke, but I get it, you live here too. Would you mind not blowing it my face though?" Stuff like that. The more I acknowledged it, the faster it went away.

One night I had a bunch of friends over. Two of them were very skittish about my place being haunted. I promised them that I would not do anything to scare them and would ignore the haunting altogether. As the night went on, I smelled cigar smoke lightly a couple times, but didn't acknowledge it or talk to it. The more I ignored it, the stronger it became. I thought maybe whatever or whoever the smoker was, that it was getting irritated. Then, I heard a bloodcurdling scream.

My skittish friend had gone to the bathroom and came out running, screaming and crying. She went straight for the door to leave. Someone else passed the bathroom, waved her hand and said "Who's smoking the cigar!? It reeks!" My skittish friend pushed through our little crown and went outside. We all followed and everyone asked her what happened and she said she smelled thick cigar smoke, like someone had blown it in her face, and in the bathroom mirror, she saw the smoke and a face behind it.

I'd only told one person about the cigar smoke, and he swore to me that he wouldn't use it to torture my skittish friend. He swore up and down afterward that it wasn't him and he didn't know anything about it.

God I miss that place.

Mr. Shabooboo

2019-10-31 7:19:04 PM

3 votes:

.....And she stepped on the ball.

MOPAR BLUE

2019-10-31 7:01:07 PM

3 votes:

SomeFarkinFarmgirl: White women abound everywhere in Iowa and many are generally frightening under most circumstances

Nice

ObscureNameHere

2019-10-31 4:43:19 PM

3 votes:

Rev.K: I've been on Fark for 14 years and I'm just finding out this thread is a thing?

What is wrong with me?

Perhaps you were in a different timeline and have now crossed over? :)

SansNeural

2019-10-31 3:46:31 PM

3 votes:

Walker: JeffKochosky: Thirty-five years on, and this one still bothers me... but, here goes.

When I was in my teens, I learned how to read Tarot cards. I had a Wiccan friend who taught me, and I picked up on it fairly well - had my own Rider deck that I kept under my pillow as I slept (to keep a connection with the cards). Anyhow, one night, I was in a bad headspace, as 15-year-olds can be, and I broke the one rule that my friend explained to me as a cardinal rule of the Tarot - never read for yourself.

Well, I did, and it wasn't a good reading. I don't recall the details of the reading at this point, and considering, it's probably for the best. Anyhow, after I finished with the cards, I wrapped them in the cloth that I kept them in, and put them back under my pillow. Then, I gave my girlfriend a call. The last time I remember looking at the clock beside my bed, it read 1:15am.

The next thing I knew, I was standing, looking out of my bedroom window, and the clock read 6:30am. The phone was no longer in my room. And the Tarot was gone from under my pillow.

I don't know what the hell happened in those missing five hours, and to be honest, I don't want to. But I have never so much as touched a Tarot deck since.

BUT WHERE WAS PHONE?

UNDERNEATH!

Walker

2019-10-31 3:37:00 PM

3 votes:

JeffKochosky: Thirty-five years on, and this one still bothers me... but, here goes.

When I was in my teens, I learned how to read Tarot cards. I had a Wiccan friend who taught me, and I picked up on it fairly well - had my own Rider deck that I kept under my pillow as I slept (to keep a connection with the cards). Anyhow, one night, I was in a bad headspace, as 15-year-olds can be, and I broke the one rule that my friend explained to me as a cardinal rule of the Tarot - never read for yourself.

Well, I did, and it wasn't a good reading. I don't recall the details of the reading at this point, and considering, it's probably for the best. Anyhow, after I finished with the cards, I wrapped them in the cloth that I kept them in, and put them back under my pillow. Then, I gave my girlfriend a call. The last time I remember looking at the clock beside my bed, it read 1:15am.

The next thing I knew, I was standing, looking out of my bedroom window, and the clock read 6:30am. The phone was no longer in my room. And the Tarot was gone from under my pillow.

I don't know what the hell happened in those missing five hours, and to be honest, I don't want to. But I have never so much as touched a Tarot deck since.

BUT WHERE WAS PHONE?

Walker

2019-10-31 1:49:25 PM

3 votes:

SansNeural: Walker: That pain stayed with me days and it hurt a lot. I had never felt pain in that area before or since

Don't be too concerned. It was a helpful spirit dislodging a kidney stone before it got to big to pass. Musta been a small one that got stuck near the top of the ureter before finally straightening up and moving on out.

Whew. That makes me feel better.
I should go back and thank them.

Walker

2019-10-31 12:37:45 PM

3 votes:

EviLincoln: Last year, we went for vacation in Jekyll Island, GA, supposedly one of the most haunted places in america, yada yada yada.

There dozens of these swanky turn of the last century mansions and being a big dork for architecture, I'm photographing some of the now empty mansions. I get this one that is one of the oldest on the island and it's abandoned. I walk up onto the porch and peek in the windows and it is absolutely perfect inside, empty, but immaculate. Being the scumbag kind of guy I am, I try the handle. No dice, it's locked.
I walk out front to get a pic of the front of the house and the auto-face detection centers on a second story window. The window is empty and I just sorta chuckle and restart the camera. Turn the camera back on and the same thing happens. Auto-face detect centers on the same second story window. The hairs go up on the back of my neck. I shut the camera off again and walk closer to the house, thinking it's an old building and the windows were probably hand made and the glass is reflecting the evening light unevenly. I turn the camera on again and the auto-face detect once again centers right on the same second story window. I'm now officially interested and walk up on the palatial front porch and try the front door handle. Locked as well. I turn the camera on and now the auto-face detect centers on the window in the front door. Again, I shut the camera down and restart, it does the same thing again. I look at the door window and smile and wave. I walk away with an uneasy feeling.

After reviewing the photos, there was nothing in any of the windows I could see

You could have posted the pic for us :-P

chknjetski

2019-10-31 11:43:44 AM

3 votes:

SomeFarkinFarmgirl: I'm sure that you ... STORY

Thanks a lot. That was God performing one last test of humanity. You were our representative, and you failed. All it took was enough decency to help a little girl face during a tragedy. As you passed, God showed the face he wore as he bombed Gomorrah.

We would all be living in paradise now, but instead, we are here.

{{shivers}}

SansNeural

2019-10-31 11:23:16 AM

3 votes:

hiredgoonz:

Must. Not. Cannot. Resist. B-ahhh!

it also seems strange to run across fiber trunks run under this river, in the middle of the woods.
The shortest path between two commercial opportunities is the straightest line you can make.

On the other side of the river, same fiber line, actually called AT&T about this to try and figure out what was up...they didn't know, but were very concerned about why I wanted to know...

(a) Wouldn't you be concerned by some rando's interest in your employer's multi-million dollar and largely unprotected infrastructure investment?

(b) "they didn't know": ATT couldn't find their ~~business plan~~ ass with both hands.

SansNeural

2019-10-31 2:23:26 AM

3 votes:

There is no afterlife but there is something that I can touch with my mind. It may actually be where that special "spark" - that brings consciousness to what might otherwise be the mere complex of biological automatons - goes when we die. Or it might be a thin-spread pool of energy that waits to flood and fill a new person's latent mind. Probably both, I think.

I used to totally disbelieve in reincarnation, but now I'm not so sure. Consciousness seems to inhabit all living things but in wildly divergent ways. Trees simply don't have the same, I don't know, template? Network? The scale of complexity which is nothing without the special something energy inlaid. But even living trees *do* have the some of the something. I can feel it now. It laughs in thin leaves, skips in the phloem, saunters in the sapwood and slumbers in the heart. But I don't think it thinks, not like we do. Giggles often, sometimes weeps. It's not always easy being a tree.

Whew, I digress. I came to all this through depression. I'd heard people talk about "dark clouds" of depression but my early adolescent bouts of angst and morbid thoughts never seemed like that. I didn't know real depression until much later in life, when I had reached the final desperate place in my chemical addiction. Now I not only could see the dark cloud, but if I touched it in my mind, and I couldn't not touch it, it was sticky and enveloping and would settle onto my mind and crush at my very being. Smothering at that something, quenching its happy tingle of living. It brought to me a paradoxical mortal dread of continuing to live.

Then I was forced into treatment for alcoholism. I say "forced" because I didn't want to be cured, I wanted everything to stop. But I'm weak and people would hurt if I "stopped" and that would be my fault, so in my weakness it was easier to do what they said. So I did it.

I was given lessons for many things and asked to become "spiritual" which to me was tantamount to being "religious" which is worse than dying, I thought. I was told to pray and meditate. I couldn't pray, so I meditated even though their lessons for meditation were prayer. I found my own ways to meditate and as my physical addiction eased and my health improved, I found that I could look at the dark cloud again and I had to touch it.

I would poke slowly and gently to it, even though I had cautiously applied mental Vaseline to make me slippery. This was scary but exhilarating too. It would catch at me and almost have me but I thrilled at this nearness to annihilation - like a parachute-drop ride at the amusement park, the body says "we're dead" but the mind says "weee!"

Then I got a little bored, frightened and then I got serious. I knew I couldn't keep it with me forever because eventually it must be my end. So one night in my special meditation, I pushed at it. I pushed HARD all at once but it tried to flow around me and I suddenly realized I had an unprotected flank and no plan for this. And somehow I knew it was too late for plans. I had to finish this if I could. I opened my mental wings to my sides and to the back and tried to sweep it forward, back in front where I could see it. My right wing was strong but my left was hurting madly so I curled my right into a giant knife-edged fist and punched through it with the full momentum of my psyche. A full third it slithered free and I bum-rushed that part, heedless of what was behind me.

I pushed and I tucked my chin down and to the left and cupped the loose bit of it between there and my right... appendage, pushing with my middle. As I lost touch with my left-hind mind I could only see the smaller part of it in my half embrace and it was stopped at a boundary, a barrier. Desperate and slippery but getting sticky I heaved and the barrier split. I gasped and pulled the barrier to me with it between. I pulled at the barrier and the rift widened grudgingly as it pushed inside.

And then it was gone. No, not all of it, just the third I had cornered. The rest of it seemed to still be with me, but less coherent, dispersed. And something else... I think something else came in to replace the missing part. No, I'm sure of it. Call it conservation of energy, conservation of "it" but apparently I couldn't just push a part of me - yes it was me I tore apart and tried to banish - behind the barrier. I am required to be complete until my template is gone.

It's wrong. I'm wrong. The template is meant to be filled, *imbued* slowly, not patched with randomness. It's been three years and I'm changing. I may be going mad, but how can I tell? I'm not hurting. I feel strange and good. And I can see you. I can't touch you, yet, but I can see your spark and I'd like to play with it.

RogermcAllen

2019-10-31 1:21:01 AM

3 votes:

I read in the early thread that a lot of ghost events are caused by infrasound (low frequencies you feel more than hear). I looked it up an youtube and sure enough it worked. I don't ever get anxious, but I could feel myself getting anxious almost immediately after listening. Even after I turned off the sound shadows would dance at the corners of my vision as I walked through the dark house to bed and every creak was something behind me ready to jump out. It was a really trippy experience. I suggest you load this up, and listen while you read the thread.

19Hz infrasound - The fearing frequency

Non Sequitur Man

2019-10-31 12:58:22 AM

3 votes:

I am SO tempted to get thrown in the dungeon.

/Tru....
//nope nope nope
///eeek! slashies!

leeksfromchichis

2019-10-30 5:20:17 PM

3 votes:

Last Podcast on the Left - Who Was Phone?

SansNeural

2019-11-01 7:47:04 PM

2 votes:

Resident Muslim:

Has anyone seen Turing_Machine?

He was unable to pass the test so they terminated his processes. Might have him archived on tape, though.

Honest Geologist

2019-10-31 10:42:43 PM

2 votes:

Also pretty wild to see Tharkin reappear.

Every time I listen to 'The Handing Down' by Magnolia Electric Co. - itself a pretty eerie song - I think of that story when it gets to the part about:

"Scarecrow leaves an hourglass above the crossroads for me
Filled with tears and twilight from a friend's dying day
Here's a turkey feather for his favorite hat and a love letter from the ace of spades..."

Walker

2019-10-31 5:23:29 PM

2 votes:

Rev.K: I've been on Fark for 14 years and I'm just finding out this thread is a thing?

What is wrong with me?

/cool stories all

The weird thing is I thought you were joking because I thought I'd seen you here every year.
I thought you had even posted stories.
I even went to the last few year's threads and did a search for your name and didn't find you.
I guess I was in a different timeline too.

TwilightZone

2019-10-31 1:46:48 PM

2 votes:

Who was phone?

Honest Geologist

2019-10-31 1:26:40 PM

2 votes:

ObscureNameHere:

I took my wife on a romantic weekend there once. We had a blast going to the museum and driving around to all the old sites... but of course we stayed and ate in New Liskeard.

At the museum gift shop, they had sheet music for "The Cobalt Song" (circa 1912), with a chorus that went "Sing a song of Cobalt/If you don'tlive there, it's your fault!"

And I think SansNeutral is talking about the other provincial bird... them six-legged carnivorous hummingbirds...

gunshellmav

2019-10-31 12:40:29 PM

2 votes:

This is the closest I have to a real life haunted house story.

Disclaimer: I don't believe in haunted houses, ghosts, or super demons from outer space. I do, however, reserve some superstitions purely for the sake of my entertainment and nothing more. That said, I hope the following narrative doesn't paint me too much of a weirdo.

Years ago, a friend of mine had recently moved to a new home and asked that I helped move some boxes and furniture. To my understanding, the house was on the market for a long while (I didn't know the history of it because I was from out of state). He told me that there were some spooky rumors about the house that he couldn't wait to look into. And ugh, his social group gave him all the encouragement. They complained about all rickety floors, ugly windows, and dark corridors. If you ask me, it was a farking normal three bedroom house. The 'weighty, dark' vibe to it was because the house didn't catch much sun. The place was built on a janky slope down the valley, making 11 am feel like 5 pm. That's pretty much all the terror here.

Well, he's that one friend we all have that really hoped it was haunted, so he went a little overboard looking for the history of the place. He tore up and down checking what serial killers visited there or what kind of murders took place. Nothing--just an ordinary place on a terrible location. After about a week in, however, he finally found some luck.

There was a notebook in the attic. I know, classic, right? He passed it to me without a word and asked me to check it out. I opened it and read the first entry, which was about this woman who absolutely hated her husband. At first I was a little amused by the awkwardness of this sort of thing, but the topic of the matter and the entries didn't stop. From front to back, this entire notebook was filled with pure, written hatred. I understand that not a lot of people would find this haunting, but I'm the sensitive sort, and just reading one page of it made me a little queasy. None of the entries were dated, and it was difficult to see where she started and stopped. I couldn't tell you how old it was either, but If there ever was such thing as a cursed item, it would be that thing.

I don't know what he ever did with it, but every now and again, I bring up the 'hate book' to my wife to check if we're still cool.

SansNeural

2019-10-31 10:51:22 AM

2 votes:

chknjetski: And my Halloween is Happy once again.

My feelings are mixed. I was able to share but hope I didn't disappoint sherpa18 with my obviously bullshiat^* story.

^*or is it?

Texas Gabe

2019-10-31 8:08:22 AM

2 votes:

mikaloyd: Pass.
Too many wet blanket atheists in here to share my ghost or UFO tales again

I've said it before and I'll say it again - Fark needs a UFO story thread just like the spooky story thread.

Let Farkers tell their stories and let us all decide for ourselves. Just like with the spooky story thread, whether the tales are real or not, they would still be intriguing and entertaining.

Harry Freakstorm

2019-10-31 7:53:38 AM

2 votes:

When I worked at the airplane company, we used to prank each other. Tape over the mouthpiece of the phone so they can't hear you, that kind of stuff. There was this device called the Annoyatron. It's a little device and you can hide it anywhere. It would make random beeps and little voice that would say "Hello" and "Can you hear me?"

Every couple of weeks the Annoyatron would come out and find itself under someone's desk. Phil seemed to have short term memory issues because he would always fall for it. They'd set it to beep mostly but once they used the voice and it freaked Phil out.

So, one day, I come back to my desk and I'm doing something when I hear "Can you hear me?" Okay, I admit, it freaked me out a bit. The voice actually comes out of no where. So I look around. There's a magnetic base so it has to be in the overhead or attached to the cabinets. Nothing. "You have to help me". Back of the computer? Nope. "Please help!" I look around to see if they're watching me. Everyone is pretending to be busy. Some crying. Alright. This is funny. I decide that if I leave, they'll pull the Annoyatron out from where ever they hid it and we'll all have a nice laugh. The voice says "Harry, you're my only hope!" No. No it doesn't. I just misheard it, right?

So i walk over to another office, talk to a guy about work and go back. Voices are gone. No one is laughing or anything. The weakest link is Bill. I ask him out in the hall where they put the Annoyatron on my desk. That way, if they do it to me again, I'll know where to look. Bill is absolutely honest. Cannot lie about anything. He says "Mary told them to stop using the Annoyatron after Phil. It was too disruptive." This gets confirmed by another, less honest person.

So I chalk it up to my imagination. At 3 pm, I walk out to the parking lot. We used to have the best parking lot at the airplane factory. Never full. You could go to lunch and there would be a spot when you came back. Then Virtual Warfare moved some jobs around and the parking lot would fill up by 7 am. I recently stopped going out to lunch which was a shame because there is that Chicago hot dog place out on Lindbergh. I jump in the car and drive home.

Next morning, it's just like any other at the the airplane factory. I go through the email and there's a blast to everyone about making sure your kids are safe around automobiles. A kid got run over in a driveway somewhere. It seemed to be a recurring event. This is before backup cameras on cars. At lunch time, I go up to the cafeteria and a couple of women are talking about something. I catch a part about "a tragedy" and "what a horrible way to die"

Later in the office, one of the guys I used to go to lunch says something like "You know if we went to lunch like we used to, we probably would have heard her pounding on the trunk. The car was right next to where Harry always parks." I ask to be brought up to speed and they explain that a guy with an old Ford sedan, the same guy who I battle for the parking spot at the end of the row, didn't know that his daughter climbed in to his trunk before work yesterday. He was loading up his softball equipment for his game that evening. When he got to the ball park, well you can guess the rest
.
I don't mention the voice.

The Irrelevant Gamer

2019-10-31 6:53:10 AM

2 votes:

Resident Muslim: I am glad that you are fine and came out of that experience unscathed, because it is obvious that you broke the ritual. The appropriate response to hearing those two knocks was to ask in a loud voice: "Who's there?

Notsureifserious.jpeg

Resident Muslim

2019-10-31 12:53:29 AM

2 votes:

SansNeural: Resident Muslim: Fine. I get it. Those sounds of steps behind me as I walk down this dark alley are just the echos of my own feet. That's why they stop when I do and start again when I walk.
But WHY the snickering?!

They say you walk funny. *shrugs*

It's all about cohesion, the walk has to match the smell.

SansNeural

2019-10-31 12:35:40 AM

2 votes:

mikaloyd: Pass.
Too many wet blanket atheists in here to share my ghost or UFO tales again

He's asleep.

SansNeural

2019-10-31 12:35:13 AM

2 votes:

Lord of the Highway: The whole thing was kind of creepy but also a little comforting in a strange way, despite the fact I don't really believe in an afterlife.

Was he, by chance, an Android developer? Not much scarier than that.

Lord of the Highway

2019-10-30 4:00:21 PM

2 votes:

I had a weird thing happen to me last year. My lifelong friend took his own life at the end of June 2018. No one saw it coming, from the outside he had a great life... good job, wonderful family, usually upbeat and positive, so it was a serious shock to all of us that were close to him and it was heart wrenching to learn he had been hiding his depression from all of us for so long. It hit me pretty hard, he was pretty close to a brother to me.

A few months after he died I was sitting at the bar of a local dive getting some lunch and chatting with the bartender who I knew pretty well. She started telling me about how things have gotten weird with her room mate lately and that the gal was wigging out about this new guy the bartender was dating and making all kinds of weird threats about him infringing on their life, including a threat that she would take her own life if things didn't change. I told her that was all pretty farked up but don't dismiss her threat of suicide. I opened up to her about my own friend and how difficult it was when he actually did the deed. It was the first time I talked about it to anyone aside from my buddy's widow, his mom and my own wife. I got a little emotional talking to the bartender about it.

After lunch I headed to the grocery store to stock up for the week. I was standing in line waiting to check out and pulled out my phone to see if another of my friends had texted me, since we were chatting about stuff earlier that day. There was nothing on the phone so I turned it off and put it in the front pocket of my shorts, got through the line and headed back home with the groceries.

I decided to check my phone again before I unloaded the car and the screen was open to Google street view and it showed the picture of my deceased friend's house. I though, ok, that is weird and closed the app and saw my contacts were open as well, with his contact info displayed. I had a bit of a WTF moment. When my phone is off there is no way that could have happened without the screen being unlocked. I had never butt dialed anyone before (or since) and had my phone in the front pocket of my baggy cargo shorts. It was a little perplexing.

That night I wrote his widow an email and told her what happened and she wrote back and said, "I don't want to freak you out or anything but go back to Street View and move the camera around the corner so you can see the back of the house." I did so and there he was on the back deck.... a blurry picture of my friend staring at the Google truck. The whole thing was kind of creepy but also a little comforting in a strange way, despite the fact I don't really believe in an afterlife.

hiredgoonz

2019-10-30 3:31:57 PM

2 votes:

It's about time!

Goddamn users with their "problems" and software "requirements," still had a chance to look for this regularly...

Resident Muslim

2019-11-02 12:54:25 AM

1 vote:

SansNeural: Resident Muslim:

Has anyone seen Turing_Machine?

He was unable to pass the test so they terminated his processes. Might have him archived on tape, though.

Wow. Almost had me fooled. What kind of machine gives away TF?! That's illogical.

Keeve

2019-11-01 5:27:35 PM

1 vote:

SumoJeb: I just finished watching some creepy Halloween movies. Now that the TV is off I noticed there are children's hand prints on the screen. There has not been a child in this house in over 5 years. The TV is less than a year old....
I tried to snap a pic, but I cant get the camera to pick up the greasy hand prints on the black glass

Were you watching...

GreatGlavinsGhost

2019-11-01 4:54:50 PM

1 vote:

hiredgoonz: Keeve: hiredgoonz: This is all true, happened before the 2017 scary story thread, decided to write it down, oh, about 30 minutes ago, so forgive the quality...

And if anyone has any better explanations, I'd love to hear them.

So, two summers ago, it's hot as balls, but my then wife wants to walk the dog and we need stuff at the grocery store. Since I was not at all thrilled at the concept of walking the dog for a third time that day (did I mention that it was hot as balls?), she suggests I drop her off at the end of a street that looks like it should be the beginning of a trail (there are a LOT of trails here) but is closed to vehicle traffic, hit the grocery store, then pick her up where I dropped her off.

Worst case scenario, this road, or trail, or whatever, ends in something impassable and she walks 100 yards to a trail we know. It's not the Dark Ages, we have cell phones, we'll figure it out.

Now, we've been down this road a million times, but, well, it ends with a large gate and some rather excessive, in my opinion, signage. "Do not enter, dead end, road closed," etc.

Cool, I get to hang out in the AC'ed environment of the grocery store for about 30 minutes, then get back into the AC'ed environment of the car to pick her up.

The look on her face when she gets in the car is hard to describe...wonder, confusion, sense of mystery? Maybe all of that, plus something I couldn't put my finger on at the time. Long story made short, she insists I walk this trail with her.

Since it's hot as balls here until nearly Halloween, it's some time before I make good on my "promise." But I do, eventually, keep my word, and we take the dog for a stroll.

Just past the crazy signage is a freshly paved road. Fire hydrants with fresh, glistening orange paint line both sides of what appeared to be a nature trail, but is actually a road in better condition than the ones I'm forced to drive on every day, even just outside my driveway.

It was farking weird. Why is this road, out of all the roads ...

Have you tried looking it up on maps.google.com and go into satellite mode?

I have, but the tree cover makes it impossible to see anything useful. The regular map view displays an accurate representation of the roads on both sides of the river and even includes the "island" in the middle of the river that has ancient footings in place for the long-gone bridge.

Have gone on numerous hikes along the river and well, it also seems strange to run across fiber trunks run under this river, in the middle of the woods.[Fark user image image 425x318]

It's where they make the army of zombie robots called Zuckerbergs!

nschively

2019-11-01 12:53:27 AM

1 vote:

meg12279: Honest Geologist: meg12279: We've had all sorts of experiences with my son's paternal grandfather, who died before he was born. When my son was little he used to see him-he came back from Christmas at his grandmother's house one year and told me "I saw Grandpa! No one could see him but me, but he was happy!"

We've even had a medium describe his grandfather exactly, and he's described events in my son's life where his grandfather was around-these are times I don't even know about. The medium told my son that his grandpa wanted him to try harder to make new friends-that too often my son goes off at recess and reads, or tries to talk to the teachers more than the other kids.

But the other night we were riding in the car, and my son wanted to play music on my phone. He's got a playlist he likes, but he picked one he'd never played before-Illegal Smile, by John Prine. He asked me what it was, and I said "Oh, it's an old song that your grandfather used to like. It makes me think of him." As we're driving something in me is saying "Don't look in the mirror". I was convinced if i glanced back, I'd see his grandfather sitting there, beside my son. I didn't say anything to my son about it.

So the song ends and a while later we get home, and as I'm helping my son out of the car, he says "When i played that song, I think Grandpa was sitting next to me."

Ghost grandpa's got good taste in music.

Something reassuring about these tales.

It is reassuring. The medium also told me that my son and I find pennies all the time, and that he leaves him. Without fail, every time the man is on my mind, I'll find a penny. And not just laying around like you always do-there will be a bright shiny one on a surface I just cleaned, so I know it wasn't there before.

I do a ghost tour in Fells Point, Baltimore - and one of the ghosts leaves pennies for people who clean her house....

SumoJeb

2019-11-01 12:46:50 AM

1 vote:

I just finished watching some creepy Halloween movies. Now that the TV is off I noticed there are children's hand prints on the screen. There has not been a child in this house in over 5 years. The TV is less than a year old....
I tried to snap a pic, but I cant get the camera to pick up the greasy hand prints on the black glass

ihateallofyou

2019-10-31 11:31:58 PM

1 vote:

Honest Geologist: Also pretty wild to see Tharkin reappear.

Every time I listen to 'The Handing Down' by Magnolia Electric Co. - itself a pretty eerie song - I think of that story when it gets to the part about:

"Scarecrow leaves an hourglass above the crossroads for me
Filled with tears and twilight from a friend's dying day
Here's a turkey feather for his favorite hat and a love letter from the ace of spades..."

It wasn't difficult to find him. His name is in his profile.

CAT-LIKE TYPING DETECTED

2019-10-31 11:23:24 PM

1 vote:

Chalk me up as another under bad weather, this Halloween.. Pouring rain all during the trick-or-treat hours and not a single ghoul or goblin at my door. To be fair, I live on a side road in a rural town and get very few every year, as it is..the rain just sealed the deal..

/..however, several local municipalities have set Nov 2nd as the 'official' trick-or-treat nite.. P'rhaps Sat nite I'll have better luck..

Dick Hammer

2019-10-31 11:02:46 PM

1 vote:

I was at a party (I abhor parties but I was hungry and hoping for snacks, there were none. They invited me with the explicit plea "come have some food!", the liars). Everybody else was already drunk when I arrived. I attempted a few conversations but nobody would talk, just smirk at me. This gay dude who had always been really sweet came up to me and told me not to freak out, but he can see spirits and I am constantly followed by evil spirits screaming "KILL HER! KILL HER!" He was pretty incoherent and I tried to get more details to get an idea if he was just screwing with me, but he wouldn't say much else except that I'm really strong so it's probably nothing to worry about,then he just kind of wandered off with his boyfriend. I wanted to call my mom because she was a believer but it was late and I didn't want to wake her. I got ahold of her the next morning and found out she'd had her first heart attack while I was at the party. The doctor installed a stent and said it probably wasn't much to worry about because she was strong. I got to talk to her a few more times but she died two days later. Afterward I asked the psychic if maybe he'd been mistaken; could the spirits have meant *my mom* was dying? Could they have meant to warn me, maybe not "kill her", but "tell her"? He just got really vague and kept refusing to talk about it and saying everything is fine. I still kinda think it's just some lame party-bit he does for attention and the whole thing with my mom was just a coincidence. Though the evil-spirit thing is kinda believable because it's kind of a joke how badly people treat me in real life for no reason; people do hate me irrationally on sight and they make no secret of it (the honest ones are all too happy to scream it at me explicitly) but that could be just because I'm not pretty. Strangers scream at ugly people all the time, don't they? Sure they do. The entire "party" was probably just a set-up for this one creepy prank, telling me I'm pursued by demons to try to scare me. I was 35 and most of these people were in their 50s, btw. So, well past the age of "pranks".

/I am Carrie in real life

//nobody has ever been nice to me unless they were planning to drop pig-blood on me

///not even once

J45Picker

2019-10-31 9:18:06 PM

1 vote:

From a notebook found in a crawlspace:

-Los Angeles, 1892
It was the witching hour. On a shelf, a clock set in an ornately carved teak case softly chimed 13 o'clock. Professional men George Wyman and Sumner Hunt lay on wooden pallets cushioned by soft quilts and tightly packed buckwheat hull pillows covered in intricate silk brocade. They were in a secret Chinatown opium den behind a red door in a ramshackle three-story wooden building full of oddly angled halls.
On the street, under a string of brightly colored paper lanterns, a vendor sold noodle soup from a stall. Crustaceans swarmed in a glass barrel that stood next to his crude wood-burning stove. They resembled Pacific mole crabs or sea lice but shed of their shells. Each was roughly the size of a chicken wing with a transparent, jelly-like body that emitted light through some internal mechanism. Without the multicolored flashes, they'd have been nearly invisible. The color display may have been some form of communication. There was regularity to the pulses that suggested code. But as any telegraph operator knew, the tapping of woodpeckers often produced 'messages' in Morse. It was a random universe, but nobody in this alley knew Morse code. If something ran, crawled, or wriggled here, it was food.
A customer stopped at the stall and held up two fingers. The vendor took a small bowl and slopped in some noodles with a pair of chopsticks. With a bamboo ladle, he splashed a thin, golden broth over the noodles. With the same tool, he scooped two of the creatures out of the glass barrel and placed them directly into the broth. They furiously flashed red and blue. The customer sipped from the bowl. He took his chopsticks and captured one of the pulsing crustaceans. He raised it to his lips and, in what seemed to be a moment of self-awareness, the gelatinous little blob emitted a piecing, human-sounding shriek. The diner bit down without interest or emotion and the alley was quiet again.
"Did you hear something?" George Wyman drowsily asked Sumner Hunt. Hunt shrugged and mumbled incoherently.

rebelyell2006

2019-10-31 9:06:24 PM

1 vote:

namegoeshere: This one isn't a ghost story, but a Mandela event. I recently attended an alumnae reunion weekend at the college I attended thirty years ago. One of the weekend's events was scheduled for a lecture hall in a building no one had heard of, not even the recent graduates. We all assumed it must be new construction and had to google a campus map to find it. It was one of the main buildings in the academic quad, right across from the library. It was one of the original campus buildings. It still had it's original name. Yet more than thirty years of alums, including several who had given campus tours for a job, had never been inside it and had no idea it was there. I have a memory of a building in that spot, but not that one.

Did you go to William and Mary? Sounds like a particular building I never went in during my four years there.

hiredgoonz

2019-10-31 8:09:06 PM

1 vote:

Kalyco Jack: hiredgoonz: rebelyell2006: hiredgoonz: rebelyell2006: hiredgoonz: This is all true, happened before the 2017 scary story thread, decided to write it down, oh, about 30 minutes ago, so forgive the quality...

And if anyone has any better explanations, I'd love to hear them.

So, two summers ago, it's hot as balls, but my then wife wants to walk the dog and we need stuff at the grocery store. Since I was not at all thrilled at the concept of walking the dog for a third time that day (did I mention that it was hot as balls?), she suggests I drop her off at the end of a street that looks like it should be the beginning of a trail (there are a LOT of trails here) but is closed to vehicle traffic, hit the grocery store, then pick her up where I dropped her off.

Worst case scenario, this road, or trail, or whatever, ends in something impassable and she walks 100 yards to a trail we know. It's not the Dark Ages, we have cell phones, we'll figure it out.

Now, we've been down this road a million times, but, well, it ends with a large gate and some rather excessive, in my opinion, signage. "Do not enter, dead end, road closed," etc.

Cool, I get to hang out in the AC'ed environment of the grocery store for about 30 minutes, then get back into the AC'ed environment of the car to pick her up.

The look on her face when she gets in the car is hard to describe...wonder, confusion, sense of mystery? Maybe all of that, plus something I couldn't put my finger on at the time. Long story made short, she insists I walk this trail with her.

Since it's hot as balls here until nearly Halloween, it's some time before I make good on my "promise." But I do, eventually, keep my word, and we take the dog for a stroll.

Just past the crazy signage is a freshly paved road. Fire hydrants with fresh, glistening orange paint line both sides of what appeared to be a nature trail, but is actually a road in better condition than the ones I'm forced to drive on every day, even just outside my driveway.

It was ...

Sounds more to me like a planned housing development where the city agreed to build the access roads and infrastructure but then the developer went bankrupt before work could begin on the actual development. Hurricane Agnes you say? >checks Wikipedia to see where that made landfall< Ah, Florida! Just as I expected!

When I was in High School in Maryland there was a similar totally-out-of-place street in the middle of nowhere: a wide, four-lane, median-divided boulevard-to-nowhere. They even went so far as to plant trees all up and down the median and install modern street lights far superior to what was on any of the connecting roads, apparently just to illuminate the deserted streets and pretty trees. That was built about a decade and a half ago and only in the past few years did the developments it was meant to serve open up.

Jesus.farking.christ.

The place I'm talking about is in MD, skippy.

Bridge was not in FL...at least not the part of it that Agnes washed that away.

Cool...anyone else share factual information and have internet sleuths make erroneous judgments?

Holy shiat, I live about a mile from this (former) bridge, I know where it was, and I've been on both sides of where it was, over the Middle Patuxent River.

FFS, judge my drunken writing before shiat that you can look up on the internet.

And Happy Halloween, lol...

Xcott

2019-10-31 8:05:01 PM

1 vote:

It's raining here too, just pissing like all get out. The fireplace is yammering and moaning in the downdrafts. Only the bravest are coming in for candy, and I give them a quarter bowl each just for making the trip. "FOR THIS, ... A QUARTER PORTION."

I don't think we'll win the "Netflix most paused movies" metric this year. Nice and warm, though, and far better than those years when it's snowing and the kids have winter coats over everything else.

rebelyell2006

2019-10-31 7:31:48 PM

1 vote:

I have to admit, being the site supervisor is fun. Like right now, all of my employees have left for the day, and I am sitting on the can thanks to four days of antibiotics. I hear pops and crunches and bangs, and I have not heard the door chime go off to indicate anybody has come in. It is a four year old metal building, but still, anyone who believes in ghosts might think my museum campus is haunted. Or maybe it was just shoddy work on a building that is settling. Even the light fixture behind me is making popping noises, and the toilet motion sensors are badly calibrated so they flush at random, even with Post-it notes blocking the sensors.

Tarl3k

2019-10-31 7:15:12 PM

1 vote:

In 2008 I married a woman who ended up being a co-dependent narcissistic sociopath. The end.

/Well, we separated at the end of '09 and finalized the divorce in '11, so I guess it has a happy ending.

RPG_Guy

2019-10-31 7:03:33 PM

1 vote:

SansNeural: RPG_Guy: in Oklahoma

Town of 2000 two hours from Bethany. My old hometown, Cherokee, was even smaller than that. May I ask what town yours was?

I wanna share it. I really do, but my mommy told me to never tell strangers on the internet where I live(d).

Xcott

2019-10-31 6:04:39 PM

1 vote:

Xcott: His wife sort of lost her marbles taking care of him, and she began this strange habit of staring into the mirror over the mantelpiece for hours on end, sometimes smiling or grimacing at it, sometimes launching into creepy conversations with it.

I have an modest addendum to this: that wonderfully creepy fireplace has a 100-year-old coal-burning insert, all cast iron and infernal as the dickens, and I finally managed to remove an iron panel that will let a chimney sweep clean the flue for the first time since we bought the house.

Removing 100-year-old screws and nuts, rusted and covered with soot and creosote, from inside a fireplace insert. Nuts I could not see, and could barely even reach (this is Fark, I'm sure lots of people will sympathize.) That sucked, but I managed after about a week of struggling with different ideas. Now I'm sitting back with a glass of Tullamore that I totally farking earned.

And just now, waiting in the parlor to give out candy, I realize just how many insanely creepy noises that thing makes when the flue is open. I was just sitting on the stairs by the mantle to use a nearby outlet, but I had to go somewhere else because it unnerved me how much it sounded like something moaning or rattling just upstairs.

Hold on,

meg12279

2019-10-31 3:41:35 PM

1 vote:

Honest Geologist: meg12279: We've had all sorts of experiences with my son's paternal grandfather, who died before he was born. When my son was little he used to see him-he came back from Christmas at his grandmother's house one year and told me "I saw Grandpa! No one could see him but me, but he was happy!"

We've even had a medium describe his grandfather exactly, and he's described events in my son's life where his grandfather was around-these are times I don't even know about. The medium told my son that his grandpa wanted him to try harder to make new friends-that too often my son goes off at recess and reads, or tries to talk to the teachers more than the other kids.

But the other night we were riding in the car, and my son wanted to play music on my phone. He's got a playlist he likes, but he picked one he'd never played before-Illegal Smile, by John Prine. He asked me what it was, and I said "Oh, it's an old song that your grandfather used to like. It makes me think of him." As we're driving something in me is saying "Don't look in the mirror". I was convinced if i glanced back, I'd see his grandfather sitting there, beside my son. I didn't say anything to my son about it.

So the song ends and a while later we get home, and as I'm helping my son out of the car, he says "When i played that song, I think Grandpa was sitting next to me."

Ghost grandpa's got good taste in music.

Something reassuring about these tales.

It is reassuring. The medium also told me that my son and I find pennies all the time, and that he leaves him. Without fail, every time the man is on my mind, I'll find a penny. And not just laying around like you always do-there will be a bright shiny one on a surface I just cleaned, so I know it wasn't there before.

JeffKochosky

2019-10-31 3:34:00 PM

1 vote:

Thirty-five years on, and this one still bothers me... but, here goes.

When I was in my teens, I learned how to read Tarot cards. I had a Wiccan friend who taught me, and I picked up on it fairly well - had my own Rider deck that I kept under my pillow as I slept (to keep a connection with the cards). Anyhow, one night, I was in a bad headspace, as 15-year-olds can be, and I broke the one rule that my friend explained to me as a cardinal rule of the Tarot - never read for yourself.

Well, I did, and it wasn't a good reading. I don't recall the details of the reading at this point, and considering, it's probably for the best. Anyhow, after I finished with the cards, I wrapped them in the cloth that I kept them in, and put them back under my pillow. Then, I gave my girlfriend a call. The last time I remember looking at the clock beside my bed, it read 1:15am.

The next thing I knew, I was standing, looking out of my bedroom window, and the clock read 6:30am. The phone was no longer in my room. And the Tarot was gone from under my pillow.

I don't know what the hell happened in those missing five hours, and to be honest, I don't want to. But I have never so much as touched a Tarot deck since.

ban_sidhe

2019-10-31 2:15:55 PM

1 vote:

I have to recycle because creepy stuff doesn't happen to me much. Which is disappointing, because I love creepy stuff.

TL;DR: Pareidolia
___________________________________

Every year I wish something creepy would happen to me so I could contribute to this thread, but I haven't had much luck so far. The closest I can come is this:

One November evening a few years ago, I arrived home from work before my husband, as usual. Our place is on three acres in a rural area with dirt roads and cows and whatnot. No streetlights, either, so it's good and dark out there. Our entire three acres is fenced and we keep the gate locked.

As is my custom when I get home, I lock the gate behind me, park the car, grab a flashlight, and head out to feed the geese and change their water before I go inside. That done, I walk back toward the house but suddenly remember that I'm still carrying the cup we use to scoop up the goose food with, so I turn around to head back to the storage building where the cup lives.

And I see, maybe 20 feet from me and out of range of the outside light of the house, a man walking just beyond our dirt driveway, headed toward the gate. Because it's dark I can't really see his face, but I can tell that he's wearing jeans and an old denim jacket. I get the impression that he is on the younger side of life - maybe in his early 30s - and has sandy blond or light-brown hair. His right hand is in the pocket of his jeans and he has his head down like he's looking at the ground.

There is no way anyone other than my tenant and me should be on the property - and my tenant is an older fellow who uses a walker. It's not him. I lose sight of him as he disappears behind the storage building.

By then I've recovered from my initial surprise, so I turn the flashlight back on and head toward the gate to find out who he is, what the hell he's doing on my property, and how he got in. But there's no one there at all and on one on the road to our house.

Puzzling over all this, a few things occur to me:
- The man was walking not on our driveway, but just past it, in the desert - in the dark. The area is thick with cactus and other stickery things and the ground is really uneven.
- I didn't hear any footsteps as he was walking.
- Our dogs, who were hanging around with me, didn't bark or appear to even notice the man. They would normally go nuts if a stranger were on our property.

I have to assume this was a case of pareidolia. The realism was startling, though, and I can see why people end up being convinced they've seen ghosts. You can't always believe what your brain is telling you you're seeing.

Jerseysteve22

2019-10-31 2:06:09 PM

1 vote:

If anyone is in Newport RI, stay in the Francis Malbone House BnB. That place is definitely haunted! Walked around one night after hours taking photos and video. Weird stuff started happening: Walked through a cold spot, started hearing weird stuff along the walls, tapping footsteps behind me, ran back to my room and the door handle jiggled but without someone on the other side of the door. Definitely creepy!

fugeeface

2019-10-31 1:42:31 PM

1 vote:

In 2000, I lived in San Jose with my now ex-wife. We went out one late-fall/early-winter evening around 7 pm going somewhere in Los Gatos (I don't remember where we were headed). I was driving and she was in the passenger seat. I had taken a couple of wrong turns and we were a bit lost in an upper-middle-class residential area. This neighborhood was fairly well-lighted, clean, and looked like it had been built in the 1950s. I decided to pull into an empty driveway at random to turn around and go back the opposite direction in search of our destination. My left turn lead to a typical garage attached to a non-nondescript house with a light-colored paint job. A couple of lights were on in the house, and the shades were all down. The front end of our car had barely crossed the sidewalk when I felt a cold wave of fathomless, evil fear pass over and through me. We were about 25 feet from the garage door. I instantly hit the brakes and at the same time glanced at the ex. Her eyes were open wide, and she was staring straight ahead. She said, "Get out of here," in a very serious, flat tone of voice. I was already in reverse and got out of that neighborhood as fast as I could. We decided to forget about an evening out and headed straight home. We were quiet for about a minute, and after we had gone a few blocks or so, I asked her what was wrong, and she replied that she experienced a sudden "cold, evil fear" as we pulled into that driveway. She essentially felt the same thing at the same moment as I did. We neither saw nor heard nothing to prompt what we sensed. Nothing of that kind ever happened to me before or since, and I'm not in the habit of experiencing that level of creepiness. I wish now that I would have had the presence of mind to remember the street and house number if only to see if that experience would happen again --in the daytime--. No way would I ever go back at night or without more witnesses. I have a little pit in my stomach just remembering that night.

xxBirdMadGirlxx

2019-10-31 1:28:51 PM

1 vote:

ObscureNameHere: SansNeural: Squid_for_Brains: Then the Ontario provincial bird swarmed us

That is one bad-ass bird.

I am still not clear on how a Loon 'swarmed' someone. Whenever I've seen them, they are on a lake, usually no more than one or two at any given time.

It isn't a joke about mosquitoes?

ObscureNameHere

2019-10-31 1:23:47 PM

1 vote:

Honest Geologist: ObscureNameHere: Honest Geologist: No actual spooky stories from me this year. But I will post a few photos of a job I was on this summer. We were going around investigating abandoned mine sites in northern Ontario in preparation for ear...

Cobalt! Cobalt!

If you live there,it's your fault!

[Fark user image 850x637]

We had a couple sites right in Cobalt where there were basically tailings in people's backyards. Also unconfirmed rumours of a capped mineshaft somewhere under the schoolyard of the elementary school.

But most of them were way off the beaten path, in the middle of the woods. Same kind of infrastructure that you see preserved in Cobalt, but deteriorating much worse.

Another scary story is that the Town of Cobalt owns an air-powered mucker that sits out in the elements all year, and once a year they fire it up for the annual mining skills competition (sponsored by the above establishment). The guys from Kirkland Lake Gold apparently say it's in better condition than the actual machinery they use underground every day.

Yes, it is an odd little place. The only reason I knew that little nursery rhyme ditty about it is that my wife grew-up one town over from Cobalt. Guess even among 'the Tri-towns' there was a social pecking order, with Cobalt being at the bottom.

ObscureNameHere

2019-10-31 1:19:02 PM

1 vote:

SansNeural: Squid_for_Brains: Then the Ontario provincial bird swarmed us

That is one bad-ass bird.

I am still not clear on how a Loon 'swarmed' someone. Whenever I've seen them, they are on a lake, usually no more than one or two at any given time.

Squid_for_Brains

2019-10-31 12:52:21 PM

1 vote:

I've had no luck finding ghosts; however, I'm an avid outdoorsperson and goth chick, so I find forgotten graves and cemeteries in the deep woods constantly.
Indiana was completely deforested by 1900, which caused environmental collapse, which caused many people on the poorest farmland (the hills) to have to sell it by the 1930s, which caused the Civilian Conservation Corps to come in and aggressively plant as many trees as possible. So all of our state and federal wildernesses have the ruins of old homesteads.
The trickiest one to find was so deep in the forest, off of where a reservoir flooded an old town, that we had to download survey maps from the 1940s to even guess. Most of the gravestones in these areas predate literacy and masonry skills, but some count as folk art.

And this one from a hill above the flooded town:

But the absolute most remote gravestone I ever photographed was south of Red Lake, Ontario, at the site of a former logging camp. There were no other stones. We had to fight our way the mere 20 feet into the woods to get to it. We needed a machete.

Then the Ontario provincial bird swarmed us, we freaked the hell out, and clawed our way back to camp, flailing and cursing.
Never again.

Astorix

2019-10-31 12:26:37 PM

1 vote:

Squid_for_Brains: I'm a curious skeptic, and an atheist-with-benefits; I know that the natural world is far stranger than we realize, and also that I don't know everything.
That being said, I might as well be psychically deaf. I've lived in several spooky old houses, hung out in graveyards, been 3rd shift security for two museums housed on old grounds or in old buildings, been ghost hunting, and to this day I think I've accidentally been the cause of more ghost stories than the recipient.
Another example: I've been camping in the same woods with the same fool friends for 30 years. We're nice people, but we're...an acquired taste. And our annual camping date used to be around Halloween.
So, around 2015 my husband and I were giving motorcycle camping a try, up the ridge from the usual spot. We are completely alone in a deserted campground...nowhere near, I might add, the Northwest Coast. In fact, we're slightly south of Indianapolis. So imagine my surprise when an all-black suv (with blacked-out windows) roars up and steps right in front of us. An older couple get out, looking this way and that, and hand me this card:
[Fark user image 425x425]
They haven't even said hello. I'm pretty much speechless in mutual embarrassment, because after a moment of questioning, I discover that these south-of-Indianapolis Sasquatch sightings go back roughly 20 years, about the time my 6'4" idiot friend discovered Ghillie suits and insisted on wearing one every year:
[Fark user image 425x531]
I pulled up the photo and tried to explain, but their eyes glazed over, they turned around, got in their creepy suv, and roared off without saying goodbye.
Seriously, folks, I'm not trying to yuck anyone's yum here, but Bigfoot doesn't live south of Indianapolis. I apologize for my idiot friends and any confusion we might have caused.

This guy, however:
[Fark user image 425x566]

Catsquatch is out there. And if you don't fill up his mug with butt drugs, there's no telling what he might do.

💀

are you talking about Morgan County, such as Monrovia? The Sasquatch legends there abound. Whole posse of friends went hunting, they tried to get me to go, I said Uh UH. The woods behind my friends house was spooky as hell, with a lot of weird rituals going on back there. One of my friends came back and said there were bones of a dog there.

No flipping way did I ever tempt fate by exploring those woods with the strange noises eminating

Resident Muslim

2019-10-31 11:21:08 AM

1 vote:

ottebx: Wendigogo: God I miss that place.

Cool story. Any pics of this fabulous mansion?

[Fark user image image 261x193]
I lived on the 3rd story - where the green dormers are. There was also a full attic and Silence of the Lambs style basement. I had access to the whole place. Being the only one there was creepy as hell.

I think there is some...thing...standing there and waving. Top of the stairs on the right.

ObscureNameHere

2019-10-31 10:50:49 AM

1 vote:

I'm a 'non-believer' but do admit that weird things happen now and then (how one *proves* what the weird things are can be a discussion for another day). There are three examples of stuff from my family, two fall into the 'precognition' category and not 'ghost stories' per se., the other is, well, not sure.

1) My Dad was driving up our long driveway (lived in a rural area) and my older brother looked out of the picture window and said "Dad brought Kentucky Fried Chicken!". I remember being really excited about this and wondering how my brother knew. Now, this is the late 70's, so my Dad would not have called home to say he was doing this. And, the KFC bag was kept on the floor of the passenger side of the car, so there is absolutely no way my brother could have seen it.

2) This one is very distinct. Now it is the early 80's, so I am maybe 12-14 when this happened. I remember that I was having a dream about something, but then the dream was DISTINCTLY and suddenly interrupted with an image blast. Almost a cerebral "We interrupt this program" moment. Imagine watching a cartoon in low-res and then it suddenly cuts over to a high-res real life photo. The image sort of looked like the end of our driveway, but there were lights at weird angles and sort of misty. So, the image snapped me awake and I sat up in bed, kinda pissed off that my sleep was disrupted. I then heard sounds from downstairs that were my mom and dad talking. So I waddled downstairs to find out what was what. My mom was on the phone while my dad was pulling on his coat and going out the front door. I looked out the picture window..... and saw at the end of our driveway a car flipped up on its side across the road, headlights still on, on a misty night.

3) Keep this short: for a period of time (told to me MANY years later), my Dad acquired -- in his early 30's apparently -- an ability to see 'auras'. He worked in corrections, and he started being able to predict intentions of the inmates based on a 'glow' he could see around them. He apparently (and perhaps obviously) never told anyone about it at work. Eventually, according to him, his Christian beliefs seemed to have guilted him out of the ability to see the auras.

ObscureNameHere

2019-10-31 10:12:09 AM

1 vote:

Jerseysteve22: What happened to the guy from Maine who went into the woods to investigate something weird? Is he still around? I forgot what year that story was from. 2012ish?

Never posted a follow-up as far as I know. Also, don't think that login showed up ever again in a thread.

Jerseysteve22

2019-10-31 10:07:00 AM

1 vote:

A man went to a hotel and walked up to the front desk to check in. The woman at the desk gave him his key and told him that on the way to his room, there was a door with no number that was locked and no one was allowed in there. Especially no one should look inside the room, under any circumstances. So he followed the instructions of the woman at the front desk, going straight to his room, and going to bed.

The next night his curiosity would not leave him alone about the room with no number on the door. He walked down the hall to the door and tried the handle. Sure enough it was locked. He bent down and looked through the wide keyhole. Cold air passed through it, chilling his eye. What he saw was a hotel bedroom, like his, and in the corner was a woman whose skin was completely white. She was leaning her head against the wall, facing away from the door. He stared in confusion for a while. He almost knocked on the door, out of curiosity, but decided not to.

This disinclination saved his life. He crept away from the door and walked back to his room. The next day, he returned to the door and looked through the wide keyhole. This time, all he saw was redness. He couldn't make anything out besides a distinct red color, unmoving. Perhaps the inhabitants of the room knew he was spying the night before, and had blocked the keyhole with something red.

At this point he decided to consult the woman at the front desk for more information. She sighed and said, "Did you look through the keyhole?" The man told her that he had and she said, "Well, I might as well tell you the story. A long time ago, a man murdered his wife in that room, and her ghost haunts it. But these people were not ordinary. They were white all over, except for their eyes, which were red."

GenePoolinWV

2019-10-31 10:03:23 AM

1 vote:

I guess I should conclude. The experience was incredibly accurate that I couldn't write if off. I figure if that much is true, then probably the whole religion thing is real, too.

Astorix

2019-10-31 8:53:41 AM

1 vote:

Another weird reincarnation story. My ex sister in law, when she was a little girl, around 4, used to describe in detail houses and events that nobody else in the family ever heard.

Her mother asked her "when did you do (or hear this)

She said "when I was a boy."

They laughed and made fun of her until she closed her mind off to it.

I wonder if when we are little kids we know more but learn to close our minds off to it. Just a thought.

Astorix

2019-10-31 8:14:03 AM

1 vote:

Chalk me up to another person who wonders if people and animals re-incarnate.

We had a cockatiel named Robert, a recessive pearl who turned into standard grey, but he renamed himself Bobert. He had a very distinctive way of saying his name: Bob-BERT, Bob-BERT! He died in 2003 after eating drywall and destroying his kidneys. He was really good friends with another bird named Lydia, who turned out to be a male. Lydia pronounced his name Ly-DEE-a. And Bob-BERT picked up on that. Lydia died in 1999.

Fast forward to 2014. Both Lydia and Bobert are long dead and there are no other birds we had who knew them let alone pronounced their names.

I get a cockatiel, a grey pearl who turned into a standard grey. We decided to name him Ollie. Within a few months he started renaming himself Bob-BERT, Bob-BERT.

We thought that was freaky, but Ollie is close to Bob-BERT. So we noted it an moved on.

Then one day he said Ly-DEE-a, Ly-DEE-a. In the exact name way as Lydia said his name.

TheLastFrontiersman

2019-10-31 7:15:14 AM

1 vote:

There is a bond that develops between musicians and their favorite instruments.With me, it was a particular guitar.I don't like to talk brands, but I will say that it was a vintage hollow body electric that I found in pieces in the junk section of a music store in the late 1960's.I paid fifty bucks for it (which was a lot of money for me at the time) and took the parts home in a paper bag.I never even stopped to wonder at the time how or why it had come to be in the state it was in.

I had an uncle who was a carpenter, and I figured I could enlist his help in repairing my new guitar.I wouldn't go so far as to call him a luthier, but he had built a couple of guitars from scratch (I still own one of them), and he was a more than competent woodworker with a shop and tools.He taught me about hide glue, and binding, and refinishing with nitrocellulose lacquer.Together we figured out the wiring of the volume and tone circuits (all the pots, caps and knobs had to be replaced); we took the pickups out of their housings so that we could re-do the gold plating.We figured out the proper angle for the neck and replaced the tuners, recut the nut; and when we were finished it was the most beautiful instrument either of us had ever seen.The figures in the wood seemed to flow around the f-holes and external hardware like they had all grown together.Like a virgin boy with his first willing partner, when it was done I was almost afraid to touch it for fear of causing something so extraordinary to sound like crap.I named her Jezebel.

Let's face it, I'd never been that good of a guitarist.I could play chords and a bit of fingerstyle and sing at the same time (which put me ahead of a lot of casual players) but I'd never been able to solo to save my life.I had done the work practicing scales and arpeggios until long after the cows came home, but something about improvisation just never clicked in my head or fingers... until I plugged Jezebel into my dad's old Fender '57 Deluxe amp.Even with my clumsy fingers, she sang like an angel and my confidence soared right along, to the point that I didn't want to put her down.Sometimes I would lose myself so much that I would play for an hours, and my fingers would be as sore as a beginners.It was almost scary, realizing that at those times I couldn't tell what was coming from me and what was coming from her.

If you were an American male who could play guitar in 1968, you were in a band and I was no exception.Three friends and I had our own "rock band" and we got together on Saturday evenings to practice in my family's garage. Bob played drums, and kept pretty good time; Allan played bass, Rick was lead guitar and I was rhythm and vocals.My old guitar was a crappy Silvertone acoustic, so even though we considered ourselves a rock band we did quite a bit of folksy Peter, Paul and Mary stuff... until the night I brought out Jezebel.I took my first solo break that night on Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away," and when we finished the guys were all staring at me."I think somebody's been holding out on us" was Rick's comment.He begged me to let him play her, and I found myself making excuses.The truth was, I was jealous.

The band changed direction that night, and we came up with a whole new list of songs to learn and play.Actual, honest to god rock and roll songs that everyone knew but we had never tried together, and we started practicing three times a week.Two weeks later Allan announced that we had a gig, a birthday party for a girl he was trying to impress; we would play for an hour and split twenty bucks.

We opened the show with the Stones "Paint it Black" and we almost knocked those girls out of their chairs; even the parents were gaping at us, and by the time the show was over you would have thought we were the goddam Beatles.Had it not been a sunny Saturday afternoon in a nice suburban backyard with parents present, I'm absolutely certain we would have ALL gotten lucky.

It was our break; a couple of the girls knew kids on the student council, and a week later our band was asked to play the local High School "back to school" sock-hop.The set list was ready-Stones, Jefferson Airplane, the Monkees, the Doors.We were ready to blow the roof off the school gym... and the afternoon of the big show, I sprained my left wrist in PE class.There was no way we could cancel the gig, and anyway I could still sing; but there was no way I could play.Rick had been drooling over Jezebel since the first time I brought her out to practice with the band, and now he was on his knees begging me to play her.The only thing I could say was yes.

We started the first set with "Happy Together," and built it up from there.Rick was on fire; he never missed a lick and was playing better than I'd thought humanly possible.At the first break though, I noticed he was really sweating, like drenched in sweat."Hey, you OK man?" I asked.He said he was fine, just needed a drink and some air, so we each grabbed a cup of spiked punch and headed outside for a smoke.I think that "punch" was more like red-colored Everclear.Rick seemed pale and not himself, but I hardly got another chance to talk to him; everybody was coming up, complimenting us on the show, telling us how awesome we were.In no time, we had to head back onstage for the second set, and Rick's cup got set on top of my dad's Fender amp.

Bob hit the opening drum riff for "Paint it Black" like a madman; we had this set down cold.Kids were dancing, girls were staring up at us with open lust in their eyes, and everything was perfect... except there was Rick, playing fantastically on my guitar with girls almost drooling on themselves as they gazed at him.A few songs later, I was quietly fuming as we swung into "Somebody to Love," the anger probably helping me hit Grace Slick's out-of-my-range notes, when I started to hear screaming from the girls down front.And not good "I want to bang you, Paul McCartney" screaming, but ugly "oh my farking god, what is happening?" screaming.I opened my eyes (you can't sing "Somebody" without closing your eyes) to see what was happening, and these girls are screaming, clutching-almost clawing-at their faces, staring at Rick.

I turned to my right to look and dropped the mic as Bob and Allan crashed to silence, Bob dropping his sticks as Allan and I both jumped back away from Rick on the small stage.Jezebel was still playing, angel voice pounding out of that '57 Deluxe amp, as Rick played on, transfixed.
He stood stiffly straight, blood streaming from this tightly closed eyes, his ears, his nose, and from his ruined fingertips.His white shirt and tie were drenched from it streaming off his chin, but he played on and on for what seemed like hours but could only have been moments.I was close enough to hear the grating sound of the bones of his fingertips against the guitar strings, and I swear I even heard the soft popping noise as his eyeballs collapsed behind his eyelids and then slid down his face, along with the louder crunch as his clenched jaw broke behind the rictus of his bloodstained teeth.

The b-string broke on the final bent note, as Rick's lifeless body fell backward onto the amp, spilling Everclear onto the hot tubes, which instantly burst into flames.There were no automatic sprinkler systems in those days, and the fire quickly licked up across Rick's body to Jezebel, where her nitrocellulose lacquer practically exploded.Screaming kids were running for the exits even before the fire alarm started its shrill, strident clanging.Bob and Allan had abandoned the stage, as I ran to the lighting panel and killed power to the amps and PA, but it was too late; the fire had spread to the stage curtains and the smoke was so thick I almost didn't make it out.
I no longer envied my friend for what he was able to play on "my" guitar, and I wonder to this day if it was only my lack of true talent that saved me from his fate.

CAT-LIKE TYPING DETECTED

2019-10-31 5:53:46 AM

1 vote:

CAT-LIKE TYPING DETECTED: Almost forgot about this one.. Manga/comic..obvious fiction, but good..

The Enigma of Amigara Fault

Remember to read right to left.. =P

Count_Crackula

2019-10-31 3:12:12 AM

1 vote:

Well, after lurking in this thread since the first one dropped sixteen years ago, I suppose it's time to share my creepy experience. Or, more accurately, my wife's creepy experience.

It's 2009. We're in Portland, OR for my wife's college roommate's wedding. Neither of us had been to Portland, so we go up a couple of days early to explore the city. I had talked my wife into doing a ghost tour as one of our activities. I like doing ghost tours because it usually ends up being a cool history lesson peppered with spooky stories. My wife, on the other hand, doesn't really do spooky, so it took some convincing. Oddly enough, she agreed to do this tour because we found out they handed out EMF meters for the tour, and she found the notion kind of charming if not goofy.

Our first stop on the tour is a 19th century saloon hotel that was home to a few ladies of the night back in the day. After we climb the main stairwell and arrive on the second floor, the host tells us about one particular lady named Rose, and how she met a violent death at the hands of a john named Sam. He then tells us to wander the floor's narrow corridors and encourages us to call out for Rose, EMF meters in hand. He also tells us not to call out for Sam ("He doesn't like to be disturbed," our guide informs us). We're the only ones in the group that goes down the corridor to the right of the stairwell. The rest of the group follows the guide down the left-side corridor.

We play along and start saying stuff like "Hi, Rose. We're sorry about what happened, we'd like to see you." We're feeling pretty silly while doing so...until we get to the corridor's fifth set of doors. Suddenly, my wife's EMF meter lights up like a slot machine and its needle to register activity moves as far right as it can go without flying off the device. I'm standing right next to her, and my machine isn't doing a thing. My wife, eyes locked on her lit up machine, says, "Honey, can you get the tour guide?"

I quickly flag the guide over to us and explain what had happened. He asks for my wife's EMF meter, explaining that the devices have been known to malfunction on occasion. She hands it to him, and he hits its button to activate the device...nothing. No lights, no needle movement, not a single thing. He hands it back to my wife, and she hits the button. It immediately lights up and the needle maxes out again. The host, in a calm voice that lets you know that he's seen some stuff go down in this one-time property of ill repute, informs us that Rose usually only presents herself to women. At that moment, the hairs on my wife's neck stand up and she starts getting light-headed. We get the hell out of the corridor.

We gather with the rest of the group by the stairwell and my wife shares her experience. It's at that time that the host tells us that we were standing in front of the room where Rose got murdered. Good times.

I'd like to think that we experienced something freaky and unexplained. (Well, my wife directly and me by proxy). With that being said, I wouldn't be disappointed if it was revealed to be a trick. If it was a deception, it was one hell of a cunning ruse.

Wendigogo

2019-10-31 1:03:22 AM

1 vote:

Resident Muslim: "...and that's when I realized I had given her my real name and number!"

/I'm going for shorts this year, it seems :)

Why not? Those can be pretty cool. Heck, Netflix has a series based off of two sentence horror stories.

sherpa18

2019-10-30 11:40:14 PM

1 vote:

sherpa18: Bathia_Mapes: Woot, my favorite thread of the year! :)

One of mine too! I just hope that for once people will just link to and not post the same damn story they do year after freaking year. And that the non-believers stop posting their 'true stories' that are obviously bullshiat.

*reads thread*

So much for that hope :o(

Walker

2019-10-30 6:59:38 PM

1 vote:

People that come in here and make fun of anyone who says they've seen a ghost, lived in haunted house, had a paranormal experience, etc. need to understand if this stuff happened to them they wouldn't be so unbelieving. Then again, maybe they would, just because they refuse to believe. People are telling you things that happened to them. If you don't believe them, fine. No need to make fun of them. Just leave the thread. Go read about sports or politics or something.

I've had quite a few experiences. I didn't ask for them. Most of the time they've happened when I wasn't even looking for them to happen. I've told some in past threads. Here's another.

People who say you have nothing to fear from ghosts because they can't touch/hurt you, obviously have never been touched/hurt by a ghost. I've had it happen three times. I'll tell about one of the times now.

The first time I was touched by a ghost was in March 2001, here at The Round House in Fremantle, Western Australia:

From Wikipedia: Built in late 1830 and opened in 1831, it is the oldest building still standing in Western Australia. Intended as a prison, it had eight cells and a jailer's residence, all of which opened onto a central courtyard. The Round House was used for colonial and indigenous prisoners until 1886, when control of the Convict Establishment prison (now Fremantle Prison) was transferred to the colony. After that the Round House was used as a police lockup until 1900. The first person of European descent to be executed in Western Australia was 15-year-old John Gavin. Gavin confessed to the murder of George Pollard and was held in the Round House until he was hanged on 6 April 1844. His body was buried south of the Round House.

So that's its history. I ended up here because I was visiting my friend, who lives in Western Australia, and we took a Fremantle Ghost Tour on a dark and chilly night. This was one of the stops. I was standing by this well in the center of the courtyard when my experience happened:

I was standing alone, no one within 5 feet of me, holding my camcorder bag with my right hand. All of the sudden I felt someone grab my right wrist. Like 2 cold fingers, someone's thumb and index finger, wrapping around it. I jerked my wrist back and looked around freaked out. I tried to rationalize it. Could it be the wind? Wind does not wrap around your wrists, and certainly not just one of your wrists. Plus my hair did not even blow and I have very fine hair that blows around on a windless day just from me walking. I looked down at the outside of the well. I don't see them in this pic, or others on Google images, maybe they were removed, but there were thick round rusted steel hooks embedded in the concrete. Like you would chain someone to. Maybe they chained prisoners around the well when they let them out of their cells? Anyway, my thought was that the ghosts of one of these prisoners must have been sitting with his back against the well, thought the bag I was holding had food in it, and that's why he grabbed the wrist that was holding the bag. He was hungry. Or maybe just curious? Or maybe he was just trying to steal my bag. Who knows. But I know what I felt and it freaked me out.

That was the first time a ghost touched me. The next two times would be more painful. I might tell you about one of those later in the thread.

meat0918

2019-10-30 6:28:03 PM

1 vote:

Lord of the Highway: I had a weird thing happen to me last year. My lifelong friend took his own life at the end of June 2018. No one saw it coming, from the outside he had a great life... good job, wonderful family, usually upbeat and positive, so it was a serious shock to all of us that were close to him and it was heart wrenching to learn he had been hiding his depression from all of us for so long. It hit me pretty hard, he was pretty close to a brother to me.

A few months after he died I was sitting at the bar of a local dive getting some lunch and chatting with the bartender who I knew pretty well. She started telling me about how things have gotten weird with her room mate lately and that the gal was wigging out about this new guy the bartender was dating and making all kinds of weird threats about him infringing on their life, including a threat that she would take her own life if things didn't change. I told her that was all pretty farked up but don't dismiss her threat of suicide. I opened up to her about my own friend and how difficult it was when he actually did the deed. It was the first time I talked about it to anyone aside from my buddy's widow, his mom and my own wife. I got a little emotional talking to the bartender about it.

After lunch I headed to the grocery store to stock up for the week. I was standing in line waiting to check out and pulled out my phone to see if another of my friends had texted me, since we were chatting about stuff earlier that day. There was nothing on the phone so I turned it off and put it in the front pocket of my shorts, got through the line and headed back home with the groceries.

I decided to check my phone again before I unloaded the car and the screen was open to Google street view and it showed the picture of my deceased friend's house. I though, ok, that is weird and closed the app and saw my contacts were open as well, with his contact info displayed. I had a bit of a WTF moment. When my phone is off there is no way ...

Good story. Hair is standing up on end.

Bathia_Mapes

2019-10-30 4:19:04 PM

1 vote:

OneFretAway: Bathia_Mapes: Woot, my favorite thread of the year! :)

Hiya Mapes. Long time no see.

Hiya, OFA!

I still post on TFD from time to time. :)

a particular individual

2019-10-30 3:59:41 PM

1 vote:

I keep wanting to write another one. "Danny Doesn't Live Here Anymore" was a lot of fun to write, and the peoples liked it. You can read it here.

Here's the closest thing to a new Halloween story, if I didn't use it already:

For some reason no one wants to live in that house on 5th Avenue, though it satisfies at least two of the three criteria for desirable real estate: It wins on location and location, convenient to schools, shopping and Downtown and the Capital complex. It falls short on the third point because it's located on a commuter route in an otherwise quiet residential area. That doesn't seem to matter to other houses in the same neighborhood; even the more humble houses were consistently occupied. This Victorian had sat empty for six months without a renter (though not for lack of walk-throughs) when one of my my clients, a property manager, asked me to produce a virtual tour of it for his Web site. The previous tenants had moved out at the end of their lease with no explanation. "We're done here, thanks."

I showed up with my camera gear in the early afternoon, glad I didn't have to use any of my lights. The interior is modern but era-appropriate, as they say in the real estate business. It has high ceilings, blond hardwood floors, ample windows with lots of natural light, and a separate dining room adjoining the living room and kitchen. The back of the kitchen led to the stairs that descended to the basement. The first thing I thought as I surveyed the house was how glad I am I don't have to go down there. With no carpets or furniture, every sound reverberates. Whatever is in the basement kicks and rumbles at its leisure.

I'm just doing the upstairs. I set up my tripod in the living room, and began taking the series of photos that would later be assembled into the virtual tour. A full panorama of a room--all four walls, ceiling, and floor--is made of about 72 individual photos, but I take a lot more than that to be sure no shots are over- or under-exposed. Fortunately, I didn't need to shoot much of the ceiling and floor for most of the tour. It took about half an hour to finish the ground floor.

"I'm glad I don't have to go downstairs" started to be drowned out by "I wish I didn't have to go upstairs." But I did. And what is that sound coming from the basement? How does it move throughout the house so wallelessly?
It's not much: three bedrooms and a bathroom; a bit gloomier and yellower. And I really wish I could leave right now. Which is stupid, it's a house and I have a job to do. Good thing I don't have to do full room panoramas. I set up the tripod in the doorway of the bathroom, then the bedroom at the end of the hall. I hated having my back turned to the rooms behind me. I moved on to the second bedroom, the master. This is where she died, alone and afraid and angry. The bed was over there, and maybe it still is. I finish the shot and move to the third bedroom. I hope I didn't wake anyone up in the other room. I set up, didn't even bother to level the camera head, and shot a dozen or so photos, and hustled downstairs. I didn't even collapse the tripod.

I still have to shoot the entryway, between the base of the stairs and the front door. A full panorama, at least 72 photos, probably more. I level the camera head and start to shoot. I can see through the dining room to the kitchen and the door to the basement, and again I'm glad I don't have to go down there. I wish I could just come back later with the client, make up an excuse to have someone else in this house with me. That would be unprofessional, so I keep shooting. Somehow the basement sounds are starting to come from upstairs: A creak. A click. A sigh. As I'm shooting the stairs, I keep expecting to see a slippered foot descend. I cut every corner possible and shoot until I'm done. I grab my tripod and walk to the car. I'm outside; there are people and cars, and I tend to my equipment and get the Hell out of there.

When I next met with the client I mentioned, in passing, that I think I know why the owner has such a hard time finding tenants. He said "I know. The master bedroom doesn't help, either, does it?"

Bathia_Mapes

2019-10-30 3:46:04 PM

1 vote:

Woot, my favorite thread of the year! :)

OneFretAway

2019-10-30 3:36:50 PM

1 vote:

mikaloyd: Pass.
Too many wet blanket atheists in here to share my ghost or UFO tales again

Dang. I bet you've got some good ones.

My sister swears the house my parents lived in when she was in high school (after I left for college) was haunted. She used to hear footsteps and doors opening on the second floor routinely when nobody else was home. I didn't year any of it, and never heard this from her until a couple of decades after we moved out.

My kids swear that my 100+ year old house is haunted. I'm not saying that it is, but some of the things they point to have been on the weird side, like a light that switched itself off when nobody was in the room, strange noices, and once my younger daughter swears they say me walk past a window when I wasn't home. They came in expecting to find me there, and I showed up a minute or two later coming home from an errand.

The closest thing to an experience I've had was sitting up late at night and hearing someone audibly whisper my name in my ear. It's easy enough to pass it off as an auditory hallucination from a tired brain, but it sounded real enough for me to turn my head expecting to see someone there. I've been very happy in the house for 6+ years, so if there are ghosts we seem to get along very well.

My ex-wife had an experience with a Oija board that spelled out "Richie's dead." Minutes later, the phone rang and her parents learned that her uncle Richie had passed away that same day.

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