Random Creepypasta 5 (Ghosts, Glitches, & General Weirdness)

When I was sixteen I skipped school to stay home and play video games. I set up my PlayStation and made some hot pockets and right when I get good and comfortable I hear foot steps walking to my room. I glance outside and see my parents aren't home yet but was still afraid I was going to get caught. Seeing no place to hide I froze. Suddenly the door was flung open and I heard a blood curdling scream echo through the house. I must have sat there petrified in that room for half an hour before going outside and waiting for my parents to come home. I tried to explain to my friends later what happened but they thought I was just pulling some bullshit from the internet.
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My grandma told me that after her husband died if she left the bedroom door open when she slept she had dreams that he was coming into her bedroom but when she shut the door the dreams went away.
Shortly before she died she told me "Now he comes in even when the door is shut."
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I used to be on a search and rescue patrol. We got a very strange call one night- a loud car crash in the middle of a rural area was reported by a nearby resident, but when emergency workers showed up, the victims we're nowhere to be found. So we showed up to the scene and at the end of a very long dirt road there was a 90 degree turn with an embankment. The car was clearly going at a very high speed, missed the 90 degree turn, hit the embankment, flew through the air and the front of the car hit the ground so hard it gouged out a pretty sizeable hole upon impact. The windshield showed two shattered impact zones where the passenger's heads hit, covered in blood and hair. There was more blood in and around the car. The scene was gruesome and didn't look like a survivable crash- especially given the mangled condition of the car. We expected to find bodies nearby. Police, police dogs, firefighters and now an entire search and rescue party was not able to locate the victims after several hours. As night set in it began to get more and more eerie. There was this horrible looking car crash but no bodies to be found. Finally after about 3 hours of searching, there was a 911 call that came in: a report of a bloodied dead body found in the bed of a parked pickup truck in a rural home's driveway a couple miles away. Apparently a family was coming home from a vacation, and when they pulled into their driveway, they noticed the body and immediately called 911. So two police units dispatch from the search to respond to the call. We all assumed this would be the end of the story. Well, the police showed up to the house and to everyone's surprise- no body to be found. Somehow the body had vanished. There was blood, but no sign of anything else. So a second search radius started from that house. We searched practically the whole night. We're called back the next morning and nobody ever found the bodies, we eventually called the search off. To this day I have no idea what happened.
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Here's one for you, I'm wondering if anyone else has heard of anything like this before... My wife and her brother SWEAR that this is true, and both have told me about it independently.
In the house they grew up in there was a room on the top floor, where if you pressed your ear against the wall you would hear what sounded like a city. Cars driving, people walking, distant muffled conversations.
They lived out in the country a bit, nowhere near any sort of city; but they swear that wall somehow audio-portaled to a city... or something.
I don't know. It's always struck me as odd and fascinating.
When their dad did some remodeling in the house, the sound went away.
I suggested they were hearing electrical wires or a drain pipe or something but they both refute that possibility.
Anyone heard of anything like this?
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In 1994 I was a policeman in Brighton, Sussex. One night in August of that year, I and a colleague were patrol officers covering the Queens Park area of the town, Around 2 am we were asked to attend an incident outside the park gates, where an ambulance unit was attending a casualty.
On arrival at the scene we found the paramedics attempting to resucitate an elderly woman who was lying by the roadside, apparently without success.
The odd thing was that we were informed that the lady, when found, was covered in green slime, which apparently appeared to have drowned her,and, there was indeed plenty of this viscous ooze in evidence, both all over the casualty and the attending medics. Furthermore there was a large amount of this slime in the gutter running some 20 feet down the road. The old lady was taken to the nearby A&E where further attempts were made to revive her which, sadly, were unsuccessful.
When the lab examined the substance it was found to be "algae like" and apparently had been ingested in sufficient quantities to cause the ladys stomach to literally detonate causing her death, at this the case was closed.
One theory bandied about was that the victim was a "hydromaniac" who had been drinking from the pond in the park and had staggered away only for the algae to "ferment" inside her, expand, and cause the injury. However the family of the lady denied any history of this type of activity, and were obviously distressed at this suggestion. For our own part we noticed the water level in the lake was low, she would have to have climbed into the muddy shallows and drunk the stagnant water from the edge. There was no evidence of mud on her feet or hands, there were no muddy footprints in evidence, neither did the slime smell stagnant, in fact it had a soapy smell not unlike detergent.
Anyway there it is.
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On a weekend afternoon in 2006, my girlfriend (now wife) were hanging out at her apartment watching The Weather Man on DVD. About halfway through the movie, from the TV speakers, we hear a muffled man's voice - like he's speaking through a fast food drivethru speaker - say something that sounded like "the toy is in Spain".
We look at each other confused. I had never seen the movie and I didn't know if this was some bizarre part of it and she was looking at me thinking I was playing some weird joke. We both say we have no idea what's going on. Meanwhile, the voice from the TV said it again, "the toy is in Spain".
With a bit of caution, I ask "The toy is in Spain? The toy is in the rain?"
It responds sounding a little frustrated, this time more forceful, as if its trying to enunciate more. "The. boy. is. on. the. plane."
We look at each other again, stunned. It seems to have responded to us.
It repeats it again, sounding even more frustrated. And again, faster now when we don't respond.
Finally, my wife shouts, "Stop it! The boy is on the plane! We don't know what you want us to do about it!"
Silence for a bit. The voice then mumbles something and then, very clearly says "Sorry." and then we never heard it again.
I watched that part of the movie again later to reproduce the sound, I tried a handful of other DVDs, I tried plugging the DVD into another player - the player into another TV, nothing. The TV just had the DVD player and a coax cable for cable tv hooked to it. I've never been able to explain what happened that day.
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I was a real estate agent in South Florida. 22 years old and really just servicing small rental homes and apartments to make ends meet. Any time a deal would arise that could take minimal effort and pay out quickly, I would definitely do my best to find someone that would be interested in renting it.
One such deal came across my system. No pictures or information about the property, but the home was huge according to the dimensions provided. Literally a humongous three bedroom house going for the price of a cheap one bedroom apartment. I called the listing agent for more details and all I got back was, "send us anyone. We need it rented."
That was all I needed to hear and I set off to find a client for the home. I advertised all over the Internet for it and left my office phone number as a contact point for me. Since the home was so cheap, my cell phone had a tendency to get inundated with phone calls every time I advertised a property so low. Less than 24 hours later, I get a call on my personal cell phone line.
An older woman speaks, let's call her Susan for the time being.
"Hello, I am calling about the home for rent."
"Hi, uh yes the home is still available. Not that I mind, but how did you receive my personal cell phone number? I could have sworn that I only left my office line."
She completely ignored the question and says, "I am available tonight to see it, after dark. Can I meet you there?"
I had a lot of appointments that day and hated showing homes that I had not previously inspected, so I tried to reschedule. She insisted that I show her the house. She said she was serious about renting it, so I accepted.
I get to the home around 6:30, before our 7 PM appointment. The whole lot surrounding the home is pitch black. I get to the front door, open the Lockbox for the keys, and enter the home. Flip the light switch. Nothing. I can't see anything whatsoever. It's then that I switch on the flashlight application installed in my phone. The second I turned it on, I jumped.
There was somebody IN the home. A dark and waspy haired woman with a cane just sitting in the dark. I was so spooked, that I almost just ran out the door. The only thing that stopped me is that she said my name.
"Andrew?"
I was stunned. Frightened. Then I started to put the pieces together in my head.
"...Susan?"
She stood up relying heavily on the cane and extended a limp hand towards me,
"Nice to meet you, Andrew."
I shook her hand, "Pleasure to meet you as well, Susan. I thought we were scheduled for 7 PM. How did you get into the home?"
She ignored me and jumped straight into speaking about the home.
"This is a wonderful home, Andrew."
Let me remind you for a second that the home is pitch black except for the light from my phone's flashlight. I walked over to the next room and flipped a light switch. This time it worked and a small lamp turned on. I looked around the home.
By far the strangest home I had ever been inside. There were dead bugs scattered all throughout the house. Holes in the walls. Old flooring. But even stranger was that the home was almost completely furnished. Couch, TV set, dining room table, bed frame. Almost like someone had moved out and forgot most of their things. The place looked haunted. One thing I couldn't deny is that the home was huge.
"Yes, Susan, the home definitely has strong bones." I said, in an attempt to remain impartial to the house's odd setting.
At this point Susan starts walking around the home. Her cane buckling with her knees with every step she took. It was clear to me, as I had a family member that did a huge 100 mile MS bike run every year, that the woman had multiple sclerosis. Every room we entered, took about 15 minutes to cover. Susan seemed to be completely oblivious to the plethora of dead insects and admired the home at every turn. She was flicking light switches on and off. Checking faucets. Tapping things with her cane. It did take an excruciatingly long time to get around the home, coupled with the fact that I was still completely petrified of the manner in which I met this woman.
After about 90 minutes, she comes full circle and sits back on the living room couch. She invites me to sit next to her, but I refuse to touch anything in this bug infested home.
She finally says, "I want this home."
At this point it's past 8 o clock, and I have a wife and child at home waiting for me. So I say, "Great! I'll put the paperwork together in the morning and we can finalize everything tomorrow."
She says, " Okay. Let me just wait for my friend to pick me up before you go."
I sigh at first due to the exorbitant amount of time I have spent in this home, but I am quickly silenced. No more than 60 seconds later, a husky man walks in the front door. I didn't see any lights on in the driveway and didn't hear him pull up. I have no idea how he even knew we would be done at this exact moment, but he was there. Silent and stone faced. He grabbed her hand and guided her to the car outside. Then, without turning the headlights on in the pitch black driveway, he pulled out into the main road and took off.
When I say I quickly locked up, it's an understatement. I was so frightened to be in this house another second. I don't know what it was, but an overwhelming fear came over me. I could only compare it to being a young child and running upstairs from a dark basement as quickly as I could for fear of what might lurk down there. It was strange. I got in my car and went home.
The next day, I called Susan bright and early. I had committed to no longer dealing with the woman in the middle of the night. If I was going to do this deal, I would do it during the daylight hours. After a couple of rings, she picks up.
"Hello?"
"Hello, Susan! This is Andrew. We spoke yesterday and I showed you the home last night. Were you ready to finalize this deal?
She paused for a second. Then, in a voice so cold that it gives me goosebumps to this day, said, "I don't know any Andrews and I didn't see any homes yesterday. Do NOT call me again."
I sat at my desk utterly befuddled. I was part upset that I wasted so much of my time and experienced the oddities of the night prior, but I was also part relieved that I wouldn't have to see that woman again.
I know this is a long post, but bare with me. This is the part when things got truly weird.
About a week later, I met a young couple. They were looking for a cheap home and had to move in quickly. They didn't even care how it looked, since the boyfriend was a contractor and had no problems renovating the place. I told them to swing by before work and they did. They said the house was pretty dirty, but that they could clean it and wanted to apply for it. I drew up paperwork for them and they were moving in a few days later.
The following weekend I went out with my wife and we were driving. She received a phone call from a weird number and opted to not pick it up. We went about our day. A few hours later I got a call from my mother, who lives in a completely different state. She told me that a woman named Susan called her cell phone asking for Andrew and said she was ready to move into a house.
I was shocked. I had no idea how this woman got my mothers phone number. Later on that night, I got a call from my father saying the same thing. At this point I am completely afraid. I get home and my wife decides to check her voicemail. Lo and behold, there was a voicemail from Susan, asking why I haven't called her back in regards to the home.
I have never been more disturbed in my entire life. I never responded to any of those calls.
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About a year ago now I was sitting at home watching a movie and noticed out onto the backyard patio a man standing there looking straight up in the air. As high as his head would go (almost looking backward). Scared the living shit out of me. Person was as still as a board. He was dressed in very nice clothes though (a navy blue suit and tie with black dress shoes) which didn't really fit the scene. I grabbed my cell phone and watched him for a minute to see what he was doing before I'd call the police. Out of nowhere he shook his head (almost out of a trance) and looked around to see where he was. He took his cell phone out and started making a call. At that point I opened the sliding door (with the screen still being shut) and asked if he was okay. He sounded very frantic and said he doesn't know how he got there. I told him where he was and apparently he lived a few streets over. He walked out the side gate after apologizing profusely. I've seen him a few times in passing and he's seemed extremely normal (drives a Porsche Cayenne). No idea WTF that was about.
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Two months after my brother and his wife bought a new house, they had to go out of town and needed their cats fed. Their house and my office are both a good drive from my apartment, but only a few minutes away from each other. My brother said if I wanted, I could just stay over in the guest room rather than driving among the three places. So I got the keys and instructions. I was staying there three nights: Mon-Wed.
Monday evening was uneventful until about midnight. I was lying on the living room couch, watching Conan, with a cat lying on my chest. I started to drift off to sleep. The next thing I knew, I was standing in pitch black darkness. I completely freaked out, I had no idea where I was. I felt around in the dark and felt nothing. Finally I realized there actually was a faint blue light coming from above. I moved toward it and then understood where I was. I was in the fucking basement! The light was coming through the basement door at the top of the stairs, which leads to the kitchen. Just enough moonlight apparently made it through from a window elsewhere in the kitchen. I bolted up the stairs, turned on the kitchen light, and closed the basement door. I was terrified until I calmed down enough to come to the conclusion you probably already came to: I had sleepwalked all the way down the stairs (after opening the basement door, which I know was closed).
A couple things are important to the story. First, the basement. The house was very nice -- actually, more than they should have been able to afford. The only exception was the basement. I had only seen the basement once, when I first got the tour. It was totally unfinished and was the one major thing they wanted to fix up. All they had down there was some boxes and the washer/dryer. I had no reason to want to go down there and had kind of forgotten it existed.
The other point is that sleepwalking is kind of a thing in my family, an inside joke. My brother talked in his sleep constantly, and would sleepwalk sometimes, and it always scared the hell out of me. The idea of people doing things in their sleep just creeps me out to the core (still does). My brother knew this and would tease me about it, so it was known in my family that I had this phobia. But as far as I know, I had never, ever sleepwalked until that night. The image kept playing in my mind, over and over, of me, asleep, getting up from the couch, walking to the kitchen, opening the basement door, and shuffling down the stairs into total darkness. Creepy as all hell.
Anyway, I saw the TV was still on in the living room, playing Wedding Crashers. I watched the rest of the movie, trying to laugh and think of the sleepwalking as a funny story to tell my brother. When I went upstairs to go to sleep in the guest room, I stayed asleep. That was night one.
The next morning, in the light of day, it didn't seem that scary. I texted my brother about it and joked around. All day I wasn't bothered one bit. But as I'm walking out of my office to my car, I'm overcome with this sense of dread. All of a sudden, the thought of going to sleep in that house -- and maybe sleepwalking again -- is scaring me. So I had a plan. I stop at the hardware store and pick up one of those rubber door-stopper wedges. At the house, I jam this into the crack under the basement door, and kick it in until it's as far as it can go. I test out trying to open the door, and it won't budge. Perfect.
Later, I go upstairs and fall asleep. When I wake up, I swear to god I think I'm dreaming. I was standing in darkness again, but this time I know exactly where I am. The smell is the same. The concrete floor under my feet is the same. I look around for the light from upstairs, and it take me longer to find it because it's farther away. Last night I was only a couple of feet from the stairs, this night it was maybe ten feet. I run up and turn on the kitchen lights. I see the rubber wedge on on the floor, a couple of feet away, as if tossed there. Again, I can't stop picturing myself sleepwalking. Out of the bedroom, down the stairs, trying to open the basement door. Bending down and yanking out the wedge. And then, again, slowly down into the darkness.
I decided I was turning on the basement lights and they were staying on. I opened the door and flipped the switch to the basement stairway. I saw there was a main switch at the bottom of the stairs. To give you a quick sense of the layout, the staircase splits the basement into two parts. To the right is a small area with the washer/dryer, and to the left is the a big open area.
Anyway, I walked down and turned on the lights for the whole basement. That's when I noticed something I hadn't noticed when my brother gave me the tour. About 10-15 feet away, in the big area, there was a door to what looked like a small closet. This door was closed, but had no doorknob (just an empty hole), so it looked like it would freely swing open. I realized it was very close to where I had just awoken. Then a fucking freaky thought came to me: it was as if each night I was heading to the door, and getting a little farther each time before I woke up. As soon as that thought popped into my head, I booked it up the stairs again, left the lights on, and closed the door. I went up to the bedroom, but it took me forever to fall asleep. That was night two.
The next morning, Wednesday morning, I woke up late for work. I didn't think about the basement at all because I was scrambling to get ready. At work though, I was still curious about what was behind the door, so I texted my brother and asked. He replied "wait....why were you in the basement?" I realized that when I texted him the day before, I never actually told him where I woke up. So I tell him I woke up in the basement, actually twice in a row. After a while, he sends this novel-length text. About how the basement is creepy, not to go down there, etc. How they tried putting the litter boxes in the basement and the cats made a mess in the house because they refused to go down. How he volunteers to do every chore other than the laundry so he doesn't have to go down there. He says all this stuff, and it's surprising to me, because my brother never believed in the paranormal or superstitions, ever since we were kids. I also realize he never answered my question about the door, but I let it go.
After work, I get the same feeling of dread as I'm walking to my car. I really don't want to stay there again, and I decide: fuck it, I don't have to. So I go feed the cats, get my stuff, and drive back to my place. I'm supposed to feed the cats one more time, so I'll stop over in the morning. As I went to sleep at my apartment, I was thinking of all the steps I would have to take to sleepwalk to the basement again -- find my car parked around the block, drive asleep to my brother's house, etc. But this time, I sleep through the night. That was night three.
Thursday morning, I stop at the house as planned. I'm about to leave when I remember that the basement lights are still on. I don't even hesitate to go down to turn them off. There was something about being there in the morning that, at the time, made it seem fine. When I go down, again that door without a doorknob catches my eye, and it also doesn't seem scary anymore. So, what the hell, let's see. I walk over to it and I distinctly remember not feeling spooked at all. Until -- I reach my hand toward the doorknob hole to pull it open. As soon as I do that, and I mean instantly, I feel this electric feeling, like the air before a storm, and I imagine a hand coming through that hole and grabbing mine. It was like 0 to 60, going from no fear to being certain that something horrible would happen if I opened that door. It's hard to describe it other than that electric feeling. I booked it up the stairs and out of the house.
So, a month later, I meet my brother for happy hour. A few drinks in, we start joking about me sleepwalking and the creepy basement. I say he never answered me about what's behind the door, and he says I don't want to know. Joking at first, but then insisting. Finally he tells me, and I don't believe him. He's my big brother and has only bullshitted me about a million times in my life. This was his explanation: the previous (and first) owners of the house had a teen daughter that used the basement as her bedroom. The door was to her closet, where one night she curled up, took some pills and killed herself. The family was going to remodel the basement, but after tearing it apart realized they couldn't do it and had to move. That was why only the basement was unfinished, and why my brother was able to afford the place -- the seller had to disclose a suicide happened in the residence. He said if I didn't believe him, to look up the market values of the identical houses in his track (I know how much they paid for their house and it was way lower). He and his wife considered themselves rational people and figured it was a bargain, but didn't want to tell anyone. After they moved in, his wife was fine with the basement, but he grew to hate it. He apologized for not saying anything to me before I stayed there, but he never thought I'd have any reason to go down there.
Now here's what that convinced me. I said "Okay, the only thing that makes me kind of believe you is that the last morning I was there, I went over to the closet door" -- and at this point, I see my brother's face change -- and I continued: "when I went to open it, the air felt like--" and at the same instant, I say "electricity" and my brother says "electric." At the same exact time. I saw his face and knew he was telling the truth.
I've never stepped foot again in that basement, and I haven't sleepwalked since.
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A few years ago I was stationed in Okinawa with the Army. At the time I was big into Geocaching (finding hidden containers using GPS for those not familiar). We were on the southern end of the island. My wife stayed in the car while my son (around 6 or 7 at the time) and I went to look for the geocache that was in the area. This end of Okinawa has a lot of cliffs overlooking the ocean. We were maybe 50-75 feet from the cliff edge, and I had to go off the trail to find the container. I told my son to stay right there on the path since I wouldn’t be out of sight. I find the container and begin signing the log book to prove I found it when my son asked if I was almost done. I told him I was, and he said “Good. Daddy, I saw hands”. I repeated what he said and he said “yeah”. I put everything back the the way I found it, grabbed his hand and hustled back to the car. The whole way back I questioned him about what he saw. The way he described it, he saw a pair of hands moving toward him. Not a person, only hands. He said that he could see through them.
I had not told him nor my wife about the area we were in. During World War II during the battle of Okinawa, a lot of people killed themselves by jumping from these cliffs to avoid being captured by American forces. Legends about the area say that if you are American, and especially if you are male, that the angry spirits of those that jumped will try to push you off of the cliffs. Needless to say, the wife was more than a little upset that I hadn’t shared this information before we went there.
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In about June 1995 I was going to work. I lived right next to where I worked at that time. A security badge was required to enter through the back door to the building where I worked. I went up the stairs to the second floor and turned right to enter a large work area I always entered, but to my shock, there was only a small room that had windows where a wall should have been. There were also several long couches and a fixed bench against the wall where the windows were. There should have been cubicles divided by the portable walls you see in hi-tech offices. A small room of about 25 feet square had replaced the 250 by 50 foot room I was expecting to see as I had seen for over a year! I descended and re-ascended the stairs four more times to try to see if the new room to the right of the top landing would revert back to what it was supposed to be, but it remained "different" than what I new it ought to look like.
I was beginning to panic when someone I knew showed up to go to work. He always took the same right turn I was trying to make, to get to his cubicle, so I followed him up the stairs just behind him. This time when we made the turn together, the room appeared as it should have been. My co-worker never knew of my weird attempts to get to my office. I kept quiet for obvious reasons. Has anyone else ever had a weird event like this happen to them? I hope I never encounter another one, it really shakes you up.
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I'm looking for some answers to something strange that occurred to me in 1998.

I was working at a tourist attraction in Manchester, England when at the end of a long Thursday I was getting ready to go to a works party. It was about mid June and it was a sunny evening. Myself and a colleague went into the centre of town to get some cash from a machine. We were walking along Deansgate past Demitries when a young boy around 10 years old ran past myself and my colleague Chris. He then turned round and looked for his Mum who was some way behind us. In doing this he looked straight at my face and screamed with a look of complete terror on his face "Its Simon!" and shot past us back to his Mum.

As you could probably imagine, this was quite a shock to myself and Chris also and Chris turned to me and said "bloody Hell, mate! What was that about?"

I was speechless, and simply laughed the incident off. You see, my name IS
Simon. I had never seen the child before, and couldn't possibly imagine where he would know me.

Chris and myself both have a laugh about this still, but recently it has been troubling me. Why would I scare him so? How did he know my name? What on earth was going on?

At the time I remember saying that he had probably met me at the attraction,
but I was an actor, my own name was never used, I had no close contact with
visitors, and had only been working there for a few weeks. Thinking hard about it this probably wasn't the case. That is why the incident has unnerved me. So if anyone has any ideas, I would love to be able to put my mind at ease.
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The Weirs remained a cause celebre for a hundred years after their deaths. Pamphlets were written about them, blaming their crimes on the harsh dogmas of the extreme Protestant sect to which they belonged. Others lamented their executions, plainly holding them to be aged and unbalanced. Their house, "The Bow," stood for a century and a half, becoming infamous as a haunted house. Neighbors reported lights and noises from the empty house, sounds of dancing, shrieks, and the sound of a spinning wheel... a glowing coach would sometimes pull up to the house to take the spirits of Thomas and Jane Weir off to Hell. No one would rent the place. The last known couple who tried, in the early 19th century, left after one night because they awoke to find -- of all things -- a spectral calf peering at them as they lay in bed. "The Bow" was torn down in the 1830s to make way for new construction.
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There is a Glamorganshire goblin called the Green Lady of Caerphilly, the colour of whose dress is indicated by her title. She haunts the ruin of Caerphilly Castle at night, wearing a green robe, and has the power of turning herself into ivy and mingling with the ivy growing on the. wall.
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In the ‘West Ham Disappearances’ of the early 1880s, a number of young girls vanished from the London slums. One of them, Eliza Carter, returned briefly before her final disappearance to tell her schools friends that ‘They’ (the fairies) had kidnapped her and now forbade her to go home.
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I was about 9-11 years old when this happened to me. I lived in a small village in Sweden, still carrying it's old name from the Viking era, located besides a large hill where priests used to burn (and hang) witches during the middle ages. I used to explore this great hill at least once a week, as it had a mysterious atmosphere to it which intrigued me.
Many times i would bring friends, and we'd be strolling around in the forest located on top of the hill, searching for the cave called the Troll cave (Trollgrottan) that according to folk lore lies hidden deep within the forest
As I was quite young at the time, I don't know whether or not this memory of mine is recalled correctly. But I remember finding what i thought was a doll.
It had real, pinkish skin with tiny lanugo hairs like on your arms. Its eye sockets where sewn together and the hair on its head was reddish and looked just like human hair.
The weirdest thing, though, was that it had what looked like veins or tubes emerging from its stomach, reaching over its arms and legs. Withing these veins lay a red liquid much similar to blood.
If you shook the doll or turned it upside down, this "blood" would sort of flow in the veins.
I left the doll in a bush and went home.
Off course my family wouldn't believe me. They said I made it up.
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This happened to me around the early 1980s at an ordinary suburban school yard in the Midlands when I was around the age of nine or ten.

I had a bit of difficulty with writing as a child (dyslexia, unrecognised until l I was older, but that doesn't really have anything to do with this tale, apart from explaining any typos/spelling mistakes etc in this post) but loved reading and would always have a book on the go. Sometimes I would get so into a particular book I was reading that I would literally have trouble putting it down until I had finished it, even going so far as once trying to read it
on the walk home from school! Very often if I was into a particularly good book I would forgo playing with my school friends at lunch time and take myself off to a quiet part of the school field away from the disturbance of the other children to happily get lost once again in the pages of the book I was reading.

This day I had taken myself about half way up the school field to sit on a small ridge next to the long jump pit. Just behind the long jump was a chain link fence, behind which was gardens belonging to a row of average sized 1940s semi detached houses. Sitting where I was I had a very good view right into the gardens, and into the rear windows of the houses themselves, but on this day I was not really taking any notice being far too keen to get back to my book. I remember it was a bright summer day, no wind. (It's funny how I can remember certain things from my childhood with vivid clarity, but I can't remember what the hell I just walked into my living room for lol )

I was soon lost in the pages, the outside world blocked out, when suddenly something stirred me from the tale I was reading. It was a sound that at first hearing barely managed a second thought but after I heard it again I put down my book and listened.

I heard it again. A distinct breath. Not an ordinary breath. It sounded rasping, like a gasp for air. I was puzzled at first. Didn't know what to make of it. I sat listening... Nothing. I began to think that I had imagined it or misheard something else, but then I was surprised to hear it again.. I began to feel a little unnerved. It was a horrible sound, clearly audible. It seemed to be coming from the direction of the chain link fence. Curious but slightly nervous I put down my book, got up and walked towards the fence to investigate. I inspected the area where the breath seemed to come from. Just grass on both sides of the fence. No bushes or shrubs either side where anything could hide. I was about to dismiss the sound and walk away when it happened again. This time it was much louder and seemed to be coming from right in front of me just the other side of the fence. I was suddenly overcome with fear. I have no idea why, but to me at the time there felt like something was very wrong with that sound. It was a horrible
feeling, something I had never felt in my life up to that point. It went from my head to my toes, and it really did feel like the hair on the back of my neck prickled.

I bolted. Ran as fast as I could away from the fence. I found one of the dinner ladies and babbled out the story of what I had heard. She took my hand and marched me back to the area by the fence where I had heard the breath.
She had a good look about the area, and finding nothing declared that it was probably a hedgehog or something that had scared me. I secretly wondered how it could be a hedgehog when there was nowhere for it to hide but could see that it was no good protesting that fact with an adult.

We had just turned our backs to walk away when I heard the breath again. Loud and clear and horrible from right next to us.

"There you go!! Did you hear that?!!" I cried out

With a puzzled look on her face she told me she had heard nothing. I couldn't believe it. How could she not have heard it? It seemed to come from right next to us and was loud enough that there was no way she couldn't have heard it.

I think she was getting a little bored with me now, and obviously putting it down to an over-active imagination of a child she said that maybe if the area bothered me so much I shouldn't sit there and then walked off.

I knew what I had heard, and after she had gone was not going to hang around there for much longer. I picked up my discarded book and ran to the school library, where I spend the remainder of lunch time, spooked, and a little cheesed off at the dinner lady for not believing me and the way she had seemed to dismiss my experience.

I later plucked up the courage to tell my school friends about what I had heard, and after school we all went to inspect the area by the fence. Neither me or any of the others heard anything that time.

In fact I never heard it again, but to be honest for all the remaining time I attended that school I avoided the area next to the long jump pit as much as I could.
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This is the original Fortean event which brought me to the forums. I mentioned my story on another website, and someone forwarded me here. It goes like this. I work across the street from an international airport. On several occasions (I think at least 2 or 3) I have been eating lunch at the airport viewing area.

I have noticed birds flying around everywhere (it's a field, go figure). But once in a while, the birds get caught in mid-air. There are no wires, no cables or anything (as I've seen this happen in 2 separate locations). They will be flying along, and hit a certain spot and the bird will get caught. It usually sits and flutters about (goes insane more like) for a few seconds, and then suddenly it's flying again.

This is not a case of an air pocket, or a bird catching a draft of wind and floating. The things literally get stuck in the same exact spot for a few seconds, and don't move laterally or vertically even a single inch aside from their fluttering wings and spinning. I always have a camera with me, and I nearly caught it on tape once because I was waiting for it to happen. Very strange. On a sidenote, I do know that many weird things tend to happen around airports for some reason.
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My first time on a train I was traveling in Germany with my grandfather, and he noticed and pointed out to me that we were riding on the "wrong" tracks, we were northbound on the southern track. Our curiosity got the better of us when I pointed out that there were some guys in bright yellow vests doing some kind of maintenance. And then we noticed that there was blood and meat all shredded up on the tracks, we were going really slow cuz of the workers, and we watched intently and tried to figure out what kind of animal it had been, but no hooves or fur were discernible. We went quite a distance without seeing many chunks, but the tracks were still bloody. Then there it was, a blue dress.
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So this happened about a year ago over the summer and unfortunately I have no contact with the people involved anymore so there's no way I can get other details/confirmations so everything will be how I MYSELF remember it. On to the story. About a year ago, I was in summer school due to some credits I needed for high school. The class I was taking was Phys Ed so the majority of the time was spent inside our gym. We had our teacher and we also had some people who I believe were part of a tutoring program I'm not sure but they were older and probably in their late 20s/early 30s. Anyway, I befriended 3 of those people and I would stay after class to help them clean up (pick up any equipment that was left out). 2 of those people were guys and the other was a girl. So we were in the gym just chatting about who knows what when one of the guys says he's gonna go put the equipment cart in the closet. Now this closest was small and only had one door. He goes in and we all continue chatting. We're standing where we can practically see the whole gym including the closet door. About 15 minutes and we start joking around saying he got lost in the closet. We go to open the closet door and he wasn't in there. Like I said , the closet was really small, nowhere for him to go. We start freaking out a bit calling his name and we figured he must have gotten out when we weren't looking (which was almost impossible bc we had a good view). We close the door and take maybe a few steps when the door swings open and there he is looking like he just saw death himself. He says that he was trying to get out but someone was holding the door. We told him we went in and didn't see him and he said that he was in there the whole time! We all got a weird feeling and just wrapped it up and left the gym. Keep in mind that there was no place for him to hide in this closet. It was just a tiny room filled with brooms, and random equipment like balls,bats, nets. The class was only about 3 weeks long and I never got their contact info because I thought it would be weird so we never talked about it again. It's not as scary or wild as other stories on here but it left us freaked out and to this day there is no explanation.
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I came across this subreddit a little while ago and thought this would be a good place to share something odd that happened to me two years ago on summer vacation. (This is my first post, please be kind! _;) It was the summer of 2011, and my younger sister and I were on our way to a family friend's house to pick up a wheelchair for my mother, who had recently become disabled due to an automobile wreck. Anyway, this friend (lets call her Jenn) lived about an hour away in a very backwater area of South Carolina. My sister, 14 at the time, and I left around 6PM in my shabby old car. We drove along the long streches of southern highway until we reached the lakeside subdivision where Jenn lived.
We turned into the subdivision and wound our way down toward the bottom along sloping, overgrown lakeside roads. The road was bordered on all sides by mobile homes perched precariously on small lakeside properties, so many that it was always hard to tell where one yard ended and the next one began.It's important to note that my sister and I had been to this location more than 5 times in the past two years for various holidays with Jenn's family and our own, so we knew the area well. We got to the bottom of the first hill, where Jenn's double-wide trailer should have been, and instead we saw a vacant space being mowed by an overweight man we didn't recognise. His sweaty face was grinning at us in an unsettling way. The subdivision was arranged in a large circle, and we knew that if we turned right, we could loop all the way around and come back to where we started. It would take about 10 minutes to get all the way around the subdivision to the entrance again. We were convinced that somehow we had driven past Jenn's house and thought it would be the best idea to look for the house again. We started to turn right and continued up the circle.
This is when things got weird. Instead of staying relitively flat like it normally was, the road started to climb in a steep sloping way. My sister remarked at how odd it was. I kept driving. The slope became more and more extreme. We would reach the top of hills that were scarily high, and then they would slope back down into deep gullies. It had been about 20 minutes of solid driving since we entered the subdivision, and we could not spot houses to the left or the right of the road, only thick forest on each side. My sister said she was scared, and I was too, though I didn't want to admit it. I was the older sister, and I knew that if I showed any fear, she would become very frightened, so I tried to play it cool. I did, until At one point, we got to the top of a hill that was so high, I had to use all my strength to hold the brakes as we went down the other side of the slope.
It had now been 30 minutes since we entered the subdivision. Seeing no other cars on the road, I put our car in park and stopped for a minute. We rolled down the windows of the car, since the summertime heat was becoming so extreme we felt like we could not breathe even with the A/C on. At that point, in the stillness we realized we could not hear birdsong. There was not a breath of wind in the air, and a feeling of dread passed over the two of us. The only sound was the two of us breathing, and the quiet humming of the car engine. I tried calling Jenn to see if we had taken a wrong turn, but neither one of us had any mobile phone signal. We decided immediately we had to turn around. Something felt so incredibly wrong, it felt almost like our very lives were in danger.
I made a U-turn and we headed back the opposite direction. We went up the large slope, and instead of experiencing the roller-coaster like hills and slopes on our way back, it was a straight road. Within 5 minutes, we could see houses again. Families played out in the yards. Within 7 minutes, we came back to the start of the subdivision, and sure enough, there was Jenn's house. I felt the blood drain out of my face. We quickly went inside, picked up the wheelchair for my mother and left immediately.
Last summer, we went back out of curiosity one slow summer day, and went straight around the small subdivision in 10 minutes without experiencing anything out of the norm. We laughed it off, and continued with our day. Even now 3 years later, My sister and I still talk about the summer of 2011 when we went to a place that didn't exist.
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My son has only said one thing creepy. It happened a few months after we moved into a new house. He was about 4 at the time. I was in the living room and he came in and sat right next to me. He whispered "mommy, who's that?" And I said "who? The people on tv?"thinking he was asking who was on the movie i was watching. But he said "no" pointing in the top corner of the living room "the lady hanging over there".
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My brother is seven years older than me, so when I was 9-10 he was in high school and had to hide from our parents that he smoked and dipped tobacco. As a result, most days of the week after he got home from school (I was homeschooled) we'd go out in the woods for an hour or two.
We lived way out in the country in an already rural part of East Texas, so there were plenty of woods to explore. The land south of our house was all owned by a mining company and my parents didn't want us going out there, so we always crossed a fence to the north of our house and explored the woods out there. Very likely some local's property that we had no business being on, but when you live out in the country you figure you'll have plenty of sign before you accidentally walk into someone's backyard.
After a few months of venturing out in this area, never traveling more than an hour's distance from our house and always in the daylight, we decided one day we'd just keep walking. And walking. My brother smoked and spit into a Dr. Pepper bottle. We entered big pastures and dove back into even deeper woods. Whenever we've talked about it, we've always said that we must have traveled at least a mile (but we usually say far more). Eventually, we came across a circular pond I distinctly remember having a much higher rim on one side. My brother explained that this was because a tractor had dug it out and piled up more dirt on one side than the others.
We kept going past the pond and entered another patch of woods. As we came out, we saw that the treeline curved around sharply to the right, and the clearing we now stood in opened up far wider. We went in that direction, and while my memory of getting there is a little hazy, I know we suddenly came across a very large white building surrounded by a high fence. There was a gate large enough for vehicles to move in and out, and a dirt roading leading away from the facility. We could hear the sounds of activity and could see people walking around the outside of the fence, near the gate. I'm afraid any other detail I could give at this point might be colored by false memory or exaggerations from an imaginative young brain, so I'll wait to talk to my brother about it more before I go any further.
At that moment we both felt the spine-tingling terror alerting the body that something about this was very wrong. We were not supposed to be here. We were at the very least going to get into serious trouble. We were standing in the middle of a clearing gawking at a facility of some kind on what was obviously someone else's property, and we were seeing something deep out in the woods that we had never known was here. All this time we'd spent walking around these woods, if we'd just gone a ways further we would have stumbled across this. I remember standing there for a moment longer, asking my brother what this could possibly be. He told me something along the lines of, "I have no clue, but we should really get the fuck out of here." The tone of his voice truly freaked me out and I remember running hard back the way we came, crossing the same pond, and cutting a path as close as possible to the route we had traveled.
When we finally stopped, out of breath, my brother told me that in no way, shape, or form, would I utter a word of this to our parents. They were spankers and awful grounders, so he knew the trouble he'd be in for taking his little brother into what was quite possible danger.
After that day, we kept going out in those woods, but never that far. Eventually, my brother got caught with a can of Skoal and my dad made him eat the whole can and puke it up on the porch. Being an easily intimidated little kid, it wasn't hard to get more information out of me about my brother's smoking and dipping habits, but I never brought up the facility we'd found.
Over the years, my brother and I have brought this story up many times. Our parents have gotten way laxer since we've all grown up, and we've even told them the story (to my mother's retroactive shock). We've added a lot of other weird ones to our arsenal in the time since, as our family has always lived by huge areas of land for us to wander around on, but this is one of our favorites. It's always "Remember the time we almost got killed by those government researchers? Remember the time we found that crazy building in the woods with those people walking around it?"
But for the past few days, this event has been really bugging me. I told my wife about it in detail, and she was pretty amused. I thought I'd look around in Google Maps a little bit at the area we grew up in, something I'm honestly surprised I've never done for these specific reasons before. And what I've found, or haven't found, is really bizarre.
Moving north from my old house (which has since burned down and left an ugly scar on the satellite image) on Google Maps, I can very clearly make out the woods we spent of our time in. When I go further north, I can see several large clearings followed by more wooded areas. Eventually, I even found the circular pond, and I'm positive I can make out the higher end of the pond that we stood on as my brother explained how it had been made. When I drag the map further, I see what looks to be the clearing and the sharp curve of the treeline to where we saw the facility, but there's nothing there. No trace of a building, no evidence of a dirt road leading away from an old structure. It's just pasture and more trees.
In fact, when I zoom out and look at the whole area, it doesn't seem possible for there to have been an operation of the scale we saw out there at all. Just a little ways further north, the land becomes nothing but pasture with houses pressed up against a county road. For people to have come and gone from this area, they would have had to have had a road of some kind, as well as power lines, stretched out to the building. But there's nothing like that on Google. In fact, there's really no "Here it was!" spot on the map. It's like it was never there to begin with.
It's been a few years since we've talked about it, so I texted my brother earlier today to ask him if he still remembered this happening. He called me immediately after and said: "Hell yeah man, that was a really weird day. You know how good I used to be in the woods, but that shit really freaked me out. We had to get out of there."
This whole event feels more and more like something that we walked into that we shouldn't have seen. I still remember the feeling of dread upon finding the place and knowing that something bad would happen if we stuck around. I'm going to try and send him this post later so he can read it and corroborate as well as look at the Google Maps for himself to see if he sees anything different.
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It happened two days after I turned 8. I live in Finland and we had just moved into town. Our apartment was in these cheap rental high-rises, 8th floor. My grandma had given me a few comicbooks as a present and I had been reading them ever since the party (quite a stack, something like 10 to 15 individual comics). There was this one book, a spider-man comic. It wasn't about the usual spidey but something about Peter Parker's clone acting as "crimson spider man" (at least that's how it was translated to finnish).
I had just returned from school so my parents were still at work and I started reading this comic. At some page the protagonist is crouching on a roof, jumps down and lands into the "spidey-crouch", hands between his legs.
Without thinking anything I just laid down the comic, walked to our balcony and climbed on the fence using a chair as a ladder. As I was sitting there I see some man down and across the street, he saw me sitting there and started running towards our house. At this same moment, I had this really calm feeling taking over me. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and jumped down.
When I jumped I could hear the man scream "EI JUMALAUTA!!!1" (NO, followed by an abbreviation to god help me). Then I just heard wind in my ears. Next thing I know, I'm on the ground, crouching like spider man. The man runs around some high bushes just when I stand up, stops dead on his tracks and all color escapes his face. He just stood there with absolute terror in his eyes, completely silent and looking at me for a few seconds before backing away slowly, without turning his face off me before he's back at the corner, where he turns away.
I returned to the lower door only to find out I had left my key inside. So I just sat down and waited for my father to return from work, something like one hour. He was naturally suprised to find me there, without my backpack. I told him what had happened ("dad, I'm spider man") when we were in the elevator. Dad thought it was just my imagination. When we returned inside and he saw my comic book laid open on the ground, with the page featuring the jump and the balcony door left open he took away the particular comic book and never allowed me on the balcony before I turned 12 and we moved to a bit better house, third floor. He also becomes disoriented every time I mention this to him and changes the subject quickly. Although he does admit he found me downstairs and balcony door was open. I still remember this occasionally, clear as day.
TL;DR I was the glitch in the matrix.
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Middle of the day, just got home from high school and drinking a nice glass of juice while standing looking out the window. All of a sudden, I hear clicking so I turn around. The cap to the juice is unscrewing itself lifting about a foot in the air and dropping back onto the bottle.
I stood there frozen for about a minute before running into the living room. I had to turn on the tv to drown out the clicking noise.
10 years later, it's still the weirdest thing I have ever seen and the lamest scary story ever.

I watched it do it at least 5 times. And it did it a few times before I turned around to see what the noise was. I ran into the next room so I don't know when it stopped.
It was a really smooth motion. Unscrewed, lifted about a foot off the bottle and then came back down. Not like it was falling. Probably a couple seconds between clicks. It really was like someone was physically taking it on and off. But no person.
I didn't go back into the kitchen until someone else was home. The bottle was still on the table, lid screwed on tight.
I have never been able to explain it. I've never had anything else that odd happen in my house.
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I was alone watching my brother. (I was around 14, he was 2 or 3, barely talking yet) We were in his playroom, a really brightly lit area downstairs, playing with blocks or something when he suddenly goes from giggling and running around to just dead frozen starring at the entryway into the room.
I ask him what's up, and he just points to our staircase and says "icky noise". He'd been pointing and saying that freaked out randomly for a while now, and I figured it was gonna be another time showing him nothing is there, but I finally take a good look at the stairs and there's something there.
Our staircase was mostly surrounded by walls, so I hadn't noticed at first due to shadow, but I could see crouched on the step just below where the wall cut off this pitch black shape of a person. It was literally a slightly fuzzy silhouette of a person made of just pure black clearly looking at us between the hand railing. It took a step further down toward us, still crouched holding the rails, before my brain processed that I was actually seeing it.
I screamed, because what other response are you really gonna have to that, grabbed my brother, and hauled ass out of the house. We ended up sitting in the backyard playing with the dogs while I called my mom and waited for her to get home.
Sightings of that thing only got worse before we moved out. When my brother was a bit older he was able to explain he called it icky noise because whenever it showed up he could hear this really gross scary gurgling whispering. I never heard it make noise, but I definitely saw it several times, and it got rid of my idea that daytime was automatically safe real fast.
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I was 13. I was waiting to walk outside for the bus, and then clear as day I saw a face staring in my window of the living room. Me being a little edgelord at the time thinking I got balls the size of fucking bowling balls, immediately assume it's the drunk next door on a tirade and I'm gonna beat this dude's ass. I go outside, nothing. I got outside so fast there was no way whatever it was ran. What made me think it was the drunk was the face looked... absent, I guess, would be the best way to describe it. Empty eyes, mouth slack, face kind of grayish. Haunts my dreams sometimes.
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One of my best friends of all time and I bonded pretty tight in our early 20's over our similar insomnia patterns and, knowing the other would probably be awake, we would usually text each other around 1 or 2 am. Having nothing else to do we’d usually drive around town talking about random shit like movies we’d seen or stories relating to songs on the radio. One night our driving path led to this new subdivision kind of outside of city limits. It was off of a main highway, probably a mile or two east of town where all the subdivisions had generic names and all the houses were different shades of the same pastels.
So we pulled into this random subdivision. The first thing we noticed was the lack of streetlights. Usually these new subdivisions were lit out the ass but this one wasn’t, which was weird.
And then we turned a corner and noticed, oh I dunno, at least 75% of the occupants of the houses on this block just fucking randomly standing out in their front yards.
With the lights out.
At 2 am.
Just, what the fuck? They weren’t even doing anything, just standing there facing the street. We obviously immediately left and I’ve gone back to the place in broad daylight a couple of times... it just looks like a normal neighborhood. I dunno what we saw but I know we both saw it.
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I’m returning from an extensive Reddit break to share this. In college I was hanging in a friend’s room when he said he and his roommate needed to go move their cars to different lots (45 minute process). I decided to stay and watch some TV. A few minutes after they left I saw a DVD, in a clear case labeled “Mausoleum.” I remember watching the creepiest movie I’ve seen to date. British, rough sex scenes, werewolves, mental asylums, a soundtrack like a haunted calliope, shifts in perspective and time periods (present, the back in 1700s), shot entirely in black and white, grotesque human sacrifice scenes/horrific death scenes, actors speaking directly to the camera for long monologues, a scene of a serial killer explaining who his next victims would be and why which really shook me, and repeated colored cutaways to flowers blooming and wilting atop headstones. I shut off the movie before it was done, got up and realized it was daylight. Both my friend and his roommate had returned. I woke them up and they asked how I got inside. Said I hadn’t been there when they returned, didn’t answer my cell. Went to take DVD out of the player and it was empty. They claimed they had never heard of/seen it. I have spent decades trying to make sense of this, have endured nightmares and occasional flashbacks. I have brought it up in therapy to no avail. Has anyone else seen/heard of this, I presume, Indie movie or experienced something like this?
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I was stationed in Seoul, South Korea several years ago. I was taking a shower in my room and when i got out, the word "leave" was written in small letters in the fog on the bathroom mirror. I didn't have a roommate because NCOs got their own private rooms. A little freaked out, I decided to do exactly that; leave. I went off post for some Korean BBQ and wondered the city a bit.
I came back a couple hours later to find the barracks was evacuated and half burned to the ground. The fire was pinpointed to faulty electrical wiring that caught some insulation on fire inside the walls.
Something knew it was going to happen and to this day, whatever that something was, it didn't want me in the middle of it. I'd gladly thank who or whatever it is if they'd give me the chance but it's been years and I still have no idea.
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I think I've shared this story here before, but when I was around 9 or 10 years old, my family had a big family reunion at my great aunt's house (a giant Victorian-era mansion with a huge back yard). I remember there was nobody there my age, and all the adults became eventually drunk, so I wandered around the house and quickly found the upstairs library that I thought was neat because it also had a back hallway with a tiny bedroom and full bathroom (probably the nanny's quarters back in the day). I remember I was sitting on the library rug I think playing with a black and gold check-printing machine, when a kid in the hallway suddenly said "You're not supposed to play with guns, Bill."
I wasn't playing with guns, and my name wasn't Bill! But I thought cool, another kid my age. I looked back and didn't see anything, then I hopped up and went around the door but he was gone. I went down the stairs and found my mom and asked if she had seen a kid my age (no). I looked all around and there was nobody there my age.
Then when I was a late teenager, my mother told me that her father (Bill), who had died before I was born, had killed his friend with a gun accidentally when he was 13, in that house. Nobody ever talked about it in the family.
Fast-forward 40 years later, I was now driving my great-Aunt, Bill's sister, who had stayed in that house until she was 90, back to her assisted-living apartment (age 105 now). I asked where Bill had shot that kid and she said in the upstairs library.
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I was working at a Starbucks in a busy metro area, it was being renovated but we have a really tiny/inadequate/crappy set up with which to sling drinks around temporarily. There was a bunch of partitions which made it creepy so everyone felt like it was haunted.
The phone rang and one of the supervisors answered it and said that a woman said she was locked in the bathroom and couldn't get out. That actually has happened in the store before so I went and checked and both bathrooms were empty. When we tried to *69 the phone number we kept getting a disconnected error. I honestly thought that the supervisor was full of crap because I just generally hated him.
Then a few minutes later the phone rang again and I answered it. There was a woman on the phone who sounded really distressed. She asked for Alejandra, who was another supervisor who left maybe 20 minutes earlier. I asked who she was and she screamed "HER MOTHER". So I apologized and said she clocked out and wouldn't be back in and she screamed "SHE'S MY DAUGHTER, I WANT TO TALK TO HER". She was clearly very distressed and crying.
I tend to mind my own business, family drama is family drama and I wouldn't want someone to make a big deal about it. So I just texted Ale when I got off work and said her mom called and sounded really upset.
She immediately called me and told me her mom had been dead for years and wanted to know who called the store. She was really pissed that someone would do that, but I was creeped out.
ESPECIALLY because someone had died in one of the bathrooms a few years earlier (was doing drugs, overdosed in the Starbucks bathroom.)
Either a very good actress who had personal information on the store was calling, or for 20 minutes our Starbucks landline was open for the dead to connect to the living. I get creeped out talking about it.
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Not my experience, but my mom and aunt's. I've posted this before: My mom and aunt have an interesting story with an old haunt. They grew up in the "hollars" in eastern Kentucky. One night when they were 7 or 8 years old, they were sleeping in their grandma's house when my aunt awoke to someone whispering her name from the end of the bed. She said it sounded so terrifying that she was afraid to look, but it kept doing it. She shook my mom enough to wake her up, and my mom, too, heard it calling my aunt's name. They had the blankets over their head, and my mom finally got the courage to look down to the end of the bed. She said there were two male figures, bloody, slightly decaying and looking like they had been in a car accident. The figures stood at the end of their bed all night, whispering their name while my mom and aunt hid under the blankets. The figures eventually 'vanished' before dawn.
My mom and aunt swear truth to this story still today. I've asked them to tell me it many times over the years and it never changes. My aunt hates talking about it because she thinks it could "invite them in". Anyway, when they told my grandpa about it that next morning, he said that he knew several people who had similar experiences and that those figures were called "Bloody Bones and Rawhead" in that area. A simple Google search will tell you that these figures existed in southern folklore.
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When I was a kid we had this above ground swimming pool. One day I was alone in it playing like kids do and my mom was outside on ground level reading and making sure I didn't drown.
I was submerged underwater then came out to the surface, facing the house. As I was clearing my eyes I looked in the reflection of one of the windows of my house and could see behind me, two legs slowly coming out of the water feet first. You never saw a kid get out of a pool faster than that. I looked in the water and obviously there was nothing there. Never could come up with an explanation for this one.
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My bus stop was half a mile from my house so usually my mom would be standing at it to walk me home until I was about nine or ten. Well one of the days she wasn't there so the bus driver said to me "Hold on there little guy, come with me and I'll leave you home later. Ain't safe to walk that road alone."
Being a kid I just agreed and on we went. I was the last stop along the bus route so at this point there was nobody else on the bus but me. Isat near the front of the bus and the bus driver went about his business collecting students from a secondary school. I remember feeling very uncomfortable the entire time. As fate would have it one of the girls to get on at the school was my cousin.
She started freaking out a little bit and asking why I was on the bus. The bus driver didn't really say anything but I told her about my mam not being at the bus stop. She sat beside me the entire time until she had to get off.
When the bus driver had finished his route he left me off at my house at around 5:15. My mam was on the phone in the hall in tears thinking something had happened and the bus driver went on without saying anything.
I sometimes wonder if my cousin hadn't recognised me on the bus and made such a big deal about me being there would I have been left home afterwards. This probably doesn't sound too creepy to some but it's always stayed with me.
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Posted this recently, was definitely creepy and scary at the time, maybe paranormal . Am a former paramedic, responded with police and fire to a report of a man down on the side of the railroad tracks in a wooded area approx 500 yards from the nearest access road. A railroad employee riding the tracks doing a safety check of the tracks noticed the man down the embankment of the tracks.
We all parked and walked with all the equipment the 500 or so yards to where the patient was. He had no signs of life, flat line on the EKG, along with fixed and dilated pupils. Do a little more checking and he has no visible signs of any type of trauma, the body is not cold yet and there isn't rigor mortis yet so he hasn't been dead too long. We don't see any track marks where he would have shot up and overdosed and feel no broken bones. The guy with the railroad said a train hadn't passed in the last 8 hours. We search the area and find a makeshift tent/campsite where the guy apparently was living and find no medications or anything out the ordinary.
We are not too far from an area where everyone believes is haunted and satanic worshipping takes place, even though all of us on the scene knew about the rumors none of us had actually seen it or had proof. It's dark and we were all waiting around for the funeral home to show up and bring the body to the morgue for an autopsy. Then the weird/spooky shit started, a few of us heard what sounded like people whispering but it wasn't from any specific direction, a couple of the guys didn't hear it and thought we were trying to fuck with them. Then the whispering noises stopped and the people on scene that hadn't heard the whispering started hearing what they all described as children laughing wickedly, but it was all over not from any specific direction. Those of us that had heard the whispering never heard the new noise. This went on for about 10-15 minutes while we're standing next to the corpse. Police officers on the scene told their dispatcher to tell the funeral home to step it up and get out there asap.
We helped them load the body(more like throw it in the damn stretcher), didn't even bother strapping it down, and got the fuck outta there.(we didn't take time to strap him down because he is already dead, we ain't gonna make him more deader if he fell off).
The next afternoon we went to the morgue to speak with the coroner and find out the cause of death. The first thing the coroner asked us was why did we clean the body? Me and my partner looked at him kinda strange and asked what he was talking about? He said it must of been a very bloody scene, so we told him there was no blood anywhere around the scene and then he turned a lil pale and said that just added to the confusion cause the body had absolutely no blood in it whatsoever. And there were no marks anywhere on him where blood could have been drained out. He also said he had a weird experience while doing the autopsy but refused to tell us what happened. To this day we have still never learned the actual cause of death, or been able to explain the whispering and evil laughing.
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Once when I was about 11, I was the only one home in my grandparents’ house. I had a toy microscope down there, so I went to get it and bring it up so I could look at stuff. There was an area that my grandparents kept lawn furniture and camping equipment, and they’d hung sheets from the ceiling to create a makeshift “wall.” As I was leaving the basement, an impression pressed out of the sheets. In my mind I remember it as looking like a persons face with their hands raised similar to a “ don’t shoot” pose. I just took the dogs and sat outside until someone else came home.
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Saw a woman in a white nightgown walk out of the forest one night while I was house sitting in the middle of nowhere. She walked out of the woods toward the house. She scared the hell out of me. There were no neighbors for miles. I ran upstairs to my gf. We both went downstairs and I saw her walk past one of the windows. I spent the rest of the night under the covers. The next day I told the home owners that “I saw something strange.” They replied, “Was it the woman in white?” They told me they have seen that woman for decades, sometimes INSIDE the house. I’m still trying to figure this one out. There has to be some sort of explanation. And why do so many ghost stories involve a woman in white? Must be something in the water. Idk.
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This took place when I was 13. No one in my family will acknowledge it happened, the only ones who would cave to my “but great grandpa...!!!” have unfortunately passed away. No one will give me the time of day about it.
My family has a cabin in Cook’s Forest, Clarion, PA. Cabin was built by my great granddad, and has expanded a bit over the years but has a nice little nook at the bottom of a long dirt road off the main road and down a hill. There are a few other properties around, but most are up and off on the dirt road, only one is down the hill and only halfway at that. It’s not modern by any means; no internet, cell service, the TV still has dials you have to twist to get to watch a DVD. It’s very rustic and I love it.
The property halfway down the hill is visible from any part at the front of our cabin, which is where the kitchen window, parking, porch, and fire pit are. For as long as anyone can remember, it’s been this abandoned lot that had what was once a cabin with a concrete basement. The cabin was built on a hill so half the basement stuck out from the hill, but the remaining part was crumbling. It also was at the fork where we would ride our ATVs to get to the firebreak, so even though it could’ve been creepy it was a very common and familiar sight.
Until one Memorial Day, which is when we opened the cabin after the winter and a large part of our family would go to the cabin for the long weekend to spend time together. Everyone would usually get there through the early evening, and then all come together for my great granddad’s dinosaur pancakes for breakfast (The highlight of my single digit to preteen years).
So I wake up, expecting to smell pancakes and hear chatter from the older members of my family down in the kitchen, but nothing. I assume I’ve gotten up too early, and go downstairs to use the bathroom and then go back to sleep. Looking back, the whole upstairs was just mattresses with an aisle between them, I should have noticed that most beds were empty.
I get downstairs and see all the adults outside, and I go out to say good morning and demand my T-Rex pancakes. I walk out and see all my family adults in a kind of semicircle facing an older man and a woman I didn’t recognize. I assume this is some adult situation so I go back inside to wake up my cousins, but not before looking at the clock on the microwave and seeing that it’s about 3pm.
Now, I LOVED the cabin. I’d doodle the cabin itself, 4 wheelers, and the area around it for months leading up to Memorial Day weekend. I was usually up at the ass crack of dawn because I was so damn excited to just be there. Sleeping until 3pm was not in any way normal.
I wake my cousins up and by the time they all mosey downstairs the adults are all back inside. Everyone is pretty silent but then great grandpa fires up the stove and gets us kids excited for dino-cakes, so all seems normal.
I was there with my one of my aunts and my uncle, no parents, and my aunt is pretty close in age to me and was for sure the “cool aunt”. So when I saw her pale as a sheet I went to ask what’s wrong.
She took me outside and pointed at the aforementioned abandoned and crumbling property. In its place was a sprawling cabin-mansion, parking area full of SUVs and the coolest looking 4 wheelers my 13 year old self had ever seen. Aunt tells me that the owners had come to say hi (the couple I saw earlier) and invited us over to hang out with their nieces and nephews, as they were having a Memorial Day get together just like us.
Me, having zero thought besides AWESOME 4 WHEELERS, almost ran to the house but my aunt caught me and rather forcefully reminded me of my dino-cakes. I conceded and ran back inside, to an atmosphere so thick with tension that even my undeveloped brain (thanks dr mom) could detect it. The oldest of the adults were acting normal and playing around with us kids, but something was very off. I finally asked wtf was up, and my aunt bonked me in the head and asked if I had seen that massive cabin-mansion last night, last year, the year before? We’d come to the cabin every few weeks until December, did I see any construction? Well...no..but they invited us over and they have cool 4 wheelers aunt Beth come on!!
A resounding NO from multiple family members made my emotional girl self almost flee and cry, until my grampie (a 6’7” hulk of a man) got down to my level and explained that he felt there was something weird going on. He said the couple didn’t act right, I assumed that meant they were rude, and that we should just keep to ourselves this weekend. I agreed and we went about our day, all adults keeping us occupied with activities either inside or behind the cabin.
We get ready for bed when I see my great granddad (WWII vet) who had the only bedroom on the first floor loading 3 shotguns, handing one off to my grampie and the other to my uncle/cool aunt’s husband. To my shock and awe, my Gramie pulls out a (bedazzled) Glock from her purse. I go to bed with images of my little Gramie taking down a bunch of bad guys with her shiny pistol.
I wake up the next day to the smell of pancakes and the sound of adults chatting downstairs. I’m sad because today is when we have to pack and leave, but things seem back to normal so I’m very glad. I run downstairs, note that the clock says 7:30, but ignore the weirdness and sit in front of a plate of dino-cakes that I dig in to, while asking my aunt what time we have to leave.
“Leave? We don’t leave until tomorrow.” Wait, what day is it? “It’s Saturday, we just got here last night.” I notice just a bit of doubt in my aunt’s eyes that I know something is up, and I run outside. The abandoned lot is back to its decrepit state. I resolve to brush it off and enjoy my ATV riding, and forget about everything pretty quickly.
It wasn’t until I got back to school and was called to the main office where the asked why I wasn’t at school on Monday. I told them that today was Monday, wtf are they talking about. Nope, it’s Tuesday, and my absence was unexplained despite several calls (I skipped school frequently) to my parents (divorced) neither of which were at the cabin.
So either my family played the trick of all tricks on me, or I’m living in an alternate universe where I can sleep into the afternoon. Like I said, no one will even remotely entertain a conversation about this incident, so I’m left telling my fellow redditors about my family’s conspiracy against me lol.
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Was driving through Illinois to get to Chicago about a decade ago with a group of friends and we stopped at a Taco Bell. The first thing we noticed was that the workers were acting very odd. Everything they said was monotone and rehearsed. After sitting in this fairly busy restaurant for a bit, we kind of all just looked at each other at the same time as we realized that none of the conversations happening around us made any sense. The people were speaking, and it was English, but the sentences weren't logical. They were just saying words at each other. We didn't say much about it until we got outside, at which point we all freaked out and confirmed each others' experiences at once, and got the fuck out of there. We jokingly refer to that place as the "NPC Training Center" since the people didn't seem to be real, or they were learning how to be human or something. Still freaks me out.
Edit: yes, I believe the orders were all correct, which I guess just ups the creepy factor
Edit 2: we were young and actually pretty straight edge at the time, none of us were high or anything.
Edit 3: the best I can remember about the weird conversations was that they were stringing several prepositions in a row with no real sentence structure, forced laughter and nodding, stuff like that. Like they were mimicking how humans talk. Think of those "what English sounds like to a non-speaker" videos on YouTube, but EVERYBODY was doing it all around us.
Edit 4: u/tommyjohnpauljones  has helped me determine that Pontiac, IL is possibly the town. Has a TB right off of 55.
Edit 5: I wasn't clear yesterday, but the weird conversations were happening between customer, not just the workers, so it wasn't the crew trying to mess with us. If it was just the workers, I would totally buy that theory. I used to work retail and you'd do anything to make the day go faster haha.
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When I was 14 or so I went to sleep at my typical time and woke up two days later in the morning. I went downstairs panicking and asking if my family knew I had been sleeping for two days and what had happened. The question was ignored and they told me to sit down and have some breakfast.
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So when I was about 7 or 8, I had a really weird dream where I went outside at night and there were these kids in the backyard. It was a summer night and there was a breeze blowing. I clearly remember the warm wind and the grass on my ankles. These kids, I think a boy and a girl, wanted to play and I never thought of it because I was a kid too and how cool was it to play at night. There was something off about them, they had grayish colored skin and light hair although still human looking. We played around on the swingset until I looked up in the sky and I see the sun just starting to come up. I remember trying to figure out what time that would make it, being surprised I'd been out playing for so long, and kind of worried what would happen if my dad woke up and caught me out there. Thinking about all this, I looked down for a second, and when I looked back at the kids, they were gone. So I just went inside and went back to my bedroom and I'm pretty sure I must've gone to sleep then, because I remember waking up the next day.
That next day, my mom swears that either my sister (who had a history of sleepwalking) or me came into the house after she got home from work late at night.
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Last winter I worked as a night route driver for a medical courier service, basically I'd drive way out to rural clinics, pick up biological samples from the drop box, and then drive them back into town and ship them to a lab via the 24 hour Kinkos.
My route was the same 4 nights a week, but on Thursday, the 5th night of my work week, I had one additional stop, a vet's office out in the middle of fucking nowhere. It added about an hour onto my run because of how far out it was, I seriously don't know how they stayed in business because I only passed like 2 houses on the way there.
Anyway, it's around 1am and I'm heading out to my last stop, the vet's office out in BFE, I get there, park, leave my car running as always, go around to the side of the building, collect the sample, head back to the car, and freeze as I see something rifling through the front seats through the open driver's side window. I think I'm being robbed in the middle of nowhere, my phone is in the cup holder, and I'm about to shit my pants when this thing stops, looks over at me, and then hauls ass back into the woods at the side of the driveway. It had to have been a bear, but it ran on two feet. I know bears can walk bipedally so I'm sure that's what it was, but some little part of me thinks I saw something else.
After that, I always drove my car right up to the drop box so I didn't even have to get out when I made that pick up, fuuuck that.
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I grew up in a small town where k-12, and an alternative school were all on one campus as well as a public pool. There's now a preschool there as well. There's one gym for the elementary school which is a separate building from the main elementary school building and the gym for the highschool is integrated into the building with the cafeteria, pool, theater, wrestling room, locker rooms, and sped classes, as well as a huge number of storage rooms.
In middle school PE we had a volleyball unit where for PE we had volleyball tournaments every day for a few weeks. One day I was helping to take down the volleyball netting which is strung between these two large metal poles which go into holes in the gym floor, usually these holes have a metal plate on them to keep people from tripping on them while not in use. I pulled the pole out as and saw a light coming from underneath, curious I looked in and saw what appeared to be another basketball court. I called my buddy T over to look and he told me that his older sister who was about four years our senior told him there was a "secret gym" but that he had personally never seen it before now and his sister had only seen it once. We reached the conclusion that this must be it, finished picking up the volleyball stuff, closed the little hatch and never thought much about it. What's strange is that I opened the hatch again years later and it was about what you'd expect, just a hole for a post to go in. The boys lockeroom is also directly below that part of the gym.
There's a lot of weird things about that campus if I'm being honest. Almost everyone I know who's worked at the pool swears up and down it's haunted, most of the older janitors acknowledge that there's basement level rooms that aren't the boiler room, the elementary school teachers refer to the basement of the elementary school as "the dungeon". My dad claims that when he was in highschool the principal then lived in a tent on campus and showered in the lockerooms. There's also multiple sheds on campus that just contain broken desks.
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Ok this is my second post on this website ever, and I hope my story falls within the guidelines, if not I will remove it. I'm not sure what to make of this situation, even a whole year later. This story is 100% real and truly...freaky. It's going to be long so hold tight! ITS WORTH THE READ! I live in North-westish New Jersey in a pretty quiet town. There really isn't much to do here except hike, go to QuickChek at weird hours, or just chill at home. So one evening, my best friend Alyssa and I decided we were going to hike up to one of our favorite (now gone due to people setting them on fire for NO REASON) abandoned places, the Profanity Houses in Allamuchy. For a little background info on this place, these houses were Rutherfurd Stuyvesant estates.
So we get to the state park, park the car and begin our hike. The walk to the closest house (there were a few) is about a quarter mile straight up through some light woods. We had previously been here a handful of times, but it truly is an incredible experience every time, which makes for interesting times. This time was very different. As we approach the first house, I begin to feel a little uneasy but I brush it off as just my general anxiety getting the best of me. Two girls in the middle of the woods on a cold fall day alone; the fear of the unknown and unknowing. The house standing (barely) in front of us is (was) two levels, big and brown. To the left of it is the abandoned stable house. We explore the stables, but they were pretty empty (besides all the trash and profanities spray painted inside the entire building) so we moved onto the house. We are both very cautious, paying close attention to our surroundings, especially here.
This is where it starts to get weird so stay with me. Now, it had previously rained that day so everything was super wet and muddy (this is important later), basically nothing in sight was dry. As we were about to enter (what is left) of the house I stop Alyssa and point to a pair of muddy, old bright green pants on the ground. We laugh about it and go into the house. We explore the house for a good 15 minutes, reading all the profanities that cover the walls aloud. The upstairs to this particular house on the estate had a staircase which was almost completely demolished. You had to use an old, disgusting mattress and a plank of wood to get up to the first (almost solid) pair of stairs to make it up to the second floor (which was un-walkable). These houses are TRASHED beyond trashed. Barely anything left, and whatever is left is completely destroyed, even the floors, walls, windows etc. I am surprised the house didn't collapse with us in it. We pay our respects and walk out the way we came in. We pass over the pair of pants, and directly in front of them is a bright white piece of paper, completely dry as if someone just dropped it there. What? This was NOT there when we were walking into the house. I picked it up, curious to what it could be. It was an old check from 1972 with an address to a family (I wish I could remember the name) on Shades Of Death Road (unrelated "haunted" road in that town). We thought it was super weird, as we were CERTAIN it wasn't there when we walked in. Again, we were completely alone in these woods.
We keep the check and continue our walk to the next house. The way to the house is a narrow pathway that was mostly all flowing water straight down to the house (another quarter mile). We had to walk on the grass outside the path as to not get our feet soaked. Boom right in front of us is another piece of dry, white paper. At this point we think its super weird and pick it up again. It was an invoice with the same family name to an auto body shop dated the year ahead of the year on the check: 1973. We are a little spooked and very intrigued. We keep the paper, and continue walking. We get to what was left of the house (just the foundation of a basement). There is a weird boat with junk piled all around the property. Garbage, beer cans, a used toilet seat - you name it, it was there. Peeking out from all the garbage was, you guessed it, ANOTHER piece of paper. Holy shit. This was a check, same family, different date, 1971. Three pieces of documents, three consecutive years. How could this be? We kept it and decided to go back to the car, and research the family name at our local Starbucks on my laptop.
After lots of googling, we finally get a phone number for the house phone of this family. We felt weird keeping their personal checks and one invoice, and thought it would be nice for them to have it back, still in shock that we even found ANY of that, and that they were completely DRY.
We call up the phone number, and after a few rings an woman answers. My friend Alyssa explains what we had found and where we had found it, and that we wanted to give it back. The woman was adamant about not wanting anything to do with these papers. She explains her mother used to live in the house (first house) and was upstairs yesterday cleaning out her old drawers. We thought nothing of that statement and decided to drop them in their mailbox anyway, being as we had the address and knew where Shades of Death was. On our way there, it hit us. How would an elderly woman (thanks WhitePages for letting us know she was in her late 80's) climb all the way up to that house, get upstairs and go through her old drawers? It was almost impossible to get up the stairs unless you're some trapeze artist, and once up, there was barely a floor to walk on. Not only that, but everything, and I mean EVERYTHING in that place is DESTROYED, so how could she have been going through anything, and how could documents be kept in that kind of condition? If it rained and they were out there the whole time, they would have been waterlogged and not crispy, white and folded neatly.
We are super freaked out. We get to the road and the GPS tells us the address was on the right. Nothing there. Hmm, did we pass it? Turn around. Nothing again. Turn around. Where could this house be? This road is not busy, with only a dozen houses. After going back and forth on this already creepy road for twenty minutes, we park the car and decide to find this house on foot. We finally find the house and mailbox. Why couldn't we find it before when it was RIGHT in front of us the whole time?? Weird. We place the documents in the mailbox and go on our way. A few months later, we tell our story to a friend and decide to show her the house of the family the checks belonged to. Gone. Nothing. There's no house. No mailbox. Nothing. What?? We don't know what to make of this situation. It was truly very weird and still rattles me to this day. Anyone??
TL;DR: My friend and I went to these copmpletely destroyed abandoned houses we've been to dozens of times after a very rainy day, found 2 checks and 1 invoice on the ground belonging to the same family, they were completely dry, called the owners to give them back, they didn't want it, said they were upstairs in the house yesterday going through drawers (impossible, physically), went to address since it was on the checks, couldn't find the house, it appears out of nowhere, and is not there anymore.
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I may not get the answers I'm looking for but I remember reading the post somewhere on Reddit (I believe on this subreddit) 3/4 years ago but seem unable to track the post down again. It went something like this although I may not be remembering it perfectly.
It took place in the US and It started as an old woman and her grown son were living in a house in the woods (or maybe a farm) and weird paranormal stuff had been going on for a few weeks but one night they were both sitting in their living room and this weird grey elephant like creature slowly crawls out of the hall and across the room, looks at them and fades in to thin air
Like I said i may be remember some of the details wrong but if you've heard of it before or it sounds vaguely familiar to you I'd be deeply appreciative! It's stood out to me a lot and I am interested in knowing more.
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When I was 11 I had the weirdest friend I've ever met.
His mom would make us do chores when we went over. We'd spend 4 hours doing the laundry, cleaning the house or some other stuff and then maybe we'd get to play for 1 hour. Also his mom would constantly tell him that he was useless, and that as he became older he'd be more and more useless. Really weird.
That friend kept inviting kids over every week. Naturally after a while we didn't want to go because none of us wanted to take care of his house for his mom. But the kid would beg us to come over and would even start crying if we didn't give in. Looking back I think his mom forced him to bring friends over to clean the house, and he was being punished if he didn't.
Another odd thing was his "dad". He kept saying he had a dad, but I never met him. When I was over at his place, sometimes he'd come back to his room from downstairs and tell me "My dad got home" or something like that. He'd talk about his father like the guy was really there, coming and going. One time when I was leaving my friend pointed to his father's shoes (which were not there when I came), and told me "That's my dad's shoes, it means he's home". The thing was, I saw his mother earlier in the afternoon take the shoes out from a drawer and put them there.
Years later, while thinking back on this, I realized that my friend had told me several times that his dad would punish him, but he never said his mom punished him. So I think she was convincing him he had a dad who was around the house, and somehow she convinced him that any punishment he received came from him, not her.
Then one day he didn't come to school anymore, and a week later the teachers explained to us that we wouldn't see him anymore because his mother killed him.
And then it just gets weirder. Several weeks later, I saw him in town with another woman, about his mother's age. I saw him with that woman on 3 or 4 occasions in total, over a few months. At first I thought it was another kid who looked like him because he was dead, but on the third occasion I went up to him to say hi and he coldly told me "Go away, I'm not allowed to speak to you anymore". A few other friends also saw him, and those who approached him got the same reaction. They also agreed he was acting cold, as if he was angry or hated us. Some of my friends said he looked scary (the complete opposite of what he was like before he "died").
I never found out what was up with that. I don't know who that woman with him was, why he did not want to talk to us, or even why the teachers told us he died.
Edit: For what it's worth, I think he was being abused, it was so bad the school would rather tell us kids he died than the truth (which is pretty creepy when you think of it, I'm sure they could have found a better explanation), and he was taken in by social services or a relative (that mystery woman might have been a social worker or an aunt who took him in). Someone must have deemed it was better for him to be taken out of school as well for whatever reason (he might have been placed in another school, or he became home schooled). But that's just my own assumptions, I really have no way to know what happened to him.
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Was playing Kinect one night. It detected a second player. I was alone.
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When I was like 4 I talked to someone all the time through the like 6 inch tall slit window to our basement. He would always tell me not to go in the basement when I'd ask to see him cause he wouldn't be there anyway. Talked to him for a year,year and a half. Told me not to tell my mom cause he didn't want to scare her. A few years later I was telling my mom about the guy in the basement (i quit talking to him by than) and she told me she could believe me because when i was a baby she would always see my door to my room open like someone was peaking in to see if I was alright and than shutting it quietly. Told me that she figured it was the guy who owned the house before us because that used to be his grandkid's room. It was one of those small towns where our grandparents knew each other.
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I wasn't quite out in the country, but I was a ways out driving to get some lunch on my break when I came to a red light behind one other car. The light turned green, and it didn't move so I honked. Again, nothing. I then backed up, and pulled around and the car is empty.
I pulled of to the side of the road, and went to go check it out. The engine was running. A/C on, radio playing, and a cold bottle of Dr Pepper in a cup holder, but no driver.
It was weird as shit. I called the police then, and told them the situation. They showed up, asked me a few questions, and then I left.
It was just super weird. There wasn't any development for a few miles, so I have no idea where they could have gone, and why would they leave their car running? It was summer time in Texas, so even if they got out, why didn't they take their drink? It had plenty of gas.
I have no idea, and I wonder about it still sometimes.
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I don't know if it is real- in fact I don't think ghosts are real. But I also don't know what the fuck I saw.
About 10 years ago I was working as a private investigator. It sounds cool- but it's actually not. You spend about 3-5 hours each day driving to your cases, steak them out in a blazing hot car with the engine off for 8 hours and then spend 1-3 hours in a hotel room writing up your reports before finally getting some sleep and doing it all over again.
I did this job for about a year after completing my training to be a medic in the Army reserves. I was young at the time so the idea of making 50k a year and traveling all over the country while living out of a suitcase seemed appealing to 19 year old me.
As I said above you spend a lot of time driving- in areas you are not necessarily familiar with. On one of these late nights I found myself driving on a twisting mountain road just outside of Taos, NM. The area was heavily wooded with narrow roads that curved sharply without a lot of places to turn off- since you were driving up and around mountains.
In the middle of the night as I maneuvered my rental vehicle through a curve I saw a woman stumbling along the side of the road carrying a small child. The sight caught me off guard and sent a shiver down my spine. It was so unexpected- and so out of place. There were no houses or businesses around me- and it was around 2:00 AM and pitch black. This unnerved me- but what sent the shiver down my spine was the way she moved. She lurched along with what I can only describe as a "stagger-shuffle" straight out of a George Romero zombie flick. And she didn't look up or acknowledge me as I drove by. She just stared aimlessly at the road in front of her.
You have to remember I was a 19 year old that was fresh out of a year of extensive Army training. I was in peak physical shape and I thought I was billy bad-ass at the time. I had spent a month working in a trauma center as part of my training so I didn't and still don't get freaked out by these things but this scared me.
I drove on for a minute or two thinking about what I saw. Who was she? What was she doing out here at this time of night? How did she get here? The more rational part of my brain took over from my lizard brain and I came to a horrifying realization- I had been driving for about a mile and a half past her and I hadn't seen any homes or businesses. Nor had I come across any places to turn off since I had seen her. And It had been about ten miles since I had come across a place to turn before I saw her. This wasn't normal. Something was wrong.
I realized that she had to be hurt or in trouble. Perhaps she had been in a car accident and was in shock? What if the child she was carrying was hurt? I was a medic. I had trained for a year to help people. Sure I was scared and unnerved- but how would I feel if I found out later they died of exposure on that mountain and I was too much of a coward to go back and help? Wouldn't I also be scared the first time I saw combat when my friends were depending on me? I had to man up and turn around. And as soon as it was safe I did.
I drove back to where I had seen her half relieved and half horrified when I didn't find her. I traced the road a half dozen times. Where could she have gone? There was only a small area on the side of the road and guard rails for miles. I drove and turned around and drove and turned around and drove and turned around.
I was obsessed with finding her or finding what had happened. Part of it was out of concern for her and her child. Part of it was about proving to myself that I would do the right thing with my training even when I was scared shitless. After awhile, however, it became about me proving to myself that I wasn't fucking insane.
I spent hours looking for her. Eventually I stopped my car and started walking along the road looking for any signs of her or any disturbances on the mountain to indicate a vehicle had crashed off the road and down the mountain. I walked that entire 3 mile stretch of road in pitch black with a flashlight- at times yelling like a madman, listening to every twig and echo with baited breath. I didn't even care about my deadline or my next case. I was so sure of what I saw that I was all in. I wasn't crazy. I wasn't seeing things. I wasn't overly tired. I saw her stumbling down that road- there is no doubt in my mind. The image is etched in my memory.
But there was nothing. Even when the sun came up and I drove that stretch of road another half dozen times there was nothing. And there were no ways for me to explain it away even after countless sleepless nights in the ten years since devoted to it. I don't believe in ghosts. I see the BS documentaries and laugh away their "evidence" and stupid orbs like the rest of you do- but I also don't know where the hell the stumbling woman and her child came from or where they went.
So on the off chance you were stumbling down a windy road in Taos, NM about ten years ago with a toddler in your arms- please tell me what the hell happened, where you came from, where you went and that you are both okay. I've been puzzled by it for a decade now.
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There's an abandoned and boarded up WWII fort in the southern part of Belgium, that we often sneak into with new recruits. Getting in there requires scaling a sheer wall (where we've placed anchoring points for ropes and climbing gear) next to a relatively busy road. So you're being super quiet, making no light and cowering every time a car passes by so he doesn't spot you in his lights. The atmosphere is set.
The moment you enter it, it's like diving into water. Sound stops and the entire place is at a constant 14 degrees Celsius, with a slight breeze passing through. The tunnel is barely large enough for me (slightly broader than the average person) to pass without turning my body sideways. The tunnel is just high enough to work up a decent gait while hunched over. If someone ahead of you blocks a passage for a moment, the breeze stops and it feels like the entire tunnel network takes a breath. Because of the way the tunnels are constructed, they echo in such a way that your own footsteps seem to be coming from behind you. They also seem to take one more step than you do when you stop.
Ofcourse we don't allow the guys and gals to take any source of light in there, so it's pretty scary overall.
So I'm in there, posted at a side passage to ensure everyone takes the same path and doesn't get lost. I go in first, before any of the climbers arrive, so they don't know there are friendly faces in there to help them. I'm in there for a while, just waiting for the first to come by, when I see a dancing little light coming down the long hallway. I quietly settle back in my nook and wait for whoever was smart enough to hide some matches and take them away.
The light quietly bobs closer when I realise there aren't any footsteps accompanying it. I poke my head around the corner just in time to see it disappear. I hear no footsteps still.
I settle back and wait some more, when I realise I do hear some scuffling. Very faint. Breathing noises, but still very faint. I become aware of a wet heat coming from right in front of me, with a faint smell of... person, sweat, dirt? Suddenly I realise, there's someone there. Right in front of me. Inches from my face.
The breathing stops suddenly, whatever it is is aware of me aswell. Whatever or whoever it is, we're both holding our breath, both acutely aware of each other. It takes ages. I'm sitting there, unable to move, speak or breathe properly.
The wet heat passes and some minutes later I become aware of very faint light coming from my right side, which soon dissipates and leaves.
Some time later still, I hear the familiar stomping of combat boots coming down the hallway from my left. I stop the person, tell them to keep following the passageway and take the first right they come to. Out of curiosity, I ask who went in first. No one, he went in first...
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When I was 4 or 5 (I'm 28 now), my older (10 at the time) brother and I were rough housing in the basement. I remember this very distinctively because I still can't explain what happened. It was just my brother and I in the house (mom went to go grocery shopping with my brother babysitting). We were rough housing in the basement when all of a sudden a closet door just swung open. We both stopped and stared at the closet when a dark/black cloud floated out of the closet towards us. My older brother grabbed me under the arms and started hauling me up the stairs, I think backwards, for some reason? Because I remember just staring at this black mass screaming and crying getting dragged up the stairs. No idea what it was. I'm pretty sure I blacked out at this point, because when I came to, I was crying on the stairwell with my mom asking us what was going on. I was sobbing saying there is a ghost downstairs, but she didn't believe my brother and I. Til this day, my brother and I swear some kind of dark entity/ghost floated out of that closet.
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I work as a security/nighttime attendant at an apartment building. It's 24 stories and one of the oldest buildings in the city.
One night I'm sitting here when the phone rings at about 3 AM, and I answer "Hello, front desk, how can I help you?" the voice on the other end sounded female, but was totally garbled and the only bit I could make out was "23rd floor." I tried to tell the person I couldn't understand them, and asked what apartment they were in, but again garbled response and "23rd floor." After the 3rd time of trying to understand them and the same response, I said since I couldn't understand them I'd come up and to meet me in the hallway.
So I go to the main elevators, and both are up on the (surprise) 23rd floor. Luckily, we have an older service elevator and it's only on the 7th floor so I call it down. I get it and hit the button for the 23rd floor, but it won't move and the inner door won't close, so I go to unlock the reset panel and boom we start going up, door still open. I'm freaking out, and the elevator is shaking because it goes pretty fast and is old. As I'm going up, I just stay towards the back and finally I reach floor 23.
I step out, door closes just fine, and I look around the hallway. There's nobody around. I walk along slowly trying to listen for anyone awake who might've called, but there's nothing. So now I head the opposite direction and go towards where the regular elevators are and when I get to them they are just sitting there with their doors open. I was pretty freaked out but I knew it could just be the elevators on the fritz, so I get in and figure I'll just reset them when I get to floor 1 when I hear the sound of the back stairwell closing.
So I quickly get out and go to the stairwell and lo and behold, no one's there, but the maintenance door to the machine room is ajar, and at that time I'm the only one in the building with a key. At the top of the building is a large machine room housing all the really loud machinery like the main HVAC and water heaters and stuff for the whole building and it also allows access to the roof. I don't like going into it because it's creepy as fuck and no one ever goes there, so at this point I'm seriously freaked out but I muster up and head in.
I shout "Hello?!" and there's no response. The lights in this room flicker because they're shitty fluorescent so I can't see well either, but at the end of the room I can make out the roof access door and sure as shit, It's slightly open. So I slowly continue forward checking the space in between each machine as I walk by, and there's no one there so I open the roof access door. I can't see anyone ahead of me on the roof but there is a slight wrap around and if there was a jumper or something I needed to be sure so I step out and leave the door ajar like it was.
Almost immediately, the door is pulled shut. Now I might've written it off as wind or something, but this door is hard to shut and hard to open. Really hard. I immediately grab the handle and yank it open, slam it behind me and run straight for the maintenance door. It automatically locks when it's closed so I slam it shut too and go back to the 23rd floor hallway, get into an elevator (doors still open) and go all the way down to the first floor. I go back to the main lobby and as soon as I sit down, the phone rings. I pick it up, don't say a word, and sure as hell garbled voice again only audibly saying "23rd floor." I hung up the phone, turned the ringer off and spent the rest of the evening just staring at the parking garage security monitor.
There's been a bunch of creepy things happen at this building, It's basically like the Overlook Hotel at night. I walked past a dark room here on the first floor once and swore I saw myself standing inside it. The next night as I'm inside said room cleaning, the lights flip off and I turn around to see a quick flash of myself walking past.
TL;DR Creepy ghost or some shit played games with me at work by trying to lure me onto the roof of the building.
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So, this was when I was about 8 (2002). My mom, brother, aunt and grandma had all traveled to Chicago to see Dinosaur Sue. We had been staying in a hotel nearby for about 5 days. It was very upscale, new, and overall very nice. Those entire 5 days, my mom would let me run ahead to the elevator when returning to our room from swimming, getting ice, etc, and let me ride up alone, since our room was right to the left of the elevator when you got off, and my grandma would always have the door cracked.
So, one day, on the way back from the pool, literally just got out (wet hair, suit, towel), I did the same, ran ahead and entered the elevator. Pressed the button for the 7th floor. There is only one elevator in this hotel btw. Once I got to the 7th floor, which I knew by the signs outside the elevator, I went to the second door to the left, like I had maybe 20 times before that week. I knocked and knocked. Nothing. I remember becoming weirdly "alarmed" at this point. Best way I can describe it. Even though I was smart enough to know I could always just return to the lobby, or that my mom would be arriving shortly. So While wondering why my grandma wasn't answering the door, I returned the few feet to the elevator.
And waited for my mom and brother. I saw on the display that the elevator was arriving on floor 7, the floor I was on. WHICH WAS CLEARLY WRITTEN ON THE SIGN. I see the light and hear the elevator ding. The doors open, empty.
At this point, I just FEEL something is VERY off, and return to the door, knocking and crying now, getting cold because I am still very wet from the pool. Finally after no more than 1 minute, a very old woman answers the door and says, "Dear, I told you already yesterday, this is not your room." I had NEVER been there yesterday. She then said, "It will be fine. I am very sorry, but I am on the phone with my son. Give it a few more minutes, your mother is coming." And freaking closed the door!! I was shocked hahah I knew I was cute. And how could anyone close the door on a crying kid who lost their mother, especially a woman who seemed like the caring grandmother type!!
Almost immediately after she closed the door, the elevator opened, and my mom ran out crying and grabbed me. She was saying, "oh honey, where were you!?!?!? I have never been so worried." She then went to open the door. Not our room. She was stunned. The whole time i'm trying to explain I had been here. And my timeline of events had only been about 5 minutes.
Her still hugging and holding me, she kinda just went into auto pilot and went back into the elevator with me. She pressed 7 again. The doors closed super briefly and then reopened. The elevator didn't move at all. Once the door opened, we both saw my grandmother standing in the second door to the left crying. And then very happy, running to hug us.
Apparently I had been missing for 45 minutes. Police were called, every floor had been gone too, they were still in the process of knocking on all doors, opening even locked, vacant rooms.
Apparently, my mother had decided to once more go and look at the pool to see if I had returned there. Then, after seeing it empty, she took the same, only elevator back up to 7. Only THIS time, out of the multiple other times that day, she found me. And, not only that, we were clearly not in the elevator hiding out. As it was the only one. And the police and staff had gone up and down the elevator multiple times looking for me.
We Still talk about it to this day and can't explain it. My hair was still wet. The police were kinda pissed until the hotel staff pulled up the camera showing me getting on the elevator, but then never getting off. Then, what was the creepiest, was that when my mother got on from the lobby, you see her get on, then TEN minutes past, and then she gets off at floor 7 with me in her arms. They went through all cameras, on ALL floors, which had very clear angles of the elevator on each floor. NOTHING.
I swear, the staff was freaked out, as were the police. They were almost convinced someone had taken me and then became freaked out and left me shortly after. The were stumped as to why my hair was still wet. But they couldn't refute the cameras, as they were high resolution, working correctly and everything.
I have always wanted to call back and see if they still talk about it years later. I just don't want to mess with it. Because it's not like I even see the event as serving a purpose, you know? I have no clue who the woman was, nor was I ever able to identify her. Because for the investigation, even after they found me, they locked down the hotel and all possible exits and had a perimeter. Chicago does not fuck around by the way with possible abductions. Every guest in the hotel was more than happy to help. Woman from ages 50 on, all willingly let police take photos. Not one of them was the woman. This woman had VERY blue eyes, like very.
The only possible connection I can think of, is that the woman and I had almost Identical eyes. I Have kinda a rare color for how dark my hair is. IDK!!
Sorry for long ass post!!!
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I graduated from high school in 1991 in a small town. Including me, there were 124 individuals in my graduating class. I don't know how many readers here came from a similar situation, but you get to know everyone, at least casually, when you're in a class that size.
Last year the usual collection of classmates were organizing our 25 year reunion. I attended our 20th, but wasn't able to go to the 25th, so instead I lived vicariously through the posts my classmates made on Facebook (virtually everyone in our class is on FB).
Among the FB posts were some video clips from our all-night graduation party that about half of us went to after the graduation ceremony back in 1991.
The video clips showed individual interviews with everyone, random nonsense from games people were playing at the party, et cetera. The interviews were pretty standard stuff, "what are your plans for the future?", "do you have any wisdom to impart to underclassmen?" that kind of thing.
I watched all of the clips. They brought back a lot of memories, clear as day.
Then one caught me cold.
Some dude I 100% didn't recognize, and he was apparently named "Adam".
I didn't know his name. I didn't recognize his face. In the interview clip he stated that he'd been living in our town "since 8th grade" (I went to school in that town in 5th and 6th grades, moved away, and returned for 9th through 12th and graduated there) but he wasn't in any of my yearbooks.
I watched his clip 3 or 4 times, trying to figure out who he was. Completely foreign to me. I was THERE, at that all-night party, and it only had 50 or 60 members of my graduating class, and I didn't remember him being there at all, much less recognize him as someone with whom I went to school for years.
Then a clip came up in which they interviewed me. I remembered the interview clearly, because while most of the questions were pretty much the same canned ones they were asking everyone, the guy threw me a bit of a curve ball with one of them and caught me a little off-guard.
While watching the clip of my interview, that mystery classmate "Adam" was visible in the background.
Needless to say, this kind of freaked me out. How do I not remember an entire person from so small a graduating class?
I searched for him on Facebook and found him. About half my old classmates are connected with him there.
I reached out to a few of them and casually asked who Adam was. Every one of them thought I was joking. Apparently I was close friends with this guy I completely don't remember.
This has been bothering me for over a year, but I'd all but put it past me until last week. Another good friend of mine from back then was going through and scanning some old photographs from a party she had hosted out at her grandmother's lake cabin (which was very remote and impossible to find without help) the last month of our senior year.
She emailed me a few photos from that day (because I had been at that party). This Adam guy was in the photos she sent me in one capacity or another. She asked me "Um... who the hell is this dude? I don't remember him being there!"
I very clearly remember that party -- it had just been our relatively small circle of close friends at the time. I can name all 9 of us that were there that day. I have no explanation for who this Adam guy is or how neither of us remembers him there.
I double checked the other day -- he still doesn't show up in any of my high school yearbooks.
When that friend of mine (who hosted that party) reached out to the others that were there, about half responded "That's Adam, duh!" and the other half of us had no clue who he was or remembered him being there.
Did half of my class go to school in a parallel universe or something?
EDIT 12/21/2017: I suppose I owe you guys an update, though it's not a very satisfying one.
I reached out to "Adam" via FB and it took him a while but he did get back to me. He went to my high school from 8th grade through 12th grade according to him (which is what others have said who remember him). I asked him if he and I had any classes together and he doesn't remember who I am - he actually asked me to send him a picture of what I looked like back then because he didn't recognize my name. So much for he and I being friends of any sort.
I also reached out discreetly to several other people, some who know him, some who do not. I didn't get much back, but "Adam" isn't in their yearbooks either, none of them, not even in those belonging to people who remember him. I have no explanation why. "Adam" has also not gone by any other names, so it's not a case of mistaken identity.
I still need to see if I can get a list of enrolled students from back then to verify if he was actually there, but I'm guessing I'll find that he was.
So I don't know, everyone. Memory is unreliable. It just seems so screwed up that those who remember him are so firm about it, and those of us who do not are equally sure.
Anyway, thanks for all the comments and the insights. I was pretty nervous about posting this here, and you guys largely did make me feel better about this glitch. I appreciate that.
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The Kumakatok ("door knockers") are a group of three robed figures believed by many in the Philippines to knock on doors in the middle of the night and bring bad omens. They allegedly look like humans, but wear hoods that obscure their faces to some extent. One resembles a young female, while the other two look like elderly men.
A visit from the Kumakatok is usually an omen of death, as either the eldest member of the house, or one who is ill, will be visited and subsequently die. The visits are supposedly more frequent after a disease outbreak. Residents of Luzon and Visayas at one time painted white crosses on their doors to ward off the Kumakatok. This trend was said to cause the trio to switch from residences to government buildings, hospitals, and even churches.
Reported sightings of the Kumakatok have decreased significantly since World War II. One explanation is that many buildings were destroyed at that time, leaving the Kumakakok few doors upon which to knock.
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I'm a police officer. One night we get a call about some banging noises in the wall of the bathroom in a shitty apartment building. The banging has been going on for a few hours and it's reported to sound like someone banging on the other side of the wall. The people who live in this unit are a husband and wife and their young son, maybe 10 years old or so.
A couple of us attend this call and when we get there, we hear the banging. Its not continuous, but it happens in 4 or 5s, every few minutes or so. It sounded like how it was reported, like someone banging their fist against the wall. It's extremely loud and forceful; I can't remember for sure, but I think it made the mirror in the bathroom fall off. It was definitely making the items on the bathroom shelf shake.
We go out and knock on the door of the apartment next door, next to where the bathroom would be. Dude answers and lets us in. Can hear the banging still, but not nearly as loud. It's clearly nobody in that unit banging on the wall.
We can't figure it out. We entertained thoughts of an animal or something being stuck in the wall, but then how did it get there? Plus the forcefulness of the banging didn't add up to an animal. A person stuck in the wall? Nope. We call the fire department.
By this time, mostly everybody on the whole floor is out in the hall, seeing what the hell is going on. Of course everyone is joking that it's a ghost. The people who live in the unit say they've heard the banging before, but not to this extent. It's never gone on as long or been as loud or forceful.
As a joke, someone shouts out "if you want us to leave, knock 3 times!" Right away, there are 3 sharp bangs. Not even joking. Everybody is freaked out by this point.
I'm walking around the unit, just seeing if anything else is out of the ordinary. I see a laundry basket on the bed of one of the bedrooms, which shares a wall with the bath. A few of the bangs are so forceful, they made the basket on the bed shake.
The kid says the banging is more frequent when he is near the bathroom. Weird shit, right?
So the firemen arrive. They think it's a big joke, but when they hear the banging and it can't be explained, they are puzzled as well. I can't remember why, but it was determined that the sound wasn't originating from the pipes or anything else in the wall. The firemen decide to cut a small hole in the wall.
Honestly, I don't even want to be there for when they do that. I've never believed in ghosts or demons or anything or that sort, but I was actually scared about what may be in the wall.
So they cut a small hole in the wall. What do they find? Absolutely nothing. Nothing is in there. It's hollow. They shined a light in there and tried to shove their phone in there to take photos, but nothing was seen. The only weird thing was that when they used a heat sensor, one part of the wall was hotter than the rest.
The banging basically died down at this point. We told the occupants to call us if it started up again, but it never did, or at least they never called us again.
On a follow-up a few days later, they said they called a medium or someone of that sort and while they were doing their thing, the banging happened again, very intensely, but just for a few minutes.
Last I heard the occupants moved out and we haven't heard anything since.
I have no good explanation for this and neither does anyone else. Maybe it's not ghosts, I don't know, but I'm of the opinion it's something supernatural and this is what made me a believer.
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Something like this happened to me, I was on my way back from practice one night, and I stop at a light. I was just looking out at a cornfield, when suddenly I notice something I have never seen before in the field; an old looking house. It had 4 windows (2 on each side) and a doorway. It had one floor and looked about 20' x20'.
Here's where it gets creepy; all the windows were boarded up. I lived in this town for several years, and have taken the same road back to practice many a time, and I have NEVER seen that house before.
I took the the same road a few days later with one of my team members. I pointed it out to him and he lost his shit, he had never seen that house before. It was just a boarded up house in the middle of a cornfield. We asked our coach about it when we got to practice and he said there was no house there, he had lived near the cornfield for 20 years.
Later that night, coach texts me: 'I saw it, I'm officially scared'.
After that, the excitement dies down for a couple weeks and it was just something we casually noticed.
But one day, the I saw the house had moved. it was no longer in the middle of the cornfield, but about 20 feet away from the road, right next to the light. I saw this at night, and I quickly noped out of there.
A couple more weeks pass. Then it was just gone. The house had disappeared leaving behind a purple rectangle on the ground around where the foundation of the house used to be.
I don't take that road anymore. Sometimes it keeps me up at night; wondering if I saw a real life monster/ghost house.
It was dead grass, but it was purplish gray. I remember distinctly going up to the spot with my teammate. I'm colorblind, but I said it looked purple or grey and my teammate agreed that it was purple.
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When I was about 6, I was ill with some type of fever. I was sleeping on the couch at my grandparent's house so my grandmother could watch me during the day.
I woke up feeling strange. My mouth was all dry, and my head felt excited and super-calm at the same time. And I was so hungry! Retroactively, I'd describe this as being high as fuck from having a fever. But at the time I had no experiences to compare it to.
I looked at the coffee table next to me, and there was a covered dish shaped like a strawberry. It was about six inches across and three inches deep, and it was made from amber colored glass with a frosted iridescent sheen to it. It had little indentations on the top that looked like seeds. I had never seen it before. I was so excited! I could tell it was full of candy. My parents thought sugar was harmful, but occasionally my grandparents had candy around and let me eat it. I was about to eat the whole damn dish of it.
I reached out to open the candy dish, and my hand went right through it. It melted away in front of my eyes. As it melted, I could see where my hand went through the dish. It made the same kind of indentation that hands make when grabbing something soft like peanut butter. Where my hand had gouged the ghost dish, I could clearly see the candy inside. It was candy I would never get to eat because in about five seconds it dissolved and was gone.
I let out a piercing shriek of outrage. My grandmother came running, and I started yelling about a melting glass strawberry. She freaked out, and had to call my dad to leave work and take me to the emergency room.
All the way there I complained bitterly through my tears about the disappearing candy. This upset my grandmother a great deal.
About ten years later I found out she had a candy dish exactly like that when she was first married. It was a wedding present from her mother in law, and she never used it because it was too fancy for her house.
But one day her church group met at her house once and she served candy from it. One of the women choked on the candy. She didn't die from choking because it didn't get caught all the way in her throat. But she had trouble breathing. An hour later, she died of a heart attack on the way to the hospital.
My grandmother, feeling horrified and guilty, said she never used that dish again, and had given it to a thrift store long before I was born.
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There is a lighthouse on an island not far from here.
Up until the 1960s or so, it was operated by families that were hired to live there year round. It was completely isolated. During the winter months, the family could go months without seeing a single other soul.
In the 1930s, one of the families who lived there experienced a tragedy. During a massive three-day blizzard, the keeper went to check the light. He used a clothesline that connected the house to the light to find​ his way there and back. When he returned home after one trip his wife and children were gone. Vanished. He searched frantically for them, but no bodies were ever found. The official story was that while the keeper checked the light, the mother went crazy and took her two kids over the 100 metre cliffs with her.
Fast forward to the early 1980s. My father and a man named Roger were two of the last light keepers before the light became automated in the early 90s. I wasn't very old, so I don't remember the specific details, but I think he said they would live on the island as a team for four months, off four months then back again.
Dad and Roger were working the winter shift January-April. This was the loneliest time, as ice conditions often meant that very few ships passed by. Dad and Roger mastered chess, cribbage, bullshitting, and backgammon. It was slow. It was boring. It was a job.
Then the blizzard came. Another 3 day blizzard with winds topping 130km/h. Dad and Roger used a clothesline to make their way the 15 or so metres to the light. When the snow had settled, they surveyed the damage: a few shingles missing, some siding blown off, and the flag pole was blown over.
Dad radioed into shore and relayed the damage. Dad and Roger could manage to fix the shingles and siding, but the flag pole would have to wait for the spring turnaround.
Things started to get weird. Dad and Roger would hear sounds - crying, moaning, screaming. Roger ran from the light in a panic one morning when he insisted he saw a small child in pajamas standing in a clearing in the woods. Both Roger and Dad suffered terrible night terrors and sleep paralysis. Dad told me a slow dread settled over them. Something wasn't right. They would get locked out of the light even though there was no reason to lock it. The Am/FM radio stopped working and would only play static. The clothesline kept falling down. They chalked it up to cabin fever and ran out the clock on the turnaround.
In April, the supply boat came with the relief crew. They lifted a sturdy new aluminum flag pole and bags and bags of cement for a new foundation the 100 metres up the side of the cliff to the light house. Dad and Roger told the next crew about the weird stuff that had happened. They all laughed it off. Light keepers are pragmatic folks.
This is the part of the story where my dad gets really quiet.
In mid-april the keepers began the process of replacing the flag pole. They removed the old, broken one and began removing the rocks at the base to make space for the new concrete foundation. Under those rocks were three skeletons: one of a woman and two children.
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The night my dad died my brother and I both saw something come in the window. Neither of us can say exactly what it was but it was like a thin green cloud.
It came in the window which we had opened it to give him some fresh air in the evening and it moved - not drifted - towards my dad then disappeared. He died that night.
He was very sick so the dying was not totally unexpected but the green cloud was. We're both atheists and scientists, but we know what we saw and we both saw it.
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It was in the summer, sometime around 1985. At the balancing lake, near Stony Stratford in Milton Keynes. Two friends and I decided to go and investigate a so-called 'haunted house'.  We walked across a field (before the lake was actually constructed). There were some kind of water workings in progress on a little 'man-made stream' thing that used to go across the field. This made it hard for us to cross one side of the field to the other as we had to crounch and go on all fours through a hole in a fence.

When we approachd the building, none of us wanted to go into the building. Strange, seeing as it was definately empty and it was in the middle of a summer's day. We decided not to bother goin in and started to make our way back across the field. About a minute into the walk I turned around to look at the house. At the front of the house stood a man in black. He had a full-length 'gown' type thing on and either a hat or a hood over his head. He was also carrying something in his right hand. This looked distinctly like a rifle in a polythene bag (maybe that's my infantile imagination - but it looked like it and it was about the right size). The hat looked like it had a bit of a 'brim' to it and was similar to a 'quaker' hat, although from a distance, it's hard to distinguish the exact shape of something black.

We ran our asses off as soon as I saw him. When we stared running, he was about 100ft away from us. We approached the 'water-works' in the centre of the field and I managed to turn around briefly as I waited my turn to go through the hole in the fence. He was nearer. The gown covered up any leg movement (if any) and the quick glance I had was not enough to distinguish whether he was moving at all. I can say that he was definately not running because his arms would be swinging from side to side and I would have been able to see his feet. Also, the whole poise of his body would be different. He was definately nearer though.

We scrambled through the holes in the fences and made our way up to the bridge at the other side of the field (about another 100 metres from the 'water works'). At this point I turned around again. Once more he was closer. At this point he was around 40ft away from us.

At this point the 'bridge' is very open and goes over the A5D which passes through Milton Keynes. We ran over the bridge and into the housing estate where we lived at the time. Upon looking around this time the mysterious man had disappeared.
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Had a chat with lady who delivered my online shopping today....... she has seen three ghosts, one in a backyard, just a glimpse of a girl with red hair, one of a deceased neighbour, sitting in his usual chair in the window, and the best, a faceless 'Quaker'.

She lived in her childhood in a council house in Sutton Bridge, Lincolnshire. Her mother bought an Ouija board and they tried it out a few times. They then became aware of a presence in the house that would hold a door fast, as you tried to open it, only to fling it open when you took your hand off the handle.

A duvet flung itself against the wall, and it was suspended there for a few moments. The sound of a horse galloping was heard outside. Then, everyone in the house, including this lady, saw the tall dark figure of a man with a cloak, and a Quaker style buckled hat with no face.

It became increasingly intrusive, appearing at the foot of beds at night. Slamming doors very noisily. The lady said that she knows the current family who rent the house and the boy of 9 saw it seemingly moving his toy truck around in the lounge. If that is to be believed. Certainly this person had seen him with her own eyes and described the black void where a face should be. He seems to float.
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I can't explain it, but the basement of the old church in Forest Home Cemetery (in Milwaukee, WI). I got down there to check it out and all I can say is that I had the feeling that something "lived" there and I was to get out immediately.

I can't really be more specific, but that's what went through my mind as I walked through one doorway in there. I've never felt quite like that before. It felt like I was invading something's home.
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For example in North Carolina immigrants from Ireland brought with them stories about 'Hungry Grass' and ‘Famine Wells‘. The Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s, gave birth to a belief that in some way the land, and even the water, had itself become infected by the deathly effects of the famine. In America this tradition merged with Native American beliefs about particular locations and geographical features which were haunted by subterranean beings, which could emerge through wells and springs. These places would then draw the life-spirit out of those who strayed into them or drank from their waters.

Sometimes the vampiric forces would be deliberately induced. Tennessee there is the tradition of the ’Cussing Coverlet, a quilt or blanket where by some secret method a curse could be stitched into the patterns of the threads. When this coverlet is used on a bed it is supposed to draw the energy out of the sleeper, leaving them helpless; sometimes strangling them in its folds.
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Not from Manchester, but I recall a news story (in local free newspaper only, no tv coverage) in Newark, Notts in the mid 90's. I remember reading about a family who said there council house was haunted and their children had been hit by 'something', locals were septical as they thought the family were looking to get moved to a bigger house. The story ran for a few weeks along the same lines before a council inspector said he would stop there from after work til the next morning, the next week the story went COUNCIL EMPLOYEE FLEES LOCAL HOME AFTER GHOST DOG SIGHTING, the inspector said he awoke about 2am feeling sick, went downstairs for a glass of water and saw a dog hovering mid air, rotating 'like a spit' with a severed human arm in it's mouth. The story went on that he was now off sick, the house was demolished shortly after.
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For some two and a half years now, I've been conducting research into a series of sightings of a somewhat peculiar figure roaming around a certain section of the West Midlands / South Staffordshire border.

Cutting a long story short, the figure is generally described as black clad - some accounts say it seems to be wearing a cloak - and 7 to 9 feet in height. A couple of the accounts I have received mention an overwhelming feeling of 'evil' associated with the figure - though this aspects does not feature in all of the stories I've collected. Strangely, such sightings apparently span at least three decades, with the most recent encounter being only a couple of years ago.

Certain details within the stories that I have collected remind me very much of other cases that I've read about previously.

I would very much appreciate input on this matter... especially if you have any anecdotes along the same sort of lines (from wherever).
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9 February 1988, around 8am, on a rural road outside the town. It was south east of the town centre and the school is south south west, around a mile away.

The man was looking for farm work when he saw a car on the verge and a woman exercising her spaniel nearby. Suddenly it fled across the road barking furiously right into a single patch of spinning yellowish mist around the hedgerow. It disappeared into the mist, or was obscured by it. The barking stopped. He followed as did the woman across the road who was very upset. The mist was spiralling and causing the hedgerow to be disturbed like a whirlwind. In closer proximity they could hear a 'rushing' noise, smelt a sulphur like odour. the area was oddly 'still' and they both felt a an electric tingling and their hair was standing on end as if inside a static charge.

Moments later the mist vanished like smoke clearing and the dog was found prone on the ground where it had last been seen entering the mist and looked dead. As he approached he could see that it was alive but breathing deeply. Its eyes were bloodshot and it was soaking wet and warm to the touch. The body heat was causing the water to turn into steam and evaporate quickly. He likened it to when you get out of a hot bath and steam rises.

The man carried the spaniel back to the car and the woman quickly drove out of there still distressed but he recalled her registration and traced her as he was worried. The dog apparently recovered inside the hour and seemed normal but died a few weeks later. It was quite elderly so could well just be coincidence.

There were no apparent after effects on either of the witnesses.

Whenever I read this one I always think the fact that the barking stopped suddenly, to me means the dog went somewhere else... if only just for a few moments. Was this why it returned soaking wet, perhaps it was raining heavily there? Would be highly interesting to find an account of a spaniel dog appearing somewhere for a few brief moments.
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We were down in O.K. visiting our cousins. We were bored one day so we decided to go for a walk in forest. we were walking along the trail and came acrossed something very creepy. it was some sort of animal that was about the size of full grown cat. It layed on its back staring at us even though it was dead. It had a long curled snout, it was orange and had stripes, it had human like hands and feet, the claws were long and curved, the very odd thing was that it had butterflies on it and not one fly. it remided me of the mythical goat sucker, but i've seen pictures of the mythical goat sucker and it was far from that but similar in a weird way. we tried taking pictures of it but no matter how still we were the animal itself was blurred out and the backround was clear. the only picture of the animal that turned out was its foot. i still cant believe that such an ugly rotten animal was covered with butterflies and not flies. Weird Huh?
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Hants and Sussex News, Feb. 25, 1920 -- "one of the most sensational discoveries and most mysterious cases of tragedy that we have been called upon to record" -- a naked body of a man, found in a ploughed field, near Petersfield, Hampshire, England.
The mystery is in that there had not been a murder. A body had not been thrown from a car into this field. Here had appeared a naked man, not in possession of his senses. He had wandered, and he had died. It was not far from a road, and was about a mile from the nearest house. Prints of the man's bare feet were traced to the road, and across the road into another field. Police and many other persons searched for clothes, but nothing was found. A photograph of the man was published throughout England, but nobody had seen him, clothed or unclothed, before the finding of the body. At the inquest, the examining physician testified that the body was that of a man, between 35 and 40; well-nourished, and not a manual worker; well-cared-for, judging from such particulars as carefully trimmed finger nails. There were scratches upon the body, such as would be made by bushes and hedges, but there was no wound attributable to a weapon, and in the stomach there was no poison, nor drug. Death had been from syncope, due to exposure. "The case remains one of the most amazing tragedies that could be conceived of."
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Vance Randolph, in his Ozark Magic and Folklore, mentions that "Mrs. C. P. Mahnkey once saw clearly a little cabin on a ridge in the old McCann game park, near her home at Mincy, Missouri." She got a pair of binoculars and studied it, noting that smoke was rising from the chimney. By the next day, the cabin had vanished again. Her neighbors informed her that no cabin ever stood there to their knowledge.
Richard T. Crowe, an expert in ghostly phenomena (particularly as it pertains to Chicago, Illinois) tells of a similar "Dream-House" located near the infamous Bachelor's Grove Cemetery:
"As if the thing were not mystery enough," Crowe went on, "old records show that there never has been a house there. But the ghost house appears on either side of the road, at different places. Witnesses always describe it in the same way: wooden columns, a porch swing, and a dim light glowing within."
Crowe says that no one has ever reported entering the house, but that maybe those who do don't come out again! If so, Don Frosty of Michigan and his former girlfriend may have had more than one lucky escape.
Manton is a small town in northwestern Michigan just to the west of Highway 131, about twelve miles north of Cadillac. When Don Frosty was a teenager, he heard of a farmhouse on the east side of town that supposedly was not always there. "There were two old mining roads, and it was off one of them," he told Wisconsin writer Linda Godfrey. Frosty and his high school girlfriend visited the place multiple times, armed only with flashlights. It seemed to be an ordinary two-story farmhouse.
"I don't recall any furniture in it," he explained to Godfrey. "It was empty like an abandoned house with a wooden floor and no drapes on the windows. The windows were intact. But when we would go back there the next day, there was nothing. Just a field." The house has not been reported, apparently, in recent years.
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Where: A stone farmhouse "near the Mound, at Platteville, Wisconsin"
When: "About ninety years ago" from the publishing date of 1962, Carl Nodolf purchased the house and acreage; the incident occurred after he married and had two children. Circa 1880.
Who: Carl Nodolf, a young German farmer, his wife Louise, and their children, Minnie and Louie.
How close to source: Not stated. The story is supposedly well known to the inhabitants of Platteville as "the Nodolf incident." Minnie and Louie Nodolf were still living at the time Wisconsin Lore was published.
Phenomena: The Nodolfs' two-story farmhouse was built like a fortress, necessarily so, because at this time Wisconsin was still untamed, and wolves and other wild animals were quite aggressive. The Nodolfs' door and shutters were thick, and Carl Nodolf carefully barred and bolted them all every night.
One June night around the year 1880 a terrific thunderstorm blew up, marked by powerful straight winds, "unusual" bolts of lightning, "balls of fire," and torrential rain. Despite the extreme weather, wolves still lurked on the farm grounds. The Nodolfs were more certain than ever to bolt and bar every door and shutter.
The storm kept the family up later than usual, but finally everyone went to bed. Not long before morning, a particularly loud thunderclap woke the elder Nodolfs, and Louise thought she heard her daughter calling for her. She lit a lamp and found that the children were not in their beds.
Mr. and Mrs. Nodolf searched upstairs and down. All doors and windows were still barred from the inside. Suddenly, during a brief pause in the storm's fury, Mrs. Nodolf thought she heard the children crying at the front door. Her husband unbarred the door and opened it. There stood Minnie and Louie on the front porch.
The children were not wet, despite the rain and wind. The girl being only four, and her brother only two, it was impossible for them to have unbarred and unbolted any of the windows or doors -- all of which were still sealed from the inside, anyway.
The elder Nodolfs questioned Minnie, but she had no idea how they ended up outside, when they had been sleeping in their beds in the same room with their parents.
Oddities: The Nodolfs went on to have six more children. This seems to have been the only "odd" event in their lives.
Ending: The Nodolfs' neighbors worried about the farm family long before hearing of the incident with the children because, besides being unusually powerful, the storm seemed to hang over the Nodolf house and direct its fury there. It faded away by morning. The two Nodolf children developed stutters after the incident that lasted "to this day."
Legend: Wisconsin Lore may be a book of folktales, but there was no lore to fall back on for the Nodolf incident. "Perhaps there isn't an explanation," Gard and Sorden conclude. "It did happen, but there isn't an explanation."
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A Strange and Terrible Fate
One night in the fall of 1950, a six-year-old girl woke in the bedroom she shared with two sisters in a house on Cape Cod. She heard a voice -- a voice that had spoken to her several times before. "Come outside," the voice said. "Follow me into the woods."
The little girl managed to sneak past her sleeping sisters and her parents' open door. She left the house via the kitchen, stepping out into a cold, wind-blown rain straight off the Atlantic in only cotton pajamas. She followed the voice into the pine forest beyond the back yard.
Meanwhile, the girl's mother woke, having heard "a voice outside her window." She seemed to sense something amiss, because she checked the children's rooms without pausing to rouse her husband. She discovered an empty bed and an open back door, and she plunged into the stormy night with no more protection than a housecoat.
The woman called for her daughter several times and finally glimpsed the girl's white p.j.s among the trees. The girl would not acknowledge her but kept on into the forest. The woman fought her way into the woods and eventually found her child, standing still now.
The six-year-old pointed further into the trees and announced, "I saw her again, Mommy!"
The woman hugged her close and asked who she saw. "The Blessed Mother," answered the girl. "She told me to come with her."
The girl, Mary Sullivan, was six years old in 1950. At the beginning of 1964 she was nineteen, newly moved into an apartment at 44A Charles Street in Boston, MA, and employed at the Boston Safe Deposit and Trust Co.
By January 4 she was dead, the last official victim of the Boston Strangler.
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D. J. West's "A Pilot Census of Hallucinations" (from Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research Vol. 57, Part 215, April 1990), carries the following account, entitled, prosaically, "Case 0878":
A female student nurse aged 21 wrote (anonymously): "It was roughly 8.0 a.m. I was sat [sic] in my room having a cup of tea. (I'd been awake for about an hour and had had a bath and dressed.) Suddenly a large hole appeared in the floor -- it took up most of the floor and the edges looked as if it were a rocky formation. Although I couldn't see to the bottom of the hole I knew it was very deep. A voice [said] to me to 'jump in'. The hole and the voice disappeared. I've not had this experience again."
Like the Cumpstons a century earlier, the young nurse heard a mysterious voice from the opening; and, as the English couple's experience was dismissed as a hallucination, so too did the woman send her account to the Census of Hallucinations. What if these events were not illusions? Suppose Mr. Cumpston or the nurse jumped or fell into their respective openings? What would have happened? One can only wonder.
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The Hole in the Path
University professor and folklorist Theo Brown spent most of her life in Devonshire, where she spent a great deal of time collecting tales of ghosts, fairies, and psychic events. In 1982 she published Devon Ghosts, a book of stories both legendary and true.
In her Introduction Ms. Brown informs us that most people of Devon will not speak of strange events, for the fear of ridicule is strong in the southwest of England. One of the delightful aspects of Devon Ghosts, however, is reading of Ms. Brown's ability not only to convince her informants to speak, but to get them to write out sizable personal accounts for her. One such account came from the Reverend Dr. A. T. P. Byles, who told her in 1974 of a strange event that occurred years earlier.
In 1946 Dr. Byles became the vicar of St. Bartholomew's Church in Yealmpton, "a rather remote village to the south of the A38, on a road between Totnes and Plymouth," in southern Devonshire. Yealmpton's main claim to fame was that "Old Mother Hubbard" once lived there. She was the housekeeper for a local family who inspired Miss Sarah Martin to write a poem about an old woman whose cupboard was bare.
Anyway, there was a door in the south side of St. Bartholomew's that opened onto a path that led straight south to a wider lane that ran around the property. One Saturday afternoon near sunset, Dr. Byles walked up the path to meet his wife, who was arranging flowers within the church. He writes:
In the middle of the path I saw a hole, of irregular shape, about a yard in width. I thought it was a subsidence, and went into the church and told my wife about it. Coming out shortly afterwards, I found that the hole was very much larger, and asked my wife to come out and see it. We both looked into it, and I suggested lowering myself into it. However, it was of uncertain depth, and when I threw a stone it bumped against stonework which we could see, and which looked like part of a wall.
The hole had grown to about nine feet in diameter, and the vicar worried that someone might fall in. He headed into the village to look for planks to cover it. While there he ran into Mr. Knight, "the local builder and undertaker," and invited him to the church to see the opening.
Upon returning to the path, Dr. Byles was astonished to see no sign of the hole -- the narrow lane and the grassy turf to either side were exactly as they had been before. After listening to the vicar voice his confusion, Mr. Knight simply said "That's all right, sir" and never mentioned the "Hole" again.
The Byles moved to London in 1950. Dr. Byles admitted to telling a few people about the Hole over the years. After receiving his manuscript, Theo Brown visited Yealmpton personally. The story of the "Hole" was well known to the villagers, but no one had ever seen such a thing themselves, before or after Byles' experience. They frowned upon her suggestion that the grounds around the church be excavated to search for underground cavities or structures. Ms. Brown concludes: "It may have been quite a unique event with a significance that must for the present remain obscure."
Here again, one can only wonder what would have happened if the vicar actually had descended into the opening. And what was the "stonework" the Byles saw, which looked like part of a wall?
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One of the most disturbing unsolved disappearances of the last half century occurred in the town of Jacksonville, Illinois in 1959 when a man named Bruce Nelson Campbell stumbled out of his hotel room one night, dressed only in a pair of green pajamas, and was never seen again. What happened to the New England stockbroker has never been determined – he simply vanished without a trace.

In April 1959, Bruce Campbell, age fifty-seven, and his wife, Mabelita, drove to Illinois from Northampton, Massachusetts. The reason for their visit was meant to be a happy one. They had traveled to see their newly born first grandson, son of Bruce, Jr., who was an assistant professor of chemistry at MacMurray College, in Jacksonville.

For some reason, the long drive to Illinois was especially hard on Campbell and he began feeling sick while he was in the car. The stock investment counselor became confused and disoriented and when they arrived in Jacksonville, Mrs. Campbell checked them into the Sandman Motel, a small, family-owned establishment that was typical of motor lodges of the day. It was located on the northwest side of town, on Walnut Street, where a Casey's store now stands. Each room had a door that opened to the outside and parking was located right outside the guest’s room. Campbell was put immediately into bed after they checked into the motel. Bruce, Jr. arranged for a doctor to visit his parents and Campbell was treated for two days before he started to show some improvement.
On the evening of April 14, Campbell visited with his family and Bruce, Jr. later recalled that his father was “rational but still disoriented” during his last visit with him. Twice, later on that night, Mrs. Campbell said her husband asked her if their station wagon, which was parked outside of their room in the motel’s parking lot, was locked up. She told him that it was, shortly before going to sleep.

She later woke up at 2:15 a.m. and saw that the other double bed in the room was empty – her husband was gone. She immediately got out of bed to look for him and when she realized that he was not in the bathroom, hurried to the door of the room, which was unlatched. There was no sign of him in the parking lot and the desk clerk on duty said that he had not seen anyone walking past the office. The Campbells’ car was still sitting in the lot. The doors were locked and it was undisturbed.

Because of her husband’s weakness and disorientation, Mrs. Campbell quickly called the police. When officers arrived at the motel, she offered a description of the tall, balding man with a slight limp and explained that when he left the motel room he was wearing only a pair of bright green pajamas, a wrist watch and a ring with the Delta Upsilon fraternity crest on it. His wallet containing all his money, his shoes, his eyeglasses  and his car keys were still in the motel room.

Police officers searched the surrounding area, the darkened streets and the Jacksonville downtown area, but there was no sign of Campbell. The next morning, a request was put out for information and theories of murder, suicide and amnesia led searchers to local creeks, farm buildings and wells. No body was ever found.

The search for Bruce Nelson Campbell, the man in the green pajamas, continued for days and weeks and then it stretched into years. His family refused to give up hope that he would be found alive until 1967, when he was finally declared legally dead.

What became of Campbell? No one knows. He simply walked away into the darkness of a quiet Illinois town and was never heard from again.
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The summer of 1951 was a weird time in the city of Baltimore. The city sweltered under a heat wave and only the wealthiest residents of the region could afford air conditioners at the time. And there were no air conditioners to be found in O’Donnell Heights, a housing project on the southwest side of the city. This was a place where steel mill and shipyard workers lived with their families. For those folks, though, the steamy heat was less of a worry than the specter that was stalking their streets.

At some point in July, a tall, thin figure, dressed all in black, began sprinting across the rooftops of O’Donnell Heights. It leapt on and off buildings, broke into houses, attacked people, enticed a young girl to crawl under a car and played music in the nearby graveyard. Groups of young men patrolled the streets, while others waited by their windows at night, keeping a sleepy watch for the “Phantom Prowler” that eluded his pursuers and vanished into the cemetery before he could be caught. By the end of the month, police were arresting people for disorderly conduct and carrying weapons, but the phantom had disappeared and was never seen again.

What in the hell happened in O’Donnell Heights in the summer of 1951? To this day, no one knows.
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I've always wanted to share this story, I used to work the ICU night shift back in my military days. Hospitals are always creepy at night but it never really bothered me until I had a patient that was on the outs and we were expecting for him to pass away on our shift.
The rooms in our ICU have glass partitions and curtains so you could see the patient next door. This is about 1:30-2 am and while I'm in the next room over something catches my eye. There is a man leaning over the bed and his face is inches away from the one in the bed, I'm looking in disbelief that it's the same person staring at himself in bed. Thinking I'm losing it, I come around the partition to see if it's a coworker in there and no one is in the room. Maybe an hour later he passed away. To this day I can't really explain it.
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As a child, I once awoke to find somebody was tucking me in. (n.b. I suppose one doesn't get "tucked in" nowadays, with duvets as opposed to sheets and blankets). In the morning, parents were told, but were as baffled as me.

And another incident of "tucking in", this time slightly more unsettling:

My wife's great grandmother was a midwife in a small Cornish village. She also sat with the dying, and laid out corpses. By all accounts she was a formidable woman. In later life she moved to a flat in a nearby town. As told to me by her grand daughter, she started experiencing these "tucking-in" experiences. At first she found them quite re-assuring, and assumed it was her late mother visiting her and making sure she was all right. But gradually the "tuckings-in" became less re-assuring, and more "rough".

Finally one night she awoke to find something was trying to strangle her with her own bedclothes .

She left the flat and went distraught to her daughter's house. She refused to set foot in the flat again. Eventually her brother retrieved her furniture and belongings and she moved back to the village.

As a footnote:
Later and at a different location. The Old Lady and her daughter were sharing a room, when her daughter awoke in the night to find hands at her throat. She screamed and the Old Lady awoke to see a shadowy figure bent over the daughter's bed. She threw a shoe at it, and it disappeared. (The general agreement was that it had gone to the wrong bed, and "It" was after the Old Lady.)
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So I live in the very top corner of Northeast Tennessee and at my college there is this large field behind most of the buildings where some abnormally tall, thin, jumping humanoids were seen.
Once the jumping humanoids heard my friends they stopped and looked over at them and their eyes reflected the light coming from far away on campus. My friends noted that their eyes were not human eyes as well. My friends ran away as soon as they looked over.
There has been little explanation behind what it could be. We initially thought it was students messing around but they were too tall and the limbs were disproportionate. Are there any other sightings or insights that anyone could give us?
EDIT: My college is Milligan College not ETSU.
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Excavation director David Pickel, a graduate of UA and doctoral student at Stanford, describes a strange cemetery in Lugnano, a villa in the central Italian area of Umbria. “Abnormal” may be an understatement – and not just because of the recent discovery of what is being called the “Vampire of Lugnano.” In previous excavations in what they refer to as La Necropoli dei Bambini, the Cemetery of the Babies, infant remains have been found buried with raven talons, toad bones and bronze cauldrons filled with ashes and remains of sacrificed puppies – signs of ancient Roman witchcraft. One body of a 3-year-old girl was weighed down with stones on her hands and feet to keep her from rising from her grave – although not necessarily as a vampire. What – or who — was affecting and possibly killing these children and babies and creatures and creating the fears that they might return to return the favor? However, there may have been more to the death of a particular 10-year-old. Her body was found in a triangular tomb created by leaning two large roof tiles against a wall in a style known as alla cappucina or tombe cappuccio dei frati — “hood of the friars tomb” — for its unique peaked shape. Then there was the stone in her mouth, which was forced open as evidenced by the tooth scrapings on the rock. Was there something else unusual about this little girl? That question may have to wait until the digging resumes again next spring.
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I also briefly discussed something from my childhood that involved finding a tiny hand print in my nans house - behind the wardrobe. The bedroom was getting an overdue makeover and some wallpaper if my memory serves me well. The hand print was approximately slightly bigger than the bowl area of a dessert spoon. Three long thin fingers (the middle one was the longest) that were slightly outstretched and a plump looking thumb. It was less than 12inches above the floor and was very distinct. It was black in colour and well formed on the plaster. It was wiped away with some elbow grease which left a clean looking hand shaped area of plaster. Years later I brought the subject up with my Nan who wasn't surprised by that find. She grew up in a house that had similar oddness and strangeness connected with it.
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Apparently, in 1911 a Walter Yeeling Evans-Wentz published a book called The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, in which there is interviewed 73-year-old Neil Colton, who claimed that as a youth in 1853 he had had a rather strange and frightening fairy encounter indeed. Colton claimed that one summer day he had been put with his brother and cousin gathering berries out in the countryside when they heard some inexplicable, ethereal music wafting through the air from beyond some nearby rocks. When the group went to investigate, they claimed that they had come across a band of fairies dancing in a clearing, and one of these little folk, a woman dressed in red, suddenly noticed they were being watched and rushed forward with decidedly aggressive intent.
The mysterious woman is claimed to have surged forth with a stick, or rush in her hand to strike the cousin across the cheek, after which she reached out to grab Colton’s brother’s arm to keep from falling. This sent the group scurrying away in a panic, and at some point on their flight back to their home Colton’s cousin collapsed to the ground seemingly dead. The girl’s father and a priest by the name of Father Ryan then came to the scene and Ryan said a prayer over her body, after which she slowly and groggily awoke. The priest would come to the conclusion that it had only been her grabbing Colton brother that had kept her from being taken by the fairies “forever.”
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On a dark night in 1849, two young men named Groves and Kirk were on their way home from night work at a barn in the township of St. Mary's, Illinois, USA, when they found themselves being pelted by a barrage of snowballs... but this wasn't just some silly fun. The snowballs were packed so tightly that they did not break on impact, so "ice balls" might be a better description of what was being thrown; and the balls were thrown with enough force to cause bruising. Kirk, in particular, was "considerably bruised." Groves investigated the origin point of the assault with his lantern, but all he saw was a field covered in snow, with no tracks evident in it. The only sound the men could hear was that of the wind.
Around dawn the next morning the men made a further investigation. The field was still just a snow covered area with no prints... but then they both saw snowballs rising up from the surface of the snow which then flew at the men "like bullets"! Groves and Kirk ran out into the field to about the area the snowballs were coming from, and started to attack the air around with pitchforks, but the snowballs continued to hit them until the sun fully rose. Kirk was badly hurt by the two assaults and died within the year, though it is not stated specifically that the snowball attack was what killed him.
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On February 20, 1936, Jeffery Derosier lay dying in the War Memorial Hospital at Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, USA. It was a small room with four other patients in it; Derosier was being attended by a nurse, and asked for a mirror that was on the table near his bed.
        After staring into the mirror a short time, Derosier threw it back onto the table while exclaiming: "My God, I'm dying!" For a long while, the room was silent... then Derosier said something very odd. "You won't be able to pick up that mirror."
        Five minutes later, Jeffery Derosier lay dead.
        Some time after Derosier's body was removed from the room, one of the other patients, Harvey Davenport, reached for the mirror on the table. It wouldn't move.
        This curiosity was pointed out, and next a nurse tried... but the mirror still wouldn't move. Next Derosier's doctor, Dr. F. J. Moloney, tried to budge the mirror and couldn't. Soon nurses, doctors, and patients from different wards were all trying to lift or move the mirror, with a variety of tools (including an ice pick). Still the mirror stayed in place. Soon, local newspapers and the Associated Press were running stories about the nonmobile mirror.
        Finally, and surprisingly, the mirror flew several feet up into the air and then dropped to the floor while a nurse named Adeline Knoop was trying to get a fingernail under the edge of it. It was immediately taken up and examined, but no form of adhesive could be found, and the table surface was dry and clean with no unusual aspects. When placed on the table, the mirror did not stick, no matter what was tried.
        The mirror had resisted all attempts to move it for at least a twenty-four hour period, and there was no indication of how it could have happened... so, not surprisingly perhaps, it was soon 'accidentally' broken and thrown out by a nurse.
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In 2007 an un-named boy at a holiday camp in New Zealand ran to the camp bathroom late at nigh, when he got there he was relieved to see that one of the doors was shut, so he knew he wasn't alone in there late at night. Unfortunately, once settled in his stall, the person in the stall next to him started banging on the walls. When he asked them to stop, then his odd neighbor started to climb the wall of the cubicle... and when he saw filthy black hair appear at the top of the wall, he ran screaming from the bathroom, waking everyone in the camp up. The camp supervisors then told everyone that a girl had died in that stall three years earlier and had been undiscovered for four days until the smell of her rotting body was noticed by police. Since then, they had kept the stall locked -- theoretically to keep the dead girl out -- but she still somehow got in and continued to try to attract the attention of her neighbors.
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In Lithuania, it was believed that plague was spread by a woman in white carrying a bloody handerkerchief... wherever she waved her kerchief, people became ill and died. It was said she could be seen in lone burial grounds and fields, wearing a fiery wreath and divining rods upon her head. She is called morowa dziewica -- literally "plague maiden" -- and there is a tale from an old Lithuanian ballad, which was first published (as far as I currently know) in the notes for an 1841 edition of Adam Mitskievitch's Konrad Vallenrod, a story which made a reference to the legend and therefore elicited an explanation in the notes.
The Ballad of Morowa Dziewica
       Morowa Dziewica was spreading the plague in the village by thrusting her hand through windows and doorways and waving a bloody handkerchief; the inhabitants of these houses always died of the plague. People shut themselves up within their houses, refusing to open doors or windows... but hunger and other needs soon forced them to open their homes and suffer again.
        One brave man "of the lesser nobility" chose to do something about this situation. Even though he was well supplied with food and could have waited longer than any in his village, he purposely opened his window and waited, a sabre in his hand which was inscribed with the powerful phrase 'the name of Jesus and the Virgin Mary.' A short time later, the plague maiden thrust her bloody handkerchief into his home... and he sliced off her arm and took the handkerchief. The man and his family died, but from that time on there were no other victims of the plague within the village. The handkerchief was said to be held at a small church, but where it is now is anyone’s guess.

Writing in 1844, Jacob Grimm [1785-1863, one of the two famous Brothers Grimm] wrote that the Greeks of his day described the plague as a blind woman that wanders through towns, killing all that she can touch. Due to her blindness, she walks along walls... so if you stay in the center of a room, she can’t get you.
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About seven miles from Farr, Scotland, there is a lake called Loch-na-Cloinne, the "Children's Lake"... and there is a story about how it earned this name.
        One Sunday, a number of children were playing by the banks of this lake when they saw a beautiful bay horse come out of the waters onto shore. Almost all of the children ran over to it, wanting a ride, and mounted on its back... but one child, a boy, didn't want to ride. He did want to feel the horse's sleek coat, though, so he touched its shoulder with a finger to stroke the animal... and discovered his finger was stuck in place! As the horse started to move, the boy pulled out his knife and cut off his own finger... just as the horse rose up and ran straight back into the lake with all of the other children stuck to its back, and they all disappeared beneath the surface.
        When people arrived the following day to search for the children, they discovered the children's 'sgamhan' -- which translates roughly as lungs -- floating at the water's edge.
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My parents and sister lived in Appley Bridge before I was born. Apparently the old place was haunted. Whatever it was used to move the ‘bedding box’ (a wooden chest storing bed linen, etc) around during the night.
My mum used to say she was very unhappy there and would never sleep upstairs when my dad worked nights. Shortly before they moved a local woman told my mum “you’ll never give birth to a child that survives in that house”. For the record my sister was 2 when they moved there.
Unfortunately, what the old woman didn’t know was my mum had just lost a son to a heart defect at 6 days old. Very sad story. Very upsetting coincidence - perhaps.
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London Daily Herald, Friday, 12 May, 1939 – Harry Francis Dean (49) of Tewkesbury, UK, found strangled at bottom of “death quarry” on Bredon Hill, UK: coroner for south Worcestershire, Mr. H.J. Saunders, returns verdict of death by misadventure at inquest; supposedly some 5 other people died similarly in the space of 10 years – belief that they were all “pushed” over quarry cliff by unseen hands in the month of May; superstitious locals somehow connect this to extremely vague notions of pagan sacrifice in distant past.
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Mr. & Mrs. Frank Pell, Coxwell Road, Ladywell, Birmingham, UK – May 1955 – 2 year old child is suffocated (SIDS? overlain?) to death in house where poltergeist-like phenomena occur, including loud noises, whispering, tappings as of a cane for the blind, a peculiar musty odor, household objects vanished or destroyed, and apparitions seen - including a small white dog another toddler in the house claimed to have seen sitting on the face and chest of the suffocated child the night before she was found dead); somewhat similar to Hornsey Coal Poltergeist in Ferrestone Road, London, in which 5 year old Muriel Parker died of a sudden illness supposedly brought on by nervous exhaustion and fear of the ghost, who likewise threw or broke objects, whispered, and appeared as the red-clad shape of the children's recently-deceased-of-tuberculosis mother; characteristic musty odor also reported of Stocksbridge Bypass spectre, amongst others.
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Transvaal, South Africa, lake of the Bavenda/Lake Fundudzi; local superstition held the lake “cursed by a sacred python”, (although there is also supposedly a sacred bat spirit associated with the lake somehow?) and that anyone who drew water from it would die; 1953 Prof. Harry Burnside of Natal made the attempt and died of enteritis nine days later; seven months later his assistant William Thacker was drowned in Durban Bay; 1947 Jacobus van Blerk and brother Hendrik drowned there; hunter Gerald Koen taken by crocodile on shore.
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I came upon an interesting account posted on another list concerning a woman here in Southwestern Ohio (too close!) who worked the night shift. Since she slept during the bright light of day she had covered her windows with layers of thick carboard and heavy drapes and sealed all other possible light leaks. Thus her bedroom was entirely dark, ebony black, even at the noontide.

One day she awoke to see a leathery-winged demon standing at the foot of her bed. The demon seemed shocked to be noticed and quickly ran off ....somewhere.

Question - if we accept this tale as genuine, does it indicate that malignant entities can see darkness in the same way that the rest of can see light? If so, the demon could have been investigating that unexplained darkness in the middle of the day.
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I was told this a couple of days ago by an elderly gent I was talking to... Long story short, he was walking his dog several years ago (winter time, early afternoon, clear sky but cold) on Beachy Head near Eastbourne.

He said that he suddenly and for no reason felt like he shouldn't be there, like really shouldn't be there...

The hairs on his arms and neck were standing up and he said he felt something of 'pure evil'. his dog was stood close behind his legs whimpering and shaking. It was then he saw a very large shadow 'thing' about 50 feet away emerge from a patch of scrub. He said it resembled a person but appeared to glide with rather than walk, but with the motion of walking...if that makes sense?

He said it felt as if this thing seemed to suddenly realise he was there and the feeling of evil increased, he turned and ran (with the dog) back to his car a short distance away and has never returned.

I've tried - without my luck - to find anything similar on the internet, I've found stories of a monk trying to convince people to jump from the cliff, but nothing similar to the story this gentleman told me.
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One sunny morning, on the 25th of March 1962, a group of children were waling along a beach several miles from Pensacola, Florida. They came upon what they thought was the drowned body of a teenaged boy. To there amazement the youth was still alive, barely. He was rushed to Pensacola Naval Base Hospital suffering from shock, exposure and exhaustion. He was identified as Edward Brian McCleary who had been missing since the previous morning along with fur friends. When he was strong enough he spoke to the Director of Search and Rescue Units E.E McGoven. His story was truly amazing, like something from a horror novel. McCleary claimed his companions had been killed by a sea serpent.
It began on the morning of 24th March 1962 when Edward along with Eric Rule, Warren Sulley, Brad Rice and Larry Bill set out to go diving at the wreck of the Massachusetts, several miles off the coast of Pensacola. As they rowed out on their 7-foot Air-Force life raft, they found that the tide was stronger than they had anticipated. Strom clouds began to gather and the boys decided to turn back. Several of them swam behind the raft and pushed it. As the waves grew higher, swamping the raft, they swam to a 20 foot buoy and clambered onto its metal scaffolding.
In the violent storm that followed the raft was sucked under and the buoy rocked by lashing winds and icy rain. Finally the maelstrom passed and a fog rolled in as the sea became mill-pool calm. A foul smell, akin to dead fish filled the air. A strange wining cry echoed through the dark. Then something as long as a telegraph pole reared up out of the water and plunged back in.
They boys panicked and jumped off the raft. Behind them they heard hissing and splashing. Suddenly Warren yelled out “Help me! It’s got Brad, its got Brad.”
Warren’s cries were abruptly cut short. The three remaining boys huddled together and tried to swim for shore. Then something grabbed Larry from below and dragged him under. Eric was becoming exhausted and Edward tried to help him stay afloat but the sea, now turning choppy again pulled them apart.
Then a monstrous, reptilian beast reared up from the deep. It had a snake like neck, gleaning green eyes and a gaping maw that fell down on Eric and dragged him under.
Swimming for his life and expecting to feel the sea dragons teeth in his flesh at any moment Edward became exhausted and felt the tranquillity of death take over him. He recalled nothing further until he was in hospital. Unsurprisingly he suffered a breakdown afterwards. The police decided it would be better for them all if they kept the sea dragon out of their official report but E.E.McGoven said to Edward “The sea has allot of secrets. There are a lot of things we don’t know about. People don’t believe in these things because they are afraid to. Yes I believe you. But there’s not much else I can do.”
Subsequently Edward suffered from a breakdown. Apparently he still lives in the area today but refused to talk about the awful events that befell him and his friends on that fateful day.
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North of the border sasquatch is rarely thought of as being a treat to humans. In his book Wilderness Hunter former US President Theodor Roosevelt recounted a story told to him in 1892 by a grizzled old trapper called Bauman. Fifty years before Bauman and a friend had been trapping in the Bitterroot Mountains between the Salmon and Wisdom rivers in Idaho. The area had an unpleasant reputation as a year before a trapper called Cluey had been killed and half eaten by an unknown predator.
The men found their camp in disarray on returning from their first day of trapping. They assumed it was the work of a bear. However that night an upright walking, foul smelling attacked their stand to shelter. Bauman shot at the monster but it slipped into the shadows. All night it circled the camp making harsh, grating long-drawn out cries.
In the morning the scared men decided to head back to civilization. Bauman went to collect the traps whilst his friend packed up the camp. On returning Bauman found the camp strangely quiet. He found his friend’s body by a spruce long. His neck had been broken and fang narks in his throat. The corpse was not eaten but Bauman had the feeling that the creature had thrown the body around like a toy then rolled over and over in it in delight. He fled on horseback, riding through the night. He never returned to the Bitteroot Mountains.
In 1920 one Albert Petka of Nulato, Alaska was supposedly attacked by a ‘bushman’. Petka lived alone on his boat with his dogs. The dogs drove the hairy monster away but the man died of internal bleeding.
An almost identical story occurred 23 years later when John Mire, known as ‘The Dutchman ‘staggered into Ruby Alaska and told of how he was attacked by a bushman at his remote cabin. His dogs had driven the beast away but like Petka before him he died of internal bleeding.
The most famous man-beast, the yeti is thought by some to be a shy, unaggressive beast but others fear it as a savage mountain daemon In 1949 a Sherpa called Lakmpa Tenzing was said to have been torn to shreds by a yeti at a remote pass in Nanga parbat but there were no witnesses and his attacker may well have been a bear.
In Australia the yeti-like yowie was portrayed as a monstrous foe of the early Aborigines in their early legends. The stories recall the trolls and ogres of European law. The brutish beast are defeated by the humans employing their wits over the yowies brawn. They speak of many human deaths in the old battles. Occasionally there are hair raising modern accounts of aggressive yowies that have perused terrified witnesses, but physical harm is rare.
In 1910 two men were walking in the Victoria Falls area of the Blue Mountains when a ten foot gorilla-like creature emerged from the bush and attacked them. It hurled a large rock smashing the skull of one man as his friend fled. When the survivor returned with a party of armed men and dogs the body was gone, only bloodstains remaining.
Tony Healy and Paul Cropper recount a disturbingly suggestive tale in their excellent book The Yowie; In Search of Australia’s Bigfoot. They heard it from fellow yowie investigator Neil Frost. In the 1990s Neil interviewed a Blue Mountains based lawyer who in the 1970s had discovered a decapitated body in the bush behind the Warrimoo Bush Fire Station. The police said the man’s head had not been cut off but had been literally torn from his body and was found fifty feet away!
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In a letter to Fate magazine in March 1966 Hiram M Cranmer of Kettle Creek, Pennsylvania wrote...
“I personally have known seven people the thunderbird has carried off. Its victims range in age from 75-year old Barney Pluff who was devoured in 1941 to a four year old girl in McKean County, Pa who was snatched in 1937 while her family were picking berries.”
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From time to time, if you're paying attention to such things or just happen to be in the right place at the right time, you may hear a story that is weird even by weirdness standards. Some years ago, on a pleasant summer evening over a campfire at a state park in South Dakota, a ranger told me that a couple camping there had once made a very strange complaint. They reported, to all appearances seriously, that a strange animal had come tearing into their recreational vehicle and done extensive damage before fleeing. It looked, they said, like something half human and half horse.

The ranger didn't tell me if they used the word 'centaur,' but then he hadn't talked with them personally. This was just a story that had circulated for some time among park employees. No names and specific dates were attached to it. It was really no more than a local legend. There was no way to know if it was or was not based on an actual claim or incident of some sort. Nonetheless, it was undeniably interesting, and it was good for a chilling sensation down the spine.
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Edmund Lenthal Swifte, appointed in 1814 Keeper of the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London, refers in an article in Notes and Queries, 1860, to various unaccountable phenomena happening in the Tower during his residence there. He says that one night in the Jewel Office, one of the sentries was alarmed by a figure like a huge bear issuing from underneath the Jewel Room door. He thrust at it with his bayonet, which, going right through it, stuck in the doorway, whereupon he dropped in a fit, and was carried senseless to the guard-room. When on the morrow Mr. Swifte saw the soldier in the guard-room, his fellow-sentinel was also there, and the latter testified to having seen his comrade, before the alarm, quiet and active, and in full possession of his faculties. He was now, so Mr. Swifte added, changed almost beyond recognition, and died the following day.
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In 1840 a Mr. Bishop of Tring bought the house, which had long stood empty, and went to live there in 1841. After being there a fortnight two servants gave notice to leave, stating that the place was haunted by a large cat and a big baboon, which they constantly saw stealing down the staircases and passages. They also testified to hearing sounds as of somebody being strangled, proceeding from an empty attic near where they slept, and of the screams and groans of a number of people being horribly tortured in the cellars just underneath the dairy. On going to see what was the cause of the disturbances, nothing was ever visible. By and by other members of the household began to be harassed by similar manifestations. The news spread through the village, and crowds of people came to the house with lights and sticks, to see if they could witness anything.
One night, at about twelve o'clock, when several of the watchers were stationed on guard in the empty courtyard, they all saw the forms of a huge cat and a baboon rise from the closed grating of the large cellar under the old dairy, rush past them, and disappear in a dark angle of the walls. The same figures were repeatedly seen afterwards by many other persons. Early in December, 1841, Mr. Bishop, hearing fearful screams, accompanied by deep and hoarse jabberings, apparently coming from the top of the house, rushed upstairs, whereupon all was instantly silent, and he could discover nothing. After that, Mr. Bishop set to work to get rid of the house, and was fortunate enough to find as a purchaser a retired colonel, who was soon, however, scared out of it. This was in 1842; it was soon after pulled down. The ground was used for the erection of cottages; but the hauntings being transferred to them, they were speedily vacated, and no one ever daring to inhabit them, they were eventually demolished, the site on which they stood being converted into allotments.
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A real estate agent from Birmingham, Rice undertook the sale of a Victorian house with a steep staircase. “The vendor warned me always to hold the handrail firmly.” One day while waiting for a prospective buyer, he toured the premises to make sure nothing was out of place. He was descending the stairway, not using the handrail, when, about five steps from the bottom, “I felt a distinct push in my back. I literally leapt down the hall.” A surveyor, after examining the house, returned the key to Rice and shakily admitted that something had pushed him as well, and in fact he had “descended almost the whole flight of stairs on his back.” The vendor of the house could only suggest that an older relative of his, found dead at the base of the stairway, might have something to do with the “push”.
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Sandringham, Norfolk, a favorite retreat of the British royals, is haunted by poltergeistic phenomena. Footsteps, doors opening and closing, light switches flipping on an off, sheets pulled off newly-made beds -- the usual tricks.

The phenomena concentrate on the servants' quarters and are said to begin around Christmas Eve and continue for several weeks. There is something in the manse that gives off a noise of "heavy breathing," and this entity has been seen: "One footman refused to sleep in the room assigned to him after he claimed to have seen something which he described as 'looking like a large paper sack breathing in and out like a grotesque lung.' He also heard heavy and regular breathing apparently emanate from the curious bulging object."
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My brother was "walked though" once. It was at our grandparents house, which had several ghosts in residence. One was our grandfather's uncle, name of Joe. Uncle Joe was one of those "regular" type hauntings. He'd make his usual rounds about the house like clockwork, you know - come home from work every night at 11, wipe his feet on the mat and walk into the kitchen for a late supper - that kind of thing. That sounds like it might have been scary but not in the least. He was quite a comforting presence. Not everyone could see him, but we could all hear him quite well.

Anyway...one day, brother was standing in front of the fire at our grandparents house when he heard Uncle Joe's footsteps walking their usual path across the room (we were all used to this and it was nothing to get excited about). Suddenly, the footsteps turned and started heading straight toward him (this was not usual and brother was very alarmed. According to bro, when Uncle Joe passed through him he felt an overwhelming sense of dread, as if something terrible was going to happen (as if being walked through by a ghost wasn't bad enough, I guess). Indeed, there was a death in the family within a day.

Brother later heard that Uncle Joe had done this once before, preceeding another tragic event, but details were sketchy. Anyway, I'm just glad it wasn't me standing in front of the fire that particular day.
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1973, Fairfield, Ohio.
I was 12 years old and alone in the house with my cat. My Mother and my two brothers were at church. I think it was about 8:00p.m.
The house was built for my Father around 1963/64. A typical suburban middle-class two story four bed room on a one acre lot. The bedrooms were upstairs, mine being at the dead end of the hallway.
As I lay on the sofa watching television I thought I heard a shuffling sound upstairs in my bedroom, my cat was sitting with me purring so I thought it must be one of the other cats in my room. I tried to keep the other cats out of my room because they would often knock my models over.
I shouted up towards the ceiling "Get out of my room!" It got real quiet. I mean, it got so quiet that you could feel the silence. After about a few seconds there was a loud "thump" from above I then shouted "Get out!!!" as loud as I could, then it happened.
First I heard the door to my room slam open then slam shut.
Next came the scream. It was the shrillest sound I had ever heard. It started out down the hall and was moving towards the stairway, as it got closer it got louder, so loud that it hurt my ears. My cat was digging her claws into my arm and stood up and we both ran out the back door and into the field behind the house.
I stayed outside until my kin came home about a hour later.
Nothing has ever filled me with such a feeling fear. I hope it never happens to me again. The strange thing is, I can go for years and not think about that night but when I do I never wonder if running for my life was a good idea.
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On Dartmoor there have been reports that the demonic shape of a man named Stephen who committed suicide still appears and bodes ill for those who encounter his grave. The apparition is described as hideously skeletal and dressed in the ragged remnants of a grey robe.
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One of my earliest paranormal memories was of me saying, "Mom, there is a man in the corner."
Just an average looking everyday man. Nothing too distinguishing. He was dark haired. Around 30 years old with a cigarette in his hand. Crouched down in black clothing. Half sitting half standing with his back against the wall.
We had just moved into this home. Our previous home was destroyed by fire. I was very young. I was around pre-school years so somewhere between 3-5 years old. I saw this man in the corner of the living room. He was kind of smirking with a mischievous grin. The impression I had of him was he wasn't that nice. He was very sarcastic looking.
Around the same time frame, my mom's mom (my maternal grandma) died. She was a very cruel person. I don't say this lightly. She did many things in her life that were hurtful to my mom. I understand there were a lot of things out of my grandma's control and she probably did the best she could. But, instead of making amends in this life to my mom for the hurts, Grandma became a very bitter and cruel person. Out of respect for the dead though, I'd rather not elaborate further.
Anyway, she died suddenly of cancer when I was 8. It took over her body and metastasized quickly. There was only a few days knowledge of her impending death prior to it happening. I'm sure there were plenty of things left unsaid between my mom and her and not enough time for resolutions.
About three days after the funeral my mom woke up in the middle of the night screaming. I was again sleeping beside her and she woke me up by screaming. I looked up and my mom pointed to the end of the bed to the wall. She said, "It's my mother and she is in a ring of fire". I looked and indeed the image of grandma appeared to me as well. There standing, was my grandma, full body, with a very sad forlorn look on her face and she had a red glow and red ring all around her. Redness shot up and down twinkling around her. I didn't see actual fire or flames but there was a redness, like looking through red colored glasses at a person. It had a fluid texture that moved and waved. It didn't appear like a real full three dimensional person but rather like a hologram. The kind of image that was in Star Wars where Princess Leia was asking for help. It was flat and one dimensional as if someone was projecting her onto the wall with redness all around her.  My grandma's voice did say my mom's name but it wasn't coming from her mouth. It was being announced by another source. It called my mom: "Carol, Carol, Carol". Then the image blacked away like someone turned it off with a switch.
My mom sobbed herself back to sleep. Not knowing what to say, I went to sleep as well. We never really talked much about it because My mom interpreted it as Grandma being in hell. This is what she believes. She sobbed herself to sleep crying.
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A rather more complicated story concerns a UFO sighting by a family in Blairgowrie, which was followed some time later by the appearance of a military helicopter hovering low over their house. The odd events continued. On one occasion two members of the family watched incredulously as a procession of "strangely dressed males" walked up the street. They were "all dressed in black Yiddish attire, wearing hats of the same colour and several with pigtails stretching down their backs". They walked up the path of a neighbour's house and disappeared inside. A little later they walked out again and back down the street. When the witnesses visited the neighbour to ask about them, she said she hadn't seen them; no one had entered her house. There were a number of other strange incidents.
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'There are so few historical sources for this kind of thing (cattle mutilation) that we offer no apologies for referring readers to chapters 13 and 14 of Charles Fort's Lo! Fort was fascinated by the winter of 1904-5, during which time, against a background of ghosts and poltergeists, outbreaks of religious revivalism in Wales, and swarms of starnge aerial lights and airships, there ocurred wave after wave of dreadful attacks on animals. At Hexham, Northumberland, something was killing sheep nearly every night, sometimes on both sides of the River Tyne on the same night. That winter there was more slaughter at Gravesend in Kent and Badminton in Gloucestershire, involving 'terrible losses for poor people'. Yet worse was to come.
'In May 1910, something began killing six or seven sheep a night, biting into their necks and sucking their blood, but leaving their bodies untouched. In 1874, sheep were killed in a vampiric manner around Cavan, Ireland; as many as thirty a night had their throats ' cut and blood sucked, but no flesh eaten'. Wolves were blamed (the last wolf in Ireland was killed in 1712) and finally a dog was shot. This time the killings continued in the same region. Something killed over sixty sheep in two nights at Guildford and Windsor in the SURREY PUMA country. At Llanelly in 1919 something entered hutches and broke the backs of rabbits. In 1925 a strange black animal 'of enormous size' tore sheep apart, terrifying the Edale region of Derbyshire into fears of WEREWOLVES. Cases occur to this day.'
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My friend sometimes tells me about his rather un-boy scoutly days as a, well, a boy scout. Most of them are about hazing new kids and stuff, but there's one story that he swears by that's just plain weird.

He says he and a group of other kids went off in the woods somewhere around Selma AL where they camped frequently and found a medium sized, very shabby house. According to him, the house was in a clearing that seemed to be formed by an old waterbed which had run dry, that it had no roads of access and lay beyond obviously ancient wood, and that it bore a waterwheel like a mill of some sort, though he describes it as a house. That in itself is odd, but not terribly odd, till you add his last detail. The house, supposedly, was surrounded by a full circle of scattered bones, surely animal. Days before his group came on this, he said he'd gone with another kid into the woods to see how far they could go without turning on their flashlights, and that they'd encountered something with reflectant eyes which terrified them because it seemed to be taller than they were by the level of the glare. The last bit I always told him just just something in a tree or on a hill, some common animal, a coyote at worst. But the bone yard house puzzles me to this day.
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Another strange thing I've found was a bizarre trail of small silver-colored metal crosses, spaced about 2ft each, leading off a dirt road(of course) into a wooded trail, over a cliff, and about 40ft down was a single, final cross at the bottom of the drop. Very strange. I was about 14 I think. I kept a few of the crosses for a time. May even still have them back home.
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I lived at ** York road, Twickenham, Middlesex whilst studying for an English/Drama degree at St Mary's University, Strawberry Hill. All my house mates had gone home for the summer break, and I was left in the house with my boyfriend for this duration. During the daytime, when I would go into the garden to hang the washing out I would see the old lady from next door (number **) come out of the house and into the garden with (and this is rather odd) a cat on a make shift collar and leash.

The woman looked in her 70s, with died black hair, although the grey was still coming through. She was very small and a little bit bent with a small dowse hump. I don't really remember what she was waring apart form a black cardigan and a skirt of some description. The cat (black) would not so much walk as squirm violently around desperately trying to get out of its harness. The woman seemed oblivious to its struggles. I tried several time to say a friendly "hi" to the woman, but every time she would look through me and completely ignore any communication I attempted. My boyfriend often saw her, and he would say the same thing, the woman would ignore him. Strangely, they were both very silent and never made any sort of sound in movement.

Once I was inside the house and I saw her from my bedroom window. I was watching her absent absent-mindedly until she suddenly turned around to stare directly at me. I immediately looked away and was a little bit unnerved at the way she seemed to know I was watching. I had seen the other occupants of the house ( a couple in their 30s)frequently and I assumed that this woman was one of their Mothers. When my house mates returned for the next semester, I never saw her again. I insisted that I'd often seen her and wondered if she had since died or moved away. We eventually asked the couple about her and her reluctant pet and they seemed completely baffled. They didn't have anyone living with them, and certainly had never seen an old lady with a cat on a piece of string.

The mystery deepened when I spoke to a local cabby about the history of the area. He had lived in the Twickenham/Teddington area all of his life and he knew York Road well. He said (to my astonishment) that the previous occupant of number 94 York Road was an old lady who kept loads of cats! This sent me reeling into all sorts of conclusions. Was she a ghost? Was she some sort of recorded image? Were people having me on? As I mentioned, I have no desire whatsoever to see a ghost in the flesh (for want of a better term) and if I saw one I think I would die of shock. This 'woman' and her cat were as real and clear as any normal object. They were not see through, they were fully dimensional and I felt no fear of her. I wonder if anyone else has had a similar experience in the street?
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Yeats documented in his 1893 The Celtic Twilight a rather strange series of fabled kidnappings, which were attributed by legend to the “fae” or fairy folk. According to such legends, even those carried away into the haunted hills were sometimes allowed to revisit their families, albeit once, after a period of seven years:
“Sometimes those who are carried off are allowed after many years–seven usually–a final glimpse of their friends. Many years ago a woman vanished suddenly from a Sligo garden where she was walking with her husband. When her son, who was then a baby, had grown up he received word in some way, not handed down, that his mother was glamoured by faeries, and imprisoned for the time in a house in Glasgow and longing to see him. Glasgow in those days of sailing-ships seemed to the peasant mind almost over the edge of the known world, yet he, being a dutiful son, started away. For a long time he walked the streets of Glasgow; at last down in a cellar he saw his mother working. She was happy, she said, and had the best of good eating, and would he not eat? and therewith laid all kinds of food on the table; but he, knowing well that she was trying to cast on him the glamour by giving him faery food, that she might keep him with her, refused and came home to his people in Sligo.”

The legends of these “faery kidnappings” involved a great stone doorway, located toward the southern end of Ben Bulben, a sheer stony mountain nearest the Seaport town of Sligo:
“A little north of the town of Sligo, on the southern side of Ben Bulben, some hundreds of feet above the plain, is a small white square in the limestone. No mortal has ever touched it with his hand; no sheep or goat has ever browsed grass beside it. There is no more inaccessible place upon the earth, and few more encircled by awe to the deep considering. It is the door of faery-land.”
Yeats noted the prolific history of strange kidnappings, adding that, “There is hardly a valley or mountainside where folk cannot tell you of some one pillaged from amongst them,” emphasizing that, “Many near the white stone door in Ben Bulben have been stolen away.”
The disappearances of the Vanishing Triangle challenged the strength of communities around Dublin, and today a monument exists at Kilkenny Castle, in tribute to those who have vanished while wandering home alone along Ireland’s country roads.
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The Dark Heart of Dunwich is a Suffolk legend from the 12th century. Eva, a Dunwich maiden, was due to be married to the son of a local landowner, but she fell in love instead with a worthless cad who soon deserted her. She cut out her heart and hurled it into the sea. Unable to die, she is purported to roam the shore. The heart, similar in appearance to wood, is believed to sometimes wash up onto the beach and brings great misfortune to anyone who picks it up.
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When I was a little child we went on a holiday trip to Barbados along with another couple, friends of my parents. In the resort was an old black gardener who'd always wear a yellow rain jacket. Apparently he had an interesting face, so my father asked if he could take a picture. The man said yes, but I am telling you I can't be captured in a photo. My dad didn't believe him, but got his friend to take a picture with his camera as well. He pretty much forgot about this incident, even when some of the holiday pictures turned out just grey (late 70s, they had to be developed). The friends of my parents lived in another city, different lab and all. Still they also had some grey pictures, but there was none of the old black man.
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In 2003, British super theme park Blackpool Pleasure Beach purchased a Wacky Worm roller coaster, a small/compact roller coaster with a "caterpillar" train from a smaller park in Morecambe (UK) for use in it's park from the 2003 season onwards. The roller coaster was to incorporate an enormous 30-foot diameter fiberglass apple that the train would snake through as a tunnel. However, when the ride arrived at Blackpool, the apple was nowhere to be found. The park they bought it from, Frontierland, stated that they shipped it and hadn't any idea where it was. Somewhere between Morecambe and Blackpool, an enormous hollow apple weighing several tons vanished without a trace, and has remained hidden for more than a decade.
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I was always told growing up that’s you shouldn’t whistle at night because if the wind stops but the chimes still ring something has accepted your invitation.
Wind chimes still freak me out for that reason.
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When I was stationed in Colorado back in the 90's my friends and I who had 4x4 trucks would go up into the mountains on the back roads, do some off-roading and general exploring around the mountains. One day while going on a dirt road we drove up on a old looking abandoned town we think and continue to drive into the town, towards what seemed to be the main downtown area we started noticing what looked like mannequins hanging from gallows around the town and from the street lights. We looked around a bit more and got out of there without ever seeing a real person. Don't know what it was or why it was there but never saw the town again even when we went looking for it. We were on our way to the Continental divide official sign coming from Colorado Springs. That's all I can remember.
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But basically my friend, my friends mom, her 3 sisters, me and my mom were walking down a particular lane and we had to walk single file as there was a main road to the right of us. There were people walking single file on the left side of us walking in the opposite direction and it was in the middle of the day. So I'm walking along not really paying much attention, trying to hold on to my mom's hand as I didn't want to get lost in the crowd and trying not to bump into people but not really looking at people's faces or anything, just soaking up the atmosphere when for some reason I feel this massive urge to look to my left at the people walking on the path in the opposite direction.
Coming towards me is a man who looks around like 50/60ish and he looked native American. He was wearing just jeans and a t-shirt so nothing out of the ordinary but it was kind of a bit strange in itself in the middle of a gay pride event in a UK seaside down but hey, he could have been on holiday. As I looked at him it was like a split second (I can't exactly explain it really)but it was like my eyes went in x-ray view and this man was a skeleton walking past me. Everything behind him turned black and I could literally just see his skeleton still walking. It Only lasted like a split second and then everything popped back and he walked past. I squeezed my mom's hand so hard and she looked a bit pale and I said 'mom I just saw something weird'. She says 'yes me too, I saw that man's skeleton'. It was so weird. We kind of just looked at each other and my mom said we'd discuss it later because my friends mom was really religious and I guess my mom was worried what they'd think of us for explaining this bizarre experience.
My friend and her family didn't see anything. It was literally just me and mom. I spoke to her about it later and she'd seen the same thing, a native American looking man who one minute looked perfectly normal, and the next he was a skeleton.
I've never experienced anything else remotely paranormal. I believe in the paranormal sort of but I can't say I really fully believed and I still don't really. If it was just me that had seen it, I would have blamed it on my 11 year old imagination but my mom saw it too. Has anyone had any similar kind of experience? Any idea what it could have been? I've never experienced anything since so I'm pretty sure I'm not remotely special and don't have any psychic ability and neither has my mom.
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Two friends and myself were sitting around the campfire. We were camped on a large flat about midway up a mountain we were hiking. All of a sudden we heard a strange screaming noise . The screams were shrill and came in consecutive one to two second bursts.
Here’s my attempt at describing the noise onomatopoeically: aaraaaah, one second beat, aaaaaraaahh, one second beat, aaaarahhhh
The noise was getting closer and I asked my more wilderness experienced friend if it could possibly be a predator. (I know mountain cats can make screaming noises) He said he didn’t think so but we grabbed our rifles.
The noise is getting closer and we can see an animal coming towards us straight up the fairly steep grade of the mountain at a fast pace. I would clock the speed at 25 mph easily. It was about the speed of someone on a motorbike going a fast rate.
We grabbed our rifles and took aim as the animal bolted straight towards our campsite. But what we saw next was not a predator. It was a deer, bounding in huge leaps, screaming, entirely on its hind legs. This deer was hopping like a pogo stick with its forelegs held in front of it. The look of pure terror in its eyes reflected in the firelight will haunt me forever.
I’ve looked for video of deers on their hind legs and such behavior but I’ve only ever seen deers getting food out of trees or possibly fighting another deer on their hind legs.
My friends joke and say the deer got into some bad mushrooms, but it was truly the strangest experience of my life.
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When I was a kid, we had this awesome babysitter. We would often play hide and seek. Whenever she was hiding - we literally could never find her. To the point we are searching outside for her, literally overturning everything to find her. We didn't have a big house, but three kids (ages 7-10 ) could not find this teenager. But then after some time (never too long, like 15-20 minutes of intense searching) she would just walk out in the living room. She told us she went to Mirror Land. Years later, we are still in touch with her and her family, we asked her where she hid all those years ago, and she doesn't remember and doesn't know what Mirror Land is.
I just want to know where she hid.
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When I was five, I was playing alone in my bedroom and my mom was visiting with a friend in our den on the other side of the house. I must have felt something watching me because I have that sense when I recall this event. I think that was the first time I had that feeling. We lived on a ranch surrounded by acres of orchards and our nearest neighbor were my granparents about 2 miles away. The "town" had only a general store and a saloon. I'm stressing the secluded no traffic setting.
My room had large windows on two walls but for a kid they were high. So I looked up toward the window I felt was watching me and all I saw was a man's hand, palm faced away from me doing the finger motion of come here. It just kept doing it steadily. I got up and slowly started walking toward it. I just remember being completely entranced by it. I got just below the window (which was open) and I saw the screen slowly slide off and fall. I took one more look at the hand that was now in my room some six inches or so, and I screamed at the top of my lungs. My entire body shook in a terrible fear and I turned around and ran as fast as I could to where my mom was. We never found anybody on our property but it scared me for years. I really didn't even know why, but instinct just told me to be afraid.

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I don't know you or how based in truthiness your account is but this isn't the first time I've heard a similar type of story.
This is what's called a pied-piper variant. Basically: a man-type with hypnotic tendencies lures kids to their deaths/"away".
It is more common than a lot of people realize.
Specifically, men luring kids out of windows or into water, and roadways is pretty common. The basic formula is always present: a man-type luring children into a deadly situation.
It's common enough that there was an online community designated for children who claimed to have experienced something similar.
If you're interested, I'll see if I can find it when I get to work. I came across it maybe two years ago so presumably it's still there.
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And I'm failing to deliver. I'm sorry to disappoint. I honestly have no idea what search criteria to even use to find it.
I'd welcome the help if anyone else has better Google Fu.
I don't remember much. Here's what I remember for anyone who wants to help find it:
There was an amateur-ish website (think Geocities) that talked about the Pied Piper legend and what the "historical record" said. Then it pivoted to how the village believed the Pied Piper would return every x amount of time to take children. And then the website linked to a message board (although I didn't get the impression that the budget website and the forums were operated by the same person?). It was... kind of conspiracy theory crazy (“here's all of the evidence that I'm the only one smart enough to connect”, etc etc).
The message board was the saddest thing. It was about missing and abducted children and was separated into categories like "family abductions" and "stranger abductions."
There was a small thread/section off that where people were talking about being lured by a strange man into a deadly situations.
Someone had mentioned living in a rural area and being lured to the second story window and being tempted to climb out. Another person described a similar experience. I was in my playroom when this man from outside called to me and asked me to follow him into this wooded area behind my house. They followed the man to a body of water and felt tempted to wade into the water but not knowing how to swim. Another person talked about a man who was on the other side of the road waving them into traffic when they were kids.
They all talked about feeling compelled to obey/listen and left with the impression that something really dark almost happened.
One particular person said it happened to them on multiple occasions in the house his/her family rented for awhile.
I didn't place a lot of value into the stories. I still don't.
But it's a story that comes up a lot. It's so ubiquitous that it's like a creepypasta genre.
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That's really bizarre and kind of reminds me of something my cousins and I came across when we were kids. We were on summer break and staying with my grandparents on their ranch in south Texas. We would sometimes explore the countryside nearby, and one morning we found a sink, like a white porcelain double kitchen sink, full of sticky congealed blood, just lying there beside the dirt road. Now, the people who owned the property around my family's ranch would rent it out to hunters, so adult me thinks we probably saw the aftermath of a field dressing or something, but there were no trees or hooks or anything around to hang the carcass on, plus I'm not sure why they'd drain it into a sink. Did they find a sink or bring it there for that purpose? Also, deer hunting season in Texas is more fall/winter than June-July. We three teen/pre-teen girls freaked out and stayed off that road for a few days.
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When I was in college, I worked on a recovery mission to find and return the bones of a man in Vermont that had gone missing a few years earlier. I plan to write a bit post about it but haven't gotten around to it. But anyways, his name was Michael Hogan, he went to this halfway house in Rutland Vermont and had called his mom hysterical one day, like he was scared and running from someone. Then he was never seen again. Like 5 years later, his skull was found like 100 yards from this halfway house, so we went and tried to recover the remaining bones that hadn't been found yet. We found a good portion of his bones, but not all of it and I don't believe they've ever found out what killed him.
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When I was about 10/11, so early '90s, we were staying at an RV park behind the Tacoma Dome in Tacoma, WA for an event over the weekend. I had brought my bike and there was another kid around my age staying there that had brought his bike as well. We were supposed to stay in the area behind the Dome where the RVs were, but kids will be kids and soon we found ourselves riding up and down the main road area at the main entrance of the Dome.
At some point, a kid a few years older than us (13/14) came riding up on a bike. He kept saying we needed to come with him right away, his parents car had broken down and he needed us to help. My friend and I just looked at each other and said we'd go get our parents to help. He said 'forget it' and rode off.
To this day it strikes me as weird that a pre-teen would be asking a couple of younger kids to help his parents work on his car. Of course it didn't dawn on me until later that it was probably some kind of kidnapping scheme. Still gives me the creeps.
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This one has fucked with my head my entire life and no one ever believes me when I tell them but I know what I saw and I will never forget it. When I was younger I lived in a huge tall building and lived on the 18th floor and there was 31 floors in the building. The building has 2 different stair cases one on each side of the building and 3 elevators. When I was a kid I would sometimes take the stairs up a few floors then go to the hallway and take the elevator the rest of the way thinking it’s exercise and good for me. Anyways I would take the nicer bigger stairs usually and not the smaller staircase on the other side of the building. Anyways one day I took the smaller side stairs up only one floor from the ground floor, didn’t feel good and said fuck it I’m taking the elevator. So I go to the hallway and notice that floor is not the same with only 4 doors in that first floor. Then when I get to the elevator there was only one instead of 3 and when I pushed for it it wouldn’t light up. I got a creepy feeling and went back to the stair case to go up a floor and take the elevator from there. As I walked into the stair case I heard one of the doors open and someone walk out and yell whose there. I got scared ran down to the ground floor and took the elevator up to my floor normally. I get home and ask my family about that floor with only one elevator and they have no idea what I’m taking about. It kept bugging me for a while and so a few weeks later I try to go to that floor using the smaller side stair case I go up one floor but it’s now a normal floor with 3 elevators. Ever since I could not get to that floor again and no one ever believed me and said stop fucking around the building and just use the elevator normally. That shit creeped me out so bad the last year we lived there I never took the stairs again but till today I know it was a hidden floor you can only reach by the smaller side stairs and not the other and then even that they closed or changed or something. I don’t know but it has always been a mind fuck for me.
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I've been meaning to post about this for months now! Just didn't know what sub. Anyway, my parents were redoing their kitchen, so they knocked down that whole side of the house. Apparently one of the construction workers had found and unused flight ticket with my name on it, (I'm an only child), to Tokyo, in February of 1994. I would have been 5! We were all extremely creeped out because 1. I would never travel alone as a 5 year old 2. No one in my family has ever been to Tokyo 3. Why was the ticket in the wall? We tried calling the airline to see who purchased the ticket but computer records do not go back that far. It's all so weird and we think I might have almost been kidnapped.
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When I turned 12, my twin sister and I were baptized in a fishing pond about sixty miles from our inner city home. (My parents were members of an Apocalyptic Baptist cult. The '70s... Lots of people were doin' stuff. Lol Anyway...) At the exact moment we stepped into the water, the small farm experienced a fall of frogs. Everyone but my sister and I went screaming out of the pond, running in every direction, but there was no escaping the downpour. Everything and everyone at the gathering, roughly 50 people, was covered in tiny, live, bright green frogs. This lasted all of thirty seconds, and stopped as suddenly as it started. We had to help some of the frogs get out of our station wagon, because we'd left the Windows all rolled down; No air conditioning. Probably 'cuz it was a tool o' the devil! Like that rock and roll music. Lol. Nearly everyone there described the sky during the incident as "clear as day", but I seem to remember a band of low, grey, thin clouds "burning off" as the sun approached its peak, after early-morning showers. I was kind of panicky about that, because I didn't want the festivities to get cancelled due to rain, or worse, the whole party moved into the barn, for a robust, painfully-long prayer session, mostly done in "tongues". Brutal. But yeah, that was strange! The frogs eventually all got scooped up with styrofoam cups and tossed in the pond. I bet some of the bigger fish had a field day eating those. I don't know much about animal falls, but I love telling people about my unusual baptism day. And my mom's hilarious reaction when she finally realized that I was actually a non-religious person, later in life; "Really? You're a heathen? Is this because of that Frog Thing?"
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About 15 years ago, a group of friends and I went to a local swimming hole one afternoon. This place is along a hiking trail, but is essentially the last real stop before the trail gets more advanced and turns into what is basically a climbing trail. The only other thing between the swimming hole and the rockier terrain is one, much smaller, swimming spot. Anyway, as we are all lounging the water, totally not drinking in public, etc, three boys who look to be about 13 or 14, maybe younger, come walking by. One is draped in a US Marines flag and, in hindsight, was possibly being coerced along the way by the other two. They pass by us, heading toward the rough part of the trail, which would obviously be too difficult for younger kids like that. We think nothing of it, though, as they're probably just down at the smaller swimming area. After an hour or so (it's been a while and my concept of time may be skewed) two of them come walking back quickly but without the kid with the flag. We all slowly start to catch on that something is weird. He was too young for the hiking trail and probably too young to be hanging out in a rural swimming hole alone, as well. Eventually two members of our party wander down to investigate and all they find is the flag floating in the water. No other sign of the kid. We made our way back up to the van and called the police but as far as I know, nothing else was ever said. I guess there could be an easier trail that I don't know about, but the whole thing struck us all as really strange and I still feel weirded out when I think about it.
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I have lived in the same house my whole life, but the house directly next to me is a triplex apartment with many different residents over the years. One year, when I was maybe 6 or 7, a young girl and her dad lived in part of the house. She was older than me I know that. Everyday, without fail, she would go stand outside the house for about an hour, just staring across the street silently. And everyday, usually, I would watch her outside my front window, thinking about how odd it was that she was just standing there. Well one day I finally worked up the courage to go out and talk to her. I can't remember what she said but we had a nice pleasant chit chat for two elementary school girls. I never asked her why she did what she did. I got really excited, thinking I had made a new friend, but when I looked out my window the next day, she was gone. That day that I had talked to her was the last time she ever stood outside that house, she and her father must have moved the next day. I never caught her name and I never saw her again.
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My grandmother always had mental health issues. She had been on every medication and even tried electroshock therapy twice. She went to therapy and she took a long list of medications including lithium and Ritalin.
Her regular doctor retired and her new doctor was appalled at all the heavy duty meds she was on. He refused to refill any them. She went into withdrawals and tried to check herself into a drug rehab. They could not help her, that's not what they do.
She wrote a goodbye note to my grandfather and no one ever saw her again. It definitely looked like a suicide note. Her slippers, hearing aids, and glasses were found on a nearby bridge.
She was missing about 30 minutes before people started searching for her. She was 70 and pretty heavy and had fibro. Not only would it have been very difficult to get up over the bridge railing, but even assuming adrenaline could help her with that, the tiny stream below would not have carried her away and there was no point of impact in the riverbed.
No one knows where she went or what happened to her. The police hired a psychic (yeah, seriously) and they said they saw two older men helping her, that her body was laid to rest and at peace... I have no idea what to think. Did my grandfather mercy kill her?
What I do know is that my parents left the country shortly after and never came back. They swear they had nothing to do with it. My brother was with them the whole time and agrees with them.
No one will ever know. No body was ever found.
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So this is a story that I know will sound fake, and I have no way to make you believe in it, but I'm going to share it anyways.
When I was a kid, I used to see these... "things" outside of my living room window and occasionally my bedroom window. We lived in a doublewide trailer in a very secluded rural area. The "things" looked like blurry grey rags being thrown back and forth from one side of the window to the other. So, I know what you're thinking. Birds. But these were not birds. They would occasionally stop in mid-air, hovering there, and I would nervously approach the window, anxious to get a look at one of the "things" up close. And it would disappear. It usually looked like it dropped to the ground, and when I ran to the window and looked at the ground, there would be nothing. The windows themselves were about 2-3 feet off the ground and the things appeared to fly/float/whatever about 3.5-4 feet off the ground. I was never scared of them because I grew up with them. I lived in the house and saw them from between the ages of 6-16. I hated being in the house. Everyone did. It was like it had an aura of illness and melancholy.
So when I was 16, my mother finally convinced my father to move from the house. She always hated the house too. A few years later, my mom was talking about how she always felt uncomfortable in the house, and she always felt like she was seeing blurry figures out of the corner of her eyes. Now, my mom is a believer in all things paranormal and I am not. So I didn't want to indulge her too much, because I know if I said "DID THEY LOOK LIKE GREY BALLS OF RAGS?" she would say "OH MY GOD YES IT WAS A SPIRIT etc etc" so I tried to play it cool. I said something along the lines of "C'mon mom, it was probably just a bird." Honestly, what she said in reply still gives me chills. She said no, they weren't birds, because they traveled at varying speeds and no matter how slow they went/if they stopped, they still looked strange and undefined and blurry. She saw them too.
I didn't talk to her much more about them, but I still wonder what the fuck they were. If you'd like to take a guess... They were grey, blurry, undefined roundish shapes that were about the size of a basketball to maybe the size of a beach ball. They usually moved very fast, sometimes slower, and occasionally stopped.
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When I was 9 years old I woke up around 11pm, and I wanted a glass of water, so I went downstairs. I got halfway down the stairs, my dad turned around to look at me, and FREAKED OUT. I had blood all down my leg and a huge gash in my leg.
I had to go to A & E and have 9 stitches. It was a really deep gash. I had no idea how it happened. When we got home we looked at the bed and there was a single solitary drop of blood on the white sheet I had been sleeping on. No other blood anywhere. Nothing sharp anywhere. No springs sticking out of the mattress or anything that could have caused it.
I asked my dad recently about this, assuming I'd misremembered and there was some logical explanation, but no. He says they never found out what caused the massive deep gash in my leg. Wtf?

What's extra weird is that I don't remember it hurting. I wasn't aware I was bleeding while coming down the stairs. I do remember going to the loo earlier that evening and my leg hurt slightly but not enough to stop me just getting back into bed and going to sleep.
I remember sitting on the kitchen counter while my dad went to a neighbour to get them to call for an ambulance (my dad is deaf). I remember it was a bit sore but only on the level of, like, a paper cut. But it was clearly a huge gash. I still have a big scar.
Very weird.
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Here's something that's been happening for about 15 years. It doesn't seem to bother anyone except me.
Glasses started disappearing from the kitchen. At first, I thought it was my teenagers just being assholes. I'd rant and fuss and look through the house, including under beds. Never found a single glass. So then I thought they were taking the glasses with them when they left. Never caught them doing that.
I started buying plastic go-cups and asking them to use those. They just looked sideways at me and said okay. No one used the plastic cups. Kitchen glasses still disappeared.
When I'd get down to the last 3-4 glasses, I'd go buy another set that matched the old ones.
After several years, I started buying stuff that didn't match. So I would have a general idea of exactly what went missing when. It was bizarre. Everything would be fine, then several glasses would disappear. The ones that disappeared always matched.
So, not being completely crazy, I figure one of my kids is doing it. Probably with their friends. Some kind of secret party or something? It never stopped happening. I just put up with it. I buy a new set of glasses about every 6 months.
So now it's many years later. All the kids have moved away from home. I live alone.
The glasses are still disappearing.
In fact, I have to go buy a new set soon.
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Sleepwalking is bad juju. I used to do it a lot as a kid, would pee in the trash can flush mid air and go back to bed. Eyes open the whole time. In my teens I used to like to leave the house, my mom tells a story about me trying to get outside butt ass naked eyes open the whole time. Most inexplicable one weekend when my mom is in AZ visiting her boyfriend I wake up in my closet naked with muddy feet. The apartment was locked up tight, no mud tracks in the carpet, nothing muddy withing a good six blocks of the apartment. I have no idea where I went, how I got there, or how I got back in the house with out getting mud everywhere.
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One day, when I was around 7 or 8, I was playing in the backyard when I heard my mom calling out to me from the kitchen like she usually did when I used to be out in the backyard all by myself for an extended period of time and she felt the need to check up on me. And as usual, I answered back promptly. A moment later, I heard the main gate opening and closing, indicating we had a visitor, so I peeped out to see who it was. And guess what, it was my mom! She told me she was at our neighbour's place to return something she had borrowed but then got caught up in chitchat. Who or what called out to me from the kitchen then? I could swear that it was exactly the same voice and tone as my mom's. Strangely enough, I wasn't scared. It was a little unnerving but then I eventually pushed it into the back of my mind.
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Some time when I was around seven years old, my dad left for Guatemala because be was going back to live there, which made me sad. Two summers later, I ask my mother if I could go visit him over there for his 30th birthday surprise. She planned for me to be there for about a week. Upon arrival, I don't see my dad anywhere at the airport. In fact, I didn't see him the whole ride to his place, in which the relatives kept (my uncle, two aunts, and grandmother) kept stating that he was waiting at the house. When we got there, he wasn't at the house either and they made another reason such as "He's out practicing Soccer with his friends." In fact, the entire week that I was there I didn't see my dad at all, because they kept making excuses. I was so sad when I had to leave because I didn't get to see him ONCE, and when returning to America I told my mom how I didn't see my dad once when I was there. She called my dad, and he said that he wasn't expecting me (since it was a surprise) but he was at his house the entire time so I should've seen him. He went on to say that he lives only with his dog Barlo, and that's what frightened me. The thing was that I saw a tombstone when I was there with nothing written on it and when I asked the relatives what it was supposed to be they said "Your dad's dog Barlo. He died a few months ago." When my mom tried contacting the relatives I stayed with, they never picked up, so she told my dad to do so. However, he said that his relatives haven't lived with him since before he came to America for a while. Since then, I have been wondering what happened because the people I stayed with won't respond to anyone. Sometimes I wonder if they were even my relatives.
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Alright, so when I was a freshman in High School it was around November I believe and I was in English class. The teacher receives a phone call in the middle of class and she picks it up. After being on the phone for around 15 seconds she walks out of the class and never comes back. We got a sub teacher the next day and eventually the school hired a new teacher to replace her.
To this day I have never heard for sure why she left, I have heard plenty of rumors as to where she has been but most likely it will never be released to the students as to why she left and the school administration will only know.
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This was around 2006, when I was 10 years old. It was after midnight; I was sleeping in one of my aunts' bed while my brother slept in another's, adjacent to mine. Across from us was our grandparents' bedroom and downstairs, next to the laundry room, was my parents' bedroom. I woke up, groggy and confused and needing to pee very very badly, and suddenly I heard a voice. With 8 people in the house, that wasn't uncommon; someone had probably gotten up to go to the washroom and either started talking to someone else or they had answered the phone (mind you, I was still half-asleep, so to me a phone call after midnight seemed totally reasonable). Well, it turns out that couldn't have been possible because I didn't recognize the voice. That was what immediately woke me up, and I froze, clutching my blanket while sitting up in bed. It was a man; his voice wasn't deep, not like my dad or grandfather's; and he kept prattling on about some 'treasure'. He was right outside the door, but he never turned the doorknob or made any attempt at entering one of the rooms. He just kept passing by, as if pacing, all the while talking to himself about a 'treasure'. I was terrified and looked over to my aunt, who was sound asleep. I still don't know how I managed to not wet the bed. Eventually the voice went silent, and I somehow fell asleep.
The next morning, everyone is doing their thing, getting ready for work or school or busy in the kitchen, so I assumed it was just a dream.
I really wish I'd kept my mouth shut.
As I'm eating breakfast, I told my mom and grandmother (who were both in the kitchen) about the voice, and laughed at how weird the brain is. They froze.
Everyone froze.
It turns out the voice was real. I hadn't mentioned his obsession with a 'treasure', but my grandfather did. As did my mother. And brother. Everyone agreed about the 'treasure'.
Apparently, he combed the entire house, but he never actually entered any of the rooms. Nothing was stolen, all the doors were locked, and all the windows had screens, none of which were missing.
Two weeks later, while I was helping my grandparents clean the garage, my grandmother found several empty Coke cans behind the old sofa, which had been up against one of the walls for quite some time. There were also empty bags of chips, candy wrappers, and fruit cores and peels.
All of which were taken from the garage.
The sofa was high enough for someone to lay underneath.
He had been inside our house. Inside our garage.
We've moved now, as have my aunts (my grandparents still live there, we're about a 3 minute drive from them), but we still don't know who he was, how he got in, and, most importantly:
How long had he been inside our home?
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My dad died in 2007. When he did, I found coins everywhere- specifically dimes. I ended up with a jar full of dimes I'd find in places you wouldn't normally find them... in the bathtub, medicine cabinets and in empty bags, as a few examples.
One day, a few months after he had passed, my mom came to me with this dusty old ring box and inside was a dime with a pin through the middle of it. She found it just sitting on her dresser.
To this day we have no idea where it came from. Some of my friends suggested that it belonged to my dad, he put it there long ago and my mom didn't notice until then, but it doesn't seem like him at all- and why/how was there a pin through it? Why had we never seen it before? My mom was kind of freaked out by it. If I can find it again I'll share a picture after work.
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What the hell did I see briefly peeking out of my neighbor's master bedroom when I was little? Thing had no face and it retracted just as fast as it had popped out. This was back in the 90's, btw.
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I was 21, back from college. We had lived in the same apartment for 26 years. The doorman sent up a woman who said she used to live there and could she look around. I let her in. She proceeded to step into the front coat closet and close the door and stand in their in silence for five minutes. Then she walked down the hall and stepped into the bathtub, closed the shower curtains and stood in there for ten minutes. She said thank you and walked to the front door. On her way out I asked her why her family moved out. She said: "because of the ghosts." And left. Still gives me the chills.
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I woke up from a nap in my room and I proceeded to walk into the kitchen. My mom was baking pies, asked me how I was doing, and then asked if I could run out to the garage (detached garage - grew up in a rural area) to grab some frozen pie dough from the freezer out there. I agree, walk outside, play with the dogs for a few minutes, then start walking to the garage. I get halfway there and the bushes rustle. A lot. I said, "hello," get no response, and walk nervously towards the garage. Next thing I know, I wake up in my bed. I walk out to the kitchen where my mom is baking pies. I tell her I had a really strange dream and then she asked me if I got the pie dough. I freaked out. Apparently I left 15 or 20 minutes before I walked out of my room and she started questioning how I got in my room, I say I don't remember, and then we both realize that I had been tracking grass all over the linoleum (I went outside barefoot). It was followed by a lot of awkward silence and confusion.
I still have no idea what the fuck happened.
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Pretty recent story, completely true: I come home to my apartment late one night, I live alone and was exhausted from work so I strip in my bathroom before bed and leave my pants and shirt on the floor. The next morning I get up, throw sweats on and am getting ready to take my dog to the park before work. In my bathroom I distinctly remember smelling something burning, but I live in a highrise and I figured my neighbors were burning their breakfast. When I get back from the park, I start getting ready for work and when I enter my bathroom, I find my pants completely charred. Burned to shit. My shirt and pants were the only things on the floor, the electric outlet is on the wall above my sink, nothing electrical near the floor or on. I don't know if my bathroom is haunted or what, but I've considered everything and still have no explanation. TL;DR I return to my apartment one morning to find my pants burnt to ash. No, I am not a liar liar.
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Grew up in western Kansas. One day, middle of summer, I found a damp, soft-to-the-touch starfish...in the middle of a dry wheat field. Showed it to everyone - no one believed I'd just found it in a field. No idea how/why/when it could have gotten there. It was a dry summer.
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Anyways, when I was really, really little, I would constantly hear whispering coming from the closet. A couple of voices, one louder and sharper, one quieter would always be talking in there. It didn't freak me out for some reason, and I'd try to talk back to them, but every time I did they went silent for a few minutes.
When I told my parents about it, they didn't think much about it, until one night when my dad came to tuck me in and he heard them. He got this terrified look on his face and opened the door to the closet, but he didn't find anything in there. The whispers stopped a couple weeks after that.
The other, much creepier story is from when I was about 9; I was playing hide-and-seek with my sister and a friend, and I was "it". I had looked in all the usual places, and finally decided to check the closet. So I opened the door and waded into the darkness, feeling in front of me to keep from running into anything. Then, I felt someone. I grabbed their arm, stopped dead, heard them breathing, and felt them move their arm away from me. I said "Gotcha!", laughed, and walked out of the closet. Then my sister walked to me from the opposite direction, and we found our friend, "C", hiding elsewhere -- she said she had tried to hide in the closet, but heard "B", my sister, moving around in there.
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One night I had fallen asleep in bed, knowing I had to wake up early for work, I set my alarm for 6am.. The alarm goes off at 3:55am and I reach over knowing it wasn't the right time. As I went to hit the snooze, I felt my fingers go through what felt to be hair. Frightened, I grabbed my phone and shined it around the room, only to find nothing.. Still terrified, I got up and ran to turn the lights on. I looked down at my hand to see long black strands of hair intertwined between my fingers. I am a dirty blonde male with a buzzcut. Still freaks me out to this day thinking about it!
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Me and a friend found a briefcase in some bushes in the nearby park/forest area, being the curious kids we were we opened it up. It was empty except for a couple of pictures, some passport sized and some standard. The pics were of people in armchairs looking very sickly and I guess asleep, their bodies were in that sort of position...wasn't until we saw that one of these people had their eyes wide open.
We noped out of there as quick as we could, gave up building the den too.
Later, when I was in college, I also found a mysterious trunk wedged in some bushes. I was waiting at the bus stop and didn't want to attract any attention, so decided to go back later that evening and open it up.
When I dragged it out from behind the bench, I realized that it was a foot locker from the Second World War. Inside was an empty whisky bottle from the 1940s.
I researched the name of the owner and found that he had lived in my hometown as a child. He was killed in action over in Europe.
Never found out how his footlocker ended up in the bushes near a bus stop many decades later.
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A few nights into our stay, we wake up and the house is fucking scorching hot; it feels like we are in a sauna. It's like 3 AM but we go upstairs to where the thermostat is and it's been pinned all the way to the right, nothing but blazing hot air. The next weird thing, the front door is wide open out into the dark woods. We close the door and check if anything is missing, but nothing is, so we go to bed.
The next day we are talking about how people have always said the house is haunted, and discussing how weird the night before was. We decide that tonight I am going to leave all of my recording gear rolling, with my super high powered mic picking up the slightest details.
We sleep through that evening no problem, but when we get up the next day and listen back to the recording, we notice something strange at about 3 AM.
You can clearly hear the door to the downstairs area of the house (where we were sleeping) open and someone come upstairs, they stand for a moment and then literally run across the floor to the kitchen and open the silverware drawer. Then total silence.
We searched the house after that and didn't find anything. Went home the next day. That was definitely the weirdest thing that ever happened over there.
TL;DR Someone came into my cabin, took nothing, and turned up the heater all the way then left the front door open. The next night we found out that they were actually coming out of the basement. Still don't get it.
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When I was 7 we lived on a country farm for a year. My brother and I shared a bedroom. I woke up one night because I heard my brother and father talking. My brother was sitting at the end of his bed looking out the window and my father was standing looking out the window. I said "what's going on?" And my dad said to go back to sleep. My brother asked my dad "why won't it go away?" And my dad seemed unnerved. I got up and went to the window and what I at first thought was a giant green moon was hovering a few meters above ground in the horse field. That's all I remember and neither of them remember. I know I was awake though.
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When I was about 8 I had one of those loft beds... One night I woke up around 3am and the top of my hand was super itchy ... Scratched it and a bunch of slimy stuff scratched off and it hurt worse than anything I had ever experienced. I started screaming and crying and my mom ran into the room and flicked the lights on...
The skin on top of my hand had a serious burn and my skin had basically melted off... It was disgusting. My bed was nowhere near an outlet, and my bedroom light was in the middle of the room away from my bed (and off)...
My mom searched everything in the house but nothing was even remotely warm... Oven/stove/baseboard heaters, etc... There's no evidence I even left my room.
I had a nice scar for a few years but it's faded to pretty much nothing unless I get really tanned.
No idea.
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Okay, this is 100% true story and definitely the scariest thing to ever happen in my life so far. Back in the summer when I was in between sixth and seventh grades I was biking back home from a girls house. She lived roughly eight blocks away, so biking home late was a norm. It was around eleven at night. Biking home, enjoying the warm misty night I turned down a block arbitrarily in the direction of home. My nose was assaulted by the stench of death and old. Not unlike the smell of a really unclean hospice center. This particular block has a nice one story brick house with three low trees in the front yard. In the middle tree was an old man in a jacket, jeans, and a blue cap hanging in the crook of the tree. I stopped my bike and stared... the man croaked/ moaned. Thus I promptly sped off home, freaked out and hid in my bed.
A week later I happened to cross in front of that same house during the day. There was a nice young girl and the SAME OLD MAN putting groceries into the house. I slammed on my breakers and begged to ask to the young lady. I asked her if the fellow was okay, explained what I saw, and confirmed that the smell was the exact same. This gal was the old mans daughter taking care of and living with him. By her account he never has been out at night, never owned or owns a blue hat and to please leave.
Not another week later he fell off a ladder into the tree and hanged.... wearing a brand new blue hat.
Super WTF. But I can't explain any of it...
Still think back on it to this day and wonder if I could have done something different. This man died painfully at 87 and I could and would have stopped it if I wasn't so damn scared.
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I live in a large African city which still has a fair amount of undeveloped/undevelopable space, and one rule to remember is that there is always someone else there that you may not see. There are people who sit alone, very quietly, in bushes or between boulders and other such places. They are (I think) harmless and don't do anything, but what they are doing has been a mystery to me for the 10 years I've been here. Most of them are too well-dressed or well-taken care of to be homeless. One thing that is annoying is that they stare at you, or at least they don't hide the fact that they are watching you.
I swear if there was some completely inaccessible cave high up in a cliff here requiring professional scaling equipment to enter, they would find a local African guy just chilling inside with no discernable means of how he got there.
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Driving through the middle of Montana one night, going about 100mph, passed something on the side of the interstate that looks like a mangled body. Turned around at the next pass, came back. Definitely a body. Put my lights on it and tried to call 911 on my cell. No reception. Got in the car to see if i could pick up cell reception (lights were still on)...nothing there but the blood splatters. Drove away QUICK.
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I am Catholic. We believe in many supernatural beings. I remember when I was a child an old woman told me that animals fall silent in the presence of the Devil. Absolute silence still freaks me out 30 years later.
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In the Army. During an exercise where we had to dig a pit at night, multiple people saw my buddy in my pit digging when he was definitely not there. He was on picquet out the front of the position.
That wouldn't really spook anyone except at one point my section commander saw him standing stationary in the pit at night when he was supposed to be digging. My seco went over to speak to him and said "what are you doing?" At which point he got out of the pit and SPRINTED OFF INTO THE BUSH without a word, IN COMPLETE DARKNESS. That is simply not something you do in an army position. There are pits, barbed wire etc everywhere.
At the time he was actually on picquet (guard duty) with another soldier.
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That's so weird. I have a memory of being in a graveyard with my uncle and sister, I knelt down and looked under one of those stone slab type graves and saw a green, dead woman. The entire thing isn't possible but I've always had this memory.
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It was either late November or early December, and about five or six years ago. I was deeply religious at the time, and we were headed to one of those "living nativity" things, where they have actors pretend to be the Virgin Mary, Joseph, the wise men, etc. and they kind of put on a show outdoors. It was held at a Christian campgrounds outside of a nearby city, and we didn't know the area very well, so we had someone give us directions. This was winter in the US, so it was already getting dark when we set out.
We got to the area just fine, but we forgot the name of the exit we were supposed to take to actually reach the grounds. Luckily, the campgrounds had a big sign right next to an exit, so we assumed this was the way to go. We took this road, and thought nothing of it. Crisis averted.
The city this campgrounds is next to is actually pretty large, and the exit we took is very close to a shopping district, so it wasn't like we started in the middle of nowhere, but very abruptly this exit turned from civilization to deep woods. We thought, well, it's a campground, so that's about right, and we kept driving.
Pretty soon we passed a clearing on the right. The clearing was maybe 50ft, and then woods again, and at the very edge of the woods (it wasn't full night yet, so you could still see) was this HUGE stone gate, with wrought-iron doors. It looked like a cemetery gate, but it didn't lead to a path or anything, just trees. Had no fence around it either, just the gate. We kept going, remarking to each other that it was kind of creepy, but still we didn't think much of it. It was starting to get foggy, at this point. I feel like maybe I should point out that despite it being winter, it wasn't that cold and there wasn't any snow. A little while later, we came to some houses. This is where things got weird.
The first house was just a standard white suburban house, but in the driveway, which was very short, was a van with all the doors open. The hazard lights were on, too, like the car was on, but nobody was in it or around it. The house was completely dark.
We were a little nervous now, wondering if maybe something bad happened, like an accident or something, and the driver of our car (not me) slowed down to look. Then, my other friend in the front pointed ahead. As it turns out, all of the houses on this street were like this, on both sides of the road. Lights out, cars in the driveways, all of the doors on the cars open with the hazards on.
At this point we're more than a little freaked out, thinking we've driven straight into Silent Hill or a particularly mean prank, if nothing else. Though it seems a little strange for there to just be a community-wide prank in the middle of winter, nowhere close to Halloween. We still haven't seen any people, mind you.
For whatever reason we still continued to drive, maybe to get out of there faster. There was a little bend in the road then, and the instant we started through it, this massive black dog, sort of german shepherd looking, came out of nowhere and ran full-tilt at the driver's side of the car. I'm still not sure if the dog actually made contact with the car, but if not, it came incredibly close. After charging us, it didn't retreat, either, it stayed in the road, barking its head off. Our driver did a quick u-turn and we got out of there as fast as possible, ditched the nativity thing, and never tried to go back.
We found out when we got home and talked to the person who gave us directions that it wasn't even the right exit we were on, and now, several years later, we're not exactly sure which exit we took that night. All I know is I'm glad we chose to get out when we did. I don't want any part of whatever was going on there that night. No thanks. Hard pass.
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I’ll start by explaining the layout of the gameroom in my childhood home. I really hope this makes sense because I was always shitty at explaining this part when telling others this story. Please let me know if you need any clarification.
When you go up the stairs, it opens up to a main room, a TV stood up against the left wall, and two brown couches opposite the TV. One is against the right wall, and the other is facing away from you, making a 90 degree angle, and also forming a “hallway/walkway” to the right, to my brother’s room and my room. The walkway behind the couch leads straight to my brother’s room, which is behind the right wall, and branches off to the right to an actual hallway that leads to my room. I’m pretty sure that’s all the room description needed for this story, but if I missed anything I’ll be sure to edit it in later.
I was eleven, meaning my brother was nineteen. He was obese as a kid, and got into parkour to lose weight. Over a couple years, he got so obsessed with it that he would stay out late every night with his friends jumping around and shit.
That night at around 10:30-11, I was watching Ghost Adventures (one of my favorite shows, even though I knew back then that it was 50 shades of fake) on the couch directly facing the TV, my dog (a labrador/collie mix) curled up beside me. My brother was out doing parkour with a family friend that lived around 45 minutes away.
I heard the front door open, which was right at the bottom of the stairs, and what sounded like someone walking/dragging themselves irregularly up the stairs. I saw my brother reach the top, and collapse at the top of the stairs, hunched over and breathing heavily, I could see the white shirt he was wearing was soaked down his back with sweat. But that was normal, he just came back from jumping over buildings and doing flips and stuff, of course he would be out of breath and sweaty. He had longer hair at the time, and it was covering his face. I never actually saw his face this whole time.
My dog started growling, which immediately raised some alarms in my head. She never growls at anyone, unless they give her a bad feeling, usually strangers on the street. Definitely no one in my family, and definitely not my brother. She absolutely adores people. The hair on her back was sticking straight up, and she was leaning into me like she was scared.
I said hi to him, and he didn’t answer. He didn’t give me any indication that he even heard me. He was still breathing heavily, laying on the top of the stairs and holding himself up with his arms. My dog was still growling and had started whining and glancing between him and me. I said something along the lines of “Fine, screw you then” since he didn’t answer, and then he started moving. Crawled to his room, hidden behind the other couch. I decided not to follow, not to bother him. He was still an angsty teenager and was known to yell at me if I was even a little bit annoying. My dog stopped growling, but her fur never went back down. An hour later, I was still on the couch, still watching Ghost Adventures, when I heard the front door open again. My brother ran up the stairs, said hi to me, and was about to go to his room, when I stopped him. I asked him, “Didn’t you just get home like an hour ago?” and to that he said “No? I was at [family friend’s house] eating Sonic.” He showed me a bag of Sonic leftovers he had.
Confused, I didn’t say anything else and just let him go to his room. Nothing happened after that.
I actually told my brother about it around 2 years ago, and he was really freaked out. He kept asking me why I didn’t tell him, but I dunno, I just thought he had snuck out again after he got home or he was trying to scare me.
I really don’t know what or who that first guy could have been. He looked just like my brother (save for his face, which I never got a good look at), same hair, same clothes, same backpack. I don’t know why my shy, loving, non-aggressive dog was growling. It still boggles me to this day.
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My mother, who grew up here, has seen multiple apparent acts of poltergeists in a home built on Mohawk land, seen evidence of a home soaked in blood for seemingly no reason, lived in a home where people driving by would stop to tell them of the "lady in white" looking in the windows, encountered an apparition that opened her car door after following her for miles, and many other odd happenings.
We have stories in our family of strange goat humanoids looking in the windows, "the unmentionables" that my family refused to talk about but later revealed were 6ft tall ravens seen in an abandoned town, a dead person's possessions burning randomly at the same time they were being cremated, homes that burned down every time they were rebuilt (before electricity)... And so many more.
I've lived in and been in many places, but all of my experiences seem to be from there. By the age of 16, I thought I may never really experience the paranormal like so many of my family had, until I moved there. In my few years of residence I went from seeing nothing, to seeing ghosts, seeing a charred home reappear like new (posted last night), strange lights in the sky that followed me and my mother one night, basketball sized balls of light floating in my home, and many other strange things I never thought I'd encounter. Since I've moved away, I've had an experience here or there; but nothing I haven't been able to explain to myself logically.
On a summer day in the 1950s, my grandmother, three great aunt's, and two great uncle's decided to camp out in Downerville (also referred to as Donnerville) NY; an abandoned town. There are a few different opinions on how this town became abandoned in the 1800s, such as an epidemic of smallpox, or a government decision to create a dam that would flood part of the town. Some older people say that the small, seasonally open, one lane road into the town was filled with snow one year; with many of the residents starving to death over the course of the long Winter.
One of them owned a camper, so they hauled it, and a good load of beer, out to Downerville to party for the night. Now, the only things still standing besides a few house foundations here and there, is part of the old Downerville cemetery. They parked their camper on a hill overlooking the graveyard, and didn't think much of it. These were down to earth, no nonsense people that worked and grew up on a farm, death was a normal occurrence of life. My point is, they weren't ghost hunting or trying to scare one another, they just wanted to have a few drinks, listen to music, and laugh.
At some point in the night, they noticed a faint orange glow in the camper windows, from the direction of the cemetery. They all crowded around the windows to investigate, when they saw that the cemetery was illuminated as if it were on fire. Walking in circles in the center of the cemetery were several large black birds with red eyes, the size of men. The second they looked out of the windows, it was as if a switch had been flipped; the unmentionables noticed the camper. They scurried around in a panic, turning off the music and turning off lights, and then hid around the camper trying not to make any sound, not even daring to breathe.
For the remainder of the night, the unmentionables stalked around the camper. Their faces would appear in the windows, eyes glowing. My grandmother said that as they walked, they would rhythmically raise and lower their wings, almost like a mating dance. But they saw that when they raised their wings, the inside of the wings were lined with large hooks instead of feathers. This continued for the remainder of the night until dawn, when the unmentionables seemingly disappeared. Unfortunately they didn't stick around to investigate, they got the hell out of there as soon as dawn broke.
None of them were ever sure if they saw demonic bird hybrids, or if they maybe witnessed a dark ritual of some kind. But for several years, decades, they refused to talk about it; even with each other. They had a sense that the mere mention of them would alert the unmentionables to their presence, like their unassuming gaze had that night long ago.
My mom did eventually get the story out of all of them, if begrudgingly, but they refused to speak of it in detail again and insisted upon referring to them as the unmentionables. You have to remember, they were very religious. They were trustworthy people, and they were absolutely traumatized by this experience. The fear in their eyes was unmistakable, as was the hours of anxiety after talking about them.
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I have this reoccurring nightmare of a raised ranch style house that looks and feels really normal, but the bottom floor is pitch black. Something tells me that I have to go through that floor to get out of the house but everytime I step into the black, I start to suffocate. It feels like a person is trying to murder me and almost succeeds every time. I feel like I'm actually strangling when I wake up, which is terrifying.
But I didn't really think anything of it until I walked into the exact house I was seeing in my nightmares. I felt utter dread, confusion, etc. I stayed there for a few days (it was an in-law's house that we were pet sitting for, a house that I had never seen before - even in photos) but never went downstairs. The nightmare went away after that and hopefully never comes back, but it was super weird and creepy. I'm still nervous to go back there.
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I was at a visitation a few years ago. I was in line at the casket. It was very crowded and the line was long. All of a sudden I felt the hairs on my arm stand on end and I got goosebumps. When I looked up, there was this woman sitting on a bench across the room from me. She was staring at me and had a very stern look on her face. Her brown hair looked like she had slept on it and hadn't brushed it. She was very pale. I stared back at her for about 45 seconds to a minute. She never blinked. People kept walking in front of her but once they moved I could see that she was not taking her eyes off of me. It made me feel extremely uneasy. I remember my heart rate picking up. At some point someone near me in line turned to talk to me. I took my eyes off her to respond. It was a very short conversation. No more than thirty seconds. When I looked back where she was sitting, she was gone. The uneasy feeling stayed with me until I left the funeral home. I scanned the area looking for her. I never saw her again. I don't know if this was paranormal but it freaked me out!
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My friend just told me this story that I found fascinating.
When she was a kid, her grandpa had two deer heads mounted on the wall in the living room, deer that he had killed. One day she wandered into the living room and suddenly felt very cold, felt a breeze and everything and vaguely wondered if someone had left the door open. But, being a kid she kind of ignored it and wandered over to stare at the largest deer head.
Being curious, she climbed up onto the couch to get a closer look and stood eye to eye, inches away from this deer head, staring into its black eyes.
She swears up and down that she saw, reflected in the eyes, a deer--this deer, it was the same size, had the same antlers and everything--standing in the woods. It was lightly snowing, and the deer was eating something off the ground. It lifted its head to look up at something, and bang--she heard a gunshot. She toppled backwards off the couch and ran out of the room. She said the whole thing played out like she was watching a movie.
Later she asked her grandpa if it was snowing when he shot the deer, and he said yes. She also said she went back several times and looked into the deer's eyes again and again, but never saw it again.
TL;DR, Looked into a taxidermy deer's eyes and saw it grazing in the snowy woods before being shot.
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This is a true encounter and one of the creepier experiences I’ve ever had. I stumbled across this sub recently so I thought I'd share my story here and see if anyone has had similar experiences anywhere in the US. Back in the summer of 2017, my girlfriend and I were driving up from Evanston, Illinois to spend the weekend at her parents’ lakefront cottage in Petoskey, Michigan, a popular destination for summer retreats. This drive for us was around 6 hours long and involved taking the highway north through the Western half of Michigan.
A lot of this path goes through some fairly remote areas, eventually we found we had been driving on the same single-lane highway road through some dense woods for what seemed like the last 45 minutes. I recall our navigation showing we were somewhere in the Huron-Manistee national forests. Also, when I say dense, I mean that the tree canopy formed almost a tunnel around the fairly narrow road, which made it seem significantly darker that it actually was outside. Luckily, summer days in Michigan are long, we still had a couple hours of daylight left.
While driving, I notice some older, dilapidated constructions in the woods to the right. It looked like remains of old sheds or storage buildings. This is a good time to mention that I’m a bit of a “treasure hunter”- I collect historical relics and old coins, and these ruins seemed like a great place to dig up some artifacts that may have been buried for years. Also, this stretch of road was deserted, so it was unlikely others had explored this place first. Luckily I had my metal detector with me in the car, as I had planned to use it on the beach at Petoskey. I also had one of those children’s shovels, made of neon plastic and a wooden handle, for digging in the sand, and although it’s not ideal for soil, it would do. I told my girlfriend I wanted to stop for a bit and pulled over on the shoulder, and she said ok but she would stay back and continue napping.
The nearest ruins were small, but not too far from the road itself. I figured the current highway must have originally been a backwoods road that the inhabitants could have used back in the day. However, I noticed a larger structure, deeper into the forest, and decided to check it out as larger buildings that could have been people’s homes and such have a higher chance of yielding a cool find. I made my way over and could see it was made of brick. The window-holes were still clearly defined, with dirty broken glass around the edges. I looked through one and could see the building, though half collapsed, had a floor that looked somewhat intact. Back towards the road, my car was just barely within my range of vision.
Since it was dark around the ruins, I recall leaving my shovel outside as I didn’t need it for the hard floor, and used my free hand to hold my phone as a flashlight to help spot anything shiny. I snooped around the corner and started sweeping with the metal detector within the building walls (the roof was collapsed) for half an hour or so when I started to hear movement around me, like crunching twigs and bushes rustling. I dismissed this as small animals at first but I kept hearing it, almost as if it was following my movement around the building from the bushes on its perimeter.
At this point the hairs on the back of my neck stood up- I got the feeling I was being watched, like some animal was stalking me. I decided to turn back. I started hollering and making loud noises in hopes of scaring off whatever could be there, and cautiously made my way over to where I’d left my shovel. It was gone. And I’m certain I couldn’t have misplaced it because it was neon orange and I had left it in the middle a pretty open area, so there’s no way I would’ve just not seen it. At this point I was spooked enough to just say fuck it, and booked it back to my car.
Hopping back in the driver’s seat, I could see my girlfriend was awake and her eyes were wide. She told me just a few minutes ago while I was gone she saw a child emerge from the forest and just look at her from several feet down the edge of the road. She described it as a boy, maybe 7 or 8, with a dirty face and ragged clothes. She told me she was worried the boy was lost or left behind, but the way he looked at her made her uneasy. Said he didn’t look afraid or curious, but just looked at her with a gaze that seemed off for a lost child. She told me she still wanted to notify police, but wasn’t comfortable leaving the car or calling out to the kid, who by now had disappeared. I hadn’t yet told her about my experience by the ruins, but at this point my heart was beating and I just felt very uneasy about this whole thing.As I looked up the non-emergency number for the nearest sheriff’s office on my phone, my girlfriend screamed my name. I looked up and there was a boy similar to the one she described just looking directly at us from the edge of the woods, a few feet from the passenger door. I was alarmed to see another, similar boy right outside the back window, peering into the backseat (!!) At this point I didn’t care anymore, I just turned the car on and accelerated the fuck out of there. After a few seconds of driving I looked in my rearview mirror and the boys disappeared into the forest as fast as they had come. I sped over the limit for god knows how long, until we were clear out of those woods.
We ended up still calling the sheriffs office, who mentioned there have been similar sightings of children along that road by other drivers. Though I never got a good look, I agreed with my girlfriend that something was off about those kids, and that their behavior didn’t match that of lost children. Maybe they lived on a nearby secluded property with their parents, and were just playing in the woods or trying to steal our shit. I had also heard of feral children, which could explain the dirty faces and raggedy clothes.
Later at the cottage I googled similar paranormal sightings. Apparently melonheads, a band of feral children with enlarged heads, have been spotted in the forests of Michigan just a couple hours away from where we had been. They could have also been black-eyed kids. Upon asking my girlfriend this, she said was sure that boy staring at her didn’t have black eyes or she would have noticed. However his mannerisms, as she described them, seemed very similar to the stories I’ve read about BEK, so it’s a possibility. If anyone has insight into this or similar experiences, I’d love to hear them. The experience creeps me out to this day, and we ended up taking a different route on the way back from Petoskey just to avoid driving through that forest again.
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Sort of not related to hiking but I was out in country lands of Texas on this remote trail mountain biking that I liked to ride when in town. While riding through, I saw an older man ahead walking strangely but I remember he was looking straight up at the sky. I see him about 60 yds ahead. It’s a singletrack so I don’t have room to go around him so I simply stop and he hears me brake and turns to me now with his head level and looking at me.
What happened next made my skin crawl. He starts talking and waving his arms but his voice sounds nothing like he looks. It sounds like a child talking and sounding scared but it was obviously a guy 50+ years old. He keeps talking but it’s like someone is playing a recording from his body with his animations and mouth not lining up and his voice sounding off. I turned around and booked it back to where I parked my car and left quickly.
He could have just been a wilderness loony with a child’s voice but there were no other cars at the trail entrance and he was a good 5 miles in without any gear or clothes that match a hiker at all.
Gah I hate remembering how he sounded in my head.
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This sounds almost identical to something my friends saw every so often for a few years back in the 90's as well.
The thing we saw didn't have a tall head, though. Our sightings had a more simian looking skull and it's hands always had four digits are the few occasions we saw them very fully.
It also only ever appeared outside my house, however, and often looked like it had no connection between its shoulders and wrists. Just sort of a "bleeding" darkness in between.
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I went to a city council meeting a few years ago when someone wanted to hunt deer in the woods behind our house, using a bow & arrow. It isn't a large wooded area--the guy would have had one acre to work in. We were there to ask for it not to happen as these woods are played in by neighborhood children and the woods are completely surrounded by housing. It was denied but another few people were there about a deer problem in their part of town and how deer would destroy all of their gardens/plants and on and on. The weirdest part was they were talking a lot about a buck that walked on his hind legs only. I assumed injuries made him have to adapt to getting around that way. Seemed very odd, but I guess it happens.
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Our entire town had hundreds of blackbirds just fall from the sky one night. Everyone woke up to dead blackbirds everywhere.
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My grandfather insisted all my life that "the little people" stole away an uncle I never met. The strange thing is, sometimes my father remembers this sibling, and sometimes he does not. My grandfather insists an enchantment was put on the family. The other people his age in our clan refuses to talk about it.
This was out on a Native American Reservation in the Southwestern desert of the USA. There is a rick lore there of the "ant people" who come up out of the earth to abduct people, and especially young children. It is very familiar to the Celtic stories of the malevolent fairies.
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My ex-father-in-law was from Kentucky. He told us this story and swore it was the absolute truth. He and some of buddies were out coon hunting one night. It had started to downpour so they were looking for a place to get dry. They came across this weathered farmhouse and went inside. After building a fire in the fireplace, they were all sitting around having a good time (he explained that meant they were enjoying some moonshine his nephew had made).
They kept hearing noises in the upstairs that sounded like furniture begin dragged across the floor. One of the men went to the bottom of the stairs and yelled up, "If you don't knock it off up there, I'm coming up there to join you." At that time, the noises stopped.
They settled in for the night and fell asleep. In the morning, the man who had yelled up the stairs was dead.
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Granny was special but she went nuts at the end. In the week before her death, she took hatchets to the bedposts and burned all the old pictures, paintings, and furniture passed down before anybody knew what she was doing or how far she had slipped. Sad loss of history but so it goes. She had 2 big dogs, german shepherd mutts that she had found in her walks in the woods that she called her protectors. They were both old boys by then too. Everybody had been checking in on her more often since the destruction but she just told everyone it ended with her?
One day, Papaw(grandfather) went to check on her and the dogs wouldn't let him in. He kept hollering "mama" but she didn't answer which was unlike her and the dogs had never done that before. He tried to force his way past since he knew the dogs and one of him bit him while the other ran to the top of the stairs.
He went home and got his gun after his wife bandaged his hand and told him his mama was dead. He asked her how she knew and she just did, no further explanation. He had to shoot the dogs to get in the house. When he walked in, all the mirrors were covered or turned around. Sure enough, granny was in her bed, freshly bathed with her hair in a crown braid, wearing her nicest dress, holding a picture of her dead husband, coins on her eyes, dead.
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In 2007 I finished college and was offered a posting as an admin in a small town working with local law enforcement. It was a 6-month contract and paid really well so all within a week I accepted the job, found a furnished place to live and took off for my adventure.
The town had just over 15,000 people and the apartment I chose was on the top floor of a three-storey building that was built in the 1960s. It was quite large and had nice hardwood floors. The walls were somewhat thin and I heard my neighbour a few times, especially at night when it was quiet. When I first got there I knocked a few times with the intention to introduce myself but they never answered even though I thought I had heard them inside. After a week I assumed maybe it was a reclusive person so I slipped a note under the door saying hello.
I worked with the same officers all the time on rotating shifts and three weeks into my stay I was into the afternoon shifts which meant I was getting home around 2am. As I came down the hallway of the building I saw a light coming from under my neighbour's door and saw the shadow of feet under the door and the peephole went dark as if they heard me and were looking to see who was in the hall. I figured if they wanted to say hello they would have opened the door so I simply waved hello and went into my apartment. Over the next couple of weeks this happened 3-4 times again. I was pretty sure I had a reclusive but nosy neighbour.
Then one night after work I crawled into bed at 3am and could hear that my neighbour was moving around in the room of theirs that adjoined my bedroom. About ten minutes later the noises got louder and it started to get me worried. They had never been this loud and it almost sounded as if they were being attacked or having a heart attack and knocking things over. I ran out of the apartment and started knocking loudly on their door but they didn't answer. I called out to them saying I was worried about them and if they didn't answer I would call for help. Still no answer. I ran back into my apartment and could hear bangs through the wall so I called the police station and asked my co-worker to send an officer over. I went and knocked on my neighbour's door one more time but no answer and then headed down to the lobby to wait for the officer who showed up within 5 minutes. I had gotten to know him a bit and we went up and knocked on the door but still no answer. I took him into my apartment and we could still hear loud thumps every 5-10 seconds and then a huge bang. The officer asked if I could go get the building manager to open the door. She lived one block away so I said I'd run over and get her. Luckily she was a night owl and watching TV. I told her that my neighbour was being really loud and wouldn't answer the door so she grabbed the keys and we headed over. The officer was waiting for us in the lobby and she asked which apartment it was and I told her 304. She looked at me weirdly and said 304 was empty. I said I had heard my "neighbour" making noise nearly every day and had seen the light on and shadows under the door a few times. The officer said he heard the noises too and asked if 304 was the apartment that was above the carport and she said yes. He replied that someone could easily climb up onto the carport and perhaps there were squatters in the empty apartment. We went up and the manager unlocked the door and the officer opened it. The apartment was dark and he turned the light on. He went in and the manager and I were peaking in through the doorway. He went into the bedroom and came back out and said it was empty. We went in and the place was spotless. All but two of the windows were locked and no sign of squatters. We all just stood there scratching our heads. The officer looked at me and said "You're not crazy, I heard the banging too". I said maybe we scared them off and they had come and gone through the unlocked windows. We double-checked that all windows were locked and headed out. On our way out I looked down, and there on the floor was the note I had slipped under the door a few weeks earlier. We locked the apartment and I said I'd keep an eye out and call them both if I ever again saw the light on or heard noises.
Fast forward almost six weeks and I was again on afternoon shifts. I came home at 2am and there was a light on. I quickly went into my bedroom and could hear thumping from next door. I called the station and asked for an officer to come out and then called my building manager. I slipped down to the lobby and waited for them. A different officer showed up and I knew him too. My building manager arrived and all three of us headed upstairs. The light was off and the building manager unlocked the door. The officer went in and everything checked out. We checked the windows again and they were still all locked. I apologized and tried to rationalize it that I had just come off of four days of 14-hour shifts and was tired, but I knew I had seen the light on and heard thumping.
Two weeks later the apartment was rented out and I got a chance to greet my new neighbours. I told them to keep an eye out because we were sure squatters had been coming in and out and I relayed the stories to them.
My final week there, the station had a BBQ and we were talking about the squatters that no one ever saw. I told the first officer about the second call out and how all the windows were locked that time but I knew I had seen the light on and heard thumping next door. He asked if I wanted to hear something "funny"? and I said sure. He said he was going to tell me earlier but didn't want to freak me out. He proceeded to tell me that three months before I moved in, he personally responded to a call to my neighbour's apartment for a very bloody suicide. The person had done the deed but had second-thoughts and called for help. When they arrived the person was unconcious but had obviously panicked and a chair, lamp and side table had been knocked over and there was blood everywhere. Unfortunately, they passed away before getting to the hospital. I just stared at him and he reminded me he had heard the banging too the night I called him over.
I asked the building manager about it the day I moved out and asked why she hadn't told me. She laughed and said "Oh honey, I believe in ghosts but didn't know if you did too and I didn't want to scare you. I know you heard and saw things. I believe you and I doubt it was squatters".
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This took place at my parent's old house when I was maybe 3 or 4. The house sat back from the road, in a deep forested area and there was something "off" about those woods. I always felt it, even at such a young age.
So one evening, my dad took me for a walk, leaving my mother home alone with my brother who was just a newborn at this stage. When we arrived back home, it was after dark and as we walked through the front door, my mother ran to my father, screaming and crying uncontrollably. My father sent me up to my room but I sat on the stairs, listening.
When my mother somewhat got herself under control, she began telling him an extremely bizarre story. She said after we had left for our walk, she was in the kitchen cleaning up when she noticed a fluorescent orange jacket hanging up on a nearby chair. The jacket was similar to one maybe a construction worker would wear. My dad doesn't work in construction and certainly didn't have a jacket that resembled this one. My mother instantly began to panic, thinking there was an intruder in the house. But the next thing she knows, the jacket lifts up off the chair on its own accord and rises above my mom's head and starts to swirl around in a circle while making a strange moaning noise. The moaning was definitely human sounding but it was coming from the jacket. Then it suddenly disappears. Just like that.
My mom was understandably confused and frightened and tearfully waited until we got home. I don't think my dad believed her though. I remember his reaction was comforting but he acted doubtful. He thought my mom was just stressed out from being alone all day and having to take care of two little children while also keeping up with the housework.
I remember this incident plain as day because it really scared me and I had nightmares about this orange jacket for months. Also, being a small child and watching my mother act so frightened and cry was really jarring to me. Mothers weren't supposed to be scared, they were the strong ones who chased away the monsters when kids got scared.
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Not sure how old I was, but at a guess, some age between 5-9. I have this vivid memory of going to the bathroom, which was at the back of the house, during a thunderstorm. While I was in there, 'thunder hit the house'. I use scare quotes because that makes no sense as an adult; it was a house on a terrace row in the middle of a town, with no prominent stuff that a lighting bolt would hit. But I remember all the walls had bright electricity running down for a few seconds, and the whole room was lit up brightly.
I'm guessing it must have been a dream, but I'm sure I remember asking my mum or my sister about it and them confirming the story.
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This happened around 1920-1930. My late great grandfather was living in Tennessee and used to go hunting for raccoons at night with his buddy. He was armed with a double barrel shotgun (currently still in my grandfather's possession) and his buddy had a .22 rifle, with them were two hunting dogs.
They were deep into a trail along a fence when they heard a crunch above them. They looked up to see a large black animal about 7 ft long with a tail. Watching them from the tree, silent. My greatgrandfather's buddy fired a single shot at the creature and it completely tanked it, then jumped down about 15 ft. and went berserk.
My greatgrandfather said it had jaws like a wolf, and it was strong enough to lift a 80 lb dog off of the ground and kill it with one bite. A 12 gauge round to the shoulder slows it down but not for long. It swipes the other dog with its claws, killing it instantly. Greatgrandfather's friend tries to run, but the animal swipes at him, fortunately it hardly just nicks his back and tears his shirt half-off.. Greatgrandfather fires his last shot into the animal's chest. The thing has most of its attention on greatgrandfather's buddy, who is holding a lantern out in front of him while the creature is growling like nothing he's heard before. My greatgrandfather takes this chance to yank a fence post out of the ground and beat the thing with it. He clubs it over the the head and spine, finally killing it after about 15 – 20 hits.
After better examination they describe the animal as having "a big wolf head, big ol' paws with claws like a bear, and a lean but strong body". It had long black hair and a long bushy tail. They abandon the hunt and skin the animal so they can drag it the 2 miles back to the cabin my greatgrandfather lived in.
This is where the story gets even weirder. Apparently they take it to a guy with a scientific background in zoology or biology or something. The man eventually gets back to them, telling them to stay out of the forest at night, with no explanation of what the animal was.
This story was retold to me by my grandfather, so some things might be twisted by memory, but my grandfather swears full truth on his part.
One more important detail about the story is my greatgrandfather's position on the identity of the animal. Him and his buddy, along with my greatgrandmother who had seen the body, are adamant on the fact that this was not a bear or a panther and the head was just like a wolf's. That's the part that gets me. Bears and predatory cats use claws a lot, but wolves don't as much. But they are sure it had a wolf-like head.
Sorry about formatting and grammar, I'm on mobile.
Please help me try to solve this family mystery.
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Time: 1/30/2018, approx. 11:30pm at night
Place: South Texas, apartment complex parking lot near a green belt
Persons involved: Myself and my bff.
Drugs/Alcohol consumption: None; we were both sober. I don't do drugs.
Scenario: (picture at the bottom of the post) After a stressful day at work, I had gone over to my friend's apartment to shoot the breeze, eat some food and play a few games on my friend's PS4. It was getting late and I had to be up fairly early the next day. My friend walked me out to the parking lot to my car.
There was no one else in the parking lot, just us two. As I was unlocking my car, a dog walked out from the side of a nearby building about 25 feet away. It came fully into view and stopped to look at us.
It was a little bigger than a standard Great Dane. It was all black with long hair that appeared to be falling out in clumps. It had long ears and a long, scraggly tail. I remember making eye contact with it. It had dark maroon-colored eyes. And in the moment we locked eyes, it smiled at us. But instead of a dog's lips going up and back, the lips went slightly sideways and I saw white, human teeth.
I recall suddenly getting a feeling of dread and fear. I felt like it was something disguised as a dog and pretending to be a dog.
But it wasn't a dog. I'm certain of it. The energy coming off of this thing didn't feel dog-like. I don't know how else to describe it, but my hair went up on end.
It turned around from us and began limping slowly back around the corner from where it had stepped out from. It seemed to have most of its weight on its front legs, walking with a hunched back. When it was limping away, I noticed its rear left foot was wrapped in blue gauze and the foot looked very... odd. The 'heel' was actually parallel to the ground.
I am unsure if my friend saw exactly what I saw, but she suddenly said, "it's leaving! Let's follow it!" And she ran after the damn thing right after it disappeared around the corner.
I remember being scared for my friend, so I went sprinting after her.
I rounded the corner to find my friend looking around confused. The "dog" thing was gone. At the rate that it was walking and limping, and given the close proximity to us (which, again, was no more than 25 feet), there was NO way that it could have disappeared that quickly.
The air was suddenly extremely cold, even for South Texas January. My teeth were chattering and I told my friend to quickly go back to her apartment, lock the door and stay inside. I warned her that "that thing was not a dog" and told her I'd text her when I got home.
Once safe at home, I texted my friend and thought that was going to be the end of it. But even as I settled into bed, my heart was racing.
It didn't help that, around 12am, there was low whistling right outside my window. My neighbor's house isn't too far from mine, but they're good people and there is NO logical reason for them to be that close to my window at night, whistling.
I didn't make any indication that I was aware of the whistling. It wasn't even musical, just the sort of whistle someone is giving if they're trying to get attention.
Eventually, the whistling stopped and I heard nothing else. I had trouble sleeping.
I haven't seen anything, or experienced anything like it since.
https://imgur.com/a/SvtbG
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My daughter has an imaginary… acquaintance. She has a lot of issues with it, so I wouldn't call it a friend. Its name is Chinta, and it's pretty awful to hear about, especially when she earnestly attributes closing doors, sudden drafts, and misplaced objects to it.
There was also, several years back, when I was a nanny to a large family, a strange series of events involving an antique silver key. This key was a treasured toy of the eldest girl, and her brothers were always taking it and hiding it from her, and her little sister coveted it. One summer, it would always find its way on top of the lintel above the front door.
These kids were all very short, and had no way on that floor of getting a way to elevate themselves high enough to place it there. On top of that, it had a particular way of resting on the the lintel that was especially creepy: it would rest on its intricate, rounded base, always with the teeth of the key to the left, pointing upwards. The summer ended with an evening when I was cleaning the playroom (it would get awfully cluttered with four of them). I turned to leave after finishing, and in the center of the room, I heard a jingling clatter of something metal hitting the hardwood floor. It was that goddam key, fallen from somewhere, hitting a spot near the center of the room.
***
Yeah. Chinta is the Hindi word used for "worrying".
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A few years back my wife and I were grocery shopping at the evil and hated Wal-Mart store in our town. On our way out, we ran into a friend. We stopped and chatted with said friend when an acquaintance of his walked in and hijacked the convo. While we were waiting for them to finish speaking to one another, my wife and I noticed a small Micronesian child (around age 5) and an older Micronesian man (probably in his late 50's). The little boy had a helium filled balloon that came from the bank in that particular Wal-Mart. He was a normal little boy...walking back and forth in front of the games and vending machines, pushing buttons, checking the coin return for any change that may have been left by the last customer. The older man sat down on a bench as if he were waiting on someone to finish up their shopping. Everything seemed pretty normal. Then, it happened.
The little boy let go of his balloon, and it started floating upward toward the high ceiling of the entry way (probably around 20 ft. high or so). He then sprinted towards the older man and said something to him while pointing at the balloon (they spoke a different language that I am/was not familiar with). The old man then started motioning toward the balloon with his finger in a "come here" type motion. Upon seeing this, I actually started laughing. I thought he was just being funny. That is until the balloon started floating back down to him...
I looked at my wife, and she looked at me. We both asked each other if the other had seen the spectacle. Within a few seconds, it happened again! Only this time, the balloon didn't get too far from the man, and it actually floated sideways towards the old man. Upon grabbing the balloon this time, he turned to the boy and said something that I imagine was along the lines of "don't do it again".
Anybody here have any ideas as to what we witnessed that day?
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We had taken a car trailer to his old place in Boise in order to haul his non-running Jeep to his new place in Medford. We hit an area of heavy snow in the southern Cascades around 2:00 a.m. It took 45 minutes or so to get down the mountain. We had of course been drinking coffee to stay alert.
About 25 miles west of the pass it became obvious that the last few quarts of coffee had to be drained. We stopped at a wide spot in the road near a summer tourist haunt; deserted in winter.  There is a gas station and ice cream joint on the west side of the road, closed this time of year and no town or settlement within 30 miles.
This is tall timber country and unsettled. Across the road is a small parking area for the ice cream joint. It is paved and about 200 ft. wide and 80 ft. deep. I pulled in and as I stepped out with .45 on hip, it occurred to me in a flash that grabbing the 590 Mossy would be good.
As we walked to the far end of the area to be well off the road, the hair on my arms and the back of my neck stood on end.  The area directly to our front was open with a depth of 50 yards and a width of 100 yards.  The night was clear and cold, 8-10 inches of snow on the ground and with a moon almost full, so we could see quite well.  While standing and taking a leak with son about 15 ft. to my right I saw, as if springing from the earth in front of us across the open area 10 or 12 creatures moving RAPIDLY back and forth in sort of a Thatch weave pattern.  These things, not human men, were close to 7 ft. tall, thin, bipedal with long arms, medium length gray fur, and damned fast on their feet. I brought the shotgun up and slid the safety off, as son was drawing his .45.
I don't know if I can adequately explain the overwhelming feeling of menace, but here goes. I had been operating on pure instinct since I had stepped from the pickup, the rotten feeling hit me a split second before the things arrived, the feeling?, instinct?, was that we were prey and subject to a very bad death and to be slaughtered and eaten, not a logical process, gut feeling and massively overwhelming.
As they were moving around in front of us, more appeared and mixed among them, all the while running about fast in front of us. Son and I were backing toward the truck, I WOULD NOT present my back to them and some of them peeled off right and left in an encirclement movement.  They were rolling in fast from the sides now, I could smell and feel their presence.
We got to the truck loaded on adrenaline and ready to kill, as we both knew we were in grave danger.  We piled into the truck, locked doors. I had keys out and ready as my butt neared the seat, I had the engine lit and trans. in gear and gas pedal mashed in one motion. Adrenaline is great stuff!  As we fled, yes fled, something VERY close by let out a undulating scream of rage, and pain. I believe one or more of the group had gotten really close to us in their pursuit and I ran over the foot of one of them, yeah they were that close.
We rolled onto the highway and I told son to watch the bed of the pickup as well as the trailer, he already was indexed to the rear with the shotgun. We hauled ass for at least 20 miles before the feeling of grave danger started to abate. The feeling that nailed both of us as we discussed soon afterward, was one of being prey and soon to be slaughtered and eaten. I am not easily led and neither believe or disbelieve all the bigfoot, ghost and werewolf stuff, in fact I am skeptical.
Son was speaking with a coworker about 6 months later who had grown up in Prospect, Oregon, about 30 miles south of Union Creek where the incident took place. He asked Jake if he had ever heard of any strange goings-on in the area. Jake went ashy white and pretty much retold the above tale.  He says to avoid the place at night.
A family friend, a 25 yr. retired cop not given to flights of fancy and an excellent observer, had a tale very similar from a year before. I told my wife of this event of course; she looked at me at the beginning as though I had developed a 3rd eyeball in the center of my forehead. That was from shock, she did believe me, but did not wish to hear any details.  She said the tale gave her chills. Me too, as I write this, hair on back of neck and forearms is sticking up.
I have NOT gone back to explore and would not without a large group of shotgun and flamethrower equipped men with me. Son and I are both sane, sober persons, and not taken to hysteria. We were wide, VERY wide awake as things transpired. We saw and smelled what was there.
As a sidebar neither of us heard footfalls from the creatures. They were silent until I heard one as we were getting the hell out of there.
To my knowledge, and I have researched, there is nothing that matches these creatures, unless one considers old legends and folk tales of were creatures.
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Dogman on Broadway, October 1911
"Theater goers were walking about and enjoying the 'Great White Way' when suddenly there were screams emanating from an alley-way just below James' position. Both patrolmen ran toward the ruckus, forcing their way through hundreds of fleeing pedestrians.

As they reached the alley-way, a tall hairy beast ran out onto Broadway and towards 40th Street. Neither patrolman could believe what they saw. An eight-foot tall wolf with human-like arms and legs, running with skill and speed down the middle of Broadway. Soon the beast was facing a NYC Packard squad car, so it changed direction and moving back towards McNamara and Dobbins. The beast was growling as it moved forward. The patrolmen took positions by a news stand, hiding and waiting for the horrible creature to move before them.

Soon the beast was at the entrance of another alley-way near 42nd Street. Both patrolmen pulled their revolvers and took deadly aim. The beast quickly dropped to the gutter. Immediately McNamara and Dobbins surrounded the body as other officers joined them. None of the public was allowed to come within 100 feet of the unknown canine. The body was quickly removed and taken to the mortuary.
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William Brien House, Inverleith, Edinburgh 1915-1916
This case involves the murder of a medical student. The reason I've included the case here is because of the wounds he is alleged to have sustained. The murder is still unsolved and the student was reported to have been investigating severe paranormal activity at the time of his death. The activity centred around an evil apparition witnessed by staff and visitors to the house now serving as a hotel. Several members of staff had left their employment and many guests had fled from the hotel in fear. They all claimed to see a very strange and evil apparition watching them. As a dare, medical student Andrew Muir asked the owners if he could hold an all night vigil in the most active room to see if he could catch whatever was responsible for the strange happenings. The owners agreed and gave Andrew a bell to ring if he needed to alert them to anything. A few hours after the vigil began, the owners were rushing back to the room. They had heard the bell, but they had also heard a terrifying scream. On entering the room they found the body of Andrew Muir slumped over. Some of the accounts state that the body had puncture wounds that were bleeding from the neck and shoulder. The murder is still unsolved to this day. Some claim that the apparition is the previous owner of the house - William Brien. He was a very strange man who lived as a recluse. On his death his body was removed by undertakers who were not known in the area. When he was buried, he left strict instructions that his grave was to be forty feet deep and the coffin to be kept secure. Whether this was to keep 'something' in or 'something' out of the coffin we will never know. But prior to the house being re purchased and turned into the hotel, there were numerous accounts of strange noises, voices and other activity coming from the empty house. So much so that many people avoided the building.
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My mom has a good story. When she was elementary school aged, she, her mom and step-father moved into a cottage in the local area where we still live. There was an attached shed on the cottage that opened from the outside only. When they moved in, the shed door was locked from the inside. Her step-father had to take the hinges off the door to open it.
Inside the shed, the floor was dug out to several feet below ground level. At the bottom of the hole they could see concrete blocks over top of bones with long red hair attached. The crazy thing is, he didn't try to find out what was down there, or report it to anyone. He just locked the shed back up and never used it. The thing my mom always wonders about it is, why was it locked from the inside? Why was the floor not filled back in? Why the concrete blocks!?
The area where the cottage was is now a parking lot. I always wonder if those remains are still under the pavement. The cottage had no basement, so it's possible it was just demolished and the area graded and paved without digging it up.
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I had a similar experience. I live near a cemetery; driving home about 1:30 AM, I passed a crowd of people of all ages staring down at a fresh grave near the (8ft tall piked wrought iron) fence, illuminated by the candles on it. I didn't think anything of it at first, but then I realized it was the middle of the night, the cemetery closes at sundown. I did a U-turn, and by then there was only the grave and candles to be seen.
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So, I had a football coach back in high school who was also one of my teachers for a semester. He told us one story that freaked us all out pretty bad.
He had a coaching job at a small college in Montana when he was a lot younger and newly married. He said that after practice one evening, he was making his long commute home, and the route ran alongside just fields and fields of hay, grain, whatever. Since it was late summer/early fall, it wasn't even approaching dark yet. His car was an old beat up truck with just a bench seat.
Anyway, he's driving along when he sees a hitchhiker on the shoulder. This being back in the day and in small-town Montana, my teacher pulled over to let the guy in without a second thought. The man was described as wearing a really old, outdated style of suit. Not quite a zoot suit, but styled in a similar, baggy way. He also had a big, stylish hat. This guy looked like he was out of the 40's, and "sort of like a pimp". My teacher thought it was weird that he was so overdressed, it being super hot out. But maybe that was the only clothing he had.
So the guy gets in next to my teacher without a word. Teacher asks him where he needs to go, and the guy just points forward. Teacher drives on.
Later, my teacher tried talking to the guy, just trying to make simple conversation, but the guy wouldn't speak or even acknowledge him. He just pulled his hat down like he was sleeping.
Out of nowhere, the guy just tips up his hat, looks out the window, and says "Stop the car, Now." My teacher pulls over and lets him out, not wanting to offend a possibly crazy man. The guy stands on the side of the road for a second, and then at a dead sprint, just runs off into the field beside the road, until my teacher couldn't see him anymore (granted the crop was fairly tall). He waits there for a while, thinking maybe the guy had the runs or something and didn't want to shit next to the road. After a long enough wait, my teacher gets back in the truck and starts to accelerate back on to the road.
The thing about really old trucks is that they don't accelerate very fast. As my teacher got back on to the road, he looked in his rearview mirror to check for a safe merge. But there wasn't a car in sight. What there was, was the hitchhiker, on all fours like an animal, running (crawling?) after the truck at an inhuman speed. Meanwhile, my teacher is beginning to fish-tail as he attempts to go faster. The whole time his eyes glued on the mirror, watching the man chase after his car.
Eventually, he was able to get up to speed and lost sight of the guy in his mirror. When he was able to stop at a gas station to use a pay phone, he called his wife at home to tell her the story, and to lock up the house. She thinks he's just messing with her, and he had been talking to her coworker about the hitchhiker. When he asks why she would think that, apparently at her office in the town she worked in, one of her coworkers told her a story of the exact same thing happening to them. And it is a well-known urban legend in that town. She thought it was just folks playing with the new girl at work, who had to drive home alone at night.
Anyways, my teacher assured her that he was not lying, and she evidently believes him and can vouch for her side of the story, because she showed up to one of our fundraisers and I asked her about it.
So yeah, now I just avoid lonely roads in Montana.
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It wasn't in a sewer but a drain system, hopefully that counts. My friend and I are pretty well versed in exploring the underground portion of the city we're from and nothing strange had ever happened to us before. One night we decided to explore a tunnel system no one we knew had bothered to check out, claiming it was infested with spiders (they weren't wrong...). We went anyway. The tunnel runs beneath an abandoned rail yard and sits far from the city limits. An hour into walking the large concrete pipe, we heard a loud boom come from behind us, like someone had dropped something large and heavy in the pipe. We froze, instantly worried we'd been caught. We stood for a long time, our headlamps pointed in the direction of the sound. Just as we had made the decision to leave a light appeared about three feet off the ground and twenty or so feet away from us. It wasn't a flashlight, there wasn't a beam coming from it and the light didn't illuminate the tunnel around it much. Instead it looked more like a ball of light or, what we realized later, a lantern. The light began to sway back and forth, swinging from left to right in a steady rhythm. We stared at it, totally taken aback as my friend kept saying we needed to get away from it. The problem was the tunnel behind us was covered in spider webs and their very large inhabitants. I'd rather deal with a phantom light than a scene out of Arachnaphobia. The light continued to swing before dipping low and vanishing. After leaving we talked it over. The tunnel has a wide stream of water running through it that would be impossible to avoid when walking. We should have heard the owner of the light approaching but we didn't, we also never heard them leave. To this day I still have no idea what we saw.
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The last story I know well is the tale of the old blacksmith building. It sits in the towns center square, and in the 1800s the blacksmiths daughter threw herself from the third story and died on impact. Ever since then people have seen her face in the window, and the owner often hears whispering when they're working alone.
Another strange thing about the town that scares me the most is that we live in tornado alley, and every town around us had been hit. We haven't been hit since off the top of my head about 1910-15. A lot of people have chocked it up to geography, and I'd agree with them except for a phenomenon I've never personally witnessed. In the center of town is a church with a giant field out back. We'll during most bad storms, a tiny tail touches down in the center of the field. It never does any damage, and seems to only be seen by a few people. It is the strangest thing in this town in my opinion.
In May 1985, my friend, Lisa, and I were returning to the U.S. We had spent a week wandering and camping in Canada (we're both female, by the way).
Being 20 years old, we had scarcely any money and we had just spent the last of it on gas, so we needed to make it home. We drove late into the night. By 1 a.m. we still had a few hours to go. We were traveling south on Route 84 to Moline, Illinois.
Lisa was driving and we were having a great time. We chatted up a storm as we made our way down that little two lane highway. It's probably a scenic road by day. But at night everything was pitch black.
Suddenly, a shape appeared at the very edge of our headlights. It looked like a log was laying in the opposite lane. As we got closer, the 'log' turned out to be the legs of a man sitting on the highway.
As we got even closer, we could see that the man was sitting on the solid white line of the opposite lane. His legs were jutting straight out onto the highway and would have been run over if a car had been coming from the other direction.
We slowed down. Lisa started to swerve towards him. We said a few things like 'I wonder if he needs help' and 'I wonder what he's doing out here in the middle of nowhere?'
The headlights completely illuminated him as we drove towards him. He sat facing the opposite side of the road, so we were looking at him in profile. He was wearing a brown suit, brown shoes, and a brown hat. His arms hung down by his sides.
At first, he did not move or acknowledge us in any way. We stared at him in silence.
Suddenly, he jerked his face towards us. His eyes were glowing red. His mouth opened and twisted into a snarl.
We were completely terrified. To Lisa's credit, she reacted quickly by swerving away from him, punching the gas, and making a getaway as fast as she could. As we sped away, we both turned to look out the back window, but neither of us could see anything in the darkness. We couldn't shake the feeling of 'wrongness'. It felt like we had stumbled across something we weren't supposed to see.
It looked and dressed like a man, but those glowing red eyes were not human.
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I've been trying to ignore this, but it's really starting to bother me and my friends think I'm crazy, so I need to share it with people who might believe it.
It started about two years ago when my older sister finally moved out. She had had the biggest room in the house, so I was very eager to take over the space and make it mine. She left some random junk, so I picked up EVERYTHING in the entire room, threw it in a cardboard box and placed it in the garage for her to pick up. Once I got the bedroom entirely clean I moved in my own furniture and decorated the room.
About a month later I was cleaning some things off my bedroom floor and found two small pamphlets, one had the silhouette of a cowboy on his horse in the sunset and I believe the other was of a dog, I opened them up only to find that they were funeral service programs. I didn't recognize the names and there was no obvious relation between the man and the woman. I asked my mom if the last names rang a bell without telling her about the programs and she said no, I then asked her the full names of the people and showed her the programs, still nothing. I shrugged it off, telling myself that they must have been my sister's.
Several months later I am going through my sketchbook to find inspiration for a painting and between the pages is another funeral program with another unfamiliar name. In the back cover there is another. At this point I was a bit creeped out since there was no way that they had just been some of my sister's leftover belongings. My mom and friends told me I was being dramatic and brushed it off.
On two or three occasions since then I have found clippings from the obituaries section of a newspaper in random places, but always in my room, the floor of my closet, underneath my dresser, mixed in with pages of drawings. They were always people I don't know and are usually old programs from 2004-2008.
Tonight I was trying to find a place to store extra canvases and decided to stack them under my bed. I usually don't have anything under my bed, but there were a few items. A random sketch I had done a while ago, my memo pad, a book, and another funeral program. This one is the oldest yet, being from 2001. Tucked inside were two newspaper clippings from the obituary section, both were for the same woman, but not the woman on the program.
I am very confused and am not sure how I should react. I plan on reaching out to my sister tomorrow and asking if she had ever had a few funeral programs, but that still doesn't explain how they wound up in places like my sketch book. All I can think of is that someone is playing a long, slow joke on me, but I can't think of anyone who would. I have saved the program I found today if anyone would like to see it.

They all died in the town I live in, but my parents, siblings, and grandparents haven't recognized any of the names.