Random Creepypasta 4 (Ghosts, Glitches, & General Weirdness)

My friend's grandmother had grown up in Vietnam. I don't know exactly where, only that it was a rural village surrounded by rice fields, with only a single road through it. Late one night, her own grandmother had woken her and told her to come outside because "the dead are walking".

The little girl obligingly went out with the rest of her family, to see a long procession of ghosts silently walking down the moonlit road. All the villagers were outside watching, also in silence.

My friend questioned her grandmother if these hadn't been people wearing costumes, and the grandmother said no, the ghosts had been translucent. Also, their feet did not meet the road, so they were gliding slightly above it.

The villagers watched respectfully until the last ghost had passed, then turned and went back into their houses. According to the grandmother, nothing more was said about it, but the whole scene had left a deep impression on her.

My friend had the idea - perhaps from something her grandmother had said - that this procession of ghosts was something that happened every so often, although her grandmother had only seen it once. Unfortunately, there was no further information available, so it was all rather mysterious.

I've searched online for similar stories, but have come up with nothing. Am hoping someone here who's familiar with the region might know something, or have a similar tale.
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Since I was in third grade I was best friends with a guy named Kris. He lived with his mother and his grandparents in the old family home, this three story farmhouse. The house had a strange rule. No one was allowed on the second story. Ever. The reason for this: It was haunted. The bedrooms were on the third floor so every time we would go up there to play we would stop on the landing for the second floor and see who could hang there the longest without being freaked out. Hang out on the second floor landing long enough and the doors began to rattle on their frames. What you could see from the landing was a long hallway, three doors on the right and a bank of windows with the blinds drawn. This was a source of entertainment for years and he would always tell us ghost stories about living on the third floor and hearing noises from those locked rooms on the floor below us. Scratching on the ceiling, banging, voices.

One summer, we repeatedly ran down the second floor hall to see who could get to the end, turn the last doorknob and get back without being grabbed by ghosts. The doors were all locked and none of them were supposed to open. We stopped doing this the one night I slept over, yanked open one of the doors (to find a dark, empty room) and heard this cacophony of horrible sounds. Scratching and babbling and what not. I also swear that I saw something moving in the shadows. We both freaked out and ran downstairs. His grandfather was extremely pissed that he had to go up and close the door. He came down from the second floor, pale as a dying man and wound up walking slowly outside and tossing the room key, this gnarly old skeleton key, into the woods.

However, the second floor lost its allure in sixth grade when his grandfather was found dead on the second floor, half in and half out of one of the rooms that was supposed to be locked forever. From that day on, we stopped fucking around there and his mother and grandmother nailed the doors shut. After that, things got weirder. He would tell us that one of the voices he heard from the rooms below was his grandfather asking him to open the door and let him out.

By the time we got into high school, he started to unravel and we didn't hang much anymore. He was extremely depressed and so was his mother and grandmother. His grandmother's health was failing, too. They all looked horrible, like they weren't taking very good care of themselves anymore. When I did see him he would tell me harrowing stories about being kept up all night by the voices in the rooms below and that they banged on the floor all night and wouldn't let him sleep. His grandfather was angry, he always told me. In the spring of our sophomore year he stopped coming to school. I was trying to check up on him but his mother wouldn't let me talk to him. I went by his house one day and she told me through a crack in the door that he couldn't be my friend anymore and that I should stay away. I went by a couple of days later and knocked again but no one answered. I saw the curtains move a little, like someone was looking at me through the window but that was it. A few days later I went by again and found that no one lived there any more. The blinds and curtains were pulled and the place was empty.

I never found out what happened to him or his family.
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When I was younger, I lived with my aunt, uncle and grandmother with my little brother. One night my aunt and uncle were gone and my grandmother was in her room next to my room. My brother was asleep on the bottom bunk of our bed, and I woke up out of the blue. When I sat up, I saw an older woman staring at my brother from the corner of the room. Thinking this was my grandmother, I called out to her only to hear her respond from the other room. As I called out to her though, this woman looked up from the locked stare she had on my brother and I could literally /feel/ her stare at me. It was absolutely terrifying. I banged on the wall and my grandmother yelled back that she was coming. But during this time I remember the figure in the corner bringing her hand up to tell me to be quiet with one finger over her lips. We literally didn't break eye contact. When I yelled again she ran one finger across her neck while shaking her head 'no' and the look on her face was of disappointment. Just as my grandmother turned the corner, I looked over at her and then looked back to the corner and the figure was gone. I was only 10 years old at the time, but I have dreams every now and then (I'm 22 now) about that night. I've been a believer in ghosts ever since.
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I used to work in a building that had three levels of sub-basements, with the piece of lab equipment I typically worked on in the lowest basement. I had the only key. There was a wired phone in there, and I did work late some nights... but not this night.
I was sleeping alone in my apartment when I woke up to a call on my cell phone from my girlfriend at 3 AM, she was in hysterics and asking why I scared her. Apparently she received a call from that basement phone just a minute earlier, with someone who sounded like me slowly repeating her name, until crackling and fading out. My apartment was 10 miles away from work. I thought she was lying, but I saw the 3 AM call from the basement phone logged on her cell myself. Still freaks me the fuck out.
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My grandma died when I was about 9 and we went to look at her for the last time at her wake. It wasn't really scary, though, it was just really sad. My grandpa cried the whole time and one of his tears fell on grandma's cheek, making it look like she was crying, too. That night I went to bed, and kept a flashlight next to me (I had a little nightlight near my bed, but that wasn't good enough, apparently .) Whenever I heard a sound I would turn it on, making sure every corner was empty. When I turned the flashlight off, I would just lie there, with my eyes wide open, staring into the dark. Then I /felt/ something, I don't remember exactly what, so I turned on my light again. Right there, just a few inches away from me was my grandma's face. She was extremely pale looking, with wide open, black eyes and mouth, and a tear rolling down her cheek. My mom heard me screaming and stormed in, turning on all the lights, making grandma disappear.
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I've posted this in a couple places before, but it's a good story.
I used to work as a 911 operator in a relatively large metro area. One night at about 3 am or so I answered a call from an elderly lady who said she didn't feel good. I tried to get more info about what was wrong - chest pain, trouble breathing, headache, is she diabetic, etc. She gave me her address and phone number and said no one else was home but the front door was unlocked so they could come in. I toned the call out as "general illness" and kept trying to get more details. No matter what else I asked about what was wrong, all she would say is "I just don't feel good, can you send someone to help me?"
After a few min she said "I'm gonna put the phone down for a minute, I need to go to the bathroom." I tried to get her to stay on the line with me, told her she can do whatever she needs to get ready but I'd like to be able to stay in contact in case there's a problem. She said "I'm gonna put the phone down, I'll just be a minute." And that was it. I stayed on the line and asked for her every so often but got no reply.
A couple min passed, then the fire department called on scene so I just disconnected and didn't think much about it. Told them the caller advised front door is unlocked and she was in the bathroom. A couple more min and the one of the firefighters called over the air with a weird tone and said "Dispatch...uh how exactly was this called received?" I told them the call was first party from the patient's home phone approx 8 min ago. He didn't respond over the air, but called the desk from his cell phone (which usually only happens when something is going on that they don't want broadcasted since anyone can listen in on the radios).
On the phone he said "are you sure this wasn't a third party call from a family member or something?" I said "negative, caller advised 'I don't feel good' and said no one else was home, so to the best of my knowledge, the caller is the patient...have you made contact?" He said "yea, she was in the bathroom like you said, but she's probably been dead for about 12 hours. Cold to the touch, fully livid, full rigor, we're gonna need a deputy out here."
Afterwards we pulled the tapes of the radio and phone calls and checked the time stamps, address, phone number, and went over everything a few times to see if I missed something. I called them back in the morning after the shift to see if they had anymore info, but they were just as weirded out as we were. The phone was still in the living room and the patient was dead in the bathroom.
TL;DR: got a 911 call from a dead woman because she didn't feel good
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Can anyone remember when you were kids, that if you went into the old public phone boxes (the ones you had to push your 2p pieces into) and phoned a number (can't remember this number) you could hear a woman screaming and crying at the other end. you couldn't talk to them but only hear. was it a bt test phone or something? very weird though. all the kids in our school used to phone it, scared witless some of them. I never did this myself, but most places I have lived had such a number - it must be some side effect of the way telephone exchanges are arranged.
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The house I grew up in was a big Moderne place, built of lead-lined reinforced concrete. When we first moved in, the area was fairly rural and the phone system for the house was a party line. My folks did not want that, and so contacted the phone company for help.

The phone man came and we showed him into the attic. There was a large closet in the upstairs hallway. There was a door into the attic, reachable by climbing the shelves: no ladder needed. The man thanked us, went in the attic, and that was it.

We never saw him again.

Around 6 another truck arrived. Some men got out, and they drove away the truck the phone man had left behind. We never heard from the phone company about the matter, although our phone was no longer a party line.

My Dad found the phone man's flashlight lying on the closet shelf-step. We kept the flashlight for years, until it was finally lost during a move.

What happened to the phone man? We never did find out.
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When I was a kid, my dad would take us to a giant lake, with a big sandy shore, like a landlocked beach for hillbillies. I was wading in the shallow end, when I felt something brush through my fingers. Being 7, and wishing it was a real beach, I thought, "Maybe these are sea plants!" Then realized that was stupid. As I squeezed the tendrils that were brushing my hand, they squished and sunk, and I felt bones through the soft, squishy mass. Finger bones like I was holding the hand of a child my age. I got out of the water, sat on the shore, and told no one. Year later, my sister said she thought a boy had been kicking her under the water, but when she grabbed at the foot, it felt cold and squishy and she also told no one.
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I've always likes these sort of stories,probably because of my own experiences with "the attic thing" as a little kid.
Living in an old house where the entire upstairs floor is closed off from the downstairs and used as a big attic I would hear all kinds of freaky stuff. The unexplained sounds in the night from up there,the muffled voices and whispers and slow clomping footsteps that would cross the ceiling and move slowly down the stairs to the door in the back bedroom that closed off the stairway from the downstairs. My stepbrother and I were like 6 or 7 playing in the back bedroom one evening when we heard the slow deliberate footsteps descend the stairs and stop at the locked doorway. My stepbrother slowly walked over put his head to the door and gently knocked once. Something on the other side knocked back which sent my stepbrother screaming from the room.
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I was probably about 5 years old when this happened. I used to have existential crises every night and stayed up crying, etc. One night, I was randomly waving my arms through the air (I don't know why. I was a strange child.) when suddenly I felt my arm hit something hard where nothing had been less than a second previously. Turned on the light, nothing was in the air above my bed or close to where I was waving my arms. Needless to say, this didn't help young me sleep better.
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16 years old, hanging out with my younger brother and cousin in a motel room on our way to a family reunion. The place we're staying at is seedy and dilapidated, and we're in the middle of what is practically a ghost town. As far as I knew, my family consisted of the only guests at the place for the night. At about 1-2 AM; brother, cousin, and I decide to all go get soda and cookies from a vending machine down the hallway. We were being loud and obnoxious teenagers, of course, but we all fall silent as an older woman comes out into the hallway. She's hunched over, greasy hair, slippers, and "haggard" doesn't even come close to describing her face. She took a few steps out and then turned and glared at us; it felt like her eyes cut straight through me. She turns her face away from us, and walks to another part of the hall and seemingly vanishes. My nose immediately began to gush blood, and I ended up having my teeth, hands, and shirt covered in it. We had to rush back to our room and get toilet paper for the mess. I only ended up telling one or two people, and even then I left out the bit with the woman... too eerie to even think about what she was doing there or where she went.
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I bent down beside my bed to grab something, for whatever reason I bent straight at the waist (vs bending my knees) and saw a pair of feet right behind mine. They were solid looking, a little girl's legs with white patent leather strap shoes and white stockings. I whipped up and turned around and saw nothing. Scared me to death, it was so clear and I was just humming and cleaning, not in a skittish state before I saw it. I don't know what the hell it was, and I don't want to know.
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We had a weekend away taking advantage of one member's newly acquired driving licence, visiting a festival in Brighton, UK and hanging out doing other stuff around Sussex.

After the festival we stayed in a Youth Hostel quite near the city. All four of us shared a single room that night with two bunks in parallel, about five feet apart, roughly in the centre of the room. I was up top on one bunk with a guy called James below me. Opposite was Andrew on the lower bed and Richard above.

We were talking idly about the lastest Sonic Youth album or something mundane and Andy turned off his bedside light whilst we were all still chatting. It was sort of dark-ish but due to hall lights and possibly moonshine there was enough light to see and make out objects. Quite shortly after the light went out, James below me was talking but very suddenly went quiet. I was almost instantly aware why; the silhouette of a person was in the room, standing near the head of Andrew's bed. There was a few moments of silence before they hurried past us between the two bunks. I distinctly remember Andrew shouting out at this point. The intruder was about head height with my top bunk but it was too dim to ID them as anything other than a person of average height and build, probably male. No remarkable features to speak of. Next thing I know the light comes back on, there's no one there and we all look around exchanging various expletives.

We searched the room but there was no sign of an entry/ exit point for the intruder. No windows were open and the only exit was the thick set fire safety door in the corner near to the heads of the bunks which would have made a lot of noise and involved the perpetrator somehow getting back past us undetected. We just couldn't understand how someone got in and out undetected and we became really freaked out, to the point of arguing with one another. It felt like we were losing our minds. Looking back, I think we just individually felt paranoid that the other three were excluding them from a carefully planned prank, but the more we cast accusations about the more we realised it didn't make any sense and the atmosphere turned oddly hostile in the group. We left the light on all night and never really spoke about it the next day, which in hindsight seems a little odd in itself.

One other probably unrelated detail is that the next day there was a very depressed, paranoid feeling between us traveling home. This was accompanied by my feeling a strange form of guilt or shame which I've never experienced since - it wasn't the exact emotion of shame but that's the closest comparison. It was this sort of wretched, empty regret about the whole trip, almost remorse, despite having nothing to feel responsible for. I'd also compare it to a sad, loss-of-innocence sort of feeling, accompanied by a sort of physical thirst and a sense of something unforgivable (?!?) Sounds odd when I try to describe it but it was overwhelming. I'll always remember that awful feeling hanging over me as we were waiting for a train and killing time in a shopping mall the next day.

I don't think I believe in ghosts per se but an explanation for this freaky event has eluded me for over twenty years now.
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Since I joined this board, I have been intending to post this story. It is the big event in my life that sealed belief in the supernatural, and that pushed me to have a real interest in things of that sort.
But I have had a very hard time bringing myself to do it. It is one of those stories that, first of all, was much more terrifying to experience than it seems in writing. Second... Well, people are involved who may, on the very very slim chance that they stumble upon my account, be unhappy with me talking about it. And third, that talking about it will somehow trigger it happening again.

But I will take the risk. I know I have made references to this enough in past posts. About time to post it.

First, a bit of background.
When I was a child, I lived with my grandparents. My mother got a divorce soon after I was born, and quickly ditched me there to resume the partying lifestyle she couldn't bear to leave after marrying my father.
Fast forward 10+ years... And she had remarried, and it honestly looked like things had settled down in her life. I started to spend more time with her, and moved up to staying at her house on some weekends and parts of school breaks. I even had a waterbed (quite popular at the time) in a shared bedroom with my sister. I loved that bed... But as I wasn't there most of the time, it became the sleep over bed for friends. One of these friends drove me crazy. She was only 5, but was a very precocious and arrogant little girl. She was spoiled rotten by her rich grandparents, but her mother was an ultra-partier like my own, so she frequently spent the night at my mother's place while her mother was out having fun.
She would cry and scream to stay with her "best friend", my little sister, and then snicker when she got her way. She would pull the same trick to force me out of my bed because she "couldn't sleep any where else!"... And then once my mother was out of range stick her tongue out and tell me that it should really be *her* bed since she is the one who sleeps in it all the time, and that she wished she could take my place as my sister's sister, how this was really *her* room, etc...
At 11~12, and trying desperately to regain the love of a mother I had felt abandoned me for years... It was really painful for the little non-relative to get preference over me, and to have free reign to say those things. Not that I could do anything about it, as she was 5 - and that was the response to any complaints about her behavior - "she is only 5!" Anyway, to put it lightly, I was nasty to her (within reason, of course, as she *was* only 5) and she was nasty toward me.

When I was 12, I spent part of my spring holidays at my mother's house.

The mother of the little girl, (who I'll call her by her initial - A.) tried to pass her off on us for a few days... But I adamantly insisted I did NOT want her over, as I had received some gifts for something (I don't remember what it was for - maybe Easter?) and I knew that if she came over I would be forced to grin and bear it while she got to use my new oil painting kit, etc, because that was how things always happened. For once, my mother gave in, (but not after calling me various unpleasant things.)

The next day (or perhaps the day after) we had plans to go on a fishing trip to a local lake.

The night before the trip, I woke up almost screaming in the middle of the night because I had an oddly disturbing dream. I dreamed that I was lying in a tiny dark space, just able to see the light shining under the door... being slowly crushed. I could see movement through the crack at the bottom of the door, and I knew there were people out there... But I couldn't move, and just lay there watching the colors of people walk by.

The next morning, on the way to the lake, we passed A's apartment complex. My mother suggested we stop by and invite her to come along.
I made a big deal out of it, and made it clear in no uncertain terms that I did NOT want to stop there, and did NOT want her to come.

But most of all, I just didn't want to stop. I had this... feeling... that if we stopped, we wouldn't end up going fishing after all. My mom decided not to stop due to space constraints in the car, and we continued on. I don't remember much of anything at the lake... A few flashes of being on the bank, under trees, etc.

That night, I couldn't sleep again. This time it was just a feeling of incredible, overwhelming horror. I woke up icy cold, covered in sweat, and too scared to do anything other than scream for my mother. I don't remember what the dream was, but it was something very unpleasant. No matter how I tried, I could not sleep in that room. I could feel SOMETHING from the corner of the room. Something around my bed, something really awful.

I slept on the sofa that night.

The next day, we came home in mid-afternoon from shopping to a message on the answering machine. A's mother had come home, taken a nap, and woke up to find A and the babysitter gone... The babysitter had taken her car.
I really didn't think too much of it. I figured that she had just gone to some friend's house and was late coming home. The babysitter lived there, so had probably just borrowed the car while the mom was sleeping off her days of partying.
That night, after finding that more was missing and still no sign of A, she was reported missing.
Again, I couldn't sleep. I could barely go into the bedroom in daylight - my sister's side was fine, but mine gave me this horrible sick feeling. I found that I couldn't even bring myself to open the closet door and get my clothing out.
My mother spent the majority of the day with A's mother.

The same happened again that night. Every night I would awaken after seeing something horrifying in a dream, and then have to scream for my mother to come and help me from the room as I was petrified on the bed unable to get out of the room myself. Things in the corner of the room scared me. The closet terrified me. (I have never been scared of closets, and certainly was not at 12) But even worse, I could hear things. I would wake up to hear giggling, to hear laughing... And I always woke up to what felt like someone making waves on the waterbed. The feeling that someone was there, just waiting for me to get out of bed to do *something* was overwhelming.

The following morning, my mother took me to my grandparent's, as my stepfather was throwing a fit about me being a baby and not sleeping in my own bed. Plus, it was getting pretty obvious that the babysitter had run off with A, and her mother needed support.

And then the next day, they found A. She'd been molested, beaten, then tossed in the closet and buried under bags and boxes of clothing. For some reason, the police hadn't checked thoroughly - even though the house supposedly smelled.
She was lying facing the bottom of the door... The head trauma had caused hemorrhaging that eventually led to her death, but she may have been alive for a while, lying there, crushed by boxes, one eye lined up with the gap at the bottom of the door.
The morning following that, her murderer was found hanging in a cemetery halfway across the country.

In later searches, they found that the guy had made various weapons - wiring knives to hammers and the like - and had probably been ready to kill anyone who'd stopped by. Possibly he had intended to kill A's mother when she came home. It was incredibly fortunate that my mother hadn't stopped there to ask if they wanted to come along. It would have been the morning after the murder.

I was never able to sleep in the bed again, no matter how many times I tried. I was never able to sleep in that bedroom.
Soon after, my mother left that husband and moved out. I opted to have the waterbed thrown away rather than risk having it bring something with it.
The ex-husband moved his bedroom into that room. He soon moved it out again as he could not sleep for hearing voices and waking up in fear. He said he woke up to hearing a little girl asking him to help her because she was still in the closet, then giggling and running away. It spooked him enough that he moved.

For me, this is the absolute true ghost story that erased any doubt in the supernatural from my mind. It makes me very uncomfortable to talk about. I am almost 100% certain of the progression of events as I was writing very detailed diary/essay entries at the time... Not to mention that other bits are indelibly burned into my memory.

Hindsight is 20/20... If only I hadn't made such a big deal about not wanting her to stay with us that week.
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I just told my girlfriend about some of the stories in this thread and after telling her of the weird man waltzing story she said casually "Well, yeah, that's like what happened to me." I've been compelled to post her story. I used to be sure all ghost stories were made up but she's told me of so many weird things that have happened to her that I don't always know what to think any more.
She grew up in a smallish Romanian town on the Danube, for those who don't know this is a wide river that flows from the German mountains out to the black sea. She's told me some sad stories of the past where people had tried to swim across the river after world war two to escape the country but either drowned from the currents or were caught by the police and shot. In fact, there had been a lot of troubles resulting in the death of innocent people in the region, post world war two, making this story freak me out that little bit more.
She had finished walking her date back to the army barracks at the edge of town and was heading back to her fathers apartment. She followed the path home along the river and was in a very calm mood, she described it as a mood in which nothing would phase her.
As she walked back she looked into the window of the post office which had been closed for a while as it was 3am. In the window was twenty faces, noses pressed against the window, staring out. She carried on walking, unphased. At this point obviously I was thinking, "Hmm, yeah, well that's not that odd, there probably were people in there"
She carried on walking further and she glanced to her left at the river to see a bunch of people swimming towards the shore. She turned her head forward and kept walking some more. She looked toward the river again, expecting for the people to be gone but they were still there. "How many people?" She shrugged, "One hundred?". All swimming towards the bank at 3am. She felt like stopping but was compelled not to break stride, she kept on walking.
As she got to the park she could see figures running and dancing in there. She didn't walk through, it's to the side of the path. She said they were wearing an odd assortment of clothes, some old fashioned, some white and semi translucent. They seemed like young people. Their dancing wasn't modern, it was waltz like. She carried on.
As she neared her fathers apartment she could see a figure moving in the distance, growing larger as she neared. She remained neutral, she wouldn't have had to pass him as her turn off was before him. As she neared she could make him out more clearly. He was wearing an old fashioned suit and was waltzing by himself. He wasn't going anywhere as his waltz took him around in circles, he was simply dancing by himself.
She got home and her father said "What happened?" as he could see the odd look on her face. She didn't really know where to start.
After our conversation she said two things of note. The first was she had kept calm as she kept thinking "It's good, there's nothing to worry about, there's something else, there's another side." The second... "Maybe it's some kind of phenomenon then, that waltzing"
All I can say is I was unnerved. She's gone out now but she'll be back in a few hours so I'll pass on any comments / questions.
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One of the grimmest tasks that confronted the workers who constructed Glasgow Subway was excavating human remains from the city’s medieval plague pits. The pits were impromptu mass graves, hastily prepared to cater for the sudden glut of deaths resulting from the outbreaks. One such pit was alleged to have been encountered whilst digging the stretch of tunnel that runs from West Street to Shields Road. Workers became concerned by the texture of the earth they were digging and alarmed by the regular discovery of bone fragments and teeth. Nonetheless, progress had to be made and soon a tunnel had been constructed, but workers continued to be suspicious of the area. They were right to be cautious, as it was this stretch of tunnel that gave rise to the story of the Clatter, an amorphous cloud-like spirit that would emerge from a wall, appearing first as a small hovering ball of light, no bigger than a golf ball, only to swell up, extending and enlarging suddenly, so as to engulf an entire area and anyone stood near. Its name derives from the noise it is supposed to produce, described by one worker as an intense clattering, like dozens of tin pans falling from a wall simultaneously and continuously.  Hapless workers who encountered the Clatter during their time in the tunnels reported seeing the anguished faces of many long deceased souls in the mists that suddenly surrounded them.
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From an early age I have experienced strange things on a regular basis but I think my scariest was when I was about 15 and staying at a friend's house one weekend. The house was just a bog standard council house from the fifties, it had neither central heating nor double glazing so when it was cold in there it was bloody cold. I had been given her brother's room as he was off at university and her parents being old fashioned the bed was made up with sheets and blankets. I remember not sleeping well because the bed was so cold, it wouldn't warm up no matter how much i tried to stretch out. The cold kept me awake for most of the night and I ended up going downstairs when it got light. I sat in the living room with my back to the door reading magazines. All of a sudden I was aware that there was someone standing right behind me. I was so scared that I couldn't turn around and I must have sat there trying to pretend it wasn't happening for at least half an hour. When I told my friend and her mother what had happened they just laughed and didn't take it seriously at all.

I've often wondered who or what I would have seem if I'd have turned around.
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No streetlights, just me and my torch. I was walking home after the end of a late shift at about 3am, along this little path that ran past some farm buildings and fields. I had my torch pointed ahead and a little to the ground so I didn't trip over anything, this was an old dirt path.
As I was walking along, my torch beam highlighted a pair of small, pale, shoeless human feet and legs, small like a young child, that ran right across the path in front of me, no more than 10 meters ahead, if that. This particular stretch of the path had a wire fence to the right and a stable to the left, and the legs that had run in front of me had gone from left to right. I stood frozen for a minute, as before I could raise my torch to reveal the rest of the figure, it had dashed towards the fence on the right. I called out something like 'hey, who's that?', but only silence greeted me.
I didn't hear anyone climbing, in fact it was dead silent, so, whatever had crossed my path must be standing up against that fence or further on down the path.
A little freaked out, I forced myself to continue walking forward, skirting around to the left and slowly turning my torch beam to where this person must have been standing, but...there was nothing there!
As I continued down the path, expecting some freaky ghost kid to jump out at any second, but I found nothing, not another soul on this lonely stretch of land.
When I think about that short moment when I saw those pale little legs run across the path in front of me, it still gives me chills. It was weird.
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Margaret Blackbourne of Rofft Hall was said to have been murdered in 1713 by her husband. She is often now referred to as “Lady Blackbird”.
The woman’s spirit was said to have been restless, the people believed she had become a vampire. This uneasy spectre was said to haunt the village of Marford, rapping upon the windows of the houses, begging to be let in.
Interestingly, the windows of the houses in the village dating back to this time, were all constructed with inbuilt crosses specifically designed to ward off Margaret’s uneasy ghost.
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I was in the Boyscouts when I was younger, the summer of '97 we were on our way back from a camp out. Our modest troop was in a 15 passenger van with a uhaul tow behind trailer. I was in the middle seat sitting up on my knees talking to the person sitting behind me (my cousin) when all of a sudden he just fell asleep as well as the 2 kids sitting next to him I looked down at the kid sitting next to me and he was also asleep then the van was upside down and I was thrown to the ceiling, it was rightside up again and I was slammed back into the seat, and lastly it was upside down again and this time it hit hard. I had glass in my mouth and felt like every bone in my body was broken, but I sat up after a minute and watched someone crawl out through the window so I followed them, when I got out I was in ankle deep water, we had landed in a ditch at the base of a hill that the road was on. I couldn't see the person I had followed out of the wreckage. I climbed the hill (losing my shoe in the process) and stood in 70 mph traffic and 2 cars slammed on their brakes to avoid me, a woman stepped out of the first car and was screaming her head off at me before she realized I was all tore up and there was a van in the ditch then she immediately ran back to her car and pulled out a car-phone. Later at the hospital numerous doctors and nurses asked me to repeat this story over and over and over again I had to tell this story. It wasn't until later that I found out everyone else was trapped in the van with broken bones and 1 kid died later on in the hospital. I was the only person who escaped under my own volition and I didn't have a scratch on me. I still don't know who or what it was I followed out of the broken window.
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A lad I used to work with told me (and he is not the sort to make this sort of thing up - very straight-laced and serious kind of guy) about a house his family used to live in in North Norfolk - I recall him saying it was an old manor house. Him and some mates were playing upstairs in the attic, kind of exploring the place as they were pretty newly moved in. While playing scalextric I think it was, something made one of the lads point to a little door in the corner of the attic. And when they all looked, they all saw the bolt on the door move sideways. There was apparently no way this could have been slid from the other side - and everybody in the house was up in the attic, apart from my friend's mum who was downstairs in the kitchen and a bit freaked out to have all these 10ish year old kids come hareing downstairs scared out of their wits. She actually called the police as she thought someone was in the house. The local policeman came, looked around, confirmed no-one else was in the house and then proceeded to tell her "You do know about this house don't you?" and apparently then related some of the history of the place, which apparently was somewhat odd.

Standard spooky stuff I suppose, but then my friend told me about other things that happened like some of the contents of the dining room consistently being found piled up in the fireplace of that room when they'd got back from a day out - I think this happened more than once; the dog being so petrified one day they came home to find it had crawled out of an upstairs bathroom window, and got down from a first floor roof to be found cowering in the corner of the garden, and - the final straw before they put the place back on the market - my friend remembering his dad getting up in the night twice as he could hear something (crying, I think) in his sisters bedroom but both times finding the girls asleep, then going in a third time followed by a huge commotion as his dad was carrying the girls out of the room and they all piled into a car and drove away from the house. My friends dad told him some years later that the third time he went into the bedroom, he found one of the girls awake saying that the little child outside the window wanted her to go and play with her. The window was on the first floor of the house, and had bars on it. The reason the bars were there was that a child had fallen out of that window many years before and died.

As I read this back to me, it looks rather fanciful, but I am relating it back as genuinely told to me by my old workmate, who I am sure was quite genuine in telling me this.
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You just reminded me of something that happened when I was a child. A friend's dad used to cycle to work through some old country lanes. These lanes were very narrow and just wide enough for a (UK) car to drive through and nothing more. One morning he was going through a stretch that had hedge on one side and a big fenced-in field on the other when he saw what looked like a white hooded figure next to the fence. It started to travel along by the fence and proceeded to keep pace with him, no matter how fast he went, for quite a distance before it vanished. He said it looked like an old monk's habit.
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Baron Hall, Beaumaris
Derelict and deserted, situated amid countryside. This house has a history of vampirism.
Apparently one of the young daughters from the ancestral Bulkeley family met a sinister death, and her spectre still roams the grounds.
The spectre is supposed to be a terrifying sight to behold, actually capable of scaring the observer to death. So much so that the area around is still unoccupied, and even to this day no one ventures near there at night.
Within the grounds there is the tomb, where the daughter’s body was interred; even today it is guarded with a sturdy door, barred, locked, and bolted. The ruins of the house have been vandalised, but this tomb remains strangely untouched. Why?!
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I recall an incident that happened 20 years ago to my mother. She decided to have a phone installed in her home as she was a diabetic and wanted to be able to be in close contact with me. A day or two after having her phone installed, she started receiving very weird phone calls. She got these calls at night, in the afternoon and in the morning; sometimes she would get these calls four to five times a day. The calls were from a little girl who mom said sounded like she was about four or five years old. The phone would ring, mom would answer it and the little girl would say, "Mamma! Mamma! I want my mamma!" My mom would try to ask her questions, but all the little girl would say was, "Mamma! Mamma! I want my mamma!" This went on for a week, and it freaked my mom out so bad that she had her phone disconnected and never had a phone after that.
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A friend and I were walking home on the train tracks one night. It had rained the night before and there were large puddles all around. After getting far enough that the street lights no longer illuminated our path, we heard splashing up ahead. We stopped and looked at each other, both expecting some sort of wild animal to scurry into the surrounding woods. Instead, we saw a skinny bald man crawling out of the water with a look of fear painted on his face. Half concerned, half terrified we stared at the man as he struggled towards us. We soon realized this man had no legs. His eyes were wide and his mouth was open, seemingly screaming although there was no sound. We quickly turned around without speaking a word and took the long way back to my house. I haven't seen this friend in about 7 years and always wonder if he remembers what we saw. I still pass by those same tracks regularly and I always think about that night.
I think we saw a ghost of someone that was killed by a train. Many people, even a family friend, had been struck and killed by trains in the years leading up to that night. I've never shared this story before.
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A female servant in the castle's heyday once saw her master's decapitated head roll across the floor in front of her, even though he was still alive and well in another part of the building. Exactly a year later, the Laird lost his head in the Tower of London. In more recent years, an old woman dressed in black has been seen on site, radiating an evil aura. August 1992 during a jazz festival held in the courtyard of Kilmarnock's Dean Castle. Margaret [pseudonym] along with other members of staff attended, but as a social event and they were not on duty. The whole courtyard was lit making the castle look quite impressive as it cast its eerie shadow over the proceedings. During the evening Margaret again saw a ragged old woman watching the festival from the walkway. She beckoned Margaret to follow and against her better judgment she foolishly did so. Margaret walked up the stairs and found a door to a colleagues room open. Stood next to the desk was the old woman smiling at her, and she cannot remember much about the evening after that. Margaret was told that she returned to the festival looking deathly white and ill, she had to be helped into a car and taken to the near-by conservation offices. There she spent most of the time in the bathroom being violently sick; it came out of her mouth with such speed that it reached the ceiling, everywhere was awash with vomit. Her friends told her that she had been moaning and whimpering like some kind of wild animal and all the time shouting, “Get out of me,” “Get away from me,” and “Leave me alone.” Heather, who stayed with her the whole time, said that at one point the sickness just seemed to ooze out of every pore of Margaret's body, “The bathroom was just covered in it.” They eventually managed to get Margaret home a little later on, and Heather stayed with her all night to keep an eye. In the morning the doctor had to be called as Margaret began to “hyperventilate.” The doctor could not explain the bluey black marks all over her body, “Like water marks on silk,” nor could he explain or figure out what exactly was ailing Margaret. She slowly recovered, however and promptly quit her job, vowing never to set foot in the castle again.
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Here's one that I forgot about until this thread popped up.
My parents host card nights on weekends at my house and were up exceptionally late one night (probably 2-3am). My mom asked me to take the dog out to go to the bathroom before bed.
While I was outside in my front yard with my dog, I noticed he was growling. My dog NEVER growls. Actually, I don't remember a time where he has growled since this night and this was easily 6-7 years ago. I look up and see a small silhouette under the street light across the street. Where I live is fairly rural so it was strange but I really didn't get a freaked out feeling.
The silhouette starts to walk over to us and my dog starts getting more and more uneasy. Right about when the person reaches my yard I could tell it was a little old lady. Even weirder. She walks up to me and by this point my dog is going crazy which is so weird because he LOVES people.
She then says "excuse me....is this the [insert my last name] residence?". I, for whatever reason, said yes. And she simply thanked me and walked away into the darkness.
Haven't seen her or heard anything about her since.
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Location: Maidstone (Kent) - Vinters Valley, path alongside reserve and woodland
Type: Unknown Ghost Type
Date / Time: 1 October 2003, 11.45pm
Further Comments: Walking home along a dark woodland path, near the Vinters Valley nature reserve, this witness observed the upper torso of a man in clothing that could have dated from the early nineteenth century, with long tied back blonde hair. There were no visible features, but the witness said that the ghost 'moved in a grotesque puppet way'. Other than having no visible legs, the witness also observed the entity had a large black hole where his heart should have been. The entity crossed the path from left to right, vanishing into a fence.
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One night, two or three summers ago my cousin drove my brother and I out to Ramsey cemetery in Effingham, Illinois. The cemetery is hidden back off the county roads that run through the cornfields down a pitch-black path that is only wide enough for one car, and winds over a sequence of hills that are forested with very old, thick oaks. The tiny cemetery is at the top of the last hill on this path. Well, we turned down this absolutely dark path and climbed over and scooted down one or two hills, the only source of light anywhere near being our car. When we reached the bottom of one of the hills, I saw something that I am now struggling to describe. Sitting in the passenger seat of this low-riding sedan, I noticed a flash of light emanating from the trees right next to me on the side of the path. I did a double-take out the passenger window, and then saw what appeared to be a not-entirely-formed, translucent and glowing yellow-white long-sleeved shirt with an old-style frilled collar from the upper chest to the neck. It was descending toward us in the car, floating down from the limbs of one of the trees, and the apparition was flailing its own limbs insanely at us, which horrified me. My cousin did not look to see this and drove past, continuing to the cemetery and parked the car. I was terrified, wanting to leave, and was asking both my brother and cousin if they had seen the crazy glowing floating half see-through shirt flailing its arms everywhere that I had just seen. My brother said I drew his attention to it as I saw it and caught a later glance at it from the backseat, and he described the same thing. My cousin seemed to realize that he had indeed noticed a light come from the side of the car. I then promptly forced my cousin to drive us right on out of there.
Weirdest thing I've ever seen. Still freaked out by it. What the fuck, man?
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The mid-17th Century bore witness to the infamous “European Witch Craze“, a period of frenzied witchcraft accusations, prosecutions and executions, which are thought to have claimed the lives of up to one hundred thousand men, women and children across the continent. Chester did not escape this craze. In 1656, three women were accused of consorting with various demons and evil spirits and using black magic to bring about the demise of their rivals and enemies. Ellen Beach, Anne Osboston and Anne Thornton were all prosecuted successfully and were executed at Gallows Hill on the same day.
In 1898, Michael Goble, a local historian, began investigating and researching the story of the Boughton witches. He is reputed to have claimed that during the course of his research he was visited by the spirits of three demented women,  who threatened to bring forth the devil should the historian not pledge to abandon his investigation immediately. Undaunted, Michael Goble continued to pursue his project, but never saw it finished. He died in 1902, whilst visiting Gallows Hill.
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The Tall Man of Quarry Road occupies a special place in my canon of Winchester ghosts stories. The entity is reported to haunt a private dwelling in Winchester and is described as being unusually spiteful and malevolent. One story from the 1960s tells of the Tall Man manifesting in front of a mother and her child and proceeding to push the five year old girl down a flight of fifteen stairs. The unfortunate child survived the ordeal, but was left with a broken leg. The property has been subjected to a number of exorcisms in recent times.
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When I was a young kid, my parents took me to a traveling children's science museum. They had lots of cool exhibits designed to illustrate scientific principles in simple, interactive ways. Well, I think they were probably pretty cool, but honestly I don't remember most of them at all.
Except one.
The one exhibit involved standing in a circular space enclosed by a heavy curtain or something similar. You stood there and then the curtain began to spin around you. I have no clue now what idea this was supposed to demonstrate -- maybe the inside of a tornado? -- but I remember vividly what happened when I stepped out. Everything was backwards.
In other words, things I expected to be on my left were now on my right. The exhibit itself was on the opposite side of the room from where I remembered it. It was like I had crossed over into some mirror world, where everything was the same except reversed. I was freaked out! Naturally my parents saw no changes in the world and I was not able to express very clearly what had happened (I'm still struggling with it today).
Anyway, the strange sensation of reversal pretty much continued throughout the day, until eventually I just got used to it and accepted it as the new normal.
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I got given a little block of wood and a small hammer with mini nails and such for a present when I only little. One day I was mucking around with it in the the play room when one of the nails stood on end, floated on to the muscle part at the base of may thumb and forefinger and started forcing its way inside my hand as I was clawing at it! Of course it had to be a dream but the nail left a little freckle behind where it went in that I still have :/
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In 1993, Brian Lowe, a local to the area, was driving along Platt Lane, a small road that ran adjacent to the former site of the mine. He suddenly became aware of dozens and dozens of eyes staring at him from the roadside darkness. Startled, he accelerated quickly to get away away from the strange shadowy hoard, but as he did so, he heard a loud bang. Initially he thought he had blown-out a tyre, but he soon realised that the car was still functioning normally, so continued to speed away.
When Brian reached his end destination, he was greeted by a terrified friend, who told him that an explosion had been reported locally, near Platt Lane. Apparently scores of witnesses had seen a tremendous flash of light, followed by a rumbling boom. The area was soon closed-off to the public, but despite an extensive search, no evidence of any disturbance was found.
These events precipitated a 17-year period of strange, unexplainable events in the area surrounding the former Pretoria Pit. People would report seeing bodies laying in the roadside, as well as disfigured, limping forms stumbling from the bushes and darkness. Sightings were often accompanied by an unexplained stench (described as being like burned meat), plus the reoccurring sound of a mystery explosion. Rumours of a mass haunting soon spread throughout the local community and many people opted to avoid the area altogether.
When a local policeman reported seeing a severed arm dangling from a tree, only for it to disappear before his eyes, a group of locals decided to act in order to bring the paranormal activity into abeyance once and for all. Believing that the spirits of the deceased disaster victims had become unsettled by the neglect of their memory, a fund was established to pay for the construction of a permanent memorial. When the memorial was finally completed, a service was held in memory of those killed and their monument, etched with the names of each of the deceased, was sanctified by a local priest. Subsequently, no further reports of ghostly activity were made.
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Contained within the Cathedrals ground was an area known colloquially as “Temporary Angel”, which was a small half-acre island of  non-consecrated land. Originally it was used by market traders, but by the 16th Century it had been built on. By the 19th Century it was indistinguishable from the rest of the urban sprawl which had gradually crept on to the consecrated ground
In the 1990s redevelopment of derelict buildings uncovered a secret chamber containing five stone tombs. The chamber, which was 8 feet beneath modern street level, had been sealed off to the outside world for 900 years. The site of the chamber roughly correlated with the non-consecrated land known as “Temporary Angel”.
Unusually, the four tombs were welded shut and girdled with a metal cage. They were positioned in a strange arrangement, with four bunched together in the middle of the chamber and one alone in the corner. When the tombs were eventually opened, they contained no traces of human remains. The secret tombs were empty and so far the mystery as to their existence has not be solved.
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My dad had an experience which involved several other witnesses... and a bus.

He is considerably older than my mum and served in WW2. Sometime in the early years of the war he was riding a bus to his home high up in the White Peak. It was late at night and pitch dark. There were less than half a dozen other passengers, and, of course, the driver.

At one point on their route the bus had to negotiate a steep hill with a hairpin bend which leads down into to a longish and very straight section of road. This area is notorious for accidents - which is probably due to the nature of the road - but also has a headless horseman tale associated with it.

Anyway, just as the bus levels out onto the straight section my dad and the rest of the passengers see a large, white, apparently solid object appear in front of the bus and brace themselves for a collision. There's a shout from the bus-driver and an almighty 'thump' as the object is struck by the bus.

The driver stops and everyone looks at my dad (a not always fortunate by-product of wearing a uniform is that people appear to think that you will know what to do in any given situation) who gets out of the bus followed by the other passengers and checks out the road and the verge. There's nothing there so they spread out and check the near edges of the fields. Still nothing.

At this point I should point out that my dad and the others riding the bus had no clear idea of what it is they had seen, but, on being questioned, the very shaken bus-driver said he thought it was a woman.

The following day police and locals searched the area and my dad thinks that a local army unit also helped, but nothing was ever found.

At the time the Peak was fairly hardscrabble farm country and those on the bus would have been, like him, pragmatic and sober highlanders, not at all prone to histrionics. It's probably also worth pointing out that my dad was a trained observer.

A couple of points: I'd initially thought that the 'thump' of the object hitting the bus might have been a misremembering of the jolt caused by the bus-driver hastily applying the brakes, however my dad is adamant that the two events were separate. Everyone on the bus - albeit there were very few - saw the object. Given the size of the thing seen by the passengers, if it was, as the driver stated, a woman, then she was several feet in the air before the bus hit her.
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Location: Wombwell - Low Valley Arms public house
Type: Haunting Manifestation
Date / Time: April 2006
Further Comments: Roger Froggatt, the landlord of this pub, was left terrified after encountering a phantom lady dressed in white in the ladies toilet after investigating what he believed was a break in during the early hours of the morning. He described the figure as an elderly woman with her cheek and jaw structure missing.
The Low Valley Arms , Wombwell, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, England
Press HD
In 2006 Paranormal investigator Darren went to the Low Valley Arms in Wombwell when he heard that landlord Roger Froggatt had confronted a ghostly woman in white with half her face missing - and police backed up his story.
Roger, aged 49, said he felt fear like never before, as he was hunting for what he feared was a burglar in the early hours.
He came face-to-face with a grotesquely disfigured woman dressed in white.
Roger was speechless with shock and his wife Kathryn called the police, believing he had confronted an intruder.
Officers found no signs of entry, although the alarms had been tripped and all the TVs had been turned on.
Officers were left shaken and baffled by a toilet in the ladies, repeatedly flushing by itself.
Darren, who runs Steel City Ghost Tours, said: "Usually I wouldn't be interested. There are a lot of pubs that have their own ghosts. But the flushing of the toilets witnessed by two police officers makes it.
"I know Roger saw something and the police back up his story. This is not made up.
"It is one of the first times I have known an apparition do something physical. This is not some half-asleep person who has had a dream. It's one of the best, if not the best, paranormal incidents I have heard of.
"With the building being refurbished the owners have been through a stressful period. The spirit has picked up on it and followed the track of it and manifested itself in the toilet."
Darren spent yesterday performing a meditation in the toilet and came up with a name for the lady: Mary Quantrill.
He claimed she was an early 19th century traveller, murdered by a man with a hoe, on or near the site of the pub.
Kathryn said a police officer asked; 'Is your toilet supposed to flush itself on its own?'
The handle was going up and down of its own accord, and the bowl filling and overflowing. Officers could not find an explanation. It went on until 5am.
Kathryn said: "The police wanted to call an ambulance for Roger because he was in deep shock. They said they'd never seen anyone so scared.
"But they looked a bit shaken themselves after we witnessed the toilet flushing itself. I even lifted the lid on the cistern but there was nothing to see. I didn't feel too scared because I was with two police officers."
It is the culmination of a string of spooky incidents in their year in the pub. Barrels have been heard moving in the cellar, bottles have smashed, the fridge defrosted while switched on and the gas pressure has inexplicably failed several times. There are regular cold spots, mostly in the toilets.
Roger, a former steel erector, had been sceptical about ghosts until he faced with one.
Wringing his hands, he said: "I'm a level-headed man and nothing like this has ever happened to me before. This was the single most terrifying experience of my life."
A police spokesman said: "Officers saw the toilet flushing but could not explain it."
To date the pub is closed and for sale unless you know different ?
Landlord Roger Froggatt and his wife Kathryn were woken by the alarm at the Low Valley Arms, near Barnsley, South Yorkshire in the early hours of the morning.

As he investigated what he thought might be an intruder he was confronted by a woman wearing a long white gown in the ladies lavatory of the pub in Darfield.

But what left 55-year-old Mr Froggatt in a state of complete shock was her face - half of which was missing.

Mrs Froggatt, 49, who was just behind her husband before he went into the toilets, said she was so concerned about what her husband had experienced she called the police.

"He was in total shock," she said. "He was shaking, he was white and he wouldn't move.

"He just kept saying 'face, face, it's horrible, it's horrible'.

"I was so worried about what he might have seen I rang the police there and then, sitting on the stairs."

But Mrs Froggatt said the bizarre goings on, which began when the couple first came downstairs to find all the televisions on in the bar, continued when the police arrived.

She said one officer went into the ladies and although the figure of the woman had gone, the toilets began to flush themselves.

Mrs Froggatt and a second officer went in and the flushing continued.

"The handles were going up and down and there was water everywhere," she said.

The landlady said she and her husband had moved into the pub a year ago and although there had been rumours of things moving around the cellar, nothing had been seen before.

A South Yorkshire Police spokesman confirmed officers were called to the pub at 1.35am yesterday.

He said a search of the property revealed a small window was open but it was "far too small for any entry to be gained."

The spokesman also confirmed that the toilets in the ladies flushed themselves when the officers went in.
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So the story goes that in the 18th century there was evidently not an abundance of eligible women in New Orleans for the French colonists to marry and populate their corner of the New World. Boats of young virtuous women from France were selected, or applied, to be shipped over for marriage. When they departed they took all their possessions in large luggage boxes known as casquettes - caskets.

On arrival, after lengthy time at sea below deck, they disembarked looking gaunt, pale and in some cases vomiting blood. When their procession was followed by the unloading of their coffin-esque luggage rumours swept New Orleans that they were vampires - or the wives of European vampires who arrived in the caskets.

The women were allegedly holed up with the nuns in the Ursuline Convent until they were too be married of and legend states they are still there on the third floor of the building - which is conveniently closed to the public and has its shutters closed at all times…

According to the story two paranormal investigators attempted to get into the Convent to do some snooping in 1978 but were found dead on the lawn.
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The parish of Ramsden Crays can be found on the A129 just west of Wickford. Beside the road is Crays Hill (TQ714922 area) where, so the stories say, the village gallows once stood. The spot is said to be haunted by a ghostly boy all in white.

Leading west off the A129 is Kingsley Lane, which now peters out into a footpath, but before it was subsumed into the Southend Arterial Road, used to continue as far as Kingsley Wood (once known locally as Shrieking Boy's Wood). Sometime in the 19th century, it’s said that a ploughman (or other farm worker) was working with a boy in the fields around here when the two got into a fierce argument, the man killed the boy, and buried him in secret. From that point on, horrible screams would be heard from the wood, which only ceased when the man drunkenly confessed his crime while at the White Hart inn.

Another version puts the incident a century earlier, with a woodsman and his helper lad working in a copse at the end of Kingsley Lane (TQ795896 area). When the boy wouldn’t work hard enough, the man sliced his head off, then hid the rest of him in the hollow trunk of a tree. Although the man told his neighbours the boy had run away, he was haunted by the deed (and the lad’s ghost), and took to habitual drunkenness. Meanwhile, the apparition of the dead boy began to sit on a gate at the entrance to the wood, shrieking when anyone approached.
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At our fraternity house, there's a cat that wont die. It's rarely seen, but I think she lives mostly in the crawlspace and basement. Her name is Fluffy, and Fluffy won't die. Fluffy was brought to the house in the early 80's for pest control and whatnot, wearing a leather collar with a tag, and still looks exactly the same, according to alumni that visit and see her. It's unexplainable. The cat didn't bring up offspring and put the collar on them. It's just a mean, creepy, silent 35 year old cat.
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This probably doesn't belong here but fuck it, it's not too long.
We had this guest room in my old house that was tucked away in the corner of our bottom floor. No one ever used it. Occasionally I would have this dream of the closet in that room having a hole in the wall which lead to a staircase which lead to another house (a very creepy house). Anyway, my mom had decorated this room with dolls making it that much creepier. My room upstairs was being painted and I was told to sleep in the doll room. I literally couldn't do it, it was the most eerie feeling of my life. I slept on the floor in our living room that night instead. Now, I never really thought much of it until we played a joke on my friend one time and nudged him into that room and locked the door. He absolutely flipped out, and I mean blood curdling screams like a 5 yr old girl. We opened the door and he ran out crying. We had never told him anything about it being "haunted" or anything. Never went anywhere near that room ever again. If I had to use the bathroom when I was downstairs I'd always go up 2 stories to do so. We eventually moved but FUCK THAT ROOM. He didn't say anything. We never said anything before we pushed him in there though. I'm telling you the screams he let out were terrifying. It was almost as if he was being ripped apart. He was in high school and he came out of there like a child. He was banging on that door like a bear was in there with him. I feel bad to this day for doing that to him but I still wonder what made him react like that. He was a pretty calm person
Edit: I'm sure people have felt this way before about a room. Everybody I had over whether I had told them or not came back to me saying "hey man that room is creepy". Door could've been closed even they just knew walking past it something wasn't right. Before I quit going near it, I used to face it and back away from it. It was like something out of the Conjuring. My experience when about to sleep in there was just that the dolls looked at you. And I don't mean the eyes were directed towards you, it felt as if they had their heads cocked to the side like "you're new here". It was fucking terrifying.
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I've only seen it a couple of times and could just be as loony as a toon, but I've seen a strange humanoid in my current home. It looks like a pale human with lots of burns, but the most shocking feature to me is that there's nothing from about the waist down except torn flesh and stuff. First time I saw it was when I was leaving the bathroom, it was dragging itself down the hallway into my room. I followed it in, but couldn't find it anywhere. Dismissed it as my eyes playing tricks on me or something, though I'd seen it quite clearly. Second time was a while later when I fell asleep in my room with my tv on and woke up to the feeling of being watched. It was holding itself up on the edge of the bed and was just staring at me. Funny thing is, I didn't feel scared...I was mostly just confused and stared back for a bit before I fell back to sleep or something. Could have been a hallucination or dream, but I don't know. Even though I wasn't scared at the time, it's somewhat disturbing to think that I didn't even try to get away or anything...
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I was ice fishing with my friend and we got caught in a snowstorm. We were on Silver Lake in west Michigan, if you've heard of the dunes there.
Well anyway, to get back, we had to go across the lake. It was a straight line, and I have walked the route plenty of times to know where the truck is. I was to the left of him with the lantern and he was pulling the sled with gear, switching every other minute or so. It's about a 30 minute walk and visibility is very poor. In the early part of the walk, I stepped in a hidden hole that we drilled earlier and twisted my ankle, so I laid down for a second on a break.
Then, after that, about halfway through I suddenly get really dizzy. Then a burning sensation in my legs. And then I was right where we were fishing before we left with my buddy next to me just like that. The sled was there too. But the freakiest part was that our tracks out were still there, but no sign of us coming back. You could see where we switched too, so it was for sure us. Not that there was anyone else crazy enough to be out there that night. We looked at each other wide eyed and I recounted the burning and dizziness. We sheepishly followed the trail. I came across the hole I stepped in and laid down by. You could see the tracks. When we reached where we got rubber banded, our tracks just simply stopped. We took off scared AF to my truck. That's when I checked the time. We decided to pack up and leave at 7:30pm. It takes us a total of 40 minutes usually to get back to the truck. The time was 8:30 pm.
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TLDR: My brother and I saw letters spelling "Help" float to the surface a lake and then sink back down.
Long form: While I was growing up, my family would visit the same lake every year for week every summer. As we got older, we would visit a large rock we called "the cliffs", and jump off. The rock was only 15 feet tall at the highest point, but the water was really deep. When we got older, we would jump in and try to touch the bottom, but we never could.
When my brother and I were in our teens we took kayaks out to the cliffs to jump on our own. We jumped off several times, and when we got too cold we took a break on the top of the cliffs to warm up in the sun. As we were sitting there, we noticed a white shape in the water, floating towards the surface. It was a letter: "H". Eventually it sank back into the water and we lost sight of it. Before we could look away or say anything, another shape was floating upwards. It was the letter "E". Eventually, it too sank below, but it was soon followed by two more letters: "L" and "P". We didn't jump in after that. We stood up and left without saying a word. We never mentioned it to anyone, and I forgot it even happened after a while.
Several years ago I was working as a camp counselor and I told this story as a ghost story. I had forgotten about it, and I texted my brother to see if I hadn't just made it up completely. I asked him if he remembered the time we went to the jumping cliffs alone and saw something in the water. He replied yes, that he did remember. I asked him what it was and his reply was: "letters. they spelled "HELP".
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I was 10, waiting for the dentist. You know the border of a glass table? It's kinda green. I was staring very close to it and I swear I saw people inside there. Black silhouettes moving, it was an Indian tribe. They were just living their lives.
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Ah, about time I get to talk about this again!
My family lives in a super rural part of east Tennessee, and we have a family homestead that's been passed down for generations called the Turley House. Legend in the family has it that it was a civil war hospital, which I can totally see because it's absolutely ancient and creepy. We also have a legend in the family that we're all haunted by a demon/spirit/god-knows-what called Wool Eyes. He's so prominent in our family's history that he's just a fact of life at this point, so it's not unusual to hear somebody say something like, "Oh look, Wool Eyes is at it again. He must be upset".
One of the creepy experiences I had growing up here is the never ending rosebush. There were two rosebushes on the corner of the house that weren't very big. I have some distinct memories of playing around them and getting absolutely batshit lost in the rosebushes, running in circles for hours and hours at a time. It was sort of like that scene in Spirited Away when Chihiro and Haku are running through the flower hedges. Eventually I would find my way out, but it would be hours later and my mom would be hella angry that I was gone for so long. I never really thought much of it because kid logic, but I asked my mom about it years later and she said that all the kids in the family have stories about getting lost in the same spot. Everybody always blamed it on Wool Eyes, saying he was just having fun messing around. Wish I could go back and explore the house some. Its got some crazy stories through the years.
Wool Eyes is a pretty cool legend. Everyone claims to have had some interaction with him before in one way or another. When I was little, I remember being pushed on the porch swing by a guy in a big coat, but I could never focus on what he looked like. I just knew he was there. I also remember seeing him upstairs and got spooked because I wasn't allowed up there.
My parents have had worse encounters. My mom talks about him watching her sleep at night and pushing her friend down the staircase and breaking her arm. Apparently there was also one time he imitated a family member out in the back field and chased her back to the house where the real person was waiting. When my parents were dating Dad said he spent the night there once and came down the stairs to get water and there was a man in a wool trenchcoat and a large hat sitting at the table. He looked up at him and said, "This isn't your fucking house. You have five seconds to leave." And then he got up and went into the basement. Dad told me he left my mom there and all his clothes and drove away that instant lol He hasn't been since, won't even drive down the road the house is on.
Apparently he also likes to pick favorites and takes care of them. My deceased grandfather was supposedly one of his favorites and when we brought his casket back for the wake (really random old tradition) the house was in a total uproar. Power outages, storms, no cell service, things breaking, it was intense. He's never hurt me either, just messed around like with the rose bush incident and popped the lock on the basement door when my uncle locked me down there as a practical joke. I also have some crazy intense luck when it comes to life threatening situations, so everyone jokes he's keeping me safe.
Rumor has it my great grandmother struck a deal with him and that's why he never bothered her. When she died nobody wanted the house, but her son Harold took it. He's recently been missing and now the house is up for grabs again, so I guess you can think what you will on that one since nobody really knows what happened to him.
Personally I'd love to get my hands on that house and check out Wool Eyes now that I' m an adult but my mom swore she'd beat me to death if I tried to live there lol Still, at some point I want to sneak back out there and explore the house and finally get up to the 2nd and 3rd floors that I was banned from as a little kid.
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Not sure if this counts.
I was driving down the highway, about to make a right at a redlight. No one next to me. As I am about to turn I hear crushing metal, terrible terrible noises, I look over and it looks as if this red car drove into a wall. There was nothing even near him. His front end was completely smashed in. Like there was an invisible wall. I got out of the car to help the person (It was lightly smoking, or it could have just been steam) and no one was in the car.
Weirdest thing that ever happened to me, no one believes me (I wouldn't either) and I'm starting to believe I made it up, even though deep down I didn't.
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This is unexplained, and probably just coincidence, but I still never mention it to my co-workers.
I spent some time as a homicide investigator. We would respond to all apparent suicides and investigate them just to make sure it wasn't a homicide. Usually we determined a motive for suicide and found a note or other indicator that the person killed themselves (one guy just taped a note to his chest that said "Happy now bitch?" and made sure his wife found him after he hanged himself).
But occasionally you get a case where all forensic evidence indicates that the person killed themselves, but there's no note and no discernable reason why this person would be suicidal. These are people in good health with decent careers and a seemingly happy family life. But who knows what's really going on with someone?
Here's the part that freaks me out. I've worked maybe ten suicides like this. The last three before I left homicide all had the same thing at the scene. These was a little decorative wicker lighthouse at each location. It was the same lighthouse, same design and painted white and blue. It stuck out to me the first time because it was by the bed where the body was, but two weeks later I saw the same damn lighthouse on another suicide and even pointed out the coincidence to a patrol officer.
A few months later I go on another suicide and I see that same wicker lighthouse. That's when it clicks that it's always been unexplained suicides. I go back and look at crime scene photos from every suicide I've worked. In two of them I see what could be the wicker lighthouse, but the angle is off and there's too much junk around to say for sure.
I dunno. I thought it was creepy as hell but I transferred a couple of months later and I let it go.
Edit: Well that got more of a response than I was anticipating. To answer the question of "was it a serial killer" I very much doubt it. These were clearly suicides, most of which had no feasible alternative explanation. We work every suicide as if it were a homicide. An apparent suicide is almost always a suicide, but we err on the side of caution.
Also, while serial killers are actually more common than most people think, they rarely leave calling cards or anything like you see in movies. It's usually some fucked up dude that has a particular taste.
I really do think it was an odd coincidence, but it was still pretty fuckin creepy.
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When I was about 7 or 8 years old there was this creek in the middle of the forest behind my house that I used to play at all the time. One side of the creek was bordered by a dirt wall about 5 feet high. I used to jump over the creek from one side to the other as it was fun to pretend like I knew parkour.
Then one day I went out to the creek and lying in the middle of it was a football. Now, I want to mention an important detail. The creek's depth made it so that the top half of the football stuck out of the water. The top half was completely dry. So it wasn't like the ball just rolled into the creek. It was placed there. Where things started to get really weird was written on top of the football in black permanent marker was "(My first name) Jumps" and underneath that phrase was a phone number. To make that clear, so if my name was Johnny it would have said "Johnny Jumps" with a phone number written underneath it.
I picked up the football and went home, obviously very confused and kind of scared. Whoever put that ball there had been watching me. They placed it directly where I would jump over the creek when I would play by myself. I grabbed the cordless phone and called the number. It was the number to Homeland Security. Yeah. Fucking Homeland Security. The fucking number that you call when you think a terrorist attack is about to go down. It was basically Super 911, especially seeing how this was only a few years after 9/11. I quickly tried to explain my situation to the lady on the phone and she told me it was ok and to not call the number again.
I instantly ran and told my mom what had just happened, and she was just as confused as I was. My dad (divorced parents) came over later that evening to drop something off and I told him what happened. He asked me to give him the football and he said he was going to look into it. I gave it to him and he left a few minutes later.
Over the next few days I kept asking him if he ever figured anything out and he would give me vague answers or try to dodge the question. This turned into a few weeks of me asking which then turned into a few months, which he then started acting like he didn't know what I was talking about. That was around ten years ago and if I ask him about it now, he says that he has zero memory of this ever happening. He doesn't remember the football at all. My mom does, but vaguely.
To this day I have absolutely ZERO idea who was watching me, why they put a football in the creek, why they put "(My Name) Jumps" on the football, and I especially have no fucking idea why they put the number to homeland security on the ball. I never really thought much of this incident until I was older and realized how fucking creepy this whole thing was. I continued to live by that creek for a few more years and continued to play and jump over the creek until I moved away. All of my neighbors were very friendly (white suburban, upper middle class neighborhood) and I knew them all personally. None of them were ever creepy to me and nothing else strange ever happened in the 12 years that I lived there.
EDIT: Just to make some clarifications. One detail that I did fail to mention was about the condition of the ball. It was brand new. Whoever put it there had gone to the store and bought the football. My dad was actually in the Air Force 35 years ago but it was a standard position. He wasn't a spy or anything like that. He flew bomber planes. I strongly doubt that the Russians or Iranians of his time somehow found me and chose a football as a way of secretly contacting the U.S government. I DO NOT think it could have been an older kid/teenager messing with me as there were no teenagers in my neighborhood. I was the oldest kid. It wasn't the type of neighborhood that other kids from other parts of town would sneak into and play in. It was a pretty private place where every neighbor knew each other by first name and there were weekly BBQ's and block parties. I didn't have any neighbors that disliked my family nor did I have any kids in my neighborhood who disliked me.
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Yes! But anytime I ever think I had a memory like this I always ask my twin sister. we basically spent every waking moment of our childhood together, and nine times out of ten she can tell me if what I think happened, happened- or if it was a dream. (For example: I remember being at my grandparents house before the two of us were old enough to speak, yet I remember talking fluently with her about our grand plan to sneak out of our cribs and to steal our grandpas dentures... asked her about it and she remembered down to how we decided we were going to get out of our crib)
One particular memory her and I both vividly remember was from the first house we lived in. It was an older house with two floors and a kooky floor plan. in my sister and I’s bedroom there was this small door that was just for storage that connected to the attic that was locked with a little sliding lock. (the attic was on the same floor, just a couple of unfinished rooms room and a locked door over) I vividly remember for months when she and I were fairly young, that after our parents had put us to sleep we would go crawl into that storage space just until the floor wasn’t as clean (the floor from our room went into the storage space a little and it was where that ended) and talking into the dark with someone!
Now I know that perhaps I dreamed this and then when I told my twin she fabricated memories to go along with it (?) but when I asked her I made sure to ask in a way that didn’t directly lead to the guy in the storage space (something along the lines of “hey remember our old bedroom at so and so?”) and she mentioned how we had bunk beds and paused... then asked me about talking to that guy in the storage space at night! Still creeps me out to think about considering I had convinced myself that I was dreaming it up for all these years until then.
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Went for a midnight walk with my bf and dog about 4 years ago after we moved to a new apartment. We went walking around a really popular lake but this was like 12:30 or 1 am. Anyway we get near the end of the walking path and we pass a senior couple slowly walking past. Okay, weird they should be asleep they're so old. Then we continue walking and my dog stops at a park bench to pee and there's a fucking old man sitting there silently. Holy christ! spooky, come on dog. We walk a little bit further and I swear my memory is not cloudy here but there's got to be a dozen or more old people just standing and slowly walking around this part of the path! Some are sitting and some are in couples. But nobody is making a sound My boyfriend and I kind of drag each other and the dog through the mess of old people and briskly gtfo of there. I contacted the local folklore ghost guy but he said he hasn't heard anything about that area. There's no old folks home in that part of town and certainly no seniors home is going to sponser a senior's walk on the lake at 1 in the fucking morning. Still freaks me out.
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Woke up one night to see my mom looking into my room watching me sleep. Asked her what she wanted and she just shut my door.
Took a few minutes for my sleep-addled brain to realize I was 25 years old and living on my own at the time. What followed was a thorough search by a naked sleepy man holding a chopping knife looking for whoever was in his apartment.
All the doors were locked, all the windows were locked, and no one else was there.

I've had something similar happen too, but as a kid - had my mom briefly peek in my room to check on me like parents do. But as she closed the door she left it open about an inch and just stared, I could see her silhouette in the hallway, dark hand holding the doorknob.
Proceeded to stare until the sun came up, 3-4 hours. I was awake and freaked out the whole time. I eventually nodded off and awoke to the door still cracked, but hallway empty.
It wasn't until later in life that I shifted from thinking, "boy that time my mom hung out in the dark hallway for 4 hours and stared at me was sure weird!" to "maybe something wicked was afoot."
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The following event is something that happened to a personal friend of mine in the state of California, USA, and, as I was watching some of her children on the night of the occurrence, I took the account and drawing the same night. You'll have to forgive me for preserving her privacy.
        On October 8, 2016, Mrs. S had spent the day with half her kids at a boating event in the San Francisco area; they were watching the Blue Angels fly, among other cool things. I was babysitting her other kids that day... so when she got home, I immediately made note of what occurred to her as she had driven back.
        The group had arrived back to the town of Petaluma around 7:30PM, after it had become dark. Part of their route through town took them past the Clover Stornetta Dairy building near the north end of Lakeville Highway... and as they crossed over the Petaluma River that runs under the road in that area, Mrs. S saw out of the corner of her eye a child sitting in one of the seats behind her where no one should have been. Assuming her youngest daughter in the car had switched seats while she was driving, Mrs. S turned to tell her to get back in the right seat.
        Only it wasn't one of her children. And the child wasn't fully there.
        All that was directly visible was from about the shoulders up of what she took to be an about three-year-old girl; the rest of the body simply appeared as a shadowy area under the head. She sat like she was just going along for a ride with the other kids. She had a round, cherubic face, and very wispy hair; her eyes were sunken in, dark, and seemingly unseeing... though she did turn her head to look straight at Mrs. S when she was noticed.  The small figure appeared to have a patterned shirt or dress visible around the neck and shoulder areas, featuring a repeating patterns of red flowers and blue spots, with a white collar. She was wet, and her shirt and face had "very very green gunk moss" on them, more pronounced to the left side of the face, and there was mud in her hair. Overall, the impression Mrs. S had was that the girl had drowned and been underwater for a very long time.
        Now Mrs. S doesn't tend to react to matters like this in a normal way; she's seen too much crap to be unnerved by a straight forward ghostly apparition. Nevertheless, she felt herself develop goosebumps and she could "feel them like they were crawling up" her body. As she attempted to explain to her kids in the car what she was seeing -- and it became clear she was the only one seeing it -- the girl faded away. Her oldest son, sitting in the front passenger seat and seeing the goosebumps on his mother's arm, told her to just pull over and park and get out of the car for a moment because he was worried she wasn't in good enough shape to drive safely... and, later on, she basically agreed with that assessment.
        About fifteen minutes later, with Mrs. S home and describing this to me as she sketched the figure above, she thought a little more carefully about what she had seen. Nothing in the clothing on the girl or the style of hair she could see gave a clue as to a time period that the ghostly child might have been associated with in life. Given they had spent the day on the ocean, and that the girl appeared as they were crossing a river implies someone who drowned at one of those two locations... but that's not enough to track much down. So, assuming the girl was in fact a ghost, it's unlikely the identity of the child will ever be known.
        Overall, Mrs. S felt the girl was just very, very sad... "her sadness seemed to be a combo of me noticing her and that she was lost and needed to be seen. To be made aware that she was something."
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This occurrence happened to my friend Collin P. and myself John G. in about 1959. At the time we were about 13 and still attending Hagley RC High School. The time was about 8.00 - 8.30 PM, the month I no longer remember but it was in the Northern Hemisphere Autumn - Winter because it was dark quite early.

The local town was Kidderminster in the County of Worcestershire, roughly in the middle of England. The area was Birchen Coppice, a housing estate owned by the local council, it was then, a respectable area as it was only probably 8 years old, I believe the area is now more of a slum but I haven't been there in 33 years as we moved in the middle '60's and then I re-located to Australia in '67.

A bit of geography is needed here so;

The street we lived in was Kinver Ave, the rear of our houses backed onto undeveloped bushland which went on into some pretty, unspoiled countryside in most directions. However the area just to the rear and to the south was called "The Burlish Camp". This Camp was built in WW2 as a repatriation hospital for US servicemen. After WW2 it was used to house Polish war refugees. As children we played, mixed and schooled with their children. In the middle '50s the people were re located and the whole area was knocked flat, except for one lonely structure called the "Water Tower".

As the name suggests it was exactly that, a very large brick tower, from childhood memory about 50ft by 50ft by 80 - 100ft high with a giant water tank in the top. It was used to supply the Burlish Camp with water. There were 8 windows, 4 at the rear and 4 at the front. The first pair about 30ft from the ground, the next pair another 30ft up. There was a steel door on the southern side but it was bricked up in the middle '50s. There was never any electricity to it and it was now inaccessible.

Back to the story;

Colin and I were just hanging out, at the end of our street under a street light. This street light was at the junction where our tarred street met with a wide dirt track that lead over to the Burlish Camp, straight passed the Water Tower and onto a small town called Stourport-on-Severn about 4 miles further on. During our conversation Colin said " hey look at those lights in the Water Tower", (the tower was probably 1/4 mile away but could be made out in the moonlight).

I was quite surprised, because we could see some form of moving or blinking light in the window area of the Tower. The light colour did not appear as normal to what we call light ie, candles and incandescent light seems to have a warm and yellow content, this light was a very sallow white, and quite opaque. A short time later, about 20 yds from us on the dirt track at angle of about 45 degrees we could see a light, the same colour light that was in the Tower.

From this point on, in the following events, I have no recollection of time; I remember we thought it was someone on a bicycle because the light seemed to fall to the ground, we started giggling saying it must be someone drunk and fell off their bike.

In the next instance, I remember myself drawn and staring wide eyed at the figure of a man particularly at the face, it was side on, very distinguishable features; vertical flat forehead, long pointed nose, sunken very staring eyes, because my concentration was so intense and to the head, I did not seem to observe any body detail, except the lack of normal motion movements, he appeared to float along. Opaque, we could see right through him.

Also the ground all around seemed to crackle, as if Rice Krispies were being trodden on. Next, I picked up a stone and threw it in his direction, Colin was pulling at my left arm screaming at me not to throw it. The stone, I estimate, fell short but in line, as it hit the soft grass with a "thud" the man brought up his arm as if to protect his face, my legs went to jelly, I fell to the ground and the vision disappeared, Colin ran off holding his ears and screaming as he stumbled off running through peoples front gardens.

BUT..... I vividly recall floating above the street light, I can remember detail such as the bird droppings on top of the post. I watched Colin pulling my left arm, me throwing the stone, collapsing on the ground and Colin running away screaming. I recall a lady from a nearby house coming out and bending over me.

The next thing I remember was lying on the ground and a lady, Mrs Sayers, bending over me asking if I was okay, and "what was all that shouting"?

I ran home very scared. Collin lost his hearing for 2 days. We made a pact not to tell for fear of ridicule, anyhow as time went by we told, and we got laughed at. But I could never see anything funny about it, this occurrence left an indelible mark on me.

Some years later at age, maybe, 16, I had been out fox hunting with a companion Peter G. Peter wasn't a local and was unfamiliar with our area, we were heading back to my home, on a "Dirt" motorcycle at about 2.30-3.00 am, Peter was pillion, I was riding. When we were directly in front of the Tower, a few hundred yards away, Peter shouted to me "who lives over there", I said,"over where"? as I concentrated on riding with no lights; "over there", to your left, as I looked to my left I was looking at the Tower. My eyes nearly popped, my jaw dropped, I was aghast. Each of the windows in the tower had those same lights as years before, but even more startling, we could distinctly see people like figures, lined up as if waiting to go in where the door used to be, the figures were not distinguishable separately but were the same opaque colour as the "little white man". That motorbike became the fastest bike in the land.

Many years later, talking to my late dad, we were passing the time talking about our family, being kids, where we lived, neighbours and the like, dad was telling me how in the post war years 1956 - 1960 times were hard and 5 or 6 of the local ladies would work continuous night shifts in an electrical insulator manufacturing plant, in the above mentioned town called Stourport-on-Severn. He said they would cycle 8 - 10 miles to work each way instead of 3 miles short cut through the Burlish Camp. I said "how come dad", oh he replied, "Mrs Hawker next door says that none of the women feel good going that way, it always seems very still and eerie when they go past the Tower, and when they come home in the morning, the birds are singing but, not up there by the Tower, it's always still and quiet". Dad chuckled. I didn't, I knew just what they meant.

Well, in the mid to late 60's the tower was to be removed to make way for a communications repeater station, the local news was there to cover the big Bang, it took 3 days of drilling and explosives to finally fell the Tower, the experts were scratching their heads, they couldn't understand how it stayed up through so many explosive attempts.
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I used to live in a house in England that we, for some reason, always called Stony Cottage. Well, Stony Cottage was haunted. I am not a religious person, and I am pretty much the definition of a skeptic. I will always default to empiricism for an explanation to a tough question, but things happened in that house that, while rather mundane as far as ghost stories tend to go, are completely inexplicable by any reasoning I can come up with, and I have had ~10 years to think about it. I swear I am not making up a word of this.

Firstly, there was a fireplace in the living room. The odd part, and the first thing we noticed about the house that was out of the ordinary, was that regardless of flue status, kindling present, temperature, or any of the other possible variables, fires could and would not burn inside of the threshold. Lighters would not burn inside of the fireplace. Matches would go out before hitting the ground, without fail. Newspapers, set on fire outside the fireplace, would instantly extinguish once they crossed the threshold. Acetylene torch, same thing. Instantly extinguished. Never once was a fire successfully started, with myself and both parents trying to the best of our ability.

Also, there was a basement which had the whole "evil presence" thing going on. My mother flat out refused to go in there after the first time she did, and that was during broad daylight. My father only did with the door open and every light in the vicinity on. I remember vividly the feeling of abject terror I felt the one time, to my memory, that I went in there, not the kind of scared you feel when you're a kid and your mom turns the light out and shuts your room door, but the kind of scared you feel when every horror movie you've ever seen comes to life and coagulates in the form of suffocating, total darkness punctuated by a hundred eyes all staring at you with a deep burning hatred. The temperature in there was always about 50 F regardless of season/time of day.

The other thing I can remember was that, every time it snowed, without fail, there was a set of shod footprints going in a complete circle around the house, without any going to or from in any direction, and with no indication of where they may have started or stopped. It was just a perfect circle, as if somebody had tried consciously to meet up perfectly in step with their own tracks where they had begun walking. Again, there were never once any tracks leading to or from the circle, and this happened every time it snowed.
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There have been some stories here recently about roads that appeared or disappeared or led to strange places or turned into something that was unexpected.

This story is about how we almost lost some people on a trail that ended in a meadow that could not possibly have been there. I was not there when this supposedly happened, so I can not guarantee its truth. Later investigation showed absolutely nothing. That happened long ago, and I do not necessarily remember all of the details now, but at least I think that I have the story pretty much right.

In a remote mountain camp that I used to frequent, a trail led down the river a short distance, I think about a mile or so, to a Rotary Gospel camp. Both our camp and the Rotary Gospel camp, and the river between them, were in a narrow canyon with high ridges on both sides and no side-canyons. Several of us had been down that canyon, also up and over the ridges on both sides, and we knew that there was no way to leave that canyon without knowing it. Although the terrain was steep, hiking was easy along the trail, and that route was considered quite safe for youth day-hikes.

Generally, it is hard to become lost when following a river down-stream. But when following a river up-stream, in some cases there is a possibility of becoming lost by accidentally following a tributary rather than the main stream. In this case, though, in that deep narrow canyon, all that they had to do was hike back up the canyon to our camp. And in an emergency, they could gave gone into the Rotary Gospel camp and used their telephone. So we considered it a safe hike.

One afternoon, two adults from our camp, with several youth members ranging in age from maybe 11 years to about 15 years, hiked down the trail toward the Rotary Gospel camp, intending to turn back at the edge of that camp, and return to our camp well before dinner. The adults and some of the youth members knew the trail well. In that narrow canyon, over the short distance to the Rotary Gospel camp, and with several people who knew the trail, a map and compass seemed unnecessary. Several people had wrist-watches (the mechanical wind-up kind -- modern quartz crystal watches were nonexistent in those days). One person had a pen-light, and one youth member had a camera.

This is their story as I remember it:

Some distance down the trail, when they expected soon to reach the Rotary Gospel camp, the canyon widened into a huge meadow that nobody recognized. Nearby, at one edge of the meadow, beside the trees, there was a log cabin, but no people were visible. The meadow seemed much too wide to fit in that narrow canyon. There was no possibility that the group had passed the Rotary Gospel camp, as it was in the bottom of the canyon just like our own camp.

Although they knew that something was wrong, they followed the river into the meadow, alert for any tributary streams that might confuse them when they retraced their route. After a while, they noticed that the river had decreased greatly in size and flow. That alarmed them, and they turned around and headed back up the river. Even as they followed the river up-stream in the meadow, the river rapidly disappeared. There were no dams on that river, and no recent weather patterns, to account for such a sudden decrease in the flow. They followed the sandy river channel back up-stream through the meadow, but soon even the channel disappeared, leaving the group in that big flat meadow with only the mountain ridges for land-marks, and even those ridges seemed to be much too far apart. From the group's position within the meadow, they could not even see the canyon where the river had entered the meadow.

Since they did not have a compass, one of the adults used the sun as an indicator of azimuth to keep them headed back toward our camp. But as they took frequent note of the sun's position, they noticed that it was setting much too fast, even though their watches indicated that the time still was early afternoon. At that time of the year, the middle of June, at that location, the sun sets very late.

Fortunately, they had not gone far into the meadow before they turned back. They reached the edge of the meadow just about when the sun set, and there they suddenly came upon the canyon that they had hiked down. It had been hidden from their view (or maybe it was not even there?) while they were in the meadow. The river was flowing normally in the canyon, and it sank into the ground where it entered the meadow. When the group started up the river, they immediately recognized familiar land-marks, to their enormous relief.

In that deep and heavily forested canyon, soon it was so dark that they barely could see where they were going, even though it still was early afternoon according to their watches. With their one little pen-light, they stumbled over the rocks, expecting to find the smooth trail that ran beside the river. But apparently they missed the trail in the darkness. Rather than spend the night there, they decided to continue the short distance up the river to our camp. As they explained later, after having the canyon and the river disappear right out from under them, and becoming lost in the meadow, and having night come in the early afternoon, they were so shaken that they wanted to return to civilization right then. They no longer even were sure that our camp still was there, or even that morning would come, and they did not want to spend eternity in a canyon that maybe went from a non-existent meadow to nowhere. So they continued stumbling over the rocks even after the little pen-light's batteries were exhausted.

Hiking on a smooth trail is easy in the day-time. Even hiking over rocks in the river, is not too bad when you can see where you are going. But it took them hours to go probably less than a mile up the river to our camp. Some of them were badly bruised from falling over the rocks, but fortunately nobody was injured seriously. They were enormously relieved to reach our camp buildings and our camp's own little meadow. They headed straight for our group's camp-site.

I had been out of the camp that afternoon; otherwise probably I would have gone with them on that hike. When I returned to the camp that evening, the decision already had been made not to start searching for them until morning. The camp director already had telephoned to the Rotary Gospel camp, and had determined that our group had not been seen there. When they returned, I was almost as relieved as they were.

We all stayed up late into the night with the camp director, going over their story. None of us found any significant discrepancies between their accounts. Their watches all indicated late afternoon. At first, they were not hungry; to them, it was not yet dinner-time. Apparently, at least in that meadow, time had affected their environment at one rate, and had affected both them and their watches much more slowly. Or maybe they still were too shaken to be hungry. Part-way through the discussion, the camp director served them dinner, and we finished the discussion as they ate.

The next day, we had everybody who had been on the hike, write their accounts on paper, with no further prompting and with no discussion between them as they wrote. After they finished writing, we asked them to add their recollections of various details, again with no discussion as they wrote. I remember asking them to record details of the transition between the canyon and the meadow, and of the river-bed in the meadow, also about where the sun set over the ridges above the meadow. I do not remember now what details the other adults requested. That process went right through lunch, and they ate with one hand while writing with the other hand. No, we were not slave-drivers; those people seemed as anxious to record that incident, as we were to have it recorded.

Then we turned the youth members loose, along with the two adults who had been on the hike, and the camp director and I stayed late into the evening comparing the written accounts. There too, we found no significant discrepancies.

To the great regret of all of us, the people had been so shaken that the person with the camera had not thought to take pictures of the meadow. Probably he still is kicking himself for that. Or maybe it is just as well that he did not take pictures; just possibly, recording that scene might somehow have trapped them there permanently. Of course that is pure speculation, wild speculation at that.

The following morning, the camp director, the two adults who had been on the hike, and I, started down the river for another look. This time, we took maps and compasses, watches, cameras, flash-lights with spare batteries and bulbs, and note paper. I took a roll of surveyor's flagging (brightly colored plastic tape) for temporarily marking our route, both so that we could find our way back in case of difficulty, and, to be truthful, so that just in case we did not return, other people could follow our route. (That last thought scared all of us a little bit.) On general principles, we took lunches. Portable two-way radios were not common in those days; otherwise we would have wanted them.

I took a small portable instrument for measuring the sun's elevation angle. For any location and time of day, it is easy to compute the sun's azimuth and elevation angle. Also, if you measure the sun's elevation angle at two known and widely separated times during a day, then, in principle, you can compute your location (latitude and longitude); that is a standard procedure in celestial navigation. If we came to the meadow again, then I would compare the sun's azimuth with a magnetic compass, and measure the sun's elevation angle, at frequent intervals according to our watches. Then, back home (assuming that we survived the trip), I would try to make sense out of any strange behavior such as the group had observed two days previously.

I also took a telephone lineman's test set; that is a little self-contained telephone like you see on linemen's tool-belts, except that test sets had miniature rotary dials in those days, rather than modern push-buttons. Our camp's telephone line ran beside the river to the Rotary Gospel camp, where the telephone cable ended. Along the river between the two camps, our telephone line was attached to trees at about head-height, so we would be able to use it in case of emergency. I admit to some concern that if we did find the meadow, then the telephone line might neither cross the meadow nor go around it, and thus we might be isolated. In our camp, I had asked the hikers whether they had noticed whether the telephone line crossed the meadow, but none of them had noticed the line even in the canyon. As I look back on it now, we were asking for trouble. Maybe we should have had more back-up before we started investigating.

Before we left our camp, I found an excuse to telephone to one of my friends at the Rotary Gospel camp, and I arranged to meet him there. From our camp director's call two days previously, my friend already knew that something was wrong. I begged off explaining until we met personally.

Now, after all that build-up, here comes the embarrassing part of my story: We walked down the trail to the Rotary Gospel camp, and saw absolutely nothing unusual. On the way, I tied strips of surveyor's flagging to tree branches at frequent intervals. I also kept a close watch on our telephone line beside the river; it was there, right where it was supposed to be. There was no meadow. The river still was very much there, in the bottom of the narrow canyon. The sun was rising slowly in the sky, just like it should be doing at that time of day. We went into the Rotary Gospel camp, and met with our friends there. As my excuse for being there, I looked at some equipment that I had helped them to build. But probably they still are wondering why we went there that day. Our camp director used their telephone to call back to our camp, to let our people know that we had made it safely that far. Then we took our leave, and walked back up the trail to our camp, removing the strips of surveyor's flagging as we went. We ate our lunches in the camp dining room, with the rest of the camp members. We felt relieved, and also a little bit foolish. But we would rather feel foolish than be lost.

Those mountains have changed drastically during geologic time. The river systems have re-formed so extensively that it is hard to imagine how much different they used to be. But all of that happened long before there were people on Earth. Thus even if our group somehow was transformed back in time to another geologic era (which I still find impossible to believe), that does not explain the log cabin in the meadow.

What was that meadow all about? And the disappearing river, and the rapidly setting sun? Darned if I know. If that group made up their story, then they did a very good job of it, telling it and writing it with no significant discrepancies. If they used the hike as an excuse for some mysterious detour, then they had one heck of a climb out of the canyon to get there. I think that all of us were basically honest, except of course for the standard campers' practice of telling outrageous lies around camp-fires. My guess is that the hikers were just as puzzled as I was, and also were thankful to be alive after it was all over.

That was a long time ago, and I have lost contact with all of those people now. If I ever talk to any of them again, it will be interesting to bring up that strange hike, and see what response I get.
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In Northeastern Illinois, where I grew up, there was an area called Bull Valley. It was sparsely populated, but there were a few distinctive buildings there, so naturally legends were created around them.
The most famous was the House with No Corners, where all the right angles were rounded off. The legend was that it was haunted by a ghost that would trap people in corners and strangle them, so the owner had the corners rounded.
Then there was the historic little red school house where supposedly back when the area was being settled, one day the children didn't come home from school. The families waited and waited and finally some of the fathers and the sheriff got on their horses and road out to the school house, where the teacher and all the children were found seated in their desks, arms folded on the desk top, head resting on their arms. Each and every one, scared to death and no one ever found out by what.
Unless it was the Bull Valley monster. Tall, lumbering, hairy, and drawn to cars parked on the side of the lonely roads that ran through Bull Valley. If your doors weren't locked he'd pull you out and pick your arms off like the wings off a fly.
Then there's the House of Pillars, which has a porch that goes all the way around the structure, supported by "Tara-like" white columns. The legend is that whenever the owner of the house becomes displeased with the job that his housekeeper is doing, she disappears, he hires another, and a new column is added to the porch, in which he's hidden the body.
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I read some graffiti on a building site years ago...it said the writer of the piece had been in a famine affected part of Africa and had seen a woman soak her arm in boiling water and peel off a layer of skin to feed her starving child...really freaked me out at the time as it has a horrible ring of truth to it....
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Here's a railway ghost. This was told to me many times by my nan, it was her mother that witnessed it.
Her mother was Scots, a stern, strong, chapel-going woman, but this was in Wales , when they lived in Six Bells near Abertillery.
One night, waiting for my nan's Dad to come home, she decided to go and meet him, as he was late, it was dark but she knew the way he was coming home, and he would follow the railway line, which was what she did. She had no torch, but at times the blast furnaces of Ebbw Vale would light up the sky, and anyway, it was not pitch black, apparently. After a time, she heard footsteps crunching along the track, well, it could be her husband, or it could be a stranger, or a vagrant, so she played safe and hid behind some bushes near the track, to see the person go by her.
The steps came level and went on and she looked out, it was dark, but then the glare form the steelworks illuminated the sky and she could see. The man walking down the track was headless.
Not a woman to be easily shaken, my nan said she was nevertheless almost fainting when she got home. She was told the next day, of a fatal rail crash that had happened the night before, when a goods train, collided with a stationary train, and the driver had been decapitated. She held to this all her long life, it was not a trick of the light, or her imagination, she swore on the Bible that the man who had walked past her, and who she had seen clearly, for more than a few moments, had no head above his shoulders. I asked once if the ' apparition ' had disappeared, she said her mother had not hung around long enough to find out.
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I was hoping someone on here could help me find a certain ghost story that I am certain I read on this board somewhere. It concerned a young married couple visiting the wife's parents who had an estate which also had an older house behind the main house. The couple went to investigate the old house and recorded an old woman ghost singing into the tape recorder, then cackling, and finally turning it off. It was in a barn at the back of their grandparents house and they heard shuffling in the attic. They also heard an old woman's voice saying 'Is that you David' and on another occasion as they ran off, the voice said, 'It was you, David, I saw you'. There had been no one up there though! They also left a tape recorder up there and picked it up the next day and when they listened to it there was breathing and then laughter as the recorder was switched off!
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In 1938, stories of a "killer ghost" began to be told in eastern Kentucky. Even though no one ever saw this malevolent apparition, it was said to have caused five very similar and unexplained deaths.

In June of that year, a man named Carl Pruitt came home from work one night and found his wife in bed with another man. After her lover escaped by jumping out of a window, Pruitt strangled his wife with a small piece of chain. Immediately after, perhaps having just realized the depth of his madness, he committed suicide. He was buried in a separate cemetery from his wife.

A few weeks after he was buried, visitors to the cemetery began to notice the pattern of a chain that was slowly forming on Pruitt’s gravestone. The "chain" was caused by an unusual discoloration in the stone and slowly, it gained links until it formed the shape of a cross. At that point, it stopped growing. A number of local residents suggested that perhaps the supernaturally marked tombstone should be removed from the graveyard and destroyed, but officials scoffed and nothing was done about it.

A month or so after the chain stopped growing, a group of boys were riding their bicycles past the cemetery one afternoon. One of them, a boy named James Collins, decided to throw a few stones at Pruitt’s "cursed" gravestone, probably just to prove that he wasn’t afraid and had little use for spooky stories. Whatever the reason for his actions, the hurled rocks managed to chip several spots from the stone. As the young men started home, Collins’ bicycle suddenly began to pick up speed, to the point that he could no longer control it. It veered off the road and collided with a tree. Then, in some unexplained way, the sprocket chain tore loose and managed to wrap itself about the boy’s neck, strangling him. Rumors quickly spread about this remarkable occurrence, especially after an examination of the Pruitt tombstone revealed that no marks or chips marred the surface of it. The other boys knew what they had seen however and their breathless accounts only fueled speculation about a vengeful ghost.

James Collins’ mother was especially heartbroken over her son’s death. Less than a month after his accident, she went out to the cemetery and destroyed the Pruitt gravestone with a small hand axe. She pounded and hacked at the stone until it lay in dozens of pieces. The following day, she was hanging the family wash on the line. Ironically, the clothesline was made from small linked chain rather than the usual rope or wire. Somehow, she slipped and fell and her neck became entangled in the chain. She twisted and tried to get free, but it was no use and she strangled to death. The legends say that after she died, the Pruitt tombstone showed no signs of destruction.
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He was working in a venue in Birmingham - not a rock and roll venue but a traditional theatre - so probably the Alex or the Hippodrome. In the early hours of the morning while de-rigging some front-of-house speaker positions he glanced into the box opposite the one he was working in and did a very rapid doubletake. He describes seeing a woman dressed in black with a very pale face holding a baby on one arm. She was staring directly at him with an air of extreme hostility and malevolence and as he registered what he thought he was seeing she gradually raised her free arm and pointed across the empty auditorium directly at him and started to laugh. There was no sound but he says he could tell from her facial expression that this was what she was doing.

He genuinely believes this happened. I know people who were working with him at the time who, although they didn't witness the thing, admit to having become extremely nervous because of the obvious fear he exuded. One guy describes him as virtually throwing himself onto the stage from overhead in order to get away from what he thought he'd seen.
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There was a story of a woman named Christine Skubish. Christine was a single mum, driving home late one night (in the U.S.) with her small son in the car. Apparently, she fell asleep at the wheel, ran the car off a ravine into the woods. It was days before anyone noticed and filed a missing persons report.

Four nights later, a man and wife were driving home late at night along the same road. The wife looked out her window, spotted a naked woman lying on the side of the road. The woman lay on her side, facing the road, with her legs slightly bent, one arm straight out under her head, the other arm draped over her head.

The husband and wife were scared to stop, thinking it might be a trick or a trap to get them out of the car. They drove on some, pulled over at a phone booth and called the cops. The police went to the area the wife described, but found nothing in the dark.

The next day, a cop went back to check out the area in the light. He found Christine's crashed car. Christine's body was propped up against the wheel. Miraculously, the little boy in the backseat was still alive, but only just barely. He was rushed to the hospital, and after treatment, he pulled through.

Later, the wife thought she recognized the naked woman as Christine Skubish. So was this the spirit of Christine trying to solicit help for her little boy?
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There is an older brick home near New Munster, WI, that had been rented by 4 twenty-something women. This home had an attic that was accessed via a staircase behind a door on the second floor. The ghost only acted up when there was one person home alone, didn't matter which one. It would walk the length of the house in the attic, masculine, heavy steps tromping up and down through the attic that ran the length of the house.
Finally one evening the woman who was home had had enough and she went to the attic door, determined to confront whatever, as it stomped it's way closest to the stairs. She opened the door and the footsteps halted for a moment.
And then a pair of men's heavy boots came stomping down the stairs toward her. You bet, she slammed the door and fled for the night, staying at a friend's house and she called each of her housemates to tell them what had happened and not to go home that night. The women made other living arrangements and then prepared to go move their possessions out. None of them wanted to stay in the house. They notified the landlord that they would be moving out, only to find that he had been trying to contact them. He lived within sight of the brick house, and he had been wondering why someone had collected all the shoes belonging to the four women and stacked them outside next to a shed near the house.
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Peg o’ Nell, the spirit of the Ribble, is the best known of these figures. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, she built up what amounts to a new mythology. Her principal haunt was a swirling ford where the Clitheroe road crosses the river near Waddow Hall. Peg claimed a life in the river every seven years: people might live securely in the meantime, but they knew that the night would inevitably come when she demanded a victim. There was a young man, a stranger, who rode into Waddow Hall on his journey across the cold fells. The maidservant pulled him to one side and whispered that it was Peg o’ Nell’s Night, but he would go on to brave the rain-swollen ford: and next morning there he was, bobbing on the water, and his horse beside him. (16). It became customary to appease Peg with something drowned on her night - a bird, a cat or a dog - to stave off her hunger for life. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t. There were men drowned in the Ribble in 1894, 1901 and 1908 - a seven-year cycle.
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My ex-wife very matter of factly told me once that she sees ghosts pretty much constantly, and only recently she has started pointing them out to me, because of my obvious interest.

One night sitting in our living room she became distracted, and was occasionally looking up at something through the window. She said - there's something looking at us. She told me that it was looking at us whenever we weren't looking at it, and that it was as fascinated by us as we would be by it. She didn't tell me what it was though - mercifully - only that it had gone now, and I'd probably scared it away by going up to the window and peering at it.

I couldn't sleep that night.
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During my childhood, my family moved around a lot. My father worked for a government agency that would transfer him to different locations on a fairly regular basis. Every year or two, we'd be in a different city or state, moving into a new home.

I was probably about 7 years old when we moved into the house with "the haunted basement". Perhaps "haunted" isn't even the right word to use - It was never really clear to me whether the basement itself was alive, or if something else, something very evil, was residing within the basement. I suppose the distinction is meaningless, because whatever it might have been, it's energy was always focused in that one particular part of the house.

I'm not certain exactly when, how or why I came to the conclusion that it was haunted. Only that it terrified me to my very core.

At some point within the first week of moving into this new house (before I had become aware of IT), my natural inclinations toward exploring led me toward the basement, just to play around, as children are often wont to do. At the time, the basement was new to me - it was (in my mind) 'unexplored territory', and I was a discoverer.

I was a young child, and I didn't know any better - It wasn't until much later that I realized it's a bad idea to intrude into areas where something might prefer to be left alone - a sleeping beast is best left undisturbed - once awoken, the beast will behave in a manner consistent with it's beastly nature.

Whatever force it was, it had decided I was unwelcome, and I somehow, instinctively knew it didn't want me around. I got the impression that it didn't like me very much at all - or perhaps it did. Maybe it liked me a little too much.

The door to the basement was just outside of the kitchen, in a small utility room/entryway around the corner from the pantry closet. The door's handle was on the left, and hinges on the right. It opened inward toward the stairs, where there was about a 4-foot long platform before the staircase descended along the left wall. Thinking back on it, this was a pretty poor design and potentially dangerous to someone who might have been coming up the stairs. The door opening at the wrong moment could easily knock someone down the staircase, or plummeting over the railing. Of course, I never thought about such things at the time. There was a light-switch on the left wall just inside the door.

From the doorway at the top of the staircase I couldn't actually see much of the basement, even if I flipped on the light-switch. The light illuminated the stairs well enough, but not much of the basement itself. That godforsaken room seemed to be shrouded in perpetual darkness. I could just barely make out the shape of the washing machine at the far right of my field of view.

The basement stank, as well. Standing atop the stairs, I could smell a very unpleasant musty odor and feel hot, dank air emanating up from within those murky depths. I could also feel a presence, like it was both sentient and secretive. It knew something I didn't, and it wouldn't reveal its dark secrets unless I went down and succumbed to its clutches. At times, it seemed only to be playfully mischievous, trying to coax me in. At other times there was no mistaking that this basement had wicked, malevolent intentions.

I never actually even set foot inside it; I was too frightened. Just looking down into it, I could feel the small hairs all over my body standing on end, as if even my very skin could sense the danger that lurked within that subterranean crypt, awaiting my arrival. I distinctly remember standing in the doorway at the top of the stairs, staring down into the emptiness, the dark abyss of the unknown and unknowable, desperately trying to muster up enough courage to descend into what I was convinced must be a magical portal to some other world; simultaneously wondrous and terrifying.

I could never do it. Fear would paralyze me before I could take even the first step down that foreboding staircase. I would stand there in complete and utter horror, sweating, on the verge of tears, until eventually something would snap and I'd regain just enough control of myself to run away. And run, I did. Every single time.

Eventually, my fear of the basement (and whatever unimaginable evils lurked within) extended to even the doorway which lead to that monstrous room. I began to avoid even the door to the basement, as if getting to close to the door would cause me to be sucked in, where I would surely suffer unspeakable atrocities. I would do my best to keep at least five feet away from that malignant, venomous doorway.

Much like any other child, I had friends who would come to visit, play, or have the occasional sleepover. On a few occasions (when my parents weren't around, or weren't paying attention) I would dare my friends to enter the basement. None of them ever did. I never told them exactly why the basement was a scary place (and to be honest, I really didn't understand it myself - I still don't).

They all seemed very willing to take the dare at first, but as soon as they approached the door they always faltered. One of them (Paul) came closer than most; and (admittedly) closer than I ever had - He walked down the stairway to almost the halfway point, where he froze. Solid. After a moment, he turned and bolted back up the the stairs. He didn't stop once he reached the kitchen, either. He kept running straight through, and locked himself in the bathroom for 10 or 15 minutes. When he finally came out he was sweating, shaking all over, and unable to maintain eye-contact - with anyone - for the rest of the night. He refused to talk about it.

My parents seemed to think that he might be ill, and they called his parents to express their concerns. I don't know exactly what transpired in that phone call, but I guess it was decided that everything was OK, because Paul's parent's didn't come pick him up. At least, not right then.

In the middle of the night, Paul woke me up and said that he had to go home. I told him to shut up. I wanted to go back to sleep. He started crying and babbling about wanting to go home. After a little while, the noise woke my parents up. It was tremendously embarrassing to me - I was sure they'd never allow another sleepover after this kid woke them up in the middle of the night with his blubbering. After all, he was my friend, I was the one who invited him here, and now he's causing problems, interrupting their sleep. They told me it was OK, sometimes kids get scared for no reason. They said the best thing to do would be to let him call home, and maybe it would help him to feel better.

My father made the phone call. He woke Paul's mother, and explained (as best he could) the situation to her. Then he gave the phone to Paul. Paul immediately started crying, the moment the phone was put into his hand. He begged his mother to come pick him up, that he needed to go home... I can still hear the tone in his voice, and the way he stretched out the vowel "e" in the word "need" and the "o" in "home". He told us all that was feeling sick, but he couldn't look any of us in the eye, and I could see the look of abject terror on his face. I knew it was the basement that had frightened him away from my house. I felt bad for daring him to go down there. He wound up gathering the few belongings he had brought with him, and my father drove him home.

Paul and I never spoke much after that - It was almost like we weren't friends anymore, for some reason. Over the short course of time that I lived there, I'd see him at school and he'd usually avert his gaze, as though there was some unspoken thing which he didn't want to acknowledge. In any case, we were never really friends again after that, he seemed to get very uncomfortable around me and distanced himself - In fact, I don't think I ever saw him have any friends at all for the rest of the time I went to school there.

Judging from the reactions of every single one of my childhood friends who ever came into close contact with the basement, we children seemed to be (in some fashion) attuned to the presence of whatever was lurking within it. We could sense it, even though adults were entirely unaware of it, and thus unaffected.

My parents never showed any signs of being frightened by the basement at all. I never mentioned my fear to them for a variety of (completely illogical and nonsensical) reasons that I'll attempt to explain later.

Occasionally, I'd see my mother coming up from the basement; usually carrying a hamper full of clean laundry. I was in complete awe of how courageous she was, to have willingly gone into (and surprisingly, returned safely from) that abomination beneath the house. I don't recall ever seeing her enter the basement, only seeing her return. I may have just 'blacked-out' any memory of seeing her enter, as if the thought would have been too traumatic for my young mind to cope with.

I'd like to think that if I'd seen her entering that dreadful tomb, I would have warned her not to go, even pleaded with her if necessary. Truth is, I probably wouldn't have. I would probably have been too afraid to voice my objections, knowing that the basement might hear me. I knew that it was evil, and I knew that it was dangerous, yet I had the suspicion that just maybe, it didn't know that I knew. Somehow, my intuition told me that I'd be safer if I didn't let it find out that I knew about it. As long as it didn't know I was aware of it, I could avoid it - but if it found out that I knew, it would have to get rid of me.

For the rest of the time that we lived in that house, I avoided that door like some demonic infectious disease that was absolutely, without-any-doubt, determined to destroy me (or worse). As I said before, I didn't mention my fear to my parents or anyone else. Using my childhood logic, saying it out-loud might awaken "the bad thing" and bring it directly to me, like some unearthly spectral dog-whistle. It seemed to be confined to the basement (for now), perhaps it was even trapped there and unable to come out. Speaking of it aloud might be like "calling it's name", which could free it from it's underground prison and allow it to come for me. I tried my best to hide my fear, because I somehow knew that if my parents found out about that fiendishly diabolical and loathsome entity, then the basement would be forced to deal with them, as well. As old superstitions go, saying something out loud calls it to you, and telling someone else brings it to them.

Looking back on it, I suppose they had to know how frightened I was even though I never told them. I don't think they could have possibly not noticed how consciously I avoided that door, and how quickly I moved when I did have to walk by it.

After about a year, we moved out of that house and to a different state. I still remember that basement (well, what little of it I ever actually saw) in great detail, and I'll never forget how I would become consumed by sheer terror whenever I came into close proximity to it.

More recent times
A couple of years ago while I was visiting my mother, we were talking and something reminded me of all this. I don't remember what, exactly. I don't even remember what the topic of conversation was at the time, most likely something inconsequential, but something she said, or something I said, or perhaps something on TV reminded me (all it usually takes is hearing the word "basement").

In an off-handed sort of way, I mentioned it to her. I don't remember exactly what I said, but I remember being shocked by the way she reacted to it. What I said was probably something mostly innocuous, like "remember when I was little, how scared I was of the basement".

She just stared at me blankly, with a very strange look on her face, and didn't say anything all. After a few seconds (not your usual 'few seconds' - these were seconds that felt like days, or perhaps weeks - timeless, infinite seconds during which I became increasingly uncomfortable), when the silence had reached a deafening crescendo and my discomfort level had peaked, I tried to change the subject. She wouldn't allow that. To my horror, she only stared at me quizzically and asked me to repeat myself. The remainder of the conversation proceeded something like this:
quote:
"What did you just say?"
"Ah - mmm, nevermind, it's nothing - just thinking out loud."
"No, you weren't - What did you just say?"
"I'm going to get another cup of coffee - do you want one?"
"Stop avoiding my question - I want to know what you meant - Something about the basement?"
"It's not important, really"
"Tell me."
"I was just saying how much it scared me when I was little."
- [blank stare from mom] -
"I was really glad when we moved out of that house."
- [blank stare from mom] -
"It's silly, I know."
"We've never had a basement."

Of course, I didn't believe her. I even argued with her a little. I described the door, the stairway, the noises... All to no avail.

I tried reminding her of the night that Paul came for a sleepover, and how he had awoken so frightened that he refused to stay - she remembered the night, but she insisted that Paul had just gotten sick.

I mentioned that the laundry machines were in the basement - She simply had to remember it; she'd been down there many times. She refused to hear any part of it - She remembered the small utility room outside the kitchen, but according to her, the laundry machines had been located in that room, and there was no door leading to a downward staircase. After a very frustrating conversation, it seemed that there was simply no way I would ever be able to make her remember, and she seemed to give up on trying to convince me.

Later that evening, she brought out an old photo album. She sat down with me and went through photos of every house we had lived in while I was growing up. Photos of every location we had ever moved to, every city and state. She could tell me what years we lived in each home and how old I was at the time. She wanted me to point out which house I was talking about. I couldn't identify which particular house it had been. Although I could narrow it down to two possible houses based simply on my age at the time, neither one of them looked like the right house from my memory. The pictures were all familiar to me, I remembered the houses, but I couldn't place precisely which one of them it had been since none of them looked quite right. She could narrow it down to one particular house; being that it was the town where we had met Paul's family. She swore that it didn't have a basement, nor did ANY home we'd EVER lived in.

Conclusions

I sometimes wonder if perhaps the basement managed to somehow erase itself from her memory - Of course that would mean that it had altered my memory as well, rendering me unable to identify the house in which it dwelt, and thus preventing me from ever disclosing it's whereabouts.

I try not to think about it too much, or too often, and I've once again decided that I probably shouldn't ever tell this story out loud.

Rationally, I realize that there's no real danger in vocalizing any of this, but a part of me still thinks that there just might be. I have nothing to gain by saying it out loud, but I also stand to lose nothing by remaining silent about it just in case it can still hear me.
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The place I work is eerie as hell. When I first started, my boss told me not to hang out here late at night unless I had a strong stomach. When she initially told me that, I just sort of laughed it off, not knowing what the hell she was getting at. The longer I've worked here, though, very subtle, unnerving things keep occurring to the point where I'm spooked.

1) I'll sometimes take a garbage can out at end of shift, come back, and one of the other garbage cans will be in its place, half full of trash, and I'll be the only one in the building.

2) Violent banging noises will come from the sink room, even though there's nothing mechanical in the sink room that could justify it.

3) Shadows swell. Only way I can think to describe it. I'd write that off as me being low on sleep, but other people that are in here late at night when we're closed will often look intensely in a general direction and mumble, or ask if we're the only ones here, etc.

4) Lights will dim in a right-to-left pattern, from one side of the building to the other, despite their operating off different wiring.

5) in the few instances I've slept here (to pick up an order early in the morning or for a meeting I'd otherwise been incapable of waking up in time for) I had dreams of cannibalism.

I joked with the owner once about how creepy the place is at at night, and then she tells me that four severed fingers were found in the basement in the 70's. I'd have just laughed that off, but half the basement is concrete floor, and on the other half it's just packed dirt, separated by a cinderblock half-wall. Who the fuck knows.
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There's a restaurant in the French Quarter of New Orleans called Muriel's that narrows off on one of the sides into an alley (the buildings are pressed close together, so the alley is formed from one side of the restaurant and the side of the neighboring building). The entrance to the alley is sealed off by a barred iron gate. I know the description is kind of weird, but I'm not sure how else to describe it.

Anyways, passing this alley on the sidewalk, you can look through the gate and see that the walls are brick and that big black rings are jutting out of the brick at regular intervals; sometimes there are candles burning under each ring, but the couple times I've passed it during the day, it's just been this empty corridor with rings coming out of the walls. At the end, you can just barely make out a usually half-opened door into a room with a table setting in it: there's a white table cloth, a candle, a plate with bread, and a glass of water.

Back in the days of slavery, this alley was used to house slaves before and during the auctions. Those rings were where the slaves were chained for hours and sometimes days before being separated from their families and sold, if they didn't die of starvation or dehydration or disease or any of the other many ailments they suffered from first; the room in the back is always kept open, lit and stocked with bread and water as a sort of respectful gesture to the memory of the people who passed through the alley, and from what I hear it can be rented out for psychic readings or something. I'm not entirely sure if that bit's true, though.

Last year, out of boredom, I read up on a bunch of the stories about the Quarter's supposedly haunted buildings and just sort of wandered around, passing by the locations of the stories I thought were the most interesting. I was walking past Muriel's when I remembered the story about the alley and the display, and since I'd never seen it before I decided to stop and look through the gate. I could see the room, and the rings, and since it was night time the candles were all set out and lit. If I had to describe the way it looked, the only word I could use would be 'sad'; it was so dim and so bare...

I couldn't see very far into the room towards the back, so I leaned forward and pressed my hand against the gate -- and I shit you not, as soon as I did that, I got this really terribly thick, heady feeling, like my head was all stuffed up with cotton, and my chest was tight like my heart was about to stop. All I could do was stand there and blink, and then, out of absolutely goddamn nowhere, I started crying. I wasn't sobbing or anything, but there were tears, and I felt like I was going to be sick right there on the sidewalk with people walking by behind me. I took a step back, and the hand that had touched the iron was about halfway towards numb, the kind of feeling you get when your fingers are just about to fall asleep. My arm felt very heavy and was tingling somewhat unpleasantly. I stood there for a moment, staring into the alley, feeling faint and breathing unnecessarily hard and blinking back tears. My arm didn't stop tingling for almost a half hour after I walked away, and I'd planned to do other stuff downtown but I was too shaken up to do much but go back to my dorm room and hole up for the rest of the night.

A few months later, a friend came to visit me and she wanted to see the alley; I started to take her by there, walking on the opposite side of the street until we could see the gate, and before we could cross the both of us just sort of stopped. My friend looked distinctly uncomfortable, but my face was getting hot and I felt like I was going to start getting weepy again, so we got donuts instead.

That's the only really creepy thing that's ever happened to me, but I think it was enough. I don't even walk on the opposite side of the street from that place now.
-----
From the August 21, 1891 edition of the Pittsburgh Dispatch:

St. Mary's, O., Aug. 20.-- The people of Byer, a small village in Jackson county, are all torn up on account of a haunted house. The building is a cheap structure, built by Thomas Woods, who lived in it and kept a saloon. Five years ago a cheap jewelry peddler stopped in the house over night, and next morning was found dead in bed with his throat cut from ear to ear. Since then five persons have died in the house, viz: Thomas Woods, Walker Benson, Tressa Byers, Mrs. Thomas Woods and James Serry.

Some time ago the place was rented to Charley Henderson, and the very second night his family moved in strange noises were heard and tables and chairs were hurled about the room by no visible means. The children screamed and say they saw a man with a mule's head. The frightened family moved out at midnight, refusing to wait until morning. Citizens say they heard strange noises while sitting up with the last one who died there. Mr. Ray, the present owner, had two men sit up in the house, but they declined to stay after midnight owing to the queer proceedings there. Unless his nerve fails Mr. Ray will try a night of it himself, and report if he lives through it.
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Shortly before nine o'clock on the morning of July 12, a woman emerged from beneath the boardwalk below New York Avenue in Atlantic City, NJ. In spite of the sweltering summer heat, this mysterious and unidentified woman was dressed in black from head to toe, and her face was covered by a black veil. Inexplicably, the woman waded into the breakers to a distance of fifty feet, then knelt down in the water. After a moment she disappeared from view and was never seen again. Mrs. James Mervine, who owned a row of bath houses along the beachfront, later found the woman's wet black veil in a vacant bath house.
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When I was a kid my mom forbid me to go into the basement of our church even though I had no intentions of doing so. Well obviously it made me curious and when I looked down the stairs into the gym size (length wise) room I saw 100+ Immigrants all on the floor sleeping and walking around. My church was baptist and in north Alabama. I have heard of bible smuggling and different things related to that, but this is an image I can never shake. I was so shocked to see this I still think about it 20+ years later and kinda shutter. I'm not sure exactly what it was I was seeing, but I probably spent more time at that church (due to 3+ services a week and attending school there from k4-6th grade) than the pastor himself so I know I wasn't just seeing things.
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A friend stayed the night at my house and my mom woke us up saying that she saw a somebody in the barn in the backyard (it was really more like the world's largest shed). Why she sent two 6th graders instead of the police I'll never know, but we grabbed some mop handles and went to investigate. We entered the barn in the most threatening fashion we could and looked behind the stacks of wood and in the rafters, but nobody was around. We went out further into my backyard to get some blackberries for breakfast. While we're walking with our backs to the barn, I turned to get one last look. I look at it for about a second or so before I see a hand move slowly across the window. It was old glass and pretty dirty, so you couldn't see far in, but I didn't see an arm, just that hand slowly moving from left to right, its fingers on the glass. I froze. My friend turned around when he noticed I stopped and asked what was wrong. I turned to face him and instantly saw all the blood sucked from his face and his jaw drop. He screamed, "I just saw a hand!" We bolted back into the house, locked the doors, and I didn't go into that barn again for years. For some reason, I didn't tell him right away that I saw the hand too. Years later, we were in my basement reminiscing and he brought up the haunted barn. I confessed to him that I had seen the hand first and there was this eerie silence as he realized that it wasn't some trick of his eyes. He refused to venture far into my backyard after that night.
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A couple of weeks ago I was walking through a mall on the way to my bus stop. It was late at night and the whole mall was closed and pretty much empty.

Anyway I turned a corner in the mall and there was a crowd of about 15 people, all different ages/cultures (not like a group of friends). They were just standing there all staring at the same spot on the ceiling. So I stopped to see what they were staring at, but there was nothing there at all.

I went up and asked "What are you guys staring at?". Suddenly they all turned and stared at me and started laughing the same creepy laugh. I tried again "I just noticed you were all looking at the same place". No one answered me, they just stared, so I walked away.
-----
When I was around ten, my whole family (brother and parents) including me were watching tv in the family room, it was late at night since we were watching a movie of some sort and despite the surround sound system playing, my father managed to hear something outside.

My father told us all to be quiet and turned everything off, and he grabbed his shotgun and went outside to see what it was. Now there's something you have to know, my father had never before and has never since wielded that shotgun except for practice at the firing range despite situations where we have actually been in far worse conditions that actually warranted it. The shotgun was a 20g riot shotgun (I know because it's still around) and like it sounds, is made with the specific purpose of shooting at people and being used indoors or in crowded situations thanks to a short barrel, tight grouping and the ability to fire all 7 shells in a third as many seconds.

My brother and I were of course watching through the window blinds to see what was going on but despite being completely dark, he still managed to spot us when he walked by outside and waved for us to get away from the window. He was out there a few minutes and then we just heard a hell of a racket outside. It quickly quieted down and it was another ten minutes before my father came back in the house; he put the shotgun away and went to his room for the rest of the night.

I never brought that night up for years and when I finally did, my parents completely feigned ignorance that it had ever happened despite my little brother remembering it although not that clearly (he was only 4, but he has a pretty good memory). I want to know what the hell happened that night.
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These lovely rugged mountains run southeast from Monterey all the way to San Luis Obispo are home of the eerie Dark Watchers - black, human-like phantoms who stand silhouetted against the sky on the ridges and peaks of the Santa Lucias. Nobody knows what they are, where they came from, or why they haunt these mountains. Nevertheless, they've been seen many times over the years, with stories about them dating back to Chumash Indian legends. They are said to appear most often around twilight, seemingly staring into space from their hilltop posts.
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But if you want an actual creepy mystery, my parents tell me that when I was three I once walked into a room full of adults and calmly told them that once I was a man in the Civil War, and I had died on a bridge in Virginia. I told them that I had been thirsty as I died.

Sort of weird. Maybe I was just a tiny liar.
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Okay, my one is quite odd (I think) but not in the 'Holy shit I'm never sleeping again' category of the black dog/peeping tom wizards, whatever that other people are cool enough to have experienced.
We got our first proper windows computer in about 1997, when I was about 7 at the time. One of the bundled games with this computer was the first 'Diablo' game. I played the hell out of the game, but one thing bugged the hell out of my 7 year old self. Why the hell did the catscratches make such weird noises? Massive backtrack time.

All my life, up until that, I was aware of the existence of 'Catscratches'. I was aware of these creatures not as crazy monsters that only I could see in the way some children do, but in the way that most western kids are aware of lions, a kind of cool but mundane aspect of another country's wildlife. I even have slightly fuzzy memories of seeing these things on T.V. at some point, on nature shows and the like. The creatures in question were among the first you encounter in the game, (They were called 'Scavengers' I think) the small, hunched hairless catlike things with exposed ribs and spines, who leaped at your face and were easily dispatched.

Anyway, fast forward to me age 7 playing this game, which, among zombies and demons and goatmen, contained identical versions of these creatures as low level enemies. The thing that bugged me about them at that age, playing alone, was the noise that they made. The 'catscratches' (seriously, what the Christ???) of my childhood made soft purring noises. These in-game beasties, to the best of my memory, made something of a screeching sound, and a kind of 'crackle' as they died. The part were this got past annoying and seriously into bat country for me was when I invited a friend over about a week after getting this game, to show it off I guess. At the relevant point, I remember saying something to the effect of 'Hey friend, what's with the catscratches making such weird noises? :P' which of course, received a huge look from my friend. The conversation that transpired made me feel really crazy, and I think afterwards I was pretending that I never 'believed' in them, due to embarrassment.

Boy howdy, I feel really crazy now.
-----
My last major brush with whatever it is, was back in 2006. My last job was a data telecoms engineer. For about three months solid, I'd been working around Ireland in nearly all of the Tesco stores, installing access points for new weighing scales for deli counters and wifi points for stock scanners. It was a pain in the arse. Thankfully many of these stores were new buildings. Which made running a cable from the A to B quite easy. However there were the smaller stores, in towns and villages, which were usually three or more old buildings, knocked into one, creating a bigger shop floor.

Myself and my boss arrived there at about 12:30am. I can't remember the town, we made a mission to finish 3 stores a day, this being our last. This store was built into three very old buildings, I could tell from the shopfront, all glazed and shiny new. Where above the signage were three different styles of brickwork and window. I knew this job would be fun. The cable routes proved to be a challenge, the offices and upstairs being like a maze. The middle building upstairs didn't have any through ways to the back offices which meant going up and down 3 different flights of stairs to get to it from the offices either side. We thought we'd make a new route by passing from the first building (1st floor) to the middle, third then through the floor to our (G floor) locations. Easy. It was that or follow existing traywork zig zagging everywhere adding about 100ft+ to our cable length. So we worked out where we needed to drill and run our cables. We decided to run the cables from a box room though one of the original walls into the middle building. I lifted up the false ceiling tile to be greeted by a scratched sandstone wall with a foot long drill bit sticking out from it. Whoever had the same idea as us had been beaten and robbed of a drill bit. Judging by the growing rust it had been there an age. We brought out the DeWalt and starting hammering away.

I must have been half way through when my boss who was footing my ladder tapped me on the calf. As the the dewalt silenced I could hear a what sounded like a woman moaning inconsolably for just a few seconds.
"Could you hear that? It sounded as though..."
"-Yeah, it must be somebody outside there's a pub round the corner"

What a dick! I'd tried my best to not think about how creepy this building really was. I could feel it the moment I walked into the stock rooms. As a rule I'd never think about stuff like that on a job (I've worked in a lot of creepy places) I'd just concentrate on what I was doing, I thought if "something" isn't screaming for my attention then I'm not going to give it any reason to give me any. Which worked, don't be a pussy, just get on with it. We paused for a moment to hear if it was some drunken party or something.
Nothing. I pull the trigger and hammered at the wall. Then it died.
"What the fuck have you done to it?"
I pulled it from the wall and tried again. Nothing.
"Is it the battery?" Stupid question I knew it wasn't the battery because we'd both made sure it had been on charge at the last store, it was fine. We tried the spare battery then the cord. Nothing. The boss got quite irritated at this. He'd just had it serviced at a DeWalt Dealer. "He must have given you a dud motor?" So we had to settle for the 110V beast which meant running to the van and back bringing all the 110 gear to power it. I eventually got the better of the sandstone wall. a nice hole half and inch in diameter.

"Right pop next door and I'll feed you the cable" So off I lumbered out the room down unlit stairwell to the first stockroom that's when I heard it;

".. N O..."

You know where you heart and stomach and arse leap into your mouth, that's how I felt. Some little invisible Irish girl had said NO to me. In an unlit stairwell. In a closed store. There was only myself the boss in the building and one security guard who was permanently sat in the other stockroom reading porn in his little cube. I'm getting shivers just typing this. I'm surprised I didn't break my ankles bounding down those steps, I went for the door, and I felt what seemed to be a lukewarm hand very lightly holding my right hand. I can't say I've ever had a panic attack but I'm assume that's what I nearly had. I felt better walking around through the lit shopping isles to the second stock room. The guard waved at me not taking his eyes away from his Razzle magazine. I felt like asking him "What the fuck" but I told myself it was just the door making an odd sound as it closed behind me. The second set of stairs were lit and warm I found myself in the room opposite where I'd drilled. My boss spoke over the walkie making me jump.

"Hang on I'm just moving these ceiling tiles boss" And there it was. A blank wall.
"Forget the tiles! Keep pulling the cable your way, its clean!"
"I'm not pulling the cable... I'm staring at a blank wall here."
"Whatever, keep pulling like that, yeah steady, signal, when you've got enough!"

"Boss I swear to you. I am not pulling any fucking cable in here."

Que a lot of arguing and quick run back to the box room up those fucking stairs with my teeth chattering, I could see it on his face when I opened the door, he was still feeding the cable through the wall. His hands dropped at his sides and the cables became taut slowly dragging their boxes towards the wall then up it.

My boss grabbed at the boxes and started yanking the cables back into the boxroom it came easy at first but then he was beginning to put more effort into it and the sheaving became torn exposing the rainbow colored cores, I got my snips and cut at the cables just to watch the wall slurp them up like spaghetti.

"What the fuck was that? Wheres that guard at?"
"He's in his cube?"

I can't remember much of the conversation but I don't think I'd ever seen anybody genuinely freaked out as much as me. We left the room and got the guard up and told him what had happened. He looked at us and said "you sure?" My boss cut a length of cable and fed it into the hole the three of us watched the cable zip up the wall above the false ceiling. Words failed me. The guard started shouting who was back there. He turned around, "It must be one of the staff fucking about" he led us to the room opposite, again a blank wall. Then the office next to it, The door read Manager.
"We'll try in here"
"I hope there's a manager locked in here with a lot of cable" My boss grunted. The guard unlocked the office and found nothing. None of us spoke, we traipsed back next door to the only other room left worth checking an office next to the boxroom. The opened it up. It wasn't noticeable straight away. A second glance and it clicked. This room had more depth. We' had drilled into a void. No way. There had to be something else the guard really wasn't sure what to do. My boss checked around where this void was. Inside and out. Even scaling the roof of the building to see if it was there, perhaps a seagull had been pulling at the cable? Again nothing. He made me check underneath the room no void. Only concrete.

We all had a coffee and decided to use the existing trunking, fuck that room and it secret. The guard spent the rest of the job talking to us and bringing our spirits up, we finished up quite quickly and began collecting the gear. The DeWalt began working again and once or twice I could feel my hand being held by the fingers, only in that stairwell.

My boss and I didn't speak about what happened it was too fucking weird. I haven't told many people about this it was just so surreal, I feel like we should have knocked that wall through. But I suppose it wasn't our problem really.
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Okay I haven't posted this story because even though things worked out okay I was terrified and thinking about how she looked and how I felt makes me feel the same way when I remember it.

I lived in the second oldest house in my area near Waco, Texas, from when I was about 11 til I was 18. I don't know the significance of this really but I feel it’s the only possible explanation for any supernatural presence. I'm not sure when the house was originally built but the rest of the houses around mine were built in the 40s and 50s so I supposed it’s older than that.
The house seemed normal when we first moved in. Only two families had lived there over the years so it wasn't like there was a high turnover rate. In fact no one really noticed or mentioned anything supernatural with the house.

However, there was a "secret room." This room was actually a selling point for my parents to help us deal with moving. Even though my dad was in the military we had lived at our past house for quote awhile and didn't want to move. So of course when my parents said there was a secret passage connecting one of the possible bedrooms with a secret room we became excited about the new house. My sister and I fought for it but I won because the other bedroom already had flower wallpaper up. When I first saw my room I went straight to the closet to see the "Secret door."

The secret door wasn't really secret, it was right in the back of the closet and plain to see. However it was a lot smaller than any normal door. Even when I was only 11 or 12 I had to squat down to get in. It looked like it was made for a child to use.
Another interesting thing was that the door handle was not really built into the door, it was just a handle added as an afterthought. This made me think it was originally just some sort of attic or crawl space door and not meant for a room. The door was lockable by key from my side of the door, the other side had no handle or keyhole. When you open the door there’s a very small hallway which is the same height as the door and not really fit for an adult, but it’s just a few feet long and then you get into the room.

The room was just an empty room added above the garage of the house. There was no way out except for the "secret passageway" to my closet. There were no windows, one light with a string used to turn it on hanging from the ceiling, and the room was completely white with seemingly new wallpaper. There was no furniture or anything left in the room from the previous owners, in fact I don't think the previous owners used it at all. I believe it was sealed before or soon after they moved in and wasn't touched since then, since it was pretty dusty, but who knows. The lock did seem very old and had a hard time moving as if it was rusted or the wood was warped or something.

Now my parents thought the room could be me and my sister's own little toy room or whatever when they first saw it, but after moving in they had second thoughts. I'm not sure what it was but they said it was because they wouldn't be able to hear us if we got hurt in that room since it was so detached from the rest of the house. Of course since we wanted our own secret room so badly they gave in, but said that we had to tell them when we were playing in there and we had to keep the door to my room, my closet, and the secret room open at all times when we were there. So we went on and like I said earlier nothing much really supernatural happened in the rest of the house, and not even too much in the "secret room," at least not to me.

My sister began having an imaginary friend. Whenever I wasn't in there I could hear her talking and whispering to someone. I noticed that although at first she used to have fun in there that as time went on she kind of seemed sadder when she was in there. However up til now this could all be coincidence so I didn't give it much thought.

The only weird things that happened with me was at night I thought I could hear some sort of scratching on the walls behind my room, except it wasn't really with fingernails it was softer sounding. It wasn't on the door, but coming from inside the room.
Now I believe that I only heard this at night because it was quiet at night, and the scratching rubbing sound was so soft that you normally couldn't hear it. I really had no idea what it was, I told my dad once and he looked around for some animal but couldn't find any so we just forgot about it and I lived with it. Like I said it was so soft it never really bothered me. It could be some far off tree rubbing against the house for all I knew. This rubbing happened consistently but like I said I never paid it much mind, at least until my sister went into the room one night.

She knew about the rubbing too and never really said anything about it. One night though, probably about a year or so after moving into the house, the rubbing was going on as usual. I was in that limbo before falling to sleep when I thought that someone was in my room and unlocking the closet door. I thought it might have been a dream but I looked around and saw my door and closet door open, so I got up to check it out. I was a little scared but I realized it was probably mom or dad checking out the rubbing sound since I told them it still happened sometimes. I turned the light on in my closet and looked in. I saw a figure sitting in the room facing the wall. Now even when I was a kid, I had been pretty brave. I was still scared since I was pretty young, but I knew that you can't just run or you'll never know. I said "Hello?" and I heard "She wanted me to see" in what sounded like my sister's voice. The light was in the middle of the room, and it was tough taking even those few steps to get to it in the middle of that dark room. But like I said, I couldn't just leave so I just went there and turned it on. When I looked at the figure, it was indeed my sister, sitting and scratching at the wall paper. I touched her and she was crying so I pulled her up and took her out of the room. I'm really glad that I didn't just lock the door and run or else she'd be stuck in there all night (this is one reason why I never run away from anything abnormal). I locked the door, took her to her room and watched her as she went to sleep. I really thought she could've been sleepwalking or something although she never had before, and since it was over I didn't want to wake up my parents. I went back to sleep.

The next day I asked my sister in the morning if she remembered going into the room and she looked freaked out. I told her she was probably just sleep walking but she said that "the girl" asked her to come look at her pictures. She didn't start crying but she was about to because she was so scared. I didn't ask who "the girl" was. I told her it was just a dream and went to prove it. She didn't want to enter the room again so I went in and saw where she was scratching on the wall. Only a little bit was scratched away, so I started peeling some more wallpaper off. Under the wallpaper were different pictures drawn in what looked like crayon. They were typical kid pictures of mainly cats, and houses, however there was one picture that I thought was weird.
It was a little girl, a cat, a mom, and a dad. Now everything looked like a normal kid family portrait, except the dad had no face. It was just a circle. Of course my rational side said she just never finished it. But still the dad picture looked strangely out of place, like the lines were distorted like she had trouble drawing it. Anyway I told my parents and they yelled at me for pulling back the wallpaper. I didn't want my sister to get in trouble so I didn't say anything about her or what happened last night. My parents said we had to get it fixed now and were mad, and didn't let me play in there again as punishment. The whole thing still seemed normal to me. Kid draws on wall, parents put wall paper up to cover it up. I didn't realize until later that night when the scratching rubbing sound started up, that it sounded like a crayon. I really started thinking that it was "the girl" that my sister talked about was drawing on the wall.

Now after this happened, I started believing that the girl was actually in there. Once I started acknowledging her presence, weirder things began to happen. It happened really slowly. I was about 14 or 15 after the episode with my sister, and the weird things were happening slowly over the course of the next years I lived in the house up until I was 18. The changes were so subtle that I didn’t really notice that they were happening until much later. The drawing sounds increased a little bit and soon were audible even during the day. I also started hearing little pattering of feet. The more I heard these things the more emotional I felt about them. I started feeling angry the more I heard the sounds, especially when I was trying to sleep. However I always managed to control myself and try to think that this girl was obviously sad and just trying to have fun and I calmed myself down. However this was going on so long that I finally asked my sister when I was about 16.

I asked her if she ever heard the sounds. She said that she did, although they were pretty quiet. Now I didn’t think this was so weird since obviously I could hear them too, and I told her how annoying it was. She kind of looked at me as if she was hurt, and said that every time she heard the sounds she felt really sad. She had trouble talking about it, but I told her this is pretty important since it’s going to affect the rest of my years left in the house. She told me that “the girl” was the girl that she used to talk to when she played in the room. She didn’t know her name, but they used to play together. She said she looked just like a little girl about her age so they had fun together. However, as my sister got older, the little girl seemed to get older too, except very unnaturally. It was subtle at first but soon she began hating seeing her. She said she looked as if she “shouldn’t have been alive anymore.” I didn’t really know what this meant. My sister said she wore the same dress the whole time, even when the girl grew out of it. I asked her why she went into the room that one night to find the pictures, and she said she really didn’t want to but the girl made her feel so sad and she’d do anything to help her out. However this still freaked her out and I didn’t ask anymore questions.

Things got worse every night, and I hated hearing that sound. I was so mad that she wouldn’t just shut up so I could sleep. The weird thing was I was scared at the same time, since I knew that whatever it was in there wasn’t actually alive anymore. What also freaked me out was that the sound didn’t annoy my sister, but I guess she had more tolerance than I did.

I asked my parents who used to live here, and they said a family with two sons. Of course this didn’t have anything to do with the room, since they had it locked off the entire time they were there. So I asked if they knew anything about the family before them. They said the original owners were the ones who had the house built and that they didn’t know much about them, except that they had a daughter who died when she was 11. I asked if they knew how she died, but they said it was some sort of accident, so it wasn’t murder or child abuse or anything. I also asked if she died in the secret room, but they said they didn’t think so. I really think that this was the girl in the room, although I have no idea why she inhabited it still.

Once I knew this I sort of had an idea with what I was dealing with. Last year was when things got the worst. I heard almost constant drawing and her jumping around inside the room. The footsteps sounded heavier and were louder. If I ever heard it I’d pound on the door to the room and she’d stop immediately, but I’d hear soft whimpering or crying. She’d also start drawing again later on. Sometimes I’d scream at her to shut up. I really got mad every time it happened since it had been going on for 6 years. However, I knew that I had to do something about this. I was a lurker by this time so I’ve read a lot of ghost story threads, and I remembered how pussy most of the goons were regarding ghosts and never checked anything out. So I knew that I had to at least understand what was going on exactly, and if possible end it. I didn’t really have a plan but I knew I had to see the girl or talk to her or something.

Last year, shortly before I turned 18, my parents went away for the weekend, so I took the key to the secret room from their room (they kept it ever since locking it that day when I took off the wallpaper). I was determined to see her so I stayed up expecting to hear sounds. I couldn’t hear anything so soon I just fell asleep. It was about 1 am when I woke up to a loud bang, like someone jumped or fell. I heard her footsteps afterwards and of course the drawing. The first thing I felt before any fear was pure anger. I hated that she woke me up, even though this was what I wanted. I immediately grabbed the key and went to the door. I was pounding on it as I said “That’s it!” and unlocking the door. The sounds stopped and I heard whimpering. I threw open the door and this was the first time I saw the room in years.

The light coming from my room illuminated a figure in the room, much like when I saw my sister years earlier. This was when I began to feel a wave of different emotions. I was really angry, really scared, yet I also knew that I had to do this and remain calm. I went into the room and stood a few feet away from the figure which was standing in the corner. I turned on the light. What I saw was probably the most horrific sight I could probably have ever even thought of in my entire life. Any horror movie monster had nothing on how unnatural the girl looked.

I finally realized why my sister described her in such a weird way. Her body was taller than she should have been. Her limbs were so lanky and bony and stretched like she kept growing past how tall she should have been. She was wearing a really small dress, and it was really tight on her body. Her face looked as if her head had continued to grow but her face had not. The skin was stretched and the eyes were sunk back into her head yet wide open and her small, childlike teeth were exposed since her lips were stretched back with the rest of her face. Her hair was down to her waist, her face had tears streaming down. I took all of this in in just a moment, and as soon as we met eyes she let out a wail as if she was crying and moaning at the same time. It wasn’t a loud wail like most people describe ghosts, it was pretty soft and it was as if she was in terrible pain, but I couldn’t tell her expression since her face was so unnatural and stretched.

As soon as I heard the wail all the anger in my body was overcome by fear and I ran. I wish I could say I ran for a video camera, but I just ran. I know I’ve been talking about how much I hate when people don’t investigate things but I was so terrified that I ran. Once I got out of my room I ran to my car and drove away and spent the night at a friend’s house. Once I realized what happened I was in a cold shiver and scared out of my mind for the entire night. I was too scared to go back home until my parents came home.

I waited until they came back on Sunday, and then I came over. They asked me why I took the key and left the closet door open and I just told them I wanted to see if I could sell any of my old toys on eBay. I took one last look in the room and locked the door. Ever since then nothing happened. I don’t know why things stopped, but I’m always hoping its not because I “let her out” like in the Ring or something and that she’s really evil. Since nothing has happened since then I do really hope that I helped her out in some way, but in all honesty I don’t care. My parents moved after I went to college, and I have no intention of ever going back. I came up with a theory that the male family member in her life was really mean to her and hated her playing in there, and possibly beat her, while the female family member always felt sad (hence my sister, and the girls willingness to open up to her first). Anyway like I said that’s just all theory but it kind of makes sense. This all happened last year, and the more I think about it the harder it is to remember. Sorry for typing such a long post, I didn't realize I had this much to tell.
-----
I grew up in southern Russia, in the nineties. When the Soviet Union left it didn't pack a suitcase--there were skeletons of apartments, of future schools, of odes to industriousness--great unfinished ruins that were smothered in the womb; buildings no one had time to finish or to erase their towering, wasteful ironwork. It just wasn't done. When you started a project, you did not whip yourself around and say "my mistake" and bring in the Kamaz trucks and wrecking balls and skinny, smoking locals to clean up your mess. We left our buildings as they were, deserted them in differing degrees of function. The paperwork yellowed in some forgotten filing cabinet, the structures were left unfinished. Respectable adults regarded them with apathy, with outrage, or with shame. Less respectable adults regarded them with as much regard as they had for any other institution, turning them into cold, concrete brothels or smoky drug dens full of perverted laughter and weeping. Therefore, to the misfortune of intrepid safari explorer kids like me, we could not explore them. I had been warned to death and resurrection and death again to avoid these places, don't even think to cross that street, and don't you dare talk to anyone around them. Run right back home, make sure no one followed you, tell an adult right away.

Clearly this wasn't an opulent playground for oligarchs I called home. We'd never, though, considered ourselves poor--we just did what we do. In the grey breast of Siberia, we were only a rail-stop on a steam truck's way to more consequential cities. We in turn had an acute intrinsic awareness of what was of consequence; the rest was a boring dream. The park near my house and its rusting swings failed to hold my interest much longer than a week, so in secret I'd steal into the urban elephant graveyard a few blocks away. Most of them were steel beams bloated with shattered plaster, and my aunt could tell instantly by the chalkdust on my little fingers that I'd been where I shouldn't have. Then I'd get the standard earful of warnings, and dispense yeses blankly from a mouthful of cereal. I never found anything interesting, anyway-- as I said, most of them were were steel beams bloated with shattered plaster-- but not the Library.

This Library was, predictably, a lithic, angular block that made a parking garage look mean for emptiness. Every step echoed here. It seemed that the building itself was simply a chiseled-out cube of stone, with labrynthine passages that had an almost intentionally forgettable layout. Every room was bare, and it was blanketed with grand, untended and undying elephant-ear plants that kept the foundation warm when the snow came. This I had to venture into.

I don't remember ever entering the building, just being inside. It was quiet as sanctuary, pensive as stone. Everything was illuminated by a familiar wan sunlight, and the walls bearing this sickly glow were cool as a cave's. My memory is in pieces, but I know I didn't defile such a temple with running and shouting and general kidliness. The lonely sound of my feet were like an elegy to emptiness.

I felt drawn to a single room--an antechamber--with a wide hole in the center that could've been a window. On its sill was a single thing: a peppery, aging Bible opened halfway. It seemed untouched by the relentless summer rain. I studied it a moment, and movement caught my eye--I looked up to see a girl, aged like a university student, standing in the doorway. She was calm, but her movements were oversmooth and everything about her seemed blurred and washed-out--her long hair, black eyes. She stared at me, unblinking, extending a hand: "give that to me, please." I looked at her, to the book, to her. I felt utter peace, and my hands found the soft leather cover and--this was absolutely out of character--I began to tear away the page the Bible was open to. I threw it out the window, and passed it to her. She didn't react to her property being destroyed at all. "Thank you." Then a sudden anger, a disgust, an intense hate came over her--"LEAVE RIGHT NOW. GET AWAY FROM ME." I hopped over the window ledge and started walking, wondering just what happened.

I denied my senses and turned around halfway home--I wonder what she's doing now? Maybe I should say sorry for ruining that book of hers. I slunk around the outside of the Library, found the window I'd slipped through, and looked in-- it was higher than I remembered, I stood on my tippy-toes to peek in. A wave of terror gripped me. Lying in the doorway was a shapeless lump, and I didn't understand what I was seeing. I kept looking, finally able to breathe, and was assailed by the sick sweet stench of animal rot. A copper, a gangrene, a rawness, a wave of evil. What I was seeing was a pile of human flesh, draped atop itself, still trickling blood, sheared off. A mountain of thick skin cut deep from a living body. There was blood, so much blood, pooling under the heap until it filled the floor to a depth. A mound of flesh sheared off and neatly stacked, like a quilt with red, running seams. I can't move. My body feels hot and horrible and wrong, red flashes when I blink, what I'm seeing is wrong, this is not supposed to be in front of me, oh my god, oh my god, what is this?

I don't know how I got there, but I was now in my living room, pale and silent and it's dark outside. My aunt and uncle are asking me if I've been watching any scary movies. They whisk me away to bed, but I can see them walking and punctuating the slit of light under my door with legs and feet, talking in quiet voices, debating whether they should tell the police.

I'm sorry to say that this is where the story ends for you and I, simply because the memory trails and wanes here. I've always had poor memory, and head trauma didn't help that. I'm bad with numbers too. I actually spoke to my aunt recently, as I've been thinking about posting this story here, and I asked her what happened after.

"Do you remember when I was a kid, I told you I'd seen a bunch of skin in that concrete building? What happened after I went to bed that night?"
The line went quiet.
"You, well, uh... I'm not sure, to be honest. Your uncle and I talked a lot about it and decided to go in the morning to see if we should get the police involved. I do remember that the next day we went to where you said you saw it, and all we saw was an open Bible on a windowsill."
-----
After being away for quite a while on business, I visited my pal, J. He’s legendarily late, so, instead of meeting him somewhere on my then birthday night, I showed up on his doorstep, which meant he needed to get ‘on the fucking ball,’ so we could go eat before the night officially began.

I entered his house, and while he hastily grabbed some clothes and headed down the hall to take a shower, I went into his room, and grabbed an old magazine to read while I waited.

I heard voices, which didn’t come from the house, and none of the TVs were on… obviously it came from outside, a neighbor’s perhaps, but it was rather uncanny how amplified such reasonable-in-volume conversation could carry into this room, windows closed.

Upon exiting the shower, I brought this point up to him.

"What?" he said, "I never told you?"

Soon, after answering ten re-worded promises of 'I won’t think you’re crazy,' he begins the tale.

Explainable Voices - A few months ago, he began being awakened in the early hours of the morning by conversations that carried into his room. His room is across an alley-way to the next house, so the best he could do was make sure his windows were shut before he went to sleep. However, the conversations continued night after night, until he noticed something strange: the voices were hushed, like whispers… but how could they be that loud to wake him?

Well, J being a lot like myself, when you get woken up so early, your sleep’s shot. He began putting up thick curtains to block out the light, because if you get startled out of sleep at 3 am, by the time you start getting sleepy again, it’s sunrise.

On one day, he woke up near dawn, and heard two older women harshly whispering back and forth. He wearily decided to get dressed, and have a few words with them; before he could react, he made out a sentence:

"We wasted our time. He’s put up those damn curtains."

This freaked him out a bit, and happened upon a picture frame on the opposite wall, where he could see a reflection through a crack in the curtains of two figures, presumably two large women, craning their necks to look in his room. He concentrated, and noticed the exact angle of reflection: they were on top of the next door neighbor’s roof?

He abruptly sat up to address this absurdity, and heard the voices panic, and the figures in the reflection ran off.

Impossible.

He quickly dressed and went outside. The neighborhood was asleep. This was a neighborhood he was familiar with, having grown up here all of his life. There were no two people of this description in his neighborhood.

As freaked out as he was, he assumed it was some post-slumber confusion, a dream that didn’t quite snap out with his awakening.

It’s entirely possible that’s exactly what it was.

Children that should be seen, and not heard - The occurrence of the 'two women’ didn’t come back, which calmed the irrational discomfort since the event.

Then, new voices arrived.

In the wee hours of the morning, yet the time of night that preceded his going to bed, he began to hear rustling in the bushes on his lawn. He wrote this off as stray cats or something similarly dismissive. Soon, he began hearing, specifically, children’s voices and giggling outside.

What kind of children are allowed outside at this hour?

J approached the window, and pulled the curtains aside. He could see no children, but the bushes about his lawn were a little disturbed. This wouldn’t have been so annoying if it didn’t begin happening every damn night. And, as soon as he’d throw open the curtains, there were no children, and there was some evidence of someone playing in his yard.

Fucking kids.

He didn’t know whose children they were, and, since he didn’t get to catch them, he did something entirely practical. He set up a webcam to catch them, and to find out who in the hell these kids tearing about his yard were.

Eyes without a Face - After a brief period without disturbances, he decided to take down the webcam sometime later that week, until, one night, the voices had suddenly came back.

He left the webcam in place, which was slightly hidden, and he pretended to sleep.

"What’s he doing in my room?" a child’s voice said, to which other children’s voices replied, though indecipherable.

Now, J was beginning to freak out.

"Shh! He might hear you!"

"He can’t hear us, he can’t even see us… who is that guy? What is he doing in my room?"

"I don’t know, we should go."

"No, we’re staying."

J peered down his bed, and watched the monitor displaying the event (but not recording, which is something he’d later regret,) and began to try to make out what was on the monitor. He saw about three children, but the lighting left a lot to be desired. He could make out about three children’s foreheads and eyes, with one of them in particular, peering aggressively into the room, the two others were tiptoeing to get a better view.

"All right, that’s enough for tonight."

As soon as J heard this, he ran up to the window, and pulled apart the curtains. Clearly, someone had been standing in his garden/shrubbery, but somehow, the kids got away.

Christmas Interference - Over the course of the next few weeks, he could hear the kids outside, but it ceased as he sat up, as creeped-out as he was, he assumed it was his fears getting the best of him in his half-sleep; however, he was still clueless as to the two significant events listed here.

One day, however, he noticed something odd about what his monitor was receiving from his webcam… in the image, it was a washed-out tree of sorts. He double-checked where the cam was pointing; it was simply pointing to his lawn. This curiosity, however, didn’t go away.

He brought his father into the room, needing a witness to this.

"What do you see?"

"What, on the monitor?"

"Yeah, what do you see?"

"Shitty quality, but… I see a Christmas tree."

"Why do you think it’s a Christmas tree?"

"There’s… a garland of lights of sorts… a few boxes underneath… and what looks like a teddy bear? Perhaps a doll? What is this a picture of?"

J waved his hand in front of the camera that was pointing to his lawn, the picture on the monitor blacked out with his hand’s movements, proving the feed was live.

"J, what in the hell is that?"

"I’ve no idea."

"You know, there used to be a tree out there, before we moved in."

"How long ago?"

"Long before you were born… we’ve had this house, what, forty years? More?"

"You sure?"

"J, this is creeping me out, how are you doing this?"

"I’m not."

J proceeded to tell his father an edited version of this story, as to not appear insane. His father believed him, but was a little afraid of letting it sink in.

"You need to record this, J, maybe someone’s playing a prank on you."

"Well, Dad, it is a possibility, I’ll look into it."

J decided to investigate a little further. He went all around his neighborhood, asking if anyone had any video, radio, or broadcasting equipment, saying it was interfering with some of his electronics, picking up odd signals. He didn’t even come across a satellite dish. Still, this interference was a rational enough possibility.

A week later, the Christmas tree went away.

The Children Return - Another week or two went by, then the children came back… in force. The webcam stayed on as a matter of habit, and once more he awoke to voices.

This time, he watched the screen again, and there weren’t just three faces, there were about five, or more. Again, not full faces, just shadows with a bit of light shining on their forehead and eyes.

"I want to see, I want to see!" several of the voices said.

"WHAT IS HE DOING IN MY ROOM?" the lead child said, angrier than before.

"What is he doing, what is he doing?"

"I don’t know, but I’m going to…"

"…what?"

"Something’s wrong."

"What?"

"He’s got a camera."

"Oh, we’d better go."

"No, that’s unnecessary."

"Well, we could block it…"

"No."

"But he’ll see us."

"No he won’t, IT’S MY GODDAMN ROOM."

"Well… aren’t you going to do anything?"

"I am," the lead voiced said, annoyed.

J slowly sat up a little, riveted to the screen, watching the main set of eyes stare directly into the camera, and six or more others scrambling to wedge their way in, to get a peek.

Suddenly, the screen washed orange, then blue, it cycled colors like when you put a magnet close to a CRT monitor… except that it covered the whole screen, and successfully blocked out any other images.

J stood up, in malhumorous resignation.

"All right, kids, you got me, I don’t know how in the fuck you’re doing all of this, but you’re good. Come on out."

Nothing happened.

"Kids, c’mon, you win, I’m spooked as fuck, how in the hell are you doing all of this?"

Again, nothing but silence; J stood still for a few moments, hoping to hear them speak again, or their rustling in the bushes.

"Well, are you going to block the camera?" one of the voices said, not acknowledging J’s voice.

"I am," the main voice said.

"How?"

"With my mind."

J began to get a pit in his stomach.

"Is he gone?" one of the other children asked.

"I don’t know, but I still don’t know what he was doing in my room," the main child spat.

"You can’t see him?"

"No, I can’t."

"Think he heard us?"

"Of course not, he can’t hear us."

Having enough of this, J ran over to the curtains, and threw them open, and, for once, he saw a small child blazing across the lawn. J ran around out of his room, and through the main one, to exit his house in pursuit. However, as soon as he got to his front door, he saw nothing. Nothing in the distance, nothing in the bushes, all was quiet.

He finally gave up and went back into his room, where he closed the door, and sat down on the bed. The screen was still awash with strange colors, but, it began to lose its opacity. Upon closer inspection, he could see the Christmas tree again, but heard nothing for a full minute.

"Do you think he saw us?" he heard, as if the children had never left.

"No. He only saw what we wanted him to see."

These events ceased in February 2005, and nothing has happened since. His father is still freaked out about it (but is getting better,) J himself is equally disturbed. He’d decided to take the curtains down, since anyone peering in or such might not be as brave.

Since he did so, the webcam was soon taken down due to lack of events, no voices (other than obviously neighbors) have been heard. Research into the house prior to his family owning it came up with nothing special. No other electronics are or were ever affected by 'interference’ of any reasonable sort. The bushes are no longer disturbed every night, and he’s been getting better rest as a result.

For once, in someone's recounting of a scary/ghost story, I saw a lot of uncommon, interesting criteria: he could only see the images through a live monitor, they couldn't hear him, but he heard them, sometimes they didn't see him at all when he was standing right there, and the only 'real' thing he saw didn't make any sense. He had a witness to part of it, and he honestly self-doubted every step of the way, moments before it got much scarier. This, I find, makes this a very disturbing story, the eerie events ceasing as quick as they'd started.

My pal J doesn't have an explanation to this day, but a lot of 'rational' excuses. He's just glad that it's over.
-----
So, there is an abandoned house in my home town. Just as there is in any town. Large, handsome real-estate which for some 'unknown' reason is boarded up and unused.

Unused by everyone except of course all the local kids, junkies, and winos. For all of whom the supposed unknown reasons are very well know, but by no means held in agreement about the specifics.

I'm young, I have a pocket full of dope and an attractive opportunity to spend some alone time with an attractive girl. I am young, so doing all this at a supposedly haunted house is a fabulous idea. I've been there before so know all about the loose boarding at the back where you can leaver it away from a window frame and climb inside. So we do. It's not night time, so while most of the windows in the place are covered over light filters through by osmosis and the empty shell of this house is more or less visible inside. I'd been there many times before and I knew that there were a few choice rooms on the ground floor to sit in and smoke up; rooms predominately where no homeless men had thrown up half a gallon of cheap cider or taken a vast shit any time in the last two months.

But this girl, you see, she's all full of spunk: not my own, not yet and actually not ever. A feisty bit and as a new comer instead of just getting high and exploring our developing sexuality, she actually wants to explore the house instead. So we go from room to room and it's more of the same crap. Sometimes literally. But mostly just empty rooms, boarded windows, holes in the walls, and so on. She wants to go upstairs, which I'd never done because, well, I'm not a fucking idiot. The whole place being a rotting death trap. But flying in the face of reason she wants to go and I'm not going to deny her biased on my desire to not appear cowardly and my stronger desire to remove parts of her clothing. Which is more or less the same desire but viewed from different angles.

Upstairs, for the sake of simplicity you can imagine there are four rooms, all connected by a single corridor that splits them down the centre; four on either side. All the first six we pass without entering are empty and featureless. Most of their windows are just voids in the wall through which the sunlight falls in. Without disappearing through the floorboards, I'm considering this to be a wasted trip and as we approach the end of the corridor I'm wondering how stoned I could have become in the time it's taken me to get here.

But the last room on the right is dark. The window is still boarded up and there is a girl lying in the centre of the floor. She is curled up, fetal and sobbing.

Beyond how bad that would normally be, things just felt utterly awful. Like you were seeing something terrible just before you could understand quite how terrible it could be. She's like a mouse. Seriously, that is as best as I can phrase it. She like a mouse that's halfway through being tortured by a playful cat. It's dark and I'm never going to be sure about specifics; but she seemed to have mousy grey hair, yet still be young. And even when I close my eyes now and picture it, I have simply no idea if she was naked. When I tell myself she was, I can see her being naked - very thin, all jutting ribs and hip bones - but then if I want to I can utterly convince myself she was draped in a kind of blanket. Like a dirty piece of tasteless 70's carpet or something.

The girl I'm with, she just stops dead her mouth just drops open. This is a junkie hang-out and while my rational mind is just wondering if I should even bother calling an ambulance - whether that would just create too many problems for both her and us - I know all too fucking well that this is no junkie. Like I say, it just felt so, so wrong. I said something like, "Hello?" Because I'm English and I find it very hard to do anything but be extremely polite in an emergency. But the thing on the floor doesn't move. It's not static, it simply just doesn't react to our presence. Then I glace at the girl I'm with. I'm feeling a bit like someone just kicked me in the kidneys, but it's not until I look at her that I really feel the bottom drop out of creation.

She's staring, wide eyed and her mouth agape in a way I've never seen in a human being since. Like she would scream, wants to scream, but there is nothing tangible to scream against. I follow her eyes, not to the floor, but across the darkened room to the corner furthest from us to where a man is stood. That simple. Some guy is just standing there, in this room with the girl on the floor. Almost completely in shadow. Just standing. Nothing in my life has ever fucked me up so much as seeing that. None of this felt supernatural. It felt violent and wrong and fucking awful. I grabbed the girl I was with and just fucking turned and walked very quickly and very purposely away from there. She was like a sack of feathers, like tugging a balloon, I mean that girl was just waiting for me to take her anywhere that wasn't there. I march down the corridor with that feeling like if I run, something will chase me. Like walking away from a snarling dog.

And I don't hear anything. Not in the lifetime it takes me to get down passed the other six rooms that lead off the upstairs corridor and to the staircase at the end. But I'm passing the final door before the stairs and I'm looking inside because I know there's no choice. And there it is again. A girl lying curled up on the floor. A man standing in the corner. The room, unlike the last, was in daylight and if I'd taken the time I could have made out his face, I could have looked at what she was wearing. Seen how old she was. But are you fucking kidding me? I was down those stairs and dragging my failed date behind me faster then a sneeze.

I don't really remember forcing her through the broken window at the back of the house, but I do remember running the fuck away and her suddenly starting to cry. We're about seventeen and she's crying like a child as I continue to drag her away. When my heart finally falls down out of my terror gland and I turn and look back at her. I see there's blood all down her face and lips. Just pouring from her nose. And there's almost a second where I'm wondering if I brought the right girl out of that room. Well, that's a true story. While I can mess around with the specifics of it my head to make it more or less fucked up depending on how alone I'm feeling, two things always stand out to me as irrefutable. Firstly, no feeling has ever crept over me that was so unpleasant as the feeling of looking into the dark room. Nothing. From funerals to horrible emotional break-ups and personal tragedies. Because nothing has ever felt so tangibly inhuman or as evil.

And secondly, I have never seen blood pour from somebody quite like it did from that girl. I don't know if she just burst a blood vessel in her brain or something, whatever it was, not in years of playing rugby or being beaten-up in bars. It was like someone was trying to pull all her guts out at once, and they were damn well going to do it out of her nose. We never did get to make out.
-----
Why my visits home have been infrequent. I grew up with my older brother and my grandfather in western Maryland. We live in a very small town on property that my grandfather (Pop) farmed with his father way back in the day. Pop served in WWII, and during his time in Europe his father died. When pop came home, he bought the small grocery store in town, which is way more lucrative than dairy farming ever was. Now our 50 acre property consists of old fields that run into a beautiful wooded area. All in all it was an awesome place to be a kid.

My brother and I played all over our property, but we were always a little creeped out by a wooded patch at the extreme northeast of the land. This patch of woods has a really cool history: Pop was incredibly peaceful by nature, but like many people from that generation, he was obligated to fight in the war. In France somewhere, he shot a German soldier during some skirmish or something. The kill traumatized him for years after the war. In 68, he went to Germany and somehow tracked down the family of the soldier. The family responded warmly; Pop returned the typewriter he had taken from the soldier (it was valuable or something, I don't know), and the family gave him a pin that had belonged to the soldier. Both families still exchange letters. I have always been incredibly proud of this.

Well, apparently, Pop still felt guilty. A few years after the Germany trip, he still didn't feel like he had closure. He decided he would bury the soldier's pin on the most beautiful part of our land to give the soldier the perfect resting place. A billion years later, my brother and I knew this "most beautiful resting place" as the creepy woods. My brother swears that when he was 7, he ran into an old man in the creepy woods who pinched his arm to the point of bruising. Although he had the bruise to back it up, I'd always figured the old man story was fabricated to save face after being bullied or something. We had always known about the buried pin, so it was pretty likely that he would try to make up an accommodating ghost story. I hadn't thought about the incident in about fifteen years, and the memory was pushed way back in my brain.

Well, you can imagine my surprise when, at the end of last summer, the neighbor's six-year-old boy came running home in tears, complaining of an old man that had pinched him in the woods. I tried to calm him down, but the coincidence resonated with me, so I went inside and told Pop. I was expecting him to say something to the effect of "Shut up boy, go mow the grass!" But instead, he said the words that I now recognize as a signal that his mental condition was decaying:
"Stay here."

I watched in disbelief as pop went to the shed, obtained a SHOVEL, and trudged off in the direction of the woods.

Sadly, pop is now at Pinebrook, an assisted living community. His last actions as a completely independent man, on that day with the shovel, are what convinced my stepmother that he no longer has the mental stability to live on his own. Pop was convinced that the "pinching old man" was the ghost of the soldier that he killed. So at a critically low point in his mental condition, he went back to the woods, dug up the pin, and melted it in the wood stove. When he was done, he came to my stepmother and I, and said:

“If he bothers anyone else, I'll kill him again."
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The year was 1958 when my parents were crossing the country to return home to visit relatives. Back then there were no highways, and the mountainous area of Kentucky was treacherous driving. Narrow roads that two cars, at some points, could not pass, and these roads also ran along the sides of mountains with steep cliffs and dangerous drop-offs. On their way to Ohio, by the time they got to Kentucky, my parents were so tired they decided to stop at a hotel for rest. They saw a sign advertising the world famous Mammoth Cave. This was not a billboard, mind you, because those were nearly nonexistent in the Kentucky backwoods of that day, but a handmade sign with an arrow pointing to the direction of yet another narrow road. They had never been there before, but figured it would be well populated, even in those days, with two or three hotels. Following the sign's directions, they turned and drove what seemed forever, almost to the point of giving up and turning back. After driving miles and miles on the dark and winding road, in the middle of the night, finally they arrived at what my father described as an aged, large, Colonial style farmhouse. They had not passed a car, or house, or any sign of civilization for many miles. In front of this huge house there was a sign - also hand-painted - saying "Mammoth Cave and Hotel."

My mother got a terrible feeling and refused to get out the car. My father was stubborn, and decided it had drove too far for nothing and was going to check it out anyway. So scared she was, my mother said, that she locked the doors the moment my father stepped out of the car, even though there was no sign of life or other vehicles anywhere in sight. My father said the door to the so-called hotel was open, and when he stepped inside there was a huge hole near the entrance with a velvet rope hanging around it. He said it was near the door and you had to step around it to keep from falling in. On one side were a bunch of old, old women in rocking chairs; on the other side a sign-in desk with a huge book on it. He said it looked like something you would see in a western movie. He said the old women numbered somewhere between 10 and 12. It was dimly lit by what appeared to be lanterns. There were no other furnishings in the room - only the gaping hole, which went straight down into the earth. He said it seemed bottomless, and the cave-like hole eventually fell from view into darkness that seemed hundreds of feet down. He described steps that ran the length of its depth for as far as one could see. One of the old women told him that the hole was the Mammoth Cave, but it was "closed" being so late at night. She offered him a room to stay in and asked him to sign his name in the book.

He said he still gets frightened when he recalls the event, and my father is not one to scare easily. He said he had a feeling that if he stayed much longer, he would never leave alive. He also said the women started to approach him, and he felt he may not have escaped their clutches had he not lied and told them he was going to the car to get his family. My mother had the car started and door opened by the time he reached it. He said she was terrified, even though she had not entered the farmhouse and saw what he did. To this day she said she has never felt so scared in all her life. They burned the rubber and got out of there, and did not stop until after daylight and they found "civilization" again.

As the years passed, our family has gone to the real Mammoth Cave - nothing like the mysterious event my parents experienced that strange night so long ago. In daylight hours, we've even searched the primitive side roads and found no house similar in design. Once we found a burnt down farmhouse, but there were no visible signs of a gaping hole that led to what seemed the depths of hell. Nearly 50 years later and we're still looking for answers.
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In my younger days, a group of friends and I would go ghost hunting. We were rarely successful, and when we were successful it was usually some strange little incident that could be easily explained with science or any other sort of rational thinking. I think what was appealing to us most probably was the wait for something to show up. Though we rarely had any real run-ins with anything one could call "paranormal", our trips were always tense. It was the anticipation that was the most exciting. It stayed in the area where it was exciting without being totally, mind-breakingly horrifying. An enjoyable level of emotions for a bunch of bored, midwestern teenagers.

The end of these fun little outings was abrupt and unexpected. There's a cemetery in the town of Anderson, Indiana that has quite a bit of lore attached to it. There's two parts: the newer part where people are buried now, and the original cemetery, which probably hasn't had a fresh corpse buried in it since the fifties. The older part contains a grave for two young children who died sometime around the turn of the 20th century, I believe. There's a statue of the two, a brother and a sister, above the grave, and it's said that the eyes of the statue follow you around. This is true, but it's merely an optical illusion. A little interesting, but not enough so that you'd want to waste a night checking it out.

That wasn't the rumor about the grave that had us out there. Recently, an article in the local paper (this was around Halloween) had talked about strange occurrences happening on the somewhat busy road near the old part of this one cemetery. People would be parked at a certain red light, and they'd get the feeling that they were being watched. They'd turn to face their window and see a small child peering into their car. Naturally, this scared the shit out of the drivers, and they'd take off, leaving the kid behind. The description of the child matched the description of the little girl's statue.

We hoped to visit the cemetery and piss off the ghosts. That's right, we deliberately set out to irritate two dead children. I had noticed that in many stories written by former skeptics, they claimed that they aroused whatever entity they encountered's presence by saying something rude or doing something obnoxious. As someone who was growing more skeptical with each paranormal outing, I felt this to be a good last-resort kinda tactic. We'd kick their grave, mutter some foul words about them, and perhaps we may feel bold enough to literally spit upon their grave. If that didn't offend ghosts that had no problem scaring innocent passerby, what would?

We showed up shortly before the sun was to set. We walked around the grave a few times, noting that the statue was very creepy. It was also surprisingly well-done, though time had taken a bit of a toll on its overall condition. The grass was a brownish green, and it was obvious this cemetery was not being tended to properly. We had been there for about ten minutes, and nothing had happened. I leaned on the boy's section of the statue (him being the oldest and taller of the two) and noticed something strange. There was a very faint pulse coming from the statue. I told the others about it, and they all felt it as well. Only one other of are party of four felt the pulse. I thought about it for a few seconds, but dismissed it as possibly the pulses in our own hands somehow resonating through the statue. Seemed plausible enough.

We began to grow bored, and despite our promise to be as hateful and vindictive to the little dead bastards as possible, no one said anything. Only as we were leaving did Rob, our driver and most assholish of friends, kick the base of the statue out of frustration.

"Waste of my goddamn time."

I was not looking forward to the drive home, as Rob's car stank horribly. He had many food wrappers, soda cans, and other useless waste lying around the car, as well as a dirty old blanket in the backseat he refused to throw out. The youngest member of our group had headed back to the car about five minutes befhorehand. As I climbed into the back, I saw him asleep and almost completely covered by Rob's blanket. It was almost adorable in a "don't sleep under that filthy thing" sort of way. Rob didn't seem to notice or care that his fluid-covered blanket was being used in such a manner. Even though he was the most skeptical of us all, he had always been disappointed with the lack of ghostly activity at the end of those summer nights. However, with disappointment on all our minds, the five of us in the car set out for Todd's house.

About halfway there, the youngest, who I'll call James, began to snore from underneath the blanket. We all thought it was a little amusing, but not exactly hilarious. Slowly though, the snoring turned to a strange gurgling noise with bits of incoherent gibberish. We chuckled at this originally, but it grew more annoying/disgusting/unnerving as it continued for the next five minutes. Finally, James made a small whimper, like someone who was having a nightmare in which they felt completely helpless. He was quiet the rest of the ride.

Everyone in the two front seats seemed to have noticed nothing wrong, but the two of us besides James in the back were quite afraid. I thought about pulling up the blanket, but some sort of instinct was preventing me from doing so. We finally reached Todd's house, and as we all got out of the car, James stayed behind. I nudged him a couple of times and told him we were at Todd's house. I knew at the time something was wrong. It was particularly cold for a summer night and it'd be wrong to leave him out in the car, but I couldn't bring myself to take the blanket off of him. I left him to his slumber and went back up to the porch where the others were sitting.

"What's his deal?" Rob asked. I explained that he was sleeping and that it felt wrong waking him up. It was then when I noticed something that almost made me throw up in its creepiness. All of us were out on the porch. Me, Rob, Todd, and James. I did a cartoonish double-take and noticed that somebody was still laying underneath Rob's ratty blanket. I realized that there had been five people in the car the whole time, when there were only four people in our group. Rob and James had sat in the front seats (James calling shotgun by leaving the gravesite early), and me and Todd had sat in the back. James and Rob claimed that they had heard nothing strange in the car on the way over, and that they had never really noticed the guy under the blanket. Seen him possibly, but not really noticed his presence.

We slowly walked back to the car and opened the passenger-side door next to the Blanket Ghost. The blanket, which had previously appeared to have a human form under it, collapsed as soon as we had opened the door. I know what we were all thinking: "Maybe it just looked like it had somebody under it the whole time." Of course, that didn't explain the noises Blanket Ghost had made earlier. And it certainly didn't explain the black liquid trickling down from the underside of the blanket in the aftermath of its collapse.

Rob carefully pulled up the blanket. What we saw was a reddish-black liquid that covered almost the whole underside of the blanket. It started to get cleaner towards the bottom of it (or, in this case, the part farthest from the door) and eventually, only one red-black handprint had been left in that area. Todd threw up a little as soon as he saw the handprint. I felt nauseous myself. Rob insisted on keeping the blanket as a souvenir. He seemed proud of it for some reason. A year later, a friend of the group caught him burning the blanket in a field near his house. He wouldn't respond to her when she talked to him, and he refused to talk about the blanket (or the incident) afterwards. In fact, he insists none of this really happened.

Todd and I have always felt the worst about the incident. We were the two who felt the statue's pulse and the two who had actually noticed the Blanket Ghost's sick snores and sleep-talk. James doesn't seem to feel strongly about his blanket-covered doppelganger either way.
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My Mom & I were going to drive from Norco, CA to San Antonio, TX to visit my sister & her husband. We hadn't seen her in years, and we were really looking forward to this trip.

My Dad had this thing about leaving for vacations at 5 in the morning. Why, I don't know; he just did. Something about getting there sooner, or beating the traffic, or whatever. So we climbed into the newish car, a horrible yellow Dodge that we called the Yellow Peril. It later blew up (well, overheated) at Picacho Peak in Arizona. But that's for another day.

At the time Norco was a small community of horse people & rednecks west of Riverside, CA. This was 1977 (yes I am that old) so there were no cell phones or computers around. One of the roads followed the hills behind Norco and eventually ended up in the La Sierra/Arlington part of Riverside. It turned into Arlington Ave, which was the back way out of town. This back way was the quickest to the freeway, so that was the way we went.

We passed the open field on the right that indicated the start of Arlington. Since the ground was fairly hilly, the road had a slightly steep incline. To the left there was a steep drop to the open fields that rolled off to the Santa Ana river. To the right was a cut covered with oleanders. Above it was the cemetery. There were no houses of any kind for several miles.

As we rounded the corner we saw a movement off to the left. Slowing down, we saw a woman in a white dress come climbing up onto the road, walk out into the middle, and lie down.

We stopped. We could see her very clearly in the headlights of the car. She was middle-aged, maybe 45-55, dark hair, and huge dark eyes that stared straight ahead. She was looking right at our car, but I don't think she actually saw anything; it was more like she was staring through us. Her white dress was very floaty, almost like a negligee.

We didn't know what to do. There was no way to turn around; the road was far too narrow. We couldn't just go around her; there was no shoulder on the left, and the right was covered with thick bushes.

I thought about getting out to see if she was OK, but my Mom was afraid she was some kind of bait. Who they'd be waiting for in the middle of nowhere at 5 AM didn't matter; she was sure it was a trap.

While we waited a pickup truck came down the other way. They also stopped, illuminating her in their lights too.

My Mom made her decision. She said "The hell with it," and we drove through the bushes to get around. As we pulled away we could hear the truck honking its horn.

We drove to the freeway. We saw no phones (that I recall) and just kept going.

It wasn't until later that morning we realized that she was at the cemetery.
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I live a boring life, but this one thing happened to me many years ago...

I was waiting for the bus, minding my own business, when a different bus pulls up to the intersection and lets a bunch of people off. There was this one chick who was dressed up kind of goth-y, not really hardcore with all the makeup and spikes and shit, but she was wearing all black and wearing a very loose shirt that seemed kind of torn up. I didn't think much of it beyond, 'Wow, goth people are stupid as hell.' She turns the corner and starts walking away, walking in the direction that my bus would come in.

I turn away for a second, and I turn back to watch for the bus, but as I do, something strange happened. The girl, who was previously walking normally, suddenly bolts off into the street, arms flailing, torn shirt segments flying behind her. Suddenly, my bus appears over the hump of the bridge. She's right in it's way! I swear out loud, but I'm way to far away to help. The bus hits her.

But nothing happens. I must have blinked or something because suddenly the girl wasn't there anymore. The bus pulls up as if nothing happened. Speechless, I just start walking/running towards where the girl was to look around. No body. No one to be seen in any direction. No hint of this girl ever having been there.

I remember that night vividly.
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My cousins all live out near my mother's place in Groton, MA, and they told me about the legend, so all the information I received on it comes second or third-hand. The urban legend has to do with this area near Bridgewater, Massacusettes, possibly forming a triangle that touches Raynham and Deadham(?) as well. What's in the triangle-area is a large swamp, called Hockamock, which, supposedly is an old Indian name, meaning 'the place where even the Devil will not go' or something of that nature.

What they told me was pretty horrifying on some counts. The exact origin of the legend of the swamp isn't known, but my cousin's friend swore it had been created back in the colony days, when the heads of the nearby village of Bridgewater wanted to expand into some swampland that the local Native Americans were already inhabiting. The town leaders asked the Indians what they would take in return for the land, and they refused to give it up. The town leaders pushed and pushed, until the Indians finally assured them that they only thing they'd take for the land was the 'souls and lives of anyone who sets foot on the hollowed ground'. The town leaders had had enough of this bullshit, presumably, so they ransacked and burned the Indian encampment. Bad move, historically speaking.

Another option for it's creation is that it wasn't a swamp originally; the town leaders broke a nearby dam and flooded the Indian settlement, killing men, women and children.

Regardless of whether or not either (or any) legend is true, anyone who enters the swamp area automatically feels sick and uncomfortable being there. It is said that there's a huge rock 'alter' at the exact center that has a forboding and sickly feeling to it as well; supposedly this alter was used for human sacrifice, but by who I don't know. Campers have disappeared; there's a famous instance of a group of friends going out to 'conquer' Hockamock's legend by proving that there were no ghosts there, but they never came back. Search/rescue efforts were fruitless as the swamp is very hard to navigate, being dense and maze-like, and the natural gases create an omnipresent stench that can be overpowering to the senses in some areas.

Probably the creepiest thing anyone's told me about this swamp was that it's growing. The area isn't a natural depression; like a lot of marshland, it's completely flat ground. Yet, the area has doubled in size from 1900 to 1970, and tripled in size by 1990. Some houses in neighboring towns have had the basements flood mysteriously, even after weeks of no rain, and no nearby water source.
Soon after, the area nearing the house will become wet and squishy, like marshground, and eventually it will become part of the swamp. This is the only part of the legend that unsettles me deeply, and the only part that may actually be factual and correct. There is a higher level of marshground vs woodlands in New England, enough that a swamp that slowly grows over time to massive proportions is not unheard of. It's just the legends associated with the place that make it so disturbing.
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This came up in conversation and needed repeating.  It's not neccessarily a ghost story, more just paranormal, but it should fit.
Near where I grew up there was a large amusement park.  One half of it was rides and coasters, the other half was a water park.  Obviously, the summer jobs there were a great pull when you were a teenager, and they employed a huge number of my friends on summer break from college.  The jobs over in the water park were generally considered more desirable, although I was never abe to get them because I am a horrible swimmer.  Basically, the water park opened later and closed earlier, so the shifts were nicer, and they had to pay you more because you had to be first aid and CPR and lifeguard cetified.  A lot of my friends worked there, and I knew about three of the people involved in this story.

It started at a water slide, one of the huge tube slides that you had to walk up 7 flights of steps to get to the top.  One lifeguard was posted up top, telling people when to go down, and one of my friends was the lifeguard at the bottom, who helped people off the slide, and gave the all clear for the next person to go.  A family had come with their child, who was very young, and apparently barely the height limit to go on the ride.  The family was in line with the father first, kid second, and mother last, so that someone would be with the kid at both top and bottom of the slide.

The father goes down the slide, gets off and the lifeguard gives the all clear.  And waits.  He can't really see whats going on up top, but finally the next rider comes down.  It's the mother, who walks over to the father and asks where their son is.

There's a moment of confusion and my friend is pulled over by the family.  The kid had been the next one to enter the slide up top, before his mother, but had never come out the bottom.  My friend is confused, calls up to the top lifeguard who verifies that the kid went down the slide.  Neither my friend nor the father saw the kid come out the bottom.  Until this is figured out, they shut down the ride.  The top lifeguard calls security and reports this as a missing child, while my friend calls a supervisor.

The supervisor shows up and is apparently afraid the kid is wedged in the tube somehow, and in such a way that the mother failed to dislodge him coming down the slide.  They way she said it it was apparently obvious she was assuming some injury to be involved.  The parents are obviously upset at this point and freaking out, and the super has the upper lifeguard go down the ride himself, spread out to make sure there's no child jammed into the turns of the ride.  He comes out the bottom, having not dislodged the corpse of the child, and everyone is more confused than ever.

Meanwhile, security called saying they just turned up a missing kid near one of the coasters, could they get a description of the child missing?  The super sort of dismisses it out of hand that it could have been the same child.  The coaster they found the kid by was clear across the park, and the child was only missing for a few minutes at this point.  Instead, she has a bunch of lifeguards run up the stairs and come down the slide, still hoping to dislodge the kid while other employees quietly look around the bottom in case the kid somehow managed to fall out of the tube.  Meanwhile, upper management is called in, as the parents of the kid are alternating between yelling and blaming each other, panicking, and threatening to sue the park.  Upper management calls security and asks them to pull the security camera footage from the top of the slide, to try to figure out what happened.

A kid a few years ahead of me in high school happened to be working security, and he was there when they pulled the footage and one of the security guards says that he is almost positive that's the kid they have in the next room.  They get the kids name, and sure enough, he's in the missing children's room, safe and sound.

Here's where things get weird. The footage shows the father, kid, and mother entering the slide.  It's also time stamped, so they know when the child went down the slide.  The incident report for when the kid was found clear across the park, behind a rollercoaster, shows he was discovered less than five minutes later. If you've ever noticed, nothing in an amusement park is laid out linearly.  There's always fences and bushes and buildings between you and where you want to go.  The idea is to make you ramble about between rides to cut down on ride wait time.  My friend the security guard tested it, and walking at a stiff clip and knowing all the shortcuts, it was a 20 minute walk for him.  Furthermore, when you hit the edge of the waterpark, there were signs that shirts and shoes had to be worn past that point. If you saw anyone (even a kid) walking past there without them, you were to detain them.The kid was found barefoot and shirtless in just his swim trunks.  The idea that no one across a 12 acres would stop this kid, who to travel that far had to be running, and ask him to put on appropriate clothing, is completely weird.

Weirdest of all was that the incident report stated that the child seemed disoriented and was at first not able to respond to questions. It also stated that the kid (who was in a water slide five minutes prior) was bone dry.

This was the talk of the park for about a week, with everyone trying to come up with explanations, guards searching the other security footage to try to find the kid going across the park, people trying to get from the slide to the coaster, etc.Then the upper management came out and basically hushed it up. Supervisors told that if they heard anyone talking about it that they would be fired. Pretty soon the park moved onto whatever the next drama was and it got swept aside.
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I was lying in bed, listening to music and reading a physics book for a class. I was really struggling through a section of the book that was a bit over my head, so I ended up reading a few pages over and over. I started to lose my concentration, probably due to fatigue, and suddenly I felt like I was just looking at the words rather than reading them.

Something grabbed my attention out of the corner of my eye, but I didn't immediately see anything. I figured I was just looking for a distraction, but suddenly there was all this tension that kind of crept up my spine. Sort of a "too much coffee" feeling.

I tried to get back into the book for a bit, but all I could really focus on at that point was the music, and I kept feeling like something was moving and I just couldn't catch it in time. I had to take the headphones off - I needed to be able to hear my surroundings. I was very uncomfortable.

I usually throw my bath towel over my bedroom door since it never dries fully in the bathroom. When I go to bed, I also close the door a bit to block out some of the sound from traffic and things. Not all the way, just most of the way.

But it was like I was in fight or flight mode, with no real reason I could figure out. Just lying in bed, holding a book I couldn't even read, headphones buzzing away on my lap. I started looking around my room hoping to find a moth or a spider or something just doing its business somewhere. That's probably what I saw, I figured. That's all.

Then I saw it. Sticking out from under the towel hanging from the door was a hand. Four fingers wrapped around the edge of the door, exposed just enough to be visible, but in a bit of shadow caused by the towel. I obviously wasn't prepared for this, and froze for a while while I was quietly losing my shit and trying to think of a plan.

How long had this person been in my apartment?

Should I say something, or... do I have something I can use as a weapon? What do they want?

I had an iPod, a book, a pair of glasses, and a plastic water bottle. Maybe my lamp could be used as a weapon, but if I grabbed it - if I could even get it unplugged without making a commotion - it would be pitch black.

Then it got a lot worse. I realized I couldn't see any part of a person under the door, through the back where the hinges are. It didn't *really* matter, but it bothered me more. I couldn't size up the person attached to the hand at all. There's only one way out of my apartment and it's through that door, past someone that... has at least one hand. That's all I knew.

I was still frozen. Hadn't dared to make a sound or a movement since I saw it. Could I open the window fast enough and jump out? It's a second story apartment, but I don't think it would kill me. I didn't know what was down there, but it didn't seem like a bad idea.

I started to lean very slowly to my left, giving me a slightly better angle behind the door. I got to the point where I could almost see the door frame, and there was still nothing. Not even a shadow from the light passing under the door. But the hand was still there.

I weighed the possibility of someone playing a prank on me. I work from home and was there all day, but maybe...

Still leaning over about as far as I could without really moving, I started to pull the covers off so I could either get up and run out the door or at least back into the other end of the room and grab this heavy brass candle holder I had in my closet. I hadn't really decided.

Then there was a thud on the floor - my iPod fell off the covers.

A woman's head popped out around the edge of the door, along with another hand. She had black eyes, black hair, and she looked right at me. She didn't make any noise, but I sure as hell did. I jumped off the bed and grabbed the candle holder, doing my best to keep an eye on the door area. She was still there, just looking at me, head moving a little bit.

I threw the candle holder at the door and hit the thin edge near where the hands were. The glass in the holder shattered, the frame fell to the floor, and nobody was there. I immediately hit the light switch by the door, pushed the door open all the way, and flung the towel on the bed. Two seconds later I was outside.

After a minute to collect myself, I turned each light in my apartment on as I made a quick sweep. I grabbed my unloaded 9mm from it's case on my way by. My apartment is very small, there's nowhere to hide, other than the standard "behind the shower curtain" or "under the couch" type of places. I was reasonably satisfied that nobody was in there after at most a minute. There just couldn't be.

I came out of the bathroom, holding the gun up like it was going to do something, and went to have a smoke outside. I was shaking a bit, but felt pretty safe outside. The complex I live in is on a major street, people are always awake somewhere, and it's pretty well lit. I just stood out there for a while, leaning against the railing, staring into my apartment.

The front door had a key in it. I have two keys to my apartment, the one on my keychain, which I could see in the little basket I keep just inside the door, and the one my landlord has. This one was gold, while the only two I've ever seen are silver. I grabbed it, sat inside with all the lights on, and just thought about what happened.

When I went to grab my phone out of my bedroom, I decided to toss the towel into the hamper. It was soaking wet. The whole bed was wet from the towel. I had taken a shower at around 7pm, and it was about 1am by that point.

I did not sleep at all that night.

The next night, I couldn't even try.

Friday night, I was invited to hang out with some friends. As I was leaving, I noticed something was under my doormat. It was a pile of keys, ten to be exact. All of them worked in my door. I don't know when they showed up.

I made a point of getting way too drunk that night to even consider coming home. I passed out on my friend's floor. I was so tired that it still felt good.

Locksmiths apparently charge more to change locks or make any other house call on Saturdays, but I changed my locks. No more keys have shown up.

Still haven't slept in my own bed except for an hour or two when I literally just pass out.

I'm moving next month, but I don't know if I can last even that long. What the hell was that in my house? Who was the woman behind the door? What did she want?
-----
Anyway, in fourth or fifth grade, when I was 9 or 10, I befriended a kid who's name escapes me but he was probably named Jessie since I've known like 10 of them in youth. So anyway, Jessie lived on the outskirts of town just before it turned into the next town over. The houses that were in this mid-town limbo had large lots and were much older than the house I lived in at the time. Jessie was one of my 2-week friends, and it did have something to do with the going-ons in his house.

Originally he invited me over to play his new N64, since no one I knew had one yet (surprisingly, since he was one of the poorer kids in school). I said hell yes like the gamer I was and went over there one day after school to play Wave Race 64. I actually didn't get to play because his sister and brother would take the controller and I didn't really care much for racing games at the time so I watched. His dad brought over Taco Bell (which is wierd because of all the Mexicans I've known I think Jessie's family was the only one to eat Taco Bell and not complain about it being fake shit)

Anyway that's not the point. There was nothing strange going on until that night when we decided it would be cool if I slept over. You see, his house was on a large plot of land that was overgrown with weeds and bushes that were never trimmed. The next house was about 6 or 7 normal houselengths away (for those of you who have been in suburbia). Also, in unincorporated parts of towns there are very few streetlights, only on corners and even then not on every one. Jessie's street was a dead end and all gravel so the city had decided not to bother lighting it and at night it would be terribly dark. I guess his dad didn't care much about it because they never had a porchlight and the one from their neighbors house only cast slippery shadows across the unkept lawn.

So once night fell and Wave Race (his only game) got boring we decided to just find something fun to do since we were kids and it seemed entirely possible. It was pretty awkward, though. His family was loud and annoying, young kids and a single parent who needed sleep to work the next day (Yelling of course), and Jessie and I had just become friends days earlier.

He didn't have any drapes on his windows so as we sat around before going to sleep I would look out the window. I was probably only a mile away from my house but even that didn't comfort me from the fear his street brought. Like I said it was awfully dark and there was only the light of his neighbor's porchlight shining towards me. There was a row of scraggly bushes that were glowing along the edge and then casting gross shadows across the grass. In the backyard was a tree with no leaves (it was fall), and it was drawing its claws across a dilapidated old shed. The house and shed were both that dark-grey deadwood color like old shanties are always portrayed as. The site and eerie feeling gave me goosebumps, but the livelihood of Jessie's smaller siblings kept me from sinking into it.

But eventually Jessie fell asleep and the kids fell asleep almost instantly. The father was snoring in the other room which I could hear faintly as I laid on whatever they had provided, I think the cushions from the couch, and stared at the bleak painted ceiling. I have always been a light sleeper and can't stand sleepovers because I always listen to the other person's breathing and can't get my attention off of it. So as I sat there and listened to Jessie breath I could hear the howl of wind stirring around the house and that groaning creek of the tired old wood

Now, I'm kind of an artistic and musical person I suppose, and I have an extremely active imagination most of the time. This, coupled with my sleepiness and inability to sleep, is what I blame for the following occurrences. It should be noted I do not believe in ghosts, I was too young to be THAT brave, and it's been a long time since this occurrence so I could be remembering wrong. It didn't affect me that much the next day since I just kinda dismissed it and promised never to go back.

Anyway, I was laying there listening to the wind of the house and Jessie when I started to hear a pattern in the groaning. Like I said, I am musical so I clutch onto rhythms a lot and try to figure them out. When I try to sleep with a fan on it drives me crazy because all I hear is the slight wump-wump-wump that fans make from rotating. Anyway, I hear this groaning and I start to hear a rhythm. The howl of the wind, however, isn't on the same beat (or any beat at all) and so I get curious. I'd probably been sitting there for like 20 minutes but it felt like forever to an ADD 10 year old. This rhythm was driving me nuts and keeping me awake even more than Jessie was so I got up silently and decided to investigate.

I made the mistake of looking out the window just as it groaned louder than usual and got very frightened. The groaning was sounding more and more human with each 2-second pulse. For those of you who haven't been in an old house on a windy day, it sounds like a creek when you sit down in a chair, only deeper and more grumpy and longer. At first it was like any other house in the wind but once I stood up it sounded intimidating, like it was an drunk old man trying to complain.

I walked over Jessie's sleeping body and past his father's open door. He was still snoring loudly but it still didn't cover the groaning, which was getting louder the closer I got to the kitchen. Once I reached the kitchen I noticed that all the cabinets were open and I thought to myself that we had left them closed, but I guess it is likely I just made that up.

The groaning was louder now so I looked for a dishwasher, checked the refrigerator, the sink and all that technological stuff but nothing was making the noise. Then I pressed my ear to a dark brown door and as soon as it touched it, the groaning was like a loud exasperated grunt. I jumped back and almost went to wake up Jessie but I bit my tongue and opened the door instead.

It turned out to be a staircase downstairs. I checked the wall on the right to see if it had a lightswitch and, like my house, it did, so I closed the door behind me and flicked the light on. The stairs were tiled with this creepy green and orange flecked fake marble and shimmered blindingly since I wasn't used to the light. I paused a second to get used to it and then began walking downstairs.

The upstairs walls extended the length of the stairway, so once you reached a certain point on the way down you could see the basement room. The groaning was louder in here but not as offensive as when I'd touched the door so I wasn't as scared as I'd expected. My heart was pounding still as I progressed slowly down the stairs, still being quiet as all hell but more in fear of waking the unknown than fear of Jessie's father.

Once I was about waist-height with the bottom of the wall I bent down and peered under. The room was a large rectangle with cement floors, walls, and rafter ceilings that supported the floorboards above. There was a washer-and-drier twin thing on the left next to a pile of old clothes. The stairlight didn't effect the whole room but the metal of the machines shone back at me. This was actually bad because I couldn't see into the far corner of the room since the light was making my eyes adjust to it. I kept going down the stairs, a little less scared but still fucking freaked out. As soon as I touched the concrete floor that was cold as ice, the groaning stopped. I could still hear the wind howl, though, and there was a cellar-type window that glowed from the neighbor's porchlight with a silvery kind of aura.

I ran my hands along the concrete wall but couldn't find a switch so I squinted into the darkness to see what was there. Something shiny was in the middle of the room. Ah, I realized, a pull-cord for a light! I crept towards it

and stepped in something wet

The only thing was, the basement floor was freezing, like I said. This wet substance was really warm like, well, blood, but I didn't think of that at the time. I just kind of froze and then the groaning came back and I got really scared.

I stepped again with my other foot to get a little closer to the pullcord but it was too far away. Now both my feet were wet in this paint-like, warm liquid on the freezing floor. I took long strides and reached for the pull-cord, grabbing it and yelping quietly. It was wet too and when I pulled it my hands slipped off. I wrapped it around my hand and then pulled but the light didn't even work. I decided to get the fuck out of there, my last hope destroyed, and turned on my heels. In the corner of the room, atop the glistening washer-and-drier thing and below the silver glowing window, a man sat cross-legged watching me. He had thin shoulders and a bushy head of curly hair, his legs dangling over the side of the machine and his hands clutching the edge loosely. He looked pretty fucking relaxed and scared the shit out of me regardless.

Now, when I was little I thought I saw a witch in a pile of clothes. When I turned on the light and realized what it was, I felt like an idiot. So here I was in Jessie's basement, staring at a clothes washing machine and seeing a figure. Logic somehow sprang up in my frightened mind so I decided it wasn't nearly as frightening but I still wanted to get out of there. I stared to walk towards the stairs with my eyes still on him.

Then he turned his head at me and groaned.

I ran upstairs fast as greased lightning, flicked off the light, opened and closed the door quietly and turned around to Jessie standing right in front of me. I ended up waking up the whole house, crying, being sent home and not telling anyone what had happened because I had looked like such an idiot. I told Jessie about it later in school and he said that there wasn't anything in the basement and sometimes the washing machine overflowed. But that still doesn't explain the groaning.
-----
The closest I've gotten to anything paranormal occurred in grade school. Every summer my parents and I would go out to my grandparents farm in the middle-of-nowhere Indiana. It was about two hours southwest of Indianapolis, just on the other side of the line that separates eastern from central standard time.

The farmhouse itself dated to just after the Civil War. It didn't have much in the way of modern convenience (read: no AC or climate control, few power outlets since all wiring was an after thought, etc.) Also much of the house was added-on after the original construction. The main bathroom for example had actually been an outhouse that was incorporated into the structure. The only original parts were the front/living room and the formal dining room adjoining it, a small kitchen off to the side of that, the stairs, and the second floor bedroom with a small sitting room.

Since the summer was incredibly hot and space always at a premium, I would usually just sleep in the front room. (My grandparents had the upstairs bedroom and my parents took a back-bedroom that was an addition). With the windows and doors open - we were in the middle of nowhere and it was a more innocent time - it didn't seem as nearly as stifling a place to sleep as some of the other rooms. Tucked into one of those "old-timey" couches it could even be comfortable.

Anyway, one night I found myself woken up by...absolute quiet. It was total. A truly conspicuous silence. The kind that seems like you'll be punished if you so much as clear your throat or shift your weight a little too enthusiastically. No rustling from the plantlife outside, no appliances humming, even the cricket on the porch I noticed when I initially nodded off had stopped. Now I had grown up with cats and dogs, as well as feeders in the yard to attract various suburban wildlife; squirrels, chipmunks, deer. So I'm used to hearing scratching and scurrying and whatnot and am used to it. (In fact I think I would have preferred it). Not to mention the sound of cars, televisions, and things that go flush in the night. But this was just an oppressive absence of sound that I hadn't really experienced before.

So I tried to shift a little and get comfortable to get back to sleep. I rolled over facing the above mentioned dining room and that's when I first noticed it. Movement waaay in the back corner. I couldn't quit make out what was causing it. It was like catching sight of "something" in the moonlight. (And no there wasn't any. Just some ambient light from a bulb on a nearby shed illuminating the yard area). The movement was sort of swaying back and forth gently in the corner. It struck me odd since there wasn't a breeze or anything. No fans were on. There were no vents or anything nearby.

That's when I noticed it began swaying its way out of the corner.

Its dimensions and form became more noticeable. As it began bobbing its way along the back wall, it looked almost like someone hunched over...a relatively small someone too. A kid? A petite woman? It also looked like "they" were wearing what at first glance was a large hoodie...but then it seemed more like a large cloak or something. For some reason it still seemed to be reflecting a very very pale light, even though there wasn't any for it to reflect. (Or maybe a drunk midget drifter got doused with a whole lot of flour and decided to break-in. Stranger things have happened I'm sure.)

It continued its way forward and weaved around the furniture and chairs, all the while doing that odd bobbing motion. The movement did begin to look more like someone walking with a leading foot though. It definitely began to look like someone laboring under an incredible large, heavy, hooded cloak too. There were no feet or arms per se...just the impression of someone struggling under a very large amount of cloth. Again, it wasn't a big figure -- maybe a few feet in height. And things were still totally quiet.

When it swayed around the turn of the table is when I got a (relatively) good look at it. The cloak was more like a long one-piece robe and hunched over, but no real texture to speak of. This quick study gave way to the realization that it was advancing into the living room.

I was just pulling up the sheet/blanky I had with me when, for lack of a better term, it looked up. Right at me. Where the face would be was instead just a black void of a space. An emptiness that was only amplified by its other notable feature; two very sharp, very small dots of light for "eyes." They actually shown quite brilliantly. Two beaming little diamonds of light, shining right at me. They were white lights, but provided no illumination. The place was still dark as it ever was.

I saw that it swayed its way to the middle of the living room and stopped...right before diving under my sheet and thereby protecting myself in the finest tradition of children everywhere.

I was just reaching that stage of "don't flex a muscle, stay still stay quiet stay alive" when I decided that this was ridiculous. I was being a baby. There wasn't really anything out there (and if there was it probably left by now). I probably just wasn't used to sleeping in this place, right? Besides it was getting hot and CO2 deadly under the sheet.

So I peaked my head out.

Not only was it still there, it apparently "stood-up." It was huge. Taller than the adults in the house anyway. Its eyes had gotten bigger too. The diamonds were much larger and glaring. It was looking down at me and was continuing its back and forth swaying motion. The cloak bit seemed to have thinned (or stretched) too, but still kept the entirety of the figure covered. It hadn't advanced any closer than the middle of the room and it still hadn't made any noise. The only noise I became aware of was the blood rushing in my ears. It still had that odd form of illumination that in later years would bother me perhaps the most...like it was a terminal reflection of something. It was appearing to raise up higher still when I retreated back under the sheet.

And there I stayed, literally scared stiff. I didn't dare move a muscle or breath hard. I was experiencing one of those primal, reptile-brain type fears that gripe people. Eventually the need to not suffocate myself got the better of me and I worked up the courage to wiggle a pinky finger sufficient to move the sheet enough to get an air hole. I lay there just waiting for sunrise and imagining that whatever it was hovering a fee inches from face...only a thin sheet between me and it. Only those few millimeters keeping me from getting de-fleshed or swallowed whole or whatever.

The next thing I know I wake up on the couch with activity and people buzzing all around me. Everyone was up and some other relatives and neighbors had come by. I went to the kitchen, dying of thirst and hearing chides about being a "sleepy-head" and "bout time you woke up." Downing my milk I said in the matter of fact way only kids can; I was up all night because of the ghost. Everyone just kind of stopped and looked at me. A ghost huh...

Yes, it was right there. It came out of the dining room.

No one said anything, they just stared. My grandmother did give a sharp laugh and said "There's no ghosts" in the matter of fact only an elderly woman can, before turning back to what she was doing. I repeated my self, stressing what I had experienced and was still greeted with silence. (Not the best time I had as the center of attention to be sure.) My grandmother then turned back and said "Well your grandfather got up to go to the bathroom last night, you just saw him."

The problem with that was a) the bathroom was right at the bottom of the stairs. To get there, you don't go through the front room, much less the dining room, just walk straight and b) grandfather was a rather rotund and not-subtle man. He had three jobs in life; fighting in the Pacific, driving a truck, and farming. He was certainly not the kind to bob and weave through the house. For my grandpa to have done it, he would have to have lumbered downstairs, go though the living room, into the back of the dining room, then walk back through both, before going back upstairs...without me realizing it.

Pointing this didn't seem to make a dent though. The issue was dropped and never mentioned again. I was given a new place to sleep on a closed in porch behind the house which went without incident.
-----
This isn't a high profile case, only an obituary made the city paper. My best friend's dad was the fire chief in our town, he had lots of first responder buddies. I talked with a (rather cute) cop for hours at their Christmas party when I was about 17. He got a little drunk and told me about this...he said even 5 years later this case bugs him more than even the most gruesome murder scenes. Someone reported a dead body in a cornfield; he was first on scene to find a 20 something woman, on her knees slightly slumped over, stiff as a board. There were no visible injuries on the body to indicate cause of death. The autopsy concluded it was a heart attack, likely caused by an adrenaline rush. He said it stuck with him not only because of the COD being weird, but also because the scene was strange. There was no evidence of anyone chasing her (no unidentified footprints, no trails torn through the cornstalks by either bodies or vehicles), her purse was nearby with seemingly everything that belonged with it inside of it, she still had on a diamond necklace, she had not been sexually assaulted, she had no bruising on her body, she had no dust or mud on her except for her knees and shoes. She had 4 small, oval, blistered burns on her left calf; they occurred at least a day before she died, the coroner couldn't definitively say what type of object caused them. She had been missing a week but was dead for less than 24 hours when the body was found. She was also in gym clothes, which was strange because she was last seen wearing business attire leaving her job for lunch. She presumably just left work, changed her clothes, laid low for about 6 days, then calmly walked into a cornfield about 10 minutes from her home, knelt down and died of either fright or excitement right there. There is still a cross with her name on it at the edge of the field today. I see it and wonder about what really happened to her often. As far as I know, its still a cold case.