Spooky!

[Clara Bow]

Ulla's been nice enough to share some true ghost stories from her college on another thread ("Why is everything in my house junk?" on I Need A Hug) and it got me to thinking...who else here is haunted, or knows of a good haunting in your area (be prepared for me to ask for the area or try to guess it, ghost stories are my passion). You don't have to tell where you're from if you don't want to obviously.
This is just for fun and just to share...I think that there are others on here who like me are amateur ghostphiles.
I'll start:
The house I grew up in always gave me the creeps. Sometimes at night you could hear someone walking across the living room floor, there was no one there of course. There was a constant sense of unease, like you would get when someone is watching you. Especially alone at night.
A woman died in my bedroom at that house. I can tell you exactly where, there was a cold spot in that room.
Also, the townhouse my husband and I lived in when we first got married was the site of a homicide. A patient from the hospital here came in and murdered the psychiatrist who lived there. My cat would not go anywhere near the dining room and the upstairs spare bedroom was downright scary. I would not go in there alone. The door would swing open, even when firmly shut and there was a deep sense of tragedy in that room. I had awful nightmares living there and could not stand to be there alone. The house where I am now is the first place save the dorm I lived in in college that I haven't had the heebiejeebies...thank heavens!

[Shoo]

This isn't really spooky (to me) but an interesting paranormal story.

In our old house, when my dd was very little, we had a monitor in her bedroom - the kind that has a camera and a little television screen we could look at to see watch her.  It had infrared, so we could see her in the dark while she was sleeping.

The orb activity in her bedroom was astounding.  The infrared picked up the energy balls as they flew around in her room.  Sometimes there was just one zipping around.  Other times there were several.  We don't know who these spirits were, but they really liked my dd's bedroom.

[Clara Bow]

Sounds like something protective, doesn't it? You spirits do often attach themselves to children.

[Shoo]

One night, at 12:30 a.m., the central fire alarm went off in our condo.  This is the very loud, screeching alarm that goes off in every unit of the building, to alert residents to something happening *somewhere* in the building, so they can get out.  If this alarm goes off in one house, it goes off in every house in the building.

When it went off, we were freaked OUT.  We jumped out of bed, went into our dd's room, grabbed her, and made our way out the door into the parking lot.  The alarm was so loud, we couldn't hear ourselves talking to each other.  The alarm stopped just as we opened the door to go outside.

Out in the parking lot, shivvering, we stood and waited for everyone else to come running out.  And we waited for the fire department to show up.  We stood there alone, and NO ONE else came.  It was dark in all the other houses.  After about 5 minutes, we went back inside and called 911 to ask when the fire department was coming.  They said they had no record of an alarm sounding at our residence.  They sent the fire department anyway, who showed up a few minutes later, and checked things out and found nothing.  They checked the alarm closet outside to see if the alarm had triggered.  Nothing.

The next day, we contacted the property managers who contacted the alarm company.  They came and inspected the alarm system and said it did not go off.  We said, oh, yes, it certainly did.  They said that was impossible.  Did anyone else hear it?  Apparently not.  None of our neighbors heard it.  The fire department was not notified, etc.   Again, impossible for that to happen, they said.  It's not wired that way.  It can't go off in only one unit.  They left shaking their heads saying they'd try to figure out what happened, but as far as they could tell, the alarm did not sound, and there were no defects in wiring or anything else they could detect.  The entire alarm system was thoroughly inspected soon after, and was found to be in perfect working order.

I got in touch with a man I know who does psychic readings (and had done one for me a year prior).  I explained to him what happened, and he explained that it was most likely an "ornery" spirit passing through who wanted to scare us.  I was so angry that I spoke aloud in my home that whoever did that had better NEVER DO ANYTHING LIKE THAT AGAIN.  To get out of my house and leave us alone because I was REALLY mad.

Nothing like it ever happened again.  We sold our house and moved away a year or so later.

[Sandi Papaya]

This post is a figment of your imagination. Nothing to see; move along.

[Cupcake Fiend]

When I was young, I was spending the night at a friend's house and I woke up in the middle of the night to find a strange woman standing over me.  I wasn't scared, actually she looked nice and just kind of sad.  I went back to sleep but when I tried to ask my friend and her parents about it the next morning they didn't believe me.

My MIL tells a neat story about a ghost.  The family of a kid DH went to school with had a party and the ghost in their house made an appearance at the party.  After the party, word spread and one day a man showed up at their house, said he had heard the story, and would the family be willing to trade houses with him for a year.  At the end of the year, if he was happy with the ghost, he would trade houses permanently with them (and apparently his house was a much nicer one than theirs.)  They traded houses for a year and at the end of the time, he gave them his house and stayed in theirs.**

**DISCLAIMER - My MIL tells this story as fact and as it happened to someone she knows.  But, my MIL is a wonderfully gullible person and this may well be an urban legend that she has adopted as fact.  She's done that before.

[Chartreuse]

I used to work in a night club in Atlanta that started life as a cotton mill, and then a sewing factory for the Sears company. The most active spirit was downstairs in the lounge area. It would move things around, and liked to play with the doors. We knew the doors opening weren't the wind or a tilt in the floor because they were counter weighted to close, not open. We'd also hear footsteps walking around the storage loft from time to time, and some staff reported seeing shapes (also downstairs) but I never did.

Masquerade, by any chance?

[Suze]

Disclaimer - this is a story that I have heard about myself over the years, I remember parts of it like yesterday, but not all of it.

Before my sister was married (she is 14 years older than me.) I must have been about 4, her and her current boyfriend (he was from Kentucky we are in OHio) were going to take a little drive over to the next town (about 4 miles) to pick up his car.

apparently I pitched a really whopping fit because I wanted to go with them. Needless to say they didn't want "the Kid" with them.  I remember screaming and crying and beating on the storm door. (and putting my fist through it!) When they got around to asking my "just WHY do you want to go with them?" I told them that I would never see Bill again. (I don't remember that part, but I don't see why Mom would make that up.)

Coming home he crashed the car he was driving into a tree and died.  I never did see him again. (Sis was following in the other car)

They have just recently cut down the tree that he crashed into. (40+ years later) I still can't drive that road going that direction, I've done it a couple of times and I swear the car wants to veer into that spot.

[Shoo]

Suze, your story gave me chills!

[Suze]

Suze, your story gave me chills!

gee -- isn't that what this thread is for?

Like I have told other people - I can't Not believe in the "supernatural" too many things have happened to me and family NOT to believe.

However the so psychics on TV do not impress me one little bit.  Especially John Edwards. I have watched his show once or twice and he just "fishes" around till he gets people to confirm or deny something.

I have watched the "Amazing Randy" do the same thing. and he is a stage magician !

[DottyG]

Quick note:  I love ghost stories and will enjoy reading these posts.  However, be aware that, for some reason, ghost threads tend to be removed here.  I'm not sure why - I never saw the reason for it in the other threads that were deleted.  But, if the thread disappears, I wanted you to know ahead of time (and know that it wasn't a ghost! )

[Suze]

Oh well I guess we have to enjoy them while they last

[mrsbrandt]

So this is a pretty weird story that actually happened to me.  I was 15 at the time and a sophomore in high school, we were in suburb of Paris on our French Exchange Trip.  The family I was staying with was kind enough to give me my own room on the 4th floor of the house.  I had the whole floor to myself as this used to be Grandma's floor and I of course was staying in her bedroom.  The very first night I was there, I saw the bedroom SLAM (I kid you not) open and shut 3 times.  I figured it was a draft except there were no windows open and there was nothing that could have caused a slamming like that on this floor.  I eventually fell back asleep and woke up a few hours later and saw this cat staring me straight in the face.  I freaked out because I'm not a big fan on cats, but I figured the cat had just gotten in.

The next morning I went downstairs and had breakfast with everyone.  I asked if anyone heard the slamming of the door and apparently it was a fairly common occurrence.  They said it had started after Grandma has passed.  I asked if they had a cat, because it woke me up last night.  The mother (Grandma's daughter) told me the last time they had a cat in the house was before Grandma died.  Apparently the cat moved in when Grandma had and died a week before Grandma did.  The currently didn't have a cat and apparently the door still slams sometmes.

I still get goosebumps when I think about it. 

[Linley]

Well, I've mentioned this on a thread on the old forum but I will do so again. I haven't ever lived in a house that was haunted (that I was ever aware of, I've lived and stayed in many old houses with their own odd occurences) but when I was younger I had a friend around whom strange things always happened. Perhaps relevant is the fact that this friend  had a number of psychological conditions, including severe bi-polar. I mention this because at times it was hard to tell what was coming from somewhere inside her head and what was otherworldly in origin. She was fascinated by the supernatural and liked to play games that involved trying to contact or otherwise tap into the supernatural. For instance, she terrified me because periodically she would just go into a trance. Sometimes she would say and do things that made no sense, other times she would attack me or other people. When she snapped out of it, she had no idea what had happened or that she had been out of it. Many, many things that I cannot explain happened while I was in her company, all the way from sounds with no reasonable cause to the time I saw a ghost of her cat. The scariest game was when she would take me to places where people had died or give me objects connected to people who were dead, and ask me to try to divine things about them. I would shut my eyes and call up the person in my mind and I would just know things. Things would just come to me out of thin air, facts I had no way of knowing. It scared me a lot. Eventually I stopped seeing this friend because it messed me up too much.

[blue2000]

I mentioned the haunted house we lived in, in the other thread, so I won't repeat that story, but my Dad used to tell one about my Great Aunt Ruby that is pretty funny.
She and most of her sisters had "second sight", but apparently she had it the most, and she was the least afraid of it.
This didn't surprise us any, since GA Ruby is (or was) about six foot ten, 300 pounds, and built like a wrestler. There wasn't much that bothered her.
One day she apparently got a used dresser with a mirror for her room. She kept seeing a man's face in the mirror.
This annoyed her no end, and she finally said "GET YOUR UGLY MUG OUT OF MY MIRROR!!!"
She never saw it again.