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And Ms Boods was never heard from again... 
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| # ? Mar 27, 2012 17:57 |
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| # ? May 24, 2013 20:26 |
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Littlest Gobot posted:And Ms Boods was never heard from again... Actually, as soon as I submitted the story, the doorbell went off for real, scaring the heck out of me. It was a very nice lady trying to give me colorful papers about Jesus. I did have to go over into the garage loft for my mom right after I wrote that. Could this post be coming from the grave?  For content: More family ghosties. My mom also informs me that the ghost-dad doorbell went off again last night. She fully believes it's him; she also tells me that my Uncle Jimmy, a far nicer person, used to whistle loudly every night when he got home from work around 6pm to let my auntie know he was home. He continued to do so long after he died. My mother thought my auntie was just bonkers, but my cousin, her husband, and their son all confirmed it, and then when my mother went to stay there for a visit, she heard him, too. When my auntie got too dotty to live at home, my cousin moved her to what turned out to be a really nice home; it was a huge mansion and all the rooms were made up for the residents. Most of them were ambulatory and had the run of the house. My auntie was on the ground floor because she had problems with her balance, but they kept catching her upstairs at night, usually in a scoldy sort of mood, as if she were annoyed by someone or something for having to go upstairs. Keep in mind my auntie was the oldest surviving daughter in the family, and left school when she was around 12 to help my grandmother raise 7 other kids (my grandad on that side of the family was a bit of a cad, and lived on the next street over with another woman) so she was used to chasing naughty younger siblings around. In years between my mom and my auntie was my mother's favorite brother; he was by all accounts a really nice man. I never knew him well because he died when I was 9, but my mom still speaks of him affectionately, and how out of all her siblings, he was the nicest to her. A really protective, good big brother. We went to visit my auntie a few times at the home-mansion, and she'd be grumbling at us, 'Well, once again, you just missed Mikey!' (the brother -- he died in 1975. This was 2009). My mother just said, brightly, 'Oh, well, that's too bad,' the way you do. Auntie Mary went on and on about how he was always visiting her, how he'd peek his head around the door with the saucy grin he had, and how he was still a ladies man, always chatting up the other ladies who lived in the home. Most annoyingly, he'd go upstairs to visit the other ladies, she said, instead of spending time with her. That's why she kept going upstairs, to scold him and to tell him to remember to visit with her. All righty then, no problem. My mother just had to smile, because it sounded like something he'd do, as he was also mischievous and liked to yank Auntie Mary's chain when they were kids. When we were getting ready to leave one time, my mom went to speak with one of the aides, and I was just hanging out in the foyer waiting for her, when another nice little old lady came by. She asked me if I were there visiting Mary. I said, Yes. She said, 'She just has the nicest brother -- what a lady killer! He likes to visit with all of us.' Then she described him physically down to a T - keep in mind, my auntie had no photos of him in the room. Sure, maybe she described him, and the other ladies ran with it, but I like to think that Uncle Mike was checking out all the ladies and making them happy, and bugging his big sister at the same time.  I gotta dash, but I ought to write up the story of Aunt Eleanor, and how she haunted her husband because he ran off with her nurse and wrote their niece out of the will. What she did to that jerk from the grave is hilarious.
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| # ? Mar 27, 2012 22:20 |
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This is not the most spectacular quality ghost story, but I can guarantee it is entirely true. My mom used to teach at a funky little hippy school in the City; it was in a small building that used to be a grocery store. It had obviously been two connected storefronts (or a storefront and a warehouse) when it was first built, a big, tall empty box split down the middle in two long, narrow rooms, but each side was divided up into four or five classrooms that were more or less open to each other. The science room had walls and a ceiling, but the ceiling didn't go up to the roof--there was about 4' of clearance. They made it into a reading loft area for the students; if you were up there you could look down into the English room and the math room, and the hallway (which had walls, but no ceilings). It was a pretty weird space. Structural weirdness aside, the place was ineffably creepy. Since my mom taught there and I was a kid, I'd end up tagging along and spending quite a lot of time at all hours. You'd always feel like someone was in the room with you, even in broad beautiful daylight. Sometimes I would hang out in the loft and hear people walking up and down the hallway. At first, I thought it was my mom; I looked over the side and the noise would stop and there would be nobody there. You could hear doors open and close every once in a while, or chairs creaking and settling. It got to the point that I would hear noises and not even look anymore, because looking and always seeing nobody was so creepy. But the creepiest thing happened in the middle of the school day (my school had the day off, but this one didn't. I was 7, too young to stay home by myself, so my mom brought me to her school--lucky me, I got to go to school even on holidays). I was in a bathroom stall during recess, just finished up, when I hear from directly outside the stall door a deep, ragged breathing, little coughs. Like an old man with emphysema, very loud. I looked under the stall--no feet anywhere. My first impulse was to run, but then I figured "ok, no way, it is broad daylight and ghosts only do really crazy poo poo at night. This is another kid who is loving with me" (I probably swore less back then). So I started yelling stuff at this kid, like "What a creep, what, are you listening to me pee? Get out of the girls's bathroom! Sicko!" kid bravado stuff. I could hear that the noise was coming from very close to the stall door, outside and to the right a bit, and I thought, "I'll slam the door open, it will hit them, and then who will be freaked out!" So I did. The door swung open and slammed into the next stall over. The breathing continued, it had moved into the furthest corner of the room, up by the ceiling. I could see all the stalls open, empty. I was alone in the bathroom. Welp, I dashed right out of there as quick as I could. I went in there once more ever, later that day, to see if I could figure out the trick, but there was nothing. I used the staff bathroom after that!
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| # ? Mar 28, 2012 15:09 |
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I guess I'll go ahead and share my own bizarre stories. I live in a pretty big house (5 bedrooms, 5 bathrooms) that my father had built when he and my mother were still planning on having a large family. It's located in a neighborhood, but the houses aren't really near to each other. We were one of the first families to live in the neighborhood. The design of the house is pretty creepy at night. There are windows everywhere, and much of the downstairs is open- the only rooms that are closed off are a bedroom and two bathrooms, and to a certain extent the dining room. The result is that you can see much of the house from anywhere else in it (or even outside of it, thanks to the many windows), despite it's size. At night, it gets pretty unnerving, but only if I think about it. Typically I'm the only person home and do much of the house-tending and maintenance myself. My dad prefers to stay at his girlfriend's house and he's too old and drunk to do most of it anyway, and my parents got divorced when I was young. For a while it was okay because my sister lived here, but she went away to school so now it's just mostly me. Even when I was young I didn't really like the house-it always made me uncomfortable, for reasons I can't quite put into words. I spent most of my youth living with my mother in a nice compact suburban home, until her rampant drug use made my father remove me from her home and move in with him. The entire house just has a creepy vibe. Despite being in a neighborhood, we are still surrounded on all sides by trees, and combined with the fact nearly every single exterior wall is covered in windows, I feel like I'm being watched constantly. There are a number of 'routine' occurrences that I've largely gotten used to. 1. Every day, sometime between 5 and 7 pm, the garage door (the door joining the garage to the house, not the actual doors that close in the garage) slams. Due to the acoustics of the house and heaviness of the door, it makes a pretty distinct sound. The underlying problems here are two-fold: a: no one is using the door at the time of sound and b: the door does not actually slam. The noise of the door slamming occurs, but the door itself does not actually move (I've tested this by tying some string to the doorknob and taping it to the doorframe. I heard the slam, but the string was still clearly in place). This never occurs while I'm looking at the door, but tends to happen if I'm ever watching the door and then turn away during those hours. 2. I hear people walking through my house pretty routinely. I suppose it could just be the noise of my house sitting or being rocked by wind or whatever, but I can hear joints popping and cracking about as much as I hear the floorboards creaking. This is interesting to me because I'm the only person I know whose joints crack as much as this 'ghost walkers' would. Maybe I am being haunted by my own ghost? 3. Something seems to actively counter-act the menial house-keeping tasks I do. If I do the laundry, I'll find it strewn across the laundry room floor. If I fill up the water softener with salt, I'll check it in a day and find it's level back to pre-fillup stages. Garbage routinely end up on my floor after putting it in the trash and walking away. I have some more actual 'stories' I'll come back and post later.
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| # ? Mar 28, 2012 15:20 |
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I don't have a lot of ghost stories, being rather Scully-esque in my view of this poo poo. There are things we can't explain, but there were a lot more of those a hundred years ago, and the further we go, the less that will be the case. Most things have a rational explanation, even if it's currently unknown. Something about the way a lot of ghosts behave like recordings, repeating the same paths over and over and over, makes me believe they're going to turn out to be pretty mundane. That said. My folks live in a very rural part of East Texas, twenty miles from the rear end-end of nowhere down a dirt road that is locally known to be OOOOOH SPOOKY-OOKY HAUNTED. It's in the deep woods, there are a hundred legends about it, teenagers go there to drink, scare each other, and/or gently caress. You know the type of place; every small town has at least one. I've never been too bothered, being A: pathologically rational, and B: raised on the stretch, but it can get a little creepy at night. My worries tend to be more about drunken redneck sociopaths or cougars than the GHOST STAGECOACH or the Goat Man or whatever the gently caress people have decided is hiding in the woods, though. You know, things that can actually cause you bodily harm. So occasionally I'll go to visit, because they get lonely out there and I am nothing if not a dutiful daughter. I can deal with the creepy vibe of the area. But once or twice recently things have gone down and I am at a complete loving loss to explain them no matter how hard I try. Both have to do with voices, inside and outside the house. Time #1: I was sitting on the couch one night reading a book. A friend was with me, my dad was outside, and my mother was upstairs taking a shower. I heard her shut the door, distinctly heard the water begin to run, and was therefore pretty fuckin' surprised when she called my name from the landing above. Her voice was croaky, like she had a frog caught in her throat. She sounded ... old. She's 48. "Yeah?" I say. No answer. "Hey, Mom, do you need something? Hello?" No answer. Friend and I look at each other, roll our eyes, and go back to our respective books. When my dad comes in from outside, I ask him to go see what she wanted. He goes upstairs, but when he gets there's she's in the shower. Huh. Okay, maybe she got out, yelled at me for some reason, and then jumped back in because, like all mothers, she's sort of bonkers. I wait until she gets out and then I ask her about it. "Hey, did you need me for something earlier?" "... Earlier?" she says. "Yeah, when you called me?" And she furrows her brow and looks at me funny and the hairs go up on the back of my loving neck, because my mother isn't a bullshitter. "I ... didn't say your name?" The friend heard it, I loving heard it, and it was neither the wind, the pipes, swamp gas reflecting off Venus or Bigfoot dangling his dick in my ear. It was an old woman saying my name, and someday I'm going to figure out what the gently caress happened that night. It's an interesting places, that farm. The woods around there are full of old settlements and houses and graves swallowed up by vegetation and loblollies. Hell, there's an old house site actually on the property; the foundation and the vegetable garden they planted (garlic still comes up every year) attest to that. Even a rational brain can look at the dried-up well and the pile of bricks and start making stories up. History, eh? Gotta love it. Citizen Insane fucked around with this message at Mar 28, 2012 around 22:28 |
| # ? Mar 28, 2012 22:24 |
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Paranormal things are pretty interesting to me, but I've not really experienced much. Nothing 'ghostly' just... some other weird things. As far as ghosts go, though, my father is convinced that a ghost inhabits our house. I haven't seen poo poo, and it's infrequent according to him. A few things have happened recently, though. A few months ago, this ancient ceiling fan - probably 15 years old by that point - just fell off the ceiling in the middle of the night. We'd had a fairly big earthquake (5.6, but that's a record here in Oklahoma) at least a month before this happened, and the drat thing didn't fall then. It wasn't even on when it fell. None of the bolts seemed to have broken, and we don't know why it fell off the hanger, but it was torn up pretty well and had to be thrown out. Between that incident and the following, there was another weird thing that happened. He thought my mother had laid down on the bed beside him, or one of the cats had jumped up. Only, no cat was there and mom was in the bathroom. This seemed to happen for a few seconds before the weight lifted from the bed. This is the second time that has happened. Then, couple of weeks ago, he swore he saw in front of him a black figure in the living room blocking out light from the short hall to his bedroom when he was returning to that room. So, he blinked a few times and still saw it, then turned around and switched on the light. Beside where he thought he saw this figure, there is a big mirror, and he figured that must have been playing tricks on him. He asked me to come see if I saw this optical illusion, and I did not. I asked him if he could see the effect again by replicating positioning and lighting again, and he was a bit surprised to find that he did not see it again. I don't know why this house would be haunted, it is only 30 years old, and the only family in before ours was only there briefly. We used to find old horseshoes in our backyard, though. Some of the terrain in the area gives the impression of a dugout or dirt cellar, so maybe it happened to be where a pioneer house was once upon a time. gently caress if I know. He's seen shadows and stuff before, but his family has a history of mental illness and I hope to God he really did see these things.
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| # ? Mar 29, 2012 01:37 |
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Can someone post that story about the goon who came downstairs in the middle of the night to find his wife watching TV only his wife was still in bed at the time? Gave me such loving chills.
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| # ? Mar 29, 2012 06:17 |
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^^^That's one of Canis Latrans's awesome stories. You can find it in the pdf compilation or here: http://nothotbutspicy.com/para/comp.../#_Toc285674402
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| # ? Mar 29, 2012 06:38 |
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Does anyone recall a story from a goon about him and his sister growing up in some small town in Alaska I think. They went to an old house that was right on the edge of a cliff and they saw something in the house. Sorry for sketchy details but its been a few years since it was posted.
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| # ? Mar 29, 2012 14:40 |
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kneedeepindoom posted:^^^That's one of Canis Latrans's awesome stories. You can find it in the pdf compilation or here: http://nothotbutspicy.com/para/comp.../#_Toc285674402 Those stories are absolutely amazing. That guy must be a professional. I've tried to send him a PM to thank him directly for them, but he can't receive PM's. So Mr Canis Latrans, if you're reading this thread perhaps (your profile shows only 44 posts, but that could mean anything), thank you very much for those stories. A gentle start with some amusing anecdotes to absolute insanity. If you're still here I'd be happy to donate you plat or whatever in exchange for more! I would get you it anyway, but I don't want to waste it if you don't post any more. I can strongly recommend anyone in this thread to read them. Davethehedgehog fucked around with this message at Mar 29, 2012 around 14:49 |
| # ? Mar 29, 2012 14:46 |
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Sorry I havn't contributed anything in awhile guys, life gets in the way you know. I'm really grateful for what's been said though, brings me up when times get rough...I'm a sucker for kind words. But seriously thanks, it feels drat good. I'm keeping up with the thread as best I can and glad for it, I am digging these! Part One: My Dad was a Sadistic Malevolent and Beautiful Bastard. So back in the halycon days of my youth, before I got crazy and my sister was infected with brain slugs my father used to take us up in the mountains of Southern California every so often for hiking, camping and crazy-fun survival poo poo. Before poo poo went sour the guy was a hilariously rad dad, he knows how to survive out there and taught us how to do it in a way that was fun, stuck in our brains and was actually pretty useful. For example, how to find water over that moss only grows on one side of the loving tree poo poo. I don't need to know that to stay alive if I get lost, I need to stay alive until I am found. During the winter months we would bebop around this really pretty little tourist-town called Julian, sometimes Ramona. In the summer it was camping at Los Coyotes and accidentally blowing up trash cans, spring saw us in the Valley of the Moon near the Desert View tower. Totally awesome places back in the day, blew our stupid little kid brains all over the place with how much gnarly poo poo we could find. I was a bug hunter with an unhealthy attraction to spiders so I was sold, and my sister liked climbing, setting things on fire and hacking at things with a hatchet. Desert, high desert, foothills and halfway decent mountains...he made sure we got a lot of range on our training, and to be sure what I learned there more than saved my rear end later on in life. Didn't feel like training though, it was just adventuring with a really awesome funny guy who sometimes lost his temper but could also outrun anything on the planet and could tell some wicked clever jokes. Anyways, we're up there one winter with one of his best buddies from work Dave, who was his partner-in-trouble and has some weird similiarities to my best bud Tony. Dave and Dad are having a blast watching us gently caress around in the snow and giving us some basic info on how frostbite works and how to prevent it. After awhile they start getting conspiratorial and talking about grown up poo poo while Sister and I are attempting to murder one another with our one lovely plastic sled. A while passes and then Dad starts identifying different animal tracks with us, and he's got this god drat gleam in his eye. We start off finding some raccoon prints which my sister nails on the first go, I gently caress up deer prints because deer have stupid loving feet but I get the direction they are going and manage to follow it a good ways. Sister identifies some mouse tracks and we follow it to a really neat kill site by some bird of prey that didn't even leave a blood splash when it hit, I catch up by finding I think possum tracks and catching a sleepy rear end motherfucking frog. Dave has disappeared during all of this and Dad is kind of guiding us in a large circular area playing Ranger Guy and feeding our brains with useful poo poo. All of a sudden he freezes and says "Uh oh," checks his sides and motions us to get quiet. We're wondering what the gently caress and after a bit of time looking worried he motions us over and points to this fresh print in the snow. It's a round circle about the diameter of a coffee cup with a sharp and prominent depression right in the middle. His fingers flick out and he points to more prints like it, spread out pretty wide and in a really weird bipedal pattern. We hunker down trying to figure this thing out and I am postively wracking my god drat brain for what the hell kind of animal could have made this mark. I was really good with animals as a kid and it was frustrating as hell, I wanted to get it before my sister did. She dosn't waste much time asking him what it is and Dad gets that look on his face, the one that says "serious poo poo time kids, ears open." "I was afraid we might run into this so we need to be quiet guys, this mark...its a Turger track. Now listen up because this could save your lives some day. They usually only come out at the middle of winter when the snow is highest, but sometimes one or two will be a bit slow to go back to sleep." He takes a knee and my sister and I find places to sit where we can all look over eachothers shoulders, he goes right along, "Turgers are a local kind of snow troll, they have round feet with a boney spike right out of the center...helps them keep balance and works sort of like a snow shoe, it also gives them an awful lot of traction." I am completely totalled by this information as 1: I thought I knew everything because I was like ten and 2: loving snow trolls. "Because of the way their feet are specialized they cant hardly even walk unless there is snow so your totally safe during warmer months unless you stumble into a den. Now out here and right now apparently one is walking around prolly getting in a few last days of hunting before the melt, they are short stumpy looking things but their legs are much longer than they look and if one gets onto you and chases you cannot hope to outrun it on snow, climbing a tree is right out as well, they'll use that spike to go right up it, your best chance is to run for some big rocks or the street, streets really piss them off." He's checking his sides and generally being the calm, alert Ranger Guy we've always known him as. "Turgers are carnivorous, predator first, scavenger second, so they wont be distracted by food thrown to the side or behind you as you run...just run and don't stop until you get to some hard ground or a street, and whatever you do don't run out onto ice. You do that and it's done, you'll slip and slide around and they will not." I'm starting to get seriously freaked right the gently caress out, my sister isn't, she has that incredibly potent faith in her parent's protective capabilities that only seven year olds can have. It's about this time that I remember Dave, he's been gone for awhile. "Dad," I sez, "Dave's out there." My dad gets a grim look and slowly nods as he says, "Yeah, I've noticed he's been gone awhile, this is what we are going to do...start heading back to the car, slow and easy like, be quiet but don't bolt or anything unless I say so, you got it?" My sister and I nod, eyes wide and the three of us begin our fearful trek back to the Jeep. Part of me is really interested in this, I have got to know more about these things, what exactly do they look like? How much do they weigh? Whats their social structure like? Is it solo or pack based...they're mammals because trolls are hairy, so do they form family groups? Why hasn't David Attenborough told me about this poo poo!? My sister remarks that she has to pee. We eventually make it back to the Jeep in it's hard top parked in the light snow on the side of the road and dad gets us in and secured. My sister is starting to feel the pressure to get the hell out and so am I, time to buckle up and get the gently caress right out. Dad won't leave Dave though, not happening. He pulls his big old bowie knife out and says to us, "Alright you two sit still and quiet, no fighting, I'm going to go get Dave and no matter what happens you two stay in here, you got it?" We're terrified and want to go NOW, we want hot chocolate and I would like to watch dinoriders or some poo poo, we no longer wish to be in Turger Country, we can't leave Dave though, so we nod our heads and proceed to being as still as possible. Dad smiles, nods and takes off into the tree line, he vanishes in moments. Time passes, nerves fray, my sister farts...we giggle. More time passes, I yawn, my sister squirms. Yet more time passes, my sister wants a drink and I'm about to shush her when against the side of the Jeep we feel a soft "thump." We do our best impression of baby rabbits, almost entirely motionless except for huge eyes and a slight consistant shuddering. We both heard it but both of our brains are trying to rationalize it out as not actually having happened. I can't move anything at all except my eyes, and I am desperately scanning my sides. I have to see what that was but I know if I see what I think I will I am going to absolutely lose my poo poo. My sister has tears running down her face as we hear another thump on her side of the Jeep, then another. Oh holy poo poo theres a thump right underneath my window. There are two of them. Pack hunters. Scratching now, not serious hard scratching but more curious. Its moving towards the door on the passenger side, on my sisters side. It's going to open that door and eat us. We can hear heavy breathing now, snuffling, deep and resonant. Grumbling. The door handle jiggles. I may or may not have peed, I can't even tell...it feels like my whole body has simultaneously fallen asleep and been doused with prickly ants. My sister takes a shuddering breath and I know without a shadow of a doubt she is going to start screaming. If she does that...so am I, and if we start screaming then we are going to seriously piss these things off and we have absolutely nowhere to run. poo poo is about to get real in a fashion I have only dimly imagined in my most coco-puffs fueled GI Joe influenced dreams. For what I think may be the first real time in my life I am dosed with enough adrenaline to kill a small yak or maybe a moose with a heart condition. My sister opens her mouth to wail, and so do I, but I'm also moving. Scrambling into the front seat, screaming my head off, she's screaming, I'm screaming everything is just screaming and frantic fumbling. We are on a fairly steep incline if I can just get into the front seat and gently caress with the pedals maybe I can...yes, yes I can! I gently caress around with the stuff up there that I understand only a bit, but I know the parking break and I release that motherfucker with a quickness. As we start to haul rear end backwards I catch a glimpse of something in the window, just a brief second of the thing outside looking in at me. I'm thrown from the seat as the Jeep bounces a couple of times, builds up speed and then slams to a halt courtesy of a nearby tree and a curvature in the road. I could hear the tail-lights shatter and the bumper crumple, my sister is screaming so hard she's gonna give herself an asthma attack and I busted my lip crazy good on one of the seatbelt buckles. But I can't move, I can't react. What I saw out that window has terrified me into near catatonia. It was my dad, and he was so pissed. See, up in those mountains a lot of people do this cross country skiing thing. They use these poles along with their skis to zoom around, actually seems like a lot of fun. Anyways...those ski pole things leave a very distinctive mark on the ground and well, my dad and Dave saw an opportunity there. He did not expect me to crash his loving Jeep. poo poo, I didn't expect me to crash his loving Jeep. Long story short, man I got yelled at and the entire time Dave is trying not to laugh his rear end off, poo poo Dad couldn't stop laughing but I still got told. Clever guy my dad, but sometimes he dosn't prepare for the full consequences of his shenanigans, something I think I inherited from him. That was a long time ago, and I would have been drat fine if that was where Turgers stayed, but well...they didn't. I'll get to that.
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| # ? Mar 29, 2012 17:07 |
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Canis Latrans posted:another good story Cant send you a PM, but I have a shiny platinum gift certificate waiting for you if you drop me your email to davethehedgehog <at> gmail.com Totally worth  for entertaining me through my mind numbing afternoon at work today
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| # ? Mar 29, 2012 18:56 |
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Canis Latrans you are fantastic. I just re-read all of his stories on the linked compilation site, but there are a bunch missing. Can anyone help out with that?
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| # ? Mar 29, 2012 19:26 |
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I am a toy of a sadistic god. I have suffered before time began. I will suffer when the last of the last stars fades away. I will suffer when the universe begins and the last star fades away yet again. I exist outside conventionality, in a limbo devoid of nothingness. His hand reaches out to me from from nothing. I scream and flail; I am like a child taken away by tides. My body does not accustom itself to the sensations, for there is no sense of passing or direction of time. I could feel His grasp long ago, ever tightening until infinity. A malleous form is the host for my consciousness, I am not sure to call it my body. I stretch and spread and compress. I do not break. A man cannot hope to fathom a single day in it's entirety of detail, yet my mind burns with the ultimate enlightenment. It's glowless shine sears through me. I am everything that is everywhere, always and never. I am a false idol to this alien presence. It adores me so to never let me away. I see it again. The sunrise of a new universe.
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| # ? Mar 29, 2012 20:04 |
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Ms Boods posted:Ghostie words There's the little boy that looked through the back door at my house in Walthamstow too you should write about.
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| # ? Mar 29, 2012 23:47 |
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Possibly a little old, but a friend of mine popped on talking about this new creepy thing she had found, and wanted to know if I had ever heard of it, since I am the pop culture geek of the group. Something that I was proud to remember, because I remember it being born on this forum in 2009: The Slenderman Let's have a visit with some friends who know him well: Thoreau-Up posted:There are woodcuts dated back to the 16th century in Germany featuring a tall, disfigured man with only white spheres where his eyes should be. They called him "Der Großmann"[Sic], the tall man. He was a fairy who lived in the Black Forest. Bad children who crept into the woods at night would be chased by the slender man, and he wouldn't leave them alone until he caught them, or the child told the parents what he or she had done. Even then, there is this chilling account from an old journal, dating around 1702: TombsGrave posted:I know of an old Romanian fairy tale, highly unpopular even in its earliest iterations. It might be based on a particular event, or perhaps it is an extrapolation from existing Slender Man stories. The translation I'm most familiar with goes a bit like this: I posted:The Slender Man. BooDough187 posted:I always found it odd that my grandpa, who was a real smart man. Always worked construction and other seemingly low pay jobs, even though he had his college diploma in business management. GyverMac posted:
Irisi posted:In Scotland there is the legend of the Fear Dubh (The Black Man). This creature is said to haunt solitary footpaths at night, generally those that pass through woodland. It is reputed to be entirely malevolent. I can remember my granny telling me stories about a lot of Scottish folk tales, she only ever mentioned the Fear Dubh once, and that was in church. I was about eight, and was spending the summer holidays with her. quote:MAY 8, 1993: GyverMac posted:
WindyWolly posted:My grandmother was a poor peasant from Russia; I never knew my grandfather, Pyotr. The last anybody heard of Pyotr was in 1939, when he “disappeared” to a gulag in Siberia. My father was born a couple months after that, in 1940, and in the winter of 1941, when the Germans were deep in the heart of Russia and stories of killings spread, my grandmother decided that she would not lose my father to the Nazis, to Stalin, or to hunger and the cold. She fled—she has still not told anybody how—and she reached America with the rags on her back, a spoon that had been blessed by the Patriarch Nikon, and my father, who was originally to be named Abraham, but out of fear of action triggered by a religious name, had been officially named Dimitri. My grandmother held him tightly, calling him “my sweet Mitya.” 
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| # ? Mar 31, 2012 06:41 |
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xzoto1 posted:My Mother the Living Ghost Same thing happened to my ex once, many years ago. We were house-sitting while her parents were away for a month; the place dated back to the early 1900s I'd guess, not massively old but it definitely had a spooky air to it. Now normally when we stayed there we'd sleep in a bedroom on the 3rd floor of the house but for some reason (I think her brother and sister were staying that night as well) we took the bigger bedroom on the first floor. We'd gone to bed fairly early, around 10pm and, unusually for us, hadn't had anything to drink, taken any drugs, done nothing at all that might cause us to witness what happened. So yeah, we're fast asleep in bed, always hated that room if I'm honest, it had a full length mirror hung on the wall and mirrors make me feel uneasy as heck but she's there so it's all good. Am dreaming away when I get woken up by movement. Hell of a light sleeper me, not fun. Anyways she's sat bolt upright in bed looking at the door. I put my arms round her and she immediately freaked out. Apparently she'd been woken by a noise and sat up to see myself stood in the doorway for a few seconds before I walked off and down the stairs. She'd assumed I'd just got up to go to the bathroom or get some food so when I touched her and she realised I was still in bed with her it scared her shitless. Normally I'd assume she was just trying to freak me out but she looked genuinely scared, like, I'd never seen her like that before or since. This story still comes up every so often and she's always insistent that that's what happened. Her sister and brother have reported seeing various stuff too, particularly in the top floor room we used to sleep in which had a bricked up fireplace that always gave me jitters. happyflurple fucked around with this message at Mar 31, 2012 around 15:15 |
| # ? Mar 31, 2012 15:10 |
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Goldskull posted:There's the little boy that looked through the back door at my house in Walthamstow too you should write about. Golly, yes, I hadn't thought about that in ages! (The little ghostie boy, not the house in Walthamstow. That was in general a good place to have lived, and I still think about that  )That was back in summertime, 2005; I was in a houseshare with a kitchen that had an old porch still attached. You had to go through it to get to the back garden, but the door leading out there had a window in it. The bathroom, which was a later addition to the house (I think one of the dilapidated 'shed's still stuck to that house was the remains of an old outside toilet) also had a frosted window that looked through that shed and got light in from the outside garden. Sometimes there'd be a shadow passing by it when we knew no one was in the garden. I remember going out in the kitchen once, and there was a little boy looking back in; there was another time when I was in the kitchen and saw someone passing through the hallway into the front room. At the time the only people home were me and a friend, and we were both in the kitchen. (Thanks for the reminder Goldskull  )
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| # ? Mar 31, 2012 15:51 |
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I really hope Ant comes back with more stories, they're always amazing
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| # ? Apr 1, 2012 18:33 |
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A ghost got me fired from my first job. When I was younger, our house sat across the road from a small antique shop called The Stone Angel. It's since been fixed up and turned into a beach clothing store, but at the time it was very run down and creeped me the hell out. I always avoided going past it when I was running around or riding my bike. When I was fourteen, my mom decided I needed to get a job. I think she mostly just wanted me out of the house and interacting with people - I was a very introverted, nerdy kid, and I spent almost all my time on the computer. I couldn't drive, obviously, and the only place in feasible walking distance was The Stone Angel, so I ended up going over and sheepishly asking the old lady who owned the place if she'd hire me. I'm not sure what it was about me that looked even remotely employable, or if she was just really desperate, but she said yes and told me to come in tomorrow morning for training. "Training" turned out to be her pointing to the stool behind the counter and telling me to sit there and keep an eye on things. People apparently came in only very rarely, and she mostly just ran this place as a hobby - her real job was fixing old furniture. Which, she told me, she was going to be doing while I "ran" the shop. Then she left. I spent my shifts all alone in the store, sometimes reading, sometimes playing my Gameboy. I think in my entire time working there (which was admittedly only a few weeks) maybe two or three people came in. Understandably I'd often get a little creeped out sitting there all alone in this old building, surrounded by weird antiques, but nothing ever happened to actually scare me. Nothing, that is, until that loving piano. The lady who owned the place did not actually own the antiques in it, but rather rented out space for people to get rid of their old junk. The building itself was just a two-story house, with both floors dedicated to selling antiques. I HATED the upstairs, it spooked me out so much, but to open and close I'd have to grit my teeth and run up there to turn the lights on and off. About two weeks into my working there, the lady had me help her haul an old piano upstairs and into a room that had previously been unused and empty. Someone had finally rented the space, but all they had to sell was this piano. I didn't think much about it, except that it looked kind of pathetic in that room all by itself, and pretty much forgot about it for a few days. Several days after the piano moved in, I was sitting at the counter, listening to the radio and playing my Gameboy, when I thought I heard music coming from the floor above me. Thinking (hoping) that it was just the radio, or maybe my Gameboy, I turned both off and sat in the silence. I sat quietly for what felt like forever, and just when I decided it'd been the radio, I heard it again. It sounded exactly like a child banging on a piano - just tuneless plunks and clinks rather than an actual melody. But what was most important to me in that moment was that it was definitely a piano. I knew no one had been in all day, but I forced myself to believe that maybe a customer had snuck in without me noticing and was messing around with the piano upstairs. I got up and stood at the foot of the stairs, telling myself to not be a baby and go up there. I was so scared I was shaking, and I really wanted to abandon my post and run home, but I knew the trouble I'd get in for doing that would be worse than whatever was actually going on up there. I stomped up the stairs - I guess in an effort to make myself feel braver - and loudly asked, "Is anyone up here?" No answer. I don't remember when the "music" stopped, but it was silent when I stepped into the hallway. The room with the piano was, of course, at the very end. What's more, I could see that the lights in the room were off. I know I turned them on. The good employee part of me told me to go and check it out, but my instincts were screaming, "NOPE DON'T DO THAT." I did it anyway. I tried to work myself up into some sort of bravery by telling myself that this was MY store, drat it, and whatever was down there was going to have to deal with me. I awkwardly power-walked down the hallway like I meant business, but stopped short of the piano room's doorway. The lights were indeed off, but all that was in there was the piano. No sneaky customer, no animal, no ghost. I don't know what I was expecting, but somehow this was just as bad. I decided that I should at least turn the lights back on, but whoever designed the house did a pretty crappy job, because most of the light switches in the place were on the walls opposite to the doorways. In this case, the light switch was right above the piano. Whatever courage I'd mustered up was gone, and like the big baby I was, I ran across the room, flicked the switch up, and ran out and all the way downstairs. I stood in front of the cashier counter, catching my breath and listening for... something. More music, I guess. For a few seconds there was nothing. And then a door upstairs slammed shut. I don't know if it was the door to the piano room, because I sure as gently caress wasn't going back up there. I jumped so badly when the door slammed that I immediately burst into tears. I reached for the phone to call my mom and beg her to leave work and come help me, when there was a horrifying CRASH from upstairs that shook the whole place. I was out of there. I didn't call my mom, I didn't lock up behind me. I don't even think I looked both ways when I ran across the road back to my house. I don't exactly remember what I did when I got back to the house, except kind of vaguely pace around the foyer waiting for my mom to get home. When she did get home, hours later, I breathlessly babbled at her about the piano and the lights and the door, but all she got from it was that I'd run out of the place before closing time, and without locking up. Angry, and probably pretty embarrassed by her irresponsible daughter, she called the lady and explained to her what happened. Turns out she had stopped by just before closing time to have me help her move some silverware in to be sold, and found the store empty. What got me into the most trouble was that she found the piano tipped over on the floor, keys broken and scattered everywhere. I knew that must have been what the crash was, and I knew I certainly didn't do it, but neither my mom nor the lady believed me. I suppose my story wasn't exactly believable either ("But Moooom it fell over by itself!"), and as a result the lady fired me, and whatever money I'd earned was taken back to pay off the piano. Was it a ghost? A haunted piano? I don't know. But I sure as hell held a grudge against whatever it was for many years after.
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| # ? Apr 1, 2012 20:28 |
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I'll tell another one of my family ghost stories that I don't think I've told here before. Grandpa Dunc and English Leather My Grandpa Dunc, my mom's dad, was murdered in the 70's. We'll just say that he supported the wrong people at one point, and was aided in taking a long walk off a tall building. He survived the initial fall, but ended up hemorrhaging and dying on his first night out of the hospital, while my great-grandma was out buying him groceries. I wasn't even a twinkle in anybody's eye at the time, so I never got to meet him. My mom was pretty devastated by this, and ended up with a lot of daddy issues from it. She ended up getting married at 19 to a nice Jewish boy named Jerry, had a nice honeymoon, and came home to the nice little house they had bought. Things were good, and nice, and peaceful, and as blissful as only a brand-new marriage could be. Well, my mom was taking a nap on their bed while Jerry was out in the living room studying the Torah, on his way to becoming a rabbi. My mom dreamed about her dad. Just that she was laying on the bed and he was sitting on the edge of it, talking to her. Telling her how much he loved her, and how proud he was of her that she became a dental assistant after high school. That she was indeed pregnant, and it was a boy. Little things really. Mom started to wake up, and in that weird twilight between awake and asleep, my mom could see him sitting there through her eyelashes, the mattress bowing a bit from his weight. She snapped awake and sat bolt upright, but there was nobody there. Shaken, my mom stomped off to the bathroom to go splash some cold water on her face. After a bit, she heard a knock on the bathroom door. "Honey?" asked Jerry. "Are you okay?" "Yeah, hon, it was just a bad dream." answered Mom. "Uh, did you spill something in here?" Mom frowned. "Uh, no?" Jerry didn't sound too steady. "Honey, come back to bed." So, my mom dried her face, and walked back into the bedroom... and collapsed to the floor, starting to cry. Jerry had asked her if she had spilled something because the bedroom reeked with the smell of cologne. Specifically, English Leather, my grandpa's cologne, and one that had no place being in the house, since neither my mom nor Jerry owned or ever had owned, in any way shape or form, a bottle of English Leather. To this day, Jerry won't talk about what happened, and the smell of English Leather makes him really uncomfortable. I really don't know how to explain it either. They lived in a house, there was no English Leather in the house, the windows were closed, and the entire room reeked like someone had poured multiple bottles of the stuff out and over every piece of furniture in the house. Magic cologne fairies, I guess.
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| # ? Apr 2, 2012 12:48 |
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The annual ghost story thread is one of my favorite times of the year! I've considered sharing this story a few times in these threads, but because it's kind of lame compared to some, I've never really gotten down to doing it until now. Hell Bike Even though I'm a huge skeptic when it comes to paranormal activity, there have been a few occurrences in my life that I simply couldn't explain. Of course, most of these have happened while I was alone, so I usually end up without anyone to confirm that weird stuff actually happened. Not so with Hell Bike. When I was 20, I went on my junior year abroad to Japan. I had been in a long-distance relationship with my boyfriend at the time, (now my husband) who was from Japan, and when I went to Kyoto for the year, he rented an apartment for us to live in together. The apartment was actually pretty large by Japanese standards, and rather cheap. It was the middle unit of the bottom floor, in a three-story, nine-apartment building. The building itself was just an average, nondescript concrete apartment building. Each unit had 3 rooms: right as you came in the door (which was on the "back" of the building) there was a kitchen/dining room/living area, connected by a door to a general room we used as a study/library, which was connected on one wall to a bedroom. Both the study and the bedroom had a window each facing out onto the alleyway the building was situated on. At one end of the alleyway was a small kindergarten, while on our end, just a little past our building, was a tiny local shrine, and the road turned abruptly right around the corner and back to a larger connecting road. At that time, I still wasn't struggling nearly as much with my sleep as I have been in recent years, and although I've always gone to bed later than most people, my everyday average put me at getting to sleep around 1am. We were living in the apartment, and I was going to school, everything was fine, I'd be up until 1-ish many nights, but nothing strange happened. Anyway, it started around the time of fall break. A bunch of my friends went away to Mt. Fuji or somewhere like that, and I considered going but I didn't have any money, so I just stayed home. I was bored in the evenings but as we had the internet and a cheap place to rent movies down the street I would watch tons of VHS videos. During the course of the break my general bedtime got later and later, until one night, I was getting in bed around 3:00am. My boyfriend was already asleep (he was working full-time) so I crept into bed in the dark and just lay there, enjoying the feeling of being horizontal on our futon. I've always had a hard time falling asleep right away so I usually just lay in bed for about 30 minutes until I actually pass out. However, as I lay there in the darkness, I heard a sound outside our window. It was quite obviously the sound of a bicycle. Or rather, the sound of some kind of mutilated metal vehicle that had once been a bicycle but no longer served its original purpose. Yet, it wasn't the horrible, distorted screech of the metal that made me take notice of the sound. If that had been all, I probably would have been just annoyed at having my sleep process interrupted. Anyone who has written in this thread about these kinds of events can probably attest to the fact that sometimes you can hear a sound that your instinct knows is 'wrong,' is not meant for you to hear. A sound which on the surface may seem entirely normal, but the moment your body registers it, you're overcome with icy terror, as though your soul itself has been plunged into the freezing night ocean. The very moment I heard that sound, I knew it was fundamentally wrong. The hairs on my neck stood on end and I froze there in bed, immobilized by fear. It started, quietly, off in the distance near the top of the street, where the kindergarten was, and I could hear it slowly, very slowly, almost excruciatingly slowly, moving all the way down the street, right outside our window, then down the street into the darkness. We had an alarm clock with big red numbers on it, so I could see in the dark what the time was: 3:15am. I lay there in the dark, thinking about the sound, thoughts of which which still wrapped cold talons around my heart. It took me a little while to get to bed after that, but I finally determined that I was being overly sensitive at what was probably some kind of fluke. I got up, I had a shot of whiskey and I went back to bed. Anyway, I don't remember when it was next, but it was probably not long after that I had another night where I happened to be up late, working. I once again ended up laying down to sleep late at night, and to be honest, the Hell Bike was, as far as I can remember, not even in my mind at all as I lay there, trying to sleep again. But then it started again, at the top of the street, crawling slowly, metal shrieking at an impossibly slow pace, right past our window. And once again, I froze there in bed, terrified at some unknown sound in a way that my normal everyday self would have laughed hysterically about. I looked at the clock: 3:15am. The next morning, I went ahead and told my boyfriend, who is even more of a skeptic than me about supernatural phenomena, and he laughed. I sat there looking at him, deadly serious, while he giggled at my facial expression and told me I was probably just suffering from overactive imagination or something of the like. Christmas season rolled around, he quit his day job and started working random hours at a convenience store to get a start on studying so he could move to the States with me. I had a break, most of my friends went home for the three or so weeks we were off, so it was just me and him trying to amuse ourselves. A lot of it was spent going out to crazy places at night or walking around or driving here and there, but one night, for whatever reason, we ended up being both at home and wide awake at 3:00am. So I reminded him about the bicycle, to which he laughed, seeming to doubt that it would show up at all, let alone be worth getting all worked up about. We sat there, in the dark of our bedroom on top of the futon, in anticipation. He was teasing me and laughing, and I was just sitting there, waiting. I'm pretty sure he was mid-laugh the very second the clock hit 3:15am and the screech began. As it traveled slowly down the length of the street, his laughter trailed off to silence, hushed breathing. I could see him sitting there in the reflected street light from the top of the curtain. He was looking at me now with a look of panic on his face. The bicycle crawled too-slowly past our room, passing once again right outside of it, until eventually it slipped away around the corner. I could tell he believed about the bike now, and that it terrified him for the same reasons it terrified me. I always had a rational desire, during the daytime, to pull back the curtain one night to see what the bike actually looked like, but whenever we ended up awake in that cursed time, fear would possess my heart the moment I even considered drawing the curtain aside, and it never happened. My will would literally melt away at the first screams of metal on metal coming down our street. Anyway, we heard it several times more and it became the topic of daytime jokes for us, but whenever it was actually happening, we both became grimly silent, able to do little more than just look at each other helplessly while it was occurring. Months later, after I moved out I went back home for a while while my boyfriend stayed living there alone for several months. I moved back to school in the states in the fall, and my boyfriend came to live with me temporarily while studying English. One day the Hell Bike came up in our conversation, and he claims (and still will swear up and down,) that one day he actually did get up the nerve to draw back the curtains and lo-and-behold he could see absolutely nothing there, even as he heard the sound pass mere feet in front of his face and down the street. He makes a lot of stuff up, though, so I'll never really know. I for one think that nothing being there isn't nearly as horrifying a thought as looking out the window and seeing some... creature that wasn't supposed to be there.
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| # ? Apr 3, 2012 03:15 |
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Drimble Wedge posted:I hope no one minds me reposting my linkdump from the earlier thread. Added this post to the OP. Thanks for all of that!
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| # ? Apr 3, 2012 05:35 |
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So much has happened since we last saw/read/SA'd one another. Turns out Hubbo took out money in my name over the course of several years, and we're getting a divorce. He isn't allowed in the house. More on that later. I've been patiently waiting for almost 9 months, to tell you about the most hosed up work situation in the world. Every person I've told this to has said, "That could never happen". Except it did and it was terrible. Last year, I was hired to answer phones at a music supply company. My boss, who I will call Holden, was seriously insane. Some days, he thought me and my manager were brother and sister. He introduced us, un-ironically, as Marcia and Greg, during a job interview with a new hire. Sometimes, he thought he was an English teacher, and made us write lines on the chalkboard all day. He made us write essays. Every day was this weird new experience with this completely insane guy. He eventually told me I was "Too pretty to have a job" and that, "To continue to remain at the company, I couldn't speak to/interact with/look at *any other employee*". So I said, "Go gently caress yourself" and left. But before that, he purchased a museum. A defunct holography museum, which he named me curator of. He announced it at a Birthday Party he threw for an employee that simply did not exist. Her name was Holly. He imagined her ENTIRE existence and we all had to play along. At the party he announced that we were moving. Family dinner style. We moved here: http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicag...ent?oid=1103150 More later. Oh...it gets so much worse. And scary and weird. tinysmokemonster fucked around with this message at Apr 7, 2012 around 12:04 |
| # ? Apr 6, 2012 23:39 |
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tinysmokemonster posted:But before that, he purchased a museum. A defunct holography museum, which he named me curator of. He announced it at a Birthday Party he thew for an employee that simply did not exist. Her name was Holly. He imagined her ENTIRE existence and we all had to play along. Yikes - I didn't know that about the Museum of Holography. That's a really sad story. I can't wait to read the rest of yours, should be interesting.
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| # ? Apr 7, 2012 06:39 |
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There was always something wrong with my mum's house. It's a big old property set way back from the street on a pretty un-travelled road, so it's always been pretty lonely, but the creep factor has always been a little more than just that. Cold spots, strange smells - mostly sudden and unexpected tobacco smells in a house of non-smokers - and glimpses of a slim man silhouetted against the window at the top of the stairs that stopped more than one of my friends coming over. Pretty bog-standard stuff. But then there was something worse. My earliest experiences seem more like night terrors or half-remembered nightmares. My window faced a street light almost directly across the road, so despite the distance from the street it was always pretty bright even with pulled curtains. Except some nights I could lay in bed and watch the light visibly fade until I couldn't see my hand in front of my face. Any sound would begin to sound muffled, like I was hearing it through a heavy blanket, and through the odd, oppressive silence I could still make out half-heard almost-words that sounded like I should be able to understand them but couldn't. My room was a loft conversion so the roof at either end sloped down to about three feet before it met the wall. They're built-in storage now but when I was around eight I begged my dad to turn one of them into a bed with a curtain I could pull across so I wouldn't have to deal with the strange, inky blackness. It didn't help. The whispering would sometimes be right outside the curtain now, too, going from the soft, muttering voice from across the room to a harsh, hissing one inches from the curtain and back again in a moment. A few times I saw the curtain move as if a hand was brushing against it before I lost my nerve, and once I swear I saw the outline of a face push itself against the curtain, like a human face that had been drawn all wrong, missing some important parts and long, animal-like teeth. I threw myself against the wall, covered my head with my arms and jammed my hands over my ears to block out the hissing and never dared to open my eyes when it happened again. I swear, pressed up against the wall, eyes squeezed shut, I could hear it smiling. Once I got old enough to start having sleepovers at friends' houses I spent as little time as possible in that room. Flash forward to a few years later, I'd packed up and gone to university and my mother now lived on her own in the house. Things had been better for me since we had an extension built and I'd gotten a new bedroom in the new part of the house. My old room had become a home office that was swiftly abandoned after no-one could bear being in there after dark. The lounge was the new hub of activity, but it was mostly low-level, just a general sense of being watched that came over you if you spent too long in there alone. My mum pretty much ignored it, which was her pretty no-nonsense way, and I thought we'd gotten past it until she phoned me up at around 11 o'clock at night on a freezing night in mid-November a couple of years ago, crying to the point of incoherence. After I calmed her down, she told me she had been engrossed in writing an email when she'd looked up and noticed the lights were dimmed. She'd felt the familiar presence and packed up to leave, but caught sight of a fuzzy outline in the corner, well over six feet tall and staring at her. She'd thought her eyes were going funny until it cocked its head at her and she'd run from the room. A couple of hours later she'd willed up the courage to go back and turn off the lights, not daring to look around, only to get so far as half-closing the curtains before she felt the shape standing in the doorway she'd just come through, much more "solid" than before. She'd turned around and estimated it looked at least seven feet tall, and clear enough now that she could make out its long arms dangling by its sides and elongated, distorted head. She'd frozen on the spot until the thing started to become more "solid" in front of her, before running through it and straight out of the front door. She had stood outside trying to catch her breath when she'd seen it. Seven feet tall and glistening sickly greenish-brown from head to toe, it had long, tree-like arms that ended in long, sharp-looking fingers. Its head was all wrong, jaws like a mangled shark hanging at least down to it's chest. She said although she couldn't see its eyes she could tell it was staring at her. Not transparent anymore, not half-hidden in darkness, it was stood plain as day in the still-lit living room, staring out at her. She said she felt like it was smiling. She'd run down the street to a neighbour and waited for her boyfriend to come and pick her up and take her back to his house for the night. The house stood completely empty for over a month. My family on my her side have always had a lot of interest in the supernatural, and despite never having believed in this stuff herself, she called in everyone she can think of to try to cleanse the house or otherwise rid it of whatever was in there. It was a real scattergun approach, there must have been a healer or a psychic or an investigator of every branch of belief in the paranormal in and out of that house over that few weeks, some paying two or three visits, but it worked. There were a few family heirlooms - mostly just old ornaments - that they said should be thrown away, and once they were there has been no activity to speak of. No cold spots, no glimpses at the top of the stairs, and especially no more monstrous, looming spectres scaring people. My old bedroom, the home office, is now back in use as an exercise room with a running machine and some free weights which is a great place to work out with sunlight streaming through the skylight. It took a long time for my mother to go back into the lounge but we got drunk and watched awful Christmas films in there when I went home for the holidays. Nobody we know now even knows about how horrible that house used to be. If all the psychics and healers and whatever else ever told her anything about what it was, she's never told me, and I'm not sure I want to know. All I care about is that it doesn't come back, because gently caress that thing.
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| # ? Apr 7, 2012 23:09 |
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Holden owns about six companies, and he purchased the museum this winter with the idea that we would all move in and occupy the various nooks and crannies of the museum, thereby saving on rent. The specifics are shady at best, and I believe the building was purchased from Broadway Bank, though Loren Billings' son still had access to the inside. There were several months in which the exact owner was unknown, but Holden moved into the building, changed the locks, and refused to leave. It was a bizarre situation in which half the employees illegally lived with him, crashing on air mattresses and making soup during meetings. One day, I was told to clean the kitchen, while Holden took a bath in a bathroom without a door. To recap, a hoarder suffering from dementia began squatting in a defunct holography museum that had been run by another demented hoarder. And I had to 'catalog' all of it. I'm a petite blonde who shouldn't be alone on the streets of Chicago. Not to toot any horns. I'm just saying, I'm not a big tough guy. I'm the worst person to leave alone, in an abandoned building without heat, to go through an insane person's belongings. And because my boss was also insane, I spent a lot of nights (oh yeah, I also worked 48 hour stretches. We all did) in a building without utilities, backed into a corner of clutter and sobbing. But more on that later. The building itself is fascinating. Three stories and a basement, it was where the Billings also lived. The main floor was all museum when we got there. Nothing out of the ordinary. Beautiful wood paneling adorned every wall, and there was a garden of fake plants in the lobby. The second floor was bizarre. After Robert died, Loren had kept his office as a sort of shrine to her beloved. At one point, he'd been in a play in which he dressed up like a nobleman. They'd taken a photo and had it painted onto a 3 x 10 piece of canvas, framed it, and placed it over the mantle. His pipe, loaded with tobacco and half smoked, rested just so on the desk, and entering the room felt, to put it scientifically, icky. Holden had a rule about always closing the door behind you. The door blended into the wall, and when you closed it, it made one feel trapped. The rest of the second floor was divided by carpeted cubicle partitions and walls that didn't reach the ceiling. There was some sort of weird photography studio, with a dolly track and a huge rotating platform. There was an intricate fort made out of cardboard boxes for her cat, Charcoal. In the corner, there was a Nordic Track and a collection of animal tails stapled to the wall, next to Christmas stockings stuffed with rancid candy. There was a sort of lecture hall, boxed in by two rooms: One was a semi-constructed bedroom, with a cabinet full of liquor and children's books. If you sat in the back row of the lecture hall, you could see her sad, little sleeping corner. On the other side, there was a hastily erected dressing/dress-up room. There were boxes of wigs, made of feathers. It was a room adorned in mirrors, with no lighting save for a Hollywood-style array of bulbs, affixed around a central mirror, and the mirror said, "You are the everything" in highlighter. The room was dark and cramped, and I once had such a bad panic attack while being shut inside it that staff had to knock down the drywall to get to me. Off to the side, there was 'her' office: an amalgamation of clutter, a sizable library, a few couches, an old television, and hundreds of books stacked in piles. Almost every book had a sort of trap in it: a razor blade (Oh, she kept them everywhere, and I'd hurt myself constantly--between those and the shards of broken glass she'd pocket into things)and, I'm not exaggerating--thousands of notes, scratched into the paper until it tore. It was so incredibly sad to see those notes. Loren was such a smart woman, and to see her planners filled with, at first intelligent prose and reflection, and later notes like "It is Wednesday. Your name is Loren," filled me with despair. From what I can gather, she had a very loving relationship with her younger son that soured when the dementia got worse. I'll talk about her son later. That is entirely, another chapter. I've barely described the 2nd floor. The 3rd floor and the basement were worse. I'm sorry to take so long with the setting, but it is so important. It's actually painful for me to write all this out. It's more painful than any experience with Harvey or Jane. It's a story that leaves me shaking. Everyone but one person has since quit, and we recently got together, at a bar, all visibly trembling, to talk things out. We've agreed that the only people who will ever truly understand are the people that were there. A couple of us have full-on PTSD and I worry that I may, as well. I don't mean to be a tease. I just don't even know how to recount the events that happened. I spend my nights, awake, terrified, literally huddled in a corner. I call my former coworkers at 3 am, sobbing, unable to cope. And when they pick up the phone, they sob back. I want to post photos. What is the best/most accepted way to do so? `
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| # ? Apr 8, 2012 06:35 |
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Try imgur. ...  Also that apostrophe at the bottom of your post is distressing me for some reason! 
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| # ? Apr 8, 2012 06:44 |
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tinysmokemonster posted:
This sounds like places I saw when I was looking for live/work space in Chicago - except for the razor blades, just because I wouldn't spend that much time in a place, so I don't know. So many big old buildings with crazy art people in them for a looong time. A lot of partial walls everywhere, too, might be a fire code thing. Yes, imgur is good, try that. edit: I was going to make a box fort for my cat, but now I'm afraid to. Blinky13 fucked around with this message at Apr 8, 2012 around 07:32 |
| # ? Apr 8, 2012 07:17 |
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About a year ago, something really disturbing happened to me. One night I went to sleep with my door open. Normally I don't since my brothers make a ton of noise and will wake me up. Well something did wake me up, but I was still half-asleep and couldn't move or anything. I heard the door creak open and the sound of someone slowly walking across the room. I asked who it was and told them to leave me alone, and I didn't get a response. They came closer until they were right at the foot of the bed. Then I hear their breathing. It sounds like that of a man, very heavy but in short bursts. Come to think of it, the person sounded like they had health problems. They lean closer to me and all I can hear is their breathing. Then I feel their finger gently push against my neck. He pushes harder and harder and soon it becomes painful. At this point I passed out and don't remember a drat thing. When I woke up in the morning I asked who was in my room, but none of my brothers would fess up to it. It didn't seem like they were lying either. I must have imagined the whole thing, but it is by far the most realistic and disturbing dream I've ever had.
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| # ? Apr 8, 2012 18:27 |
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I tried the image uploader pages already, and they make the pictures too big--is it bad form to just post a link to a google album? There was an entire portion of the second floor that was divided into half-hallways. I honestly think it was meant to be a full-on maze. It was between the dressing room (only accessible by a secret cubby) and the photography studio. It featured no lights. It twisted back and away from the rest of the building, spiraling around, littered with mannequin heads (coming upon a mannequin head in the dark can be scary, and the heads would always get rearranged when I walked away). I actually tied a string to myself, hoping to Hansel and Gretel myself to safety with figural breadcrumbs. I looked back from reading notes that I hope to post, scratched deep and angrily onto the backs of bills and old mail, about death and teeth and...just...too scary and I can't go into it yet...to find the string severed. The third floor. It was a wasteland. Bubble wrap was affixed to every wall and window. There was an opening in the floor, near the stairwell, without any sort of barrier except for bubble wrap. I fell down the hole more than once. I was pushed into the hole more than once. But again, more on that later. There was a little room off the stairs where Holden slept, huddled in a sleeping bag, on florescent, snot-yellow carpet, along with whatever employee had been tasked to be there. There was a lot of old medical equipment. There were wheelchairs and walkers and bed pans, all on the third floor. The elevator...suffice it to say, it didn't work. It's what gives me hives and shakes and nervous breakdowns. So at some point, there was someone up there who couldn't use the stairs, and they were stuck up there, without electricity. There were half eaten TV dinners everywhere. There were piles of cut-up bread and notes about the birds on the roof everywhere. Before I go forward, I need to post photos. Everything is...too bizarre not to share, and I don't know how to describe it. So, internet, tell me how, and I will. In the meantime, it is 3pm on Easter Sunday, and I am curled up in a patch of sunlight, shivering.
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| # ? Apr 8, 2012 19:50 |
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tinysmokemonster posted:I tried the image uploader pages already, and they make the pictures too big--is it bad form to just post a link to a google album? There are different sizes you can link to, possibly you were linking to the original? It sounds like they may have been installing another gallery on the 2nd floor, maybe to go with the lecture hall? Which might have gotten weird, since it was a slow, piecemeal rehab that had been going on for decades. Those can turn out like the Winchester Mystery House, in the wrong hands. Third floor sounds awful!
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| # ? Apr 8, 2012 20:34 |
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What the fuuuuuuck tiny, post the link, I need to see this, it's way past my bedtime and I cannot go before I see this horrible yet strangely intriguing.. thing!
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| # ? Apr 8, 2012 20:35 |
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tinysmokemonster posted:I tried the image uploader pages already, and they make the pictures too big--is it bad form to just post a link to a google album?
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| # ? Apr 8, 2012 20:44 |
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tinysmokemonster posted:I tried the image uploader pages already, and they make the pictures too big--is it bad form to just post a link to a google album? You can use [timg] instead of [img] when you post a picture, and it will post a thumbnail we can click for big.
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| # ? Apr 8, 2012 22:01 |
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tinysmokemonster posted:Before I go forward, I need to post photos. Everything is...too bizarre not to share, and I don't know how to describe it. So, internet, tell me how, and I will. In the meantime, it is 3pm on Easter Sunday, and I am curled up in a patch of sunlight, shivering. This is going to be good. I'm anxious.
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| # ? Apr 8, 2012 22:46 |
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I'm probably just going to post a google album because at this point, I'm writing from someone else's crummy computer, and every other option has failed, so I hope that's okay. Remember The Ring? Remember how scary a ladder can be? In a wood shop on the third floor, in which a coworker's thumb was mysteriously severed, there was an old wooden ladder. Some of the rungs were broken off. To climb it, you needed a spotter, and more than once, my foot broke through to the next rung. Trying to climb up, you'd get halfway to the top before the ladder would shimmy and shake, and then throw you to the floor. But if you got to the top, you'd instantly want to crawl down again. At the top of the ladder, there was a small room. It housed the elevator mechanics, a single chair, and hundreds of pieces of cubed white bread in a punch bowl. There was a door to the outside, and you could slam your shoulder into the side of it until it opened, and the roof was exposed, with a gaping drop to the street directly to one's right side. I can only assume that Loren would sit in that chair, throwing hunks of bread out the door, and making notes about the birds. And then there was the basement. At a certain point in the dementia, three Russians took advantage of Loren, moved in, and scammed her out of a great deal of money. I found so many notes, scrawled in her 'Not Loren' handwriting, begging herself not to trust the Russians. And then later, drafts of suicide notes, dedicated to the Russians. Their office was in the basement, left untouched, with 90's style desktops, phone books, and family photos. It was as if they'd up and vanished overnight. There was also an entire holography school down there, with lots of little classrooms carved into the floor plan. There was, for some reason, a meat locker that we were not to enter, accessed if you pushed through the elevator shaft, past junk and plastic flaps. And the meat locker was huge, and it twisted and turned into new rooms. And there was a secret room that housed doctor coats covered in blood. There were dioramas of what I can only describe as a shark/dinosaur/unicorn frolicking in a dystopian wasteland. There was a kitchen down there where Holden held "Family Meetings" where we sat around a dinner table, pretending to be related and writing essays. It housed a giant stove that seldom worked, and he'd test it by igniting a candle-lighter and pushing it near a cloud of gas. Graffiti covered the cabinets, and mannequin hands were glued to the walls in random places. Loren had saved THOUSANDS (I wish I was making this up) upon THOUSANDS of empty sorbet containers. They crowded the kitchen. She'd saved spices from before she was even born, somehow. The elevator was so broken. Modern day elevators are moved upon metal structures. This apparatus was so old, it moved on wooden beams. It's so far beyond being up to code. It rarely stopped on the floor it was supposed to, and I was encouraged to 'just jump' to where I'd intended to be. The mechanic who visited freaked out when I stepped in a certain corner and all he could say was 'No!!" before collapsing into laughter. I was regularly trapped inside the elevator for hours. More on that later. When you got near the second floor while riding the elevator, it would screech to a halt and for a good five minutes, something would scratch at the sturdy walls as you watched them buckle. It would tear at the outer walls, shake the car, bang on the floor, and howl. It would shut down the lights, whisper your name, and scratch at you. A new hire had a complete nervous breakdown in there, and was witnessed passing by the second floor, tearing the paneling off the walls and screaming. He left that day and we never heard from him again. More later. I promise to post photos. Right now I'm just...reeling with memory, to be melodramatic. And despite being alone in a new, clean apartment, something is standing behind me, breathing heavily, touching my hair.
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| # ? Apr 8, 2012 23:26 |
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You're the new Humper Monkey, or Ant. This is so good, I love it.
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| # ? Apr 8, 2012 23:41 |
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| # ? May 24, 2013 20:26 |
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Tiny: 1. I'm glad Harvey didn't eat you. I was worried about you in your long absence. 2. Your soon to be ex-husband is a jerk. 3. You lead an absolutely horrifying life. All the same, I think I would urbex the poo poo out of the holography museum.
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| # ? Apr 9, 2012 01:04 |
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