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Onic posted:It's actually in the OP by the way it looks. Just read the Camp Hell story. Have you ever considered that perhaps you were born on the day that the fabric between our reality and some shadowlands reality was the thinnest, or perhaps broken, and you are now marked as a sort of conduit through which hell and the denizens of the shadowlands can interface with the fleshland? Also, that tent smelled like loving spiders? What do spiders smell like 
Aziraphale fucked around with this message at Mar 18, 2012 around 05:59 |
| # ? Mar 18, 2012 05:16 |
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| # ? May 22, 2013 01:37 |
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Forgive my poor writing ability. It's been a long time since I've written anything except reports for the military. A Little Late For Watch Life on a ship is rough. Hell, most people don’t need me to say that, they can imagine just fine. Showers in water mixed with a little fuel, sub-par food made from thrice prison rejected ingredients, long hours and thankless work. Ports are not often enough, and folks with jobs like mine are lucky they have a locked space to call home, free of the stupid requests of well meaning, but naive Division Officers and conniving Chiefs. We spend more time away from our families than with them, so much so that you might forget you have a wife and kid at home. Darken Ship is probably one of the worst parts though. In ports, I can take wondering the P-ways at night if the lights are on and the ship is quiet, but gently caress those red lights. It isn’t the pseudo-twilight they create or the uncanny way they make the odd dried paint drops look like spats of blood. They cast odd shadows and trick the eye, and that causes anxiety in a lot of new sailors. Wandering the desolate ship in a bath of crimson, feeling an oppressive loneliness while wondering if that was some sort of shadowy beast that just flitted by the corners of your vision, or a hanging “DANGER!” tag from a broken valve. The forward end of the ship is where the SONAR equipment is housed. In the darkness, the sound of active pinging is more terrifying than in movies. It isn’t like you see in movies with a hollow “pink-PONG! pink-PONG!” There are a lot of different frequencies, some like birds calling. Others like a man following you, whistling to get your attention. I know the first time I heard it scared the hell outta me. One of the duties of the watch I was standing was to gather temperature reports from our vertical missile launchers. Around 0300 I had to go a short ways up a deck and to the large, heavy blast door and fight with the pad lock we kept on it to get inside and read a little gauge. Tonight it was merciful, and came off much more easily than usual, and as I glanced up to make sure nothing was blocking the heavy door, I caught a slight movement through the porthole of the hatch in front of me. I'm a bit of a punk sometimes, and I like pray on other people's fears of the red lights. So, I opened the hatch slowly, trying to make as little noise as I could, to sneak up on the person. This passageway goes in a horseshoe shape. You'd walk though the hatch I just described, hang a left and follow it around to head back down the other side of the ship, going aft this time. As I stole a peak around the corner to see which SONAR technician I was about to scare, I noticed a man that I'd never seen before, wearing his dress white uniform and standing at the other end of the P-way. He turned, and smiled calmly at me. A hand was raised in a wave, and the last I saw of him was a trailing white flap from the back of a dress white jumper vanishing into the bulkhead. I lost my cool. Sweat flashed on my palm and I felt the blood drain from my face. I got a taste in my mouth like iron and I breathed fire and ran as fast as I could back to my sanctuary of normal florescent light and TV shows. My heart was pounding, and I hardly knew how I got back to the shop I was so fear-blinded. I talked to a few SONAR technicians about it the next day and found out that a few had seen him and didn't know what his story was. He comes in different forms; sometimes he walks back down the ship and vanishes before he gets to the Passage going aft. Sometimes, he is missing his hands when he smiles and waves. Shortly after, I got qualified in another watch station, and stopped standing that particular post anymore. The fire lit under my rear end to finish that qualification I more than partially credit to that spectral stow-away.
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| # ? Mar 18, 2012 15:52 |
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This is a true story, so it may be lame in comparison to some of the others. Every Summer over 4th of July week, my entire extended family stays in this 14 bedroom mega-house in the mountains of Asheville North Carolina. This house is 106 years old, and pretty much the epitome of a house you think would be haunted. Anyways, my family is the last in our extended family to arrive this time down, everyone already has their room chosen except for me. I end up in the attic which was turned into a bedroom. At first, I thought it was the best deal ever, I had my own personal cave away from all of my awkward relatives and loud little cousins. The room itself actually is pretty awesome, the ceiling was triangularly concave, and there were windows on both sides that gave awesome view of the mountains and whatnot. (This is the closest representation I could find)  Needless to say, I was pleased with my sleeping quarters, until night fell... Everything was going smoothly, me wrapped up like a Beefy 5 in bed, fell asleep in no time. At 3 am things changed, I woke up to a banging sound coming from the small walkway just outside my room. At first I was pissed thinking one of those little poo poo cousins of mine came up here to play around or something, but when I opened to door, no one was to be found, but I did find the source of the noise. In the walkway there is a small stand with a lamp on it and two cabinet doors. The cabinets were opening and slamming on their own... I stand there terrified, but with an amused smile on my face, I wasn't about to let this poltergeist think he got the best of me. After about 15 seconds or so, I slowly turn around, walk back to my room and gently close the door. I turn every light in that room on, and sit on my bed awake for the rest of the night, listening to the occasional banging noises. The next day, determined to figure this mystery out, I question the poo poo out of grandma, who purchased the house. I asked here everything I could think of about it's previous owners/history, but she didn't really know much. Then I decided to check the guestbook (the house is rented out to students that go to UNC Asheville during the Fall, Winter, and Spring). There were three different accounts about a ghost being in the house, two of them referencing the attic. That was enough to convince me, however it didn't bother me too much and I toughed it out the rest of our stay in the attic. Fast forward 3 years, the attic ghost is a well known phenomenon among the houses renters, as it fills the guestbook and my grandmother decides to close up and lock the attic to make renters more comfortable, even though she thinks its a load of poo poo. When it comes to the 4th of July weekend, someone has to stay up there or else there's not enough room. A few of us walk up there with a key to the attic door, we open it and everything seems normal at first, until we walk into the bedroom. Scratched into the wall, at a child's height,(also the height of the cabinet doors)in all caps, reads the phrase "DONT HURT ME MOMMY" We came to the conclusion that this is the ghost of an abused child. Me and my uncle decided to do some investigating, looking through every piece of furniture and items that came with the house when it was purchased. We stumbled upon some children's books, all of them titled "SUSAN" yes, in all caps. This has to sounds fake, but the creepiest and most conclusive piece of evidence we discovered was a page from a journal in a locked dresser drawer (it was so old it wasn't hard to bust open). The journal was basically a note of pity from a brother to his sister Susan, apologizing that he did nothing to stop the things momma did to her. AQWERDsilence fucked around with this message at Mar 18, 2012 around 16:00 |
| # ? Mar 18, 2012 15:55 |
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Yes, I love these threads! And finally I have something to share. Sorry it's kind of rambly and full of weird non-native English idioms. This is my dad's story. The Darkness Inside I'm typing this in a train, returning from a visit to my hometown. There's still three hours out of seven left to kill and the internet is spotty at its best so I might as well write down something my dad told me. English isn't my first language so my apologies for any mistakes. My parents live in a tiny country side town in the middle of Nordic wilderness. The nearest shop from their home is 8 kilometres away. The nearest train station, 50 kilometres. Movie theatre, 80 kilometres. Me and my siblings moved,my parents stayed put. My dad has lived in the same house for 50 years, and I don't think he's gonna move soon. Anyway , when my dad was a little kid and before my grandpa built the house my dad still lives, they lived in another farmhouse about a few kilometres away. That house was even more apart from others, built in the middle of a small forest. There was no running water in the house, but a small well behind it. After my grandparents and their 9 kids (yeah, there wasn't much else to do in the middle of the winter than more kids..) moved to their new home, the old house and buildings around it (cattle shed, outhouse, barn...) were left to rot. No one really cared to do anything about them, since there was enough land to go by around it and the forest wasn't particularly valuable. After my parents wed, my mom moved in to the "new" house and they kept raising cows just like my dad's parents had. A decade and four kids later they realized that there really was no point since they barely made the ends meet. My mom went to work as a carpenter (she's one tough lady) and my dad decided to start making timber cottages. Since the turning lathe and various other machines he needed made hell of a lot of noise and wood scraps he decided to put them where the old house had been, in the middle of the small forest, away from the neighbours. The forest had at this point become an unofficial dumping ground for my numerous uncles and aunts. Old appliances, cars, other big junk that didn't fit anywhere but might be useful someday were hauled there and promptly forgotten. The last standing wall of the cattle shed was covered in hub caps because hey, why not. My dad didn't mind the stuff as long as his siblings stored them inside the various buildings and left the general area clean so that he had enough room for building cottages. So dad started working there, and everything went swimmingly. Our dog Jasu kept him company, barking at the squirrels and sniffing for rabbit holes. Deer and sometimes even the random raccoon dog showed up. My dad's customers popped by occasionally to chat and evaluate his work. Then, one day, dad noticed that instead of shuffling around Jasu had frozen in the middle of the work area. His fur was standing up. Dad shut off his machines and took off his hear protectors (sorry I don't know the word in English). Jasu was growling, making really low, guttural noises. He was not an easy dog to spook so dad was curious what had made the dog so agitated. He tried to call Jasu but he wouldn't even flinch. Dad walked next to him, trying to see what was in the half-collapsed barn Jasu was staring at. A raccoon dog maybe? Or even a fox? But he couldn't see anything out of the ordinary. Just the same old junk. Actually, now that he thought about it, he couldn't even see that. The inside of the barn was weirdly dark. It was a bright spring day and the roof of the barn was more holes than tiles but the inside of the barn was pitch black. Well that's weird, thought my dad. But maybe the trees next to the barn cast an unusual shadow over it? Dad took a few steps towards the barn. Jasu was still growling and wouldn't move from his place. Dad tried to peer inside the barn from another angle but the darkness wouldn't yield. Instead it had an odd... flatness to it. Like the inside of the barn was a huge photograph of a pitch black room instead of three dimensional space, as my dad later explained. I think a photograph of a pitch black room is the same as a piece of black paper, but my dad insists there's a difference and this is his story, so whatever. Dad didn't really feel like walking any closer to investigate so being the crafty man he is, took a stick from the ground and threw it inside the barn. First, nothing happened. The stick flew in and was, again my dad's exact words, swallowed by the darkness. Then dad noticed that something had changed and looked around him - Jasu had at some point stopped growling and was nowhere to be seen. The usually vocal birds were quiet. It seemed like everything, even the wind, had shut down. Dad didn't dare to make a sound either, and he wasnt even sure wether he could even if he tried. He just stood there, staring at the darkness inside the barn. Then a small squeaky sound broke the silence. A bright red baby carriage rolled out of the darkness. One or the other of my aunts and/or uncles had brought it in the barn a few weeks beforehand and dad hadn't paid any attention to it. Now it was rolling it's way cumbersomely through logs and grass like being pushed by an invisible mother, taking he invisible child for a stroll. It stopped a few meters from my dad and just then he snapped out of his trance. He turned around and started running like crazy back to our home, to other people. He said that he didn't look back to the small forest once during his flight. I heard this story last Easter when me and my boyfriend went to spent Easter with my family. We were wandering and photographing around the small forest, and asked my dad about the weird stroller left to rot at the middle of his working place seeing how leaving junk on the ground was not tolerated. My dad loves to tell stories, so we took it with a grain of salt. My mother does attest to the fact that my dad didn't suddenly go back to his work place for a week after around the time my dad claimed it had happened but... I guess I really don't know. But I know that the stroller is still standing in the middle of an overgrown patch of grass. ~ I dug around for a while and found pictures my boyfriend took of the stroller in question, so I'm adding them here:  
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| # ? Mar 18, 2012 19:53 |
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Aziraphale posted:Also, that tent smelled like loving spiders? What do spiders smell like Hmm, I think back upon that and can still smell it in my mind. If you ever crush a daddy-long-legs, it lets out a pungent aroma. Kinda like those bugs that look like lady bugs. It's hard to describe, it just wasn't a good smell.
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| # ? Mar 18, 2012 22:35 |
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Is it better or worse than the smell of cockroaches? Because I swear I can smell cockroaches.
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| # ? Mar 19, 2012 00:20 |
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Coconut Indian posted:Is it better or worse than the smell of cockroaches? Because I swear I can smell cockroaches. I've never actually seen a cockroach in my life, so I can't tell you. I don't think we have them in the upper Midwest. While digging through archives I found another old story of mine, posting it for content. \\\\\\\\\\Woods By The Lake/////////////// It was the Summer of 2005. I had gotten the weekend off of work, so I decided to hitch up the camper, and head up to the lakes for a weekend of relaxation. I got the 5th wheel camper all hitched up to the truck, and took off to my favorite camping place. The campground that I always went to was great. It was out in the middle of nowhere. It was surrounded by quite the extensive stretch of woods, and sat right beside the lake. The place was pretty beautiful in the fall as well, which is my favorite time to camp. Anyway, I got there, and pulled deep into the campground. I only saw a few tents on the way in, which is good. I like privacy. About an hour later, I had the camper off the truck and leveled out, and I was sitting on the picnic table, drinking a beer. That night, I decided to go for one of my creepy walks. Not creepy for me, but for the fact that when people hear about my walks they think I'm the creepy one. I like to walk around in the woods in the pitch black, and drink beer. It's very calming, a good way to listen to nature, and just get away from any people. The woods around the camper work perfectly for this. There is an extremely old foot trail that leads around the campground, and towards the glacial valleys in the woods to the west. So, at about 1 A.M. I set off into the woods, with a 12 pack of beer in a little cooler. My plan is to walk for about 2 miles, till I got to this little building I knew of. I take my time and get to the building about 45 minutes later. The building itself isn't very large at all. Its probably 10 foot by 7 foot. Its covered in moss, there's rot holes in it, and the wood-shake roof is collapsing in. I think it used to be an old-school outhouse or something, but there's nothing inside so I really don't know. DNR that I've talked to said its been there for as long as they remember but they don't even know what it is. So, back to the story. I get to the little building. I set my cooler down, and crack open a beer while leaning up against it. The moon is real bright that night. There is no wind at all, and all the crickets in the world are chirping. Its very peaceful. The kind you just don't want to end. I have a couple beers, but keep hearing this noise. Its the sound of something walking around in the dark. I brush it off as a deer or raccoon. I finish my 3rd beer, pick up the cooler, and decide to walk towards the glacial valleys. There's a real old bench out there that I like to sit on. And on a cool night like this, it would be perfect. It's quite a walk on the trail though, so I decided to take a shortcut, by just walking in the direction of it. Which is no problem, since I know my way around the woods anyway. About 20 minutes later I am about halfway to the valley area. I'm trudging along, not really paying attention to anything. But I have this weird feeling that somethings not right. I just can't figure it out for the life of me. It hit me real soon though. All the crickets had stopped chirping. This is not a good thing. Not a good thing at all. This usually happens when something is about to be killed. I stop dead in my tracks, and take in my surroundings. I see nothing out of the ordinary in the moonlit woods. There was no sound at all. so I take a few steps, and stop. I had seen something. I was not alone. The hairs on the back of my neck were standing strait up, and I got that goose-bumpy feeling. Then I saw it again. Out of the corner of my eye. It was a white kind of blur, just between where the moonlight ended, and the dark started. I was paralyzed. I didn't move an inch. Whatever this was, apparently had been following me for a while. Then it came into full view. It darted from the dark towards my direction, but off to my left quite distance. By my best guess, it took it about 2 seconds to go the 50 yards from one dark patch to the next. The thing was huge, It was about the size of a horse. It was a brilliant white, but it didn't look anything like a horse. It had no real features at all. just a white body. Now here's the hosed up part. It was running on hind legs, and leaned forward. Like some sort of Jurassic park raptor or something. But it's front arms or legs or whatever they were, were just as long as its hind legs. They were just curled up to its torso. During this thing's sprint, it didn't make a single noise. Nothing. There was plenty of sticks and leaves and crap all over the ground. But it managed to do this in complete silence. As soon as it hit the darkness it vanished. I don't mean slowly sink into the dark or anything. It was just, poof, gone. I stared at the spot where it had disappeared. I wasn't moving, I was pretty freaked out. Then something licked my hand. SOMETHING LICKED MY loving HAND. A Huge rear end tongue by the way it felt. I dropped my cooler and hauled rear end out of there. I don't know for how long I ran, but I eventually hit a road that ran between the woods. I felt a lot safer once I hit the pavement. Being a smoker, I was completely out of breath, and just sort of jogged down the road. Headlights showed in the distance. I flagged them down, and it was the DNR thankfully. Even better, it was a friend of mine who was on duty that night. He picked me up, and asked if I was on another one of my late night wood walks. I told him that I was, but I didn't mention what I had seen. He took me back to the camper, we said our goodbyes, and he took off. I jumped in the camper, locked the door, and sat there the rest of the night. Soon as daylight hit, I passed out. I woke up at about noon. I stepped out, filled with confidence that the daylight had brought. There was another camper set up near me now, they must have showed up while I was sleeping, but that's irrelevant. I then remembered that I had dropped my cooler. I had to go back for that cooler. Sentimental value outweighs fear. I got in my truck and drove to the area of road where I had been picked up, pulled off to the side and shut the truck off. Now armed with a machete (cliche but all I had) I took off into the woods. I sort of remembered where I dropped it, so I headed in that direction. It didn't take long to find it. When I did though, I was angry more than anything else. The cooler was busted. a huge crack was down one side, and the handle was snapped off on one side. The top was nowhere to be seen, and all the beer was gone. I looked around for any sign of something having been there. But I'm no tracker so I don't really know what I was looking for. I didn't find anything. I grabbed the remnants of my cooler and walked back to my truck. Drove back to the camper, and packed everything up. I had way to much excitement for the weekend. I drove home, and didn't go up for another few weeks. Which was mostly thanks to not getting off of work. I have been back up quite a few times since then. I still go for my walks in the woods. I figure that if it didn't kill me when I saw that thing, that it probably doesn't want to. Or maybe I'm just lucky, I don't know. End
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| # ? Mar 19, 2012 03:41 |
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Coconut Indian posted:Is it better or worse than the smell of cockroaches? Because I swear I can smell cockroaches. Roaches eat a lot of garbage and poo poo a lot so they don't smell very nice. Also spread all kinds of nasty germs.
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| # ? Mar 19, 2012 03:49 |
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Onic posted:All the crickets had stopped chirping. Oh god I hate it when this happens for no apparent reason. Usually when it happens it's like "oh well there's a big rear end bear" or "I crunched ever drat twig in the forest" so it's no mystery. But once in a blue moon the crickets will just stop for no apparent reason, and it's mortifying. They're like "I know something you don't know. . ." I actually have my own story involving crickets as heralds of doom. The Lost Baby A few summers ago some friends and I decided to hike Half Dome in Yosemite. For those who have never been it's a pretty drat rigorous hike from the valley floor and takes pretty much all day to get from the bottom to the top for an average hiker. Because of this, we agreed that we'd have to set out really drat early, starting the hike before dawn in order to have enough time. Of course, Yosemite being Yosemite it was really hard to find a campground that wasn't filled to capacity, but despite having no reservations we lucked out and found a place right near the entrance of the park. They only had one spot left, an undeveloped site on the very fringe of the campground. It was pretty much just a tiny clearing at the end of a dirt road and didn't really have any sites nearby. Well, being a bunch of young 20-somethings who wanted to drink and smoke some weed, this was pretty perfect. We were out of earshot of other campers and had total privacy at our site. We set up camp at dusk, built a fire and shot the poo poo for a few hours. Everyone wanted to turn in as early as possible and get some sleep since we set our alarms for two in the loving morning, so by ten o'clock most of us had passed out. We were sharing a single tent. One of my friends, Jacob, stayed up with me, and we left the campground to smoke a bit of weed. It was a new moon night, so the forest was absolutely pitch black, but Ryan, the trip organizer, had brought a giant halogen lantern so we grabbed that and went for a bit of a walk. There was a narrow overgrown footpath leading from our campsite, probably from campers going out into the woods to explore and collect firewood. The whole campground was in a tiny valley, and like I said our campground was at one edge with just dark forest leading off into the wilderness. After a couple minutes the trail petered out in a small clearing that was at the end of the valley. Shining the light around, I noticed an old logging road that traveled along the edge of the valley, about halfway up the slope. My light caught a reflection at the edge of the clearing: it was an ancient shack--more of a lean-to, really--that had collapsed in on itself. A bit of corrugated metal caught the light, reflecting it dully. A huge, dark tree had sprouted from the remnants of the shack, and it was pitch black on the inside. It was definitely creepy, but just eery in the way that all abandoned buildings in the woods are. We smoked some weed, turned out the light and looked at the stars for a few minutes, then made our way back to the camp. Jacob crashed out immediately. I am a terrible insomniac and wasn't sleepy at all. We were packed like sardines in that tiny tent and it was like a sauna in there, so I laid with my head toward the tent flap, cracking it open for a bit of fresh air. Since I smoke cigarettes it would also be easy for me to slip out without waking anyone. I lay there for awhile, peeking out at the stars with only the crickets to keep me company. Everyone else was totally crashed out. After a couple hours of struggling to get to sleep, the beer had worked its way through me and I needed to take a piss and decided to take the opportunity to have a quick smoke. I exited the tent without the flashlight as my eyes were pretty adjusted to the dark and the embers of the campfire provided enough light for me, just a low orange glow that disappeared after the first trees. I made my way about twenty or thirty feet along that footpath, just enough for a little piss-privacy, and lit up a cigarette. It was a warm Sierra night and the forest was perfectly still. But as I started my piss I noticed something was off. I couldn't put my fingers on it but something was giving me the willies, and it wasn't a pee shiver. When I heard a faint breeze rustle through the pines, I realized what it was: the crickets were silent. When you tromp around the forest at night, you get used to everything shutting up as you come near. But no matter how noisy us bumbling humans are, if you listen close you can always here the forest critters off in the distance, chirping away and rustling around. But not now. It was dead quiet, and what was disquieting is that I had no idea why. Then I heard it. It was a baby crying. Just your typical little infant going "waaaah, waaaaaaah!" It echoed around the trees. But what was creepy about it was it didn't come from behind me, where the rest of the campground was. It came from in front of me, where there was nothing but wilderness and dark woods. As a matter of fact, from the pitch and distance I could tell exactly where it was coming from: that little clearing with the ancient lean-to. It was at this moment that I mulled over the possibility that there was a real, live baby out there all alone in the woods. The thought terrified me; what a horrifying thing it would be that a little helpless infant was all alone in the forest in the middle of the night. gently caress, I'd be crying my rear end off too. But it just didn't make any sense. I'd been out there, and there was nothing and noone there. That old logging road was way too overgrown for any vehicle, and there was just no way a baby could have gotten out there without going right past our campsite. What was worse was the baby was moving. I could hear its cries becoming slightly more distant, as if the poor thing was crawling out of the clearing toward the edge of the valley. I was done pissing at this point but just kind of stood there in shock, listening to a poor baby lost and alone in the woods, crying out for help. To reassure myself I glanced back over my shoulder and saw the comforting glow of our dying fire. I just stood there listening, my cigarette having long since burned out from neglect, as those cries got more and more faint. From the sound of it, I could tell the baby was crawling up the slope at the edge of the valley. For about ten minutes, it just wailed and wailed as it made its way through the woods. Then, when it was about where the old logging road was, something happened that sent a chill down my spine. The baby let out a clipped squeal and a moan and then just stopped. Silence. Another slow summer breeze crept through the trees. A minute later and the crickets were back at it. I fumbled in my pocket and found my lighter, smoking that cigarette in a single drag as I stood there shaking. I quickly finished it and made my way back to the tent, zipping the flap before hunkering down in my sleeping bag. I didn't care if it was hot or cramped, there was no way I was gonna leave my head poking outside when I had just heard some creepy-rear end baby ghost in the night. I didn't sleep a wink, and nearly jumped out of my skin when my alarm went off what seemed like an eternity later. I asked everyone else if they had heard anything last night, but seeing as I left them snoring their asses off I wasn't surprised to hear "no." Unfortunately we left so early that I never had a chance to ask the campground's owners whether this was a common occurrence or not. We ended up driving back home after the hike, and I haven't been back since. The story doesn't quite end there. I suffer from occasional horrible bouts of sleep paralysis and night terrors. I know those stories are frowned upon in these threads, but this one is relevant. Last summer, I was enjoying another wonderful night of being paralyzed in my bed, half-awake, when I heard that cry again. The baby was back. Only this time, it was in my wall. It sounded like it was about thirty feet away, crying and wailing and lost like it was that night. Only this time, it was coming towards me. I lay there, paralyzed, drenched in sweat, as ten agonizing minutes dragged by. The cries grew closer and closer until they were right on the other side of my wall. I knew what was coming next. A squeal and a moan and the crying just stopped. I shot up in my bed, now fully awake and shaking. I was ready to chalk it up to just another bad night of hypnagogic hallucinations, but what happened next, just. . . Ugh. I look down to where my dog always slept next to me in bed. She's a pretty calm, chill dog, but when I looked at her, her ears were perked and she was staring intently, right at that spot in the wall. Thankfully that was almost a year ago and nothing has happened since. Pitnicker fucked around with this message at Mar 19, 2012 around 06:41 |
| # ? Mar 19, 2012 06:36 |
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Pitnicker posted:Yosemite baby ghost stalker Sierra Nevada Mountians ghost stories represent! Here's my own, which is pretty lame and non-scary, but still defies explanation: As a kid I was on the annual trip to the Sierra Mountains with my family in the summer, and we decided to visit the Hetch Hetchy dam and reservior:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/rwlesl...in/photostream/ We walked along the top, and at the end there's a tunnel leading through part of a bordering mountain, which is maybe a couple hundred feet long, and leads to a trail that runs around the reservoir:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/redbea...in/photostream/ I had been walking well ahead of my parents who were hanging back and enjoying the views from the top of the dam, so I went through the tunnel before they did, meaning I was all alone inside of it. About half way through I heard humming coming from ahead of me, which was strange, as I thought I was alone in there. I looked up to see a woman silhouetted against the tunnel opening, walking away from me. The first weird thing was that she was not there moments before...and now she was. The second weird thing was that she appeared to be balancing a large basket on her head. At the end of tunnel, the path curves, so I lost sight of her. I was definitely weirded out, so I ran ahead to see if I could get a better look at her in the sunlight before she disappeared down the trail. But she was gone. To the left was a relatively barren and steep hillside with no nearby places to hide, to the right was the reservoir, and straight ahead was the path, with no one on it. She appeared to have vanished into thin air, just as she had seemingly appeared out of thin air. Judging by the fact that she had a basket on her head, I'm going to speculate that she was a native american ghost. Or my imagination, but I like to think I'm not crazy, so I'll stick with the ghost explanation. Onic posted:scary woods monster You should be glad you dropped your cooler. The monster ended up drinking your beers instead of drinking your bodily fluids.
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| # ? Mar 19, 2012 18:43 |
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Where are all of the authors from the old thread? This story is originally by Richard Wright, although at the time he had no copyright due to the fact that he was a black in the South. He wrote it as a child, so I thought I'd continue it. THE VOODOO OF HELLS HALF ACRE There was once a window who lived in a small southern town in a house about as big as school. She had lived here ever since her husband died (or MIA) in the Korean war, and it was really the only piece of him she had left, because he had returned from service early to write his wills. Now, this house is in a relatively nice neighborhood, but that doesn't stop the murderers, burglars, or cons from stopping by. One afternoon the widow was at home with a biscuit and some tea reading a story about a fisherman who took on the strongest storms, and those thing, when a knock at the door sounded. She, being a widow, thought is was the best thing in the world to have company at home. When she opened the door, who, or what, she saw was irregular, It was holding a knife, but had no eyes, or arms, and had a pitch black mask on. It finally said after about 40 seconds of awkward silence "You cheated me.", in which on that note the widow started to shake, she said she'd call the police, but to no avail to get this man or thing off of her property. At this point, she noticed a small shining silver object in the shape of dog tags in his hand. She gasped. It was her husband, who she had missed for so long. Her husband dropped the tags, and stepped on them, crushing the widows excitement to have him back into dust. In a burning rage of fire the husband leaped at her with the knife, only to miss the target. She ran for the window, but when her husband took his mask off, she knew. His face so utterly disfigured, had been blown off by the force of an artillery shell. He then proceeded, his grip tightening on the knife, he approached her. She knew what was coming, but was too afraid to even consider the thought. Her heart pounding like a drum, here vision went black, and a ringing noise in her ears, she was dying. The husband left, only to be found back in Vietnam years later, a new widow, he was an aspiring sociopath.
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| # ? Mar 19, 2012 19:34 |
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Still pulling my old stories out of the archives from half a decade ago. \\\\\\\\\\Who You Gonna Call?//////////// The last time I spoke of the house I live in, I told of how I was struggling with a temperamental specter. At the time I was trying to weather proof my house for the harsh Iowan winter. The ghost however, thwarted my attempts at low heating costs. It would rip the plastic from the windows, pull nails out of the upstairs door, and just be an all around rear end. I conquered over it with the help of my temper and a red sharpie marker though. Or so I had thought. The ghost was not finished though. He had other plans for the winter months. It wasn't more than a few weeks after I posted about my weatherproofing that things started to go sour once again. My awesome job of putting plastic over the windows was ruined. The bastard had gone through every room upstairs and tore all the plastic off the windows once again. It also managed to open the door leading to the outside. Not only did he do these things, but something worse! He ruined all of the curtains too! All of them were ripped up, and looked like poo poo now. What could I do about it though? I apparently couldn't stop the rear end in a top hat from doing these things, so I just decided to say screw it. I sealed off the entrance to the upstairs good and hard. I had bought some 2x4s, some insulation, and plywood from Menards. I built a frame around the entrance to the upstairs, put the insulation in, and then sealed it up with the planks of plywood. That was all followed by a good layering of duct tape. This way, I wouldn't have to reseal everything upstairs, and I also didn't have to worry about cold air getting downstairs. It was the perfect plan! It seemed to work pretty well too. My heating bill for that month dropped drastically. I was happy that my work had finally payed off. The noises got worse however. The walking upstairs I have more than gotten used to. The scratching doesn't really bug me anymore. These things I had just gotten used to. They got louder nightly, but once I would fall asleep they couldn't wake me up. One night however I did wake up to this odd sound. It was a whimpering from a small child. Where was it coming from you ask? About 3 inches from my face. My bed is shoved against the wall of the bedroom you see. I sort of leaned up and looked at the wall through the dim light, and didn't see anything. But this noise persisted. I kept staring at the wall, wondering what was going on. Then when I tried to get up to move, I couldn't. I was glued in place, with my face just inches from the wall. The wall start to crack, and open up into a small hole. I was glued in place, I wanted to move but I couldn't. Now all I could do was stare at the hole that had just opened in front of me. Something started to develop in the hole. A tuft of hair flopped out. Then two pale hands squeeze from the hole the size of your fist, and grabbed the edges. The wall started to bow inward. Something started to squeeze it's full sized head through the hole. I could hear the bones cracking, and see blood pouring from the head of whatever was trying to squeeze it's way out. At this time I'm panicking, and trying to move, but I just can't. The head is halfway out by now. I can make out the chunks of torn flesh hanging from the gruesomely crushed skull. Chunks of hair are torn from the top of the head, leaving exposed patches of bloody skull. Then with a mighty thrust, the thing flings itself right into my face. Pain shoots through my arm as I wake up. I'm swearing up and down and sweating like a pig. I scramble for the light switch next to my bed. I turn it on and jump out of the bed. My arm and fist are both hurting, and I don't know what just happened. It took a few minutes to get my mind working right again. I realize it was just a nightmare. I look over at the wall next to my bed, and see a hole the size of a fist in it. Ah, so thats why my hand hurt. I guess I had punched the wall during my dream. Kinda hit the edge of a stud too, which explains why my hand and arm were hurting so bad. I glance over at the clock, and it was 2:45 in the morning. I was way too rilled up to go back to sleep, and sweating too much to lay back down anyway. So I went to take a nice hot shower. The water was not hot by a long shot. It was ice cold for some reason. I figure it could be the upstairs ghost loving with me, but this was the territory of the ghost in the secret room. The actual nice one. At this time I should mention that the shower is in the basement. I said screw it and showered in the frigid water anyway. After I had dried myself off, I checked the water heater. It felt warm to the touch, so that wasn't it. The water from the faucet on the main floor of my house was hot too. After that I think I just cruised around on the SA forums until work. Work sucked a lot. I was tired from lack of sleep, and pissed that my hand hurt so much. Gripping a welder all day did not help any. I got home after work, and parked my truck. I get up to the house and see that all the doors are open. First thing that came to mind was, "Oh poo poo, did I get robbed!?" I ran into my house, and went through it. There was nothing of importance missing, that a thief would take. The house was as cold as a witches vag however. I got the doors all shut up, and cranked the heat up. It took a few hours to get back to a moderate temperature again. I got showered up in actual warm water after the house was warm again, and made something to eat. I don't remember fully what I did after that, but I eventually went to sleep. I was having a good nice sleep, I remember the dream from that night. It was full of zombies, and zombie bigfeet! How kick rear end is that? The dream ended when I woke up though. I don't know why I woke up. I look over and it's 2:45 in the morning. I decided to empty my bladder while I was awake, so I jaunted off into the hall, and headed into the bathroom. I go to flip the light switch on, but it wont work. I figure it's just the cold making my light not work. No biggie though, I know where to pee, and theres still some light from the moon shinning through the bathroom window. So there I am, peeing in the dark, when the toilet flushes mid-piss. That startled the hell out of me, but I held steady and made sure not to spill a drop. I step back after I finish, and wait for the toilet to refill so I can flush it...again. I glance around the bathroom, but can't really see much due to the lack of light. The mirror catches my eye though. I stare into it for a short time, and see what looks like my dark image staring back at me. I hear the toilet finish filling, so I step over to it and flush it again. I catch sight of the mirror as I lean back up, and see that the dark image is still in place. It was only for a moment, but it was still standing there, as if it was looking at the spot that I was standing at. As soon as I really notice whats going on in the mirror, my image reappears in the hunched over state I was in. Ok, then. I walk back down the hall to my bedroom, and listen to a creaking noise in the process. Old houses tend to creak, but not usually from inside the walls. The wall that was creaking, is solid brick. Alright, thats some hosed up poo poo right there. When I stop walking, the creaking noise keeps going. I listen to it go right into my bedroom. Well, thats just fantastic! So, this noise is now in the solid wall in my bedroom. The one I had punched was a lath and plaster wall. This was in the solid one, on the opposite side of the room. I stood in the hallway for a bit, deciding what to do. Seeing as how I'm such a heroic person, I had to do the bravest thing possible. I said, "gently caress that room", and decided to sleep in the living room. I have 2 couches with pull out beds in them, so it was no biggie. I picked the one couch that was pressed against the wall. On the other side of that wall was my actual bed. I lay down and start to get some sleep, but sadly I didn't get to continue my awesome dream. I awoke the next morning, and started to get ready for work. I went into my bedroom to get my work clothes. As soon as I got into the room I stopped and stared at the bed. There was the impression of someone laying on the top of my bed. I yell "Out!" at whatever it was, and the impression faded slowly. Guess my stern voice did the trick. I got dressed for work, and pulled the sheets off my bed. I had decided to launder them. The sweat from the previous night, combined with what was just laying on it, gave me a gross feeling. So, I threw them into the washing machine just before I left for work. I figured I could dry them when I got home. I returned later that day from work. It was a friday, so I had just gotten payed. I walked into the basement to put my bedsheets into the dryer. I opened up the washing machine, and my bedding were not in there. Hmm, thats pretty strange. I went out on a limb, and opened the dryer. There were my bed sheets. And they were dry too. Well, that's just awesome. I chalk that one up to the cool ghost in the basement. I carried the nice clean sheets upstairs, and into my bedroom. Something is different though. I couldn't quite put my finger on it at first. But as soon as I went to put the sheets on the bed I noticed it. The huge Rand McNally world map that was on the wall above my bed was flipped upside down. That map had been hanging on the wall in this room, in the same spot for at least 15 years. Old packing tape had held it's corners in place. But now it was upside down, and the tape had been neatly placed on the headboard of my bed. I went to grab the map, and it tumbled down on top of me. There was nothing holding it to the wall, but it was still sticking there until I went to touch it. I look up where the map was, and noticed that the wall was actually whiter where it was hanging. Just goes to show how long it had been there. Right in the middle of the large white mass was scratch marks though. A whole series of them. It was as if someone had been dragging their fingernails over different spots behind the map. That made me shudder a bit. A few new pieces of tape later, and the map was back in place. I had decided to just cover the spot back up with the map once again. At least the ghost hadn't screwed with my kicking rad dinosaur trim from the eighties that went all around the room. That trim is my pride and joy. I went to the bar after I had gotten the bed made, and had gotten showered up. It was pay day as I said before, so I had to spend some of it. What better to spend it on than scotch and good memories. I returned home, plastered off my rear end, and went strait to bed. I awoke at 2:45 in the morning. (Are you seeing some sort of pattern here?) I glance around the dark, as I feel the bed spinning beneath me. I was that stage of drunk, where you are just coming down, and you feel like poo poo. I got up and stumbled into the bathroom for another session of bladder emptying. I figured that I had woken up from need to pee, or from just being too drunk. As I stood there peeing I heard some sort of noise. It sounded like whispering coming from the bathroom closet. The closet itself is not used. It's a little door that leads into a room under the steps going upstairs. The door handle has been missing for years, and new carpet in the bathroom overlaps the door, preventing it from being forced open. I listened to the whispering coming from the door for god knows how long. The door started to shake violently instantly. Screaming was heard from the room behind it. The same screams that I had heard from upstairs. At this point the booze really got to me, and I blacked out. The Door.  I woke up in the bed the next day with a pounding headache, and a filled bladder. I headed to the bathroom to drain away, not even thinking about the night before. I go to open the door into the bathroom, but am met with a 'thud'. I glance into the room to see what the door is hitting. It's the door to the bathroom closet. What the Christ! I squeeze through the door way to see what the hell is going on. Sure enough, the door to the closet is wide open. The carpet around the door is bunched up, exposing the linoleum that the carpet was glued to. I flip the bathroom light on, which now thankfully works. Something had forced the door open, and actually gotten the mechanism to work. As I said, there was no handles on the door, but it still held shut with the old mechanism. Before further inspection there was something that I just had to do. Peeing after drinking all night in my mind, is better relief than anything in the world. Anyway, I moved over to see what the hell was going on with the closet. I then remembered what had happened that night. Even in the drunken state that I was, I could still remember what had happened. I peaked into the closet. It was empty and musty. You could tell that it hadn't been opened for years. At this time I'll talk about the closet. As I said before, it is a little door. I'd say about 4 and a half feet tall. The room itself is located under the stairs, so it goes from about 5 feet tall at one end, down to to nothing at the other. The ceiling slopes with the stairs. There is a solitary clothes hanging rod at the high point, and thats about it. Like I said though, nothing is out of the ordinary in the closet. I turn around and face the mirror only to see a torso hanging from the closet rod. I whip back around and see nothing on the rod. Another look into the mirror proves nothing. "Am I going nuts here?" I think to myself. This wasn't the kind of stuff that the ghost had done to me in the past. The ghost I was always putting up with was annoying, and at sometimes scary, but never played mind games on me like this. I faced the door and shoved it closed. I kicked the carpet back into the place, and stomped on it, till it looked presentable. I left the room, shut the door, and started to walk towards the kitchen. The door behind me shook, then a banging noise echoed through the hallway. I went to open the bathroom door, but what do you think happened. Sure enough, the loving closet door was wide open again. I said screw it, and went to the kitchen anyway. First thing I see is the fridge door open. Thank God, I have no food in there, because the condiments that were inside were room temperature. Any real food, would have spoiled. But my beer was warm! Now that is just wrong. Beer that goes from warm to cold and then back to warm tends to get skunky. I was in no shape to deal with any of this. I grabbed some ibuprofen from the cabinet and washed a few down with a warm beer. My head was still pounding from the night before, and now even worse. I felt the beer shits coming on. Don't worry guys, I won't tell a poop story to you. I will say, that nothing eventful happened while I was doing my business. The rest of the morning was spent wasting my life on the internet. I could occasionally hear footsteps above the room. Not stomping, but kind of...like someone was just walking around, doing stuff. An ice cold hand grabbed the back of my neck and squeezed hard. I flip around and see nothing behind me. My neck actually kind of hurt now. One glance in my bedroom mirror proved, that I had red marks on my neck from someone gripping it. You never know when something will come up behind you in the daylight or dark of night, and grab you. I kept looking over my shoulder the rest of the day, to make sure something was sneaking up on me. Soon night had hit, and my lights weren't working once again. The cold does something to the wiring in this house. Not sure why it just affects the lights, but it only does it in the winter. The only thing lighting up the room I'm in is the warm glow of my computer screen. Which is a pretty big glow actually (big flat panel). I think I was playing Warcraft at the time, when something fell off a shelf behind me. I look back, and sure enough, my Shark in a jar had fallen onto the carpet. Thank god it didn't break, that's not something I want to deal with. My parakeets start going ballistic in their cage shortly after that. They're jumping around in there, making that horrible squawking noise. So now I'm yelling at them to stop, while walking over to pick up my shark in a jar. I bend over to pick it up, and the birds stop instantly. Well, isn't that just awesome. Right away I hear heavy breathing. I whip around and see nothing, but now the breathing is behind where I was just facing. I turn that way, nothing, but still breathing. Any direction I go, the breathing follows behind me. I start doing circles, in an attempt to see what is behind me. I can't catch a glimpse of anything. Something wet slaps against the back of my neck. I practically jump to the ceiling. I run for the door, but it wont open. No matter what, the handle won't turn. I start shouldering into it, and only succeed in busting the middle panel. It then hits me. Doors open inwards dumbass. My poor door died in vain. I look around the room while still tugging on the handle, and see nothing, that breathing is still following the back of my head though. I was going through such a feeling of hopelessness. Something crumpled over by my bed. I look over to see the map laying on my bed, and the scratch marks behind it. Something really catches my eye. I watched in horror, as 4 new marks were scratched into the wall. I could hear it too. It sounded horrible. Bad enough in fact, for me to cover my ears. As soon as the scratch ended, I grabbed the door again, and it whipped right open, I ran into the hall but ran into something soft and cold. A black figure towered over me. I looked up at it. It looked back down. It then turned around and walked away down the hall, only to fade into the darkness of the 2nd bedroom. I scrambled into the kitchen, and out the doors to the winter weather outside. I stood outside, and watched as shadows moved behind my bedroom curtains. The light apparently was on now. Ghosts need lights to see I guess. I stood out there for what seemed like ages. Soon the shadows stopped, and I was getting so drat cold, that I just had to go back inside. I walk back inside, and make my way to the bedroom. I crack open the door. And there laying before me in a grotesque pile on the floor of my bedroom was mello yello cans! All of the can's that I had kept in a garbage bag in my kitchen, were dumped into a pile in the middle of my bedroom floor. What in God's name is going on! Now it's back to the poo poo that the ghost upstairs would do to me. Why did this thing dump all my empty cans on my floor? Just to inconvenience me? All of my fears of empty cans laying on the floor had become manifest. I pick up the can's, put them back into the trash bag they came from, and set them in the porch this time. Nothing happened the rest of the night, but I didn't go to sleep either. Come morning I started scrubbing the carpet, in an attempt to make it not so sticky from dripped out mello yello. The closet door in the bathroom was still open. I still hadn't closed it yet, so I decided to do that. I start to close it, but take a peak inside and notice that something was inside of the closet. There was something sitting in the deepest part of the closet, where the stairs meet ground level. I should point out that I have very bad judgment. I step into the closet, and crawl to the back of it, where I saw the thing. I reach the back, and finally see what the object was. It's a shoe box. I grab the box, and start moving towards the opening, so I can see what is inside of it. I hear a creaking noise. I look up, and see that the door is almost closed. I'm a few feet from the door, so I lunge forward, and stick my arm thorough the gap, preventing the door from opening. As soon as the door touches my arm it stops closing, but something licks my hand! Oh God, I hate that loving feeling! That's twice now. I rip my arm back through the door, and slam my body into it, causing it to fly open. I look around and see nothing. I reach back into the closet and grab the shoe box. It feels kind of heavy, so I'm curious of what's inside of it. I finished closing the door up, and then head into the kitchen. I use a knife to cut the tape that was holding the box closed. I open the lid of the box, and take a peak inside. A dead rabbit. Oh hot dog! Now, that right there is mighty hosed up. I dumped the rabbit in the ditch, and threw the box onto my burn pile. That was just, too screwed up for me. I don't know whether to take that as a gift, or a threat. For the next week I had nonstop nightmares every night. I kept waking up at 2:45, on the spot, nothing notable happened when I woke up those times however. The nightmares were pretty twisted though. I'm a weird guy you see. Most of the dreams I like, most would consider nightmares. Monsters, ghosts, etc.. I love having those in my dreams. When that happens, the dreams are adventurous. The last nightmare I remember quite well. I was in an old house on the prairie setting. There was all these children spread out on the ground. All of them were tied up and crying. I wasn't in the dream. It was more like I was a nonexistent witness. Anyway, all these children are on the ground. They are all wearing old time clothes, like you would see people wearing in the 1800s. The crying instantly turned into screaming. I could see this huge wagon full of decaying corpses driving over the children. The wagon wheels would run over the children hard enough to flatten a path about as wide as your hand through them. It looked like the kids were getting split into pieces, but that wasn't the case. They're flesh and bones were crushed into the ground. Whatever was run over would turn as black as tar, and glisten in the hot sun. The children wouldn't die though. They would just scream and cry louder and louder. I was powerless to do anything, and I couldn't look away. Soon, I could hear the children screaming my name, and begging me to help them. Here is the very bad part about this whole thing. It went on for about 8 hours. In my dream, I had to watch this for 8 strait hours. It was horrible. When I finally did wake up, I was sweating, and my heart felt like it was going to explode from beating so hard. I had woken from the dream, at you guessed it. 2:45 a.m. There was no sleeping after waking up from something like that. I was too terrified of going to sleep and having to witness that hell again. About 2 and a half weeks ago, the stuff started up mildly again. It had quit after that last horrible dream I had. The only stuff that was going on now, was some noises in the upstairs, and in the basement. The occasional door will open in my house, but not the closet door. The lights still won't work. Even as I type, they are not functional. Well, that's pretty much it guys. That's all that has happened since the last thread. Granted, it might seem like a lot of activity, but it is spread out over several months. I hope you enjoyed this story. It's been 4 hours since I started typing it, I hope it was worth it. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to crack open a new bottle of Red Label. End Onic fucked around with this message at Mar 20, 2012 around 01:13 |
| # ? Mar 20, 2012 01:07 |
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Onic posted:holy poo poo That's some hosed up stuff man, great story though. I didn't get it, did this happen since last thread or was that an old story? The opening disclaimer and the ending contradict each other.
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| # ? Mar 20, 2012 04:35 |
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Danilh posted:That's some hosed up stuff man, great story though. I didn't get it, did this happen since last thread or was that an old story? The opening disclaimer and the ending contradict each other. This is a really old story I wrote, from like 2007. I'm not really posting the old ones in any order. I lost them for the longest time and have recently been going through the SA archives to retrieve them.
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| # ? Mar 20, 2012 21:25 |
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My mom could read minds. Seriously, it was really bizarre, but I have distinct childhood memories, (Definitely not dreams) of us playing a game where I would think of a number between one and ten and she would guess it. She was never wrong. I was a little kid and this didn't seem strange to me at all, it was just something mom could do, but thinking back on it now it's really crazy. Edit: It even got to the point where if I thought of a number that wasn't between one and ten, like thirteen, she would look at me weird and ask what I was doing.
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| # ? Mar 21, 2012 00:33 |
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You were a little kid, you were probably showing all kinds of tells like mouthing it to yourself. If someone could read minds they'd use it for way more than guessing what number their kid was thinking of.
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| # ? Mar 21, 2012 00:55 |
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A Fancy 400 lbs posted:You were a little kid, you were probably showing all kinds of tells like mouthing it to yourself. If someone could read minds they'd use it for way more than guessing what number their kid was thinking of. The most common place for us to play this game was in bed, lights out, her sitting next to me. I don't know, maybe I involuntarily whispered the word really quietly? 
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| # ? Mar 21, 2012 01:20 |
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Jygallax posted:The most common place for us to play this game was in bed, lights out, her sitting next to me. I don't know, maybe I involuntarily whispered the word really quietly? Maybe confirmation bias - you remember the times she was right because it was impressive and forget the times she was wrong because it wasn't. That would be my guess.
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| # ? Mar 21, 2012 01:40 |
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KimJongUnstoppable posted:Maybe confirmation bias - you remember the times she was right because it was impressive and forget the times she was wrong because it wasn't. That would be my guess. Sounds plausible. drat, I guess I probably didn't have an awsome psychic mom after all :  :
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| # ? Mar 21, 2012 01:54 |
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Jygallax posted:My mom could read minds. Seriously, it was really bizarre, but I have distinct childhood memories, (Definitely not dreams) of us playing a game where I would think of a number between one and ten and she would guess it. She was never wrong. I was a little kid and this didn't seem strange to me at all, it was just something mom could do, but thinking back on it now it's really crazy. Odd. I have a similar experience...though sort of reversed. My cousin, about 6 years younger than me, could do the same thing as you described with me or anyone else. Thinking of a number (usually 1-20) or a basic-color. Blam! right on the money probably 8 out of 10 times. That was roughly 10 years ago. These days, he's all about hunting and fishing. I don't know what the deal was with how he'd pull it off.
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| # ? Mar 21, 2012 02:15 |
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drat Onic.. I always think about how it kind of sucks that I've never personally experienced anything that I can't explain, but after your stories especially I'm becoming more glad that I never had to deal with anything that hosed up. However, I'm a complete believer of other-worldly happenings and beings and what not just based on giving people the benefit of the doubt and not just assuming poo poo isn't real because it hasn't happened to me. To add to this thread, since I don't have a story of my own and often spend time searching the internet for proof of stuff like this, I figured you would enjoy a saga of video recordings from youtuber NQGHOSTHUNTER, who seems to have had a particularly annoying poltergeist latch onto him and make his life hell. If you go back to his oldest videos, he found the thing in the basement at his workplace.. and it then followed him home. People try to debunk his vids all the time but this could be as real as it gets. This is another reason why I feel like I should not bother going to look for something I may not actually want to see.
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| # ? Mar 21, 2012 02:46 |
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Varg posted:drat Onic.. I always think about how it kind of sucks that I've never personally experienced anything that I can't explain, but after your stories especially I'm becoming more glad that I never had to deal with anything that hosed up. However, I'm a complete believer of other-worldly happenings and beings and what not just based on giving people the benefit of the doubt and not just assuming poo poo isn't real because it hasn't happened to me. I'm wondering why his birds appear so calm. There's one shot where the doors separating the living room and where the bird cages are suddenly slam, and the birds don't seem to notice. In a lot of shots you can hear them, but they don't really change their pitch or frequency of chatter. That just seems odd to me.
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| # ? Mar 21, 2012 17:57 |
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Ctrl_Alt_Delete posted:I'm wondering why his birds appear so calm. There's one shot where the doors separating the living room and where the bird cages are suddenly slam, and the birds don't seem to notice. In a lot of shots you can hear them, but they don't really change their pitch or frequency of chatter. That just seems odd to me. What we have here is clearly a case of poultrygeist.
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| # ? Mar 21, 2012 18:54 |
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It makes sense that birds shut up really fast when they get scared. They suspect a predator and they don't want to tip it off to where they are if there's nowhere to fly to.
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| # ? Mar 21, 2012 19:00 |
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Ctrl_Alt_Delete posted:I'm wondering why his birds appear so calm. There's one shot where the doors separating the living room and where the bird cages are suddenly slam, and the birds don't seem to notice. In a lot of shots you can hear them, but they don't really change their pitch or frequency of chatter. That just seems odd to me. All I kept thinking in the first few videos "good thing that ghost who can move things doesn't knock down the tripod with the expensive camera on it". I dunno it seems kinda fake but it's entertaining.
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| # ? Mar 21, 2012 21:29 |
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Can someone post Wireman? The imagery in that one was absolutely fantastic, unnerved the hell out of me the first time I read it.
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| # ? Mar 22, 2012 00:59 |
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Jonny Angel posted:Can someone post Wireman? The imagery in that one was absolutely fantastic, unnerved the hell out of me the first time I read it. The Wireman Last night, I was derailed from seeing a movie by a pal of mine ‘J,’ who needed a ride to a barbeque, with an invite as barter. drat right I could see the movie another time! We arrive at Lindsey’s house, where her roommates were all running about, organizing the contents of 11 empty grocery bags; meat here, condiments there, booze here, etc… I’d noted to Lindsey that I liked her new home, it’s much bigger, roomier, and safer than her previous one, to which she looked a little puzzled. “You… you must be referring to the house on ‘Nashville St,’ because you never saw…” “…the other one,” Lindsey’s roommate Emily finished. “So… you don’t know the story of the place in between the place you knew us to live in and this one, right?” Lindsey asked. I just stood there, curious of all of the wide-eyed, uneasy looks, making myself wordlessly obvious that I’d not a clue. They called in the third roommate, Brianne, followed by J. They took turns adding in their ‘two-cents,’ confirming little details, adding others, to which they all agreed upon as the story progressed. Rather than make this a back-and-forth story of four people interjecting, I’ll tell it to you third-person. On Carrollton Avenue in New Orleans, Lindsey had parted with her previous roommate, and got together with two girls from school she didn’t know so well, Brianne and Emily, and got a decent place. The place in question was rather roomy, in a good location, and, above all, a hell of a bargain. This house, like most in the neighborhood, is nearly one hundred years old. When Emily and Lindsey arrived to move their belongings in, they saw a note on the door of the furthest room from the front door, there was a note by Brianne, saying that she’d already claimed it, which annoyed the other two girls. A blessing in disguise. Within the first week or two, Brianne and the girls were all in the house together, Lindsey and Emily supposedly asleep, and Brianne up all night, determined to finish the book she was reading. At somewhere between 2-4am, she reached the last page of her text, closing the book, and settling into bed to see if she was tired enough to sleep, just yet. Note that the book was NOT a mystery/horror book, and that she had an elated feeling about what she’d just read. She was replacing the book back on the shelf, and general before-bed tidying up, when the light above her started flickering, then went out. Brianne then turned off all of the lamps around the room, leaving the one near her desk on. She soon found out she couldn’t sleep, so she sat up again, and turned on the television, putting in a cartoon DVD, in the hope it’d tire her out before the sun came up. She heard a rapping on the wall, and stood, not knowing if it came from her door or her wall. Brianne lowered the volume on the TV, fearing it woke up a roommate, and approached the corner of the room where the noise was coming from. It wasn’t the door, it wasn’t the wall, it was coming from the closet. What Brianne didn’t know at the time was that her deep closet shared a wall with Emily’s equally deep closet, not Emily’s wall. Brianne assumed it was Emily who was knocking, and crept back to bed, in silence. Again, the rapping coursed through the room, so Brianne got up, exited the room, only to find Emily fast asleep in her own room, her body splayed nowhere near the wall in question. She checked on Lindsey, who was also fully asunder, her room too far for her to have knocked on the wall, to do so loud enough to gain Brianne’s attention would have woken up the whole house! Confused, and a little weirded-out, Brianne returned to her room, closed the door, and turned off the TV and remaining lamps, and reached for the desk lamp, which turned off before she could hit the switch. She retreated her hand in surprise, and the light flickered on; she then reached forward again, and she successfully managed to turn it off, the desk lamp having given up on a life of its own. Suddenly, light flooded the room, the overhead light blasted into life; perhaps it wasn’t the bulb that broke, but simply a loose socket? Brianne, in the few seconds it took for her to turn around, and head towards the light switch, became uneasy. Sure, it was scary, and the visual impact of the overhead light flickering like crazy was intimidating enough, but it wasn’t without the realm of reason that this old house had loose bulbs, sockets, even wiring, to which she’d have a chat with the landlord about investigating before a inner-wall fire could occur. Brianne consoled herself with such thoughts, as she approached the light switch in the strobed room, to finally turn it off, and put an end to this ordeal for the night. However, she began to believe the strobing effect of the light flickering on and off maniacally was making her see things… or not, for once she got to the light switch… The light switch was been frantically flipping up and down on its own. She jumped back in panic, as the strobing continued for a full few seconds, then suddenly stopped. Following a few moments later, in the darkness, was the knocking making a re-appearance, but much, much louder than before. Brianne grabbed what she could, and got the gently caress out of there around 5am, not only not looking back, but too scared to even inform the other girls of what went on. It took a long time for Brianne to be coaxed back into the house, since no strange events had occurred since, yet Brianne wasn’t going anywhere NEAR that room, so, she slept elsewhere in the house. It was suggested that Brianne sleep on the second floor, since the weather was good, and the only reason it wasn’t used was that the landlord had yet to repair the AC/Heating units up there. Brianne refused. As tall-tale hauntings go, Brianne reasoned, she was going to stay away from an attic as far as possible, despite the fact that all of the happenings occurred in the back bedroom that she once claimed. Weeks passed, and Emily had some visitors come over on one occasion, and Lindsey had some of her own on another; neither group of visitors slept more than one night in that house, citing that they had ’strange dreams’ that they refused to discuss, and they had an unnatural apprehension from going down the hall past Emily’s room. Lindsey decided to investigate a bit, and entered Brianne’s room during the day, finding nothing out of order. However, upon inspecting the closet where Brianne heard pounding noises, she discovered that not only did the back of the closet share a wall with the back of Emily’s closet, there was a sizable hole cut out of it, enough for a child to pass back and forth. Upon even closer inspection, the wall was shared, yes, but was hollowed, there was three feet or more difference between the two panels in the back of the two closets. Lindsey shined a light on the little space, and found a large spool of ‘industrial’ wire. She turned the light upward, toward the ceiling, and discovered this little ‘hollow’ went straight through the second floor, and into the attic, she could see a large beam stretching across, far above. Lindsey kept this discovery to herself for a few days. A night or two later, Emily was looking rather haggard, and explained that it was due to lack of sleep, since recurring nightmares kept jolting her out of slumber. The other two girls pressed on the contents of the dreams, the reslut of which much to their shock. All three girls (and one overnight guest) had the same dream, as did the two previous guests, when contacted and insisted upon the details: A very old, bald man was suspended above them, from wires somehow attached to his back, reaching up into the blackness; his arms were slung down, locked at the elbow, as to reach as far down as he possibly could; his arms began as skin, muscle, and sinew, but gradually terminated into a cluster of wires. The Wireman dangled above the dreamer, waving/scissoring his arms back and forth at locked length, as if trying to wipe past the faces of the startled dreamer. Finally, the man would buckle, as if a few inches of slack was granted from above, and the Wireman would immediately and eagerly grasp the sleeper’s throats with its wire-hands, and choke them vigrously. They could hear him smiling. The dreamer would suffer and die in the dreams, before awaking. The vast majority of these factors were shared with the dreamers, without deviance. The profusely apologetic Landlord didn’t question the girls’ fright (obviously there’s something he knew they didn’t,) and offered to send in an exorcist. Apparently, Exorcists are few and far between, so the girls popped down to some of the (very few) reputable psychics that were marvelously expensive; she got three to come on half-pay, half-favor. Remember, this is New Orleans, even I know of 1000 ‘Psychics,’ but I only believe 3 or 4 of them. It should be noted that Lindsey was smart about this, she didn’t mention anything about the room, dreams, or actual location of the house, and should the psychics wish to investigate before they come to the site. Lindsey convinced them to accept the job with as very little info as possible, and all of the girls were there when the Psychics showed up, offering them nothing, but listening to everything. The Psychics entered the house and all of its rooms, feeling nothing, until they got to the last room of the hall, where all three of them looked at each other in discomfort. One began crying. They backed out of the room. Lindsey took them into Emily’s room, and showed them the ‘little room’ between the closets (obviously from the ’safe’ side,) and directed their attention upward. Soon after, the band of explorers would find themselves in the dreaded attic, and had found the crossbeam in question. It had a deeply-etched groove of wear from a once-taut wire, and was indeed centered directly above that little hole. The Psychics soon joined the girls in the living room, and discussed what they felt. Apparently, a long time ago, a woman had run off from her husband, and little boy. The husband refused to let the child go outside, thinking that he’d run off, and the only way the mother would return was if the child was there, she’d surely not come back if it were just the father. One day, tired of the wait, the father locked his son in his bedroom, and hung himself (with wire, we’re not 100% certain, in the little room? Not 100% certain) until, of course, he died, assuming that the mother would soon come for the son. She didn’t. The little boy died of dehydration in his room. While this didn’t explain a good half of what went on, the Psychic went on to say… “Well, there was some sort of torture… perhaps self-torture, but I don’t know if the preceded the man and his boy, or if it involved the man and his boy… we threw down many tarot cards, and, despite the meaning of ‘The Hanged Man’ that we all accept, it came up every drat hand… we use 108 cards, it came up EVERY three cards after a thorough re-shuffle. I think it’s demanding a new meaning, perhaps an obvious one? We don’t know, we don’t normally do this, but certain impressions are undeniable.” The Landlord offered a second property, bigger, better, and cheaper, to which the girls took, and presently live. The girls, when they think of it, did a little investigating, and here’s what they came up with:
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| # ? Mar 22, 2012 14:30 |
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Onic posted:It's actually in the OP by the way it looks. Don't take this the wrong way, but I could not help but read that story in my head as Kenny Powers. You sir are a badass. I never would have imagined cussing out an invisible monster following me.
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| # ? Mar 22, 2012 20:52 |
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Doll House Ghost posted:Ghostly stroller story Eerily wonderful pictures! Also, please tell me you are Finnish too? This time I'm reading the thread in the afternoon while Sun is shining.
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| # ? Mar 23, 2012 11:45 |
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Varg posted:I figured you would enjoy a saga of video recordings from youtuber NQGHOSTHUNTER, who seems to have had a particularly annoying poltergeist latch onto him and make his life hell. If you go back to his oldest videos, he found the thing in the basement at his workplace.. and it then followed him home. People try to debunk his vids all the time but this could be as real as it gets. I just have to address this. It's really hard to believe the footage to be true. The guy uses same sound effects over and over again and he uses his own voice to create some of the ghostly voice effects. There's a teddybear peeking into the bedroom. This is for starters. By all means it is great entertainment and recorded with a good quality camera, but dude blocks away the people from his account who talk about debunking and fraud. Reminds me of the entertaining and creepy YouTube saga about the girl who moved into her first own apartment, do you remember that? It was great and later revealed that they all were actors. I suspect the poltergeist dude is just that.
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| # ? Mar 23, 2012 13:22 |
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Blooshoo posted:All I kept thinking in the first few videos "good thing that ghost who can move things doesn't knock down the tripod with the expensive camera on it". I dunno it seems kinda fake but it's entertaining. There's actually a couple of videos in there where the camera ends up falling hard on the floor. Like from about 6:11 in this one. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvccv_A8Ak0 edit: not that that makes it real.
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| # ? Mar 23, 2012 15:48 |
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I've got kind of a mild story, but I'll share it here. My Mother's Grandmother Emmy played a big part in her life. She was a very mannered, stern, serious woman and my Mom would often stay with her as a child. Emmy was a widow with a very clean, quiet house. She had an old Seth Thomas pendulum clock (looks like a tabletop grandfather clock) in her front room who's ticking sound would dominate visits to the otherwise empty home. My Mom says that the clock is the first thing any of Emmy's 10 grandchildren would remember about their visits to her house. Every day, Emmy would wind the clock using a key. Turning the key raised weights inside the clock, one that powered the pendulum/timekeeping mechanism and another that powered the chimes. The two weights were wound through two different slots, one on each side of the clock. Emmy would let the grandchildren help with the winding if they were staying over at the house. When Emmy moved into an assisted living home, she asked my Mother what she might like to have from her house and my Mother picked the clock. It was packed and shipped to us, and my Mom put it in our living room on a table with a picture of Emmy and her sister. She kept up with winding it for awhile, but we didn't like the chimes and she soon got out of the habit of keeping the pendulum would as well. Several years later, Emmy passed away (at 92!) and my Mother attended her funeral. A few weeks after she got back, she was walking by the clock and heard a loud "Gong!". The clock had chimed! Now, we hadn't wound the timekeeping side of this clock for years, and the chime side for even longer. My brother and I tended to stay away from it thinking it was old, stuffy, and creepy, especially with the old photo next to it. My Mom was surprised but didn't think much of it. Later that day, she mentioned the clock chime on the phone to her brother. He was a bit creeped out, apparently he had taken some of Emmy's things out of storage and found a different tabletop clock of hers. He had refurbished this tabletop clock and had just placed it in his house that very afternoon. Later, my Mom looked up the date and discovered that it was Emmy's wedding anniversary. Coincidence? Most likely. Message from Emmy from beyond the grave? Possibly... EDIT: Here's an image of a clock that looks very similar to ours. The door of the clock is open so you can see the two weights that power the chime and time. When the door is closed a decorative panel covers them. Both weights in this picture are at the bottom- meaning the clock will not function if they are not raised using the winding key. This is how my Mom found the weights in our clock after the chime- unwound so the clock should not have been functional. 
SchrodingersFish fucked around with this message at Mar 23, 2012 around 22:15 |
| # ? Mar 23, 2012 22:01 |
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SchrodingersFish posted:clock My boyfriend has a bronze bust of a Marine (don't know who it is, if anyone) that has a music box in the base. When we first started dating, I picked it up and wound it up all the way -- nothing happened. He told me it's been broken for years and sometimes it plays, but sometimes it doesn't. So, I forgot about it. Several months later, he moves into a new house and I go over one night. Later, I wake up with a start in the middle of the night because the bust was creepily tinkling out the Marines' Hymn in staccato, distorted bursts.  My boyfriend explained that the bust sometimes did that, that after being wound up, it would play days or even months later. He even laughed at me and said, "You thought my house was haunted." Little did he know, the house really was haunted!  (But in that case, I think it was just the bust being kooky.) I know I've told some of the stories from that house before in these threads. He doesn't live there anymore, thankfully. It belongs to his friend Josh, and on occasion Josh will ask us to house-sit / dog-sit when he's out of town. I try not to, but when I go over by myself, I always sit in the car for a few minutes steeling myself to go in...
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| # ? Mar 25, 2012 18:45 |
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chuchumeister posted:My boyfriend has a bronze bust of a Marine (don't know who it is, if anyone) that has a music box in the base. When we first started dating, I picked it up and wound it up all the way -- nothing happened. He told me it's been broken for years and sometimes it plays, but sometimes it doesn't. So, I forgot about it. This is really really creepy... I'm glad ours was just a chime, distorted music is terrifying, especially when you're not expecting to hear it.
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| # ? Mar 26, 2012 06:02 |
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Added 'The Wireman' to the OP for easier access.
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| # ? Mar 26, 2012 20:17 |
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My Mother the Living Ghost I was roughly 7 at the time and had been involved in archery through my mom and dad. There was a tournament being held at the local wildlife federation and while I was there, I don't recall competing. From what my parents can recall, I was feeling rather ill that day and we had left the club early in the afternoon and headed back home. I remember my dad decided to nap on the living room couch while I laid down next to my mom in her bed, probably because I was sick. I recall taking off my coat and setting it down next to me while I settled into the bed, grabbed a book and got comfortable. I starting flipping through the pages when something caught my attention from the corner of my eye. I looked over to my coat and saw a candy jawbreaker roll out of its pocket. Curiously I went to grab it and when my hand should have grabbed hold of it, it suddenly disappeared. At that exact moment, something else had caught my eye at the entrance doorway to the bedroom. I looked over to see my mother walk past slowly while wearing her wedding dress and giving me a stone cold stare while doing so. She kept walking past the doorway until I could no longer see her all the while she was sleeping right next to me. This is the most vivid memory I have of my childhood and I am absolutely certain it wasn't a dream or anything to do with sleeping. My only explanation is that I was more sick than my parents thought and I was hallucinating. I tell this story when we have family gathers and are sitting around telling ghost stories. It was a pretty bizarre experience. St. Louis Ghost Train There is a local ghost in this area (Saskatchewan) and I'd imagine other residents in the area can confirm this "ghost". It's a mile or two down a back road where an old set of railroad tracks used to sit. There are a few variations of the story but the one I am familiar with goes something like this: A train conductor had his head dismembered accidentally by the train and the "ghost" you see is actually him and his lantern walking around searching for his head. The cool part to this is that you can actually see it just about every time you go out there. There's so many explanations but it's hard to pin point what it is. This is what it looked liked at its "best" when I saw it: You can see this light from what looks like a few miles down a long path. It will fade in and out and appear to come closer and closer. It doesn't sway or move erratically. I've sometimes seen it glow red and at times it will get very bright. I've had this light come as close to what had appeared to be about 100 yards away. I was with a group of friends and the light was bright enough from that distance that it was shimmering off of our clothes. I've even walked down the entire path not seeing the light while a group at the beginning of the path saw it. It's really really bizarre. Here's some crappy footage I found on YouTube. You'll see 1 or two other dimmer lights which are actually farm lights. The bright light to the right is the "ghost". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYlWGbm-OtY The most common explanation is that it's reflecting car headlights from the highway. I have a problem with this though. The highway is about 2 miles away from this path and there isn't any rails left to reflect light off of. How about off of something from the farm yard? Nope. This light has apparently existed since the 1920's (when there was no farm there). Some say "swamp gas" but the drat light reappears to locations where there are no swamps. It was even on Unsolved Mysteries. I may go on a ghost hunt and do some recording if I get a chance this summer.
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| # ? Mar 27, 2012 04:59 |
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xzoto1 posted:
There's a similar light with the exact same backstory in several other places, actually. Weird.
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| # ? Mar 27, 2012 07:53 |
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xzoto1 posted:St. Louis Ghost Train I've seen an explanation for something similar we have around here that might be an explanation? Ours are called Min Min lights. http://www.uq.edu.au/news/?article=4265 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Min_Min_light
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| # ? Mar 27, 2012 14:03 |
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I love these threads and they're part of the reason why I finally plopped down the money for an SA account, so I suppose the least I can do is finally contribute a bit.  I've had a few seemingly supernatural, pretty creepy things happen to me. The earliest one I can think of I can't reliably say actually happened anymore. It was so long ago and in the fuzziness of early childhood I'm not sure anymore if it actually happened or if I dreamt it. I suppose part of it is also that I really hope it never happened, and unsure memories are better than facing it as reality. That having been said, I guess I'll start with a slightly later set of experiences, which my mother has corroborated. I was about five or six years old at the time, just starting in kindergarten. My dad had just left the Army, which meant we were moving into our first off-base house. It was a small-ish, one story, three bedroom house. Not too large, but with front and back yards and more than enough space for a family of three. This was the first day we were moving things into the house. I remember it was a sunny day, and generally feeling excited about moving into a new place. When you entered the front door, there was a small, linoleum-floored entryway with a short set of steps leading up into the main portion of the house, and to the right was a metal door which led into this sort of not-really-a-basement. It was a fairly large room for where it was situated, the walls and floor completely made of concrete. It served as the laundry room, so for the moment the only things in there were a washer and a dryer. While my parents were out at the car, moving and digging through boxes, I had decided to explore the house a bit. Like I said, it wasn't particularly large, so it wasn't long before I got bored of dawdling in the empty bedrooms and decided to check out the laundy room. At this point, the room was pitch black. The light bulb had apparently burned out and it had no windows to speak of. One would think a completely dark, unwelcoming room would dissuade child-me, but no, I continued inside for some god-awful reason. This was a bad idea. Stepping into that room, I recall immediately feeling ill-at-ease. I wouldn't describe it as terror or fright, but it was a definite feeling of wrongness that is hard for a young child to really recognize or qualify. The reason for this became immediately apparent. To the left, where the room was otherwise empty, were a large pair of red, almond-shaped eyes. The color was solid and uniform, with no pupils or other features. They seemed to glow, in a way, without actually emitting light into the rest of the room. Whatever those eyes belonged to, it was a lot taller than I was at the time. I took a couple of slow steps towards it, meekly calling out a couple of questioning hellos that weren't met with any answer. I extended a hand out towards the thing, and could feel deep, hot breaths on my skin. At that point it was too much, and I ran out of the house to my parents, screaming that I'd just seen a monster. My dad decided to go in and check, and naturally saw nothing. When we were finally moved in, my room was at the end of the main hallway, and it had an entryway in the ceiling to a small crawlspace. Once in a while at night I could hear what sounded like whispering coming from up there. I couldn't really hear what was being said, though sometimes I thought I could make out my name. Ultimately it led to years of me sleeping on the couch rather than in my room, though nothing else really happened in that house. Now that I've put all that down, it seems kind of overwritten for "I SAW EYES AND IT WAS SCARY ", so I'm sorry about that. I've experienced other things over the years, though I suppose none are particularly frightening in a "GHOST/MONSTER BOOGEDY-BOO" sense, but I'll see if I can't get those down and post 'em later.
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| # ? Mar 27, 2012 17:02 |
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| # ? May 22, 2013 01:37 |
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I've seen and experienced all sorts of weird ghostie things since I was very little; most of it stopped about 7 years ago now when I escaped from my abusive ex husband. I like to think all the ghosts and strange things stayed with him, the shadow men, the giggling in the woods, the flame-thing that once stood at the edge of our driveway watching the house. The lady in a grey dress who peeks around the stairwell in the house to look at us. The black shadow thing that crawled up the steps at night towards the bedroom, I hope they stay there with him. On his isolated farm. In the middle of nowhere, Virginia. He he he. Anyway, the most recent strange business with me, aside from my cheerfully nasty haunted steamer trunk, has been my dad. He died about two years ago after 87 years of being a miserable, abusive, hoarding, mean old bastard. He made the lives of everyone related to him absolutely awful. My poor mother stayed married to him for 60 years, and it was a lifetime of put-downs, abuse, fear, and stress. When he died, she asked me, the only single child in the family, to move in with her as she's now 83 and has never lived alone (that adventure is another story -- she's driving me nuts as she wants me to go back to being 12, &c.) It was about two months between him dying and me moving in; she told me that after he died (after spending only about three days in a hospice), the doorbell started to ring in the middle of the night. She'd get up to look out the window, wondering who was bugging her at 2am, but there was never anyone at the door. Then she realised it wasn't the doorbell on the outside stormdoor, but the old doorbell next to the proper front door (which you can't get to if the storm door/porch is locked, as she locks it every night.) So no one's used that doorbell in maybe 15 years. She thought, 'I wonder if it's dad trying to get back in,' because he begged with her not to put him in full time care, but she was too ill herself to look after him properly anymore. Now when the doorbell wakes her up, she just goes back to sleep -- especially now that I live here. My oldest brother and I are pretty grumpy, but in no way as mean-spirited as my dad was, and she figures we'll be a road-block between her and any ghost that wants to get in, because gently caress anyone, dead, alive, or undead, that messes with my precious, precious sleep. Then she had a dream that he was at the door, asking her to let him in. The dream really scared her, but my brother and I reassured her that it was a dream, it wasn't really a surprise (she felt guilty that she didn't mourn him and that she was relieved that he was gone). Then I had a dream about the old gently caress -- believe me when I say, I had nothing but an awful relationship with this man growing up. He had a violent temper and would go berserk at the slightest provocation; he hated that I did well at school and went on to university and beyond, believing that educated people 'put on airs' and that they just had 'book learning and no common sense' about how the real world worked. My earliest memories of him are him throwing things at me and beating me for the dumbest transgressions, and then the constant put downs, screaming sessions, whatever when I got older -- if my father was angry at you, you ceased to exist. He wouldn't speak to you, wouldn't put out a plate for you at supper, &c. Your stuff would get thrown out because 'Who does this belong to?' This could go on for weeks at a time. When I moved out, it was a good, good day. So I dreamt about him, and he was asking me if he could come back into the house. Nope, you old gently caress, I told him in the dream. gently caress off. Meanwhile, on behalf of my mother, I'd go out to the cemetary on significant dates to put flowers on his grave, and the grave of my young sister-in-law who died in 1985. It was over a year before any grass grew on his grave -- I told my mother, 'The old miser is so selfish, he won't even rot for worm food.' I never have any 'Oh Daddy, I wish we'd had a better relationship' moments when I'm at his grave. Nope; I'll do up the little flower things for my mother, and then say, 'There you go, you old gently caress.' Weird dreams and swearing at a grave aren't much, I suppose. We're also still clearing out the 5-car garage and other outbuildings on my parents' property -- he was a hoarder. Not in the 'Hey, look, here's a flattened cat' or 'Jeez, dad did save everything, here's 9 million bags of poo poo' way, but in the 'Oh, look, every receipt from him buying gas for his car back to the 1940s. All of his paystubs back to 1944.' Unfortunately, despite him claiming that everything he had was going to be worth a fortune, it's all junk. There is so much stuff in these buildings that it's actually costing us more than it's worth, literally to haul it out. As a hoarder, it meant that my dad was always crying poor, and claimed he never had money for any of us kids or the household needs. But he always had a lot of money for himself. My brother estimated, for example, that my dad spent over $50,000 in little Matchbox cars -- at $1 each -- when he was clearing out one room of one of the sheds. We grew up with the heat on 55F in winter, with no properly working bathroom -- but HE had one, a small bath off the side of his office; he had plenty of money for the pick up trucks and Corvettes he bought. And no one was ever, ever allowed near his stuff. For me as a child, that was grounds for a beating. He also felt, as the paterfamilas, that anything anyone in the family acquired, automatically belonged to him, and he'd steal stuff from our rooms to stash in his hoard. As my brother, and me, finally go through the forbidden piles and stacks in the garage and outbuildings, we're finding childhood toys and possessions that went missing 20,30, and 40 years ago (my brother is 58). And, boy, is my father angry as gently caress about it. I had another dream about him, and he was walking out in the back yard down towards one of his outbuildings, and I asked him, 'Why are you here? You're dead. Just lay the gently caress down already.' Just as he would in real life, he got very angry, started swearing at me, and dismissed me with a flap of his hand. Then I started to hear the door bell. I told my mom this. She said, nervously, 'Maybe it's just because I mentioned it, and anyway, it's probably because there's some goofy wiring glitch, and it just goes off sometimes.' I told her, that's as may be, but the chime isn't the one to this house; it's the one to the house we lived in in the '70s. Then I started actually to see him. I've seen him plain as day a couple of times, walking in/through the door to one of the outbuildings. The entire top floor of that 5 car garage is a big, open-plan loft. My brother has removed about half of the car parts, junk, and scrap, but all under the eaves on one side are the family goods we've been sifting through. I've been up there several times to spend a day working, trying to find my stuff in the mess. When I've been up there, stuff has fallen with a bang on the far end of the garage (it's about 2500 square feet in the loft). Not things that are precariously piled; I mean, a shelf will tip over. Or something very solid will roll out of the shadows as if kicked or pushed. I usually just pick something up and fling it back in that general direction as hard as I can, and it settles down. My dad always was a paper tiger if you stood up to him as I learned finally as an adult (and, oddly enough, as a teacher.) Stuff has come and smacked me in the back of the head when I've been bent down going through boxes (not from above, but from behind.) When I've been the only one here, as my mother is more or less an invalid, I've gone out into the garage on consecutive days to find the stuff in the attic completely moved around and piled in different configurations. No one else has a key; no one else is here. I was walking the property yesterday, as I do sometimes, and my brother does when he's up here (he lived several states away). While I was trying to look in the window of one of the outbuildings, a completely healthy tree in the little stand of woods next to me suddenly groaned and cracked and fell over within feet of me. I said, 'Yeah, yeah, whatever, you old gently caress. loving missed me.' When all of this crap happens, I just taunt the old man; I'm actually not afraid of him, and I don't care if he's stomping his feet, or pissed off that we're messing with his junk, or finally finding all the stuff he took from us. My mom feels bad because she thinks he doesn't realise he's dead (she's Catholic, so she feels awful for him.) Not me. I've been through so much poo poo in my own life, that an angry ghost dad gets a 'meh' from me. He he he -- just as I've been proofreading this, one of the doors in the basement, where he had a couple of 'storerooms' for his junk, just squeaked and slammed shut. I'm home alone.
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| # ? Mar 27, 2012 17:08 |
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