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Haha holy poo poo is that really how bad GBS has gotten? Jesus it's a horror story in itself. Where are the 50FA and whatever goon writes the Scooby stories writing their stuff? Was it in this or the seasonal thread?
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Feb 11, 2014 17:17
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Here's a weird-rear end email trail that I found on the company's servers:quote:From: ██, Lisa M
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Feb 11, 2014 17:29
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I don't get it.
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Feb 11, 2014 17:36
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Tony killed Dan and took his daughter
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Feb 11, 2014 19:35
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Okay, I thought so but I wasn't sure.
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Feb 11, 2014 19:43
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Thanks Noni. Shame GBS got to that point, these were always really popular threads but there's just too many FYAD-reject assholes in there now diluting the signal-to-noise ratio for the thread to get going. I know it's PYF but hopefully we can still get original content. SUPER NEAT TOY posted:Haha holy poo poo is that really how bad GBS has gotten? Jesus it's a horror story in itself.
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Feb 11, 2014 19:43
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SUPER NEAT TOY posted:Okay, I thought so but I wasn't sure. There may be more to the story that I'm missing, I don't get the significance of the Bible verses for instance and I doubt they were mentioned for no reason.
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Feb 11, 2014 19:47
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Does anyone have those creepy newstories supposedly dredged up from a Canadian wireservice? Those were really good.SUPER NEAT TOY posted:Haha holy poo poo is that really how bad GBS has gotten? Jesus it's a horror story in itself. GBS is a loving pit. Foyes36 has a new favorite as of 20:53 on Feb 11, 2014 |
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Feb 11, 2014 20:51
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I think it's these. Can't speak to formatting.ScottyBomb posted:I work in a newsroom, and sometimes some very creepy stuff crosses the desk. And sometimes, something that didn't look creepy at first starts to when you put it all together.
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Feb 11, 2014 22:44
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I'm still going through old ghost story threads and this is another short story that was requested year after year. "The Patch," by Darth Tang, copied from the original post: --- Frankly, I do not expect this to be believed. But I'm going to tell it anyway, simply because its been weighing upon my mind lately. I ran into Flash last weekend, who was back in town, and he spoke to me about it. Knowledge of the physical environment is essential to an LEO in Patrol. It is one reason why seniority counts for a great deal in this line of work-the longer you work a given juridiction, the better you know it. And locals who become police officers quickly learn that growing up in an area does not mean you truely know it. Part of it, is that an LEO, unlike most people, has no perception of private or personal space. We can go anywhere, given correct circumstances. And because of that, a great deal of 'idle time' or 'routine patrol' is spent exploring. Can you get a patrol car through the gap in this fence? Where does that track lead? Is there a way to get from this parking lot to another? If you walk this easement or power-line access, what will you see? This is essential, because at some point this knowledge can mean shaving thirty seconds off a response time, or catching a fleeing subject. In every police jurisdiction of any size, in my experience, there is always at least one strange place. Not the spots you take rookies and play Find the Mud Hole, or the crime scenes you use to scare Explorers, but the real thing. The places that nobody talks about much. The places you don't find out about until you have to go there. The places you go to only if you have to. We have a place that is sometimes called the Patch. Its about thirty-five acres of very broken ground covered in scrub oak on the edge of town, completely isolated from everywhere else, out beyond an old brick plant that now makes clay pots. Nothing, as far as I can tell, have ever been built there, nor is it really good for anything. Its at the base of the tall ridge that currently marks the west boundry of our burg, cut by numerous gullies, and whose red-clay soil is about useless from growng anything. The City seized it for taxes back in 1932 from a land company; it was listed as 'waste land' (no commercial use) back then. Its really a strange place. I've been on search teams across it six times in eleven years, and every time I've been on it, it creeps me out. It gave me the willies when I first explored it shortly after being cut loose on my own; you can't get a car very deep into it, and frankly, a short walk on foot into it gave me such a bad feeling I never went back without a reason. It wasn't until about eighteen months later that I learned that I was not alone in my reaction to the place. One factual thing that bothers me about the place, is that I get lost in it. I have, since I was old enough to think about such things, an unerring instinct about the direction north. I can always find it. Night time, snowstorms, forest, whatever; give me a few seconds to concentrate, and I know which direction north is. Even the desert, which screws many people up, never bothered me. And the Army taught me land nav to a fine degree; I've run compass courses with multiple dog-legs and hit my target location every time, even on featureless terrtain such at Fort Hood, where one bit of scrub is identical to every other bit. But every time I've been in the Patch, I've gotten turned around. In broad daylight, with a ridgeline a quarter-mile away that is only a couple degrees off a true north-south axis. After the first search, I started taking a compass with me. Near the center of the Patch is a structure we call the Playhouse. Its a building made out of sheets of old galvanized tin nailed to thick posts and four-by fours, with a dirt floor. We call it the Playhouse because there is absolutely no rationale for its positioning or design; firstly, you can't get a vehicle larger than an ATV or dirt bike to it due to washouts and gullies; maybe a jacked-up 4x4 if it was dry and you really did not care about your paint job. Secondly, because the place is big (about 3000 square feet, as near as we can tell), but has no purpose. There's no animal pens near it, nothing; just a wood framework with tin nailed to it, no tar on the roof-seams, no doors (but several door-way sized openings), no windows at all. Inside its split into at least a dozen 'rooms' by either more tin sheets, or partitions made out of old packing crates from the railroad. Some of the rooms are completely isolated from the exterior walls. There is no logic or reason to how the rooms are laid out; several have openings that are barely 3' high. It reminds you of how kids put together a fort or treehouse. Except that this one has cut-down telephone poles for roof supports set several feet into the ground. Whatever else you can say about it, someone built it to last. There no junk or litter about the PH, and no grafftti; while its not very obvious, its been there since before the City seized the place, and with all the generations of kids, you would expect some beer-drinking, ghost-hunting, or general spray-can antics. Nor is there any sign of animals taking advantage of the shelter, nor have I seen any bird's nests, although hornet's nests and mud daubers are present. And it smells odd. That's all I can say about it: it smells different than what I think it should. This has been commented on by others, as well. No specific odor. Just odd. And flashlights fail in it. Yes, flashlights fail everywhere, but flashlights seem to fail a lot more in it than anywhere else. $70 Streamlight Stingers that are City-issue and have reliable rechargeable batteries go abruptly dead in there. And not in the usual fashion, the light going yellow for twenty minutes, getting dimmer and dimmer until they just fade away; rather, going from hard white light to dead in a minute's span. When you carry the same light every day for years, you know its battery in detail. Yet many of us have been caught by an unexpected dead battery in the Playhouse. Some time in the past, we were searching for a missing girl. It was likely that she had been carried off by a recent high water after massive cloud burst (10" in ten hours), but foul play was also a possibility, for reasons best unrelated. A search was mounted. I was tasked with taking two officers and checking the area around the old brick plant and the Patch. I had two veteran officers, both entry team members and well-known to me; call them MD and Flash. They readily accepted my suggestion that we change into tactical gear in order to protect our uniforms from the brush; to be frank, I was less concerned with the brush, than for having an excuse to bring my MP-5 along. I wasn't alone in that, as unbidden, both Flash & MD got their shotguns out of the arms room. Flash had a 14" pump, and MD a Benneli semi-auto. We searched the Patch first; and although all three of us were carefully keeping track of where we were in a place we had all been in before, we managed to get well and truely turned around twice in the space of ninety minutes. It took us a lot longer than it should have to search the area, because frankly, we weren't splitting up. At all. Anywhere else, we would have been twenty to thirty feet apart walking on line. Here, we stuck together. We had been on other search teams which had gotten got hopelessly jumbled and separated in the Patch before. It was late afternoon when we went to the Playhouse. The sky was completely overcast, the color of lead. The ground was muddy, everything was wet, and there was a cold breeze out of the north. To say it was a miserable day was an understatement. We circled the Playhouse, looking for footprints, and found nothing. However, drainage was such that it was possible that they could have been washed away, so a search was nessessary. Inside, there were no gaps in the ceiling to speak of, and very few in the walls; the gray daylight hardly made its presence known through what gaps there were, although the dull light through nail holes made you think (unpleasently) of animal eyes in the night. I led the way in. Twenty feet in a portable metal detector (a wand type used to check for weapons) that Flash was carrying suddenly started beeping, and did not stop until he pulled the battery pack; he swore it had been turned off the whole time he had been out. Later, at the PD, it worked perfectly. We were clearing the place like a hostile building, rather than a seach; we had not talked about it, but all three of us were on edge. Very much so. The place smelled very wrong; not a smell of anything in particular, just not the way such a place should smell. I can't explain it any way better than that. I was on one knee checking out a closet sized-'room' when abruptly the light on my MP-5 died, going from white & bright to dead in a couple seconds. Flash took point and MD center while I tagged along and switched batteries (I had a couple full-charged spares on me, as well as two more flashlights and some cylumes). A minute or so later Flash's light died the same way, and he dropped to the rear to change out, while MD and I moved up a place. We stopped at that point, and we heard something. Flash muttered 'What was that?' and we all listened carefully. It was coming from ahead and to our right; we did not speak at the time, of course, but later, we never agreed on what it sounded like. To me, it had sounded like a sick cat might sound as it whimpers. We moved forward towards the noise, and came to a largeish room which had the exterior wall on one side. MD made entry, and at that exact moment his flashlight died. He immedately side-stepped and dropped to one knee; I moved in and past him along the wall as Flash slid along the wall on the opposite side of the 'doorway'. Flash was to the left of the 'doorway', MD was right, kneeling, and I was about two feet to MD's right . The room was about twenty by eleven, with us at the narrow side. And something moved in the far right corner. Flash hit it with his light a second before I did; I remember MD yelling, and then both fired. To this day, I swear I saw a big dark dog, I mean large, 150+lbs, bull mastiff-sized, in Flash's light, moving fast. I fired, three-round burst, and then kept firing as MD and Flash pounded away. Both went empty and yelled that they were withdrawing (team procedure), and I fired to cover them as I backed out last. After the first burst, I couldn't see much for the muzzle flash, so I just ripped up the corner with three-round bursts. I fired off the full thirty-round mag. In retrospect, I can not explain why I fired thirty rounds at a dog. There was no valid reason to simply hose it down; nor for Flash and MD to blaze away like we had. Nerves, is the only explanation I can offer. All I can say is that that encounter was quite simply the most stressful incident I have ever had, bar none. In the second room, we reloaded, and MD switched out batteries. Then we re-entered the long room. There was no dog. No body. No blood. Zip. None of us decribed what we saw the same way. Flash was extremely reluctant to describe what he saw at all. But there are a couple facts: all three saw a target 'in motion'. Despite the fact that we all perceived it as being in motion, we all saw it in a corner, and never shifted our point of aim, despite the fact that we all trained regularly on moving targets, MD & Flash were hunters (I shoot lots of moving varmits), I served in military actions, and both Flash and I had been in fatal police shootings. And we had twelve 12 gauge 3" magnum hulls and 30 expended 9mm brass. Thirty bullets and 108 000 pellets were fired at a specific area, in this case an area consisting of a dirt floor and tin walls. All three of us were classified as expert shots. No matter how closely we, nor the two investigators who came out later, looked, we could find no hits on the floor, and only 23 projectile penetrations in the tin walls. Out of 138 projectiles fired (000 pellets are 0.36" in diameter steel balls; 9mm bullets are roughly 0.38), 105 remain unaccounted for. The 23 holes we found were concentrated in the target corner; 9 to the left, 14 to the right of the corner, with the two groups 22" apart at the closest. As if something solid between the two groups had soaked up the missing rounds. The dept wrote the incident off as an 'accidental discharge'. The girl was eventually found elsewhere. Flash, MD, and I never realy talked about the indicent except indirectly. All three admitted having felt more stress than before or since. None of the three of us have been to the Patch since. Both MD and Flash have moved on to other agencies for unrelated reasons. Thats all there is to it. (In response to questions in the thread) I feel better for the input. This is one story that doesn't get told around the station; in fact, aside from my wife, I've never told the entire story before. teucer, I told the others what I saw; MD shook his head and said it was leaner and longer; Flash flatly refused to say what he saw, then later said it was a dog and left it at that. He was the worst-shaken of all of us (not that MD or I were all that steady at that point), and he normally has nerves of steel. WingedCoyote, that was one of the creepier things, later on: when we tried to explain the whole matter (and a firefight is not a joking matter to the police, no matter that no one got hurt), the administration members we were dealing with, who have been LEOs here for 40+ and 30+ years respectively, nodded, asked few questions, and let the matter drop. --- (Darth Tang wrote a follow up which those with archives can read here if you want the story speculated upon.
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Feb 12, 2014 05:27
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Feb 12, 2014 06:18
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I look forward to 50 Foot Ant ruling over this thread like a tyrant.
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Feb 12, 2014 07:19
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SheepNameKiller posted:There may be more to the story that I'm missing, I don't get the significance of the Bible verses for instance and I doubt they were mentioned for no reason. Tony is a demon, that's what you're missing. His name is Tony Zazel. Tony is short for Anthony, in other words A. Zazel. Azazel is a demon in Christian literature.
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Feb 12, 2014 07:20
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Orkin Mang posted:I look forward to 50 Foot Ant ruling over this thread like a tyrant. 50ft moved his stuff to Creative Convention last season where it had room to grow, there's no need for bad blood.
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Feb 12, 2014 08:09
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I have a fair few stories from my family. Only 2 I can corroborate, as I was present for them. I'll start with them. First off, when I was a kid, at around 7 to 10 years old, we lived in a house in Roma, Queensland, Australia. For the curious, it's 17 Feather Street. You can't miss it, it has a high roof, which is painted blue. It is the oldest building in town, built by the founder of Roma. Funny story, he was from England, and the high roof was made that way to prevent snow buildup in the winter. He was due to arrive in Roma (he had the place built before he even made it to Australia) in December, and as such ordered his servants to have all the fireplaces raging for his arrival, not knowing that December in Queensland is no stranger to temperatures as high as 48 degrees celcius (118.4 Fahrenheit). Apparently they couldn't comfortably enter the main house for a week due to the residual heat. Anyway, it was once part of a large estate, with stables and a greenhouse and servants quarters and other rich person stuff. That's all gone now, all that remains is most of the main house, everything else is now knocked down and long ago turned into blocks for new houses and such. My mother loved it the second she stepped foot inside. Dad, not so much, but mum talked him around, and they bought it. The previous owner was a woman in her 50's who had inherited it, and lived in it for her entire life, until she married and moved with her husband to the house right next door. She was a nice enough lady, if a little bit batty. Here is the weird. Women loved that house. LOVED IT. Men did not. To be clear, women felt super comfortable and safe inside, and men felt unwelcome, like they were being watched and generally creeped out. We had a guy mow our lawn occasionally, and he came around to pick up his payment, and my father invited him inside for a drink while he sorted out the cash. It was another typical hot as hell day, and the inside of the house was always fairly cool, even without air conditioning, so the guy was happy to accept, but he put one foot inside the door and "jumped back with a yelp" according to my dad. "That's not right. There is something wrong with that house. I'm sorry, but I am not coming in there, I'll wait outside." Dad just shrugged, and told him "I know." My parents were very active in the community, and as such they would fairly often have dinner parties or barbeques and invite a bunch of people over. Generally, the events would start in the dining area, but as soon as dinner was done, without fail all the men would leave and congregate around the barbeque outside. No matter the weather, it could be winter, raining and only 5 degrees outside, and there would be a bunch of guys standing around the barbeque for warmth, talking about stuff like it was normal, while inside all the women would be gathered around one of the 4 fireplaces, having a grand old time. I was just a kid, and I remember the house being either subtly creepy bordering on actually scary, or really calm and safe feeling, just... carefree? Sometimes I'd be inside and I'd run everywhere, because of this feeling there was something watching me in every corner, and just being constantly uneasy. Other times, it was like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders when inside, like everything was perfect, and even the darkest shadows held no fear. It's hard to explain, but it was rare for me to feel just "normal" like I did outside the house or in other peoples homes. We always had cats, who very rarely came inside the house. I had a chinese chow dog, who came and went as he pleased, but occasionally would go absolutey bonkers and run around the house, from room to room and bark at thin air. The cats would do the sme, if they were inside for extended periods of time. (but they wouldn't bark) No-one liked the hallway. Everyone fast walked through the hallway, man or woman. Men, because it felt wrong, like the rest of the house, but moreso. Women... well actually, I don't know how the hallway felt to women, I never asked. I'll have to ask my mother when I talk to her next. Stuff would go missing, then turn up. Can't find your keys, but you're sure you put them on the otherwise empty kitchen table? Leave the room. Come back. They'll be there. The kitchen had several fires while we lived there. It apparently had several before we lived there too, and it was actully brand new when we moved in. It had been completely stripped and entirely replaced, partly because so much was destroyed, and partly because they figured faulty wiring must have been the cause, so it was all done from scratch. The fires we had, however, were from appliances. I don't know much about electrical fires, but I always thought it odd that the guts of appliances would be the bits to flame up, and not the wall socket or the lead for the appliance. I had a recurring dream about a man with a knife chasing a woman down the hallway. She almost made it to the formal dining room at the end of the hallway each time, but he always got her and dragged her just back over the thresh-hold. Then he'd grab her by the throat, standing over her, raise the knife, then look up straight at me and grin. Then I'd wake up. That does it for the "general creepiness" stuff, I mean, I could maybe rationalise most of that, like the sudden temperature drops could be because its an old house, and the high ceilings probably create good temperature... drafts, or something. Here is the stuff that gets proper weird. My parents room was off the hallway. The door was right in the middle of the hallway. One night, probably around 1 or 2am my dad got up to take a leak, and went to exit the room into the hallway, only to find he couldn't. He described it as "like a wall of cold air, I could not push through it, but there was nothing there." He says he had to wait for it to pass on down the hallway before he could physically leave the room. My grandmother lived in Brisbane, which is about 500km east of Roma and the states capital city. She was having health issues, and so was coming to live with us after she got out of hospital. As such, one of the rooms around the back of the house got renovated, to make into a nice place for her to stay. It was nearly done, just needed painting, when we all headed to Brisbane to pick her up. My godfather volunteered to stay and finish painting the room before we got back in a few days. The same day we left, he was alone in the room on a ladder, painting above the doorway. He says he felt like someone was behind him, and he quickly glanced back and saw a woman. He was not alarmed, because he figured it was my mother. All he registered was a white/floral dress and mid length brown hair. He thought that maybe we had forgotten something, and returned to pick it up before continuing on to Brisbane. He spoke to her over his shoulder as he climbed down from the ladder, turned around, and the room was empty. Then he realised the only way in or out was through the door he and his ladder were blocking the entire time. He checked all the other doors in the house to be sure anyway, found them all locked and decided to call it a day after that. We moved back to Brisbane after a few years. My mother decided to look into the history of the place, because of all the weird stuff, and found this: Several people had died on the property back in the day. Mostly servants, mostly dull stuff like "Got sick. Died" or "Got kicked in the head by a horse. Died." but there was a servant who got pregnant, and was possibly but never proven to be murdered at the stables, some children died and there mother went a bit odd, but most of these things happened away from the actual house itself. The really interesting revelation was that in the early 1900's, the house was turned into a battered womens shelter. We guess that explains why women feel so at home inside, but men don't. If there is any interest, I'll find out more, because I'm sure there is stuff I've forgotten or my parents never talked about regarding that house. I now live in Roma with my wife, and every time I drive by that house, I always think I should go and knock on the door and ask the current owners if they've noticed anything odd. The other story is also in Roma, but in a tiny unit my wife and I shared when we first moved in together. It was small, just a dining/lounge, 1 bedroom, a kitchen that couldn't hold more than 1 person at a time, a spare room and a bathroom. At least 3 times a week, at around 11pm, poo poo would go down in the kitchen. It sounded like someone had opened every cupboard and drawer, then reached into them all and tossed the whole lot onto the floor, all at once. Imagine someone tossing the entire contents of your kitchen around. You'd jump up out of bed, (or off the couch, located 4 metres away) race into the kitchen and... nothing. Everything is fine, nothing out of place. We never felt threatened, just puzzled. Occasionally the stove would also adjust itself to temperatures much higher or lower than you set. My wife is an excellent cook, and she would set the knob for a roast on at 180 or whatever, come back and find it had been turned back to 100 or up to 300. That was annoying. Eventually we just learned to check the stove as often as possible, and as for the 11pm kitchen noise explosions, we just ignored it. Whatever it was, 11pm was apparently party time.
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Feb 12, 2014 15:38
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Someone re-post the one about the millitary medic turned reluctant gang doctor haunted by the ghost of a mexican gang leader, who throws the bones against the Baron and gets a witch banished to "the Hell populated by penguins with dicks on their heads". It's written in a first person perspective, iirc.
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Feb 12, 2014 16:57
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Ooo, I want to hear more about Roma if you have more stories. I don't have a lot of time right now, but just a quickie: I work in a call centre in an abandoned mall. The mall has a...history of being cursed. There's a legend that says that natives were chased off their land to make for the development of the downtown core of my city. A native woman apparently cursed the area saying no business would ever thrive where the mall was eventually built. And it never has. Movie theaters, coffee shops, stores, barely anything has survived even when the downtown became the main hub for the local university. So that's a bit odd. I was sitting at my desk one day, it was pretty quiet, and we had a shitload of down time between calls, when out of nowhere there was this blood curdling scream. It somehow sounded close and far away at the same time. Theresa, the girl who sits beside me turned and asked "You heard that too, right?" And I know a few other people who sit around us commented on it too, and looked really concerned. Nothing else seemed to come of it but a bunch of us felt uneasy all day. Nothing spectacular, but a fair few odd things have happened at this call centre. I dunno probably don't have a call centre in the middle of an abandoned mall on cursed land. 
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Feb 12, 2014 19:25
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RickVoid posted:Someone re-post the one about the millitary medic turned reluctant gang doctor haunted by the ghost of a mexican gang leader, who throws the bones against the Baron and gets a witch banished to "the Hell populated by penguins with dicks on their heads". http://nothotbutspicy.com/para/cl/ All of the coyote's stories are found here. 
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Feb 12, 2014 19:41
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A bit of a lower-intensity story from me, which I'm sure I've posted before in one of the previous iterations of the thread, but eh. I make no comment on the underlying 'truth' behind the following, only that what happened isn't embellished in any way whatsoever, that local reasearch confirmed some key facts and skepticism aside I know what my family and I have experienced there, as with house guests, holiday renters and previous owners. So, to the meat of it all. My family is lucky enough to own a farmhouse in northern France as a holiday home. The house is a large manor-style farmhouse built around a central courtyard- parts of it date back to the late 15th or early 16th century, with additions made in the 17th, 19th and 20th century. It's actually two properties in one- when we bought it the oldest part ('The Old House', imaginatively enough- making up the western side of the courtyard) was completely derelict and lacking large chunks of its staircase, as well as such niceties as safe flooring and structural stability. The part of the house we used at first (and that we now rent out as a holiday home) dates back to the early 19th century and extends along the north side of the courtyard, butting up against the Old House. I'll call this part 'The Farmhouse'. The other two sides of the square courtyard consist of barns built into a continual structure with a roofed gate on the south-eastern corner. The eastern side consists of old stables we use as garages and a very large barn we've set up with a trampoline, badminton court and the like, the southern side has a long barn we converted in a shooting range. We bought the place in 1988 when it was a mostly working farm but in absolutely terrible condition- we had to pretty much totally renovate the Farmhouse, and then in 2003-5 gut and completely rebuild the Old House. In the Old House there's a lot of inscriptions scraped into the walls, dating back to the 1600s- like I said, this place is old. We started staying in the Farmhouse regularly from Easter 1989, often sliding over from London for a weekend away- this was when I was about 8 or so. The place always had an atmosphere that's sort of hard to describe- both peaceful and brooding is the best way to put it, I think. We all noticed this and actually grew to like it- though I did find parts of the property absolutely terrifying for reasons that I never quite understood. Put it down to little kid fears, I guess. Anyway. Once we had the Farmhouse set up properly we began renting it out to people when we weren't there to help cover the costs of the maintenance etc. We kept a guestbook, and soon enough comments started appearing in it about footsteps in the upstairs passageway at 4am. Three or four different families reported these, though my parents absolutely refused to mention it to my brother and I (probably for the best, as we'd have both been scared shitless). This took us through to November of 1991. We went out for a weekend there literally straight from the funeral of one of my mum's close work-friends who died young of leukaemia- he was a lovely guy, friend to the whole family and we were all really cut up about it. That night, my parents both heard the footsteps for the first time, stomping down the passageway outside the bedrooms that ran the length of the upper story of the Farmhouse. Interestingly, it sounded like the footsteps were on bare wood, when at the time that passage was floored with a combination of /hideous/ carpet and linoleum. My folks heard the footsteps several times over the next year or so, but again didn't make any comment about it to us kids. They always seemed to come when someone in the house was either sick or unhappy, but also around religious festivals- Easter was generally a hotspot, and Good Friday in particular. But I'm getting a little ahead of myself. I first heard the footsteps in May 1992, or possibly 1993 (my memory is a bit hazy). I do know that my little brother was sick at the time, and as we shared a room this meant that I was being kept up by his coughing and spluttering. Our room was at the far end of the corridor from my parents, and the door had an opaque glass panel in it for some reason (not frosted glass, but sort of wave-patterned? You could see through it, but not make out any details). We used to have the light on in the hallway as we slept, because frankly I was a loving coward as a kid and scared of the dark. Anyway, come 4am I was trying to get back to sleep after my little brother had woken me up, when I heard the heavy clomping sound of booted feet just outside our room. They moved past the door, and there wasn't the slightest hint of a shadow cast in the light streaming through the glass panel, though anything passing by should have disrupted it. I was terrified, but also sort of stuck in that I couldn't run to my folks without going through the passageway itself! Anyway, the next morning I told them what I'd experienced, and they explained that they and a few other people had heard the same and that I shouldn't be too scared, but not to tell my brother. I heard the footsteps several times more, until they became almost (but not quite) normal to me. Up until Good Friday 1994. I was 12 and my little brother 9 at the time, and our parents had to go over to the next village to talk to the bank manager. My folks were rather protective, and to be honest this is one of the first times I can ever remember being left without adult supervision in the house. We were hanging out in the games room, playing ping-pong and table football and poo poo. Now, this room was directly underneath the passageway upstairs. I can remember, I'd just missed a shot in ping-pong and swore loudly, delighting in not having my parents around when we heard the first few steps. Big, heavy booted feet stomping around. Except instead of just ten or twelve steps like I was used to, these didn't stop. It sounded like someone was marching back and forth up there constantly and /really/ stamping their feet. My brother and I got more and more scared, and decided to go break open our 'armoury', collecting air-rifles, a hatchet and a garden hoe from the storage room. With a loaded airgun I went upstairs to check in case there was an actual intruder- of course, there was nothing there and the footsteps stopped once I mounted the stairs, only to start again after I came back down. We full-on barricaded ourselves into the games room (literally pushed a sofa across the door and built a barricade with firing points from other furniture) to await our parents return. They called up from the bank (this was before the days of cellphones, or at least not ones that needed to be fit to the car) and after I told them what was going down headed back genuinely worried that we were going to open fire on them when they pulled into the courtyard. That was the first time we could really talk about the haunting openly in the family, as obviously we were all clued in. Over the next few years the footsteps were heard many times, along with some other incidents as well- our housekeeper and several other people reported the clear sound of horses' hooves in the courtyard in the middle of the night (there used to be stables along the ground floor of the Old House); people in the shooting range have reported feeling 'someone holy' standing very close behind them (yes, I know this is sort of vague), things occasionally moved on their own. I actually /saw/ something for the first time at Easter 2002. We were staying in the house as usual, and the rest of the family were out at a Good Friday party the village's main 'clan' were throwing (The Ducroq family- we bought the house from one of them, another is our cleaner, another our builder, my dad and I go hunting with them.. they're an awesome collection of hard-working, hard-drinking rural french folk who very much absorbed us into their extended family) while I was stuck at home with a stomach bug. I was sitting in the kitchen downstairs, using my laptop wired into the phoneline to do nerdy poo poo (I think I was roleplaying on a Starwars MUSH) when I looked up from my monitor and saw what I can only describe as the shadow of a man about 5'10" or so cast onto the air in the doorway. I couldn't make out features, but it was obviously wearing a jacket of some sort, breeches, heavy boots and some form of hat. Please note, this wasn't in my peripheral vision or a brief glimpse- I was looking straight at him for a good 10-20 seconds or so. With some presence of mind (which also says something for my priorities at the time) I managed to touchtype out 'AFK guys, looking at a ghost RIGHT loving NOW' to the people I was RPing with before the figure inclined its head in a sort of nodding motion and just melted away. As I grew older I had less and less chances to go out to France- when we once went literally every other weekend, I've probably only visited the house about ten to fifteen times in the past decade. However, that's not stopped the appearances. On Good Friday in 2005 I was out with my family, talking with them in the courtyard about plans for a big party we were throwing that september. I went inside to get something from the kitchen and heard heavy footsteps go up the stairs and into the upstairs passageway- I thought it was my dad. However, when I stepped out into the hallway I saw all of my family still standing outside talking. The second most recent time I went out to the house was in august 2012, I took my girlfriend along for her first visit (or rather, we stopped in to visit my parents on the way back from a road-trip across europe). My parents now stay entirely in the Old House when they visit (which oddly enough has no atmosphere or any strange occurences at all- perhaps because it was completely gutted and rebuild by our renovation.), so Jo and I were sleeping in the old master bedroom. I'd told her about the stories and what I'd experienced, which didn't scare her much as she used to live and work in a very haunted pub. Anyway, we were lying in bed on our second night there just chatting, when the room temperature suddenly dropped about ten degrees- seriously, it suddenly became absolutely freezing. And then came the thumping sound of footsteps from down the corridor- just a couple, but enough to make it clear that our regular visitor was back in town. So, what caused all of this? Well, local research by my parents revealed that the previous owners and indeed the owners before them had all experienced similar phenomena in the house. The whole thing seems to date back to the early 19th century, when the house was the local manor (it even had its own attached brewery). The family had a manservant who is/was known as 'Gaston', who was particularly dedicated to the family's children. At the time the top floor of the Farmhouse was where the nursery and servant's quarters were located, and the story goes that in the small hours of one morning robbers broke in. Gaston got stabbed on the upstairs passageway, outside the nursery where the children were sleeping and died there trying to protect them. The local legend is that's why he is heard whenever a member of the household is sick or distressed- that he's there to look out for them and keep them safe from harm. I'm not sure how much I believe in that aspect of the story, but hey, it makes a nice tale. And I know what I've seen and heard, what my family has seen and heard.
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Feb 12, 2014 19:42
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Thank you for the link in the OP.
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Feb 14, 2014 01:42
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I just remembered another haunting in Roma. Repertory House was a hall just down the road on Feather Street, and it was also fairly old, although I'm not sure how old. The local ballet teacher used to use it to teach dance and store all the dance gear, and it had a kiln out the back for the local pottery group to use and a little playground as well. It was owned by the town council. I knew it well, since I was signed up for ballet classes there as a kid. The haunting for Repertory house was pretty much a non-issue. The front of Rep house had a few stairs up to a walkway that went for about 4 or 5 metres across the front of the building, in front of a large window seat that looked into the main room of the building, where the dance classes were held. The walkway connected to a small verandah, built into the building, where the front door was located. In order to enter via the front door, you had to pass the window seat, which was easily 3 metres long. Since all the classes faced the front door, you could see anyone coming up the stairs, crossing the front of the building, and then coming in through the front door. Except for those times when the person you saw climbing the stairs and crossing the front of the building ceased to exist by the time they reached the front door. Female. No clear age. No specific time. Just about everyone saw it, at some point or other. In fact, it was so common-place that regulars stopped reporting it, and if they did it wasn't a huge deal. Generally a person would spot it, and run at the front door, find nothing outside, and return to their class. We'd all look, at first, but eventually even that stopped. It was only a big deal when someone new saw it for the first time (or times) because it'd weird them out pretty badly, and everyone else would be all "Oh, that's just the ghost, don't worry about it, it happens all the time." When I moved back to Roma, I immediately went back and signed myself up with ballet classes again, still being taught by the same lady (and now her daughter) and the ghost was still turning up time to time. I was surprised the first time I saw it again, having completely forgotten about it in the years since I left. I ran to the door, and finding no-one there, I came back inside. "I could of sworn I saw someone coming up here!" "That's the ghost. Don't you remember the ghost? She's still around, just watching the ballet." I also saw something weird, walking home from the pub one night at around midnight. I walked by rep house and saw through that front window seat, what looked like a candle being walked around inside. I thought someone had broken in or something, since the place had some fairly expensive sound and lighting equipment stored there. I jogged up to the window and looked in, and the place was, as far as I could tell, empty. No light, nothing. According to them, she also walks around the interior of Rep house, you can hear the footsteps. She has also been seen inside, but never a really good look. Like, they'd be in the main room, fiddling with the sound system, look up to see a woman walk around the corner out of the main hall into the kitchen/kiln area, run up to the kitchen and find no-one there. We all just figured she must have been hanging around to see the kids dance. Never really scared anyone, or made a nuisance of herself. Just hung around. About 4 years ago the council sold rep house, it is now a private residence. The dance school has moved to the scout hall a few blocks away, and the new owners of rep house were friends of a friend of mine, but since my friend moved away, I havn't really had any reason to talk to them. I wonder if they see her still walking around. princecoo has a new favorite as of 10:04 on Feb 15, 2014 |
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Feb 15, 2014 09:45
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I don't know if I believe in ghosts. I know that I give them an awful lot of thought, and that I believe what I've experienced. But I don't know if I could just say, "Yes, I believe in ghosts." I'm very skeptical of other people's stories, which maybe isn't fair. There's just so much that feels like fiction, and it makes it hard to tell the truth from the fictional. I do believe in what happened at the Harriet House, though. We found the house for rent on an online site, and were long suffering tenants of a really crappy apartment building. My roommate, Amy, was moving back to her home city since we had just graduated university, and as such, my boyfriend and I wanted to branch out on our own, with our little cat and dog. When I first saw the pictures of Harriet House, it looked...sickly. It was a creamy yellow colour and I didn't like it at all. But Steven talked me into going to see it, and when we finally got to see it, I was won over somehow. The house was small, but was clearly renovated with care. I was so hopeful that this would be the next step in a new life for Steve and I. I started having issues with the house almost as soon as we moved in. I had been so excited about having my own art studio/office in the basement, but I couldn't stay in it for long periods of time, especially not alone. Even with the door closed and the lights on, I felt like somebody else was in the room, watching me. When I was in that room, I would often have to have music going on my laptop to keep me company and ward away that creeping feeling. I seemed to be okay when I had music on. If there was something there, it knew this, because all of a sudden, my music would pause or turn off. My music was always mp3s played through iTunes, and when it stopped, the iTunes screen wouldn't show that it had been paused. It would be silent for a moment or two, up to 10 minutes sometimes, before my music would start up from where it left off, usually startling the hell out of me. It was never a certain song, the computer never seemed to freeze, there was never a pattern. Soon, I wouldn't do art in my office unless Steve was in the basement too, watching a movie or hanging out. When he stopped doing that and spent more and more time in his office, I stopped using my office all together. The basement itself was something else. It was always freezing cold, and always felt oppressive. I refused to go downstairs for anything, unless my dog, Riley, was with me. That was the only time it felt safe. I noted that everything in the basement felt damp, and the walls took to sweating, but I figured that was just the temperature differences between the basement and the upstairs which was much warmer. My body started to ache, not like when you sleep the wrong way. It felt like I had been beaten in my sleep. I limped everywhere, and my posture suffered. Since Steve worked all day and I worked a part time job, I was home most of the time. I caught so much poo poo from him, that I was home all day, the least I could do was unpack boxes and clean, cook meals, etc. I tried to explain that I hurt all over, but he wouldn't hear it. He had changed from a soft, loving and supportive man to a cold person who only sometimes resembled the man I loved. Soon, my days were spent in the bedroom, the bathroom, or not in the house at all. There were a few times I heard voices, like Steve had said something. One particular time, I was tidying the bathroom after having a bubble bath (one of the few comforts the house offered was a bathtub with jets and a rainforest shower head...baths and showers were a sanctuary for me) and I heard Steve say, "Hey, maybe a movie?" This made me so happy. After what seemed like a month of Steve seeming to be behind a foggy glass, he was suggesting we do something together, and I was more than happy to take part. "Yeah! I'd like that. Got anything in mind?" I'll never forget the look of confusion on his face when I poked my head into his office (right beside the bathroom) to answer. He swore up and down that he hadn't suggested we watch a movie. The pets changed too. Riley wouldn't leave my side, and Warren the cat (an otherwise friendly and cuddly cat) became spastic and mean. He would sneak under the bed at night and wake Steve and I up with this unearthly screaming and hissing. I still heard whispers and once or twice saw shadows that looked like a person walking by doorways when I was the only one home. But I had learned not to say anything. I was always either ignored or laughed at. Steve would just say my mind was playing tricks on me, etc. Steve grew further and further from me until we eventually broke up. He broke up with me a month and a half into living there, but demanded I stay in the house to pay rent, and took to sleeping on the couch in the basement. Good riddance, I thought. I hated being in that basement anyway. He could stay down there, for all I cared. I moved out as soon as possible, and suddenly everything stopped. The whispers, seeing things, the body aches, the feelings of being watched. Steve stayed and found somebody else to rent the house with him. I don't believe in a lot of ghost stories, although I love them. I do believe in what happened at the Harriet House, I don't think you could pay me to set foot in that place ever again. It may not sound like it, but aside from the names, everything I've written is true.
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Feb 16, 2014 23:27
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One of my mom's college friends married some guy and settled down on a colonial-era brick farmhouse in our hometown in upstate New York, so Mom went to visit her. This happened back in the '70s, and Mom told me about it in the '90s when we happened to drive past that specific house once (no longer occupied by the friend at that point). Anyway, it had been several years since college, and they hadn't really kept in touch, and they were reconnecting since the friend had just moved to the town where Mom lived and all that poo poo. Mom showed up & was invited in and then kind of left to hang around in the front hall while her friend rushed around in the kitchen to finish up dinner. I've never been in the house myself but I've been in plenty of others in the area and the architecture's pretty standardized - emphasis on symmetry and regularity, all like Palladian or some poo poo - so I can imagine the layout pretty well: big central hall running from the front doors through to the back with a dramatic staircase, so the area in front of the staircase is a fancy entry hall with a two-story-high ceiling, and on the second floor the same floor plan is duplicated so there's an open hall up there too from which you can look down the stairs and see who's at the door, right? So Mom's in this entryway area waiting for her friend, and she looks up and there's this little kid upstairs. Like, a little boy, maybe two years old. Mom didn't know her friend had kids already but they hadn't been in touch so it wasn't unbelievable or anything, just "oh hey I didn't know that," no cause for alarm, Mom's like saying "hi" to the kid or whatever and then the kid loving leans through the railings at the top of the landing and Mom tells me she had just enough time to realize she should tell the kid to stop leaning through the railing before he fell and Mom tells me she watched him fall but never saw him land. Just disappeared halfway down. So she was like "gently caress waiting in the hallway I'm going in the kitchen" and told her friend and was basically told "yeah, that happens"  I've definitely seen similar stories or variants on this idea before. Mom claims it really happened to her but everybody says that about their ghost stories
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Feb 19, 2014 15:45
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I'm so glad this thread is back. I was sad to see it die in GBS. I'm going to be typing up my own stories and a couple my mom has told me. Not too scary, really, but I want to keep the thread alive! I love reading your stories and bought Goonbumps for my Nook.
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Feb 21, 2014 18:45
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I'm trying to find a particular goon horror story. A guy buys his grandad a computer and helps him connect to the internet. Weeks later no one's heard from the grandad so the guy goes to investigate. He finds out his grandad had become a shut-in because of a desktop buddy avatar that would demand the old man pay attention to her and would flash gory torture footage while screaming if he didn't respond.
Sad Mammal has a new favorite as of 06:41 on Mar 7, 2014 |
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Mar 7, 2014 06:37
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http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Helen
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Mar 7, 2014 20:21
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So a few years back my Wife and I were kind of in a bad place. I'd lost a good paying job almost a year ealier, and while I was working part time, it wasn't enough. I was mentally in a pretty terrible place, we had a kid a bit over a year old, another on the way, and we couldn't really afford rent. Not trying to go E/N here, but it was not good. Help arrived in the form of my Wife's foster sister. She had a rental property that they hadn't had any luck getting anyone to rent out. She offered to let us live there, at less than we were paying rent at the appartment we were already in, as long as we could keep it up and looking nice. We went to look at the house to see if it would work, and while it was nice and seemed like it would work for us, it was basically a formality because we weren't going to turn that deal down. The house was actually pretty nice. Not that big, but it had nice hardwood floors, and plenty of space for a family of three soon to be four. Around that time I'd even picked up a new part-time job, working over-nights stocking grocery shelves, so things were really looking up. Now, this is where the story takes a turn for the weird. My Wife has always been... I guess spiritually sensitive is the word? Although I sometimes feel like metaphysical magnet might be a better descriptor. I hadn't had much experience with the supernatural prior to getting together with her, but we've had one spirit or another in every place we've lived together. In the appartment we'd recently vacated, we had a spirit that would either march the hall outside of the baby's room all night, or would just stand watch in that room through the night. During the day it would just occasionally thump up or down the stairs. In our current house we've got one in the downstairs that hangs around the kitchen (It doesn't like me, bastard lifted a wine bottle and used it to smash my electric skillet. Jerk.), and one upstairs that hangs around our girls room. Either we just get lucky picking places, or the things are drawn to her. Who knows. Anyway, this house had at least two spirits. At first we thought it was just the one. Neither Ash or I wanted to spend much time in the basement, because it was oppressive and there was a serious air of menace down there. Our little one seemed to love it down there. She'd slide down the stairs and then run around, laughing and talking like she had a playmate. We figured maybe the spirit was a kid or just didn't like adults, so what the hell. She seemed safe enough. Then Ash found her crying down there one day. She was all but inconsolable, but we eventually got her to tell us what was up. She said that her "friend" wouldn't come play with her, because he was scared and hiding. She couldn't tell us from what. That was when we started to figure out that we were dealing with two ghosts, and that only one of them was the Caspar variety. Ash started hearing a lot more noises at night after that, footsteps, banging, doors rattling or closing on their own, that kind of thing. She started having our daughter sleep in our room, with our door closed, because she was getting pretty intimidated by the thing. It all finally came to a head while I was working one night. I had my phone muted since I couldn't use it while I was working, so I had some very interesting text messages to read on my way home. At about 1 am, our daughter starts freaking out. Crying, yelling "Mommy, help him, mommy, you have to help him, it's coming, it's coming!" and so on. At the same time the normal footsteps in the hallway had picked up into full on stomping and running up and down the hall. And the normal door rattling had turned into very loud slamming and banging as if whatever it was outside the room was desperately trying to get in. Desperate my wife turned to the Internet. Yeah. I know. After suggestions like "Ask it what it wants" and "Try to help it realize that it's dead so it can move on" failed to elicit more than more pounding, she turned to exorcism techniques. After shouting a bunch of Catholic prayers at it (she never was a very good Catholic, but I guess if anything is going to help focus your faith it's something trying to beat down your door) the house finally quieted. Our daughter then turned to her, happy as could be, and started yelling "We did it, we did it!" and after a few minutes of that promptly fell asleep. When I came home our daughter was still solidly out (and was down for most of the day), but Ash looked like hell and hadn't slept at all. Also we had a line of salt in front of the bedroom door, which apparently was supposed to keep spirits out. Ash said the stuff she read recommended oil too, but she didn't want to ruin the floor. Things stayed quiet after that, and according to our daughter her playmate had "gone home" too. Haven't had anything like that happen since, anywhere we've lived. (Except for that one ghost breaking my stuff, the bastard.)
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Mar 7, 2014 22:00
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Senior year of high school, I went to the National Museum of American History with my parents. We were in this room with cars all the way back to buggies and wagons when my parents went off one direction and I went another. At one point I was walking by a row of carriages when I saw this guy sitting in one of them. It was this little carriage--I remember it had a cute name like "carriagette" or something and it had a closed top, four wheels, and two seats. I saw this guy for a brief moment, sitting in the left seat, closest to where I was standing, just looking straight ahead with his brow furrowed a bit like he was annoyed. He was a kind of upper-middle-aged, slightly overweight man wearing a brown hat and a brown suit. He had this big bristly mustache and this mink scarf thing, or some other brown animal draped around his neck. It was one of those ones with the face and feet still on it. The guy was just sitting there like he was annoyed the carriage hadn't started moving yet and he had places to be. Then I blinked and he was gone. I was sort of confused and did a double take, but he still wasn't there, and he wasn't anywhere else in the room. I thought "Oh, it's a mannequin! It just fell over." So I leaned over the rope to look inside, but the guy wasn't in there. Then I realized that none of the other cars, carriages, or wagons in the room had people sitting in them, real or fake. Not sure if it was really some guy dressed up like an old-timey gruff gentleman and I missed him getting up and leaving, or if there's some vaguely annoyed ghost forever sitting in this carriage, wondering when he's going to get moving.
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Mar 7, 2014 23:04
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This isn't my story, it's my dad's, but I'm telling it because he doesn't really like to talk about it. We live in a family neighbourhood, and have done since I was a small child. It's well lit, very safe, and there's a park up the road from us. There isn't much traffic, and four or five schools within a twenty minute walk. There are always lots of children around, and everybody sort of keeps an eye out on each other, because pretty much every adult in the neighbourhood is a parent. While my dad was briefly unemployed, he was home during the day, and his office has a view to the front of the house. He was looking for work online, and would glance out of the window now and then, and watch the world go by. We've got a fairly gentle slope down our road, and kids love it for skateboarding and scooters. My dad notices, out of the corner of his eye, two figures walking up the front garden path to our porch, and at first, he thinks that he's not going to answer the door, because he's mid-way through an application. He gets up anyway, and he told me later that it felt like he didn't really have much of a choice. He simply had to answer the door. This was even before he heard anybody knocking. My dad goes downstairs, and opens the door, and there are two children there. One is in his early teens, and the other is maybe ten, or so. They are both boys, one with quite tanned skin, and curly dark hair, like his own hair, and the other boy is very pale, and has freckles across his face, and over his arms. Both boys are dressed in jeans, and both wear hoodies. They look like any other kids that pass our house every day. The younger, blond, boy cradles his arm very gently touching and rubbing the spot just above his elbow, as if checking it every couple of seconds. "Hey, can we come in?" the older boy asks. "My little brother fell off of his bike at the park, and I need to call our dad to come pick us up." My dad says that the kid seems very bright. He speaks to him clearly, confidently, without any verbal tics that most kids that age, like, default to, you know what I mean? Yeah? My dad is a sensible, rational man, but he just feels sick to his stomach, and he just knows that something is wrong. He stands at the door, blocking the entry to our hall, and he just freezes, and said nothing. He is terrified, and has no earthly idea why. And the weirdest thing was that the older boy doesn't seem at all put off by this. He just smiles, patiently, and speaks again. "We'll be really quick, we just need to make a phone call. Please can we come in? My brother's pretty badly hurt." My dad shakes his head, and goes to close the door, and the boy gets more insistant. "Look, just let us in! We're only going to be two minutes, and my brother is hurt. Can we come in? Just let us in." Throughout this, the younger boy starts to look distressed. He has been cradling his injured arm throughout the exchange, but my dad says that he never looked in pain, or at all concerned by the injury, but more like he was trying to make it quite clear that he was injured. Only the refusal of entry to the house is making him agitated or upset. The younger one looks up at my dad, for the first time - his eyes have been fixed firmly on the ground up until now. My dad recoils, as he notices that the boy has pure black eyes. No white, no colour, just as black as the pupil, the whole way through. So does the older boy. The eyes aren't empty, but he couldn't hazard a guess as to what they have behind them. My dad closes the door, locks it, bolts it. He moves to the stairs, which are hidden from the glass in the door, and he waits. He can hear that the boys are still on the doorstep, and he hears the older one knocking, and calling through to him. "Please can we come in? You need to let us in." My dad admits that he felt like a terrible person, and part of him screamed at him to just open the door, and let the boys in to make their phone call. He was a father, how could he just ignore a kid that needed help, and how terrible would he feel if somebody had refused help to his child. But he doesn't. He sits and he waits, and he can see the outline of two figures standing at the door, even after the knocking and the words stop. He knows they are there. They know he is there. Words are not needed. My dad says he sat on that staircase all day, waiting, and listening. I phoned him before I came home from work, and he asked me not to use the front door of the house, but he wouldn't say why. He just said it was dangerous. He met me at the kitchen door of the house, and let me in, and locked it up as soon as I was inside. He stayed at the stairway, and asked me to wait upstairs, and to lock myself in my bedroom. My dad does not act like this. I don't think I had ever seen him this scared and rattled. It is entirely out of character, and I was pretty scared myself at this point, but I do as he asked. Thirty seconds later, he calls me downstairs. He tells me he checked the doorstep, and there was nobody there, and explains what happened. The kids weren't there, and we've never seen them again. However, we did find something there. Two pieces of bark from a tree, tied together, left on the doormat. My dad burned it. I believe him entirely. I kind of wonder what would have happened if he had let them in, but I don't really like to think about it.
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Mar 9, 2014 10:05
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monsteroftheweek posted:Kids with black eyes Your dad isn't the only one who has apparently had this experience. "Black eyed children" are actually recognized as A Thing by paranormal-minded people. I don't know much about it, but all of the reports follow the same pattern - kids want to be let in, person feels extreme dread, person sees their eyes and runs the other way. Apparently no one knows what happens if you actually let them in.
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Mar 11, 2014 04:58
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It's actually popped up a few times in past SA ghost story threads. Here's the version I've seen repeated: I don't really know what I'd call this story if I was submitting it for publication in Fate or something of its ilk. "Brian vs. the Evil, Black-eyed, Possibly Vampiric or Demonic But At Least Not Bloody Normal Kids" doesn't have much of a ring to it. (Shrug.) But that's at least an accurate title. As so many things do, it all started out innocently. My Internet Service Provider used to have offices in a shopping center before they moved to their (comparatively) lush accommodations elsewhere. There was a drop box at that original location. The monthly bill was due, and thus, there but for the Grace of the Net I went. It was about 9:30 p.m. when I left. From my relatively isolated apartments, it's about 10-15 minutes or so to downtown (Abilene has a population of about 110,000). Right next to Camalott Communications' old location is a $1.50 movie theater. At the time, the place was featuring that masterwork of modern film, Mortal Kombat. I drove by the theater on the way into the center proper and pulled into an empty parking space. Using the glow of the marquee to write out my check, I was startled to hear a knock on the driver's-side window of my car. I looked over and saw two children staring at me from street. I need to describe them, with the one feature (you can guess what it was) that I didn't realize until about half-way through the conversation cleverly omitted. Both appeared to be in that semi-mystical stage of life children get into where you can't exactly tell their age. Both were boys, and my initial impression is that they were somewhere between 10-14. Boy No. 1 was the spokesman. Boy No. 2 didn't speak during the entire conversation -- at least not in words. Boy No. 1 was slightly taller than his companion, wearing a pull-over, hooded shirt with a sort of gray checked pattern and jeans. I couldn't see his shoes. His skin was olive-colored and had curly, medium-length brown hair. He exuded an air of quiet confidence. Boy No. 2 had pale skin with a trace of freckles. His primary characteristic seemed to be looking around nervously. He was dressed in a similar manner to his companion, but his pull-over was a light green color. His hair was a sort of pale orange. They didn't appear to be related, at least directly. "Oh, great," I thought. "They're gonna hit me up for money." And then the air changed. I've explained this before, but for the benefit of any new lurkers out there, right before I experience something strange, there's a change in perception that comes about which I describe in the above manner. It's basically enough time to know it's too late.  So, there I was, filling out a check in my car (which was still running) and in a sudden panic over the appearance of two little boys. I was confused, but an overwhelming sense of fear and unearthliness rushed in nonetheless. The spokesman smiled, and the sight for some inexplicable reason chilled my blood. I could feel fight-or-flight responses kicking in. Something, I knew instinctually, was not right, but I didn't know what it could possibly be. I rolled down the window very, very slightly and asked "Yes?" The spokesman smiled again, broader this time. His teeth were very, very white. "Hey, mister, what's up? We have a problem," he said. His voice was that of a young man, but his diction, quiet calm and ... something I still couldn't put my finger on ... made my desire to flee even greater. "You see, my friend and I want to see the films, but we forgot our money," he continued. "We need to go to our house to get it. Want to help us out?" Okay. Journalists are required to talk to lots of people, and that includes children. I've seen and spoken to lots of them. Here's how that usually goes: "Uh ... M ... M ... Mister? Can I see that camera? I ... I won't break it or anything. I promise. My dad has a camera, and he lets me hold it sometimes, I guess, and I took a picture of my dog -- it wasn's very good, 'cause I got my finger in the way and ..." Add in some feet shuffling and/or body swaying and you've got a typical kid talking to a stranger. In short, they're usually apologetic. People generally teach children that when they talk to adults, they're usually bothering them for one reason or another and they should at least be polite. This kid was in no way fitting the mold. His command of language was incredible and he showed no signs of fear. He spoke as if my help was a foregone conclusion. When he grinned, it was as if he was trying to say, "I know something ... and you're NOT gonna like it. But the only way you're going to find out what it is will be to do what I say ..." "Uh, well ..." was the best reply I could offer. Now here's where it starts to get strange. The quiet companion looked at the spokesman with a mixture of confusion and guilt on his face. He seemed in some ways shocked, not with his friend's brusque manner but that I didn't just immediately open the door. He eyed me nervously. The spokesman seemed a bit perturbed, too. I still was registering something wrong with both. "C'mon, mister," the spokesman said again, smooth as silk. Car salesmen could learn something from this kid. "Now, we just want to go to our house. And we're just two little boys." That really scared me. Something in the tone and diction again sent off alarm bells. My mind was frantically trying to process what it was perceiving about the two figures that was "wrong." "Eh. Um ...." was all I could manage. I felt myself digging my fingernails into the steering wheel. "What movie were you going to see?" I asked finally. "Mortal Kombat, of course," the spokesman said. The silent one nodded in affirmation, standing a few paces behind. "Oh," I said. I stole a quick glance at the marquee and at the clock in my car. Mortal Kombat had been playing for an hour, the last showing of the evening. The silent one looked increasingly nervous. I think he saw my glances and suspected that I might be detecting something was not above-board. "C'mon, mister. Let us in. We can't get in your car until you do, you know," the spokesman said soothingly. "Just let us in, and we'll be gone before you know it. We'll go to our mother's house." We locked eyes. To my horror, I realized my hand had strayed toward the door lock (which was engaged) and was in the process of opening it. I pulled it away, probably a bit too violently. But it did force me to look away from the children. I turned back. "Er ... Um ...," I offered weakly and then my mind snapped into sharp focus. For the first time, I noticed their eyes. They were coal black. No pupil. No iris. Just two staring orbs reflecting the red and white light of the marquee. At that point, I know my expression betrayed me. The silent one had a look of horror on his face in a combination that seemed to indicate: A) The impossible had just happened and B) "We've been found out!" The spokesman, on the other hand, wore a mask of anger. His eyes glittered brightly in the half-light. "Cmon, mister," he said. "We won't hurt you. You have to LET US IN. We don't have a gun ..." That last statement scared the living hell out of me, because at that point by his tone he was plainly saying, "We don't NEED a gun." He noticed my hand shooting down toward the gear shift. The spokesman's final words contained an anger that was complete and whole, and yet contained in some respects a tone of panic: "WE CAN'T COME IN UNLESS YOU TELL US IT'S OKAY. LET ... US .... IN!" I ripped the car into reverse (thank goodness no one was coming up behind me) and tore out of the parking lot. I noticed the boys in my peripheral vision, and I stole a quick glance back. They were gone. The sidewalk by the theater was deserted. I drove home in a heightened state of panic. Had anyone attempted to stop me, I would have run on through and faced the consequences later. I bolted into my house, scanning all around -- including the sky. What did I see? Maybe nothing more than some kids looking for a ride. And some really funky contacts. Yeah, right. A friend suggested they were vampires, what with the old "let us in" bit and my compelled response to open the door. That and the "we'll go see our mother" thing. I'm still not sure what they were, but here's an epilogue I find chilling: I talk about Chad a lot. He's still my best friend, my best ghost-hunting companion and an all-around cool guy. He recently moved to Amarillo, but at the time this happened was still living in San Angelo of Ram Page fame. I called him and talked to him briefly. He had two female friends with him at the time, both professing some type of psychic ability. I started telling him the story, leaving out the part about the black eyes for the kicker. One of the women (we were on a speakerphone) stopped me. "These children had black eyes, right?" she asked. "I mean, all-black eyes?" "Er ... Yes." I said. I was a bit taken aback. "Hmmm," she said. "One night last week, I had a dream about children with black eyes. They were outside my house, wanting to be let in, but there was something wrong with them. It took me a while to realize it was the eyes." I hadn't even gotten as far as them wanting to come in. "What did you do?" I asked. "I kept the doors and windows locked," she said. "I knew if they came in, they would kill me." She paused. "And they would have killed you, too, if you had let them into your car." So, from this extra-long post, we have three unanswered questions: A) What did I see? B) What would have happened if I opened my car door? C) Why does Chad always get the cool psychic chicks?
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Mar 11, 2014 05:13
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Oh wow. I know it sounds silly, but reading the other description of those kids made me feel physically sick. It's pretty much dead on what my dad said. I've showed him this page, by the way. He was pretty irritated that I told this story anyway, because it's pretty outlandish, but I think there's more to it. Also, my dad says he does know what happens if you let them in, up to a point. Apparently, something happened when my dad and his brothers were pretty young, so I'm thinking I might have a word with the brother most likely to actually talk about it. I'll post back here when I've got some details?
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Mar 11, 2014 08:08
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monsteroftheweek posted:Oh wow. I know it sounds silly, but reading the other description of those kids made me feel physically sick. It's pretty much dead on what my dad said. I would love to hear more of this. The Black Eyed Kid phenomenon is fascinating to me. I thought it was more web-tomfoolery (and it might be, but I have friends who are skeptics up and down who have reported run-ins with kids very similarly described. Not always in pairs though, which is a bit of a break from the normal story but interesting nonetheless. I'm a dyed in the wool skeptic and don't put any stock in supernatural myself, but sometimes it's hard to look a good friend in the eye while hearing one of these stories directly and not wonder. I'm sorry the thread had to be moved to PYF due to the lower traffic compared to previous thread but GBS really kinda sucks now!
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Mar 12, 2014 16:17
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I had a chat with my dad's brother. A little background is needed, I think. My dad is one of seven. There were eight of them, but there's only seven now. My dad is Dominic, he was ten at the time. Sean, the brother who told me this stuff, is fifteen months younger, and was nine at the time. David was next, and was seven. All the rest were younger. I'm also going to tell this refering to my dad by his name. It's probably weird to read 'my dad' every few stories. Dominic and Sean have always picked on David a little - not in a bad way, just in a teasing sort of way, and because children are dicks to each other. The house they lived in backed onto an old, unused field, which backed onto a little forrest. Beyond that, none of them ever really went. But they played in the woods a lot, and one afternoon, Sean and Dominic tell David to hide, and they'll find him. Of course, they don't, they just leave David hiding up a tree. It starts to get late, and Dominic and Sean know they can't just leave David in a tree all night, so they go back to the woods and start calling for him. David, surprisingly, isn't pissed off when he comes back, he's cheerful, and brags about the friend he's made. Sean and Dominic bring him home, and humour David about his new friend. David also says that his friend is going to visit the house tonight, since Sean and Dominic are leaving to go camping. The boys share a bedroom on the ground floor, and Dominic helps David fix a piece of bark to his bedpost, that his new friend apparently gave him. David opens the window, and the three have dinner. David goes to bed, and Sean and Dominic leave the house, and go camping with a couple of friends in the field. They come back the next morning, and something is off. David is normally very cheerful, and talkative, but he's much more subdued. David has two older brothers that he very much admires, and wants to have their attention, so he's constantly talking, if he has the chance. He still smiles a lot, but it's offputting. Sean and David do their best to avoid spending time with him during the day, but David sticks to their side the whole time. They go to bed, and as usual, David has settled down first. But he's not actually sleeping. He is laying down, in the dark, with his eyes open. His breathing is deliberately steady, but he's not sleeping. Dominic and Sean are unsettled. The two try to sleep, but Sean told me that it felt like as soon as he closed his eyes, it felt as if David got up, and was moving closer. So, Sean stayed awake the whole night, watching David not sleep. Sean knows David is awake, and David doesn't seem to care. He just smiles, and doesn't sleep. Over the next few days Dominic and Sean start sleeping in shifts, so that there's always somebody awake to watch David, to make him stay in the bed. For some reason Dominic and Sean are certain that David can't do anything while one of them is awake. But they can't keep it up forever, and the two fall asleep at the same time. Sean says that he thinks he woke up again, but he saw David get out of bed, crawl along the floor, up over the bed, and sit on his chest. His eyes are black, his teeth are sharp, and it's only Sean screaming that wakes Dominic up. In the chaos of everybody in the house running to the bedroom, David seems back to normal, and behaving perfectly innocently. Sean and Dominic have had enough, and being children, they beat the poo poo out of David, and start throwing his stuff out of the bedroom, refusing to share it with him any more. The thing is, after this, David seems to snap out of it. He returns to being David, and claims to have absolutely no memory. He remembers going to bed, he remembers coming home to all of his belongings outside, but nothing in between. He states that his friend was real - a familiar man that he thinks he'd seen around the village. According to my grandparents, David didn't act unusual, and Dominic and Sean just up and traumatised the poor boy out of nowhere. It's worth mentioning that David has epilepsy. He doesn't really shake or seize when he fits, he just goes blank, and very still, but I don't think David could have fitted throughout an entire week, and missed it all. I don't know. Sean and my dad tell the story pretty much the same, and David is adamant that he met somebody when he was a child. All three started to see the familiar man, after that incident, and then they didn't see him much any more, after my aunt went missing. Sorry if this is a lot of words, but this thread is pretty dead, which is sad.
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Mar 14, 2014 23:01
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monsteroftheweek posted:All three started to see the familiar man, after that incident, and then they didn't see him much any more, after my aunt went missing. I'm posting to get you to post more. I like your stories so far.
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Mar 14, 2014 23:27
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eating only apples posted:I'm posting to get you to post more. I like your stories so far. Well, in that case! It's not really hogging a thread if nobody else is posting stories, right? Sean and I talk a lot more, now. Sean's pretty cool, but my mum doesn't really care for him much. He's never really done anything with his life - he's a bit of a stereotype. He drinks too much, he smokes too much, and for some reason, there is a constant stream of new people in his life. He's pretty chill, and he likes scary movies, so we have something in common. For obvious reasons, Sean hates "Legion". Other than the fact that Legion sucks. Sean also believes in the black eyed kids and the Familiar Man a lot more than any of the others. Sean always says Familiar Man in a very distinct way, and it sounds like it should be capitalised. This man is somebody that he doesn't really know, but he feels like he does, from somewhere. When he sees him, he gets a feeling like when you smell something from forever ago, and it almost triggers a memory, but not quite, and the more you struggle to remember what it is, the more you come up with nothing. If that makes any sense. I think I get what he means, anyway. Dad and David reluctantly agree with this. Sean told me another story. Dad was there, and chipped in now and then with the parts he remembered, but it was awkward. Dad pretty obviously isn't happy. Again, I'm telling it with Dad being Dominic. The three, Dominic, Sean and David saw the Familiar Man a lot. When they walked to and from school, they would see him just standing and waiting to the side. Sometimes he'd acknowledge them, and offer a slight nod, sometimes he wouldn't, but he'd always have the most calm, serene smile. He got braver, as Sean puts it. He'd be waiting closer to the house, to the point that some mornings, they could see him from their kitchen window, at the start of the footpath they used. But not always - he was never there often enough to allow them to get used to him. When Dominic was twelve, Sean was eleven, and David was nine, they were left in the house alone. Dominic was a pretty responsible kid by this point, and was happy enough to babysit, and Sean and David were happy enough to not have to visit family. Their routine stayed the same, mostly, but they stayed up later, as the family was going to stay the night away. At around eleven, Dominic went into the kitchen, and he can see the Familiar Man on the footpath. He's looking down at his feet, but his head snaps up as soon as Dominic's eyes land on him. He starts to walk closer, and Dominic freezes for a split second, and then starts running around the house, locking outside doors and windows. They live in the middle of nowhere, so of course, nobody really bothers to lock things. In this chaos, Dominic has lost the Familiar Man. But he knows that he is outside, somewhere, and he can feel that he is being watched. He doesn't want to scare David, so he tells Sean, and the two of them arm themselves with their father's Intruder Pipe (the metal piping used for home defense), and a kitchen knife. They make the mistake of taking their eyes off of David for five minutes. The next thing they know, David is outside, walking towards the Familiar Man. Dominic is terrified, but is not going to be responsible for his little brother being killed, or eaten, or whatever the hell was going to happen, so he runs outside, and starts trying to physically drag David back inside, while David screams and fights harder to walk towards the Familiar Man. Sean takes over, pulling David into the house, and as soon as both David and Sean have set foot over the threshhold, the Familiar Man attacks, grabbing Dominic's upper arm. Dominic isn't far from the door, and based on fear and instinct alone, manages to free himself and get inside. He slams the door shut, and keeps his whole weight against it, while Sean restrains David, who is screaming at Dominic to let the Familiar Man in. The Familiar Man is hammering on the door, and David starts actually fitting. His eyes roll back, he starts seizing. Sean tries to hold his head to keep him from hitting it, and Dominic is still barricading the door. As Sean remembers it, Dominic stopped it all. He shouted at the Familiar Man, "I'm not letting you in, you can never come in." The banging on the door stopped, and so did David's convulsions. The night is as still as it's ever been. All three are tired, but Dominic and Sean sleep in shifts again for the night. In the morning, their parents and younger siblings come back home. David is a little shaken, but not hurt. Dominic has a deep cut on his upper arm, and still has the scar from it today. The story my grandparents settled on was that David had a seizure, and that in the stress of it, my dad caught his arm on a stray nail. David doesn't remember anything from that night, and won't comment. It was one of the few times that David ever had convulsions. After that, they didn't see the Familiar Man at the path again. They only ever saw him beyond the woods, so they stopped going there. When the family moved house, the Familiar Man didn't follow. They only saw him once more, between this incident, and the one with the kids on the doorstep. That's the one that nobody talks about. My dad flat out refused to mention it, David claims that he doesn't remember any of it, and Sean just tells little snippets, and then gets too upset, and won't talk about it anymore. I just know that it has something to do with their youngest sister, May, who went missing.
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Mar 15, 2014 17:32
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My family has always seemed to live in creepy houses, though I could never remember those hauntings beyond what my dad told me. If I can ever get him to open up about his own experiences, I'll post them here too. For now, I'm going to tell you guys about everything that's happened to me in the past two years since I moved into The Village. It has a sort of cheesy Shyamalan kind of feel to it, but this area is actually called The Village. It's a hippie sort of area where a lot of the people have ridiculous names like Rainchild or Moonflower, and everyone is an "artist". I live right on the edge of the Village, near the river, in what used to be an old hotel before it was turned into an apartment complex. As I'm typing this, I can hear something moving around in the kitchen, and my wife keeps giving me these looks like don't we have errands to run? Two years and neither of us have gotten used to this place. A little backstory: as I said, the apartment complex used to be an old hotel in the late 1800s. It had almost a complete overhaul in the 1920s but the wood flooring is still from the original building design. It was abandoned in the 70s for years until some time in the 1990s, when it was bought by the current landlord and converted into apartments. There are actually three small buildings, each with two floors, and they are all connected by breeze ways (I guess that's what you would call them?) both upstairs and downstairs. You have to enter the building to get to any of the apartments and of course, each building has those glowing red exit signs near the entrances inside the buildings. The rent is almost stupidly cheap, which is what got my attention. At the time, my wife (back then, my girlfriend) and I had fallen onto some really hard times and had to move out of our old house to stay with her mother until I could find a better job. When I found the listing for this place, I considered myself pretty lucky. It was close to where I worked and more than affordable. I drained our savings and a week after looking at one of the cozy little apartments, we moved in. The first couple nights were quiet, with the exception of our cat acting weird. He would pace nervously throughout the living room and bedroom, and would refuse to go near the hallway that lead to where the kitchen was unless someone went with him. We had to keep his food bowls in the living room otherwise he refused to eat. I thought it was just that he was too wound up from all the new sights and smells. I should have known better. My dad came by about four days after we'd moved in to see the place, and stopped at the doorway. "This place is not right." My dad is a skeptic in nearly everything. Tell him the sky is blue and he might just go outside and double check it. He's seen things, felt things, heard things that made him a believer though. Seeing my dad on the doorway, looking around and refusing to come inside, that spooked me something fierce. I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up, and for the first time I thought maybe I'd made a mistake. All of our money had gone into this move though, so there was nothing I could do. The noises began a week into living here. I remember waking up abruptly and seeing my cat at the foot of the bed, staring into the darkness, creepily still like it was watching something. That's when I heard it, footsteps walking up and down the hallway just feet from where I was sleeping. My wife heard it too, but she had cocooned herself in the blankets, with no intention of coming out. She asked what we should do and all I could say was "go back to sleep." The noises stopped after maybe an hour, the rest of the night was uneventful. Whatever is in the kitchen is getting louder now, I just heard something get knocked off the counter, and the cat passed away two months ago so that rules that out. This is the first time I've ever really talked about this place to anyone besides the tenants, so I'm going to go grab a pack of smokes and post some more via my phone. I'll start with some of the stories the other tenants have told me about this place, starting with There's Something In The Walls. 50s girl groupon has a new favorite as of 03:35 on Mar 16, 2014 |
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Mar 16, 2014 03:32
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I think I'm going to only post these stories outside of the apartment now, just because it's been somewhat calm lately and I don't want to disturb that more than I already have. As crazy as it sounds, I think that place knows I'm talking about it. There's Something in the Walls It was the morning after the footsteps that we met one of our neighbors. Shari lived in one of the downstairs apartment across the breezeway from us. She was a really nice girl, a veteran who had been injured in a "rather mundane way" in her own words. Her back gave her a lot of problems, sometimes so bad that she couldn't get out of bed some days. She fixed computers from her apartment for a living. She ran into us as we were checking our mail and that's when we found out that we weren't the only ones experiencing things. "I've been here for five years now," she told us, taking a swig of cherry coke. "You don't get used to them ever, but you learn to ignore them." "Ignore what?" "The things in the walls." She looked at me for a long time, until it was almost uncomfortable. "You'll see. There's something in the walls and they bang around sometimes. Sometime they do more than that. You'll hear them soon enough, and five years from now maybe you will start to ignore them too, or maybe you will move. But you will never get used to it." She was right. It was two months before I heard the things in the walls. I had the first shift that morning, but I was up before the alarm went off at 4 am. I could hear this soft sound, almost like a siren that was stuck on one tone. I checked the time, it was 3:26 in the morning. I had to showerand leave for work in 34 minutes, so I was pretty pissed. I tried to cover my head with a pillow but I could still hear it. I managed to fall asleep somehow and when I woke, it had gotten louder and it had changed. It was this awful wailing sound that made my skin crawl. I put on my robe and stepped outside, thinking it had to be coming from outside somewhere. I made it to the middle of the little parking lot before I realized that it was now behind me, as if it was coming from inside my apartment. I rushed back inside, not wanting to leave my wife alone with whatever was making that terrible sound. Inside, it sounded muffled again, like it should be coming from outside. I felt like I was going insane. My wife was awake now, staring at me, wanting me to do something, anything. It was louder now. "It's inside the walls." She said finally, blankets pulled up to her chest. "There's something inside the walls." We showered together, she dropped me off at work and spent the day at her dad's house. The cat had hid himself in the living room and refused to move. We were nervous about going back to the house that night, but nothing else happened for several days. I've heard that wailing a few times again and each time I tell it to go to hell and just ignore it. I'll never get used to waking up to it. My skin crawls, my heart races and I sweat, but the only thing I can do is ignore it. Shari has moved out now. One day she came by the apartment and said "I'll be gone on Sunday." She moved out that Thursday. She packed up everything she could fit into her VW bug, and left the rest. There was no forwarding address, no goodbye. We went inside her apartment out of some terrible curiosity. It was absolutely packed with stuff, it looked like a hoarding nightmare. Furniture and clothes stacked up the ceiling, posters and curtains hung haphazardly everywhere. I couldn't help but notice that the walls were completely covered, either by stuff or by those posters and curtains. She even had these god awful butterfly decals pasted over where the wall might have peeked through. Her pantry door was barricaded by this ugly entertainment center that didn't belong in a kitchen at all, and was too heavy to have just been moved there temporarily. She couldn't ignore them any longer.
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Mar 16, 2014 04:47
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Here are some pics from Google street view of the houses in Roma I mentioned earlier in the thread. This is the front of the house, but no-one ever used it, prefering the right hand side entrance. Those front doors opened into a sun room, then the hallway. https://www.google.com.au/maps/plac...1af570e!6m1!1e1 Funny, looking at that picture has made me realise the roof is no longer blue. This is Repetory House. Street view is out of date, it's all fenced in now. This is how it looked while it was still being used by a dance school. https://www.google.com.au/maps/@-26.57223,148.785634,3a,75y,283.24h,78.86t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1snE_BHgGK6Fw5Yj84e4OPSQ!2e0!6m1!1e1 Finally, the unit my wife and I used to live in, with the noisy kitchen. It's actually 2 identical units, built as one building. We lived in the front one, closest to the street. That front window was our office/spare room. https://www.google.com.au/maps/@-26.558288,148.783428,3a,75y,12.31h,73.28t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1skN5l9IpgT67Sy7V7uKsdeQ!2e0
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Mar 16, 2014 11:03
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I'm rereading the 2007 Spring thread and came across this one. Not overly scary but I enjoy the setting. I always wondered where the actual location was, sounds like a cool thing to check out on Google Earth. Unfortunately cardinalpuck hasn't posted since 2008 so there's no way of finding out, if it's even real at all. ------- Okay, I'll post these as I edit them and double-check facts with my friend. I’ve posted in these threads before a few experiences I’ve had in a haunted theatre, but there have been enough requests for me to post the whole story that I’m finally going to do it. A friend and I wrote this out so we could put some sort of capstone on our experiences, to chronicle in our small way the events that we witnessed and lived with for the year and a half the Rambledown Theatre was open. Rambledown is not the real name of the business, but it does bear some resemblance to the actual name. I’m not going to include any place names and I’ll do my best to keep the location secret, because my friend and I truly believe that it would be a very bad idea to go back there today. I didn’t mean to fictionalize this story at all, and everything is just about exact to my memory, but the only way I could write it out was to write it as a story. To make it seem like it happened to a character, not me. I assure you though that everything I wrote about really happened, the Rambledown did exist, and so did all the people. I guess I hope you can get some enjoyment out of it, as it really does make a good story. Anyway, here it is. Chapter One: Exposition It’s been about three years since I’ve even set foot in the same state as the theatre, but I still get chills when I think about some of the things that I or others saw in the short time it was open. The Rambledown Theatre was a sprawling, three story building that looked like something out of the old west. In fact, it’d been built as a saloon and, as rumor had it, a brothel for the old mining town in which it sat. The mine had dried up, and the town had emptied out, and in the long years since the great western gold rush the buildings had crumbled around the Rambledown until nothing but a few vacant clearings were left to mark the place. The theatre itself, however, survived. Its strong grey stone form had protected it from bullets and fires common in a rowdy cowboy town, and so it protected the Rambledown for the hundred years it sat vacant. It wasn’t until 1998 that a group of enterprising college friends decided that the untouched valley where the old mining town had once survived, only an hour from what had become a midwestern arts capitol, would make a perfect place for a trendy nightspot and dinner theatre. They bought the land and spent four years and hundreds of thousands of dollars clearing trees and brush and debris of a century’s neglect in order to make their business adventure a success. They installed fences around the yawning entrance to the old mine. They built a road out of the valley to connect their little slice of paradise with a major highway. Most of all, they refurbished the old saloon, installing plumbing and wires and every modern amenity that would be required. They changed the shape of the building, carving out a grand thrust theatre where brothel rooms used to be. The bar became a lobby and dance floor. They bought DJ equipment, theatre lighting, sparing absolutely no expense. I remember first coming over the lip of the valley and stopping my car to see these massive flood lights sweeping the far cliffs. The valley was really more of a slash in the earth, the walls cut straight down, five hundred foot bluffs that towered very majestically. The depression where the building sat ended in a V, with the mine entrance burrowing deep into the point. The road entered the valley from the other end, carving its way down the steep hill and affording an awesome view to all who entered it. I was working in a coffee shop and finishing up another year of school when I saw a sign for employment at a new nightspot called the Rambledown Theatre. They were looking for workers of all kind, from actors to bartenders to janitors. I’d always been interested in theatre, and I’d recently become acquainted with booze, so on a whim I called the number and set up an interview. The drive was long and unfamiliar, and I missed the sign a half dozen times before I managed to make the turn into the valley. It was probably twenty miles from the highway, and the small, freshly poured concrete road plunged into a thick wood that blocked out most sunlight for a majority of the drive. You would start to climb a steep hill in your car, gears whirring and car straining until you reached the top of it and suddenly the vast expanse of open space would catch your breath in your throat. The valley was spread out directly ahead, and there were no more trees as far as the eye could see, just dirt and grass and high cliff walls. Night was falling by the time I pulled up in front of the building, all windows blazing with light, and ran up the steps to the lobby doors. One of the group of businessmen greeted me as soon as I entered. They were doing small group interviews, and he led me to a conference room where five or six other young men were waiting. I sat down and we all smiled nervously. A woman walked in and began to speak to us, explaining with a Power-Point slide show the history and aims of the Rambledown theatre. She spoke at length about high art and culture but all of us could only sit with dollar signs in our eyes. She had promised us each twenty dollars an hour for the first six months, working part time to help the theatre run smoothly. We got a tour of the facilities, everything shining and new, but with the charm of history showing through it all. We were excited. Professional actors were to be brought in from as far away as New York and Chicago to perform in classic Broadway plays. She promised a full house every night, people eating and laughing in the lobby before the show and paying big money to sleep in one of the fifty suites housed in the building. Dancing, weddings, a nightclub and all of it a near guarantee. It was to be a new kind of theatre, a hidden jewel of culture close enough to draw the public in from the city and others for hundreds of miles around, and we were going to make it all happen. As we all drove away in the darkness, I stopped at the top of the hill and sat on the roof of my car. The building looked alive, bursting with promise and light from every window. I wouldn’t sleep until I got the phone call that told me I was to work there as the stage manager for the theatre. I would sit up and night thinking about how excited I was, and I would wait. But underneath it all, there was an uneasy feeling about the valley. If the building was a jewel, the valley was coal. As I slid off of my car to start the long drive home, my eyes swept past the Rambledown and fell on a great black hole in the darkness. The mine, I realized. I shivered in spite of myself, watching the pit in my rear view mirror as I drove away. Chapter Two: The Tour I dressed up for my first day of work and headed over about two weeks later. There wasn’t any need for me to look nice, it was only training, but I felt like I needed to fit and and make a good impression for my bosses. I drove out and found the turn off without any problem, and when I pulled over the ridge and the building came into to view, I was still awed. In the daylight, I could see that the theatre was surrounded by a dozen little outlying buildings. I assumed that these were the luxury suites we’d been told about. A half-mile from the main complex was the mine entrance, which was surrounded by three layers of chain link fence. We’d been told that the shafts were unstable and dangerous, but plans had been set into motion to turn the twisting tunnels into a restaurant and party room, once the proper stabilization had been completed. For now, though, it was blocked off from the world. A tall, muscular man met me on the stairs, introducing himself as Jared and giving me a firm, confident handshake. He was about thirty, with dark hair and these blue eyes that were bright and constantly flitting around. This whole project had been his brainchild, he told me. “I didn’t want to do anything else,” he said, “My great-grandmother used to tell me stories about this town, and for as long as I remember I wanted to come back and do something with this land.” He and four friends from college, who majored in business, accounting, architecture and theatre, respectively, had banded together to build there dream out in the west, finding the area and buying it from the long-defunct mining company with grant money they’d received their senior year of college. The man was full of dreams, I could tell, but he also seemed reckless. He’d purchased the area without a moment’s hesitation and was absolutely sure it would make him a millionaire. He asked me what my name was and which job I’d be handling, I told him Cardinalpuck and that I was to be the stage manager. He let out a big laugh and told me he didn’t know a thing about theatre, but would trade me off to Andrea, the theatre major, for the last part of the tour. He rubbed his hands together anxiously and asked me if I was ready to go, I said yes and we started off. I figured we would head inside through the main doors, but Jared turned and started walking along the side of the building. As we walked around the property I got the sense of how massive it was. The front of the building faced East, towards one of the high cliffs, and stretched out for a long ways. It took us about two minutes to walk from the front door, which just about split the wall in halves, to the Northern corner. He paused to let me catch up when we got there, I was definitely out of shape, and then started walking again. The North wall was half-again as large as the East, with a large deck addition jutting from the second story. “Its an extension of the ballroom,” he told me, “It doubles the dancing space and has a retractable roof for when the weather is nice.” We ducked into a maintenance door halfway to the deck. “This Maintenance tunnel one, this stretches the entire length of the building. Tunnels three and five run parallel to this one, north-south, and tunnels two, four and six intersect it.” “Did you put these in?” I asked. “No, these are left over from before. They actually used to flood these tunnels with just a few inches of water, and use sleds to move barrels and supplies from one end of the building to the other.” “Does that still work?” I asked, curious. He laughed, “No, all of our supplies are dropped off from a loading dock on the west wall, these tunnels are just open so we can get to the breakers, or pipes if there’s a problem.” ——————- I’m including a sketch of the tunnels and map of the building so you can check back on it later. The building really was massive, and it was easy to get turned around so I can imagine you might get lost in my storytelling. The maps are all orientated with west up, sorry These are the tunnels, you can see how they run and intersect. Each closed off space is a room, used for breakers, pipes or just storage. There never seemed to be any rhyme or reason to what was in each room. At the east and west walls of the building, in tunnels 2 and 6, there were stairs leading up. Also on the west wall is a loading bay for supplies, thats the room right above the number 5. These, aside from the one maintenance door on the north wall in tunnel 1, are the only entrances to the basement.  The next is a map of the main floors, which is sort of a split level, with the guest rooms 1-8 and ball room being on the higher portion, and the rest of it at ground level. To reach the ball room and guest rooms, there was a stairway off of the lobby. All the other rooms just had high ceilings to make up for the disparity in space. The space between the ballroom and guest rooms was a low, columned walkway in which we hung art and things from local artists. Sometimes a live band would play here, or we would decorate it with the seasons. The box office was located directly beneath room 2, and there was a large display case of costumes and things from past productions under room 1. Rooms 1 and 2 were both suites.  ——————- Jared led me through the tunnels and pointed out rooms of interest, the breaker boxes and the main wet room, where shining new pipes fed the entire building with hot water. We walked up the narrow stairs at the east wall of tunnel 2, and entered into the staff break room, which was already full of workmen and janitors who were resting for lunch. “The entire building should be up in running by June 1st,” Jared told me, “And we hope to open our first production for the July 4th weekend. Our grand opening will be on the 4th, we bought a fantastic fireworks show.” He took me through the museum, which chronicled the progression of the area with period pictures and rocks from the mine. At the end of the timeline was a picture of Jared and his four friends, smiling and laughing in front of the rebuilt Rambledown. I smiled to myself as we passed into the kitchens. The fires and stores were mostly empty, with only one lone workman making a sandwich on an aluminum table. Across from the kitchens was the storage room and maid service for the guest rooms. The last stop had us cut into the lobby and into the food court area. It wasn’t really a food court, but thats what Jared called it and so the name stuck. Here were a dozen tables that could be done up for wedding parties or rehearsal dinners. This was the temporary restaurant while the mine was made safe enough for diners. I asked Jared if we were going to see the ball room, but he said no. “Thats the last thing to be finished, the workers have to replace the floor and install our lighting, but they should finish by the end of May.” He brought me back to the lobby and introduced me to Andrea, and pretty, small woman with straight black hair. She was to be the director of all the productions, and hugged me instead of shaking my hand. I followed her to the box office, where she showed me how to use the ticket printer, in case I ever needed to. Then she unlocked the grand doors to the stage itself. There were seats enough for 350, each covered in dark red satin. The curtains were drawn at the proscenium, but the thrust of the stage extended far into the audience. There were no scuff marks on the black stage, this was virgin territory. She led me behind the curtain, babbling as she went. “This has basically been my dream since I was in my first high school production,” she beamed, “To own and run a theatre of my own. I’m bringing down actors from the rep theatre in the city, where I’ve been working for a while now. Oops, watch your step!” There was a small stair leading down into the recessed shop, where sets were to be built. Past that were the dressing rooms, and past that was the green room, where actors waited for their entrances. It’s important to note now that the green room was installed with a monitor, so that actors could listen for their cues from the stage and know when to enter. Below the monitor was a large screen set into the wall, that was dark for now but would be hooked up to a camera in the technical booth. I thought this all was extremely high tech. Andrea brought me back to the stage and sat me down in one of the seats. “We chose you because you’ve got extensive theatre experience, and a basically free schedule,” she said, “You’ll have to be here every night of rehearsal and show, to call cues and help things run smoothly.” I nodded, I’d done all of this before. “Okay,” she smiled, hiding her big secret, “I suppose you’re dying to know, our first show, we just got the rights, is…” she waiting for the mental drum-roll, “Oklahoma!” I barely suppressed a groan. Andrea took me back up to the lobby and hugged me again. She was really very pretty, if a bit old for me. She told me that when rehearsals started, she would call me, and we could really get down to business. The last three weeks of May were a waiting time, they felt like an inward breath to this era of work and progress that I would enjoy, and get paid to experience. Looking back now, those three weeks were probably more like the calm before a storm, the bright clear sky before a long winter. At the time, however, I was completely oblivious to it all. Chapter Three: Spotlight It was mid-June and we were right in the midst of our rehearsal period when I first noticed that something was off with the old building. We had just finished up a choreography rehearsal, and when the last of the cowboys trickled out through the main entrance, Andrea and I stayed behind to lock things up. I went to clean up the Green Room, just picking things up and moving furniture back in place, (the janitors would deal with the rest in the morning,) when I heard a loud bang from the monitor. I was momentarily surprised, as the monitor really wasn’t being used on a choreography night. The screen was off, but I was still getting clear audio from the speaker. I did a mental check of what was still left to do. Andrea and I had already walked through the theatre, picking up stray water bottles and candy-wrapper trash that the actors had left, and I thought that she had locked the doors as we left. It was very possible that she had forgotten something and gone back, so I didn’t think much of it. It wasn’t until the bangs started to repeat themselves in a rhythmic pattern that I started to wonder. I finished pushing a couch back against the wall and walked to the screen and flipped it on. The camera was dark, there were no lights on in the theatre. Hmm, very strange, I thought, and left the screen on as I continued to clean. The bangs sounded very like someone in a heavy boot stomping on a wooden floor. I had just about finished cleaning when Andrea walked in the room and became sort of wide-eyed when she saw me. “I thought you were on stage,” she told me before her eyes slid to the monitor. “I thought it was you,” I said, and gave a small shrug. It was strange, I thought, she really seemed scared. Seeing her sort of shivering as she stared into the screen gave me the first inkling that maybe something really bad was going on. She turned her head to look at me when suddenly a light became visible in the camera. The bangs started to move around, like somebody walking in a circle, and I pointed over her shoulder. One spotlight was on, pointed lazily across the room and illuminated the first row of seats and part of the stage. Andrea and I looked at each other and I shrugged again. There really weren’t any words. We walked into the hallway and she opened the door of the theatre. When we stepped inside, the banging had stopped. I ran up the stairs to the balcony and hit the off lever on the big spot and the stage plunged into darkness. “Hey!” I yelled, “I can’t see poo poo!” Andrea didn’t respond, but a few seconds later the house lights came up and I found my way down the stairs. “So, what’s the verdict?” I asked. “I don’t know,” she said, “that was really…weird.” At our next rehearsal, after Andrea and I did our walkthrough of the seats and stage, I started to head back to the shop area to clean. She held her hand up. “Wait a minute,” she said, and disappeared into the wings. She came back a minute later with a bare bulb set onto a tall iron stand. “This is,” she started. “A ghost light.” I finished. I raised an eyebrow. For centuries theaters have traditionally left a lamp burning center stage when the space was left empty. It was to keep ghosts from taking up a home in the theatre that this was done, but the tradition had died out over the last hundred years. “Ah, we can’t be too careful,” she said, her eyes flicking up to the stage left spotlight. I watched as she set the light in the middle of the stage and ran a cord to one of the floor-boxes and plugged it in. The little bulb blared to life. I’m wasn’t sure what people would think of an electric ghost light, but I supposed it would have to do. As we left the stage and started cleaning the Green Room, I flipped on the screen and looked. The little light cast a pale circle into the gloom. I wasn’t sure how it would fare, this little light. I wondered if it could really scare off any ghosts. I chuckled.
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Mar 26, 2014 05:37
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