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   Welcome to this year's ghost story thread! If you know the drill, skip to the links or start posting. For those unfamiliar, read on: Since 2002 or so, Something Awful has hosted seasonal incarnations of ghost story threads. Some of them are original experiences, some have been retellings from old campfire stories, others have come from ancient BBS boards, and still more have been tales from original authors. Onic, Canis Latrans, Khazar-Khum, and HumperMonkey/50-Foot Ant/Nostalgia4ColdWar all have stories that have become major favorites. Discussing everything from Skinwalkers to security cameras, these threads persisted yearly until neo-GBS arose, at which point things nosedived as you'd expect, and former SA mod noni decided things would go more smoothly here in PYF. So here we are now keeping the storytelling alive. Post your own spooky experiences, hauntings, or just favorite stories your granddad told you. Here are some basic links, courtesy of Missing Name:
I've compiled (as far as I know) links to all past major ghost story threads (note that Archives are required for most of them, but if you don't have the feature and can't find it in the above links, I'll be happy to do my best to retrieve it for you): quote:Goldmined: Fine Print just in case: Nobody cares about you being the brilliant skeptic who conclusively says ghosts aren't real. We know. These are fun stories. Conversely, nobody cares about the time you were falling asleep and saw a shadow. Basically, don't be an rear end in a top hat. 
Hazo has a new favorite as of 19:22 on Apr 23, 2015 |
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Jan 29, 2015 09:55
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And here are a couple of favorites to get us started: The Wireman Stuntcock posted:Last night, I was derailed from seeing a movie by a pal of mine ‘J,’ who needed a ride to a barbeque, with an invite as barter. drat right I could see the movie another time! The Patch Darth Tang posted: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.
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Jan 29, 2015 10:00
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Missing Name posted:There's supposedly some stuff happening in my city. Some I've heard about, but the big library? It was even on loving Ghost Hunters. Didn't know that. (It apparently has nothing to do with the awesome hidden room behind a swing-out bookcase. I'll watch this bullshit TV show episode just for laughs.) edit: S8E05 "Due Date With Death." I had it backwards-- the regular motion-highlighting camera caught it, but nothing showed up on thermal. 
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Jan 31, 2015 19:15
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They usually make it a point to emphasize that everybody on the filming and "investigator" crew was accounted for, but sure I guess they could just be flat-out lying and nobody's come forward yet.
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Jan 31, 2015 19:29
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Hijo Del Helmsley posted:They were all accounted for. That could still mean "We knew one was poking a sack round a corner on a stick", and wouldn't be a lie.
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Jan 31, 2015 20:15
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vaguely posted:do you have the PDF collection of goon ghost stories linked yet? it has a lot of good stuff in there, all in one place but I added it.
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Feb 1, 2015 16:44
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That's "Blood Mirror" by TacoCriminal. It's a pretty often-requested story. I'll dig around and try to find the original post but here's the text (sorry about formatting, ASCII doesn't work well in archives) in the meantime: ------------------- EDIT: That actually wasn't too hard. Original found here in the 2003 thread (archives needed): http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=668360&userid=36639 ------------------- My grandmothers house is a restored and remodeled farmhouse. The foundation, and most of the downstairs, is unchanged from when the original house was built around 150 years ago. All of the materials, the lumber, iron nails, thick door frames, are all the same. For a better mental picture of the house, the downstairs is very similar to the house in the 1990 return of the living dead. The difference is the hidden basement, and the previously sealed room. Without going into boring detail, a hidden basement was discovered at my grandparents house about 40 years ago, and there was a strangely shaped room down there. No one knew what the room was for, until a local psychic looked at the room and immediately told my grandparents to stay away from it, and to move the antique furniture out of the room. The psychic, or as the town called her "witch," left the house in a panic repeatedly mumbling "bad people," and "cursed." My grandparents didn't do as she said, and only moved out the furniture when my father and mother bought a house. Family and friends always thought the old witch was just a crazy woman, until the problems started. Now, no relative on either side of the family will accept the furniture, and some can't even bring themselves to look at it when they're at my parents house. No one goes in the basement. No one can figure out why the basement has smelled like rotting meat ever since the furniture was moved. There has never been an explanation why the door to the basement will unlock itself, and open. The fresh flowers grandma used to arrange downstairs will always wilt in a day, and everyone who has stayed and been in the bathroom has heard at least once someone knock on the basement door and quietly ask "hello?" Like my parents house. . .except not as worse. This is the background story before the serious stuff. The death bed/ The silent mirror. The worst part of the furniture that was moved was an old wooden bed that was painted in a faded, pea soup green, and the matching mirror cabinet. Everyone hated these pieces of furniture after the move. The bed frame had a huge, plain headboard, and there were pillars in the four corners of the bed that ended in a dull, arrowhead shape. Because of the design of the bed, the mattress would rest just below a thick frame that connected all the pillars. When you laid down in the sunken bed surrounded by its high, wooden walls, you always felt like the bed was swallowing you. About 150 years ago, an unknown relative of the family built this bed, and no parts had been changed since. Every time you rolled on the bed it would creak loudly, moaning under the stress it has had to endure over the decades. The matching mirror was a huge and flawless despite its age, and the ornate frame for the piece showed no signs of wear. The mirror was attached above cabinets, so an average size man could only see his reflection above his waist. In the room that had both pieces, the mirror faced the bed. The headboard of the bed faced the door, and the mirror was on the same side as the door. If you wanted to see your reflection in the mirror, you had to walk into the room and stand in front of the bed. The reason the bed is called the death bed is because family members would always sleep on the bed when they were extremely sick, or going to die. Almost all of my dads family had died on that bed, and by coincidence, a few of my mothers family passed always as well there. My first experience with the death bed was when I was a child, and I had a bad case of strep throat. I had to sleep on the bed. I had fallen asleep as soon as my head touched the pillow, but my fever was too strong, and I woke up in pain around midnight. As I lay in the bed, struggling against the pain and facing the wall on the left side of the bed, I heard the bed creak. Not only did I hear the bed creak, but I could feel it move. I lay motionless until the creak happened again, and I felt someone roll over closer to me. Thinking it may be my mother who might have come in to keep an eye on me since I was sick, I rolled over to see if she was asleep. Someone else was there. A woman, probably in her thirties, was facing me. She was staring right at me with her eyes and mouth wide open. She looked like she was going to start crying and wail out in pain, but she just stared. Surrounding her eyes and mouth were dark blue circles, and her straight black hair was thrown covered part of her face. Her cheeks were sunk in, and her mouth kept dropping more and more open like the sorrow was becoming too much. I turned away to try and grab a hold of the side bed and pull myself out, and when I looked back she was no longer there. I crawled back into the bed, put the sheets over my head, and didn't move for the rest of the night. I told my mother what I saw in the morning, and she didn't seem too concerned until I mentioned how sad and hurt the woman looked. My mother, who was sitting at the kitchen table with me, stood up, went to the bedroom where my father was getting ready for work, and starting talking to him. I couldn't make out what she was saying, but he came out soon after and said "don't go in that room again, and you're not to sleep in there again, I don't care how sick you are." I asked if it was because of the woman and he said yes, and then I asked if I'm going to be in trouble and he said "your great aunt is dead, she won't bother you and she was nice woman." She is the only young woman to die on the bed. She died of some type of asphyxiation that the farmland doctors couldn't figure out. Apparently she stopped getting enough oxygen being pumped in her blood, and she died being virtually paralyzed and unable to call out for hours. The good poltergeist stuff is coming up; this is the calm stuff. More death bed/mirror Although this particular mirror (there are three total) never conjured the big problems like the other mirrors, it did something strange always. The room with the bed and mirror had blinds that keep all the light out of the room when closed, and at night, there was no light at all. The room was always pitch black except the mirror, which would glow. It wouldn't project light or illuminate anything, but it would glow brightly despite no light being directed to it at all. If you went to look in the mirror, you could see a clear reflection of yourself, but NOTHING else in the room. It was like you existed in a void. Death bed silent man My first encounter with the silent man was about two years after the dead woman on the bed. It was during the day, and I was looking through the mirror cabinet draws for an old stapler. I found the stapler, and I as I was looking at it to see if it needed staples (or if it would work), I heard a man clearly say: "Hi" He didn't say it in a friendly tone, but more of "I see you" sort of tone. What's worse is I looked up into the mirror and I was alone in the room. I moved as quickly out of the room as I could, and as I did I heard the same voice, but in a growling, angry voice say: "Get back here" I didn't, but whatever it was now angry, and people started to take notice. Since the room with the bed was at the end of the end of the hall, you could look right in to the living room from the doorway. Also, you could always see me leave my room since. I remember the first time I left my room and froze in fear as I looked into the doorway of the death bed room. There was something like a man, translucent, crouched down like a panther ready to pounce. I stared into the top of the head of the "man" (because the figure was looking down), until I gathered enough courage to run for the living room where my parents were. As I took off, so did it, and it jabbed me in the small of my back, knocking me down. Over the period of a year, this happened a few more times, and I have scars on my lower back the size of fingertips. There are no fingerprints, but there are unusual and consistent oval scars. Also, since my parents room were right next door to the death bed room, the door to my parents room would slam shut. It would only slam shut when someone was trying to enter or leave the room, sometimes hitting one of my parents in the face with the door. My mother was pissed one day that the doors would do that and I said it was the ghost in the death bed room. She said she knew, and her and my father could hear something laughing through the walls sometimes. She closed and bolted the door shut until we moved. Occasionally you would hear something knock lightly on the door and ask "hello" very quietly. When we moved, my parents had the bed and mirror destroyed to take care of the problem. Unfortunately we then decided to keep the old music boxes and the buried mirrors. On a kinda side note: No one had ever experienced anything bad with the bed, or anything with the angry male ghost until it was moved into the séance room in the farm house basement. People don't go down there anymore because something else also knocks lightly on the closed basement door and asks "hello." The big stories about the old music boxes and the two mirrors are next. First the old music boxes. I hated this fuckin' things since the first time I saw them. They were about 100 years old, ceramic (mostly), highly decorated with sky and clouds type themes, and the music that came out of them were perfect. All three of them, the two clouds and soaring ballerina (the top had a ballerina that would twirl when the box was wound), were in perfect condition. They just didn't seem right. The people had left these boxes and everything else their daughter had behind. They were angry with her because she committed suicide, and didn't want a reminder of such a bad child. Wow, what a happy family. We stored everything she used to have in the attic except the boxes (my mom loved them), and we didn't take down this mirror thing she had in her room. Instead of a full-length mirror, she took mirror squares and glued them almost next to each other on a part of the wall. It was like a broken, full-length mirror that faced the bed. Luckily, I got the room with the horrible mirror. One day, the dog was chasing one of our cats around, bumps into the dresser that had the music boxes on them, and all the boxes fall to the floor and break. There were only two people that were upset that happened: my mother and the daughter. We were there only one month after that, and it was a nightmare. Our dog suddenly developed over 50 ulcers in her stomach and died. . .in three days. Even though there was no smoke, you and everyone around you would start choking and coughing. Air would rush so strongly by your ears sometimes that you couldn't hear the world around you. People would start sleep walking (the only time ever in this house during this period) and leave the house. You would always wake up outside like it was an eviction of a supernatural kind. Then there was her mirror. She looked very similar to the girl in the ring (no drowning symptoms, evil whitish eyes, or any of that stuff, but she wore a white night dress and has long, dark hair). I remember being in bed and looking at the mirrors, when I saw her for the first time. It was like the mirrors were really one big, broken window, and she was looking through. Just her upper body because she was like peering around through the mirrors at me, and she was angry. Sometimes she would look scared or worried, but most of the time is was pure anger. I hid every time I saw something like that, except when I was leaving the room. Sometimes I would be walking out and I would look at the mirror at an angle, and I could see her kinda like hiding behind the wall so you couldn't see her if you looked directly at the mirror. She apparently appeared in some other mirrors in the house, but I didn't see them. New tenets moved in after us, and then quickly moved away. The house had been abandoned for a few years and was recently torn down. Next are the antique mirrors that used to be buried. (Why my mother and father wanted them, I have no idea.) More about the death bed I forgot Just about everyone that knows the death bed room remembers the mumbling voices. If you left my room at about 1 a.m., or at noon, you could hear about 10 people "talking," but it was more like a whole bunch of mumbling voices. If you got to about two steps from the doorway to the room, they would stop but not all at once. It was like someone said "everybody quiet," and not everybody did right away. I had a sleep over, and one of my friends got up to use the bathroom at night. He said when he was coming back that he heard the mumbling in the room that I told him about a while ago. However, he didn't go up to the door, but stood there and tried to listen to what's going on (the angry male ghost hadn't appeared yet, so there was no reason to be scared). Eventually, the voices quickly died down and he left about 5 seconds after it was quiet. As he started to walk to my room, the door to the death bed room closed very slowly, and he says he heard something like a giggle. When he made it to my room he was so scared he was crying. would rather have the death bed than this mirror. Sure, I don't live at home anymore, but the fact that it exists bothers me. It's called the blood mirror because the seal used to keep the back of the mirror to the frame is blood. Blood isn't like glue so we were able to crack the frame off easily (we were going to save the frame and replace the mirror around the first week we had it, but we put everything back together). One of my mothers relatives (the first woman to kill herself) used to do this with cabinet seals and stuff, so we weren't shocked when it happened, but we were spooked. She tried to put her blood in everything because she was some type of witch, and she was trying to live forever or something. I know that's going to raise questions but we don't really know because there aren't any records of her anymore or any solid information or basis really in witchcraft. She was probably just plain nuts. Here's a diagram of the upstairs where the mirror is. It will be important later. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Brothers Room | Bathroom | Parents Room | | | | |--------------------D------------------------------| D D -----------------| Hallway | Blood Mirror D | Room |--------------------------------D------| | | Metal frame mirror room | Stairs | | | | | | | ---------------------------------------------------------- It's crude, but there you go. It's all upstairs. Ghost stairs There are three types of ghosts on the stairs. The first is the casual walker, who will walk at a calm pace. Even if you stare at the stairs, whatever it is will keep walking. This doesn't happen to often anymore, but it was really cool when it did. The second is the clumsy runner. Someone just takes off and kinda trips and stumbles on the stairs on the way up. It's like a kid running. Very rare to happen. Both all reach the landing on the second floor and walk towards the blood mirror room, past the metal mirror room. That's how I connect the stairs walkers, but I could be wrong. The third is horrible. I was asleep one night and I woke up to a loud thud downstairs. I listened as whatever it was ran full speed to the stairs, up the stairs, down the hall, and slammed into the door with the blood mirror in it and kept slamming. . .where I was sleeping. I started shaking because I just woke up and it sounded like some madman was in the house coming for me and I wasn't ready. My dad comes out of his room and yells "what the gently caress are you doing at. . " and trails off. No one was there in the hallway. The knocker The knocker comes in two varieties. The knocking with the death bed room is more of someone making a fist, sticking out his or her index finger, and gently rapping on the door. The first knocker with the mirror is nothing like that. It's more of a full fist, all four knuckles rapping on the door. This one comes once in a while and just knocks on the blood mirror door for about two minutes, sometimes during the day. "knock knock knock" (quickly but gently) Me: "yeah, what?" "knock knock knock" Me: "yeah?" "Knock knock knock" Me: "what?!" (I go to answer the door) I open the door and there's only dead silence. The second knocker is a full-fist pounding that shakes the door. This has happened twice. The first time was 10 seconds of beating on the door at 2 in the morning. I go to the door because I think it's an emergency, and no one is there. The second time I heard the pounding and didn't get up (this was about six months later). Every ten seconds something would pound on the door and pause for about one minute. Then I heard the doorknob wiggle. Scratching on the door. The doorknob shaking slightly. Then BAM!! One big hit smacks the door and I hear something run downstairs and into the kitchen, where there is no more noise. Scratching. Scratching has been heard on many separate occasions, from either inside the closet or from behind the mirror. I would have to say from behind the closet is scarier to me because I saw the movie House when I was young, and if you've seen that movie you know that a certain part can leave an impression on a kid. The scratching is very light, and not in one spot. The scratching will go from low in the closet to high like something trying to figure a way out. If you see the original haunting, there is a scene when something is trying to get into a door and it sounds just like this. The pounding on the door wasn't similar, but the scratching is dead on. Behind the mirror you hear scratching sometimes, only around 1 or five in the morning. Sometimes there is a tapping sound, but mostly scratching. I got more, but I got to take a break for a sec if that's ok. Why I hate the blood mirror. Sure it attracts things that knock on the door and run up the stairs. Yeah there's scratching and tapping from the closet and mirror. When you look at it though, it's just noise. The blood mirror, however, is more than just noise. It could be any day, at any time, with any one in the room, and then it attacks. Since the mirror has no way to directly hurt you, it makes you hurt yourself. I have been quietly watching TV or talking to friends that are in the same room with me and the blood mirror, and you can feel it come alive. The room temperature will drop 40, 50, 60 degrees within minutes so you can see your breath. You can't concentrate or focus on what you were doing. Your eyes can't focus on one point, and you're unaware of what you're body is doing. All you can really hear is your heart pounding at a rhythmic pace. Suddenly you, and anyone else around, is in a haze. . .a trance. When you regain focus, you realize you're bleeding. The most common thing people will do is scratch themselves with their fingers on their left hand on their right arm or upper chest. Without thinking, people will dig huge gashes into their bodies with just their fingers and not know it. Every time they will look at the mirror when they realize what they just did. It doesn't happen often, but when it does it's truly frightening. The best example I have is when I brought my now ex-girlfriend to show her the room because I had told her about all the ghosts in my house. When we walked in I said: "Here's my old room, and there's the mirror." And as soon as I said that and pointed to the mirror, the temperate began to drop drastically. I went over to some shelves to see how much of my stuff my little brother had taken since I had left, and I took my eyes off her. When I looked back at her she was staring at a wall, with a desperately sorrowful face, and digging into her right arm. I grabbed her, and as I did I must have woke her up out of her trance. She looked scared until she saw the cuts in her arm and screamed. She was out of the house before I could leave the room. As soon as she left, the room instantly got warmer. It wanted her. . .something about her she liked. The blood mirror still stands today behind an old dresser. My mother always gets crippling arthritic pain whenever she goes to take down the mirror and get rid of it. The pain is so bad she can't even grip silverware. . .until she decides to do something else. I moved the dresser drawer to hide the mirror, to bury it, so it won't bother anyone else. Some day the dresser drawer will be moved and the mirror will reflect the light of day again, and I know it will be even angrier than it was before I hid it. I pity the person that inherits it then. Thank God for eBay. Sorry for the crappy joke. Anyways, I need to clarify some earlier stuff I wrote about so I'll do that in another post if you want me too. Also, I've got some other stories, some of which are my friends if you want them. Thanks for all the support so far. In regards to the séance room in the basement: Furniture from upstairs was moved downstairs, and into the séance room accidentally. The furniture was later moved out when my parents bought a house, and put the death bed and mirror into the third bedroom for guests. I have no idea why they would want to use the family death bed for a guest bed, but I guess it was free. If you want a mental picture of the basement, here it is. The basement is a simple rectangle, maybe 20 feet long, and 15 feet wide. Then there is a séance room, I forget the specs but it's built for "satanic" type rituals, attached to the basement walls. The séance room is right by the steps up to the basement door. The basement door was hidden on a wall in the huge downstairs bathroom. The mirror faces the basement door, so you could be looking in the mirror and hear the knocking behind you. Whatever it is in the basement "talked" to me three times in one day. The first time it knocked and asked hello, the second time it knocked and asked hello but a bit more worried than before, the third time it just angrily "breathed" out at me. If you exhale lightly at first and then exhale strongly and quickly at the end, you can kinda get the idea of what I heard. As for why my parents keep these things, I have no idea. My parents are addicted to anything that has been passed down through the family, and their house is now loaded with stuff from both sides. My mother hates the mirrors, but she only wants to take them down and not throw them away because they've been in the family. It's a weird mix of stuff from both sides of my parents families. My father has old, ratty stuff like the old death bed, and my mother has expensive stuff from when her family was rich and lived in a mansion. It's like we have stuff from Night of the Living Dead, and The Haunting all in one place. My mother has the family opals, which are exquisite pieces of jewelry that only women in the family can wear, not because of tradition, but of some type of super bad luck. She also has these 80+ year old ruby glasses. The glasses aren't made of rubies, but they are a beautiful blood red and flawless. When she inherited them about 10 years ago, she said she had to put them in a sturdy china cabinet or they'll fall and break. That's because every other day you can hear someone run through the dinning room and to the china hutch, where the glasses are. My dad has this old trunk from Ireland that has the creepiest lamp (that used to be kept in the séance room too) in it, pictures of my Indian (native American) relatives that we no longer know who they are, and some sentimental news clippings from a cousin of ours in Ireland who was with the IRA, but was really a child killer. No one wants this stuff, the trunk used to be in the basement next to the séance room, and it's ugly to boot, but it's old and has stuff from the family. They just won't get rid of stuff that's old and has been in the family. Destroying the death bed was kinda hard for my dad to do, but WE STILL HAVE PARTS FROM THE MIRROR. All of it is ugly, everyone knows the pieces are cursed or at least haunted, and we don't need any of the pieces at all, but they still keep them. I mean Christ, those opals, once put on, cannot be taken off until right before the coffin closes, and you are to be buried in the ground. If you take them off the body earlier, or accept them as a gift while the original wearer is still alive, you will go mad. Apparently that's not enough to call the pieces cursed since it has only happened TWICE in the past 40 years. It also happens 100% of the time too, but that doesn't matter. I'll take as many pictures as possible while I'm there. It's like sentimental pieces from a haunted mansion all over the place. About why there are things happening in the basement to our house, I don't know. There are things everywhere in the house, and the basement is no exception. I'll do an outline of the house, and when I get a Chicago ghost hunt going, we'll stop by my house for a quick tour. Basement: Only thing here is the shadow man and the swinging boxing bag. The shadow man has only been seen twice, and has "charged" every time he knows you're looking. He doesn't come straight at you, but follows the walls around. The swinging punching bag was really fun. It happened about every other time anyone was downstairs, and it was really cool. I had a 110 pound leather punching bag attached to the ceiling of the basement. Really simple construction: just a swivel hitch bolted into the ceiling, and a three chains attached to the hitch. You would be sitting downstairs, watching TV or talking to friends, and the chain would start to creak. For a while we thought vibrations somehow moved the bag, until two of us saw how it started. The bag would be perfectly still, then it would move about a foot in one direction, and then swing back. It was creepy because you knew something was moving that bag. Ground floor: All you get are the occasional runner, the night light painting, and I guess orbs. Once in a while you see a quick flash of light like a firefly, usually in the spring or fall. Upstairs: This is where the mirrors are and the knocking. Sometimes you hear mumbling, something moving papers (and always loving up the system you have), lots of motion in the mirrors (bathroom and metal frame), and one of our dogs growling at something in the hallway briefly. If you have cat in your room, the cat will wake up sometimes and just stare at the door for a good five minutes, and then sometimes go under the bed. The upstairs is where the fun is. Oh, and I should mention that our new dog won't go into the dinning room where most of our inherited stuff is. He'll whine and cry if he looks in there, won't come if you're offering him tasty hamburger, and will fight you if you carry him in there. He gets over it, and then one night you hear the china cabinet move in the dinning room, and he freaks out. Until this thread, I never really thought about all the hosed up stuff we have in our house. I knew we had some bad things, but I just realized how much we have there. Hazo has a new favorite as of 05:25 on Feb 5, 2015 |
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Feb 5, 2015 04:57
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:Does everything posted here have to be in the 1st-person creepypasta "it happened to me!" style?
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Feb 10, 2015 06:06
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Backweb posted:I always feel like fiction horror stories deserve their own threads. Fiction is great, but when so much of it gets posted I feel that it pulls the thread into a different direction... like how that "Aine" story took over the thread the other year. They really deserve their own threads. Let's keep this thread for personal (or second hand) paranormal tales, urban legends, and campfire stories. Your own fiction can go in Creative Convention.
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Feb 10, 2015 07:56
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SlothBear posted:Resposting one my favorites "The Patch" by Darth Tang.  That reminds me, though: Turns out that's not quite "all there is to it." I was browsing the 2011 thread last night and came across his epilogue if anybody's interested. Darth Tang posted:The chemical angle has some merits- during WW2 our county hosted one of the largest training facilities in the USA, and chemical weapons (mostly mustard gas) were tested and deployed here. Numerous Chemical Corps units were formed and trained here. Hazo has a new favorite as of 22:57 on Feb 10, 2015 |
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Feb 10, 2015 22:55
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kazr posted:Does anyone have the story about the guy and his friend going to a country in south east Asia I think and do a rite of passage/manhood and they start being followed by something that repeats the end of their sentences? They camp out in some trees and set up a trap to ambush it and it's this weird pig mimic thing. I'm pretty sure they were Marines or something similar doing relief work. --------------------------------------------- Another story from the jungle, this one being the one that still gives me nightmares on occasion. Now, I can not really claim this as happening exactly as I remembered it, not in any honest sense. I remember it as happening like so however, which still has me waking on occasion in a cold sweat. This is back in some weird little island in the Philippines learning jungle survival stuff from the nigridos. My friend Tony and I were getting the hang of some of the finer points of staying alive in a world that wanted you dead and festering with larvae. Tony is a solid guy, the kind of friend your lucky to have. He had my back, I had his, and it didn't matter what stupid poo poo the other decided to get himself into, he wasn't going into it alone. Seriously the guy was loyal to a fault, still is. This is actually how we ended up in the middle of the bush together god knows how many miles from whatever could be considered civilization and light years away from anything remotely safe. Part of the final test of what you learned out there was to go out alone for a coupla days and make your way back to the village. It was a basic practical test, ideally you had a nigrido shadowing you not too far off making sure you didn't get yourself graved by being an idiot. You'd never know these guys were there though, ever, they knew this territory and knew how to work it. The jungle is dense, profoundly thick. I know you've probably heard stories about how you can walk past like...an entire ruined temple in the middle of South America and never even clue in that its there even though your practically on its doorstep. Its true, you step ten feet from your buddy in the wrong direction, blink wrong and bam, your alone. We had both done pretty good as far as the nigridos cared, we picked up things fast and weren't shy about doing things most westerners balk at, eating bugs, getting filthy and reaching into mysterious holes to grab whatever might be lurking in there. I had no problem with this as my dad was kind of a nutjob survivalist in my early youth and had a thing for doing things "the Traditional Way," Tony had no problems doing this stuff because he had balls the size of a C-130, loaded with tanks, and driving those tanks were condors with helmets. Anyways, its time for the practicals, and although we were supposed to solo that noise, Tony and I basically said "no dice we're going in as a pair," to which the nigridos smiled and nodded and agreed that we were smart to demand such a thing. You never go out there alone. I always thought it was kind of a trick question thing anyways, sending your goofy rear end out into the dense solo when all throughout the training they go on and on about how you're a dumb poo poo if you go out there alone. Bonus points for us I guess right? We get bags over our heads and led to a little riverboat. They rumble us out for a few hours and then unceremoniously dump our asses onto the beach. The nigrido tosses us a knife, stares at us for awhile before making this weird little gesture and buggering off on his boat. I couldn't catch the exact gesture, but it was like a gang sign I guess, quick, fingers all tangled up. His boat was poo poo, I swear it was made out of warehouse pallets or something the like. Tony and I both figured the guy probably went up river a bit then bailed on his own craft and fixed to shadow us and keep an eye out. With bravado fed by the others presence we went into the jungle all smiles and ego. We were good, we knew this, we were not afraid and figured this would be fun as hell, and give us some future stories to tell the ladies about and hence get laid. Tony has a knack for direction and the two of us sussed our whereabout after only a few hours. It was daytime, so climbing a tree gave us a pretty decent view. Not a lot to see really, but somehow he figured on a direction we were supposed to go and we headed off. Moving through the jungle can be slow work, in the movies you have to hack your way through poo poo with a machete like Indiana Jones or some poo poo. Reality is a bit different. If you know where to step, you can avoid all the work of cutting stuff down. Along fallen logs is pretty good, up roots and the like, but don't ever put your foot alongside something like that, that's snakefood. The nigridos do it at kind of a lazy jog, we were more deliberate but still moving at a pace that was comfortable to us. We chattered constantly, it wasn't to keep predators away, as far as we knew the island had no real big threats like cats or anything, we did it because Tony and I couldn't shut the gently caress up when we were around each other. I'm sure you guys have friends like that. Those two chucklefucks in the back of the classroom in highschool always snickering and loaded with injokes, that was pretty much us, in the jungle...with a single knife and something to prove. The first day was pretty drat uneventful, we didn't eat, and we spent almost the entire time moving. We found water in different places, big cone shaped leaves are good for that, and they typically come with snacks of differing squiggly varieties. We made camp up in the branches of a big goofy rear end looking tree, took light watches and slept like babies. I woke up covered in bugs the size of my fingers and Tony fell off his branch and got stuck in the crook of the tree when he woke up, clumsy bastard. The second day started out like the first, chattering, moving, high spirits. The jungle was getting smellier and bleaker as we went, I think we were close to an estuary or something because there was a briny smell. The soil went from firm with a heavy layer of dead vegetation, to black-brown silt and loose. Tony and I tried making some fire, took us awhile but we did the trick with thread from his shirt and long bendy twig to make a bow with and whatnot. We got some smoldering going, but poo poo out there was so wet it just made a lot of thick black smoke and never really caught. I figured if we kept some tender dry ontop of our heads or something and maybe found some good dead wood we'd have something worth burning. As time went on we got to talking about old times, funny crap we had done, new ideas for pranks with which to torment our hapless buddies with and the desire to come out of this not only successful but as badass as possible. We didn't want to be the Swiss family loving Robinson, we wanted Rambo. I mean seriously, how could anyone want anything BUT that. Imagine that crap, coming out of the bush all grim faced and scarred, with like a dead deer over your shoulder and the skulls of your enemies tied around you in a belt made out of human hair. Not that we had enemies local, but I'm sure we could make some right? That's pretty much us. It was around mid-day Tony and I noticed this weird echo effect with the jungle. It was hard to notice because we never really shut up, but when we talked, there was this weird echo that was soft and sounded far away at first. Until he pointed it out and we started listening more carefully. Every time we talked, there it was, that echo...it wasn't as far away as it initially sounded either, just deceptively soft. We figured it was maybe soundwaves bouncing off the broadleaf plants in the area or something and coming back at us all curved up. We weren't rocket scientists, but we weren't proper dumb either. Tony and I made a game out of it, we'd start chattering at each other and then he'd hold up his hand, fingers splayed and visually countdown with em, we'd stop mid sentence when he hit zero, and could hear the last few words said bounce around us in a weird jungle whisper. At dusks we had been getting kind of tired of the game and blew it off, but before we went up to rest Tony pulled it on me one last time. Normally echoes just kind of stop or trail off right? This time...I dunno, it just kind of looped, and it looped wrong. The last thing I had been saying to Tony was something along the lines of "I'm a goddamned sexual tyranno-" and cut off. What we heard bouncing around us in that quiet sibilant way was, "I'm a god damned, god damned, god, god, I'm, damned." Tony and I stopped talking and just kind of stared at each other for a bit. We weren't ruling out echoes yet, though over all our time out here doing this training we hadn't ever really heard it before, or mention of it. We were both creeped right the gently caress out, and when one of us is creeped, the other picks up on it and the hackles go up. We found ourselves a solid tree and that night we did not pull light watches, we pulled proper. I'm figuring a little after midnight Tony woke me up with a hand on my shoulder. It's dark at night in the jungle, god damned dark, and noisy. The canopy over head pretty much prevents any good starlight coming through, and the skies are most always fat with gray clouds. The bugs get set to screeching at night and they don't quit for nothing. Underneath our tree something was rooting around in the bushes, even through the bugs we could both hear it. Shuffling, a quiet snort, crunches, snuffling. Sounded like a pig to me and I was set to bark at it and maybe spook it off when Tony's hand on my shoulder tenses. Then I could hear it. Muttering in between the snuffles. A snort, some bushes rustling and a few low scattered words. Bits and pieces of sentences. It took me a second, but gently caress me if it didn't sound like Tony down there pissed off and searching for something he'd lost in the bush. You know when a grumpy rear end drops a contact or something and gets to searching for it muttering under his breath, it's like that. Whatever was down there was loving talking. It wasn't making any sense though, the weirdest loving thing. "So tits," snortsnort "Yeah the green," shuffle, "Named after fucker," rustle. Then a laugh, and I froze when I heard that. It started with my laugh, which is this goofy Mark Hamill as the Joker thing and ended with Tony's troublemaker's drawl. See we had been bullshitting for the past what, day and a half, and spent a good time laughing our asses off at each other. Whatever the gently caress that thing was down there it was like it was trying our voices on for size. Canis latran We'd both seen Predator, we'd been quoting that poo poo for days out here. I can't even begin to count how many times I'd just stop while one of the instructors was explaining something, stare off into the horizon and mutter, "Theres something out there, up in them trees." Which never failed to make Tony laugh like a retard. Military types watch a lot of god damned movies, and your typical boots on the ground motherfucker can quote like a champ. No lie, we can even do crazy poo poo like quote a movie line for line with a different cast from yet another movie. You haven't lived til you've seen a bunch of petty officers do a scene from Aliens with Thurgood from Half-Baked as the Sarge. We caught the similarities to our situation pretty god damned fast. It was eerie listening to this thing natter about imbecility down there, it had no comprehension of the noises it was making, but it was loving making them. Tony slid me the knife and secured himself in his spot and I kept the watch until dawn. The thing trundled off a half hour or so before daybreak. I'm no Apache, but I know knives well enough to be comforted by holding one, but even that didn't break the "oh what the gently caress have we gotten ourselves into," gloom that caught us. The next day was a grim loving thing. We weren't chattering, we weren't joking around anymore. Nerves were on edge and both of us had to have looked like someone had gutted our favorite dog. Tony did at least, I'm a goofy looking guy so I probably still looked like a run of the mill dork. Believe me, the urge to quote predator was pretty god damned strong but we just couldn't get past the feeling that we needed to be quiet and careful. Tony managed a half-hearted Arnold gargle when we were headed up a ridge, I think in an attempt to beat the gloom, but even that couldn't do it. He does a good Arnold gargle too, for those that don't know what that is, its hard to describe really its like a weirdly accented "Arghlearg" noise done in Arnies manner that's pretty unmistakable when you hear it. Wow, actually writing that down makes it seem so dumb as hell, still funny as all get out though I think. We didn't hear that weird echo as long as we didn't talk. We were starting to get hungry though, and random bugs wasn't doing much to assuage that. It felt like, I dunno the right description, it felt like we were being bullied if that made any sense. We couldn't talk, we weren't allowed to. That got us both feeling a little pissed off. Tony and I individually aren't anything I'd call cowards, we aren't heroes by any stretch of the word, but were not pussies. Together though, we get stupid brave. I'm sure you might see where this is leading. To us it was a natural shift. It took a few hours of grimly trudging along in the direction we believed was the right way to go for the shift to happen, but it was kind of inevitable. Screw this thing. Screw this stupid talking thing. I broke the silence proper, started bitching about the girls on this island, how they had curves like a dirt road. Tony countered immediately that I lacked the proper gear to drive a dirt road. We started chattering again, this time aggressively, we were defying this damned spooky thing. We began the most ridiculous conversations. How do you properly screw a dolphin? Do you beach it and plug the blowhole? Do you sneak up on it in a zodiac, spear gun it's rear end and go at an eye socket? Crap like that. We were uncouth savages. We were listening for that stupid echo, waiting for it. We were not disappointed. The echoes started up, it was hard to get a location, but the best I could figure was back and towards my side a bit. Tony scored a major victory when he said something along the lines of, "Dance around that flagpole bare-assed and body-painted like I'm a drag-queen paramount." The echo came back as "I'm a drag-queen." Tony stopped in his tracks, turned around and screamed back at it, "YOU'RE loving RIGHT YOUR A DRAG-QUEEN YOU DICK EYED JUNGLE oval office!" It was liberating, terrifying though. That was the first time we actually addressed the god damned thing. But we did, we addressed it, we acknowledged it as existing and that just sat bad. A small victory but that feeling in our guts, that wasn't the feeling you get when you win a fight. It's the feeling you get when you start a war. When Tony had called that thing out it was a declaration of war. We both started getting hostile, not towards each other mind you, but towards this whatever the hell it was. We got to planning, and threatening, vocalizing the horrible things we were planning on doing to it once we caught a hold of it. I distinctly remember Tony saying something along the lines of "I'm strangle this goofy-assed thing, I'ma kill it with my bare hands." I laughed, "Dude what if it's a fuckin' nigrido and he's just screwing with us." Tony just stared at me. I shrugged, couldn't blame him for the sentiment really. Thing is, we kept going on, we never turned around, neither of us wanted to actually stand our ground or charge off after it. There was this distinct sensation that doing so would have been one helluva bad idea. We were getting hungry though and figured that it was probably time to do something about it. There's a lot to eat in the jungle if you're not shy, frogs, bugs and the like can keep you going like a trail ration, but if you want something with more substance you have to kill it, or if you're some sort of fancy botanist I suppose you can tell a jungle death turnip from a potato and do it that way. We were not botanists, and I only knew which plants could get me high, unconscious or stop bleeding. Tony climbed up a tree and managed to brain some sort of monkey critter with a rock. The guy could be quiet as hell, and the monkey critters out here were curious and stupid. The specific trap we used to catch the monkey off guard was me laying down in a space between some trees and doing my best curly impression from the Three Stooges. You know the thing where you lay on your side, and start running and kind of churn circles while going "whooop whooop whooop." Well, that's what I was doing, which got a few monkeys coming down and looking at us like dude, what the gently caress are you doing, and Tony hit one with a rock. We were some crafty bitches. I managed to start an acceptable fire, previously I had taken our tinder and folded it up in a dry leaf and worn it on my head like an idiot. The campfire was tiny, but it did the trick, I cleaned the monkey critter as best I could and we cooked it old school on some sticks. The sticks caught fire frequently, and a lot of the meat burned to inedible carbon but my god it was good. We cooked the hell out of that monkey, I'm sure it was loaded with parasites, but burning the hell out of it had to help, and I figured we could get purged when we got back to our unit, or hell, just the village if I could boil some water and drop some tabs. The other monkey critters watched us eat, they were quiet, just staring. Probably should have felt bad about that in hindsight, but neither of us was feeling charitable or friendly really. Something about having meat in our bellies and actual fire, albeit a small one made us feel a lot more ready for this weird poo poo and we got to planning on how we were gonna handle it. Idea one was to continue on as we were going and maybe just pick up the pace. It was the safest idea by far and Tony figured we had another day until we got to either a lovely road we could navigate off of or a larger river we could follow. Idea two was to cover ourselves in mud, arm ourselves with bows made from roots and poo poo and ambush the thing. I poo poo you not, we figured why the hell not. Idea three was to split apart at night, have each person in a different tree and stay up until whatever it was came snooting around. Whoever was in the tree it decided to investigate would signal the other who would come down and murder the hell out of it from the rear. I liked idea three and voted for it, Tony voted for two and the monkey's skull sided with me making it a unanimous vote for idea three, because Tony was Italian and Italians don't get to vote. There was some threatening of each other's life, but in the end we pretty much settled on our two tree ambush idea. We didn't move from that site that day. We sharpened some sticks, thick short ones make good spikes. Tony let me keep the knife since I was a bit swifter with it than he was and he carried the spikes. The guy is strong, much stronger than me and I figured he could put those things too much better use than I if he could get a good line up. Figured it would go like this. It would start bothering one or the other of us who would throw a twig at his buddy. Buddy would come down and engage whatever it was, at which point the initial target would drop down and help secure the kill. We went over it a coupla different times, figured out some possible oh-poo poo secondary plans but really, there wasn't much to it. This thing had been creeping us out for awhile and we wanted it dead, we felt kind of elated by the thought of killing it. Turn the tables on its rear end and come out like badasses. We got ourselves motivated and I did something which is I guess kind of embarrassing but whatever. I put on warpaint. I guess that's dorky as hell. I took some of the black-silt soil we had been around, mixed it with monkey-juice and smeared three dark lines across my face. Tony thought I looked kinda badass so he did the same. We used to do this during training and paintball games, hell, once during a hide and go seek game with some corpsman girls at camp Lester we did it. Yes, we played hide and go seek, with the legitimate intent of getting laid by said corpgirls, yes we smeared our face paint on the aforementioned corpgirls. He did a full on handprint on his face, it looked very Conan meets Geronimo meets a Guido. The paint tightened up into pretty solid noticeable lines when the fluids coagulated, which took all of fifteen minutes or so. Our site was decent too, an opening in the canopy over where we had set our campfire promised that if there was any light to be had that night, we'd be able to make some use of it. We picked out our trees, climbed up there and took a few practice throws with twigs we had nearby. I hit him in the eye, he kept aiming at my balls. Spirits were high, sort of...it was a false high, bravado I think. Night came, and with it, bugsong. High chirps and cackling buzzes all over the place. I near pissed myself when what I had assumed to be a knot of wood next to my thigh twitched and started this staccato screech that ricocheted off the trees. Was a big assed beetle thing. We lucked out in that cloud cover was lighter than it typically is and we had a good moon. Not bright by any stretch, but more than we had any night previous. We waited. Felt like forever, sitting up in a tree, trying to keep your heartbeat regular. Knowing the second we heard whatever it was we heard we'd get that adrenaline kick to the nuts that would make our whole body start shaking. I'm not sure how long we waited up there before it came. At first I missed it entirely, I was so intent on listening for it I missed it entirely. When I finally zeroed in on the snuffling, rummaging, muttering beneath me I realized I had been hearing it for some time now. It was under me. Me. I pulled my knife up and crouched on my branch, my free hand making sure for the love of god I had a strong hold on a nearby branch. I took a few minutes to steady myself and really listen. I wanted to make sure of a few things before I alerted Tony. I desperately wanted this thing to be alone, and I wanted to get a general idea of its size. Size wasn't too hard, judging by the heaviness of the rummaging going on beneath me it was man-sized, maybe a bit bigger but lower to the ground. As for the numbers, well gently caress...I only heard one. Small comfort that. I had a pile of little pre-snapped twigs and I grabbed the whole drat thing and tossed it towards Tony's tree. Now, remember I said Tony can be a quiet guy. I had no idea if I had hit him, or if he had started moving, I could only really guess as to the actions over on his end. I got a good grip on the branch with my legs and made to swing under it, do kind of spider man maneuver and maybe stab downwards. It was a bit overelaborate yeah, but I used to climb trees all the time as a kid, and dangling like a douchebag was second nature. Nowadays the dangling not so much, douchebag I still got. Anyways, I'm dangling, I let go with my hands and get ready to knife this loving thing in the head when I see it. A huge moment of confusion washed over me when it happened. I drat near went loose and fell off my branch. Tony is looking straight up at me. He's gotta be like, four feet off the ground just looking at me with this blank retarded look on his face. Mind you, its pretty dark, but I can see a face...swear it looked like him, at first. Then I focus on it a bit more and notice. It has no loving facepaint. It's not Tony. poo poo, it doesn't even look like Tony's face anymore, it's just A face. But it's a god damned human face, looking up at me, blinking. My blood runs cold and I can feel my body come to a screeching halt. "Tony, get the gently caress back up in your tree." I say. "Up in your tree." It says back, sounding pleased with its god damned self. I can hear Tony, the real Tony over there in his tree rustle as he gets right the hell back up in the branches. "What the hell is goin' on, what the hell, what the heeeeell is that." He's got this angry nervousness in his voice. I've heard him like this only a few times, usually before we got our collective asses kicked by some angry merchant marines. The thing is still staring at me, and I'm making out more of its body. It's a loving pig. I mean, it's body. Its got the broad rectangular barrel of a body. Its quadruped though I cant make out the distinct feet, its got a human, or at least human-ish face. "It's a pig Tony, it's just a god damned pig." I say, and the thing is mimicking me just the same as always. I can hear an exasperated sigh over in the other tree and I continue, "It's got a people face though, stay the gently caress up in that tree Doc." Doc is a magic word to corpsmen, its a business word and it isn't lightly used, marines call us Doc, but usually only after we've proven ourselves I guess you could say, corpsmen rarely refer to each other as such, unless were trying to elaborate on a point. I was elaborating my point as hard as I could, as calmly as I could, without making GBS threads myself. I was still upside down, if I had poo poo myself, well...think about how unpleasant it would be to fill your pants and then have it run up your damned back and into your hair. Blech. Man-face is looking up at me and Tony goes silent over there. We stare at each other for along while before I manage to find purchase and swivel back upright. I'm not looking down anymore, let that thing root around. I didn't sleep that night. It left before morning, like it always did and Tony and I went to ground and moved out, as fast as possible. We talked little, only that what I had seen was an unquantifiable thing, I could not predict any actions outcome on something I knew absolutely nothing about. I mean poo poo, if it had been like a tiger or something ridiculous like that, I could have figured something out, even something stupid, but not this thing. If it had been the nigrido, well, Tony and I would have likely kicked the hell out of him, but I woulda chilled Tony out before he killed him no problem. It wasn't anything I knew though, it was wrong, and bizarre and very disturbing. We immediately initiated idea one. We didn't hunt anymore monkeys, we didn't fish, we didn't eat bugs. We drank sparingly as we went, which gave us some serious dehydration issues. Tony had an idea of where to go and that's where we went, fast. Thank god for the river, when we found we made so many miles. We weren't playing around anymore either. The first civilian craft we saw, which was this lovely little rickshaw thing, we flagged it, asked for a lift and we got back home. When we arrived at the village we were haggard, dehydrated, cut up and miserable. This wasn't a big surprise to the nigridos, everybody came back from the practical like that. What bothered them is the man they sent out to watch over us never came back. That keeps me up some nights. by Canis Latrans of Something Awful
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Jun 29, 2015 08:39
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andipossess posted:If you have archives, is it this one on the second page of the last thread? Need to get around to finishing it. The next page has the next post. Not sure if there are more. Onic posted:I live on a farm outside of a city that currently has a population of around 1700. It's a small town that was built along the railroad back in the late 1800s. Most of the original buildings are still standing along Main Street. Some of them are pretty cool, and over the years I have explored most of them. My favorite was a large building that was a flower store and phones/service. The flower store took up the entire first floor, while the phones and service used the entire basement. At the time I was around 10 years old, and my father was working with the phone guy over the winter. edit: if you don't have archives I can post the other story too
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Aug 15, 2015 01:45
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Quidnose posted:There's also a really great multipart story that I think is in this thread somewhere involving a guy who interned at some sort of dinner theatre mansion themepark where they were going to open a restaurant in the coalmine nearby. poo poo was awesome.
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Aug 15, 2015 06:10
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Blizzy_Cow posted:You guys remember atound the time ole Slendy was made a goon also made up "the "rake". Well I was bored as hell on one of my days off and flipped over to Destination America and some show about a group of fellows who hunt cryptids "professionally". They were in like Nevada, New Mexico, or Arizona; some state full of desert. Well they heard reports of a strange creature harming animals, harassing people, etc and that it lived in some cave system that served as a tourist attraction. According to these guys the rake actually lives there and in fact some demon thing from India. Best part is one of them wanted to take a gun in the caves in case it attacked but since it wasn't allowed to it possibly causing a cave in he opted for fisticuffs and a pointy stick. I'll look up the episode and post it shortly if you guys are interested.
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Sep 26, 2015 04:46
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Telemaze posted:Anybody know the story someone posted a couple years ago, about working in a mine (?) and having to check a particular room? I think the room had some kind of large machine in it, and the poster thought something was walking along with them on the other side of it.
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Sep 28, 2015 15:47
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12 Belt Dreagon posted: In 1980 I was working as a crusher operator at Homestake Uranium Mill in New Mexico. The Mill was the oldest mill in the area and of course had several fatal accidents over it's history. There were several places in the mill that were rumored to be haunted, such as a ghostly maintenance man in the filter building who occasionally fixed things, or allegedly the settling tanks were twice drained when two different people swore they saw someone thrashing in the water where a cleaning man had drowned years earlier. But (lucky me) I worked in Crusher building which had the most actually FEARED spot in the mill. The room was called "12 belt". It was an underground bare concrete room, about 20' by 30 ft long, whose only feature was a conveyer belt that ran along one of the 30 foot walls, about five feet from the wall. It had a chute that dumped ore from the crusher, which sat directly above the room on the main floor. The chute extended from the ceiling to the belt and ran the length of the belt, effectively creating a wall that seperated about five feet of the room from the rest. You had to walk around the head of the belt to get to the area between the conveyer belt and the wall. The strange thing is that there is no definate story as to who or what lurked in 12 Belt but unlike the joking and/or teasing that accompanied the other "hot spots" of the mill, people really didn't like 12 Belt. My first clue about that was the fact the room was so brightly lit. In the rest of the mill, about one quarter to one third of the lights were burnt out and people only got around to replacing them when it got to dim to work, but never in 12 Belt. As soon as a light burnt out, it was replaced. When I got transferred to crusher building from the labor pool (called Bull Gang) I naturally started at the bottom of the pecking order. And naturally I was assigned 12 Belt as one of the areas I had to clean. At first impression the only thing of interest was the sound, the crusher on the floor above made this incredibly deep hum that was very loud but so deep pitched that you could barely hear it. Other than that it was a bare, well lit concrete room. I was only in there 5 minutes though before I got the most powerful sensation I wasn't alone. If you have ever had the sensation that someone was watching you, imagine magnifying that to the sensation that someone was almost standing directly behind you staring right down your neck. It was that powerful. After spending several minutes constantly looking over my shoulder, my internal radar seemed to locate the "presence". I "felt" that it was on the other side of the belt in that five foot "alleyway" that was cut off from my vision and the rest of the room. I could also "feel" it begin to slowly move up the belt towards the head pulley where it could come around and be in the room with me. Again, the sensation was so powerful, that even though I was telling myself I was being silly, I was pacing down the belt with my shovel cocked like a baseball bat. When I reached the head pulley, I screwed up my courage and quickly stepped around the pulley and looked down the "alley". There was nothing there. I quickly finished sweeping up, and left. This happened almost every third or fourth night for the next month and a half and I almost considered quitting. Then the crusher operator quit and I applied for his position and got it. So no more 12 belt. While I was operator, they decided to just have different people from Bull Gang come work for us to take my place. One of them, a Navajo, quit on the same night he started for us. He just came up to the control room, visibly upset about something, and told me he was going home. That was all. I later found his shovel and broom where he left them, in 12 Belt. And then came the worst night. (God, I have goosebumps on my arms just typing this) The Bull Gang was short handed so each of the rest of the crusher crew had to divvy up jobs that the laborer was supposed to do. I got 12 belt. There was a big storm going on outside, but since we were inside I barely noted it. When it came time to clean 12 belt, I just gritted my teeth and resolved to be in and out of there in fifteen minutes time, so I went down there and started sweeping. I was somewhere in the middle of the room, when lightning must have hit a transformer and the power went out. Remember, this room is underground, so suddenly I was in absolute blackness, and had no idea which way I had been facing. Worse, I suddenly felt the "presence" even stronger than it had ever been before. All I could do was feel around with my broom until it struck something solid. When it did, I followed it until I felt that I was up against the chute and the belt. The bad part was that I could feel "it" was on the other side of the chute and starting to walk up the belt again towards the head pulley. I paced it about what I felt was half way up the belt and then blindly took an angle across the room to where I thought the stairs should be. When I bumped into the corner of the room, I was momentarily confused, and for a second had the unnerving thought that the stairs were gone. But then I realized I must have walked under them. The problem was that for the first time, I felt "it" finally reach the end of the belt and come around the head pulley for the very first time. It was now in the room with me. Naturally, I was telling myself the whole time to stop letting my imagination make things worse, and to just step forward a couple of paces take 5 paces to my left to where the stairs had to be. I was about halfway through this process, when something "clapped" onto my shoulder. The only way to describe that kind of fear is to say it felt like my spine had disentigrated in an electric explosion. I don't even remember how I found the stairs and got to the main floor. I don't remember if I screamed. My coworker Louis will never forget though, how I ran his rear end completely over when he stepped into the door of the building to yell for me and find out where I was. Even when I finally stopped, it took me several minutes to collect my mind enough to talk coherently. In the end, it was noticed that there was a huge dust smear on my shoulder, and theorized that what probably happened was that dust had caked up on the damp ceiling caused by the rain, and part had fallen off and hit me in the darkness. It is a plausible theory because I had swept up several dust cakes earlier. But I never set foot in 12 belt again. About 2 months later, the mill had a big layoff which I was part of so it never became an issue.
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Drain Lady by Kendrik My father was a military man. Retired back in ’95 from the Navy after 20 years of proud service to our country. But before that, we moved often… every 3-4 years or thereabouts we’d pack up and get shipped somewhere new. Early 1989, a wonderful opportunity arose and dad took it. A 16 hour flight later, and we were stationed at N.A.S Sigonella, Sicily. I guess I was about, ohhh 10 or 11 at the time. Those years were blurred save those pinpricks of memory that still haunt me. That still plague my dreams from time to time. Our first home there was an apartment in a complex called “Bellavista” far from the Naval base. There was a waiting list to move into Base Housing that generally ran for about a year and a half’s wait. Until your time to move, you had to live amongst the locals wherever you could. Bellavista was a beautiful place… we lived on the upper floor of the complex and had a wonderful view of the countryside off our back balcony. At night, one could look up at the night sky and see a thin trail of fiery red lava slowly ebbing from still active Mt. Etna. And in the morning, everything left out in the open was often found to be blanketed ever so slightly in volcanic ash, almost like a light dusting of snow. But naturally, as perfectly nice as Bellavista was, it wasn’t meant for us for long. The lnadlord’s daughter was pregnant, engaged… and homeless. Guess who got the boot? So we moved, with the landlord’s assistance, into another home. Motta S. Anastasia, a little cobblestone-streeted town near Catania, and much closer to the Navy base. The day we drove up to the new place, I felt ill. Of course, nothing was thought of this at the time, but I’d swear in retrospect I was being told something. The place was a 3 story house with an apartment on each floor. I really don’t remember the neighbors, but both were similarly Navy families. And I can imagine I pissed them off a lot with the screaming. Dad unlocked the door and proceeded into the small entryway. The cobblestone street gave way to a marbled floor entrance and a matching set of marble stairs up to the second floor, which was our new home. The place was stunningly beautiful. Marble floors… glass french doors into the living room area… balconies attached to nearly every room, save the one that was to be mine. Claw foot bathtub…bidet… all the modern conveniences expected of a home in Europe. I walked into the room that was going to be mine. Small, simple, square and quite cold. To the left, at the end of the wall was a door covered with a “persiana.” Basically, a form of window blinds made from heavy horizontal flaps that was operated via a cloth strap attached to the wall. I pulled it up to see that the door was mostly glass and beyond it was a very small “room” lined with brick along the floor and walls. I opened the door and stepped into the room and looked up to discover the room extended all the way up through the third floor and up to a hole in the roof. There was no covering on the hole either… it went straight into open air. The shaft allowed a fair amount of light to shine into the only room in the house without a window in it, which I thought was pretty drat cool initially. The chill seemed to come from the room, despite the glaring sun nearly directly overhead. It was then I heard the first whispers. Like… if you were to take a wire brush and softly rub the stiff bristles against your jeans. At the time, I attributed it to echoes off the brick… but I couldn’t help but feel weird about it. It wasn’t coming from any discernable direction or source… but it surrounded me like a blanket, as if sound could be tangible and touchable. It pressed in gently on my ears like pressure on an aircraft ascending or descending. I turned to leave and I noticed a glinting drain in the middle of the floor. It was obviously for rainwater to drain away but my nausea increased when I saw it. My stomach gnawed at itself as I ran out of there and I swear I saw the drain cover jiggle a bit on my way out. I lowered the persiana quickly and rejoined the family in the living room, shaking and sick as a dog. Now granted… a little brick room was far from the norm for paranormal ghosty stuff. But try telling that to whatever was in there. Christ. For weeks and weeks, I’d get up the nerve to open the persiana in broad daylight and risk a peek… only to stumble back from the door sick as all hell to my stomach and trembling. I tried telling my parents of course… but an 11 year old’s ramblings about a scary brick room generally get chalked up to too many “Freddy” and “Jason” movies. The whisperings rarely stopped at night. They were persistent from the time I laid down until I finally forced myself into slumber. Often, I’d wake up in the middle of the night to silence, and then the whisperings would start up again, as if it was waiting to make sure I was awake. There was never any real words to the whispering… just a hollow “ksssh sshhhaww hissssshhhhh haaahhh ooooshhhh aaashhhhh” that seemed to repeat, but never in the same cadence. There was no emotion behind it either that I can remember. It wasn’t angry, it wasn’t sad nor happy. Just there. Always loving there. One night, after about 2 months of this, I was awoken by a particularly horrifying dream. I seemed to start having those dreams after we moved in… I had never had constant nightmares prior. But I awoke from the dream with the feeling that something was terribly, terribly wrong. Immediately my eyes darted to the door… and saw that the persiana was up. Now, European goons with experience, back me up… Persianas are about the noisiest drat things to have in a house. They’re generally metal slats hooked in with metal hooks that grind and squeak loudly in protest as they’re pulled open. There was no way in hell that the persiana, which was always closed, could have been opened without waking up everyone in the house. But sure enough, it was open about 3/4 of the way up the damned door. A bit of moonlight reflected off the bricks in the shaft and into my room with a dull bluish tone. I lay there for hours, paralyzed in my bed, but unable to look away from the door, lest there be something there when I looked back. Eventually, I just conked out… The next morning crept up finally and I was freed from my paralysis. I ran to the door amidst a wave of nausea and pulled the persiana shut as fast as I could. There was a light dusting of volcanic ash on the brick floor and I’d swear I could make out footprints or scuffing in it. Mom, still asleep at the time, yelled at me from across the hall after hearing the noise, but I couldn’t care less. Over the course of the next 3 months, it was the same routine. The whisperings never faltered. The persiana would be found at least 2 to 3 times a week opened, and the blackness of the room would stare out at me in my bed. Then one night, it was different. I still have nightmares of this incident and it makes me cringe and want to curl up in a ball still whenever I conjure it up. I had awoken again in the midst of a terrible nightmare. And sure enough, the persiana was up, but this time it was all the way up. The moonlight was barely filtering in that night, but I’d swear I could make out something there in the room. It felt like I was at just the right angle for me to see whatever it was, and if I were to move the slightest bit, I’d lose sight of it. It was a small sphere that shimmered like a soap bubble does. But it was so faint I could barely make it out. I watched as it hovered there for the longest time. It began to shrink like some TVs used to do when you turned them off… shrink into a tiny dot of light. But before it winked out, it flashed and expanded. It did so at an alarmingly fast rate and solidified into the form of a woman. She looked to be in her early to mid thirties, dark curly hair… definitely a local Sicilian. When she became “whole” and a solid image, she began shrieking and pounding on the glass doors with both fists. Her head swiveled wrong on her neck, shaking back and forth like if you put a teakettle on a stick and shook the stick around. Her eyes were completely black and full of anger and hatred… The skin around her mouth flapped loosely, giving me glimpses of her teeth and tongue and her hair was tossing around violently. Some sort of liquid oozed in small spurts from the corners of her mouth and flecks of whatever it was flew as she shrieked. Her screaming was horrific and nonsensical, and all I could do was scream back. My dad charged into the room to my bed, thinking I was having a nightmare. She shrank back from the door and… ugh. She slithered down the drain somehow. She twisted and distorted and I’d swear I could hear her bones splintering and cracking as she wound herself down into it. It was awful and to this day, dad says he’s never heard anyone scream so inhumanly before. I often ask him jokingly if he meant from me or her. Hazo has a new favorite as of 20:44 on Dec 20, 2015 |
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Abandoned School by Seventhrev I’ve got a pretty long one that I think I’m ready to tell. I’ve lurked here for years on and off but never noticed the ghost story threads until now for whatever reason. It’s a good ten pages in MS Word, so I’ll break it up into chunks, to make it a bit more digestible. The first part is mostly set up, and doesn’t get weird till the end, so I’ll preface it with a little gem of wisdom my grandmother once gave me about night-lights to get into the swing of things and make this post at least worth something. Like many young children, I slept with a night light. We had one in the hall and the bathroom too for night journeys. One summer, my grandmother came to live with us, and took up residence in the room next to mine. I’m not sure why she told me this, but I distinctly remember her saying it just before bed-time one night. She said, “you shouldn’t use a night light.” I of course asked why. She looked at me dead serious and said, “they only let the devil see you better.” Needless to say I never slept with one again, and hated the one out in the hallway enough to shut my door at night. I was probably all of eight years old at the time. Thanks Grandma! Ok, on to the main story: This is an event that happened to my ex-girlfriend and myself along with a few of our friends about 11 years ago. We were all in high school at the time, Juniors all of us but my younger brother who was a freshman and his older Sophomore friend. I had a thing for haunted places, though honestly I really hadn’t done much more than explore some supposedly haunted abandoned house out in the stix. Nothing doing there. My girlfriend, we’ll call her Katie for the sake of privacy, was also mildly into the whole paranormal thing, as were a couple of my friends and my younger bro, Mark. As the story goes, my mother discovered that I was into these kinds of things, and sure enough, so was she. She really enjoyed the whole idea of ghosts and ghouls and such. None of us had really done anything though, that is to say, we’d never actually gone out to a cemetery or haunted house except for me and two of my friends. Now at this time of her life, my mother liked to smoke when things got stressful. However, she tried not to do it often, and she never did it in front of anyone. It was her little secret, even though my brother and I knew it was going on. She’d sneak into the bathroom and turn on the overhead fan and open a window and puff a couple out. We’d always smell it sooner or later, but we played it cool. She could be drinking we figured, so a little cigarette here or there was better than some of the alternatives. Anyways, around that time she was on the verge of divorcing our cheating step-father as well, so things were pretty tense on the home front. He was indeed cheating, and she eventually did divorce him, but after she found out, she allowed him to prove himself, if you will, by ending the affair. Anyways, she’d occasionally just get so stressed with work and her cheating husband, and surely of making dinner and cleaning house and working late at her lovely job and all the other stuff moms do for their families, that she’d just hop in the car and take off. She’d always tell us when she left, and eventually we got used to it. She’d essentially just drive around for a couple of hours, usually out in the boonies, and smoke. It was her way of letting off some major steam. After one of these drives, she came home all excited. She was always in a much better mood after a drive so at first I didn’t think much of it. But she kept looking at me like she wanted to tell me something, get something off her chest, but she was smiling about it so I knew it wasn’t anything terrible. Finally I asked her what was jiving her up so much. She leaned in close, and the smell of cigarettes on her breath, mingled with mouthwash, was overpowering, but I stayed put all the same. “I found an old abandoned school,” she said. At first I didn’t get it. So what? A school? Out in the boonies? And it was abandoned? And then it clicked. She leaned back and smiled. “You wanna check it out?” she asked. My interest was immediately peaked. Of course I did. However, I couldn’t quite accept that my mother was just gonna let me go traipsing around some abandoned building far away from any form of civilization, even if she were chaperoning. I hesitantly nodded, but voiced my aforementioned misgivings about the matter. She promptly said that she knew exactly where it was, and that as long as I took a handful of friends and we all had cell-phones charged and plenty of flashlights and a decent first aid kit, she didn’t mind my checking it out. I could hardly believe it. When she’d found out about my former adventure in the not-so-haunted house out in the stix, she’d nearly launched into the stratosphere. She’d taken my car away from me for a month, she had paid for it after all, and I had to ride the damned bus to school, which was a major shock to my high school junior ego. So here it was, the answer to my previous longings to do something. All I had to do was let her know about it. Of course that seems obvious now, but as a teen the last thing I wanted to do was tell my mom I might be getting up to some trouble. So she agrees to allow me to visit the site, but of course she lays on the Mother pretty thick. If anything, anything at all goes wrong, even a scratch on some rusty metal, she is to be called immediately. Also, all the other parents of my friends involved must be aware of our little outing as well. This was the gotcha. None of my friends parents would agree to such an excursion, especially not Katie’s. However, my mother didn’t ask us to prove all was well with the other parents, so we never asked them. Perhaps a bad decision in the long run, but again, we were all teens, and just because my mother was suddenly open to the idea of us mucking around inside some possibly haunted but mostly nature overrun school, none of my peers parents were likely to be. So, we didn’t tell them, and mom didn’t ask. We decided to visit the school on a Saturday. It would give us plenty of time to check the place out, and we were all hoping that we might actually be able to spend the night there, with a quick call to our parents of course. The plan was to all pile into the van of one of the guys coming along, Joe was his name, and head out around noon. We’d go eat lunch someplace first and then make our way out there, placing us at the school around 2:00 in the afternoon. This way, we figured, we could argue that we’d not had enough time, and we might as well stay the night, if we could. And of course we’d only really be calling my mother. I felt certain she’d let us stay as long as her rules were obeyed. We headed out, grabbed a quick lunch, and got to the place close to the designated time. All was well. My mother had been right when she said the place was way out there. There was nothing for miles around but cornfields dotted with thick tangles of woods. None of us could fathom why there would be a school so far away from anything. I later found out there had been a one street town there, within shouting distance of the school in fact. It had been abandoned after a fire gutted most of it, sparing the school, some forty years previous. None of us knew this at the time, otherwise we might have widened our search, for there were apparently a few old houses and remains of the one street and such in the newly grown woods in the area. We just figured it was a schoolhouse for the farm kids back in the olden times, before we were but a twinkling in our mother’s eyes. For the first hour or so we mostly stuck to checking out the perimeter of the school. It wasn’t massive, but it wasn’t tiny either. It was a good three stories high, rectangular in shape, probably had at least 20-25 good sized rooms in it, including administrative offices and such. It had probably served most of the region, as the city I’d grown up in had been tiny back when the place was built, as were all the surrounding hamlets. I discovered all of this upon doing some research at the public library shortly after our little excursion out to the place. I didn’t find many records for the building, which I thought was strange, but what I did find indicated that it was the main school for some fifty miles in all directions. And the town it was built in had apparently burned to the ground. The school was saved but most of the towns survivors simply moved to one of the neighboring hamlets, which by then were growing enough to warrant building their own schools. So this one gradually fell into disrepair and was forgotten. It was terribly overgrown with vines, bushes, even trees. The western corner was dominated by a massive oak that seemed to have grown right up alongside the building, destroying much of the exterior as it grew. None of the windows had any glass in them, not even shards. There was a bit of graffiti, but it was noticeably scarce. This place was truly off the beaten path. None of us had heard of it from anyone else and there were plenty of similar places, old houses, shacks in the woods, etcetera, in the area that teens ventured out to. The road, if you would call it that, that we drove down to get to the place, was completely overgrown, never been paved, at least that much was clear. We had to park the van halfway down it due to a couple of several year old trees growing in the middle of it. You could see some of the school from the main road that we took to get there. Of course it was barely wide enough for two cars and looked like it hadn’t seen any maintenance in a decade. Joe was not happy about all the potholes he had to caress his van through. The place didn’t initially seem all that daunting to me. It looked like a semi-modern school that had been left alone for a few decades and mother nature had done her thing. I didn’t get goose-bumps looking at it, and as far as I can remember, no one mentioned anything about being creeped out by the place when we first arrived. I was really kind of unimpressed by it at first. Our initial search revealed little. There were remains of a playground area behind the school, mostly just rusted playground equipment, a lot of it unrecognizable due to it’s advanced state of degradation. We did notice what looked like a dilapidated old house, one story tall and probably no more than three or four rooms, off in the distance. But we decided to leave it be for the time being, focusing on the school. The front entryway was completely overgrown with vines. Most of the building was covered in them. My grandfather owns a house in the town I grew up in near there with a similar vine problem. He actually mostly lives in Florida, but spends some time in town to make sure his sons are keeping his family business tip-top. Every summer, he has to either have one of my uncles or a hired crew come and trim down the vines growing all over his house. It’s a yearly battle and the few summers he’s simply let it go led to nothing but damage to the gutters and windows of the house. The vines growing all around this school were the same kind, ones you might find on some stately manor giving it an air of age and pomp. Of course, these vines had seen no attention for years, and were really doing a job on the exterior of the place. What little we could see of the actual exterior was made of limestone and granite, two very abundant rocks in the region. Adam, another of my friends along for the trip, had thought to bring machetes, otherwise we would have had a hard time getting into the place. He had three with him and distributed them amongst our small group. He had one, Alex, a friend of my brothers, had one, and I had one. My brother, Katie, and Joe were equipped with pretty powerful flashlights. We decided that we’d split up into pairs as we explored the place, we all had flashlights of some kind, and at least one of us would have a machete in case some homeless guy or wild animal decided to attack. So, after a look around the outside, we hacked our way through the front doors. The doors themselves were long gone. The clearing of the entry took longer than we expected, we could see the gap and the vines didn’t cover it completely, but they were tough as hell. Finally, we cleared a hole and headed in. We were immediately met by the smell of an ancient rotting building. I wished we had brought some kind of masks or something, because the place was surely toxic. The walls were warped and caving in with mildew and water damage. The floors were slimy in some places, crusty in others, but all around fragile. It’s a wonder none of us stepped through any of them. The front hall was in pretty bad shape, we figured because it had been open to a good deal of exposure with the doors missing. We didn’t notice any remnants of them come to think of it, they were just gone. Most of us had enough sense to bring at least one extra set of clothing with us, except for my younger brother. After hacking our way into the front entry we backed out to retrieve a shirt or some such to wrap around our noses and mouths. They weren’t perfect, and you could still smell the place through them, but they were better than nothing. My brother, being the douche that he can be sometimes, decided that he didn’t need anything anyways, and refused to wrap a t-shirt of mine around his face. I gave it to him regardless and he stuffed in in his back pocket, most of it hanging out, “just in case” he said. By this time it was getting into late afternoon. The month was early October, so the light was going to be failing soon. But we have enough time to get a good lay of the land before we’d have to rely solely on our flashlights, the interior was dim but not dark. We split up. Me and Katie were together of course, my brother and his friend Alex, and Joe and Adam are the final pair. Katie and I decide to head to the top floor, my brother and Alex take the middle, and Joe and Adam poke around the ground floor, with the idea that we’d meet up in an hour or so at the entry way again and each take a different floor. This way we’d all get to see the whole place before it got too dark and we could decide upon a good place to crash for the night, or whether or not it was a good idea to do so at all. So we all head out. Luckily, the stairs had been made of concrete, at least the ones at the entry, so going up to the top floor was not difficult, though the stairs were strewn with several decades worth of debris from storms and peeling ceilings and walls. Katie and I made it to the top floor without too much trouble and started moving through the school. The place was interesting, to say the least. Most of the classrooms still had desks and cabinets and such in them. In the few that we could open, however, we didn’t find anything but rust, mold, and rot. I felt no heebie-jeebies while I was there, at least not till the end. Even Katie remarked that the place was not what she expected. I don’t recall hearing any weird sounds that weren’t explainable by the creaks and groans of an ancient building, nor did I see anything strange; no children running past a doorway, no old schoolmarms eliciting rage upon their former pupils, no silent-hillesque monsters looming out of the shadows. Of course, that was the case at first. Then, for some inexplicable reason, Katie simply disappeared. I say she disappeared because one minute I was checking out the corner of some moldy room, the next I was asking her what she thought of some huge hole in the wall that looked out of place, and she didn’t respond. I looked around and she wasn’t with me anymore. At first I didn’t panic. She’d simply stepped back out into the hallway again, on to the next room. I called for her, no answer. One of the reasons I digged Katie was that shecould play a good practical joke. I was the type of guy who loved pulling one over on a buddy or whoever, and Katie was the first girl I ever dated that actually enjoyed the occasional prank and loved to one up me whenever she could. So of course I figured she’s about to spook my rear end. Nothing to worry about. She’ll jump out at me any second, or feign being injured or whatever to unnerve me. So I call out for her again, kind of playful like I’m onto her. No answer. Typical, I think to myself. She’s just reeling me in. I leave the room I’m in and make my way to the next, glancing over my shoulder every few moments to try to catch her sneaking up on me. I never see her. The next room is empty. The room after that is empty as well. Two rooms later and I’m at a fungus covered wall at the end of the hallway praying that the shirt wrapped around my face will keep all the nastiness out. I check the last two rooms there at the end of the hall and she’s still not around. Now I’m starting to feel the beginnings of anxiety. Usually by this point she would have sprung her trap on me. But no dice. So I carefully backtrack, searching every room again, opening closets where they actually still had hanging doors, looking under rusting and rotting desks, glancing through vine infested windows to make sure she’s not outside looking up with a grin on her face. She is simply nowhere to be found. I checked the entire top floor, as thoroughly as I could. I’m thinking by this point that I need to do what mom asked me to do; call her if anything goes wrong. But I just know that Katie is playing a prank on me. She has to be. How could she just disappear? She had to be somewhere, and wherever that was, she was probably laughing her rear end off about it. But my gut was churning and something was definitely wrong. I held off on calling mom. I figured Katie might have headed back downstairs and outside to do the necessary or something. I found it strange that she wouldn’t have said anything to me about it, but this place was obviously toxic, maybe she had gotten sick and just couldn’t stay long enough to say “hey, I’m out.” So I headed down to the second level along the main stairwell. There were at least two other stairwells going down from each end of the hall at the top level, but I figured I’d have a better chance of catching her down the main one as the side ones were wooden and did not look safe at all. I found Mark and Alex on the second floor, and they hadn’t seen Katie either. Neither of them looked like they were faking to prolong the prank, and Alex actually looked upset. I didn’t take the time to ask him what was up and instead started shouting out Katie’s name. By now I’m getting pretty worried and hoping to hell this better pan out as just one hell of a trick on her part. Still no answer. My brother and Alex and I all head down to the ground floor after a cursory look in all the rooms on the second floor, all pretty worried about Katie. After a few minutes of searching, we find Joe and Adam, and they seem to be pretty bored with the place. They ask what the other floors look like before we get a chance to mention Katie’s disappearance. My bro and Alex just shrug while I blurt out “where’s Katie?” They both look at each other, and then back at me with blank stares. Joe starts to crack a grin and suddenly I feel better and angry all at once. Surely he’s in on it and just can’t hold it back any longer. He’s about to tell me she’s waiting in some closet somewhere close and I just have to keep looking so I can get the poo poo scared out of me by my girlfriend. The joke was going to be, after all, on me. He asks me if I’m kidding him. I freak out and say of course not. He doesn’t get it and I suddenly get very angry. I’m confused and worried and this prick is seemingly playing around with me. I’d had enough of the joke and was about ready to pound his face. He suddenly realized I wasn’t kidding around and got really pale, said he didn’t know where she was, asked if I’d looked everywhere. Of course I had, I told him. But surely I had not. I realized that this place could have a basement. It was then that we heard the scream. It was like nothing I’ve ever heard before in my life. It was obviously Katie, but I’ve never before or since heard anyone scream in that kind of terror. It sent my body into animal mode. Every muscle tensed up, from my rear end cheeks to the cheeks on my face. For a moment all any of us could do was stand there and listen to this banshee wail of a scream. It was petrifying. And then another came. And another. By the time Katie had screamed a third time I was on the move. Halfway down the main hallway I heard what sounded like a large heavy door slam shut. She must have screamed another half dozen times before I finally found her, at the bottom of a stairwell, a level below the ground floor; the entrance to the basement. Ok, I'll go ahead and post the last two parts, figured I'd spread them out a bit for the sake of sanity but, I guess I'll cut to the chase. Here's the second part of our misadventure, the third to follow on it's heels: Things of course got very strange at this point. The stairs, as I mentioned earlier, were wooden here, and looked completely unsafe. I hesitated, but only for a moment as Katie screamed again, before heading down them as lightly as I could. It was also, obviously, pretty dark near the bottom of the stairwell. All three of the upper stories of it were lined with windows, but they had mostly been covered over by the vines on this part of the building, so the whole place was dim. I flicked my flashlight on as I made my way down the one flight to the basement landing, but did not immediately see Katie anywhere. She let out a gurgle of a scream, and then another real peeler. I wondered if her wailing might not bring the stairs down from under me. Finally, I get to the bottom, the other guys are all clustered at the top of the first floor landing looking down at me with pale faces and nervous eyes. None of them seems willing to follow me down, for the moment I didn’t really care. I just wanted to find Katie and get the hell out. And from the sound of her screams she was right there with me. A quick look around the landing revealed that it was just that. A doorway was built into the wall to my right as I left the stairs. The corner of the building was in front of me. There was a little stretch of concrete floor in front of the door that led to a corner on my right. Katie was seemingly over there somewhere. I flashed the light and saw her huddled in the corner where the stairwell came down, as far from the door as she could get. The light obviously startled her because she let out another scream. I started towards her but she got visibly more shaken the closer I got. It was as if she didn’t see me. I say see me rather than recognize me because she really seemed to be looking through me, but not at my face. Clearly, though, she could see me approaching, so it was pretty unnerving. I slowly squat down next to her, and she’s moaning the whole time, still looking through me and not at me. She starts slapping me and scratching me like some wild animal, screaming and kicking and lashing out. She knocked me on my rear end and I went sprawling towards the door. Here eyes got really wide, like she was either finally recognizing me, or something worse was going on in her head, and started moaning again. Her hair was a mess and her clothing looked like it had been torn and was filthy in places. So she is clearly out of her mind. Instead of approaching her I start talking to her, telling her that its just me, her boyfriend, that everything will be all right, that nothing is gonna hurt her, there’s nothing to worry about. After a few minutes of this, she seems to calm down a bit, and finally stops looking through me and at me. Suddenly, and finally, she recognizes me, and just starts sobbing at me. I move in close and she hugs me to her, babbling through her tears about something on the other side of the door. I don’t want to stick around, and of course I need to get her out of there, so I didn’t mess around. I picked her up and trudged up the stairs as fast as I could. She was basically wrapped around me like a little frightened kid the whole time, her legs locked around my waist, her arms around my neck, and holding me in a vice grip. Finally, I get her to the top of the stairs, but she doesn’t let go. I don’t care and push my way through the guys just standing there, like they were statues frozen to the ground. A moment later, we’re all outside in front of the place, the guys just standing around scratching their heads. My brother at least tried to help me comfort her, but she only moans and cries louder when he comes near, so they all just kind of backed off and let us alone for a moment. I manage to get her to loose her monkey grip on me and we sit down in the tall grass, her on my lap with her arms around me under my arms and her face buried in the nape of my neck. And still all she can do is sob and moan a bit. I tried to talk to her about what happened for a few minutes, but she just gets all panicky and says she wants to get the gently caress out of there. All I wanted to do was oblige her, so I hollered at Joe to start up the van so we can head home. I tell Mark to call mom and manage to get Katie to actually stand with me and walk to the van. We all pile in and are about to go when suddenly Katie starts to freak out again. She suddenly shouts “wait!” and we all look at her. I’m still holding her next to me and she’s still shaking all over, and she looks at me and says, “my purse.” I’m a little confused at first, but then I realize she had brought it in with her. I had asked her why at first and she showed me a little first aid kit inside and a bunch of extra batteries. She had emptied out most of the other stuff she normally carried in it but still had her wallet inside. She had told me it was our survival bag with a wink, pointing out a couple condoms as well. At this point, I’m ready to leave the drat thing wherever she dropped it, because she clearly does not have it with her. She would have as well if her wallet hadn’t been in it, I‘m sure. But important stuff was there, some cash, her social security card, her driver’s license, the usual. She didn’t want to leave any of that behind, or have to come back out here and get it later. She was getting much calmer by the minute, happy I’m sure just to be out in the sunlight again, but she refused to leave without the thing. Rather than argue with her I hop out of the van and start making my way back towards the school, machete and flashlight in hand. I figured at least one of the other guys would follow me in, my brother maybe. I looked back and they’re all still sitting there in the van staring at me like I’ve got tentacles growing out of my eyes or something. I gesture at them to follow me and Joe leans out the window and shouts, “she’s your girlfriend man, I ain’t going back in there!” Everyone else shares the determined-to-stay-put look on their faces. By now, I really don’t give a gently caress. I haven’t seen or heard anything weird other than my girlfriend freaking the hell out. So I head back in. This is when I do actually begin to feel the heebie-jeebies. The whole place just felt oppressive. I didn’t notice it at first, or brushed it off for as my own internal worry for Katie, but halfway down the hall to the stairwell, around the same spot I had previously heard what must have been the basement door slamming, it started feeling really bad. It was like a bad case of acid reflux or something. My stomach started churning and I felt like I was still carrying Katie, like something was pulling down on my shoulders. Still, I persisted. It’d take me no more than another three minutes to get down there, grab her purse, which was probably right where I had found her sitting, and jet out. Then I started thinking about that basement door. I hadn’t really paid much attention to it before. I’d just sized up my surroundings, homed in on my girlfriend, and forgotten about where I was for the sake of getting her out of there. But as I made that last little jot to the stairwell, it dawned on me that I had actually heard a door slamming. My mind started to wander, and I tried to place it into a nice snug little box of logic. Maybe a door down the other end of the hall had been blown shut, or on at higher floor. The thing is, none of the rooms that any of us investigated had any doors on them. There were of course large metal and wooden cabinets in most of the classrooms, so surely it had been one of them. But my brain still insisted that this had sounded like a large door, not a cabinet, being slammed shut. And of course, the only real door I had seen so far was the one in the wall of the basement landing. I don’t really consider myself some kind of tough guy or anything. Never been in a fight, not even with my brother. I get scared just like anyone else I’d imagine. I can’t stand deep water, even if I can see right to the bottom of it, in fact that makes it worse. And spiders freak me out. But for whatever reason, I kept pressing on. Katie would not let it go if I left her stuff behind, and I’d likely have to make another trip out there to get it to make her happy. So I just kinda sucked it up and plowed forward. I resolved to get that purse so I could be rid of the place and that was that, screw the tension in my neck and the weight on my shoulders. The oppression of the place did seem to lighten a bit as I mustered my courage, and I found myself at the top of the staircase peering down into the gloom below. And the final part. (This all took place in South Central Indiana, and really that's as much as I want to say about the location.) I start making my way down the steps, a little more carefully this time. The sound of the wood creaking under me is really noticeable now without the screaming and sobbing to drown it out. I figure I’ll be lucky if I don’t slip this time on a well rotted step or patch of mold, or worse, step through the wood. I’m about halfway down and moving the light around on the steps below me, not paying much attention to the landing below so as not to loose my footing, when suddently the sound of the van’s horn honking makes me want to climb the walls and shout bloody murder. Joe honks again as I realize what I’m hearing, and anger washes over me. Now I’m not scared at all, just pissed, and off balance. I started moving down the stairs a bit faster. I’m nearly to the bottom when suddenly I feel what must have been fingers pinch my Achilles tendon on my right foot. This time I actually do jump, because now something is screwing with me. It’s not a car horn or weird smell or the weight on my shoulders, it’s someone’s fingers on the back of my foot. They were only there for a moment, but they pinched pretty hard, enough to bruise when I checked it out later. I thought I’d go toppling over, but managed to right myself and rush down the last remaining steps. I wheel around and without much searching find that there is a pretty good sized hole between two steps a ways up, right were my foot had been when I got the pinch. The hole looks large enough for me to stick my own hand through so I figure there has got to be someone down here with me. I side-step towards the door to my left now and shine the light on the wall of the descending staircase. Of course, there is a hatch there. However, it has a lock built into it. No handle or anything, just a flat little square door in the wall that previous tenants of the school probably stored something behind. I’m pretty amped up, and starting to get scared all over again. The place really seemed to be pushing down on me once more. But I don’t care if there is someone back there or not. I just want to grab Katie’s poo poo and get out. So I pass the light over the ground where Katie had been squatting, she was pretty close to the hatch actually, and there’s nothing there but some leaves and twigs and debris seemingly from past flooding. This is when I notice the door I’m standing next to is actually open, just a bit. It was enough to really get my blood pumping. I hadn’t paid too much attention to it before, as I said above, but I had been pretty sure the thing was closed. And of course I had heard something slamming down here. Maybe it had been the hatch in the wall under the stairwell, to this day I’m still not really sure. It could have been anything. But nonetheless, as I stood there in the murky light cast from the vine-crowded windows above and the slight glare of my own flashlight, I couldn’t help but feel truly pit-of-the-stomach scared. I broke out in a cold sweat staring at that door, wondering what the hell might be beyond it and why Katie’s purse wasn’t right here. I hadn’t managed to get anything out of her before I’d trudged back in other than her babbling about something on the other side of the very door I’m standing in front of. Again, I wonder if she had been talking about this door or the hatch. Regardless, I’m freaked. But I just stand there for a moment. I still need to find her damned purse, and I’m not quite ready to give up. I’m just overreacting, I tell myself. There is nothing down here but rotting wood and dripping pipes and a pile of leaves in the corner. Everything is cool. Find the purse, and get the gently caress out, yelling and making GBS threads yourself as you do it if you have to, but do it. So I steel myself for a moment, and finally reach out for the door. Slowly, I pull it towards me, shining the light around it as soon as I can. Thankfully, nothing jumps out at me. But the feeling of weights on my shoulders intensifies again. So for a moment I just stand there with the door open, moving the light slowly through the room before me, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness ahead as best they can. Clearly, this was some kind of maintenance room. I see brooms against the far wall, an ancient mop bucket with a molding mop in it next to a huge porcelain sink covered in black cracks along one of the side walls to my left. To my right is a jumble of junk, a lot of it unrecognizable. The place looked like it had been inundated a few times and I could only guess that the pile of stuff I was looking at was old decaying boxes of books. The place stank far worse than any of the other rooms we’d been in up till then. Without really thinking of anything but finding that damned purse, I move into the room quickly, shining my light to the left and right, ready for something to jump out at me. Nothing does. This is when I notice the light coming from under the door on the far wall. Either my eyes adjusted to the gloom, or someone or something had actually just turned on a light on the other side of that door. It was really dim, and my immediate thought was that it had to be candle light because it seemed to fade in and out a bit as if it were flickering. There wasn’t a window in the door or anything like that. I of course flashed my light over on it. It was a large metal door, rusting pretty badly. But it looked thick as hell, and not yet ready to give up the ghost and fall off it’s hinges or crumble to nothingness. I could only imagine horrible things behind it, but it was probably the door to the boiler room or some such. For a moment, I dared not move. Then the purse came to mind again and I made a cursory search of the room I was in along the floor to find it. This, however, was as far as I was going to look. I had made up my mind about that if nothing else. I couldn’t stop looking at the other door while I searched the room once more with my light, and that almost not-there light was still seeping out from under it. I had made up my mind to finally check out when I heard what sounded like a bolt being thrown. I jerked my flashlight up towards the door, frozen in place. I felt like I was underwater or something, the pressure on my shoulders was palpable, and my ears started ringing and popping, as if I were driving down a really steep hill. Even my stomach felt like it was up in my throat. All I really wanted to do was bolt, but momentarily, I could do nothing but stand there like a deer in the headlights, shining my light on that door and waiting for whatever it was that was going to happen to happen. I have no idea how long I stood there, but it surely wasn’t long, because before I knew it I was leaping up the stairwell and breezing down the hallway to the entryway of the building. I burst out into the sunlight, dazzled by the brightness, though it was overcast, and made a bee-line for the van without taking a second look back. The guys inside could clearly see that I was freaked out and Joe started it up as I approached. I hopped in and we tore rear end out of there. Back on the main road, Joe suddenly didn’t mind the pot-holes so much and we were halfway home before we knew it. My brother finally looked around his seat at me and Katie, now clutching each other, and asked us both what the hell had happened. We both just looked up at him. Katie finally said, “not now Mark.” We drove the rest of the way in silence. She didn’t even mention her purse. The look on my face and my behavior must have told her it was gone and there was no going back to that place because she never did bug me about it again. Whew! This has turned out longer than I figured it would. Anyways, a few days go by, and we don’t mention a word of anything about the school to anyone. My mother is noticeably concerned when we get home, but I told her nothing at the time. Eventually she stopped bugging me about it, just glad nothing truly bad happened. Finally, after a few quiet nights just hanging out together and watching the television in my basement, Katie and I decide to talk to at least one another about what happened. She refuses to tell me anything until I tell her what happened to me. So I lay it all out for her. Her eyes open wide and she kinda nods when I mention the pinch on the back of my foot. I finish telling her about the way I felt and the room behind the door and the hatch and the light and the bolt sliding, and she is pretty shaken up. So she starts to tell me about what happened to her, slowly and almost pleadingly at first. And bit by bit, her story really starts to freak me out all over again. So we had been up on the top floor, and sure enough, she’d gotten it into her head that she’d prank me. So while I was distracted she ducked out of the room we were in and rushed down the hallway to the top of the stairwell at the end of the building. She figured she’d head down it and jump out at me as I came down either it or the middle stairwell from around a corner or something. The steps are pretty bad of course so she has to take her time, but she doesn’t want to get caught either. She said she can’t really explain why, but for whatever reason, she didn’t want to stop at the second floor landing. She could hear my brother and his friend, but they seemed to be down at the other end of the hall, so it’s not that she’s worried they’ll find her, she just has this impulse to head down to the ground floor and get me there instead. So she kept moving down. By now I was actively looking for her and was nearing the other end of the building. She got to the first floor landing without incident, but as she’s arriving, she says she sees light ahead and below in the stairwell leading to the basement level. She figures its Joe and Adam and thinks she can maybe get a twofer and scare the poo poo out of them too. So she begins moving down the stairs. As soon as she does so, the light she saw goes out. She said she actually hesitated at that point, but still figured it was Joe and Adam, they’d probably heard her and were waiting or something. So she kept going, not bothering to turn on her flashlight so that she might still creep up on them. Near the bottom of the stairs, she starts to get that same weighted feeling that I described to her, like something was sitting on her shoulders. But she presses on. On the very step that I received my pinch on, she got something much worse. She claims what felt like a hand wrapped around her entire ankle and yanked back. She went toppling down the last half dozen stairs and landed in a heap, apparently knocked unconscious from the fall. This is where it gets really terrifying. She finally comes to, who knows how long later, but it couldn’t have been too long as it only took us ten, maybe fifteen minutes to eventually find her. By this time myself and my brother and Alex are down on the ground floor making our way to Adam and Joe. So she’s laying there in the darkness, wondering what the hell just grabbed her and starting to get freaked out, when she realizes she’s not at the bottom of the steps where she should be. She’s back in the corner where I found her, next to the hatch under the stairs. She can kind of make out the door to the right, and it is clearly wide open. The hatch is also ajar in such a way that she can look in at the darkness beyond. I’m really not sure that I can do this part any justice, I’m glancing over my shoulder just typing it down. The whole ordeal sends shivers up my spine every time I willfully recall it and I’m probably not going to sleep for poo poo tonight. It won’t be the first time, but at the very least this will hopefully be somewhat cathartic. So she’s sitting there in the dark, and is stone cold petrified to move. If Adam and Joe are trying to freak her out they are obviously doing one hell of a bang up job. She decides to try to get up and find her flashlight, which isn’t anywhere near her that she can tell, and get the heck out of there. She has made up her mind that spending the night is out of the question and she just wants to go home and slip into a warm bath or something, shake this place off and forget about it. This is when she notices the eye in the opening between the door of the hatch and the wall. For a moment all she can do is stare at it. She said it was pretty small, and the face surrounding it, though covered in shadows, seemed to be terribly wrinkled. She doesn’t remember a mouth of any kind but just telling it to me she broke out into tears again and once more wrapped her arms around me on the couch, shaking and sobbing a bit. It was just one eye, small and black. It didn’t glow or wink or anything like that. It had whites, but not much, otherwise she figured she might not have seen it at all. Suddenly, the hatch closes and she hears the lock turning. She’s not into full out screaming mode yet but she says by this point she started to get audible, letting out little chokes of air and sucking them back in as if she couldn’t breath. Who could blame her. Her ordeal was not over. Now she notices that the light she’d seen earlier is back, and it’s coming from the room beyond the open doorway to her right. She looks up and begins to finally start screaming. Standing there were two figures, one about a foot taller than the other, but both small. She figures the small one was no more than a couple feet tall, and the other, maybe three, three and half feet in height. They both appear to be wearing some kind of dark heavy textured robes of some kind, like sack cloth, but black as pitch. They’ve got hoods on and are just standing there staring at her. They instantly make her think of the single eye she saw not a moment before, for these things, though their pasty colored faces are in pretty deep shadow due to the hoods and general gloom of the place, are horribly wrinkled. They have mouths but without lip structure of any kind, like narrow slits in their oval faces. And the eyes were just like the one she had seen in the hatch, black middles with a sliver of whites around them. One of them had what might be a nose, some kind of protuberance at least, but the other had just a flat spot with a single black hole in the middle where it’s nose should have been. They had hair but it was stringy and tangled, though long, as it poured out of the hoods they wore and down their fronts. The hair on both was jet black by her recollection. Suddenly one of them flicks on her flashlight and is moving it around, looking at it, making the light dance all over the walls. The other seems only a bit interested, and they both take their gaze off of her for a moment, but eventually the taller one looks back at her while the smaller one clicks the light on and off repeatedly. Then it shines the light right in her face for a moment before turning it off again for good. Of course by this point, she can’t hold back the screams any longer, and starts really belting them out. And the things both start to move towards her, kinda shuffling a bit. She doesn’t remember seeing their feet or hands or anything else, the black robes covered them up pretty well. Her first instinct is to toss her purse at these things before they can get to her, and luckily, it was still around her neck and shoulder. So she yanks it off and chucks it at the two figures. They instantly retreat out of sight. She kind of curls up into a ball in the corner and plants her face in her knees and just screams, hoping to God one of us gets there soon. When I arrive with my light, she thinks I’m one of them again which is why she started bashing me, but finally when I start talking to her realizes it’s just me. She doesn’t remember hearing the door in the basement slam shut. From there she doesn’t remember much until she was back in the van, realizing that she had just flung her purse at these things in the doorway. She’s not thinking clearly, and all her mind can latch onto is that she has to have her purse back. It was like she needed it for comfort or something, some kind of way to ground herself again. If she could get it back, then maybe she didn’t throw it after all. Maybe none of it happened and she just tripped on the way down the stairs and had one hell of a nasty concussion-induced nightmare. By the time I get back and she can see the way I look and that I have no purse with me, she just went into lock-down mode, like I myself did, for a few days straight. She claims that she actually had to make her mother let her sleep with her while her father slept on the couch for weeks after. They were pretty pissed with me and let me know about it every time I came over to pick her up or called asking for her. It’s a wonder I guess that they didn’t just keep us apart, but she seemed to be better around me, I knew I felt better around her, just being close to someone who had gone through something similar. As far as I know, she never told her parents what actually happened, or anyone else for that matter. I ended up telling my mother and brother, and he told his friend Alex who let the other two guys in on what had gone down, but they didn’t spread the story around to anyone else as far as I know. They were all pretty shaken up about it as well. We rarely spoke of that day and they never pushed me to tell them myself what Katie and I went through, thank God. The story mostly ends there. Katie later told me that she would occasionally wake up from nightmares where she could see the two figures coming at her from her closet doorway. I was really thankful that I had seen nothing of the sort myself, but still had my own similar nightmares. Over time, we grew apart, and eventually broke up the summer before our senior year. We hung out a few times that year but really, our previous comfort in one another seemed to just grow into a sense of dread. I hate to say that this thing pushed us apart, but I really think it did. She became really dejected and quiet, completely unlike she’d been before, and I just felt strange around her. It sounds cowardly I guess, but I just didn’t want to deal with it anymore and was the one to break it off. I felt like a huge jerk doing it, but like I said, our relationship had really soured in the months since going out to see the abandoned school. I have no idea what eventually became of Katie after high school. Hopefully she’s well. I still have nightmares about whatever those things were, not so much lately, but for years they haunted me as I’m sure they did her. Anyways, it feels kind of weird to get it off my chest. I’m not sure that I feel any better about it, but things have gotten better since then, so I shouldn’t be too worried I guess. So there it is, my long rear end creepy ghost story, or ghoul story, or whatever you want to call those things in the basement. Hazo has a new favorite as of 20:45 on Dec 20, 2015 |
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Dec 20, 2015 20:42
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