Ghost stories please..

Yes, as much as I'm fascinated by these videos, the important thing is I don't live there!

V.C. Brunswick said:

One thing that's been spooking me out a little lately is sometimes when I come home at night I'll find the lights on either in the front bedroom that serves as my office or the bathroom across the hall when I'm 100% CERTAIN that I turned them off when I left.

Click to expand...

Check your closet!

(see enclosed links)

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,360427,00.html
http://boingboing.net/2009/12/09/woman-whod-been-secr.html

V.C. Brunswick said:

One thing that's been spooking me out a little lately is sometimes when I come home at night I'll find the lights on either in the front bedroom that serves as my office or the bathroom across the hall when I'm 100% CERTAIN that I turned them off when I left.

Click to expand...

Try this...booby trap the doors with a very small wedge of something like a toothpick, that would only fall if the door had been opened....that or you can hunt down all the powder items in your home, take them with you so no one else can "fix" this if you do it, but then sprinkle powder near door openings and see if you find any foot step traces....if not and the problem continues, call Father Merrin and have him do his thing!

Oh yes, another thing that you can try, leave a very large grumpy dog in your place....

Glad to find this thread and it's been great reading it. I started a sort of related thread last year, Ghosts of the Golden Era, if anyone's interested:
http://www.thefedoralounge.com/showthread.php?55407-Ghosts-of-the-Golden-Era&highlight=
X
BD

My favorite ghost story has always been the Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving... a classic.

Also Teague O'Kane and the Corpse, another chilling tale that is best told in person.

As far as personal ghost stories, my father owned a home in Portola Valley California that was once an old hunting lodge. The place was filled with a haunted presence. The living room had a nine foot wide fire place, tall enough to stand in. There was a pipe organ at one end and the beams of the room were made from an old schooner. If you had a fire, the beams would warm and start shifting, creaking like a ship in a storm. If you sat at the fire long enough, you'd swear there were other people with you, a muffled step, a slight cough, a rustle of clothing and always a slight smell of cigar smoke and brandy.

We were at my friend's place yesterday, we were all round cheering her up because her mum passed away 4 weeks ago.. It was say gone 12 ish, and we were all up having a bottle of wine. My friend was feeding her 6 week old with a bottle of milk she had just made when someone suggested if they could have a cigarette...I said that they would have to wait until the baby had been fed and was put back up in their room (smokey atmospheres not good etc etc) but as I was mid explanation we heard something fall in the hallway. Me and a friend went out to investigate it and the glass lampshade (that screws into the ceiling) and sheered off and was sat on the floor...? It really freaked us out.

hellsbellslolly said:

We were at my friend's place yesterday, we were all round cheering her up because her mum passed away 4 weeks ago.. It was say gone 12 ish, and we were all up having a bottle of wine. My friend was feeding her 6 week old with a bottle of milk she had just made when someone suggested if they could have a cigarette...I said that they would have to wait until the baby had been fed and was put back up in their room (smokey atmospheres not good etc etc) but as I was mid explanation we heard something fall in the hallway. Me and a friend went out to investigate it and the glass lampshade (that screws into the ceiling) and sheered off and was sat on the floor...? It really freaked us out.

Click to expand...

Thomas Edison "now" decides to take a vacation to England....

Here's an interesting photograph that was taken in 1996 at Boot Hill in Tombstone, Arizona.





The photographer (a descendant of Ike Clanton of OK Corrall fame) discusses the photo with a psychic.
[video=youtube;pMimsnk4Ql4]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMimsnk4Ql4&feature=player_embedded#![/video]

That's really weird!!

Geez, maybe there is a "Casper"...?

LoveMyHats2 said:

Geez, maybe there is a "Casper"...?

Click to expand...

And he is packin heat!

Regarding the Boot Hill photograph. I have dozens and dozens of old VHS tapes. Some twenty years ago I was taping some movie or TV show and when I played it back I found a similar-looking anomaly. I never edited out the commercials so when I was fast forwarding I caught a promo for the ten or eleven o'clock news that night. In it the anchorwoman is sitting in the empty newsroom of the TV station giving a brief summary of the day's news. Behind her near one of the desks is what appeared to be the head and shoulders of a man that didn't look like it was really part of the background. The man was wearing a red shirt and vaguely resembled the young Elvis. Now it could have been a poster or a cut-out sitting on the desk but it was very bright while the newsroom was dimly lit. I'll have to go through my tapes to find it.

I do honestly think there are "spirits", souls, of people that "hang around" in our dimension after they have died.

Studies (not the ones showcased by idiotic television series for mere entertainment purposes) but real studies have been done, in some rather strict scientific conditions, as to what happens when a person actually dies. Stanford Medical University once was deeply involved with finding what they could about a "physical" element or existence of what we commonly call our spirit.

They had a few volunteer patients that allowed being placed into a sealed container at the death moment. The container was being monitored by many instruments, including an "atomic scale" that would have registered the very smallest amount of weight change. It was found in some conclusion that within a day or so, the human body weighs less. The study takes into consideration that water we retain may disperse however it would still be in the container and have the same overall weight. The question and maybe some answers they had been seeking is, what was the "weight" of the soul? What may the soul be made of? Electronic information imprinted within a human and the mind, that when it would leave the body at death, travel to some other dimension? Although there is no total proof to conclude a fact finding truth, they did have some facts that are without question. The human body houses information (perhaps in a very similar way a computer has programs installed), and that there may be in part, an unknown "thing" we could call a soul that is connected to this program ( our memory, etc.) and that what ever it is, leave the body and goes some place we have no idea of where it went, scientifically of course.

We read of many things that are on the brink of showing there is some truth to people being dead briefly and having what is called, out of body experiences. If one could travel "out of body" and observe, and recall, it had to be placed into the memory of that same "item" the researchers at Stanford were dealing with.

What we know is so very limited to date. Humans are still learning more and more all the time. Maybe some time soon, we will have some really good facts to know the entire story.

Well my father is convinced he saw a ghost when he was about fourteen. He was living in a house where an old man had been neglected(allegedly) and died. Dad's room was on the second floor and remembers something catching his attention in the window one night. So he looks and there is an old man's face in the window. Stays for a few seconds and then is gone.

I have a story that isn't a ghost story but one that scared the living daylights out of me.

I had recently moved in with a friend I knew from the Marines in Lakeville Mass. It's a fairly rural, woodsey area south of Boston (sounds impossible, huh?). The house is on a two-lane road which is actually more like a lane and a half. Not many houses and the ones that are there have the property lines divided by old stone walls.

Well, one night after work I decide to go for a walk and check out the area. I start walking, enjoying the solitude and scenery and the road decends into a small hollow with a cranbery bog on the left about a mile from the house when I notice a couple of things. One, it's getting dark, and two, there are no street lights. So I turn around for home and in no time I can't see a thing. I mean almost nothing. The only thing I can discern is that the "sky" over the road is SLIGHTLY brighter than the complete black surrounding me. This is the only indication that keeps me from blundering around in the dark. Now I start thinking about the Salem witch trials and other dark thoughts(I know, I know). I'm in my own dark universe when to my right I hear a low growl. My mind screams HOUNDS OF HELL! and then I scream the loudest scream I'm capable of (and I can be very loud).

Well I must of scared the hounds back to perdition because I was not attacked. I did quicken my pace and tried looking over my shoulder although I couldn't see a thing and soon I could see the lights of my place shining in the distance.

I didn't calm down for about an hour after I walked in the door.

I suppose the family ghost story is a common one. Driving down a deserted road you stop to offer a ride to a lone man walking down the road. After a few miles he asks to be let out. Driving on you realize that you have never seen the man before. Getting home no one else knows who the hitchhiker is and others have had similar experiences. The name of the road is "El Desaparecido" the disappeared one. Some how El Desaparecido wears the same clothes and talks about the same things.
When I was a kid and we went to visit relatives in South Texas when we drove past a certain road my dad would point it out and say "Por hay anda El Desaparecido, there is where the disappeared one walks, evoking silence from a previous rowdy brood in the back seat of the Chevy Bel Air.

Had a 'mystery' beer can the other night at my place. I had a friend over and we were shootin' the breeze. I had grabbed a beer for myself, and in my thoughtlessness, almost slammed the door on my buddy. He grabbed himself a beer and we were chatting. We went into my 'phone room' to sit down and noticed a can of beer sitting on the end table next to my chair which mysteriously rocks back and forth now and then. Can't explain how it got there, as we both had only had the one beer.

About an hour later, I picked up the beer, it was still cold, took a drink, hadn't gone flat, so it hadn't sat out for days (I thought perhaps I had forgotten it from the night before, unlikely, because I'm a bit of a neat freak) Didn't scare me, just odd. My buddy decided it was a haunt.

I was at Mom and Dad's on Sunday and there's a shadow that goes across their bedroom all the time that looks like a person. Sure enough, I was sitting there and saw it clear as day.

My sister and her family have just returned from a few years living in Singapore. Their house - a lovely two story home, with beautiful large, open spaces, marble floors and a wooden staircase - had last belonged to a young couple. The husband had recently died when his car crashed into a tree, and my sister briefly met his widow.

I visited them about eight months after they moved in, in August – my friend and I slept in one of the children’s room, belonging to my niece and her toddler brother who was still in a crib. During the time I was staying there, I became very ill and had to spend a lot of time in bed. I spent a disturbed night when I noticed a light doing something strange that I can’t quite describe, and one afternoon was wakened by sleep by a fingers plucking at my arm. Later, I was witness to my niece saying she didn’t want to go to bed because “I’m scared of the things that are in the lights in my room.” I stayed quiet, but some weeks after returning home, I asked my friend if she thought there was anything “odd” about the house. She paused thoughtfully, and told me that sometimes when she was sitting downstairs with my father (who was also visiting at the time) they’d both turn at the same time as if someone was just coming down the stairs, and she felt watched from the staircase. I told my mother, who went very quiet and said “don’t tell your sister.”

The next August, my sister became quiet distraught and rang my mother – her daughter had come to her in the middle of the night saying she’d been bitten by something, and to my sister’s horror, she was bleeding from a small mark on either her arm or leg. Examining the bed, all she could find was a small pair of tweezers, and she tried to work out if that could have caused the injury. She put the child back to bed…only to have the same thing happen the next night. And the next. And her older son was bitten as well. My sister was becoming rather frantic, but finally the culprit was found – a rat was coming in every night and biting them. Now, this was curious behaviour – it’s not unheard of for rats to bite sleeping children, but usually they attack children who are weak, malnourished or living in unhygienic conditions. This rat had to navigate up a set of stairs night after night to bite her – there was no food or incentive for the rat to go up there, nor did the house have any previous problem with vermin. They set a trap and caught it, but my sister was so shaken that she arranged for a “blessing” of the house.

I visited once more, the following year – an overnight stay on my way back from Europe. We were sitting there talking, and my sister asked her daughter to tell me about the “ghosts” in her room. It wasn’t a specific story, but my niece assured me that she saw ghosts in her room moving around.

Earlier this year, my sister and her husband decided to pack up stakes and return to Australia. My mother had a long conversation with her, and my sister said she was not going to miss the house – she thought there was something very wrong with it. Apparently, the reason she moved the youngest child from the crib to another room (he was originally in the room I’d slept when I saw odd lights) was that he would wake up in the middle of the night and stand up in his crib screaming that something was “pulling” at him. I had never told her about the thing that tugged at me.

Their maid, while sorry to see them go, was also relieved to be out of the house and told them so. Just before leaving the country the family took a holiday, leaving her in charge. She spent a terrifying night with the sound of footsteps going up and down the stairs and whispering voices – in fear that she retreated to her room, locked the door and spent the night on her mobile phone to a friend who told her to turn up music to drown the sounds out.

I didn’t tell my sister that I had thought something was wrong with the house until after she was back home in Australia. She took it very calmly – said there were reasons Singapore was supposed to be the most haunted country in Asia, and recounted a story a friend had told her about another house in the neighbourhood, where during a dinner party things had been simply moving around the room.

It was my friend who pointed out to me that the incidents during our visit, and the following year with the rat attacking the children, both took place during August when many locals celebrate the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts.

We have friends in the shed.....it's been a very interesting few months for this sceptic...

[video=youtube;dgcKMQhNYfo]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgcKMQhNYfo[/video]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWQbOCC1LD8&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2knQ7ig4Y0&feature=related