The Spooky Tales Thread

Off-topic Chatter
1

Ever had a spooky adventure? An out of the ordinary occurrence? A funny weird adventure? A good campfire tale?
Post your tale.
Let’s limit this to stuff that has actually happened to you.

I’ll start.
Out west of us is a place we used to go rock climbing. It is part of a road side park. But there are no facilities at all other than a few pick-nick tables and no one but a few of us ever camped there.

It was a stagecoach stop as well as a stop on one the old Native American trails that runs from Mexico up into the rest of the norther parts of the US.

Supposed to be haunted.
Well, several times while camping there, an odd sound is heard during the dark hours.
It’s sort of a Humm Huh Ha Humm Ha Ha. Kind of like a muffled chuckle - sort of laughing sound.
Nobody knew of any critters that made that kind of sound.
But we always suspected some sort of nocturnal flying thingy.
Or perhaps the tormented lost soul of someone – who was put to death by having to listen to bad jokes?

It would often start near by and then move across the field and up the cliff face. Or so it would seem.
We could never see anything. This was back when a 4 D cell mag light was state of the art.
It always happened when there was no moon showing – or so we thought.
It happened often enough that several of us heard it.

One time I positioned my van that was topped with a bunch of KC daylighters ready to light up the night. I sat awake in the open van waiting.
The campers signaled and I lit up the field. Never saw a thing.

To this day we still don’t know. But it would surly make the hairs on the back of your neck stand at attention whey you heard it.

All the Best,
Jeff

2

I sleep with the head of my bed against the wall in the corner of my room. If I were to lay back spreadeagled on the bed my left hand would be in the corner where the bed meets it.

One night I woke up and in my groggy state became convinced that something was inhabiting that tiny corner. I have a vague memory of weight and something watching and I was afraid to look in the corner. I don’t remember if my hand was in the corner at the time. Anyway, I figure this was probably a low-grade sleep paralysis demon.

I wish horror movies were even half as effective for me as that half-waking moment—most of them utterly fail to elicit any type of fear response in me. Recommendations for actually-creepy horror movies are welcome! (btw, gore is not scary on its own)

3

Yeah, most of the new ones substitute gore for actually frights.
Who didn’t jump at the Hitchcock shower scene, the Jaws through the bottom hole in the boat scene, or the Wait Until Dark - Leap - not dark moment.
Even the low budget films like the original “The Thing” had it’s moments - at least when I was a little kid and it fist came out.
All the Best,
Jeff

4

woke up at ~1AM because our piano was playing.

not a dream…real notes, sort of like “scale” practice.
all of us have seen the old movies where the organ
starts playing all by itself….well, since i was 11 at
the time…i wanted to see that!
however, when i opened my bedroom door,
Mom was already in the lead to our living room,
and there was our cat, Bobbie (not Bobby) walking
up and down the keyboard. my baby sister forgot
to let Bobbie out for the night.
baby sister was grounded.

5

Had an eerie incident just today, in fact.

Was sitting in the living-room, and all of a sudden the hallway door just opened. Not slow-motion as if it just drifted open, but “fast” as if someone were walking in from outside and manually opened the door.

I’m like, wtf??, and look. No cats around. Last time I even went into the hallway was the night before to put out the trash for pickup, and I saw both cats many times during the day, so no one got locked in there.

The door doesn’t close all the way (frame’s a bit out-of-square), so you gotta push it and wedge it closed. To open it, you similarly gotta give it a decent pull.

Other asides. Solid main door was closed and locked. Storm door was closed and locked. Still has the (plexi?)glass in it vs screen, so no chance wind would’ve gotten through to push it open. Window was open (screen), drape wasn’t moving at all, bush in front was also not moving at all.

So? Was writing off anything that might’ve nudged the door open, and nothing. Even just unwedging it and letting it go on its own, it’d just slooooowly drift open, and not open as if done deliberately.

I’m still at a loss. Pretty eerie.

Late now, but remind me about The Alien and I’ll write it up. :laughing:

6

Forgot about this till I read LBs story. Back in the 70s.
In my folks house there was an old B&W TV that the power (analogue) quite working.
So I bypassed it and made an external little box with a toggle switch rescued from a dead vacuum cleaner.

One night when home from college I heard a noise. People talking.
Went down stairs and the TV was on. Weird. My folks wouldn’t do that, but perhaps they just plain forgot.

Neither of them had woken up and they were closer to the TV than my bedroom.
This happened twice more while I was there.

Made me crazy. So I replaced the switch I made with another.
This stopped the phenomenon - at least until I went back to college.

TV died soon after and my folks never made mention of this weirdness.
All the Best,
Jeff

7

Had a backyard campfire last night. 3 of us saw green and red lights in the field that meets the lawn. No explanation.

8

For a short time, my immediate family (Mom, dad, big bro, myself) moved in with my father’s parents. G-pa and G-ma lived in the family home in the city. It is a very large house, biggest on the block, a two story affair built in the early 1900’s. It was split into a two family dwelling in the 60’s after my great grandparents who lived on the upper floor had passed.

My uncle and his family lived upstairs in the separate apartment portion of the dwelling. My family resided on the first floor with the Grands.

It was a nice bright summer day in 1992, late morning. My uncle and his wife were gone for the day (work). My two cousins were out somewhere in the neighborhood. My dad was at work. G-pa and G-ma were out doing something for their church. Mom was home, in the living room, watching “Days of our Lives.” My big brother and I were in the dining room, which shares a common wall and entryway with the living room, playing a command line entry type “Destroyer Commander” PC game on an “ancient” MSDOS run computer. Absolute cutting edge…at the time.

We had our backs to the rest of the dining room, including the aforementioned entry into the adjoining living room. Being an old and well settled domicile it had its share of creeks and groans which we were all familiar with. There were three exterior doors to which you could gain entry to this floor of the house, they all had sticky doors and made a god awful racket when opened. There was one floorboard in particular in the dining room, near the entry to the living room, that always popped when you walked on it, going from one room to the other.

My brother and I heard that floorboard emit its usual noise and were a bit startled as we had had no other auditory clues to someone moving into or about the house. Mom’s show is in full swing, she’s not moving. We both turn around from our seated positions in time to see the back of a six foot-ish elderly male walking into the living room from the dining room. He was wearing a white, short sleeved dress shirt with vertical pastel yellow and blue pinstripes, brown slacks, and black suspenders. Since this description could easily fit Grandpa on ANY given day we looked back at each other, shrugged, and went back to our game.

About ten minutes later, mom’s show is over, we had sunk the enemy fleet, and my brother and I walk into the living room to inquire about lunch. Expecting to find grandpa either sitting in his chair next to Mom or in the study/library in the next room…the conversation went something like this.

Me: “Mom, what’s for lunch?”
Mom: “I was thinking maybe bologna sandwiches.”
Bro: “Where’s grandpa?”
Mom: “As far as I know, still with your grandmother out at Bethany.”
Me: “Yeah but, we saw him come walking in here just a couple minutes ago.”
Mom: “NOBODY has walked into this room for the last hour.”
Bro: “C’mon ma, Kevin and I literally watched him walk in from the dining room.”
Mom: “I swear not a single person has come into this room recently, until you two walking stomachs came in asking about lunch.”
Me: “We…saw…him. Now where is he? We didn’t hear the front door open so he has to still be here.”
Mom: “Boys, I don’t know what to tell you other than I have been alone in this room for the better part of an hour. Now, let’s go make some sandwiches.”

My brother and I exchanged a quick worried glance with eachother. Was mom slippin’? To this day, talking of this incident with my brother, causes goosebumps and skin prickles for both him and me. Mom was unperturbed by our interaction and absolute shite at lying to a person’s face.

My brother and I, know now, like we knew then, that what we saw that day was not strictly bound to our plane of existence. Call it an apparition, a ghost, a spook, I don’t care. Call us nuts, liars, frauds, I don’t care. There is no denying our shared experience. We know what we saw.

9

This didn’t happen to me, but to my best friend when he went on a trip with his gf at the time. Hot day, road trip, stopped off at some historical site. He’s religious, but isn’t at all into ghosts, spirits, the like. So they get the quick tour.

Old house, no AC, certainly no “central-air” if it’s a historical house, but in one room, it seemed as if the temperature dropped from sweltering to comfortably cool in just seconds. Looking around for an AC vent turned up nothing, of course.

Well, his gf is feeling very uneasy, and at one point sits in this kiddie-chair and just breaks down sobbing. Almost indecipherable blubbering, either “I want my mommy” or “I want my dolly”. He’s freaking out, like what’s wrong with her?? The guide just shushes everyone away, kneels down next to her, and as if talking to a toddler, reassures her, “It’s okay baby, she’s upstairs. Just go upstairs and you’ll see her. Okay? Want me to go with you?”, and so on.

Well, the gf calms down, and is bouncing between being emotionally drained and overcome, to “wtf just happened??”. The guide later explains that [insert tragedy, forgot specifics] the ghost of this little gril occasionally makes an appearance. The kiddie-rocking-chair upstairs sometimes rocks, sometimes people can hear a kid upstairs, whether playing, talking, laughing, crying, etc., and so on. On rare occasions, people who are “sensitive” just pick up on the kid’s wavelength, and in this case, it was the gf, and the kid was upset, as she often looks for her dolly and for her mommy.

He’s still not convinced of “ghosts” or “spirits”, but at least he was open-minded enough to not trash her or the experience. Gf was still embarrassed as Hell for breaking down like that.

10

Okay, “the alien story”…

Æons ago, like way way back when my nice neighbor lived next door and I even rented her garage for my car, I was coming home from somewhere (work, gf, no idea) and it was really late and I was really exhausted. Gotta picture the layout…

Neighbor’s garage, with the garage door flush up against the sidewalk.

Small “alley” between garage and neighbor’s house, maybe 8’ wide and only 8’ or so ’til you hit the front gate which is flush with the front of neighbor’s house.

Neighbor’s house, with small front “garden” as all the houses on the block have (some paved-over, but the space is still there), and all houses are recessed maybe 8’ from the sidewalk.

Almost nonexistent alley and then my house.

So I back into the garage as always, get out, chirp the alarm, and close the door. Just as I’m about to turn and start walking, out of the corner of my eye, I see (and hear) a… “figure”… greenish-gray blur, come flying out from that alley and run into the street, and promptly disappear.

Now, it’s as if a kid were planning mischief, “hid” next to the garage, panicked, had nowhere to go, and then made a run for it vs being penned in if I’d see him and catch him. It was that same sudden blur of motion practically next to you, the sound of someone running past you and into the street, that you could practically feel the breeze of someone running past you so closely. Yeah, like that.

Well, obviously, if the figure just disappeared after clearing the curb, and there’s nothing around in the dead-silent street (again, really late) what was it??

So I chalked it up to exhaustion, hallucination, sleep-deprivation, whatever. Still, the experience was pretty damned real at the time.

I think I PMed someone here the experience of the “mice”, so I might do that later. That was freaky…

11

I once witnessed a picture frame of out pet dog on my kitchen counter pop up all by itself in broad daylight when the family was about to go eat Mexican food one afternoon.

12

Okay, the “mice”. Just engorged on some homemade pizza, and better type this in before I get The Itis and fall asleep. :laughing:

K, so a friend of mine is really into eerie things. Does meditation, astral travel, all that fun stuff. Before he moved, any time we hung out, we always had to “do something”, like visit this hole-in-the-wall repository of ancient texts in lower Manhattan (!!), a temple of something or another in Flushing, you name it.

Well, he “travels” to these different “planes of existence” and somehow always meets up with juvenile delinquents of the Spirit World™. Anyway, it’s fun, a blast even, and sometimes a different “piece of the puzzle” snaps into place.

This time, though, he calls to just hang out.
“Uhhh, not ‘do something’ or ‘go somewhere’?”
“Nope, just hang out. I’ll order pizza.”

Hmmm. I can smell something’s up, but wotdahell.

So we hang out, pizza comes shortly, dark b33r in the fridge just for me (woohoo!). Channel flipping, some Three Stooges marathon or something (yeah, like AC/DC, I can only take both in small doses before it all just blurs together), and eventually one of the Indiana Jones flicks that I never saw before.

Every now and then, though, I see darting movements out of the corner of my eye. Turn and look… and nothing. Then in front, near the teevee. Look at where the motion was, and nothing. Goes on, and on, and on, for almost an hour. Finally, as I’m looking at my plate in front of me on the coffee table, right at my friggin’ feet some little… thing… darts out from the ~1” gap under the coffee table, right across my feet, then back under the coffee table. I jump back, kicking back and bashing my toes on the coffee table, seeing stars, and shriek out, “JESUS CHRIST!!!”.

“What??”

“Wtf ‘what’? You got f’n mice in here or something?? The f’n thing ran right across my feet!!”

“THANK YOU!! I thought I was going f’n crazy! I keep seeing these little shiitheads all over, and thought I was going crazy!”

“So you dragged ME into it??”

He goes on to explain that yeah, after one of his “trips”, he started seeing those things around his apartment. Motion, motion, motion, but nothing “sitting still” where they’d stop. Sets up a go-pro with motion detector turned on. Nothing, not all night, not when he’s there and seeing them, nothing. Then leaves it recording nonstop ’til it runs down. Scans the entire video, nothing. So he’s seeing them, but nothing on video.

So of course, he invites me there to see if I see anything, without telling me. Thanks a lump.

And for a while after, I’d see the occasional “mouse” every so often, but it stopped after a while.

13

hmm… what was on that pizza? Happy pizza? Magic mushroom? To me it looks like a usual flashback of LSD.

Here is a real ghost story:

Once I lived in an old rented house and saw at night that usual woman dressed in white.
I never thought these stories of old houses are real, until I saw her the first time.
Did not fear anything, as she seemed to just come through one wall with one closed chimney behind, walk through the door of the bedroom (no matter open or closed) to the other closed and unused chimney in the hallway and disappear through that wall.
She came every evening exactly 23:43, never changed her “route” or did anything else than just quietly and steadily walking from one wall to the other.
Until after a shooting of a music video, it was really late at night, and I permitted a band mate to stay the night on the couch in the living room, so to save him from riding all the way home exhausted as he was.
After an hour I heard this man scream and shout, I rushed out of the bedroom to find him in the living room pale shivering in fear and uttering something of a woman in a white dress having tortured him. She had disappeared in her usual spot in the hallway as soon as I came out of the bedroom.
You can imagine, this night was over.
Interestingly this was not her usual time, because it was already after 2 AM.

To top this one up: Days later I let cameras down into the chimneys and found bones on their floors. Police later revealed, the one near the hallway was a baby skeleton, the other that of a young woman who disappeared in the year 1932.

The white woman has never been seen again. I moved years later and never saw something like this again.

14

Naw, check out the “What’m I snacking on now?” thread. Shroom sauce, mozz, onions, olives, peppers. Nom-nom-nom…

The “mice” following me home I eventually just chalked up to… not sure what you call it… but like seeing bugs on teevee and getting all itchy yourself?

He is really into that kind of stuff, though. Once he asked me “What’s wrong with your shoulder?”, and I’m like, “Wtf?? Yeah, I twisted it, but how’d you…?”. Aura. Apparently, there was a disturbance in The Force™ or something, and it was visible.

Oh, have I got stories…

15

screams during Halloween Night……

was with friends watching a Horror Marathon at our house after trick-or-treat.
parents were asleep when we hear “something” and think it is the movie.
the paranoids among us go outside to hear it even louder,
so all of us go outside to hear it again and again and again.
we walk toward the screams. we cross two fences to find a nanny
goat in labor pains (called kidding, not kidding). since March is the
usual time for this to happen, no one expected to hear birth bleating.

16

Sounds like trouble…

17

Good idea for a thread.

When I got my UV S2 I had to go exploring outside the first night. Some things looked as expected with the UV and others were pretty much a surprise. So I was focused on the individual items and not the big picture. After looking at the tires on our golf cart I turned around with the light held at shoulder height and suddenly about three feet away there was a hideous creature looking me eye to eye. I wasn't paying attention to exactly where I was and ended up being right next to our bird feeding platform. It is just a flat board (for suet and peanut butter) about 4.5 ft. high on a 2x2 post. On top of the board was a large 'possum that didn't know I was there either. Face to face with a 'possum is one thing but when it is a total surprise with a UV light it would put a huge fright in anybody. 'possums are not the prettiest creatures but under UV they become monster movie material. It scared the crap out of me. What I remember the most was strange eyes and MANY odd colored teeth. Instinct had me increasing my distance away him immediately. I cannot remember how he got back to the ground, jumping or climbing down. What I do remember was that it did put a major scare in me.

18

I was a teenager and one of my classmates told me about an abandoned house around the corner from us. He kept telling me stories about ghosts in the windows and strange things going on there, such as the owner who passed away was found dead standing in the doorway. one day after school instead of walking home we went past our house and straight to the abandoned house. I walked up to one of the boarded up windows and my friend went around towards the back. as a peered in I saw a hand reaching towards the window from inside the house I yelled out to him move as a vaulted an 8 foot hedge without even touching it and ran all the way home half a mile away. the next day when he saw me in school I explained to him what I saw. we didn’t think it was a person because the house was completely boarded up from top to bottom. As I got older I figured it probably was someone homeless or drug addicts that got in the house some how, but I never found out for sure.

19

And they fluoresce a pale red color, too! Didja notice?

I got video of a pair that would come onto my patio for food, and one even wanted to come inside the house as I had the door open recording them. :laughing:

20

About 20 years ago I was seeing a girl who had grandparents that were claiming a ghost was causing some liquor they had to go missing. They lived alone and sort of passed it off as one of them blaming it on the other. This was up to a point where the grandfather said that he got a push when he was going down the stairs. Luckily he wasn’t injured. I passed this all off as just old people being weird or trying to make their life more interesting. So, when the chance came to go there and stay the night I wanted to go and be a total skeptic and see that nothing was happening. Around evening we were playing cards, probably euchre, or some variant and I asked about the missing alcohol. Her grandpa brought out a bottle of Old Crow with some markings in Sharpie done down the side. The bottle was maybe 3/4 full and the last marking was maybe a cm above the level of the liquid. So I got the sharpie marked the current level and put the time, date, and signed it for good measure. I took the cap off and smelled it, yep definitely the cheap stuff. Then I put the cap on tight and I mean very tight. I then put some tape around the cap and drew lines on the tape, so I could tell if it was disturbed. Then I put the bottle in a grocery store plastic bag and knotted that. I gave that back to her grandpa and he put in another room but had left and came right back within a few seconds. We then played cards for about 45 min and I had them go retrieve the bottle. He went in the other room and brought the bottle still in the bag right back. The bag was still knotted so I ripped it off. I picked up the bottle and noticed the tape was still intact. Looking down the side with the markings I saw the prior lines and scanned down the side to where I had mine signed and dated, and there it was. But the level of the alcohol had changed! It had dropped not a cm or two, but at least a solid 2 inches or more! How is that even possible? So I ripped off the tape and unscrewed the cap. Now I am pretty strong and had tighened the cap beyond what I think an older person could have opened, and the cap was equally hard to open. So I was at a total loss of where or how I was being tricked. But what surprised me most was the lack of surprise by either of them. They said it’s been happening for some time and they’ve seen it multiple times and were more annoyed than anything. They just wanted it to stop so I guess they had gotten somebody from the church to stop by and eventually things stopped. So that’s my one ghost story, ghost stealing booze. There was some story that they guy that had lived on the land was an alcoholic and there was a cane of his that was saved and later tossed out.