Let's Talk: Real Life Ghost Stories/Experiences

That telephone story is a real pants-wetter.

I also think it's hilarious that we have a real highwayman in our midst.

Those are some cool stories. I have never experienced any kind of ghostly experiences.

I was however one of the witnesses to the V-shaped UFO's that were reported in phoenix in 1997. Famous sighting, but I saw them in Albuquerque N.M. the same year. same configuration, a v-shaped string of lights. They said it was an experimental aircraft, BUT when I saw them they slowly moved across the sky. then stopped for 10 minutes, then moved away again. Pretty sure we don't have an aircraft that can do that. And I didn't even know about the Phoenix sighting of the same configuration till years later.

I shit you not. I am the biggest skeptic there is, but this I did see.

wadenels wrote: About around 1999 I was working small-town small-county highway crew. This mostly involved laying tar by hand from buckets with a bottom valve into cracks. We spent most our time smoking cigs and being generally unproductive. The truck-pulled tar tank usually took about 90 minutes to heat up to pouring temp, so we never lit the damn thing until we were already on site.

On a side note, I'm sure this was a shitty job. But part of me sometimes wishes that like 1-2 months of my job was just doing this and the other 10-11 were my normal white collar shit.

Michael Barnes wrote: I am 100% a skeptic. I think most ghost stories are complete garbage, and all of those "ghost hunter" shows on TV are trash. However, I've seen too much first-hand to NOT believe that there really are spirits, presences and maybe even things best classified as "other" out there.

So....90% skeptic?

I'm not a hardline skeptic. Sure I have doubts to most claims, but I think the world is a more interesting place with these types of oddball experiences floating around. Maybe they're just phenomenon that haven't been discovered/labelled. Maybe they are Uba's Sub Bass explanation. Who knows...

Personally, I haven't had any spectral encounters. Though I think I have two that are either UFO or experimental aircraft. I grew up an army brat, moving around every 2-3 years. Well, on two separate occasions, my father was stationed in Huntsville, Al at Redstone Arsenal. This is the same town that Von Braun and company developed rockets for NASA. Anyway, when I was in 4th grade, I was out back our duplex one evening chatting up GI Joe with a neighborhood kid when we both saw this orange hamburger shaped object in the night sky. It had three yellow orbs in the center. The object appeared to be floating over a distant hill, then gradually went down behind it. This was some distance away, and I was young so we didn't go on some kid adventure to check it out. We went the hell inside. Ended up playing some Intellivision.

Then, about a decade later, after tours of Germany, my family is back in the Huntsville area. I was riding with a buddy from Decatur, Al to Huntsville. This was about midday, and we crested this hill near Redstone. From the top we saw this huge Rodan shaped shadow on the plains coming towards us then over the car. We couldn't find anything in the sky though but a few clouds and nothing shaped like that.

Other members of the family claim to have more ghostly experiences. My mom shares several stories of her grandmother's experience living in the house where her husband died. She, mi madre, also claims to experience 'cold spots' and such in the house her mother passed away in. The one I find the most interesting though is what happened to my brother.

After graduating HS, he enlisted in the Navy (as a Corpsman - medical specialist). This was in 95-96. Well, after basic he was stationed at Quantico. Late one night in the barracks he was asleep, but kept hearing a voice whispering his name. He recognized it as a buddy who's room was down stairs and on the other end of the hall. He woke up and thought he heard it again, but wasn't sure. On a lark, he went down to this dude's room and knocked on the door. There were low murmers from within. Getting the guard on duty, they opened the room to find the guy had slit his wrist and was bleeding out. Fortunately, they got to him in time and he was saved. Did this guy call out to Anthony? How could Anthony hear him in his sleep? Even awake, how could he hear someone whimpering on the other end of the building and on a different floor?

So Michael... just to clarify, are you saying that as far as you can tell, your cat TELEPORTED outside of the apartment?

Great stories you guys. I love it. More UFO stories too if you got em!

Never heard of the sub bass theory that's really interesting.

Regarding UFOs, I agree with Hawkings 100%. If there are aliens out there, we do _not_ want them to know we're here...

Alright, here's my non-ghost story because I am the biggest skeptic on the damn planet. I don't believe one bit in ghosts or ghouls or spirits or any of that nonsense.

Me and my buddy Paul are on vacation in Scotland and we decide to visit the castle (more of a fortified manor house) that inspired Bram Stoker to write Dracula. This place --

This is off the web but I have a photo just like it that I took myself. We're cruising through the countryside with this killer tour book published by the AA that is pointing out off-the-beaten-path sites like this one, which you won't find in any U.S. published tour book of Scotland. It's a nice day, sunny, at least until we get to this place, Slain's Castle. As we come around the corner we drive straight into a fog bank that hangs over top of the place. Now, you can't just pull up in your car, you need to walk a bit and as we're making the hike up the hill there's crows in the dead trees above us screaming their heads off, and Paul and I look at each other like, "no wonder he wrote a damn horror novel, this is one seriously messed up piece of landscape right here." You can hear the sea hitting the rocks beyond it and the entire thing stikes us as something from a B movie with too big a budget.

So we check the place out and it's seriously cool, and we stop for a bite, and that's about the end of it, until we find one staircase going down into a basement that's plenty dark and plenty wet and plenty cold. I step a couple of steps down to see if I can get a look in, and after a minute my eyes adjust and I realize it isn't a basement, it's a crypt. There's the bricked-in entrances to individual resting places along the one wall I can see, and it turns a corner. "Dude, it's a crypt" I say to Paul, "you gotta see this."

"No I don't" was his reply and I looked at him like he was from Mars. Paul did crazy shit I never would have considered and here he is afraid of an empty room. I asked him if he was serious and he assured me he was, he wasn't going in, no way, no how. So I was going in alone. I wanted to see the damn thing. I've never seen a crypt let along a crazy old one like this.

But it was pitch black once you turned the corner in the stairs. Paul had left his flashlight in the car and I wasn't going all the way back for it, so I patted my jacket pockets and found a box of wooden matches from the Chinese Restaurant near my house in Annapolis. No breeze down here, so that would do the trick. I got to the edge of the darkness, struck a match, and walked on in with my free hand shielding my eyes from the direct light of the flame. This was my first crypt, and it was like walking into a time machine. There aren't any crypts in Maryland.

Needless to say, the match came to an end, and I wasn't done looking. It wasn't a surprise and I had prepped. So as I could see it start to dim I stopped walking and grabbed the half-open box from my pocket with my free hand. Well I'll tell you what, when that match burned out and the room turned pitch black every dead body in that crypt animated and started silently walking towards me to eat my head. I fumbled in the box to grab the second stick (you know how hard it is to grab a single match when you're in a panic and can't see what you're doing? A lot harder than you would imagine) and got to hurrying as the army of the dead got closer and closer. "Don't drop the box, don't drop the box . . . " I finally struck the second match, it lit and -- nothing there. Empty room. Now I'm laughing at myself for creeping out over absolutely NOTHING WHATSOEVER. Paul shouts down to ask what I'm laughing at and I honestly answer "nothing!" because that's what was there, not a damn thing. I finish looking around on the second match -- more or less an empty room with little cubbies, and turn around to get myself positioned to head back to the stairs on match number three. Match two goes out, the dead awaken again, I'm in a damn near panic because I can't get a hold of a single match stick and have to settle for striking three on the box simultaneously to keep from getting eaten! "God DAMMIT!" I'm half pissed off, half amused as hell at myself now. This time the flame is plenty bright and Paul shouts down to ask if I need him down there. (Sure, a second coward would be a big help, eh?) The dead jump back into their slots for the second time before I can get an eyeball on them.

At this point I figure it's time to head on out without any further delay. I carefully walk across the uneven floor stones, taking care not to drop my three-match torch as I go. Back to the stairs, out into the screaming bright daylight and Paul asks me what's down there.

"Not a damn thing."

I have a great one. AS those who know me will attest, I'm 100% skeptic. So anyway, I'm walking around Birmingham UK on my way to work in about 1988 or so and I suddenly get these really serious stomach cramps. The kind where you HAVE to find a functional toilet or a very nasty accident will ensue. I am walking in the middle of a large traffic circle (roundabout for the UK folks) but it has some horrible public toilets on it. I make an immediate beeline for it. Now, normally I would never use a public toilet for a shit but I had an emergency on my hands.

I relieved myself and luckily no one was in the cubicle next door so it wasn't too embarrassing. So I'm sitting there wondering if my stomach has calmed down and I hear footsteps approaching, presumably to use the next door cubicle. I'm getting a bit worried because now I notice there is no toilet paper in my cubicle and I might have to just live with that and wait until I get to a more civilised convenience. Anyway, I'm sitting there pondering my predicament and the guy goes into the adjacent cubicle. Then it's dead quiet. No noise. At all. Intrigued, thinking maybe he decided not to use the facilities after all, I bend down to see if I can see his legs in the next cubicle. I am faced with a dogs head that met my face exactly as I bent down as 'he' was bending down at the same time. Non human face staring at me from an unnatural position below the cubicle wall. I fucking pulled my trousers up as fast as I could and ran out of there.

I know, could have been a dog. Trust me it was something sitting on the toilet bending down with a dogs head. Holy shit, I had nightmares for weeks after. I wasn't drunk, on drugs or anything and it scared the shit out of me. It was broad daylight outside.

Cue X Files theme tune.....

I've never been a skeptic, but that doesn't mean that I'm a gullible dumb-ass either. I believe that there are more things in heaven and on earth than we can perceive with the limited senses that we have, and that occasionally some of us are born with the ability to perceive a little extra. I have very little in the way of personal stories, but I have a cousin who is a very gifted psychic so I get a lot of second-hand stories from her. Gary Sax, if you're looking to find something beyond yourself, perhaps I could set up a reading between the two of you.

Amy said, “don’t go into the basement...NEVER go into the basement.” My family had just moved to a suburb in Chicago, Dad having been transferred for a big project by a major oil company. The move had been quick so Mom and Dad rented this older Victorian home, one that was readily available, conveniently available, and furnished. Our personal stuff traveled by moving van. The house was a large and creepy 19th Century, three story home, and, it had a basement. The first week Mom and Dad went to a corporate party in the City--they rode the train--they weren’t expected back until sunrise.

Amy was my 17 year old babysitter. Amy had blonde pig-tails, wore cut-off blue jean short, shorts, and a pale green tube top. Steve showed up later. Steve was cool. He was Amy’s 19 year old boyfriend. He had shoulder length black hair. He drove a primer colored Camaro with wide tires and mag wheels. I still remember his black t-shirt, bell bottom blue jeans, and his thick leather belt with a brass buckle. I especially recall his black t-shirt--it scared me a bit. I was only 5. It had this screaming crazy reddish man with a freakish expression on it that said King Crimson, Court of the Crimson King.

Steve was too cool though. That night he showed me how to pull pop tops off of beer cans. He showed me how to make a necklace out of the pull tabs. He let me puff on paper white smoking sticks. Steve also insisted that I take sips from his special “pop”--it made me feel dizzy and sleepy. “Take a sip, little man, be cool like Steve...” Steve would periodically suck on Amy’s mouth and try to wrestle with Amy. Amy would giggle and tell him to “Stop...we can’t...I’m babysitting.”

I knocked over Steve’s beer can tower. “Psst...kid, ain’t it time for you to go to sleep, yet?,” barked Steve. I guess I was tired (and, unbeknownst to me as a 5 year old, I was drunk). My eyes drooped. Amy said, “sweetie, why don’t you go to sleep? I’ll walk you upstairs to your room...I’ll read you a story.” “OK, Amy,” I said. We walked through the kitchen, past the basement door, to the winding foyer stairs that led to my room. Amy tucked me in and I drifted off to sleep. I awoke to what I thought were screams...screams coming from downstairs.

I walked downstairs, through the kitchen, past the basement door--it was open? I remembered what Amy said: “NEVER go into the basement.” I could hear something down there though. I slowly pushed open the basement door and entered the darkness. I could seen wooden stairs leading down into a dark mist--there was a slight glow somewhere below. Step, creak, step, creak...on the staircase I felt along the side of the wall as I walked downward, downward into the dark--I couldn’t see were I was going. When I reached the bottom I drifted toward a slight foggy glow, somewhere within the ink, my right hand pushing and dragging against the wall as I walked.

As I turned the corner, I entered a red room with an orangish orb floating within. The walls flowed the melting ice cream. They were crimson red. Plaster melted and puddled on the floor, revealing wooden laths which looked like bleached bones. The room pulsed, its parts flowed like a river, draining into an unknown depth, dragging me into its currents. I screamed, screamed, SCREAMED.......it felt like I was drowning.

My mom woke me up the next morning. I was in my bedroom upstairs. I asked about Amy and Steve. She said they weren’t ever coming back again and she’d find a new babysitter, mumbling something about “damn oversexed teenagers” and “drinking all of your Dad’s beer.” I ate breakfast in the kitchen, a bowl of Honeycomb Kids. I stared at the basement door as I spooned large bits of cereal into my mouth like a chipmunk.

Later, my Mom just opened the door and walked down the basement stairs to start some laundry. I wanted to tell her to "stop, STOP..." I wanted to tell her about the strange red room. I carefully followed her down the stairs. Sunlight now peered in through the basement’s windows. There was no crimson red room. There were no melting walls. We moved three weeks later.

Well, no really creepy encounter except for a huge shadow.

My late dad worked in the national petroleum company, and we often moved around. When I was at the 5th grade we moved to another city in another island (borneo). The company placed us in a very nice house with AC all around the house, and I got my first room. The houses there had big yards, and behind my house was a HUGE banyan tree. It wasn't in my backyard... rather there was a large empty grassland surrounded by half doze houses, and here the tree grew. My newfangled room faced this tree. I often heard scary stories from the neighbor, and I've heard noise of baby crying and light knocks on my window (there's a huge window, not facing the tree, but to our side yard... if you're in the side yard you can see the tree in whole). I wasn't really scared yet.

But the thing that scared me actually came in *front* of my house. One day the house was empty except for me. I was watching TV alone with the lights off. I think it was 9PM. The living room was in the front part of the house, and we had this very large window with single large glass, no panels. Beyond the window was our front yard, with stone walkway crossing from the left to the right of the window. Just after the stone walkways is a garden lamp. I didn't notice it at first, but then I saw the shadow of a tall man projected by the garden lamp on the right side of the window through the closed curtain. He was tall because I couldn't see his head, but I could see his long and thick hair which reached his butt. He walked left, but I heard no noise (usually you can heard the noise of soles hitting the stone walkway). I pulled my blanked over my head but peeked. The shadow moved back and forth couple of times, and then left.

The next day my uncle who's 6ft tall came. Later in the day I asked him to stand in front of the garden lamp, I went inside to check and his shadow barely reached 3/4 of the window's height. It could be a very tall homeless, but very unlikely since the average Indonesians aren't very tall, and our house was located in the company's housing complex. Several years later I asked my grandma about this and she said it's probably genderuwo.

I was never really freaked out though. We still played and camped around the banyan tree (it was fun hanging and swinging from its massive vines).

I love these stories, and am also jealous of how well they are written.

My aunt owned a small former plantation property in Louisiana. The main house was called White Hall, and this was where she lived. There was also a house called Rosaria where, at the time, my cousin lived. White Hall I didn't have any problem with, but Rosaria creeped me out. There were two bedrooms on the lowest floor of Rosaria, the "orange room" and the "blue room" (so named by me for the color of their decor.) They were formerly servants' rooms, so there was a stairway connecting the orange room to the master bedroom upstairs. Once there was a wedding party for a cousin at Rosaria and I was a wee kid so they had me sleep in the blue room. I didn't like it and it spooked me, but I was at least glad I wasn't next door in the orange room. I really didn't like that room, and the stairway up to the bedroom? Fuck that thing. I had been in it *once* and that was more than enough. Nothing happened, but just climbing that stairway scared the bejeezus out of me.

My cousin who lived there, and also my aunt, told ghost stories about Rosaria sometimes, but I don't really remember them and have no idea if they were "true" or not. (I know that whenever I would read a ghost story taking place in a house, I'd set it in Rosaria in my mind.)

Anyway, when my sister got married, the reception was held at White Hall. At this time no one was living in Rosaria. We needed more chairs, so they sent my cousin Trey and I to Rosaria to grab some that were stored there. Trey and I had grown up together but I'd never said anything to him about my fear of Rosaria because I knew I was a little wuss-baby and didn't want to sound like one.

We go in the place and Trey says, "This place has always given me the creeps." I laughed. "You too? I thought it was just me." "Oh no," said Trey. "I've always hated this place. Those downstairs bedrooms? Ugh." His mention of this interested me. "What's the worst place in this house, you think?" I asked him. He didn't have to think. "That back stairway," he said. "That thing wigs me out."

At this point we both were creeped out and we grabbed the chairs and left. It's a sucky story because nothing actually *happened* to us, but we both knew there was something wrong with the place and exactly where it was centered.

Not sure if this counts as a ghost story, but it was a weird experience:

Right out of High School, my buddy Jake and I took a road trip from Washington State to see this girl in Nebraska. We were driving an old VW bus and it took leaded gas, which you could still find in Washington at the time, but which became more difficult to find as we headed East. As the trip went on we soon learned about lead substitute... anyway we were in either Montana or North Dakota late at night and running low on fuel (trying to find leaded).

There weren't a lot of towns or gas stations and we were glad to see an exit sign for a town, in my clouded memory it was call MacFadden. There was no mileage for how far the town was so we drove for a good 6 or 7 miles without finding it and finally gave up and turned around. Nothing but dark empty cornfields and grass lands. On the way back to the highway- driving on the same road we drove right through a well-lite small town. Small, but not so small that we could have driven through it with out see it. I swear this town had not been on the road 20 minutes ago.

Freaked-out we got back on the highway and went as fast as we could (which was not very in a 1960s era microbus) and just hoped that we would find another station before we ran out of gas.

This was 20 odd years ago, still gives me the shivers writing about it.