Friends, I’m lost as to what spooky stories I’ve already posted. It’s all a hopeless mess. “Forgive me for the harm I have caused this world. None may atone for my actions but me, and only in me shall their stain live on. I am thankful to have been caught, my fall cut short by those with wizened hands. All I can be is sorry, and that is all that I am.” Enjoy!
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This happened to me the summer I turned 11, and is one of the scariest, weirdest things I’ve ever experienced. I’d think it was a nightmare except at the end, there was another witness.
That summer, my parents sold our very regular, one-story house and bought a much larger, incredibly unique house in the next town over. The architect who built it used all kinds of old, reclaimed materials, and almost all of the windows were antique stained glass that came from England. The outside had wide, rough cedar planks instead of regular siding, and my brother and I learned early not to run our hands over them, or we’d get splinters. It was the coolest house I’ve ever lived in.
No My room was also huge. It had its own bathroom and a walk-in closet. There were two large stained-glass windows facing out towards the street, but at an angle—these windows were deeply recessed under the roof line. It was Florida, and this kept the scorching hot sun from shining directly in any of the rooms. When we moved in, my mom put my bed against the inner wall, facing the windows.
Again, coolest, most beautiful, most original house I’ve ever lived in. Our parents didn’t tell us about the house until the deed was done. Then they took us over there to see it, and we were SO EXCITED. It just seemed so huge and exotic and grand.
We moved in, and my brother and I spent the summer exploring the neighborhood (which was a lot older than the one we moved from, with a bunch of cool older houses in it) and trying to meet some kids. Which we did. And when we did, we found out why our parents got a great price. The guy who built the house, who was a well-known local architect who’d built quite a few unusual, unique homes in the area, was also a convicted pedophile. He built the house we bought not long after he got out of prison for his wicked deeds. All the kids in the neighborhood knew about it from their parents, and when they found out which house we lived in, oh boy. “YOU LIVE IN THE HAUNTED HOUSE.” “The guy who built your house is a pervert and went to jail for it,” etc. etc. We got big eyes at the pervert revelation but snorted at the haunted house one—since no one lived in the house before us what, exactly, was haunting it? I mean, it LOOKED like it could be haunted, but it was also technically brand new, reclaimed materials or not.
I also happened to read The Amityville Horror that summer, long before it was debunked as fake. I’ve always loved scary stories, ghost stories, stuff that scares people, and never felt especially scared or freaked out myself. But for some reason, that stupid fake-ass book scared the shit out of me, resulting in my developing some serious sleep issues that summer. It didn’t help that we were in a huge, strange house that I wasn’t used to yet, and also because the house had so much wood inside and outside of it that every room had a smoke alarm with a red light that was really noticeable at night. The one in my room was on the wall right next to the closet, and after reading that dumb book, I’d wake up in the middle of the night and see the red light and immediately think of Jodie, the pig-demon thing with red glowing eyes the daughter in the book saw, and I’d lay there thinking about the book and freaking out about the light. It usually took me hours to relax enough to get back to sleep.
This happened almost every night. Then, one night, I woke up needing to go to the bathroom, did it, get back in bed, and then lay there looking at that light and wishing for the millionth time I’d never read that damn book. It was after 2 a.m., the whole house is silent, and I was really not jazzed that the rest of my family was on the other side of the house, which isn’t that far in the daytime but seems like miles in the dead of night. Then I saw something in the window out of the corner of my eye, and holy god, there was what looked like a human head peering in the window at me. Two stories up, a head looking in.
OK, this next part is difficult to write because it was so fucking weird, and I really don’t like remembering it. The windows of my room were very large, a two-part design where the larger, lower half was a rectangle topped by a smaller sideways rectangle, intersected by a thick wooden frame. My mom put in shutters on the lower half and sheer curtains on the top half. Some parts of the window were clear like regular glass, some thick wavy glass, and some colored glass. When you looked through them, you’d get a distorted view of the outside, some clear and some not. So the head (or whatever it was) wasn’t easy to see, except as a shape. It kept rising up above the shutters like it was trying to see into the room, then would sink back down. I have no idea how long it was doing that before I noticed it.
My first thought was that someone was standing on a ladder, trying to see inside. But if that was the case, then either the ladder was propped against the window glass below, or the person was very tall. But then the head shape did something so horrible, so strange, I almost screamed out loud. It had been peeping up from below the shutters like a regular person would, but then it disappeared, and when it reappeared it was LOOKING IN FROM THE SIDE, like whatever it was, changed position and was suspended sideways in the recess. Which was impossible.
All thoughts of “weird dude on ladder” flew right out of my head, and bad, bad thoughts about demons and monsters flew in. I lay there in absolute terror, watching as the figure would appear and disappear, sometimes from the left, sometimes from the right, then most horribly upside down as if whatever it was was on the roof, hanging over and looking in. Except again, these windows were in deep recesses, and the head was right next to the glass, meaning, it was clinging (or god help me, floating) right outside. At some point I realized I could hear it as well; it made these faint scratching sounds as it moved around, sounding just like when squirrels scrambled around on the cedar planks. I couldn’t see any facial features, and it didn’t look like it had hair, but it definitely had an oval-shaped head.
I don’t know how long I lay there, scared to death and watching this *thing* look in my room, but then, having no idea what was happening, my brother walked in to use my bathroom. One of the less convenient features of this house was that his bathroom was actually located off the laundry room on the first floor, and HE didn’t like walking through a huge dark house in the middle of the night, so he used mine instead, which was fine with me and especially welcome at that moment, because it broke the strange spell. I screamed at the top of my lungs, the thing disappeared with a loud scratching noise like it had claws that slipped off the cedar planks, and my brother said, “What was THAT?” I started crying. “What WAS that?” my brother kept asking, and he was almost as shaken up as I was. He told me later that the minute he walked into the room he knew something fucked up was going on, as the hair on his arms stood straight up.
I spent the rest of the night sleeping in his room on his spare twin bed. The next day, we went outside and looked all around, but there was no sign of anything—no marks in the ground if there was a ladder; no marks on the side of the house; no evidence at all that something had been crawling around my window, trying to see in.
We never told our parents—they weren’t the kind of people who believed in the supernatural and would have dismissed it as a nightmare. And it was the kind of soul-scarring experience that would be made so much worse for being dismissed out of hand as imagination, when I knew it really happened. Nothing like it ever happened again. We lived in that house for years and everything was fine.
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The black telephone
Those of us old enough to remember when the phone was wired to the wall, usually in the kitchen, can relate to this story. I loved this read.
When I was a young boy, my father had one of the first telephones in our neighborhood. I remember the polished, old case fastened to the wall. The shiny receiver hung on the side of the box.. I was too little to reach the telephone, but used to listen with fascination when my mother talked to it.
Then I discovered that somewhere inside the wonderful device lived an amazing person. Her name was “Information Please” and there was nothing she did not know. Information Please could supply anyone’s number and the correct time.
My personal experience with the genie-in-a-bottle came one day while my mother was visiting a neighbor. Amusing myself at the tool bench in the basement, I whacked my finger with a hammer, the pain was terrible, but there seemed no point in crying because there was no one home to give sympathy. I walked around the house sucking my throbbing finger, finally arriving at the stairway.
The telephone! Quickly, I ran for the footstool in the parlor and dragged it to the landing. Climbing up, I unhooked the receiver in the parlor and held it to my ear. “Information, please,” I said into the mouthpiece just above my head.
A click or two and a small clear voice spoke into my ear. “Information.”
“I hurt my finger…” I wailed into the phone, the tears came readily enough now that I had an audience..
“Isn’t your mother home?” came the question
“Nobody’s home but me,” I blubbered.
“Are you bleeding?” the voice asked
“No, “I replied. “I hit my finger with the hammer and it hurts.”
“Can you open the icebox?” she asked.
I said I could.
“Then chip off a little bit of ice and hold it to your finger,” said the voice.
After that, I called “Information Please” for everything. I asked her for help with my geography, and she told me where Philadelphia was. She helped me with my math.
She told me my pet chipmunk that I had caught in the park just the day before, would eat fruit and nuts.
Then, there was the time Petey, our pet canary, died. I called, “Information Please,” and told her the sad story. She listened, and then said things grown-ups say to soothe a child. But I was not consoled. I asked her, “Why is it that birds should sing so beautifully and bring joy to all families, only to end up as a heap of feathers on the bottom of a cage?”
She must have sensed my deep concern, for she said quietly, ” Wayne , always remember that there are other worlds to sing in.” Somehow I felt better.
Another day I was on the telephone, “Information Please.”
“Information,” said in the now familiar voice.
“How do I spell fix?” I asked
All this took place in a small town in the Pacific Northwest . When I was nine years old, we moved across the country to Boston . I missed my friend very much.
“Information Please” belonged in that old wooden box back home and I somehow never thought of trying the shiny new phone that sat on the table in the hall. As I grew into my teens, the memories of those childhood conversations never really left me. Often, in moments of doubt and perplexity I would recall the serene sense of security I had then. I appreciated now how patient, understanding, and kind she was to have spent her time on a little boy.
A few years later, on my way west to college, my plane put down in Seattle . I had about a half-hour or so between planes. I spent 15 minutes or so on the phone with my sister, who lived there now. Then without thinking what I was doing, I dialed my hometown operator and said, “Information Please.”
Miraculously, I heard the small, clear voice I knew so well.
“Information.”
I hadn’t planned this, but I heard myself saying, “Could you please tell me how to spell fix?”
There was a long pause. Then came the soft spoken answer, “I guess your finger must have healed by now.”
I laughed, “So it’s really you,” I said. “I wonder if you have any idea how much you meant to me during that time?”
“I wonder,” she said, “if you know how much your calls meant to me. I never had any children and I used to look forward to your calls.”
I told her how often I had thought of her over the years and I asked if I could call her again when I came back to visit my sister.
“Please do,” she said. “Just ask for Sally.”
Three months later I was back in Seattle .
A different voice answered, “Information.”
I asked for Sally.
“Are you a friend?” she said.
“Yes, a very old friend,” I answered.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” She said. “Sally had been working part time the last few years because she was sick. She died five weeks ago.”
Before I could hang up, she said, “Wait a minute, did you say your name was Wayne ?” “
“Yes.” I answered.
Well, Sally left a message for you. She wrote it down in case you called. Let me read it to you. The note said, “Tell him there are other worlds to sing in. He’ll know what I mean.”
I thanked her and hung up. I knew what Sally meant.
Never underestimate the impression you may make on others. Whose life have you touched today?
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I have a personal mystery. When I got home from uni and before I found a job I had a period of time where I stayed at my family home. Due to being home alone often during this time I tended to be the one who collected the mail and did odd home jobs. One day we had a particularly large amount of letters and parcel (for my brother’s birthday) and because two trips are for weak people I struggled and carried them all into the house. I managed to throw the letters onto the table but about half slipped onto the floor (this is important). Thinking screw it, I carry the box upstairs to the office and come back down to pick the letters up. Yet, when I come back into the kitchen there are no letters anywhere. Confused, I check every downstairs table and eventually the mail box. Nothing at all. Finally I go back into the kitchen and notice one of the kitchen chairs is slightly pulled out from under the table. I pull it all the way out and under the cushion on the seat is a neat pile of the letters. There was no one but me at home for a few hours before this. Utterly confused till this day.
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throw away account cause this is really personal.
My last semester at a certain college I was assaulted by a football player for walking where he was trying to drive (note he was 325lbs I was 120lbs), while unconscious on the ground I lived a different life.
I met a wonderful young lady, she made my heart skip and my face red, I pursued her for months and dispatched a few jerk boyfriends before I finally won her over, after two years we got married and almost immediately she bore me a daughter.
I had a great job and my wife didn’t have to work outside of the house, when my daughter was two she [my wife] bore me a son. My son was the joy of my life, I would walk into his room every morning before I left for work and doted on him and my daughter.
One day while sitting on the couch I noticed that the perspective of the lamp was odd, like inverted. It was still in 3D but… just.. wrong. (It was a square lamp base, red with gold trim on 4 legs and a white square shade). I was transfixed, I couldn’t look away from it. I stayed up all night staring at it, the next morning I didn’t go to work, something was just not right about that lamp.
I stopped eating, I left the couch only to use the bathroom at first, soon I stopped that too as I wasn’t eating or drinking. I stared at the fucking lamp for 3 days before my wife got really worried, she had someone come and try to talk to me, by this time my cognizance was breaking up and my wife was freaking out. She took the kids to her mother’s house just before I had my epiphany…. the lamp is not real…. the house is not real, my wife, my kids… none of that is real… the last 10 years of my life are not fucking real!
The lamp started to grow wider and deeper, it was still inverted dimensions, it took up my entire perspective and all I could see was red, I heard voices, screams, all kinds of weird noises and I became aware of pain…. a fucking shit ton of pain… the first words I said were “I’m missing teeth” and opened my eyes. I was laying on my back on the sidewalk surrounded by people that I didn’t know, lots were freaking out, I was completely confused.
At some point a cop scooped me up, dragged/walked me across the sidewalk and grass and threw me face down in the back of a cop car, I was still confused.
I was taken to the hospital by the cop (seems he didn’t want to wait for the ambulance to arrive) and give CT scans and shit..
I went through about 3 years of horrid depression, I was grieving the loss of my wife and children and dealing with the knowledge that they never existed, I was scared that I was going insane as I would cry myself to sleep hoping I would see her in my dreams. I never have, but sometimes I see my son, usually just a glimpse out of my peripheral vision, he is perpetually 5 years old and I can never hear what he says.
EDIT (24 hours after post): never thought anyone would read this, I changed a line so that it no longer seems that my 2 year old daughter bore a child.
I have never seen Inception or the Star Trek episode so many have mentioned (but I will eventually)
I will not do an AMA
I’ve had many PM’s describing similar experiences and 3 posters stating such experiences are impossible, I’d say more research needs to be done on brain functions. Pre-med students, don’t assume you know everything.
A few have asked if they can write a book/screenplay/stage play/rage comic etcetera, please consider this tale open source and have fun with it.
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Rizzybear:
this is pretty creepy. i used to get bronchitis often (every 2 or three months) and one time it was particularly bad. i had friends checking in on me making sure i took my meds regularly and one friend made a lot of echinacea tea and made sure i drank it regularly.. i have no memory of this time. during that time i lived a completely different life. it wasn’t ten years though just a few weeks. up until i got sick i was very unhappy with life in general. very depressed a lot of the time and even suicidal. my best friend had died recently and basically my whole life sucked and i could not find ways to fix it.
during these few weeks where i was “out” i managed to find ways to fix most of these problems. my friend even came back. i was super happy, met a great girl. huge promotion at work. EVERYTHING was better.
one afternoon my friend and i were hanging out at our favorite bar and i realized i hadn’t shown him any of the tattoos i got while he was dead. i went to show him the one i got in memorial of him and it was literally dripping off my skin. as were all the other tattoos i had gotten since his death. at that point it occured to me that he was dead.. that i somehow had a child with this woman i had met a few weeks ago and that the bar we were in was abandoned and empty and lined with cobwebs which i had noticed before but it didn’t seem weird until just that moment.
that whole existence ends there in that abandoned bar.. no more story there. i assume this is when i started walking around on my own again but i still have no memory of that either. in fact i have no memory of anything for a week after i “woke up” and started walking around again. during that week my friends tell me i didn’t speak or make eye contact. rarely ate in front of anyone (they left food out for me. they came back to an empty dish. i didn’t die.. i must have been eating.) i have no memory of any of this. my first memories kick back in while im at work.
it was difficult to cope with this. to finally get all this weight off my shoulders and finally be happy again. to finally put that part of my life behind me was the best feeling i’ve ever experienced. and then to wake up and find out that’s not real is hard. it’s hard to accept as reality. Every night you go to bed expecting to wake up in that dream world and learn that bad world was actually the dream. never happened.
this was three or four years ago now. sometimes when i’m really stressed out little pieces will creep into dreams. the dripping tattoos for example. but the one that haunts me the most is every once in awhile i will have a dream where im on the couch with my son (the same from above) and my wife is in the kitchen doing something. the phone rings and i answer and it’s my current girlfriend. she asks what the noise is and i say “thats my son” and as soon as i say that it becomes obvious to me that she isnt the mother and shes not my wife in the kitchen. then i wake up.
i know its my stupid brain screwing with me but something in my head that i cant quite explain KNOWS that this is reality that hasnt yet come to pass. or a reality i missed the turn for. its SO real. its actually caused some problems between myself and my girlfriend because in the back of my brain i know someday i will meet my wife and this is temporary.
i’ve had doctors try to tell me im making this all up.. its pretty scary for someone to come up and explain almost the same thing without ever hearing me explain it before.. like this could be an actual thing. i feel for you dude. i cant explain how painful it is to lose something that great. and then have to try to explain to yourself that you never had it to begin with.
i have a question though.. do you ever run across things like that lamp “in the real world”? does it terrify the hell out of you? years later i still have moments where i think i see something glitchy like that and the anxiety is instant. like im about to lose my reality again.
wow dude. scary day now. thanks for posting this. i’ve never talked about this before and its somehow comforting to write it all down
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Two days after my grandfather died, the neighborhood security guard knocks on our door on a Sunday morning. He told us: ‘An old man came to your house earlier, knocked on your door for half an hour, and finally left. When I asked him what he wanted, he told me he needed to say goodbye to someone he had never had the chance to meet.’ We were all stunned, had no idea who this old man was, or who was he looking for. When the guard came in, he shouted: ‘That’s the old man!!’ pointing at a picture of my grandfather. My entire family froze for a minute. I’m not 100% sure if the guard was telling the truth, but I almost like believing that my grandad wanted to say goodbye to my newborn sister, before resting in peace.
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When my family hit hard times we had to move into a small house where our uncle had recently shot and killed himself. He had done this because of his depression after his wife had overdosed on pills, and died the summer before. It all happened so quickly that when we moved in there was still a bit of blood in one of the rooms. But on the third or fourth night of living there, my sister and I, who were sharing a room in the tiny house, were awake in our room playing video games at around 1-2 in the morning, when someone knocks at our door. We didn’t think anything of it and shouted for whoever was outside our door to come in. No answer. Another knock. We stop and stare at the door and another knock comes, the doorknob does a full rotation and snaps back as if someone turned it and let go very quickly. I get up and open the door expecting to see one of my other sisters or my mother, the only other people in the house. I opened the door and stared into an empty hall way. I walk down the hall and peek into the other bedroom, my two younger sisters and my mother are both fast asleep.
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I have a really good one that is actually true; it happened to me. This could have been a dream, but I testify to this day that what I saw was a ghost. So here I am, a young buy who awoke in the middle of the night. I am currently sharing a bunk bed with my brother, and I am on the top bunk. I look out into my living room and notice everything is dark, however there is a person in an evening gown dusting my fireplace mantle. The woman was slender, which threw me off guard because my mom is obese. I yelled out ‘mom?’ To the person dusting the counter, and the person turned around. It was not my mom, but some older woman. Suddenly, she shrieks and her face becomes severely deformed. It was like that shit you see in horror movies, like ridiculously scary especially for a young kid I blink my eyes and she was gone. I somehow went back to bed, and the next morning I went to my living room and noticed that even though the tv was off, there was something ‘written’ on the screen. It said: ‘Do not be afraid.’ The text slowly faded, and no one else saw it. As a young boy, this was, and still is, extremely terrifying to me.
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I still have fresh memories of this.
When I was very young, about three or four, I remember having a friend named Alli.
Alli lived with me and I would play hide and seek with her in the back yard. Alli was a year older than me. Alli loved my mom but wouldn’t stay long enough to meet her.
My mom didn’t believe I had a friend named Alli, I kept telling her, and my mom first got a very white face and told me stop, and Alli isn’t real.
Well one night Alli told me she had to leave, so she did. Never heard from her again.
Fast forward to when I was 16, and mom told me that before I was born I had a sister named Alli, and she had passed away due to complications (idr what the problem was, something about her lungs I think).
My mom tells me that it was probably all a coincidence since a divorce was going on during that time and I wanted a friend.
But I still remember everything about Alli, and I refuse to believe it was all pretend.
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I have four little cousins who never got to meet my grandfather—he passed before they were born. One morning, they ran downstairs for breakfast as they usually do. As my uncle was getting their food ready, one pointed to the fridge and said ‘that’s him!’ My uncle, not thinking much of it, said ‘who?’ and looked over. They were pointing at a picture of my grandfather that they never got to meet. My cousin responded ‘The man that comes and talks to us at night until we fall asleep sometimes!’
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When I was in high school, my family had to move from central Texas back to West Texas for my dad’s job. We were under a lot of stress and other family issues at the time as well, but that is besides the point. My sister and my mom were painting the upstairs walls as we got the house to get ready. My mom was on the wall to the far right, there was a blank wall in the middle, and my sister was on the far left. I was downstairs packing up things into boxes. Anyway, suddenly, my sister comes downstairs (she is older than me) looking scared out of her mind. She asks me to come upstairs. On the wall in between them, for no apparent reason, this ‘writing’ appeared. Looking closely enough, you can see it was not written by accident, but rather by broad strokes made by a human hand. Problem is, the handprint is too big for any of us three to make it. The longer we stayed in the room, the more freaked out we got as we realized that nobody was playing a prank on anyone else. I still have no explanation to this day of what it means.
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A few years ago my brother would get a call on his cellphone around 2:00 – 3:00 A.M. every night. He would answer and it was this hellish sounding noise. Like static mixed with screams. He changed his cell number after a month of this and it stopped.
Then after a week or so it began again. The exact same noise. Exact same time. Finally one day he decided to backdial the call. It was an old man that had no clue what he was talking about. Still the calls persisted. If he didn’t answer, it would call a few more times. No messages were left.
He decided to say screw it. Ended his contract with his phone company, switched to a new one, and then got another new number. You guessed it, the screaming static calls continued after a short delay. By this time he was terrified every night. Unsure why this was happening. He backdialed the number again and got a different person.
Around this time he lost his job and his phone. The calls stopped of course. His phone was disconnected now. So one day my mom asks me to listen to this weird message she got on our home phone.
It was the static screaming. We showed my brother and he was freaking out. He backdialed the number again and it said the number was disconnected this time.
Never heard from it again after that.
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When my sister was young, my parents got her a personal “phone” – a landline so that she could feel ‘special’ (yes, she was extra spoiled). It was a pre-paid landline though, so basically no one could call in or out if she ran out of credit, much like a mobile phone. Anyway, every night at 3am her phone would ring. She said there was a man on the other line, and she would get really scared and come running to my room. It escalated to the point that I asked her to please disconnect her phone before going to sleep because it was becoming extremely annoying to get woken up every single night by this ‘person’ that called her. To be honest, since she was about 10, I thought it was just these stupid scary movies she liked to watch. Eventually she just got rid of the phone.
In any case, I recall this stopping. A few years ago we were talking about it, and she confessed that her phone continued to ring even after she disconnected it, which is why she said she didn’t want it anymore. She has no recollection of what the person on the other end was saying, or maybe she’s just completely blocked it out.
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A few weeks ago my girlfriend and I were sleeping together, when I woke up to her saying “What are you doing?” She sometimes talks in her sleep, but this sounded so coherent and urgent that it jolted me awake and I asked what she was talking about. She then woke up and said she thought she saw someone at the end of the bed. Thinking it was just a dream, or semi-awake hallucination, we thought nothing of it and went back to sleep. About an hour later, I woke up and saw someone standing on the bed, with the sheets wrapped up and twisted to their neck. I didn’t know what do but the first thing that came out of my mouth was “What are you doing?” My girlfriend then woke me up. I had been dreaming the exact same thing that she did, and said the exact same thing.
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My friend and a few of his college buddies were going on a ghost hunt, and had heard about some graveyard where children murdered by their mother had been buried. The graveyard was located off the main road, so my friend parked his car on the side of the road, and the group (5-7 people I believe) got out and followed the small path through the woods for a couple minutes to get to the graveyard.
Once there, nothing exciting happened for the first 10 minutes or so, and they had tried everything the website or wherever they heard the story told them to do, with nothing resulting. They got bored, and being typical, inebriated college kids, started taunting the supposed ghost of the mother. This continued for a few minutes before they tired, and decided to go back to the car as one of the girls had to go to the bathroom.
Once they got back to the car, my friend, the sober driver, tried opening the handle without unlocking the car because he hadn’t locked it in the first place, but found it locked. He attributed this to bad memory at the time. The group drove home, laughing and talking like normal. After he had dropped all the others off at their homes, he went back to his own house. He got in at the same time as one of his roommates, who stopped and waited for him to pull in. The roommate had his phone out, and shined the light in the window when his friend pulled in as a joke. What he saw was tiny, baby sized handprints all over the windows. As soon as my friend got out, he went into the house without saying a word to the roommate. The roommate, confused, went back to the car and tried to rub one of the handprints. They were on the inside of the window.
To this day, my friend will not speak of his drive home after he dropped off his other friends, and has since sold the car without ever driving it again.
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True story. My best friend died of cancer back in 2002 – we were incredibly close in every way and we spent the majority of our free time together. Almost a year after she died, I was in my apartment sleeping and my phone rang around 3 am – I had one of those sony ericsson t610. I was very groggy and picked up the phone from my nightstand and looked at it – I saw it was my friend’s number. I immediately became alert and awake and answered the phone very curious. I said hello a few times but all I could hear was very loud static for about 30 seconds. Eventually the call ended. At this point I was freaking out and called the number back only to get an automated recording that this number was out of service. I then called her mother’s house to see if possibly her older sister may have had my friend’s old phone and might have called me by accident, but there was no answer at my friend’s mother’s home. Come to find out the remaining family was away in Miami. After they came home a few days later, I took the phone to them and showed them the call log and they were in disbelief. They went to my friend’s room and got the phone out of the drawer where it had been sitting for months.. battery stone cold dead.
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My house was built in 1904. It is a single family home, wood frame setting on a concrete block foundation. I have been living here for about 12 years. Of all the weird things that my siblings and I have seen or heard in this house this one event is my favorite. This happened to my brother. About ten years ago my brother and his best friends had started a garage band playing mostly ‘Spanish rock,’ alternative music but in Spanish. His friends could only get together on Sunday afternoons. They would practice into the early evening, they would usually call it quits by 8 pm, this was the time I usually showed up and went to bed, cause I worked the graveyard shift. This happened in late fall, so the days were getting shorter, they had just finished a long session when the decision to head to someone else’s house came about. My brother handed his car keys to his buddy so they could load up the equipment, every one had filed out of the basement, the tricky part was that they needed to walk all the way to the back of the basement, up the back stairs, through the kitchen doorway down the hall into the living room and out into the front porch. Everyone was outside sitting in my brother’s truck waiting for him. My brother was walking up the backstairs when he remembered that he had left his pancakes in a to-go container sitting on a speaker in the basement. He made the decision to go back. Now the basement is not clean, with full sight lines, there had been partitions made, and the boiler and main heating unit are right smack in the middle. So after my brother walks back, he is about to retrieve his food container, when out of the corner of his eye he sees it.
It is a shadowy figure, right at his peripheral vision, this feeling of dread and uneasiness washed over my brother. We had been taught that if you are in the presence of a spirit or ghost and you felt a bad vibe, to say quick prayer or to cuss at it. My brother chose the latter, he basically just told it, ‘Hey fuck you, I don’t have time for this shit.’
My brother started to walk to the back of the basement and briskly up the stairs, closing doors and turning off lights as he was walking out, the last light switch is on the opposite side of the front door… Luckily the door was open and the light from the street lamp was flooding the living room with its amber light. My brother said he felt something at his back, but at no point did he turn around, as he flicked the last switch the living room went dark, as the rest of the house. As he stepped out he pulled on the door closing it behind him, still holding his food container in one hand he jogged down the few porch steps, he walked towards the front gate…our house resides far from the main street, essentially having a large front yard but no rear garage. As he closed the gap between himself and his friend laden truck he kinda smiled and thought things over in his head, mad at himself for spooking out when there was no reason.
He climbed into the drivers side of the truck, putting on his seat belt and getting ready to pull out of the parking spot directly in front of the house, when one of his friends asked, ‘Hey wait what about your brother, isn’t he coming with us?’
My brother answered, ‘What do you mean? He went to work early tonight. He is already gone, do you see his car anywhere?’
The next question they asked, ‘So then who was walking behind you when you were leaving the house?’
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This happened to me when I was a junior in high school. It was December and it had just started snowing that evening. My best friend and I were in debate and getting ready for our state qualifiers, which were the next day. We were writing our cases and as usual, at each other’s throats over the details of the cases. It was a stressful, tense evening. We finally finished our cases at about 3am. Then, we went to my room for the night.
Almost as soon as we get into my room, we hear what sounds like the water turning on in the other end of the house. No big deal, probably my parents, I think. Then, we hear the front door open. I told her, “I bet mom woke up and wanted some fresh air.” It made sense. I really thought that’s what it was. Until we heard incredibly heavy footsteps in my living room, headed for my room. They were NOT anyone in my family’s footsteps. Then they stopped. My friend and I looked at each other and were both freaked out, just standing, frozen in my room. We walked closer to each other and the footsteps started again, but this time they were running toward us. We both flipped. We grabbed each other’s hands, out of fear, and my bedroom door flew open. We both looked at the door. Nobody was there. We ran to the bathroom that’s connected to my room. I closed/ locked the door and stood against it. When we finally got the balls to do it, we sprinted to my parents’ room, crying and hysterical. We obviously startled my parents awake. They said neither of them had gotten up. My dad grabbed his gun and looked outside. No tracks in the snow, anywhere around our house.
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My brother once lived in a flat in downtown Mt. Clemens, MI. The Clem was known to be a hot spot for “baths” back in the depression era and was booming with activity. Nowadays it has some run-down parts, this is where my brother rented his flat. It was a giant old raggedy house which was now separated into multiple odd apartments. Anyways, long story short, he always admitted to odd experiences, cupboard doors opening up, things missing, but one peculiar oddity was that he was always missing boxers/underwear from his drawer. He admitted that he thought his house was haunted and that the ghost had a crush on him. Never anything violent or disturbing, just odd things.
Later on he starts dating his future ex-wife. She starts coming around and he notices that the oddities begin to increase. New oddities began to occur, his girlfriend would always find her shoes (which were left on a mat inside the apartment) outside the door on the patio in the morning. She’d always comment to my brother to stop putting her shoes outside, he had an idea of why but didn’t want to frighten her… besides, it wasn’t hurting anyone right?
Well, things started getting worse, he comes home from work and his girlfriend was staying there while he was gone, claims that the stove burner kept lighting itself, she’d walk into the kitchen and it would be lit, she’d turn it off and shortly later it’d be lit again. Then, one night my brother wakes up in the middle of the night and sees his girlfriend sitting at the end of the bed, not just sees but feels her near his feet, staring at him. He calls out for her to come back to bed, she doesn’t respond so he calls out louder telling her to come to bed and asking what’s wrong? His girlfriend then asks what he’s doing, he turns and she’s sleeping next to him, he turns back, no one is at the end of the bed. Now, he’s freaked out but doesn’t want to scare his girlfriend from coming over his place.
A few nights later, they’re both sleeping and he wakes up to his girlfriend screaming. He looks over and she’s sleeping but thrashing around holding onto her neck. He doesn’t see anything so he starts yelling and shaking her to wake her up, after a few shakes she wakes up crying and terrified. She starts telling my brother about how real her dream felt that a woman was strangling her telling her to get out, that she doesn’t belong there and to leave her man alone. Her neck had red marks on it, possibly from herself trying to ‘defend herself’ but they believed it to be from something else. My brother then comes clean with her, then decides to do some research and find out that the address that they live in was an old brothel back in the day that the rich bathers used to stay in. My brother lived in that house for a few more weeks before he could locate a new place, she never came back to stay the night though, and he never experienced anything aggressive while there. Still, kinda fucked up though. I know my brother and I can tell when he’s lying, this shit was legit and when she talked about it, you could see how shaken up she was.
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This is a story I do not often tell. I promise, sincerely, that this has scarred me for life and although I have looked into psychological explanations for what I heard and natural explanations for what occurred, they remain unsatisfactory.
When I was a child, I was scared of the dark. I swore to my mother I heard voices in it. They were not evil, but they were not familiar and so they scared me. It was not uncommon in the middle of the night for me to wake up and hear ‘whispers’ as I would call them when asking my mom. She figured they were just ‘bumps in the night’ and typical kids’ nightmare material. I tried often to explain to her that it was more than that, that they sounded different from one another the way people’s voices do.
On some nights I would get so scared from these ‘whispers’ that I would sleep in my mom’s bed with her. It was an added bonus that the bathroom was directly outside of her bedroom door for my late-night tinkles.
I should add at this point that when walking out into the hall to go to the bathroom, you looked directly down the stairs that would lead you into my living room on the first floor (as my mom’s bedroom was on the second floor).
On one such night, around Christmas, I awoke and felt the need to relieve myself. I walked out from the door and distinctly heard the phrase ‘Look!”‘and to my astonishment, a red light, almost like a spotlight, was cast upon the wall at the very bottom of the stairs. The light had no other source, it was by itself, and I was transfixed by it.
Being a little kid, and it only being a few days from Christmas, I KNEW what this light was. IT WAS SANTA!!! How else could he get into my house to know I was being a good boy. I was so excited I began walking down the stairs to greet him, picking up my pace after the second step as it began to creep off the wall and fade into the darkness in my living room.
That’s when I heard him. A very strong, masculine voice. Different from the first. Not at all like my father’s (not to say he isn’t masculine, it was just distinctly different). It said “Stop! Right now. Go back up those stairs.”
I listened, turned around, and what happened next I am not sure I would believe if someone had told me this same story. After reaching the top of the stairs, I heard a very loud CRASH that sent me running back to my mother’s bed where I jumped straight under the covers and stayed there the whole night.
When we awoke the next morning, the poinsettia lights (little Christmas flower lights that glowed red) my mother had put on the railing down the stairs were pulled straight down to the bottom of the stairs, some broken from what seemed like a forceful tear, laying in a single pile. The dry sink in my living room had fallen from the wall. My mother could not explain it! My father was worried we had been the victims of a home invasion. My sister was crying.
There was nothing missing, nobody had broken in, there did not seem to be any reason this had happened. And then I saw it, and I kept quiet about it because I was so afraid that I could not force words out of my mouth.
There, on the edge of the wooden dry sink which had been facing up, were three indentations where the finish on the wood had been worn, almost as if in a forceful grip. Something down there had GRABBED IT AND THREW IT DOWN. That was what the bang was.
I was mortified. After that day I never heard a single voice again. I do not like to imagine what was waiting downstairs for me that night, if it was anything at all, but I can tell you that the reality was that something had physically acted upon two things in my house near the bottom of that stairwell.
After this, I had never heard another whisper again. Which is sad, because in some ways I would have liked to thank the man (masculine energy?) that had stopped me from going down those stairs. This happened when I was 7 (or 7 and a half! as I liked to say at the time).
I am 20 years old now, and because of this incident I am still afraid of the dark. ESPECIALLY shadowy stairwells
———————-
We moved into a new house a few months ago. As we were in the process of purchasing the house, the renter who was living in it died unexpectedly of natural causes in his mid-40s. He died right in the middle of the living room.
Shortly after, we move into the house, and almost immediately our 2-year-old daughter starts talking about the ghost that lives in our house. Now let’s be real here—she is 2 and 2-year-olds are VERY impressionable. Halloween had recently passed, and she had this Halloween-themed picture book that she loved to read, so it’s entirely possible that all this talk of ghosts was just coming from looking through that book on a regular basis.
Still, she was always telling me that the ghost was in her playhouse in the basement, or that the ghost was on the stairs, or that the ghost was standing in the corner. She never seemed to be afraid of the ghost, and considered him to be her friend, so I wasn’t all that concerned even if there really was a ghost haunting our house. If he’s a nice and helpful ghost, it could certainly be a lot worse. I would often tell the ghost that he was welcome to stay if he wanted to, but he was also welcome to go if that would make him happier. I was about 30/70 on the ghost being real and she could see and talk to him versus the ghost being just her imagination fueled by her Halloween book.
… until one day, when we were going out to the car to go to daycare in the morning. It was still dark out and rainy. My daughter told me that the ghost was on the back deck, and then she told me that today was the ghost’s birthday and she wanted to sing him Happy Birthday. Once again, I mostly disregarded what she was saying, as she is birthday obsessed and has in the past made us sing Happy Birthday to Mickey Mouse, a bowl of fruit snacks, and the bathroom. So we sang and wished the ghost a happy birthday and went on with our lives.
Later that day, out of pure curiosity, I looked up the obituary of the man who had died in our house.
And wouldn’t you know it? It was his fucking birthday
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This is a story I have never told anyone, because, well, even I think I sound a bit crazy for telling it.
Back-story-time: Me and my then girlfriend(let’s call her Audrey) went to see a movie a couple years ago(Transporter 3…?), we both smoked at the time and were collectively out of smokes, so on the way to the theater we went to grab a pack. Because of this we were a bit late to the movie, and never had the chance for a pre-flick cigarette.
Anyway, we saw the movie, and niggerfaggots on our way out, a friend(call him Mike) of ours came up and asked if we wanted to join him for a smoke. As we walked out of the building Audrey took the plastic off the pack we just bought, took out a smoke for the both of us to share, and tossed the plastic into a trash can. As we stood talking to Mike, a guy came up to us and asked Audrey for a smoke, and she told him we were smoking our last one. This guy didn’t take kindly to that, and started shouting about how she’s lying and how she has no right to lie to him. We offered him a “sorry dude” and tried to walk away. Then things got messy. He grabbed Audrey’s wrist and wouldn’t let go, and started shouting “what the fuck” and such things. Now, I’m not going to let someone harm the person I love, so I stepped between them and grabbed the arm he was using to hold her. Then, before I knew what was happening, I had a horrible pain in my throat and stomach, my coat was getting wet, and Audrey was shouting “STOP! STOP! STOP!” I also heard Mike saying “What the fuck” and “Oh my god.” Then, I started feeling what I could only describe as exhaustion, and I no longer had the strength to hold my head up. As my head was dropping, I saw the red all over my coat and the knife the guy was holding. My vision started going black and sounds became muffled. As I felt gravity overcome me, I heard a single sound, coming from all around me, like it was the only thing that had existed. It was Audrey, calling my name for help, just once. The instant after I heard her, it felt as though the universe began to shake, a mid range hum took over my ears, and all the black became a flash of blinding white.
Then I was inside the movie theater, next to Audrey, with Mike apologizing for startling us so badly. We were apparently “white as ghosts.” He then asked us if we would join him for a smoke, and Audrey quickly declined. We left the theater, without saying a word to each other. I decided to break one of my own rules and asked Audrey for a cigarette when we got in my car. She took them out of her jacket and put the plastic-less pack on the dash in front of me. I began shaking when I opened it and saw a single smoke missing. Audrey let out the most fearful scream I have ever heard in my life when we drove past a guy walking through the parking lot. It was him. She insisted she stay the night at my house.
When we arrived at my place, we turned on all the lights and just cried in each other’s arms. I asked her about it the next morning, and she confirmed it wasn’t all in my head, but that was the extent to which we ever talked about it. And I’m sure this experience is what led to the end of our relationship, things got too intense between us after this.
tl;dr: I died in front of my girlfriend and we went back to a checkpoint moments before.
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was standing on the deck of the ship speaking with a fellow Marine. He was eating some candy orange slices. These guys:
When he got to the last one, he offered it to me, saying he didn’t want it. As I am not a fan of sweets, I declined, so he tossed it over the edge of the ship. About 10 ft down, it turned into an orange butterfly and flew away.
Let me repeat that: A candy orange slice turned into an orange f*cking butterfly and flew off. Something similar to this butterfly, except more orange and less yellow:
Did the other Marine see it? Indeed he did.
Maybe a butterfly happened to fly right by at that moment and it was an optical illusion? Except, we were in the Indian Ocean… far, far away from land and butterflies.
No, it makes no sense. None whatsoever. Sure, I could be lying… but I promise I can think of a large number of more believable, less randomly bizarre stories if I wanted to make crap up.
After 12 years, I just accept it is just one of those things I’ll never really understand or make sense of.
———————-
Back in the late 1980’s, early 1990’s, I was married to my (now) ex-husband and we had 6 children together.
We owned one of those Toyota mini-vans, the kind with a pointed hood and a door on the side that slid open. It seated exactly 7 people but we used to cram 2 of the younger ones into 1 seat using 1 seatbelt, so technically they were all seatbelted whenever we went anywhere.
Having a family that large meant that when we went out for day trips like to the beach or something, it was more practical (and cheaper) to pack a small portable Weber grill and bring along hotdogs, burgers, carne asada or something that could be quickly grilled and eaten, than to stop somewhere and buy pre-cooked meals for ourselves and the kids. We also had a huge igloo thermos (the orange kind you see strapped on to the backs of work trucks) which I would fill with Kool-Aid and ice and which the kids would fill paper cups up with throughout the day to stay hydrated.
So my ex-husband had some very unyielding ideas about most subjects. One of them was that he did not drink out of paper cups and he did not eat out of paper plates, like all the rest of us did. We always had to bring a regular plate and a regular glass for him to drink and eat out of whenever we went anywhere.
Back in those days, Tupperware used to make these drinking glasses out of whatever Tupperware is made of (plastic? rubber? neoprene?) and you could purchase a set of 4 in the color of your choice. My ex mother-in-law LOVED those glasses. She had sets in all kinds of colors. And when my husband would go over to her house, he would sometimes grab one of her Tupperware glasses, fill it with whatever beverage she had in her fridge, and bring the glass home, saying he would return it on his next visit.
Now there was one glass that he brought home that he never returned to her. Reason being is that he brought it into the backyard and after he finished drinking whatever was in there, he gave it to the kids to use in their sandbox. It was the perfect shape for a turret on a medieval sandcastle! The kids would fill it with wet sand and use it to form intricate details on their creations. Eventually, it became one of the main accessories of their sandbox. It was always left outside, along with a garden trowel, a plastic shot glass, some colorful rocks, used popsicle sticks and other miscellaneous decorative material to beautify their sand castles.
After months of this Tupperware glass being left out in the sun, it gradually started fading in color. It had started off a kind of peachy orange, but after being exposed to the sun and other elements, the plastic started looking mottled and blotchy. The blotches had faded to a near-white color, but there were other areas on the glass that retained the original peach/orange, and others that had faded to gradient shades of pink, peach and orange. It was very distinctive looking.
Eventually, I guess the glass made its way back into the house and was washed and put into the cabinet. And one day in prepping for a beach outing, I grabbed the glass and threw it into a bag that contained the fixings for a family picnic/lunch.
After a long day at the beach, we started heading home. I had put all the leftovers and stuff inside a large bag and stuck it inside the back of the minivan. The kids were all strapped into their places, my ex-husband sat in the driver’s seat, and I got into the front passenger seat.
We had just gone through the Gaviota tunnel and were on a small stretch of the 101 Freeway North heading towards our exit, when we passed a guy walking along the side of the freeway, dressed in raggedy clothes. He had long hair and a walking stick, and was probably in his early 30’s.
My husband turned on his signal light and stopped on the shoulder of the freeway.
Me: “What are you doing?”
Him: “That guy looks just like Jesus!” (Meaning the Christian Jesus Christ, not a Hispanic person named Jesus).
Me: “Well he has long brown hair and a beard and moustache. Most white guys that fit that description probably look like Jesus. Not that anyone knows what he really looked like.”
Him: “Well just in case… I’m gonna see if he wants something to eat and drink! It’s hot outside and he’s in the middle of nowhere!”
I sigh. “Okay. I guess.”
He gets out, opens the rear door, takes out some food, gives it to the guy, then gets the mottled peach glass and fills it with Kool-Aid. I hear the guy thank him, he sounds totally grateful. He downs the Kool-Aid in a couple of big gulps, then I hear my ex-husband say, “Here, let me pour you some more. It’s hot out here.”
He pours him another glass of Kool-aid and then I hear, “No, that’s fine. Go ahead and keep the glass! You’re welcome.”
He gets back into the car, starts it, merges back onto the freeway, and we pass the long-haired bearded man in raggedy clothes. The man holds up one hand to say goodbye/thanks.
I say to my ex, “Why did you give him the kids’ sandcastle glass? That was the perfect thing for them to make their sandcastles with!”
“They can use something else.”
“So could he! Why didn’t you just give him a paper cup? He’s probably going to just throw that glass in the bushes as soon as he finishes the Kool-Aid!!”
“No he won’t!”
“What do you mean, he won’t? He’s not gonna want to walk around carrying a glass everywhere he goes! I can’t believe you did that! That was the kids’ favorite thing!”
“Can’t you understand that was Jesus we just saw walking the earth?!! Or at least an angel??!! You need to stop being so damn selfish, Maria. Everything is always about you.”
I groan and sit back in my chair. We rode the rest of the way home in silence.
When we get home, after the kids all exit the car and take turns jumping into the shower, I go to the kitchen to put away the stuff we took on the beach trip. I get the Igloo cooler and dump what’s left into a pitcher and then turn to the sink to fill it up with soapy water so I can clean it out. That’s when I see it. In the dish drying rack is a Tupperware glass, originally a peachy-orange color that had been left out in the sum for months and as a result, had turned a blotchy white/pink/orange/salmon/cream. There could not be another one like this in the world. And I had just seen my then-husband hand it to a long-haired bearded guy walking down the 101 Freeway not 45 minutes ago.
Nobody believes this story and I would not believe it either if I had not seen it (and touched the Tupperware glass with my own hands) myself
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I’m hesitant to tell my tale to the world but I know every word of it is true.
I will begin by stating, I do not believe in ghosts, spirits, the undead, an afterlife, god, allah, satan, etc. I believe wholeheartedly that all of my experiences in my old house have a rational and logical explanation. I just have no explanation.
In 2005 just after being discharged from the US Army, my wife (ex wife now) and I moved into my deceased grandparents house. Aside from a rental tenant or two, it had mostly been vacant since my grandparents died several years earlier.
We arrived to find much needed renovation. I had just left the Army and was still being paid due to having a significant amount of leave time (vacation time) and my wife was able to get a job very quickly. So we decided to temporarily live with her parents while I worked on the house everyday.
Eventually we moved in. At first, everything was normal.
I still remember the first night she woke me to tell me I didn’t turn the lights off in the living room. “But I wasn’t even in the living room.” Regardless, I hopped out of bed and shut the light off.
The next time it happened, I returned to bed only to be nudged awake again. “Matt why didn’t you turn the light off” demanded an angry wife. “I swear I did. Was I dreaming?”
This became a regular occurrence. Go to bed, awake to see lights on all over the house. Go turn them all off, return to bed. Awake an hour later to find lights on again.
Probably an outdated electrical system. The house was over a hundred years old. It was doubtful my grandparents did any serious work on it since the 80’s.
Oftentimes, I would come to bed after my wife. I am a stickler for a closed bedroom door at night. Even in a house where I’m alone. Just hard for me to sleep with an open door. Many nights I would awake to find our bedroom door open. Nothing earth shattering there. Old, drafty house. Likely the wife had gotten up to use the restroom and didn’t close the door upon returning to bed, etc. But still, just as the lighting, many nights found me getting up multiple times to close the door.
Now for the “wrestlers.”
The house was two stories with the upstairs being a single bedroom with a larger room to the side. In older houses, it was common to have bedrooms separated only by a wall and a door-so one bedroom would open into another. This was the layout of the upstairs area. Given the fact that my mother was an only child, I suspect the adjoining room was a play room/living room type area for her.
One night as my wife and I were lying in bed-not yet asleep, we heard footsteps upstairs. If you’ve ever lived in an apartment with an upstairs neighbor, you know the sound. I immediately ran upstairs, and turned every light on, opened every closet door, looked behind every door…Nothing. No one was there.
I returned to bed. The footsteps continued. I ran upstairs several times that night and never found anyone.
This continued almost every night-to a point that we just accepted it and stopped acknowledging it (several months after it started.) Then it got loud.
I prefaced this part by teasing “the wrestlers.” The reason is because once we began to ignore the footsteps upstairs, it got very, very loud. I once remarked that it sounded as if wrestlers were wrestling in the upstairs room. It was loud and it sounded violent.
Many late night sprints up the stairs, still I found nothing but dusty carpet, bad wallpaper, and mismatched furniture.
All of the above became routine for us. I never found a culprit for any of the occurrences we endured nightly.
Over time, our marriage crumbled to something that resembled the old and forgotten dust embedded in the 70’s era shag carpet that covered the upstairs floors. In an instant, my wife was gone and I sat alone in a house that seemed to hide something unexplainable.
My mother suggested the occurrences in the house were my grandparents making it clear they were unhappy about the woman I had brought into their house. But again, I don’t believe in these things. Besides, even long after my wife was gone, the occurrences continued-only they were much worse. Doors slamming shut, lights turning on and off so rapidly it seemed as though someone was manually manipulating the switches, and the rumbling from upstairs…that was so loud that I honestly believed the ceiling would fall and crush me to death.
Every night….night after night, lights, doors, violent wrestling upstairs.
One night my upstairs guests were particularly loud. Loud to a point that honestly frightened me. More so than ever before. But I had had enough. I calmly walked upstairs, turned the overhead light on, sat in the middle of the floor and said “you can no longer torture me. If you are here to frighten me, I’m no longer afraid, if you’re here to cause me harm, get on with it.”
I sat in the upstairs room all night. I never slept. I didn’t leave. I sat. It was as quiet as could be.
The following night, I sat in the living room watching television when the upstairs wrestling match began. But this was different. This was like nothing I had heard before. This sounded like the universe being ripped apart. This was new. This was terrifying.
The wrestlers then began to move down the hardwood stairs. They…it, whatever it was, was coming downstairs. “Did I taunt this thing? What’s about to happen?” I wanted to run away but I couldn’t stand. I couldn’t move. Maybe it was just fear that paralyzed me. But I was physically unable to stand. Whatever was coming, I had to face it.
I watched as the door separating the living room from the stairs was violently beaten and kicked. I could tell someone…something was trying to open the door. It seemed like, someone was on one side trying to open the door while someone on the other side was holding it closed.
Unable to move a muscle, I only watched.
After what seemed to be a lifetime, the door burst open. The thing, the being that I saw defies any and all logic. My best description is the thing I saw was right out of central casting from Star Wars’ Tattooine. The scene in the bar where all the strange looking creatures are enjoying themselves…this thing came right out of that. The first thing that I noticed was how this thing moved. It didn’t run or walk. It wildly flailed its extremities in every direction. They moved so fast it Was just a blur.
As this thing moved toward the door that would exit my house, it’s face looked at me for what seemed like hours.
It’s face was leathery with metal tube covered eyes that resembled ship portals. Like a steampunk nightmare. It had various tube-like things protruding from all over its head.
It stared at me for what felt like an eternity. While its body and appendages were a blur, its head was, in the words of Samuel Taylor Coldridge, “as idle as a painted ship, upon a painted ocean.”
The horrid, muted screams that emanated from this creature were beyond my ability to properly explain. Imagine a large group of people with taped mouths being tortured. Something like that.
As the creature approached the door, it began violently kicking and beating the door. Its feet left the ground and its body levitated only to repeatedly kick, pound, and throw itself into the door.
For the entire episode, I was unable to move…hell I couldn’t even blink.
Finally the door was opened and the thing vanished into the night. I sat for hours, still unable to move.
When the morning came, I still sat, wide awake trying to comprehend what had happened. I was not under the influence of anything. I had not been asleep and dreaming.
Eventually I left the house. I stayed away for a few days. ”Did I have a psychotic break? Is this due to the stress of divorce? This can’t have been real. None of this is logical at all.”
After a few days I returned to the house. I brushed my teeth and went to bed as usual. As I laid in bed, I awaited the nightly wrestling. I wondered how soon I would have to get out of bed and turn the lights off again. But more than anything, I wondered what I saw just a few nights earlier. What was that creature? It certainly wasn’t human, but I don’t believe in spirits, ghosts, monsters, etc. So what the hell was that thing? “It had to be a dream, right? None of this can be real…right?”
Eventually I drifted off to sleep. Upon waking the next morning, I immediately realized I had slept through the night with no upstairs wrestlers, no lights to turn off, and no doors to close. The morning was oddly peaceful.
I went to work and went through my daily routine. When I returned home that night, the house was the same but something was different. I had dinner, watched a little television and went to bed. I laid in the dark waiting…nothing. The house was quiet. It was just a house now.
Several months passed before I moved on to another house in another state. But for the rest of my time in that house, I never saw or heard anything unusual ever again.
For a few years now, a man and his wife have occupied the house. Occasionally I ask my mother if they’ve ever reported anything strange to her. Nothing.
Prior to my moving in, a woman rented it from my mom. According to my mom, the woman described often seeing a man wandering around at night. When she described the man, my mom showed the woman a picture of my grandad. The woman said “that’s the man I see walking around in my house.”
I don’t expect anyone to believe this is anything more than an attempt at a good story. But I guarantee this is 100% true and happened exactly as I’ve described.
Nothing about it is logical. Nothing about it is believable and yet I lived it. I still think about it everyday and wonder what exactly happened in that house.
Anyway, that’s my story. If you read it all, thank you.
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One night I was at my cousin’s house in Los Feliz, right at the bottom of the beginning of Griffith Park in the Hollywood hills. It was your average twenty-something party in Los Angeles. My cousin and her husband worked in film. One guy was in a band (of course!) and one wrote for High Times and another for the Los Angeles Times. Me, I was in mortgages, exciting – right? The night began to wind down. So, the dude that wrote for high times magazine – we’ll call him James. My cousin’s husband- we’ll call him Red. And the Los Angeles Times writer, we’ll call him Bruce. So it was me, Bruce, Red and James on the balcony. Before they put up a skyrise next door – my cousin had an amazing view of the city at night and it was only 4 stories up so I could enjoy myself. I don’t like heights. It was getting very late, around 2am. James lit a joint and we all whispered about the quiet and beauty of the night. We were in the dark as to not wake up my cousin – Suddenly we heard loud clopping coming from up the hill, from the Griffith Park entrance. It’s a horse!?! At 2am? We can not see it, only hear it. Clomping. A galloping horse getting closer. We were all straining to see it. So you have Red, my cousins husband from Chicago. He’s the sweetest man ever and he always looked out for me like a big brother when I lived in LA. You have Bruce. 6’4 beautiful black man with long dark hair and gold chains. Also, sweetest guy I know. Cuddle bear type. James – James was from the Philippines and very quiet. Solid guy though. And me, I’m a Mid Western girl from the woods. I know the sounds of a horse. This one was galloping down the hills towards us. None of us were frightened- people ride horses in Griffith Park. Not this late but it’s possible. You hear that it’s haunted up there by the Hollywood sign but everywhere is haunted. You don’t think of these things or worry. We weren’t even high really and we had switched to water awhile ago. There was 4 of us and we know what we saw. Finally the galloping is getting closer. I knew in a few minutes I could see this horse. I felt like a horse was on the loose. Then it reached the streetlights. Perfect view. We stood like statues, complete shock. It was some sort of man. It’s looked like a very sick man, his skin was see-thru green and you could see veins and things – almost like he had translucent skin. His hair was fire orange – like Ziggy Stardust- he was thin and strange but it was his body…he was bent backwards – think opposite naruto run. Leaning back but not in a way anyone could and run. The front of him was running but his legs were bent like a flamingo’s. His knees inverted. He wore nothing but dirty white baggy pants. At first I thought he was wearing loud boots but as he came down the street we could see they were hooves. I’m not kidding. It was terrifying. There was another thing we all agreed on later was that there was this extreme primal thing about this creature- like it was after something but it wasn’t us. But it has the worst face. Translucent skin stretched over a knee – cap looking. Sharp teeth and black eyes. I would not have noticed the black eyes but as it galloped by James sucked in air really quick – no words but like when someone startles you and you suck in air and clutch your chest? He did that. In a split second the thing stopped on a dime, turned its head sharply and looked right at us. No one moved. We all held our breath. Los Angeles is a big city. Hundreds of balconies and buildings. We should not have been visible. We were in the dark. We were floors from the street. All James did was gasp quietly, but this thing turned its head like it was sniffing us and then look right at us. It paused as if to size us up and then galloped away but when he galloped away – it made no sound. We were all a wreck til dawn. James and I would not walk down to the same street to get our cars. Bruce lived next door and didn’t want to leave. We stayed huddled in a circle all night terrified it would come back. We refuse to ever talk about it now but that night we did. For James – he thought it was a ghost, maybe someone who got murdered in the hills? Because the creature was so bent strange. Bruce said where he comes from you don’t look at or talk to the dead. You also don’t laugh at the dead. I related to that. I’m Catholic so I also just wanted nothing to do with it. I don’t deal with the dead. The thing is – I’m not sure if I feel like it was a ghost. It wasn’t see through like a ghost it was see through like he had see through skin and we could see veins and things. Red agreed with me on that. Had to be a creature of some sort. Had too, plus it had hooves. We are afraid to talk about it because we feel like that will give it power. I know that sounds weird. For years I had a hard time on that street at night but we never saw it again.
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Q-Funeral workers:
What’s the weirdest request you’ve gotten regarding a deceased person?
A-I’ve requested for years that my wife take my remains somewhere where basically nothing is illegal, and have me taxidermied.
I want the full treatment, stuffed, wrong color, mismatched eyes, one of which should be lazy, and posed like your classic stuffed wild bear.
Years/generations down,
“Hey, little Timmy! Do you wanna meet your late great great great great grandpa joe? Oh, YOU DO?! Then, run straight up into the attic and immediately turn on the lights.”
And there, I’ll be. Terrifying the next generations, as the elders should.
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My grandmother had a poltergeist living in her old farm house.
She called it Blackbeard for some reason she never explained and it had one particular trick it used to play on her.
The angrier she got at this thing the more it would do its trick. It infuriated my grand mom.
At the hallway where the phone was plugged into the wall, there was a writing desk with a pad of paper and a pen.
The entity loved to steal the pen. Now I know your thinking that people misplace their pens and pencils all the time. But this was different. My grandmother was constantly buying new pens for the house as they never turned up anywhere, and she would swear that she would stand up mid phone call, turn her back and the pen would be gone!
Anyhow batty old woman your thinking.
One day many years later me and my cousin decide to check out the attic on this 100 plus year old house. We first needed to remove the ancient wooden slats that covered the small access stairs. Then remove all the nails to open the actual hatch in the ceiling. All in all about half an hour to gain access to this room which had about 2 inches of dust covering everything. The room clearly hadn’t been occupied in many decades!
We found an old school desk, the type with an ink well and a drawer on the seat.
Opening that drawer we found 247 pens inside.
Grandma laughed her head off when we told her and then made some disparaging remarks aimed at Blackbeard.
Edit: before anyone says rats did it, let it be known that we don’t have rats in Alberta where this happened. The largest house rodent is a deer mouse. Not large enough to pack away items. And cats were kept for that type of critter!
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My parents thought they were just going to have one child-me. My mom had my brother the summer before I started fourth grade. I was *relatively* okay with this. My mom had a c-section, and her mom came to stay because my baby brother was freaking huge and my dad had to get back to work.
People were very generous, and lots of gifts were sent to the hospital. One gift included a helium balloon with a rainbow on it. The first sign of trouble was when I woke up and the balloon was in my room with me. This was odd since I slept with my door closed, but I figured it must have gotten in before I shut my door, or my grandmother opened my door to check on me or something.
The next day the balloon was floating over my brother’s crib.
The third day I was in the shower washing my hair (with the bathroom door closed and the shower curtain also closed) when I turned from the faucet and the balloon was in the shower with me. My screams woke the baby. My mom was furious with me. She locked the balloon in a closet. That night, she woke up and the balloon was over her.
When she woke up in the morning the balloon was still in the closet.
That morning, my grandmother went outside with me so I could swim. We had a small deck off of an enclosed porch, and then stairs leading down to the pool. I was standing on the diving board, facing the porch when I saw the porch door (screen door, so it opened out instead of in) open. I thought my mom was coming out.
It was the balloon. It turned on the deck, so the rainbow was facing me. Then it started WALKING down the stairs, like a human. The balloon didn’t just float from the deck into the yard like a balloon, it went down each step like a person or animal climbs stairs. I was screaming from the point the balloon came out instead of my mom. My grandmother joined the chorus.
The screen door opened again. This time my mom ran out with scissors. She had been standing in the kitchen looking at my grandmother and I through the window and saw the screen door open and the balloon go out. She chased the balloon down and as she stabbed it (over and over and over) that balloon SCREAMED.
A little backstory. My mom’s brother completed suicide a couple of years prior to this. Oddly, my brother and I favor him to an insane degree. Not only do we physically resemble him far more than we do our actual parents, but we apparently have his mannerisms, gestures, and patterns of speech although I spent very little time with him as a small child and my brother was born after his death.
More backstory. He killed himself in a work truck. My family decided to have the work truck crushed. The work truck did not agree. First it refused to crank. Then it almost killed someone as it was loaded onto the flatbed tow truck. Then as they loaded it onto the crusher it cranked and almost ran over someone else. My other uncle also reported seeing a weird creature standing on his staircase, staring at him silently, for a couple of years after his brother died.
That’s mostly the end, except my brother has had a lifelong fear of balloons. Oh, and that my own daughter was born on the anniversary of my uncle’s death. And one day, when she was a preschooler and we got a cat, she turned to me, smiled, and said “I’m going to name it Rainbow. You need to know that the rainbow was never going to hurt you.”
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I was recently staying at a wellness resort retreat in the desert. I don’t want to say the name because it’s truly delightful, but it’s like one of those place where white women go to do yoga and eat organic food and get Ayurveda massages. They also have a lot of things there that would maybe be considered mysticism. They have spiritual healers, reiki, crystal work, etc. You can like paint on a horse. IDK, lots of spiritual stuff.
So I’m there for a few days with my mom and a friend, and we’re staying in a casita, where there was like the main house, the guest house, and a courtyard between them, all inside a walled metal gate.
A big part of being there is you do lots of spa treatments and activities and healing and stuff on your own schedule, so you’re alone a lot, even if you came with other people, just because your schedules don’t overlap. In my alone time, I did a lot of trail running. I just went out in the desert, it’s super isolated and go for an hour or so. On my last run though, I just kept getting these feelings like I was being watched. It’s the desert, so there’s big rocks, and brush, and I kept looking back over my shoulder, or I would go around a corner and like brace myself that I was going to have to fight. And then nothing. General desert creepyness.
So that night, I’m asleep in the guest house, and I wake up to drumming. Like a legit drum circle drumming with rhythm. And my sleepy brain is like, okay, this is a weird place, sure, there could be a 1 am drum circle. So I lay there in bed, listening to the drumming and I’m getting more and more angry. Like the emotion was pure rage. When people say they see “red”, that was me. So I’m in my pajamas and I like crawl out of bed, and like angrily stomp on my sneakers and the only thing I can come up with doing was to go outside and yell STFU. I cannot overestimate, how not in my right mind I was – just completely filled with rage. I would never stomp around a luxury resort yelling at people to shut up but I was filled with such a rage I was like a woman possessed. I realize how crazy this sounds. But I was ready to walk into the desert in only my pajamas to stop this drum circle.
So I leave the house and I stomp over to the gate to exit the courtyard and go outside, and the moment I put my hand on the handle to the gate, this voice spoke to me really calmly and clearly and it goes “the thing that’s trying to lure you outside in the dark is not the thing you want to meet.” And it’s like it broke the spell. Like a switch flipped, I went back inside, and laid back down in bed. I went from being like red hot to ice cold. And the drumming had stopped. No sound. Nothing.
I asked everyone the next morning, I was like, what was with that drum circle, and no one had heard anything. I checked the resort schedule, and there wasn’t anything scheduled. I have no explanation. But I’m glad I didn’t go outside.
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When I was about 14 I went down to San Antonio with my family and a buddy of mine. We were staying at a hotel that was right next to Six Flags Fiesta Texas. Since we were staying at the hotel they gave us free tickets and early access to the park, which was awesome. So me and my buddy go in and we are basically the only people there and maybe a few other hotel guests. Now my buddy was terrified of roller coasters, so I basically rode all the rides by myself that day. After about an hour I decided I want to ride the Rattler which is an older wooden roller coaster. (Basically the same as the Texas Giant) I get up to the coaster, there is no line so I go straight to the front cart. I thought I was going to be the only one riding but another young teenager walk up and asks if he can sit with me at the last second. I say sure, no big deal. We both strap in, but the cart attendant only checked my seat to see if it was secure. However, I just thought if you checked one side, both sides were safe. So the ride starts all is good, the coaster was fun. When the ride stops, me and the teenager get off the ride and I tell him, “take it easy” and he does the same. I walk out of the ride in front of the other passenger toward the little area where it shows you the picture it took when going down the big fall. I walk up to the screen to wait for my picture. Since it was early no one was working the counter to buy the pictures, but they still showed up on the TVs. Like I said before it was just me on the ride before the other teenager got on at the last second. When the picture finally showed up, I about pee’d my pants. It was JUST ME in the picture. No one was sitting next to me…It was an empty chair. There wasn’t a glare, there wasn’t anything that would have obscured the teen sitting next to me.
I ran back up to the top of the ride to ask the cart attendant but I guess they had switched shifts or something because it was not the same person. I looked all over for the kid around the ride and throughout the park the rest of the day and never saw him again.
One of the craziest things that’s happened to me. I will forever believe in ghosts because of it.
I wish I could have have bought the picture at the time. Even in the years afterwards I have researched to see if there were any accidents on that ride or if there’s were any weird deaths before the park was built. I have found no information on the kid I rode with or of any accidents there.
Still gets me just thinking about seeing that picture that was taken.
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This story originally forced me to take a break from selling real estate, and it’s not something I would like associated with my name. That being said…
A few years ago, I was helping an old friend sell a house out in Morrison, Colorado. For those who don’t know Morrison, it’s this teeny-tiny, quaint town adjacent to the beginning ridge of the Rocky Mountains. My friend’s mom had cancer and died in the house. His father, distraught from her death, got bloody drunk the night after and accidentally tripped and fell down a steep cliff while walking his dog Bono. The dog survived. Unfortunately, his father broke his neck and died.
Fast forward a few months, I’m doing a preliminary check on the house’s condition when, in the kitchen, a knife literally was flinged out of the silverware drawer, right towards my foot. I narrowly dodged a trip to the hospital. I felt it was a freak accident and carried on with my inspection.
That afternoon, a fierce snowstorm came through and essentially closed down the one-way dirt road out of town. I called my buddy up and he gave me permission to stay in the house on the condition that “Sleep wherever, but don’t sleep in my parents’ room. The house sometimes makes noises during snowstorms and it can get pretty loud.” He explained it had to do with the piping running right under his parents’ bedroom.
Sure enough, around 3 AM, I began hearing pipes. Well, it didn’t sound like pipes, but someone moaning.
“Gehouh, Geh out, GET OUT!”
The voice sounded like a demon and scared the living wazzoooo out of me. I ran outside and slept for the rest of the night in my frozen car.
The next day, I wake up and find scratch marks along the side of my car. Inside, the house is trashed. Just destroyed, with no sign of break-in whatsoever. I call the police and my buddy and explain what happened.
Because of the events and the fact I was now a person of suspect, I decided to handoff my duties to my partner. That is when things got even weirder….
A week later, my friend called me from a rest stop.
“I’m not sure how I got here,” he told me over the phone.
Apparently, he had sleepwalked five miles in the middle of the night to this stop. I thought he was losing his mind, until he told me this after I picked him up:
“You know that piping sound I told you about? I don’t think that’s the pipes. Maybe I’m going insane, but I think the house is haunted. My grandfather always used to clamor about that back in the day before he died of a mysterious heart attack. And I’m starting to think it’s the reason why my dad fell down that ravine.”
We drive back up to the house and go inside. At this point, I’m debating whether I need to get my friend to a shrink or get him out of this house. I tell him, “Hey, let’s stay at my place tonight.” Suddenly, the floors started shaking and a loud “GET OUT!” violently echoed through the hallways.
My friend doesn’t react. Meanwhile, I freak out and run for my car. I drive home, sleep it off, and call my friend the next day.
“What are you talking about? You came over, we played cards, and you left. Nothing out of the ordinary.” How did my friend not remember what happened the night before? I tried convincing him over the phone, and, later, over coffee that was anything but the case.
After our conversation, I never heard from my buddy again. I tried reaching out, but he ignored me. A year passed and I saw his obituary in the news: He had died from a brain aneurysm at the age of 38.
That day, I decided to take a break from the industry and went on sabbatical to India. I’m not sure whether he went crazy, I went crazy, or the house was demonic. And I’m not sure I’ll ever get those answers.
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This happened to me 15 years ago while backpacking in Peru with a friend. There were a lot of backpackers in the region, and we quickly discovered a lot of them came with the sole intention of doing lots of drugs. We were both straight edge at the time so we generally avoided befriending these types. I think they were lured by the legends of ayahuasca and other ancient psychedelic rituals, but it’s widely known these experiences are not readily available to tourists.
We were in Cusco, which is the ancient high-altitude Inca city where you head off on the Inca trail from, and were staying in a youth hostel in a mixed dorm. We befriended a guy about our age- I think his name was Nick. He was American, and immediately recognizable as the shady tweaker archetype. He had a scabby shaved head and those really unhealthy, almost transparent teeth. But he was friendly so we chatted with him when our paths crossed. He was always in his bunk, on his laptop. He said he was just resting until he was healthy enough to get on a plane back home as he had partied too hard recently.
At this particular hostel, power went on and off on a schedule. There was always electricity via generator but there were only hot showers in the early morning and late night (like after one am). I had pretty terrible altitude sickness since we arrived and decided to stay up late to shower hoping it would help me feel better. Altitude sickness is kind of like mild nausea and being slightly stoned at the same time. While I was showering I heard Nick come in and ask “Who’s there?” I answered and we bantered for a minute. I heard him enter a shower as I finished up.
I had forgotten to bring underwear so I got dressed from the waist up and donned a towel for the walk back to the dorm room. The hostel was an adapted colonial courtyard building, pretty typical for Cuzco but it means you have to use exterior terrace walkways to move between rooms. It’s really cold in Cusco at night and I remember immediately after leaving the shower room feeling dizzy. I had to close my eyes and grip the doorway for a second so I wouldn’t fall over. Right when I was starting to feel okay enough to move again I felt a giant whooshing around me. I opened my eyes and realized all the power, including the generator had shut off. It was pitch black and absolutely silent all around me except for bright flashes of light. Like lightning bright even though I could see the stars and there were no clouds in the sky. I called to Nick if he was okay but there was no answer and no shower running so I assumed he’d left before me.
I started feeling my way down the walkway, carefully holding my towel in place. The lightning or whatever it was, stopped. When I got to the dorm door and began to unlock it with my key, I heard a body hit the tile walkway floor behind me with force. I looked back and made out the figure of what I assumed was Nick, apparently having a seizure and writhing on the ground. He was making a gurgling sound and by the time I got to him his mouth was oozing vomit. He was completely naked and soaking wet and I started yelling for help. I still couldn’t see much in the pitch black but I will never forget his eyes- it was the first and last time I had seen the eyes of someone who is alive but not really there. I rolled him on his side but he kept choking. I was petrified but he kept grabbing my hands and trying to talk to me through clenched teeth and the vomit. He was saying something but it was really fast and not any recognizable language I knew. I looked around and kept calling for help but on instinct started trying to clear his throat with my hands. I had to pry his teeth apart to reach into his mouth (I couldn’t tell if he was biting me deliberately or still seizing) and found that aside from the vomit, something was very wrong with his tongue. It was too sinewy and moving insanely fast. And then it wrapped around my fingers and GRIPPED THEM TIGHTLY. I could feel it tightening until it hurt. I screamed and jerked away, and started sobbing. He was still looking at me (but still not there) and I could just make out his tongue lashing around outside his mouth, thin and long like a… snake’s tail. My brain clicked that he must have somehow swallowed a small but very much alive snake. I was so confused by it but that was the only logic in the moment that I could have arrived at.
At that point some hostel staff came running with a flashlight and a phone and started yelling in Spanish to whoever was on the other end. He yelled at me “What did you take? Injections? Pills?” He rattled off names of drugs I had never heard of before. I said I don’t know, I just found him like that. I think they see their fair share of overdoses and he seemed more annoyed than shocked. When I looked back at Nick in the new light of the flashlight I realized his mouth was empty, save for some foamy vomit. There was literally no sign of the snake. I told the hostel staff man that there was a snake in there and pointed to Nick’s mouth. He looked at Nick’s mouth and saw absolutely nothing. He seemed extremely angry at me for being what he assumed was high and unhelpful. I realized then that my towel had fallen off and was semi-exposed. I think the hostel guy felt bad for me and just told me to go back to my room without any other exchange. I got into my bed still wet but put my headphones on and shivered until I passed out.
The next morning, I woke up late and alone in the dorm. Nick’s stuff was still there and when I made my way to the dining room people were talking about what happened to him. It was mostly just gossip but when everyone started speculating what he took I just froze. My friend noticed I was turning white so we excused ourselves and left. She tried to grill me on what I knew and I told her I had found him, that he was seizing and vomiting, but I could not for the life of me tell her about the snake. I still have not told her to this day because as time passes I feel less inclined to even believe myself. I don’t know if I’m afraid she’d call me a liar… it’s just so unfathomable. But I will never forget the feeling of a snake wrapping around my fingers and tightening until it hurt. Maybe this stupid gringo was tricked into thinking he could have some psychedelic transcendent trip by swallowing a live snake?
We left the next day for our week long Inca Trail trek to Machu Picchu as planned. We didn’t see Nick around and assumed he was still at the hospital. When we returned from our trek to pick up our packs we stored there, I saw Nick’s laptop in the storage room on top of a bag. I asked the attendant what happened to the guy those belong to and the receptionist said “he not coming back.”
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My husband was on life support in a coma. He was not expected to make it and had to be brought back multiple times.
I was by his side, beyond distraught. He was by far the ‘sickest’ person in the ICU — too sick to transfer to another hospital.
Other people who had family in the ICU rallied around to support me as it really didn’t look hopeful for him, and my pain was obvious.
One family, in particular, helped me a lot. The grandfather of that family had had surgery on his foot, but it’d gone wrong. They ended up amputating his foot, which then got infected. He ended up dying. But even after he died, his daughter stayed in the ICU to help me.
When my husband finally woke up, he told me he had been walking the halls with some guy who was missing his foot.
That guy told him it wasn’t time to go yet and that his daughter would wait with me until my husband woke up, but that he had to wake up soon.
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Edit: it was suggested that I add a warning and I think that’s a good idea. This can be triggering and unnerving – don’t read it if you’re not in the right frame of mind to process it in a healthy way. I didn’t share this to frighten people. I shared it because I think it’s important that we’re aware of the dangers that we can’t see.
I don’t know that I believe in black magic but I lived through something I can not explain. And it was devastating.
My ex was from Central America. She was literally born in the jungle – her mom went into labor while foraging for various fruits. Carrying her newborn, the mom made her way through the jungle back to her little village. Out of nowhere, a sinister looking old lady appeared. Even though the old lady smiled and seemed very drawn to the infant, the mom had a terrible feeling. Refusing to let the old woman hold the baby, she began “speaking in tongues,” waving her arms and hands wildly and then said in Spanish that the baby was cursed with The Darkness and would not live to the age of 30 and that she’d come for her someday. The mom began running away and as she ran she said the old lady shouted that evil would never be far from the baby. When she got settled a few days later, the mom visited a “brujita” (a witch) to counteract whatever curse was put on the baby. The brujita told her to put breast milk in the baby’s eyes 4 times a day for as long as she was lactating and to pray to San Simón for protection while doing so… I was told this story over and over by my girlfriend and her relatives. It was very interesting but I thought it was just a crazy old woman (I also thought she may have been speaking a dialect as opposed to “speaking in tongues.”). My girlfriend started behaving very strangely. She seemed distracted, edgy, angry, anxious – you name it. She’d wake up in the middle of the night and wake me up and say, “she’s here – she’s watching us – she’s not a lady – she was never a real person.” Weird as hell, right? My girlfriend dove into heavy drinking – the only way she could find some peace. But she became someone else when she was drunk – literally, it felt like I was living with a stranger. She began setting up little alters around our home with candles and religious objects – praying to San Simón to protect her. She also had hidden altars that creeped me out when I stumbled upon them. I felt she was in the grips of major mental illness until a few things happened that forced me to consider the reality of everything. I’d wake up in the middle of the night to voices in our room. Full on conversations – in a language I’ve never heard and have never come across again. They were faint – so faint, I almost didn’t hear it until I made an effort to listen closely. My girlfriend would be sitting up, wide awake, saying nothing. When I said, “what the **** is that? What’s going on – you hear that, right????” She said, “I told you she was here.” I couldn’t get much more out of her – it’s like she was in a trance. I made an appointment with a psychiatrist immediately (my girlfriend refused to see one but now I feared I was catching her crazy). I was thoroughly assessed and diagnosed (again) with anxiety and OCD but nothing severe enough or nothing else to cause delusions. My psychiatrist told me that during bouts of heavy anxiety, people can hear voices when they’re half asleep and that as long as they weren’t actually telling me something then it was okay and would pass. There was no message – it seemed like a foreign language. I rushed off to another psychiatrist the next week and was told the same thing. I was advised to meditate and exercise and try to get more sleep – it was just anxiety. But the voices and my girlfriends behaviors continued. And if it was my anxiety causing me to hear this – why could my girlfriend also hear it? My girlfriend became so hard to deal with and connect with that I ended up permanently sleeping on the couch in our living room. Our bedroom was now a full blown alter to San Simón and I couldn’t handle it. I wanted to stay and help her but I was starting feel unsafe – like she’d kill me in my sleep or something. Funny thing – I never heard the voices when I was away from my girlfriend – it only ever happened when I was with her. Id be asleep on the couch and wake up – freezing cold – and it just felt like something horrible and threatening was looming over me. I really can’t explain it. I can’t. I felt like a kid hiding underneath my blankets. I worried I was losing my mind. The feeling – the thing – whatever it is – I could feel when it left and went to the other end of the house. It didn’t seem focused on me – rather, I was a pit stop on its way to my girlfriend. Worst, most awful feeling I’ve ever had and I still don’t know how to describe it. Then I’d hear my girlfriend engaging with it – speaking to it in Spanish. I needed to leave but I needed time to save money. My girlfriend called me, from her room and I blurted out that I needed to leave soon- that I loved her but that I was losing myself in her mental illness. This is where things got terrifying. The light bulbs on the fixture attached to our ceiling fan burst – one by one – four different bulbs – spraying tiny shards of glass all over me. I was sweaty – it was hot – so this glass was stuck to me. It’s like someone took a baseball bat and swung away at each one. A heavy iron Celtic Cross that had been hanging in our hallway for years, dislodged itself and flung to the other side of the hallway (only about 4 feet but it was big and heavy – how did that happen?) and a San Simón candle near me knocked itself over. I yelled, “baby, I get it, you’re not crazy – we need to get the **** out of here right now!” And she yelled back, “come here, lovey!” I started across the house and right when I got to the bedroom door, my cell phone rang. I have no idea why I bothered looking at it. It was my girlfriend. Thoroughly spooked, I answered, “are you okay – can I come in?” She said, “I feel sick from overheating – can you put the air on so it’s cool by the time I come inside?” WHAT? I said, “inside from where?” She said she was almost home from running errands and sickness washed over her. It was very hot – 104 degrees out – but I had been interacting with her in our house – with her voice at least. I almost started crying – I rushed outside to our back porch steps and said I’d wait for her there and told her what happened and that I was having some sort of mental breakdown. Our neighbor yelled for me and followed my voice out back and said, “Did you have a crazy electrical current charge through your house or what?” I was confused and asked what she meant. She had been in front of my house and saw and heard the lightbulbs bursting above my head – thank goodness my huge windows were open! I had a witness. It actually happened. In those frantic minutes – I questioned if it happened. She said “we need to get that glass off of you – should we use the hose?” I just sat there stunned. My girlfriend pulled up and got out of the car and her eyes were black. She had beautiful light blue eyes – no idea where she got them – everyone else in her family had dark brown eyes. But they were black at that moment – no blue at all. She dismissed our neighbor. Stood there looking at me and said, “You’re not leaving.” It didn’t look like her – she looked like a whole other person. It hit me – how in the hell did she know I was planning on leaving? She wasn’t actually home when I said that! She laughed a weird laugh when I asked her how she knew I had said that… The madness went on for a few months. My girlfriend was sick and kept getting sicker. The activity in the house escalated but other than that one day – it never seemed to target me – just her. She ended up in the hospital. Eventually lapsed into a coma and died nine days after she went into a coma. Once I was physically separated from her – I never experienced any of that phenomena again. Nor did I ever question my sanity again – I didn’t have to. I’ve consulted with my priest over this, with psychiatrists and even a few paranormal researchers. I still don’t understand it. And no – I’m not making it up but I absolutely understand if people think I did. I don’t think I could’ve believed something like this either – until I experienced it. My girlfriend was 29 years old when she died. I don’t know what took her but it certainly wasn’t her own madness – I saw and heard too much – something else had a hand in her demise.
Answering readers’ questions:
hello – I completely understand your questions. I referred to her as my ex because the day before she died, her family held some bizarre marital ritual (not legally recognized – it was a “spiritual union”) between my comatose girlfriend and their neighbor. They wanted her “married to a Latino” before she died. So – while she and I hadn’t broken up and she hadn’t consented, it hurt me so badly – technically, I think that made me her ex. Her family was looney. They were not well. I actually often wondered if they summoned whatever it was that attached itself to my girlfriend. They were violent (grown people engaging in fist fights, hair pulling, slapping, etc.). The mother, especially, seemed to be drawn to “witchcraft” – at least that’s what my girlfriend called it. Her family wasn’t a part of her life. They disowned her several times and then reunified only to disown her again shortly afterwards. They didn’t help me while she was sick. I took care of her for years and they wouldn’t come visit or call or anything. That’s why we never bothered having legal papers drawn up giving me power of attorney – they didn’t want anything to do with her. Yet, after I gave them the courtesy call that their daughter was in the ICU – they rushed over, took legal control of her and barred me from the ICU. The nurses and doctors were horrified. They never accepted me – I’m white and a practicing Catholic. Even though they were all baptized Catholics, they followed a very different and privatize path to spirituality. So, I wasn’t welcome in their family and they made no secret of that… As for why my girlfriend didn’t reach out to the church – whatever this was, this evil, it already had her in its grips. I was later told that’s a very common occurrence. The target becomes isolated and breaks ties with everything and everyone that could actually fight this thing. She still had glimmers of faith that shown through. She’d randomly try to connect with her faith but ultimately, this thing took over again… We were in the US, California is where we lived but we spent a lot of time in her country, together, also… The official cause of death was brain death of unknown origin – so they didn’t solve why that occurred. The secondary cause of death was liver failure due to alcoholism. I believe the third cause was pneumonia which is very common in sick, sedentary people. She had been sick for years. We went to her neurologist every few weeks to address her symptoms but there wasn’t a definitive diagnosis. He speculated that she had some genetic issue that interacted with her alcoholism but while some things supported that, others refuted it so it just remained a theory… I did involve my priest in the beginning. We didn’t live in his diocese (he was the family priest I grew up with) so he did what he could and it initially helped. But my girlfriends darkness put a stop to his assistance… I don’t know if you believe in or feel energy but the energy in her country pulsed with life. Good and bad. I felt it before we even landed. I kept a spiritual shield around me, so to speak. It was almost palpable. If one has leanings towards darkness – they’d surely find it there. Or if one is vulnerable – they could be exploited. On the other side, there’s boundless beautiful energy to be absorbed as well. I do know that it’s a very, very violent place and none of us felt safe when we were there. I’ve got to wonder what’s behind that…
I still miss her. I miss who she was before this thing took her over. She was The One. We were supposed to grow old together. I’ve been kind of lost since then. I don’t really bother with love because I know I’m one of the fortunate people that actually found the love of my life. I’m also spiritually and emotionally still a bit banged up from the whole experience. How do you fix what you just can’t fully comprehend? I wish she had a better ending. She had a very challenging life, filled with tragedy. She deserved more.
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I’m a cat lover. I have 2, Bellamy and Juno. I treat them like my children, and they treat me well back. About a month ago I was on my way to work, I parked my car and stepped out into the parking lot (-10° weather) and I could hear weak meows from under the car next to me. A black kitten popped out and immediately threw itself at my feet, exhausted. There was a bit of an accident when trying to confine her to my car to get her to my apartment where it was warm and safe. So immediately she went to the vet to be checked out, was given her shots and all the clears, and then began acclimating to life indoors and life with me.
For the first week she spent most of her time in my bathroom (slow introductions so all cats would get along) I was originally going to nurse her to health and give her to a trusted rescue group in my area so she could find a forever home, but during my countless bathroom visits to her during the day I began to bond with her. I named her Suki. I felt an intense attachment after only a few days. Shortly after the bond began to form is when things began happening.
My other 2 cats began sleeping with me. Every once in awhile before this I’d wake up in the morning to find them at the edge of my bed but our sleep schedules are opposite; suddenly they were attached to my hip during the day and sleeping at the head of the bed, on MY pillow, next to my face every night. As if they were protecting me while I slept. They would not go near the bathroom. My cats are very shy, and sweet. I didn’t even think they knew how to hiss until the new cat got here. They suddenly were attacking the bathroom door, and Juno began to get sick. She’s lost weight. The vet has no explanation and as I said, Suki (the new cat) has been to the vet multiple times and has been given the clear too. I’ve even gotten second opinions. There’s no explanation for the illness. Things began to go missing, like photos, jewelry.
Then, I began waking up in the night with this terrible feeling of dread. I can no longer have cats in my room at night because the door now needs to be shut. When it’s dark, I get the feeling something is looking at me. From the other side of the doorframe. I find myself having to look twice over my shoulder because I’m constantly seeing things out of the corner of my eye. Picture frames have been taken down because the morph in the dark.
A couple weeks ago, things amped up. I’ve started hearing whispers, and meows that sound out of tune from a normal cat meow in one end of a room, but this cat is sitting at the end of my bed. I’ll shake it off and think, maybe I’m hearing another cat? This cat will disappear for hours on end. Nowhere to be found in my apartment that’s sealed tight- until the night comes around. I’ll be doing work at my desk when I catch a glimpse of this cat out of the corner of my eye, and it’s not moving like a cat? She seems to morph in the dark, and when I’m not paying close attention. I keep thinking I need to get my eyes checked. My other cats have not acclimated to her- which is weird because even kittens and cats I’ll foster for rescue groups from time to time will be accepted in a week or 2, but it’s been months.
When I think about something being off about this cat, it’s like she knows, I can see her eyes change. The emotion in them, it’s different. It’s hateful. Things came to a head tonight when the cat jumped up on the bed while I was trying to go to sleep, I felt her walk up behind me, and brush against my back. At first I could feel her soft fur, but then, I felt a mans hand, spread across my entire back, brushing it with force.
I jumped out of bed feeling like I was going to cry. I put the cat in the bathroom, and she meowed for a moment. She meowed and cried to be let out, and the last meow was something that couldn’t have come from a cat. I have all the lights on, blinds open, and this terrible feeling something awful is going to happen.
I do not think this is a regular cat. I wonder to myself, is the black cat superstition getting to me? Is it right to rehome her? Am I losing my mind? Something is wrong.
UPDATE: over the weekend I had a phone call with my mom. My youngest brother is 4, we were talking about him coming to stay the night in a few weeks during my spring break- I told him I’d have to see what my work schedule looked like but I’d pick him up from school and bring him over one of these days no matter what, when suddenly- I heard “Fuck you, bitch.” Come through the phone, my parents are pretty granola. They never cussed or spoke like that around us growing up or my younger brothers. I don’t know where he would learn to talk like that unless he’s watching inappropriate YouTube videos on his iPad or something?? I’m shocked, I almost want to laugh when I notice the cat. Staring from the doorway. Chills went down my spine. I had enough. I packed her in a carrier and went to the only rescue group with a facility near to me open on a Saturday. Said she was a stray, left her there.
The next day I received this text that Im going to try to post here, I’ll figure out how to link an image in the morning or maybe sometime soon if I can’t sleep. A lady from my rescue group texted me begging to take in a kitten one of the ladies in the group had found in her barn just until another girl has a couple kittens go to new homes over the next couple weeks. I agreed for just a couple days, and she said she’d drop her off on Monday. There was a bit of a mix up on gender, but I was under the impression it would be a male kitten. She sent me a photo on Snapchat of an skinny little tabby needing a place to rest. Come Monday, she brings the cat over, opens the carrier, and a black kitten is peering at me.
I began to cry. I’m so embarrassed of myself. I felt like i was in a dream. I kept wanting to wake up but it was reality. My friend, the woman fostering in this rescue group with me asked what was wrong- and I lied and said that I don’t know how someone could let such a little baby be all by herself in the cold, considering the windshield in my area is -20°. That was a lie.
I don’t know what to do. This is just honesty when I tell you that all I can think about for the entirety of the day is how to kill myself in a way that isn’t too painful and where people will find me and rescue my cats so they’re not alone for too long. It’s like I’m living in a movie. There’s no way out. Something terrible is going to happen. I don’t know who can help me.
The illusion of control 
