I’m sorry. Did you really think we would limit ourselves to only ten of your scariest stories this Halloween?
As a follow up to yesterday’s Never Sleep Again: Your Ten Best Stories of Absolute Terror, here are more reader submitted tales to keep you up at night.
Are You a Bad Ghost? by Hailey Kathryn:
I thought I would share a story of my dad’s. Our family has many stories where none of us can quite explain it, to non skeptics we believe we are definitely clairvoyant to some degree. My parents tell me stories from when I was younger, I’m not as in tuned to it as they are but this story of my dads is from his days growing up in a small town outside Toronto. The boys in the story, many of them now fathers and grandfathers refuse to discuss this story unless they are all together, had a few beers, and the lights are all turned on. Other then that it is not talked about. The house I am going to refer too has two parts to they story.
1. My dad and his friends had gathered in the basement of Jason’s house (I have changed all names for privacy,) and were doing what kids at the time did, smoking cigarette butts that they stole from the ash tray and playing with games and toys. One of the boys had found a Ouija board. With little else to do they decided why not play it.
They began with silly starter questions, like does this girl at school like me, will I pass the English test, and then they decided to get more brave.
“Is there a ghost down here?”
“Yes” the Ouija board led their hands to the answer. All the boys giggled thinking this was fantastic.
“Are you a nice ghost or a bad ghost?”
“Yes” the Ouija board said back. Jason smacked the question asker in the back of the head, explaining that they need to ask a single questions.
“Are you a nice ghost?”
“No”
The boys got quiet and one of the lights in the basement let out a loud pop before the corner of the basement went dark. This is the mid 60’s and this home was pre-world war 1. Light bulbs are going to pop.
“Are you a bad ghost?”
“yes”
A second light popped on the opposite room, only one light remained in the basement above the boys head.
“What’s your name?”
They watched as the board began spelling out letters, with one of the boys keeping track, ‘William, it says William!’ the boy yelled out, they felt a flood of air surge through the room and the next part none of them can explain.
The air moved the Ouija board across the room and all the boys stood up, and backed across the room, staring at a lone mirror in the room, only they didn’t see their reflection, they saw an older man with dark black eyes and a long beard and circular lenses staring back at them. They all started yelling ‘go away’ and the mirror slid of the wall and shattered before the last light went pop.
The boys went back upstairs and refused to play in Jason’s basement ever again.
2. Flash forward to many years later, Jason’s mom had sold the house and moved across town and Jason and my dad were left to pack up the home.
That included the basement.
My dad kept loading boxes, and people had been in and out all day helping. He got downstairs where a man was standing by a washboard. Not doing anything just standing. Naturally he asked the man if he could lend a hand. The man stared back. He seemed to have a glowing look to him but my dad chalked it up on the basement lights. The man said nothing so my dad continued grabbing boxes and taking them upstairs.
He saw Jason and told him there was some weird old man downstairs. Jason was white as a sheet and said ‘The moving truck isn’t back no one is here but us.’
They both went back downstairs and saw the same figure only it was slowly walking from corner to corner of the basement with its back turned.
“Excuse me, who are you?” Jason asked, before the man began screaming. My dad describes it as a deep yelling that got louder and higher pitched, like a kettle screeching on a hot stove with the lights flickering.
Both of them couldn’t find their feet, and stood there, and suddenly it all at once stopped as soon as it started. They turned to look at each other and back at the figure only instead of being at the other end of the hall it was standing right in front of them, they could smell something that reminded them of sick, and could see every line on this mans face but there were no eyes.
They finally turned to run and let the movers return and do the rest of the work. They only shared single glances and they were reminded of that night as children when they are sure they saw the same face with black eyes. When Jason was unpacking boxes he found an old photo album and flipped through it, he saw a picture he had never seen. His mother told him that was his great uncle William who had lived at the house a long time ago, William had gone crazy and drowned two of his three children (the daughter was with the mother,) and when his great aunt Shirley came home she found him in the basement where he had hung himself, but over his face were scratches where his eyes had been.
there is no doubt in their minds that they had seen William, and one of the reasons why Jasons mom finally decided to move was that in the bathroom, quite often she would find water all over the bathroom which she thought was apart of faulty plumbing, but the boys are sure that it was William.
It Wanted Us Gone by Turd Ferguson:
This is a story of a crazy haunting that took place over 9-10 years, so there’s a ton of detail I could put into it. Heck, every bit of it could be its own haunted horror story. Just writing it gives me flashbacks of the terror.
In all seriousness, I used to laugh at ghost hunter tv shows and I openly mocked people who believed in ghosts. My husband was one of them. I thought he was just a loose nut about those things. Then when I was pregnant, things began to happen to us -well, me- in the house, all slowly and all very explainable at first. Cold drafts. Doors opening. Lights turning on or off. Footstep sounds. Smells. Shadowy figures. I was just so set in thinking that ghosts were not real, that for every event I had some kind of scientific explanation for it. After all, the house we bought was built in 1823 with a fieldstone foundation and remnants of the old knob and tubing electricity, the floors weren’t level and the walls had new cracks so there had to be some shifting and settling going on.
As the weirdness began to ramp up, I started running out of explanations. Footprints in the snow and mud leading up to our house, but not walking away. Finding things in and around our house that we didn’t have, didn’t buy, didn’t put there or wouldn’t have put there because it makes no sense. The bedroom door slamming shut with nobody touching it. The front door swinging wide open in the middle of the night, despite having been locked.
After my baby was born, things turned terrifying. Things would be moved around the house. Knives were thrown and stuck into our door. Tarot cards with terrifying meaning were found on my baby’s crib pillow. My baby would begin crying in his sleep every night between midnight and 1am, but not wake up. We kept the baby in our bed, between us, because it felt safer than having him all alone in his crib. Upon waking up to my baby’s cries, I would fall into this heavy, irresistible sleep, yet I was fully conscious as though I were not sleeping. Then my husband would experience physical events - scratches, being pulled up out of bed, or having his arm pulled. I could hear him and I would feel the bed move from his movements, but no matter how hard I tried I was unable to open my eyes or sit up until after the event was over.
We had the house blessed, we had investigators come in, we had people pray and we had psychics clear the space. The strange events stopped, the midnight crying, the sounds, the things appearing in our house, everything stopped really quickly. The investigators never told us what they heard on recordings. I’m not sure I ever want to know and I hope that whatever was haunting us is gone for good.
Don’t Wake Up by whateverwalkedthere:
This ghost story isn’t really mine, but it starts with me.
Years ago, back when I was younger and in better shape, I used to do some backpacking. Nothing terribly ambitious, but every so often I’d find a loop trail that could be done in a few days, get a friend, and head out.
One weekend, my friend Kristen and I went to southeastern Ohio to backpack a 14/15 mile loop trail. It was great: very wooded, moderately strenuous, not too many other people. There were some signs of past human habitation along the way – a broken-down shack, a little old schoolhouse, that sort of thing. We did it in two days, camping about halfway along the trail. I noticed, though, that on our way out, just a few miles from the trailhead, there was a beautiful spot to camp, if you had time to make it a three-day trip. There was just enough room for a single campsite right on the edge of a ravine, with a smoothed-out place for a tent and a stone fire ring already in place. Once I got home, I told my roommate at the time, my cousin Shelly, about the trail, including the pretty second-night campsite.
A year or so later, Shelly’s half-sister Emma came to visit, and they decided to backpack the same loop trail. They, however, decided to make it a three-day trip, and spend the second night at the campsite that I’d told Shelly about.
I only found out what happened that night (no one volunteered the information) when Shelly overheard me talking about the trail to some other friends, and she laughed and said, “Yeah, Emma says she’s NEVER hiking that trail ever again.” When I, surprised, asked what had happened, this is what Shelly told me:
Apparently, during the second night, in the absolute darkness that you can only get when sleeping out in the woods, Emma awoke to the sound of a woman screaming. Right outside the tent. She was petrified, and lay huddled in her sleeping bag, listening to the sound of screams until they finally faded away.
She then fell asleep again, until she (sort of) woke up and opened her eyes and looked through the shadowy barely-there early morning light at the front of the tent, toward the tent’s door.
There was a little girl crouched there, looking at her, whispering, “Don’t wake up. Don’t wake up.”
The little girl faded and Emma pulled her hat down over her head and scrunched up in her sleeping bag until Shelly woke up (having slept the night through quite well) and they could get out of there.
The Face in the Ceiling by shimmerisle:
When I was a child, we used to spend every summer at my aunt and uncle’s house in Michigan. It was a massive house that looked more like a castle, especially from the back. I did not know anything about the house’s history, but it gave me an uneasy feeling every time I walked in. The study was filled with secret storage places and there were two big tunnels under the house that you could only get to from the secret closet in the basement. As you entered the tunnels, you were greeted by an ostentatious lion fountain, which looked like it hadn’t worked in years. One tunnel lead out to the stable, while the other just lead out to the grounds.
Every time I entered the house I felt like a weight had been put on my chest. I really looked forward to seeing my cousins, but absolutely hated that we had to spend our time in that house. The only room where I felt at ease was the family room, which I found out many years later was a new addition. The play room was in the basement and all the other kids used to play down there, while I often sat and cried on the stairs. The basement gave me the worst feeling of all.
One summer my grandparents were also staying in the house. I woke up pretty early and followed the cat down to the main floor. He started walking towards the basement and darted in the other direction instead, but I decided to continue on since my grandparents were sleeping in one of the basement bedrooms. I quickly ran down the stairs, passed the play room and into their bedroom. They were both mostly asleep so I decided to lay down in-between them instead of heading back upstairs. As I looked up at the ceiling, a small crack formed into a woman’s smiling face. At first I thought it was my imagination so I turned around and looked back at the ceiling, but the woman’s face was still there. Sometimes it was her profile and other times it was hear head-on. At no point did I feel threatened or unsafe, there was something very warm about her actually.
A few years later my aunt and uncle decided to put the house on the market (it never sold), but a psychic insisted on visiting the house. Most of the people around the area were aware of the house’s history. My aunt begrudgingly agreed to have her come visit the house and she arrived within the next few days. The psychic wandered around looking at things and making sounds, until she got to the basement. My aunt said she went completely pale and yelled “a woman was assaulted here” and ran out of the house. It was around this time that I learned that construction workers would hear sounds on the top floor even when there was no one in the house. A woman living in a house on the grounds said the stable lights would come on and off in the middle of the night all the time. The security alarm also had the tendency to go off at random times.
My uncle still lives in the house, so I’m not sure if I should reveal the history…even though it is pretty well known in that area. All I will say is that it belonged to someone who handled the shady dealings for a very famous automobile manufacturer.
The Thing with Tim by STelizabeth:
So, the story begins with my now-fiancé, M, and his friend Tim. Tim doesn’t deserve anonymity and should be locked up before he can hurt anyone. Tim and my fiancé had been friends for only about a year but they became really close and like brothers. Tim had on and off dated this girl, E, forever. Whenever they were broken up, they’d date other people and end up back together. At one point, they broke up and Tim started dating this other girl for a while. She will be now known as V for victim for the story and also because I can’t remember her name. V had a young son and I had heard some stories from M and from Tim about her, nothing bad just stories that come out when you’re reminiscing. Through this I found out that V had loaned Tim about 700$ to make a trip to Mexico for his archeology class and had bought him a laptop and all this shit. They ended up breaking up before I started dating M and Tim was back to dating his on again off again gf when I first met him.
Tim was a vegan, straight edge, hare Krishna - aka a party pooper. JK he was actually pretty fun and didn’t care what others were doing and would always be the DD. he usually had some humor about it too and didn’t even get mad when my brother thought it was really hilarious to throw empty beer cans at him at a barbecue. My brother is an asshole - but one of those fun assholes you know?
So I met Tim pretty quick after I started dating M and at that time M was living in a big rooming house in a college town that was mostly empty for the summer because most of his old roommates had graduated and didn’t do sublets for the rest of the lease. Tim is short and fat and looks like s gremlin. He was nice enough and was always joking around and was just kind of one of those “weird guys” like harmless seeming but just kind of weird. M would have get togethers and bbqs at his house semi frequently over the summer and Tim would usually come. I started to get to know him better and better but for some reason I was always uncomfortable being around him. I am a HUGE JOKESTER so I make jokes all the time and Tim would always joke back to me but would make them kind of weirdly sexual? But we didn’t put much into it because we figured he was just being that weird funny guy and he wasn’t serious about it and plus my fiancé trusted him completely.
At one of these parties, everyone else was on the porch and I had gone in the house to use the bathroom or something and Tim was coming out of the kitchen so we started joking around and kind of like play fighting and I bet Tim that I could kick over his head. I’m tall and have long legs and can kick really high and Tim was the size of a hobgoblin. So I go to do it in an arc like fashion - starting low then sweeping over his head and then coming down on the other side. When I was starting to end the kick, he pushed me, and I fell backward into the front door which was that cheap treated glass type door. THANK HEAVEN ABOVE it didn’t shatter and slice me to bits but I left a great big cobweb shatter thing from where my ass hit the door. Right after it happens, M , comes rushing in to see if I’m alright and Tim started apologizing to him and not to me. He played it off like we were just fooling around and I THOUGHT we were too at the time. Looking back on it, I remember the look on his face right before he pushed me and he had this creepy smile. Thinking back on it there’s no way you wouldn’t know that pushing me would push me into the glass door. SO everything was fine and no one was hurt so we laughed it off and continued about our night.
Tim would always make those jokes that all friends do like “if you hurt him I’ll kill you” and one time I was like “yeah haha I’m not planning on it” and was just trying to laugh it off but he would NOT LET IT GO. He kept saying he’d kill me if I hurt M and I just kept trying to laugh it off and he finally stopped when M came back from the bathroom (we were getting lunch at a restaurant)
So once again I just chalk it up to him being a fucking weirdo and I tell M about it later and he thinks the same. That summer continued on being the best thing ever. Tim and E ended up breaking up for good this time, me and M got engaged and everything ruled. Toward the end of the summer Tim started dating a new girl named A. A was so cool and funny and she rescued and trained dogs and was just awesome. And way too cute for Tim and they’re STILL TOGETHER NOW BARFFFFF.
Anyway, M and Tim end up moving into this shitty ass townhouse in the ghetto together when both of their leases were up in August. Tim had lived in the apartments across the street and claimed he could get s discount on rent (lie) and things were getting down the wire so they just moved in there. BIGGEST MISTAKE EVER.
Anyway things are fine at first but M starts getting more and more annoyed with Tim. It’s just roommate things like Tim never cleaned and never bought anything for the place and if he did he’d buy like the shittiest stuff - like dollar store brand 1 ply toilet paper. And also his fucking cats had fleas and gave one of our ferrets fleas. She had never had fleas ever and she had a white coat so we noticed them pretty quick. He said it was IMPOSSIBLE for the fleas to have come from his cats (lie) but the fleas would NOT GO AWAY no matter how many flea treatments we gave poor little Chloe. The fleas actually probably came from Tim because he is disgusting.
Anyway things are like okay for a few months and Tim is still dating A. During this time, my fiancé ended up buying a (LEGAL) sawed-off shotgun to keep in his closet for protection. There was a dealer that just dealt right over the fence in our backyard and people were constantly being robbed and jumped and stabbed and a few murders had happened on our street SO whatever, it made him feel better before we had gotten our dog.
He had told Tim about it just so that he knew because I mean they were living together but it was always kept in Ms closet on a rack. The weekend before Halloween last year, we were all hanging out, me, M, Tim, and his new gf. We were watching the hills have eyes in the living room and just kind of goofing off. Tim and A were going to a Halloween party the next day and Tim was dressing up as ash from evil dead two - you know the bloody shirt the gun missing hand all that. He kept talking about how he should just use the shotgun as a prop and we just kept laughing it off but he kept bringing it up over and over and over whenever he could. Watching the movie - oh if that were me I’d just take the shotgun and kill the mutant. Shit like that. Eventually he starts bringing up the girl he had dated a long time ago the VICTIM (V) And he just keeps bringing her up for no reason and we were just like....okay? And ignored it. We called it a night probably around 430 am and the next morning when we woke up M Had all of these Facebook messages from V and they were all super urgent and she sounded really freaked out. She left her number for M to give her a call so he did. Turns out the night before, Tim was texting her the entire night, while we were all watching he movie, while he was with his NEW GF, and saying stuff like he’s been making himself better for her and all he wants to do is marry her and take care of her and her son. She was really worried about him and sent us the screen caps of the conversation because after she told Tim she had a new boyfriend he started saying he was going to kill himself because if she didn’t want him life wasn’t worth living. He told her he had gotten the shotgun and he was in the basement and was making a countdown until he was going to pull the trigger. He said the gun was in his mouth and he was going to pull the trigger at 335 or something. Which none of this was true because at that time we were all in the living room watching a movie together.
Tim and his gf were out for the day and we were worried for Tim and M had planned on talking to him when he got home. In the meantime I went out to the sporting goods store and bought a locking gun case and we ended up having a friend of ours who had a gun safe come and grab it for safe keeping. Tim came back and M told him he needed to get help and that he was worried. He tried to play it off like it was some joke and he was just messing around but the texts proved he was serious. M tells him he needs to get help and talk to his parents and that if he didn’t by the end of the weekend, M was going to call his parents and talk to them. We were just worried about our friend at this point. BUT
The next day we wake up to more texts. Screenshots from the night before when Tim was at the party with his new girlfriend. The texts had taken a different turn. He started saying he was on his way across the state with the gun and was going to take care of V, her son, and her new boyfriend. He sent her texts all night threatening to kill her and her son and her boyfriend in various ways. We freak out and M sends me to my dads house and talks to Tim and let’s him know what he knows. He tells Tim that the ex girlfriend has already called the police and made a restraining order and that M was going to call the police on Tim for this if he didn’t go into the hospital for a psych evaluation. In my state, you get put on a 72 hour psychiatric hold if you come forward and say you are going to hurt yourself or someone else. M made it clear that they wouldn’t be living together anymore and that someone would have to move out and told Tim that if he came back to the house before 72 hours were up he would call the police on him and tell them what had gone down.
So blah blah blah, Tim ends up moving out and fucking us over forever with the townhouse from ghetto hell. He comes back one night to “talk” and get his things and I have never been so scared of someone in my entire life. His eyes were black and lifeless and he had almost a hypnotizing effect when he talked (pure sociopath) and he was starting to kind of get M to go along with being friends again and I was pissed. I said “you two will never be friends again, I never want to see your face again, I don’t want to talk to you again, I want you out of our lives forever. You can’t be trusted and you tricked us for this long”
He then says “it’s funny that you don’t want to see me again cuz imagine how I feel about you”. Scared me to death. He goes to gather some of his things and M and I go out for a cigarette and I ask him what the fuck happened. He had no idea and said he just felt hypnotized by Tim when he was talking and he thanked me for snapping him out of it. We barricaded ourselves in Ms room for the night and didn’t sleep. For the few hours Tim was there we could hear him softly chanting Hare Krishna the entire time.
A few weeks later we were sick of so much of his shit still lying around so we packed up his stuff and moved it into the basement. I found a notebook that he had written a poem story thing in. I can’t remember it exactly but I’ll do my best :
“I walk home past the houses and see lives and lights
I make it to my dark door and open it waiting to see my love my life
I go down to the basement where I left her she still looks the same
Her hair is perfect and her lips are still stretched in a final scream
She looks so good in red
I turn the record player on and I sing”
Not Your Sister’s Hands by Fun Dip Baseball Disco Dance:
Growing up my parents added onto our house and my bedroom was the only one upstairs. My sister and I had shared a room at one point, and are still to this day extraordinarily close, so it wasn’t uncommon for her to wander into my room and sleep in my bed or vice versa.
I woke up in the middle of the night one time to see a hand scrabbling around between the edge of the bed and the wall. I immediately assumed that my sister had slept in my bed and had fallen off the edge. The hand was grasping the side of the bed and reaching like it was trying to grab something desperately, in a blind panic.
Thinking my sister needed help, I looked over the edge of the bed and there was nothing there.
I scurried down the stairs and slept in my sister’s room that night, where she was sleeping peacefully without incident.
Jackson by CherryBarGirl:
My clinical rotation for mental health nursing included a much anticipated tour of East Louisiana State Hospital outside the town of Jackson. Throughout my childhood, “Jackson” as it was commonly called had woven its mythology into my life. Both my mother and aunt had worked there, and from time to time would talk about some of their patients’ delusions and hallucinations.
Jackson also made for a good way to threaten bad children. Whenever I acted up, my mother would say, “You better stop it or I’ll send you up to Jackson.” I had never laid eyes on the facility and my imagination could only painted it as dark vortex of an entity that grabbed at life tightly and never let go. I was an adult now and looking forward to putting a realistic face on one of my childhood monsters.
The morning of the tour, I ironed the required creases into my perfectly bleached white scrubs while I muttered to myself about the ridiculous appearance standards at nursing school. Then I collected my clinical materials and begun the hour drive to the hospital. Jackson was built on the high ground away from the swamps and mosquitoes, but also away from the cities. After turning off the main highway and onto the rural road leading to the facility, cell service waned.
I knew I was close when I saw the road sign that advised travelers not to pick up hitchhikers. I slowed to turn onto a gravel road and a guard waved me through the front gate. My car snaked up a jagged road until an impressive Greek revival building with fading whitewash came into view. Patched columns struggled to hold up the entablature. Forgotten landscaping continued to divide the grounds into sections resembling formal gardens while smaller squat buildings sprung up on the sides of the main building like poorly planned afterthoughts that attempted to bring modern amenities to the facility.
I parked in front of the main building the Union Army refused to burn it down during the Civil War because they knew the horrors that would be released into the community. I left everything in my trunk as instructed with the exception of a single car key.
Our class gathered on the front steps and then filed through the main entrance into darkly carpeted foyer flanked by walls lined with portraits of the men who kept the order over the years. An empty courtroom stood off to the side. A couple of times a month, hearings were held, mostly to extend involuntary commitments. Our group wound up and around the grand staircase until we reached the ballroom on the top floor.
A decaying drop-down ceiling revealed beautiful darkened wood paneling above and a wrought iron balcony presided over the entrance. When asked why an insane asylum needed a ballroom, an administrator began to tell us about the “idiots’ dances” that were held once a month. An orchestra would play on the balcony while the patients would dance for the pleasure of the wealthy townspeople. Today the room served as the facility’s makeshift museum. We poured over nurses’ notes detailing women who fell catatonic after being jilted and men who drank until their brains turned to gelatin. After gawking at primitive electroshock therapy and archaic restraints, we were split into smaller groups and continued the tour.
We proceeded down a side set of stairs and onto a dimly lit back hall. The entire building had a quietness about it. It was no longer used for patient care and looming budget cuts might finally shut it down. Once we all assembled in the hall, the administrator pushed a small door open and said, “Who wants to visit the dungeon?”
We were led down a narrow set of stone stairs. Taller students had to hunch down to avoid hitting their heads. The corridor had a dampness about it. It was dark and I held the railing tightly to avoid falling. The stairs exited into a long rectangular room made of bricks. The floor was comprised of loose soil and rock and slightly gave way with each step. It moved with me and felt alive. The administrator informed us that the basement dungeon flooded often, so recently four feet of soil was added in an attempt to prevent the bricks from eroding. Leftover wrought iron O-rings stuck out from the bricks. The chains that were connected to them had been removed long ago.
The dungeon was cold and the air stood still, but it was not stagnant. I stood at the back of the group with my back towards the far wall while the administrator told us about the type of patients confined to the area. The room had held some of the most violent souls to inhabit the institution. Before effective anti-psychotic medicines and other forms of chemical restraints were available to tame the wicked, they were given a slop bucket and chained to the wall until their will was broken. Then they could be returned to the general population.
The group began to file back up the stairs. I took my first step forward. Something grabbed at my left shoulder and tried to pull me back into the wall. I looked behind me and saw nothing. I hurried to blend in with the rest of my group. I was very confused and breathing quickly. I touched my shoulder on the stairway. Maybe water or part of the ceiling had fallen on me. We exited and stood in the back hall. I grabbed the sleeve of my scrubs expecting to see dirt or water or some physical explanation of the event. The only thing I saw was a pristinely creased white sleeve. The administrator asked if I was OK. I said it felt like something had tried to grab me. She said, “That happens sometimes. They don’t want to let you go.”
Five Siblings by reggaejunkiejew:
About 4 years ago, my boyfriend and I moved into a duplex just outside the city. The first day I was all alone in the house, I started thinking that I was seeing things out of the corner of my eye. Flashes of lights and shadows. I never ever had that sensation at my old place. It happens from time to time, but not this often. It was like every 10 minutes that I was turning around looking for something or someone behind me. When my boyfriend got home that night I asked him if he was experiencing the same thing. He told me no, and that I was being dramatic. He remained a skeptic until a few weeks later. The day after Halloween, boyfriend, our cat, and myself were in the kitchen and we heard a huge BANG. One of the night tables in the bedroom had fallen over.
It had fallen over face first. The lamp was on the floor about 6 feet away, unplugged from the socket.
I usually work from home, so the following workweek I was home alone with the cat all day. I would hear strange bangs, dishes shifting in the kitchen, and knocks on the walls. The lights in the bathroom went out and we had to rewire them. I don’t know how any of that shit works, but my boyfriend was very confused as to why they all went out at once. Even HE said it was weird. One time the TV turned itself on at full volume in the middle of the night.
The cat’s litter box is in the basement but he REFUSED to go down there. He would just crap and piss on the floor upstairs. One time I tried to carry him downstairs and he panicked, started squirming and crying and clawing at me to put him down so he could run back upstairs. My boyfriend’s sister brought her new dog over one Saturday afternoon. He’s a total sweetheart. We’re chilling in the basement when the dog starts growling and barking at a corner. “I’ve never heard him do that before.”
In early November, I took a silly photo of my boyfriend wearing a Snuggie in the basement.
Spot the face?
In late November, I’m lying in bed, trying to fall asleep. My boyfriend is passed out. All of a sudden I hear him shudder. A deep, almost violent, involuntary shudder. He’s propped up in bed, eyes wide open, looking straight out our bedroom door. He tells me he just had a dream where he was lying in bed looking out the bedroom door when a blonde woman in her early 30’s walked by our door down the hallway. Then she turned back and stood in front of our door, and looked right at him. She didn’t look happy. Then he woke up. That was the last incident we ever experienced in our house.
Here’s the kicker: my landlord’s bought the house in 1955 and raised a large family there. They told us they had 5 children. They’re well into their 80s now and they’re very lovely people, however we mostly deal with their youngest daughter when it comes to repairs, etc. She once mentioned that she had 3 siblings.
I think one may have passed away in the house and was unsettled by our new presence.
He’s Always Been There by Snarkilicious:
I’ve always been weary of the supernatural, anxious to find a reason behind the phenomenon, if only to keep myself from getting too scared. I have no logical explanation for what happens in my house. When we moved in, my oldest was 2. His bedroom closet has a small door in the back leading to the attic. My husband and I called it a “Malkovich Door,” put a lock on it, and didn’t think about it any more. Until my son started crying at night. He cried because of the mean man in his closet. Every night. Same spot. I stayed calm, told him to yell at the man to go away, and burned a smudge stick just to be safe. (Trying not to believe in ghosts and actually not believing in them are two different things.) Eventually my son started sleeping again, so I chalked it up to a lot of changes in a short time.
Five years later, my youngest, 3, started having the same “nightmares” about “a spooky guy is in my closet!”
“Yeah, he’s always been there,” my oldest said. “I just stopped talking about him.”
Demons, They Are Real by dthedestroyer13:
The women in my family are a mixed bag of crazy. We see, hear, sense, and dream odd things. So trying to write about one really scary story is very hard because every house I’ve lived in was either haunted, or became haunted due to the presence of my mother and I. This story is 100% true—hand to bible.
I live in Oahu, Hawai’i. Oahu is beautiful but riddled with spiritual activity, so I expect a daily occurrence of weirdness. My daily routine was simple: Bus, Starbucks, Work, Bus, and then home. Like clockwork I had departed on the bus at 6:17 a.m..
The bus populace that early morning was rather crowded, so I sat in one of the seats closest to the rear exit. Thankfully the numbers thinned out little by little. Normally on the bus here in Hawai’i, an occasional homeless person would trudge onto the bus and stay glued to the handicap section. Thankfully the bus driver could monitor the level of crazy, or the level of belligerence. The homeless man du jour was about 50 years old with a torn Aloha Shirt and once white Bermuda shorts. Homeless man began mumbling a string of random incoherent sentences at every other stop.
As the bus passed the Kokokahi YMCA, I looked up at the homeless man because his mumbling speed and volume had increased to steady talking. I faintly heard him though my earbuds. His words flew out at breakneck pace causing me to take off an earbud and try to eavesdrop more closely on his cuckooed recitation.
I was so curious about the homeless guy that I didn’t bother to notice a man in a suit sitting right next to him. It was weird that I had just noticed the man in the suit, for I normally try to be observant on my bus rides because of possibility of a stranger following me off the bus—call it paranoia or being really cautious. But this “man in the suit” was of a slight build with a black suit who looked comically out of place sitting next to a middle aged homeless man. I kept my head somewhat down and my eyes on my phone to keep a low profile and not ogle (or a least not be noticed).
Homeless dude isn’t mumbling anymore by this point in the bus ride and is loudly speaking gibberish. His consistent pace of non associated words are almost rhythmic, but shit got horrifying when the man in the black suit looked like he was actively listening in on the homeless man’s words. The man in the suit started to nod his head as if he was listening to an old friend: then clearly amidst the frantic slurry of words of “homeless man,” I heard, “She can see us—blah blah blah blah—SHE CAN SEE US.” My blood ran cold and I looked around for other people on the bus to see if they noticed the crazy shit I was witnessing. No one else was on the bus except myself, Homeless Man, thebus driver, and the man in the black suit.
Let it be known, I am a Catholic—a “jack” Catholic, but a Catholic nonetheless. I have heard horror stories about spirit boards and demons, but I honestly wasn’t prepared for what came next...
The man in the suit stopped his even paced nodding and listening to the homeless man and looked straight. at. me. His eyes were pitch black like the black sclera Halloween contacts and his thin and narrow face twisted into a grin. Homeless man immediately went quiet. What happened in those couple of seconds felt like forever: the hair on the back of my neck stood on end, a cold shock ran up my spine, my limbs felt heavy, and I felt horribly nauseated. Then I heard the man in the black suit say to me in a dry voice, “Yes she can, special, special girl.”
I felt like my heart was going to fly up into my throat. I heard a high pitched ringing in my ears until I heard a voice ring aloud in my head: Pray, pray hard, pray, for the love of God! My vision started to blur as I saw the man in the suit sitting in a closer seat. I started to pray: my limbs started to feel lighter and lighter. I pulled the stop cable to signal the bus driver as tears are streaming down my face. I was a mile away from my work, but I didn’t care. I was a cornered animal. I needed out. I shoved the doors open and got off the bus. The bus drove away, and I immediately threw up on the side of the road. I called my mother and cried, “ Mom, demons, they are real. It’s all real.”
A Classic Story of Sleep Paralysis by DragonsDaughter:
Most of you may write this off as a classic story of sleep paralysis, and in the sake of transparency, I did for many years. However as time has passed from this incident certain details have come to light that have made me wonder about that explanation, if not wholly reject it. To be honest I don’t know what happened, because it happened to my mother and not to me, but I did wake up to it, to see my mom weeping in the arms of my sister in our darkened room in the middle of the night. This story is 100 percent true, Christ on the cross, by my blood and his. I’ll tell it as I’ve heard it from my mom and sister, and recall from my own memory.
When I was 5 my 18 year old sister rescued my mother and I from a house with bullet holes in the windows and shut off heat in the dead of a Northern Ohio winter. My sister escaped my fathers’ abuse to work a factory job with her boyfriend (now husband) and scratch together enough for a small 2 bedroom apartment. She had her taste of freedom, but could not enjoy it so long as my mother and I froze in our broken home while my father was off doing whatever it is men who let their wife and child freeze and starve in a home with no electricity do. So she rolled up one day with a sympathetic uncle, a truck, and said “let’s go”. I owe my life go her.
My mom and I moved in to her tiny second bedroom in the apartment. I’ve known people with larger closets, and I’m no landed gentry. Years later, over tear stained glasses of wine I later found out what happened to my mom wasn’t the only thing that happened in that that room, but here it is.
My mom was sleeping on her little pad of blankets on the floor when suddenly her eyes opened from dead sleep. Her gaze fixed to a spot on the ceiling but could not move from there. She was utterly paralyzed, incapable of even moving her eyes. The room was pitch black, with only a little watery grey street lamp light filtering in front the window. I was sleeping right beside her.
She said she felt something laying on top of her, crushing her with its weight. She could not turn her eyes to see it, but felt and heard its breath rattling against her neck, feeling it’s head and teeth pushed up against the underside of her jaw, rasping its breath. The horror she described the rare few times she recounted this for me still moves to her to tears; the utter helplessness and fear to the fiber of her being that possessed her, as this thing pushed her against the floor with its weight and it’s sickening rasp on her neck. She couldn’t move a millimeter, couldn’t even tear her eyes away from the ceiling as the thing breathed on her. She says her life flashed before her eyes and she felt the tears flooding her eyes but she couldn’t even cry.
My mom has had a hard life, and it’s made her deeply religeous. The only thing she could think to do was to pray to Jesus and beg him to take this thing off of her so she could go on living to protect me. She tried to move her lips to pray but couldn’t, so in her mind screamed Jesus’s name to save her. She said she screamed his name for what felt like hours, but in this she had no concept of time.
My sister was sleeping in the master bedroom just a few feet over. Here is where it gets even weirder. My sister said she woke up in the dead of a sound sleep to a nagging, ringing feeling of anxiety in her gut. Go check on mom, it told her, but she thought she was being crazy. On and on this back and forth went, like a mental argument between part of her saying go back to sleep your being insane with part of her pleading to get up, totally out of no where, to go and check on our mother, a completely healthy 40 year old woman.
My sisters cautious side gave in, and as she tells it she got up a bit indignantly and crept into the blackened hallway to check on mom. As she rounded the slight corner to our bedroom the hair stood up on her neck, telling her flatly thT something was wrong. She peered into the slightly ajar door of our bed room, her sudden feeling of terror surmounting.
Mom, she whispered.
She said when she finally clicked on the light, my mothers eyes were rolled so far back up at the ceiling they were white, and her skin and limbs were grey and stiff and contorted as a corpse.
My sister rushed to my mom and began to shake her, thinking the worst. I awoke in my little kid bed to my mom sucking in a massive breath and beginning to weep, the life flooding back in her veins. She said the moment my sister touched her she was free. I can still see them crying.
We don’t know for certain what the fuck happened in that room that night. My mom, being extremly superstitious, won’t even say the word demon, but I know that’s the word she’s reserved for the thing that held her against the floor that night. When I learned what sleep paralysis was that’s what I chalked this whole thing up to. Simple; a nice easy explanation for a weird night I remember as a kid. At least until the story my mom told me of when I out of nowhere started sleepwalking when we moved to this place, and she would find me leaned against the 4th story window in the middle of the night with my little hands trying to undo the window latch. Or when my sisters future husband got blasted one night and brought up the time his brother spent a drunken night crashing on that same guest bedroom floor, to wake up to someone laying on top of him in the night trying to get frisky, breathing on him, specifically. There was a brothers fight over whether it was my sister, but her alibi for the night was locked down. There wasn’t a single person in that apartment aside from them and one very straight friend the whole night. Before I remembered the things I saw there when I had my near death experience as a kid with a 104 degree fever.
I didn’t know how to take this story from my mom or sister for years. It was a weird night I woke up to as a kindergartner, no more no less. But even now my mother, who still lives in that place, won’t go in that room. Over the years she has become a selective hoarder, methodically sealing that room off with layer of trash upon trash until entry has become impossible. I still try to ham open the door when I visit to try and get an idea of how bad a fire hazard it is, until I get the door open just enough to feel the dread come rushing back, before I close the door with that same familiar rush of apprehension and disgust.
Fuck that room. Shit’s haunted.
Fuck these stories. They’re ALL haunted.
Contact the author at madeleine@jezebel.com.
Image via Shutterstock.