We all love to wonder about the supernatural and the paranormal—but when it comes to actually believing in them, it’s safe to say that most of us have our doubts. So when an otherwise skeptical person goes through something that completely changes their beliefs, there’s usually a pretty chilling story behind it. Here are 50 real-life stories about experiences that made people change their minds and start believing in the existence of ghosts.
1. A Can-Do Attitude
My aunt used to live above a convenience store. It was a duplex and had a mud room that connected the front doors to each apartment. The other apartment was empty and unlocked, so my cousins and I would hang out there. One night, we are playing hide and seek in the empty apartment. My cousin and I are running from the seeker and the hallway door slams shut in front of us.
We freak out and end the game because we are too scared. But it wasn't over—there were cameras. We tell our parents and my aunt happens to have a night vision baby camera. She sets it up in the living room of the empty apartment and we can all see it on the TV in her house. We are watching it for about 10 minutes. Dust is flying everywhere and nothing is happening.
Out of the darkness, a Pepsi can rolls up and hits the base of the camera. Everybody is like what the heck!! We conclude that this place is haunted. I never went up the stairs alone to get to her house again, I was way too freaked out. About three years ago, unfortunately, the entire building burned down under very mysterious circumstances. I don’t know the cause.
2. It Don’t Mean A Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing
So back when I was in high school, I worked at kids’ birthday parties. The place was basically a giant gym, and gymnastics and dance classes were also held there. One day, I came in, and one of the girls I worked with (who was very spiritual and very religious) was totally freaked out. During the gymnastics class she taught that morning, one of the kids was staring up at the ceiling the whole time.
When she asked the kid what he was doing, he said: "There's a little boy up there" and pointed at the ceiling. Strange enough, but whatever. Kids are weird. Later, two girls who were working a birthday party before mine came out of the gym and were visibly shaken. This is where it started getting freaky. A pair of five-year-old twins went down a slide and then stared at the ceiling.
They both said that there was a little boy "up there", in the same spot on the ceiling as the kid from the morning gymnastics class had pointed out. We all went in and inspected the ceiling. Of course, it was just a regular, gray, warehouse-y ceiling. But we were all super freaked out at that point. During my party, I was pushing a little boy on the giant swing we had in the gym.
He, too, began to stare at the ceiling. He said directly to my face, "Hey, there's a little boy up there!" We told all of our coworkers and managers about the three separate experiences we had today with children from different parties and classes seeing a little boy on the ceiling. The next day, we had downtime between parties, and nobody was in the gym. Or so we thought.
There are cameras in the gym that allow parents to see their children playing from the lobby. My manager called us out of the break room, shouting: "Guys, check this out!" We come out and see the screen, which is streaming live from the gym. It was showing a giant swing going back and forth. Nobody was in there. It's just the swing going by itself.
I like to think that the ghost was truly a little boy who just wanted to play, and that he finally got an opportunity to go on the swing. Could be worse.
3. Spooking In Style
I was around 10 years old and living in San Antonio when this story occurred. I got back to the apartment first after school. About five minutes of being in the place alone, I saw in the reflection of a mirror that an older man in a tuxedo was sitting in the kitchen. I flipped out and ran to my room to grab a bat. I waited 10 minutes or so before coming out.
I locked the door when I got home and never heard the door open for someone to leave. I didn't tell anyone about it at all. But the guy was gone when I finally came out, so I just assumed I had imagined something and moved on with my life. Fast forward six years. I was watching Ghost Hunters with my family and my mom asked if any of us remembered the old man in the tux.
Crazy stuff.
4. Blasts From The Past…And Future
My wife and I swear that our daughter used to talk to ghosts when she was a toddler. She was an only child at the time. First instance I remember was her telling me that she was talking to Nana. That's what I called my grandmother, who passed about 15 years before my daughter was born. My daughter was young and so I hadn't even talked about Nana to her ever.
I started to find this creepy, but this was just the beginning. I showed her a picture and asked who she spoke to. There were four women in the photo, three of which I didn't even know. But without hesitation, she pointed to my Nana. Ok, no biggie. Then, some months later, my wife and I are trying for baby number two. After my wife gets pregnant, my daughter is sitting next to her on the couch and puts her head on her belly and says, "Mommy, there's a baby in there".
Okay, maybe that's a coincidence. She must have overheard us saying something. A few weeks later, my wife miscarries. Maybe my daughter picked up on our sadness, who knows, but she again puts her head on her stomach and says, "Mommy, there's no baby in there anymore". Then, several months and one more (very early) miscarriage later, my daughter tells us, "I was talking to my brother last night and he said that my sister is coming to live with me soon".
Again, she's an only child and had no (living?) brother. We were still trying at this point, but had not taken any tests. We picked one up that night, and sure enough, my wife was indeed pregnant. When the time came to reveal the gender, I wasn't even interested. My daughter had already said it was a girl. Sure enough, I now have two daughters.
5. Looking Out For You
Once when I was in university, I went to go and see my therapist whom I had been seeing twice a week for about five months. On this day, he was uncharacteristically quiet and I asked him if he was all right. He said he was fine, and we continued through what would prove to be one of our greatest breakthrough sessions. A lot of repressed memories came up through it that have helped me to heal.
At the end of the session, I asked him why he was acting differently today than other days. His reply sent a shiver down my spine. He said when I walked in, I was accompanied by a warrior-like person. He said he had the overwhelming feeling to perform as best as he professionally could that day, and that he got the sense that this “warrior” had fought a lot of battles to protect me.
This would seem coincidental, except for the fact that 10 years later I was living on the other side of the world. I had a Puerto Rican neighbor who I would see occasionally, and I eventually got pretty close with him and his family. One day, as I was walking by, he kind of gets quiet and weird and then says in broken English, “Do you know there is a soldier who follows you around?” I knew instantly who he was talking about.
In both instances the figure was described the same exact way. Just over six feet, blonde curly hair, wearing primitive warrior clothing, and strangely “a white guy”. Neither of these people could have known that my closest brother, who tragically lost his life at the age of 14, was over six feet tall with blond curly hair, and always acted as my protector.
6. A Late Night Visitor
I was eight years old when my grandma passed. I was so sad. So around two months went by and I was going to visit my grandma's former house where my grandpa still lived. So I wake up at 3:00 in the morning and hear footsteps coming from the bedroom door. I froze. I saw my grandma walking up to me and she said "Hello little sweetie" and walked away. I know that it was not sleep paralysis because I could still move my hands and feet. But I wasn't the only one who saw her.
The next morning, I told my grandpa about it and he said "I've seen grandma almost every night, she likes to visit, so don't be scared next time when you visit".
7. Come Fly With Me
My girlfriend’s grandfather’s ashes were on a little shelf in the living room, right next to a very solid and heavy angel statue. Well, one weekend, she and I are fooling around on the living room couch and out of the corner of my eye, I see the angel statue fly off the wall, accompanied by a deep grunt. Now, when I say this thing FLEW off the wall, I’m talking at least seven or eight feet of air before landing on the hardwood floor and leaving a dent where the wing hit.
Even if this thing had fallen off the wall, it would have dropped straight down, not soared with force. Well, we both stood there in shock, and I whispered to ask if she had heard the grunt as well, to which she agreed. So we both booked it for the day. Well, later that night at dinner, we told her parents what happened (leaving out the naughty bit). Her younger suddenly sister burst into tears. She revealed she had seen a dark figure at the foot of her bed the last couple of nights but didn’t want anyone to think she was crazy.
Our grandfather that passed had mental health issues that caused a lot of pain for the family. Welp, after that day I was a believer.
8. What Keeps You Up At Night?
When I was about 10 to 14 years old, I had terrible insomnia. I would imagine things and felt incredibly unsafe as if I was being watched, although I never admitted this to anyone. I began only sleeping on the couch, with my back against the wall, and had to have the TV or some sort of light on. I missed an immense amount of school because of this, so my mom had me see a neurologist.
The neurologist diagnosed me with some things. But the crazy part was that, during my sleep study, I slept amazingly well. No issues at all, and I slept in the "real bed". Eventually, I got transferred to a children's hospital and, speaking to the doctor, I explained that I would "see" things and felt uncomfortable. They had thought I was experiencing sleep paralysis.
When they told my mom, she went ghost white. She pulled me aside and explained she was experiencing things, too. She described in detail what I was seeing. That evening, she approached my brother and asked some broad questions, such as "Do you notice anything weird happening at home?" He also described what we experienced.
It was then I realized we must have paranormal activity and I've believed it ever since. When we moved out of that house, all my sleep issues abruptly stopped and I haven't experienced it since.
9. Following The Arrow Wherever It Points
This one is not about me, but rather it’s about my three brothers. We used to live in the Philippines, where everyone believes in ghosts. People also believe in things like Duwende (dwarves), Diwatas (fairies), etc. Our old home was the second house built in our subdivision, so it was very old, with huge mango, santol, and other fruit trees growing all over.
As my mom informed me, my three brothers were engaged in playful activity, launching arrows from their bamboo bows, crafted for them by one of our helpers. It was all fun and games—until it happened. My third brother shot his arrow and, according to him and my brothers, it stopped in midair and dropped to the ground. Needless to say, they found this weird and stopped playing.
On the next day, my brother is suddenly hit with a high fever out of nowhere. They were going to take my brother to my aunt who was a doctor, but my older brothers told my mom about the arrow stopping midair. My mom decided to take him to an "Albularyo," which is a practitioner of folk medicine I think.
So my mom took my brother to this guy so they could find out what had happened, and what they could do about it. Once they met up, the Albularyo decided to do a ritual that involved dripping candle wax in water to see what caused the sickness. Once they did this, a small humanoid figure formed in the water, but it was missing a hand.
The Albularyo told my mom that my brother probably shot an arrow and hit a Duwende's hand, which is why he got hit with a fever as punishment. I don't know exactly what they did to ask for forgiveness, but apparently my brother got better the next day after this experience. I'll try to dig up more details if I can, out of curiosity. The whole story gives me very spooky vibes.
10. Sounds Like Everything Went Swimmingly
I worked at a public pool. I would work alone after hours, cleaning the building and the pool. One night, at around 2:00 in the morning, I'm cleaning the change rooms. The pool has been closed for four hours at this time. Then a chilling sound hits my ear: a child's laughter and bare feet running across the pool deck. I go out and scan the area. There's nobody in sight.
The doors are all closed and locked, and there is literally nowhere in the building that a kid could be hiding. There were no wet footprints anywhere on the pool deck. I re-check the doors and the security monitors. I am the only person in the building. I have no idea where or who those noises were coming from, to this day. It was unsettling.
11. Room For One More
I was visiting my mother after my dad had passed. She went shopping with her sister and left me alone. Then, all of a sudden, I heard my dad as plain as day up in his room. He got up from his computer chair, walked over to the door, and opened it. He walked down the stairs and stood on the last step for a few seconds before walking back up to his room and closing the door.
I was probably five feet from him in the living room. I just froze. It scared the heck out of me.
12. Spirits Can Be Stingy, Too!
I slept over at my buddy’s house one night. I woke up at 3:00 in the morning to the sound of a woman’s crying coming from right outside his bedroom. I figured it was his mom arguing with another family member, so at first I felt very awkward rather than scared. Then things began getting more intense. She started screaming “Seven dollars?! You did this for seven dollars?!”
And as she began getting louder and louder I thought I might need to intervene before someone got hurt. I stood up, walked to the door, grabbed the handle, twiiiiiist, open the door. Instant absolute silence. Every sound I heard stopped in a heartbeat. It went from a battle zone to being able to hear a mouse yawn. Outside his room, every light in his house was off.
There was no one else awake, nothing at all to be observed. I still can’t explain what the heck happened. I woke my friend up and he told me he once saw a lady in a white gown walking up his steps and thought it was his mom, but when she didn’t respond to him calling out to her, he followed her up the stairs. And when she turned a corner, she disappeared.
Then one day, when they are moving out of this house, his cousin and sister arrive to the new house after grabbing some things from the old one and tell everyone that they swore they saw a girl in a white gown standing at the upstairs window as they pulled out of the driveway. Me and my friend never told anyone about our stories, so his cousin and sister said they saw what they saw without any prior knowledge of the situation.
13. Hallway Etiquette
I was staying in the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado. For those who don’t know, this is the hotel that inspired Stephen King to write The Shining. At around 1:00 in the morning, I heard what sounded like children running up and down the hallways interspersed with laughter. I opened the door to see what the heck was going on, and didn’t see anything.
Quick little rascals, I thought. Then, the next morning, when my significant other and I took a tour of the building, the guide stopped directly in front of our room to tell us the story of young girls whose ghosts can be heard running up and down that same hallway. It was a very spooky experience, especially since I wasn’t aware of the whole ghost legend at the time I heard the sounds.
14. All I Have To Do Is Dream
Within a very short period, two of my best friends and my closest cousin all passed. All at separate times and for different reasons, but still within a relatively short period. Although I loved these three people, I had never dreamed about any of them as far as I can recall. That is, until after they passed. I had one dream for each of them that consisted of myself and them just talking and hanging out like normal.
Those three dreams would be the only time I had ever dreamed of any of them. Each dream was extremely realistic, to the point where I thought I was experiencing it firsthand up until I woke up. At first I thought it was just me missing them, but after the last dream, I was left with the feeling that these were their final goodbyes. And the dreams never returned again.
15. A Hair-Raising Tale
I was always on the fence about ghosts because there was no scientific evidence of them being real, and I was going through a big question phase with religion and the afterlife at the time anyway. But my family moved into an old farmhouse when I was 12 years old. This was a very old farmhouse with a build date around the 1860s.
The original owner's name was still on the old barn out back and we found numerous old antiques built into the walls when we completely renovated the place. It seemed pretty normal, if a little spooky at first. Then, when I turned 16, things started happening. Things I couldn't explain. They never happened to my sister until after she turned 16, too.
This is the most prominent memory I have: The upstairs consisted of two bedrooms. One bedroom was the room at the top of the stairs, and the second bedroom was in a separate room just to the left of the top of the stairs. I had the "private room" and my sister's room was the landing. When someone walked up the stairs it was very distinct. You could hear each individual step and the creaks got louder as the person approaching got closer.
So one night, I am sitting on my bed watching TV or something and I hear my sister come up the steps and go lay on her bed. So I start talking to her. When she doesn't answer me, I get annoyed and go into her room to figure out what her problem is. Only she is not in there. My mind was blown because I know I heard her. I call for her and she had been downstairs the entire time.
We never felt threatened. But it did seem that this entity liked picking only on women. Even my mother who absolutely doesn't believe in ghosts had to admit some odd things had happened. I think the funniest thing was having my ponytail pulled while I was doing the dishes. I don't know why it was so funny. It just cracked me up that whatever it was felt like playing with my hair.
16. Bathroom Break
So my grandma use to live with me. She was in the room next to mine and would get up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, which is connected to my room. There is a drop from her room to mine, so we put a night light outside the bathroom so she could see the way. It was like this for about 12 years. Only a few days after she had passed, I was in my bed with my cat and dog reading a book or something.
I remember my cat and dog both waking up and looking at the night light. My cat got up and went to the light, pawing at it and making noises. My dog just stayed still, not barking. I would grab him so he would calm down or go to sleep, but he never took his eyes off that spot. That's when I saw what I can only say looked like a light bend around the night light.
I was positive it was my grandma coming back to “use the bathroom” and check on me and the house. To this day, and her passing was about five years ago, I still have that night light there and I still turn it on every night for her. I haven't seen her or experienced anything like this again, but I'm sure she's still around in some way, shape, or form.
Last night, a little past midnight, I wrote her a letter. I then left a sticky note behind it and thumb-tacked it to the wall right under the night light. I regret to inform you that nothing happened, as far as I’m aware. Though I did feel that good kind of bad when writing it. I leave on vacation for two weeks tomorrow, so I'm going to leave the note one last night for her. We'll see what happens then…
17. A Purr-fect Story
I still don't believe in ghosts, but…I did have a strange experience one time. I had a cat who I found in a ditch many years ago. She was cute and I pet her, so she followed me back down the train tracks about a mile to my home. I opened the door for her and she went in. She was offered the opportunity to go back out, and did for a moment, but then came back in.
She was mine forever. I've had many pets over the years and loved them all. But this one was different. She wanted to be near me all the time. I'd often said I'd never had a cat who made me feel like my personal space was being violated before. She followed me up to bed every night and purred me to sleep. Unfortunately, she didn’t live too long.
She passed fairly quickly. I barely even had a chance to say goodbye. I knew she was ill, having been diagnosed with hyperthyroidism, which cat owners will know is not a good thing to hear (Although progress has been made, ask your vets about the pens! They've worked miracles for my current cat who also has it).
They vomit their food up and waste away slowly, eventually succumbing to either congestive heart failure or kidney damage. She had taken a turn for the worse and I thought her treatment wasn't working. On examination, they found tumors in her stomach and liver. She had received a fatal injury and was only going to experience increasing pain.
In the most painful thing I've ever had to deal with, I put her down. She even meowed one last time before the end. I forgot to mention that this cat was also the most talkative I've ever had. She frankly wouldn't shut up! I buried her in the yard to keep her close and tried to go to sleep, completely beside myself with grief.
As I lay down, I heard something...familiar. I live in an old house and my bedroom doesn't have a door, so I installed one of those plastic sliding doors. The slats it's made of make a tell-tale clacking sound when they're disturbed, like they did when a cat pushes in between them and the doorframe. I heard this, and a moment later, I felt the foot of my bed compress, and could feel the mattress deform around my feet, up beside my legs and roughly to my hips.
I looked. No cat. I don't know how to explain this. I don't believe in ghosts and I'm sure grief can cause some pretty significant psychological disturbances. A quick perusal of my post history will very quickly show I am ANYTHING but cuddly, but I was absolutely in the kind of deep grief where one would expect, as I loved that cat more than basically anything else.
Even typing this now, years later, it’s making my eyes well up with sadness for my lost friend. I could write off the sound of the plastic slats as a breeze or a hallucination. Older members of my family said they saw my father after he passed and I've read about grief-induced hallucinations before. But to feel my mattress deform like that, in exactly the way she used to circle my feet and come up beside me, I don't know what to think.
I'll address the sleep paralysis theory that has popped up every so often when I tell this story. I have experienced sleep paralysis a handful of times in my life on waking. I have found it's almost always a product of going to bed overly tired and sleeping on my back. Some have reported frankly terrifying experiences during their imprisonment, but I've been fortunate enough to have never had that happen. I'm just mostly awake and can't move.
One time, I found my arm was free, so I spent the time waving it back and forth above me, rocking my body in the process. That's about it. Although I don't entirely discredit the idea of sleep paralysis or a hypnagogic hallucination, my brain does not remember it that way. First off, I wasn't paralyzed. I was fully ambulatory. I just held still when I felt the bed depress because...I just wasn't sure what I was about to see!
It turned out I would see nothing, but I did eventually lift my covers once I had composed myself to look for her. I have had hypnagogic hallucinations before when I'm overly tired. It's always like a repeating white noise sound that repeats faster and faster and gets louder until it startles me out of the twilight state my brain drifted into. Once or twice I heard my name called real as day.
That's truly terrifying when it happens. I've never had a hallucination anywhere as sensory-complex as feeling a cat who wasn't there impacting my mattress, though again, not claiming that's not what happened. I don't know what happened. The whole day, I knew what was coming and I remember it all like a fever dream. I took her to the vet in the morning, expecting to hear her hyperthyroidism had taken a turn for the worse.
That's bad, but I thought we still had time. Liver and stomach cancers were entirely unexpected. We spent the day together, and she mustered as much enthusiasm as her ruined body would allow her for all the things we loved to do. We spent our last peaceful moments laying on my bed, staring out the window until that evil time had come when I had to take her to be put down.
Unfortunately, I see now what eluded me then. Liver cancer in cats is a little like pancreatic cancer in humans, in that by the time we discover it, it's almost always too late. Cats will have periods where they're significantly impacted and sick, and then bounce back for a bit. They go through cycles of that, and each time they bounce back a little less, and then get sicker, longer.
It's very similar to how hyperthyroidism affects them. I had no idea. If you see your cat going through that type of cycle, get her to a vet and have her abdomen checked. Maybe you will be more fortunate than we were. I am not humbled often. But I am now, after this experience. I suppose it should have, but it never occurred to me that this could be a common experience. Here's to all our little friends. May we all be reunited one day.
18. Having A Ball
When I was in fifth grade, I was playing with silly putty in my room when my mom called me down for dinner. I had molded it into a ball and placed it down directly behind me. I’m talking as soft as can be here. When I stood up to go downstairs, I felt something hit me in the back of my head with some force. So I turn around and see my silly putty ball, not on the ground anymore, but bouncing on my windowsill until it eventually rolled back onto the floor.
Needless to say, I ran downstairs hysterically trying to tell my mom what had happened.
19. Passing The Torch
I was one of the firefighters working at Ground Zero on September 11th. I lost two of my buddies, and it still haunts me to this day. As I was making my way through the rubble, I heard someone screaming. I bolted to wherever I heard the sound, and only found a twisted body on a rebar. The body was burnt and pale, and it looked like it had been there for a while.
I watched a firefighter walk up the rubble towards me, and hug me. I was confused, but I understood why he wanted a hug. I hugged him back, and when I opened my eyes, there was no firefighter. I stood there, holding a helmet. I don't know how I got this helmet, but it was in my hands. The golden eagle on the front had been bronzed, and a hole through the side of the helmet, with dried blood around it.
I was holding this helmet in tears, while in front of an impaled civilian. I did some research, and the firefighter that I hugged had apparently been reported as losing his life just three hours before I believe I saw him. I still have that helmet, and I will never forget the hug the fallen firefighter gave me. It was a life-changing experience.
20. “Armed,” But Not Dangerous
I was having a conversation with my mom when I was a teenager. Suddenly, mid-sentence, I felt a hand grab my arm. I spun around to see who it was but no one was there. My mom didn't see anyone either. Apparently, the same thing had happened to my sister a few weeks before. Also, we happened to notice all the random voices and bags falling off shelves and moving shadows in the periphery.
I believe it was just the house that was "haunted", but they weren't malicious so it was all good.
21. Floating To Victory
In 2011, I was studying abroad in Morocco. We were staying in a riad in the city of Marrakech with tall, ornate windows. I had one roommate who was already asleep that night. I thought I saw her sitting up in the bed next to me wearing all white. Suddenly, I saw a white, hazy thing vaguely shaped like a person floating above me next to the big windows. I was so scared I went into the bathroom, turned the light on, and stayed in the bathtub all night. My roommate didn’t see anything.
22. That’s One Way To Introduce Yourself
When I was little, I once woke up to a ghostly pale old lady standing next to my bed, which caused me to scream. My dad ran into the room, saw her, then yelled at the old lady. She then promptly vanished into thin air. We still have no idea what she wanted or who she was. A few days later, me and my friends witnessed a toaster fly off the counter top and go twenty feet across the house.
23. Nothing To See Here, People!
I lived in a haunted house for basically all of my life. It used to scare the heck out of me when I was little, but I basically just got desensitized to it over time. We always experienced things like hearing footsteps, hearing voices upstairs when everyone was downstairs, dogs following nothing around the room. I felt like we were all going crazy. Some of the stranger experiences include my grandma seeing her mother in her room at night.
Another was my mom seeing a ball of light floating in our hallway. My brother and I separately heard fingernails tapping on the walls of our bedrooms, and when we called our mom in to listen, the sounds would stop. Then as soon as our mom left, it would start again. We experienced this at different times, my brother for a week or so and then me.
And without knowing that the other one was having the same experience. I had a desk toy in my room that had a little foam ball hanging from a chain on it. My cousin and I were playing video games and the ball randomly bounced like someone had tapped it from below. The kicker was when my mom started feeling like something was climbing into bed with her.
She describes it as like a dog trying but failing to climb up on the foot of the bed. She thought it was my dad moving his feet, but then she felt it when he wasn’t there and she was wide awake, so she knew it wasn’t him. She kept this story to herself, and then a few days later my uncle stayed the night in the guest room and described feeling the exact same thing. That's when she decided to do something.
At that point, my mom waited for a day that everyone was out of the house. She opened up the windows and told the spirit that it either had to leave and move on, or it wasn’t allowed to bother us anymore. Since then, we’ve gone from activity every day to one-off experiences every few months. We’ve been told by several people, who have slept in the guest room and had nightmares about it, that there is a portal of some kind in the closet of our guest room.
Sometimes I think that spirits just pass through occasionally and cause a flurry of activity. I have so many more stories, too! But a couple of little disclaimers first. In regards to my family's general makeup, we aren't some crazy hippies that use substances or hallucinate. There is nothing like that whatsoever among us.
My father owns his own business, my mother does finances for said businesses. My brother is a civil engineer who graduated from a very reputable school with honors. I am a musician, but before that I went to a couple different reputable colleges and made straight A's, even taking classes like second-level anatomy, etc. We believe in science and have no explanation for these experiences.
In my life, the basic consensus has always been that ghosts are real, and people who think they aren't are like those idiots who think that evolution is made up. I am a religious person and my belief in the paranormal has only strengthened my religious beliefs. I know that in the end all that stuff doesn't really matter and I could just be pulling your leg or I could just be totally crazy.
I will say though, as far as I know, all of the stories that I post are true, and it's your choice if you want to believe me or not. Buckle up folks, I've got a lot to tell. Not all of these stories happened to me directly, and not all of them take place in my house, but all of them have at least been told to me by people who I trust, are of sound mind, and have no reason to lie.
I don't believe most of the stories I hear and I take every experience as an opportunity to try to prove that something isn't haunted. I ghost hunt fairly often and I go into every building assuming it isn't haunted. Also, I run my investigations off of the motto "if there's any doubt, you throw it out," meaning that if there's any possible way to disprove an experience we assume that it was that normal factor and not a ghost.
We do this as scientifically as possible. I'll start with the portal in the closet. I have never experienced that and I have slept like a baby in that room a couple times. Never had any weird experiences, so I don't really know about that one. But for a while, I lived in a dorm that was rumored to be haunted. The only experience of note that I had other than just spooky feelings was one night when I came out of my room to go to the bathroom.
As I rounded the corner to go into the bathroom, a shadow, about four feet high, came out of the room and vanished right before it went through me. I was about 18 years old at the time and, despite living in a haunted house for my whole life, it was my first time seeing anything like that with my own eyes. I wasn't really scared, more surprised. Which defines most of my paranormal experiences.
My father owns two branches of a business and one of them is in a building that is over 100 years old. Since we got the place, we've had employees tell us stories about odd experiences in the store. Everything from products flying off shelves to seeing shadows where there can't be any. One driver in particular was in the back of the store and saw a shadow in the shape of a person standing at the top of a set of steps.
He backed out into the front room and was super pale. He told my dad what happened and he never went back into that room again. He quit not long after because he was too afraid to go back to work in that building again. In that same building, my dad and I were there changing out lights on a day when the store was closed.
I believe it was Memorial Day a few years back. We were the only people there and we are 100% positive about that. Basically, my dad was up on a scissor-lift 15 feet up changing lights, and I was running back and forth from one of the back rooms flipping breakers so he didn't get electrocuted. There were three shelves that I saw on my way in and out each time, two super tall shelves with one about four feet and one in between them.
One time, as I came out of the back room, I got the shock of a lifetime. There was a man standing on the other side of the shorter shelf. He was looking at me. He was wearing a hat, and had a mustache. I would've guessed a style from the 1920s. At first I thought it was my dad. He is mustachioed and it was the only logical explanation my brain could come up with.
But as I rounded the corner, he was still 15 feet up on the scissor lift. Not scary to me at all, but super fascinating. My grandma used to hear kids running around in her apartment, long after all of her grandkids were grown up. The meat shop below her apartment hears it too. My cousin, 15 years old at the time, was at his house not long after his grandpa passed.
He and a friend were playing video games and they looked behind them and saw a shadow, generally in the shape of and with the posture of his grandpa, standing behind him. Both kids screamed and it vanished. They ran downstairs to tell his mom, who didn't believe them because my cousin is known for telling tall tales.
My cousin then burst into tears saying "I think it was grandpa". My cousin is not a cryer, and certainly would never cry in front of his friends, so at that point my aunt believed him. The next day, she went upstairs and basically did what my mom did in my house, asking it to leave. And as far as I know, they haven't had any experiences since.
Finally, the last time I went ghost hunting, I had one of the most up-close experiences I've ever had. We were taking a ghost tour of the old Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum. I was going up some steps immediately behind the tour guide, who was the only person in front of me. As I came up the steps, I heard a voice in my ear that said: "Hey, he's bringing a lot of people up here".
It sounded like it came from inches away. Again, I wasn't scared. Just totally fascinated. I love this stuff. That's pretty much all I got for now. I leave in less than a week to do a week of investigations around Kentucky. Waverly Hills Sanatorium here I come! I know a lot of people don't believe in this stuff, but a lot of people also don't believe that the earth is round.
All I know is that consciousness is an energy and according to science energy cannot be created or destroyed. We don't know what happens to you when you pass, and according to my life experiences you have a soul that either hangs around on earth for a while after your body passes or moves on to the afterlife.
Thanks for reading!
24. Humming A Happy Tune
This is a weird story that made me quickly question what was real and what wasn't. When I was around let's say eight years old and my brother was six, we had been playing video games in my room while my dad and mom watched football downstairs. For a while, we had lots of fun. That was until I got a really bad chill down my spine.
I shrugged it off before I noticed my brother getting a chill as well. He continued playing the game, so I just thought if he wasn't worried then neither should I be. Everything went smoothly, but not for long. My brother paused the game. "Do you hear that?" he asked. I then heard a humming sound of what seemed to be a little girl.
I nodded. "The humming, right?", I asked him. He nodded as well. The humming was coming from the hallway right outside our room. We began to get very nervous because me and my brother were the only children in the house. The door was shut, thankfully, so we did not see anything. After a few seconds of the humming, it stopped and we heard footsteps from the attic.
The thing about the attic, though, is that nobody ever really goes up there. At the time, neither me nor my brother had been ever up there and my parents only went up there once each in their entire lives. Once the footsteps stopped and nothing else happened, we opened the door to see only the hallway. The next day, we told our parents in great detail what had happened and they did the whole parent thing saying, "Oh you probably just heard us, it was your imagination".
Needless to say, if I didn't believe in ghosts before that incident, now I do!
25. Just Came To Say Hello
I have two stories about supernatural experiences. The first used to happen when I lived in a large house that had been converted into several flats in South London. There was one flat above me and my wife, and we knew the woman upstairs quite well. We would always know when she was out because her car wouldn't be in the shared driveway.
On many occasions, when the upstairs neighbor was out, I would hear footsteps in the flat above me, even though we knew the upstairs neighbor wasn't home. The floors were wooden and I could hear the wood creaking during the footsteps, so it was definitely something moving around up there. The upstairs neighbor didn't have a partner or friends that may be staying over.
It was also far too small for anyone to live up there without us hearing or knowing. The second story is a bit more strange than the first. In around the year 2001, a good friend of mine passed from cancer. He was only in his early twenties. He was a tall guy called James, and he had short blonde hair. Fast forward to around 2010 and my best friend's nephew, who was about seven at the time, was hanging out at his grandmother's house.
The nephew was out in the hallway playing by himself when his grandmother (my best mate's mother) heard the young boy start up a conversation with someone in the hallway. The grandmother didn't think much of it, as kids often chatter when they play. But when the nephew came into the front room, the grandmother asked who he was talking to.
The nephew said he was talking to James out in the hallway. Naturally, the grandmother was a bit alarmed that someone was in the house talking to a child. She asked the nephew a few more questions about who he was talking to out in the hallway, and of course he gave a good description of my friend James who had passed 10 years or so beforehand and had been to the house many times while he was alive.
The nephew would have never met James, as he wasn't born till many years after James’ passing. He also would have had no reason to lie or make something up like that. This second story still gives me goosebumps to this day, even as I write it out for you. I hope it means that James’ spirit is still out there somewhere, hopefully doing well.
26. A One Of A Kind Character
I had a wild experience with a ginger tabby cat I owned. I only had him for a short time, but I taught him tricks and he was always by my side. I was only five at the time and he thought he was human. He loved showers and bath time, and would sit in a little stroller I had so he could go on trips into town with my parents and me.
He was trained to shake paws on demand, and every Friday evening he would trot down to the local tavern on my street. There, he was spoiled with treats and a bit of the bubbly brew until the barkeeper would inevitably reach out to my parents for his retrieval. He was truly one of a kind and my best friend. Sadly though, he passed on my sixth birthday. He got hit by a car and the driver threw his body into our garden to fend for himself, rather than take him to a vet.
My parents had rented a venue for my birthday so I didn't know until after what had happened, but that whole day I had a feeling that something was off and I didn't enjoy my birthday. Anyway, for months afterward, on random nights, I would feel a cat jump on my bed and curl up. Other nights, my parents would be woken up by a cat climbing under the blanket to sleep between their heads.
He liked to sleep like a human with his little head on a pillow and his body tucked in. But when any of us looked, there was nothing there. We've since moved, but I've never stopped thinking about my ginger Jazzy.
27. A Comforting Message
After my aunt Joan (my dad’s sister) passed at 40 of alcoholism, we had a few strange experiences that we have yet to find an explanation for. Let’s start with the first one. I was about five years old when this all happened, and my dad and I were over at his parents’ house taking care of it while my grandparents were out of state with one of my dad’s remaining sisters.
He was in the guest room and I was in the room my aunt slept in when she had lived there in high school. My dad calls out “I’m going downstairs now” and a voice like my aunt’s calls out “okay!” I asked him about this a few weeks ago, almost exactly 20 years from when it happened, but my dad understandably doesn’t remember a lot from that point in his life, including that moment. But I remember everything.
Here’s the second story. The day after the memorial service for my aunt, my other aunt was back home in Pennsylvania. We are in Colorado, for context, which is where the service was held. My living aunt was still having a hard time dealing with her sister’s passing. She and her husband walk in the house after getting home from their flight, and find a message on their answering machine. There is no explanation for what that voice said.
It was some stranger in New York who was asked to call my aunt’s number and deliver the message that “Joan is okay, you don’t have to worry”. He didn’t know who the caller was, just that he was given the number and the message to relay. Pretty much my entire family understands it would have to be a coincidence of cosmic proportions if that’s all it was.
I believe she’s in a better place now. While I miss her, I know she was released from terrible suffering and I’m glad for that.
28. Dog Days
Most of my family is extremely religious and believes in ghosts wholeheartedly. Most of them claimed to have seen something paranormal at some point in their lives. I wasn't very religious, and I always thought to myself, "If I haven't seen it, then it's not real". That changed during my senior year in high school. I was dogsitting at my great aunt's house while she was out of town for a few days.
A little after midnight, I'm watching a movie and my aunt's dog starts barking like crazy and runs up the stairs at full speed. The dog was small, but fierce. Suddenly, I clear as day heard a gravelly voice at the top of the stairs say "Bad doggie". My stomach dropped to the floor. The voice was deep and masculine. I went upstairs because I was certain nobody else was supposed to be there.
I looked around and there was nobody in sight. The dog was still barking at something that I couldn't see. She was just barking at an empty hallway. That's when I heard footsteps walking away from us down the hall and into my aunt's bedroom. I could hear the footsteps, but I couldn't see anybody making them. I noped the heck out of that house with the dog and went outside to my car.
The dog and I slept there for the night. I'm not entirely sure what on earth I experienced that night, but I definitely believe in the paranormal now. I never told my aunt about what happened, but apparently my great uncle, her husband, had passed in that house a few months after I was born. I never knew him, but I'm willing to bet that it was him who I heard that night.
29. A Busy Few Weeks
Over a couple of weeks, many years ago, I had a strange experience. I was living with my ex. We were in the shower together when a sudden sound scared the heck out of us. The bathroom door got knocked on extremely hard and aggressively. We got out and opened it basically straight away and there was no one there. No one was in the house and all the doors were locked.
We also had the cliche footsteps and I remember one night there was even this weird music coming from nowhere but still inside the house. That was whack. A Friday night (or maybe Saturday, it was years ago now), some teenagers from next door came and knocked, saying there was someone in the house with them.
They were alone for the weekend and afraid, so my mates and I plus them and my partner went out with them. We saw the lights go out all at once but no one came out. The authorities came and called for backup. They went through and found no one after looking for like 15 minutes. The thing is, though, unless whoever was in there could climb four meters in a few seconds, the only way to the street was past us.
They stayed with us for the rest of that night, but we never heard anything about it again. They also moved away maybe a month after I think. The last thing that went down over those weeks was the one that messed with me the most. I heard as clear as day my name said right behind me and then footsteps above me while doing some early morning weekend work.
I used to work in a very high-security facility and for someone else to be in the building, they would have had to have been let in by me and couldn’t have been in there before me, as the alarms couldn’t be deactivated without my fingerprint. I almost pooped myself, and after talking with my boss on the phone and checking that there really wasn’t anyone else there besides me, I bailed and never did another Saturday morning alone.
There were absolutely no cars in sight, besides my work car and my private car locked in the grounds with the other work cars. After that, nothing paranormal ever happened to me again, and nothing ever had before either. I still think about those weeks all the time. It was really freaking weird and I have no explanation besides “Darned if I know, ghosts?”
30. Wake Up Call
I was sleeping in a hotel room and something suddenly woke me up. I looked next to the bed. There was a woman sitting cross-legged on the floor below me and she locked eyes with me. She then tilted her head sideways and floated up toward me before dissipating into thin air. I prefer to think it was one of those hallucinations people can have in that pre-awake stage, but boy was it terrifying!
31. Keeping The Receipt
When my grandma passed, in that exact moment, my husband and I were facing several economic problems. So, the next days after her funeral, I started to dream about her, and she told me in my dreams that if I need money for an emergency, I should just check under her mattress and I will find 1500 Mexican pesos. I just ignored it, but the same dreams were repeating again and again.
So, eventually, I decided to take a look under her mattress and GUESS WHAT??? I FOUND 1500 MEXICAN PESOS!!!! And, since that event, I never dreamed about her again.
32. Secret Santa
I grew up in a very scientific family. I never knew my dad's stance on ghosts, but they were never talked about so it really didn’t matter. One day, when I was in high school, we were eating dinner, and I decided to ask my dad about our old house, and what moving into it was like when I was just a baby. He went quiet—then he told me a story.
Apparently, when we moved into this house, we lived there for about a week before we started to receive “gifts” once a week. Every Friday morning, my dad told me that there would be some sort of hand-crafted gift sitting on the mantle of our fireplace. My dad was reasonably freaked out by this because we were the only ones with keys to the house, and the last owner had moved well out of the state.
So, he informed the local authorities, and they decided to patrol the property every Friday night looking for intruders. They found nothing, and as you could imagine the gifts kept coming. So my dad told me they eventually gave up and, feeling helpless, he went to our local church. Eventually, he had a priest come and bless the house, and we stopped receiving the gifts.
What really freaked me out about this was the fact that my dad never believed in ghosts, and didn’t mention once that a “ghost” was causing these gifts to appear. He’s an engineer, so he always tries to debunk people's “paranormal stories” with a realistic explanation, but he was 100% serious with this story. One of the gifts we received we actually still have.
It’s a wooden sled with a small painting of a man, presumably my dad, pulling me and my sister on the sled. We received this gift about eight months to a year before my mother passed from cancer, so that made the painting on the sled very freaky in hindsight. My dad only told me this story once and he denied he ever told me it when I asked him about it recently.
33. The Night Shift
When my son was a baby, he started crying in his crib at about 3:00 in the morning one night. I sat up, dreading having to nurse him back to sleep for the third time that night. All of a sudden, I hear a soft, sweet, woman's voice over the baby monitor say, "Shhh.... don't cry...go to sleep..". And my son settled right down back to sleep.
In my delirious sleep-deprived state, I was like, "Cool, she's got him" and I went back to sleep myself. When I woke up that morning, the panic set in. I was like, "Did I just let a ghost nanny take care of my baby?! Can she come back tonight?!" She did not. But I did constantly see orbs fly around over his crib over the video monitor, which were clearly not bugs or dust.
34. More Than A Feeling
I was always open to the idea of the paranormal, but wasn't convinced that it was real. That changed a couple of days after my grandfather passed. I was in my room at night, thinking about him, when I suddenly felt as if someone was rustling my hair. There are no vents in the ceiling in my room. My fan wasn't on. It was a very slow, deliberate feeling, as if a hand was very slowly running its fingers through my hair. I believe it was his soul.
35. One Last Goodbye
My dad passed. After I found out, I went home. My parents were separated, so my mom and dad each had a house. My mom is disabled and has a two story house. It’s very hard for her to go up and down the stairs. My old bedroom was upstairs. I got in the house at about 2:00 in the morning with my husband. We were laying in the bed and my husband instantly fell asleep.
I was too upset to sleep. My door was cracked and I saw a shadow pass by my door. I thought it was my mom checking to make sure I got home okay. After a few hours of not sleeping, I went downstairs to get coffee and my mom was there. I said “thanks for checking on me last night”. She looked very confused and said “I didn’t go upstairs at all last night”.
I’m convinced that it was my dad checking on me.
36. Running For His Life
I’ve written about this before, but once while falling asleep after a movie with the family, I was awoken by what seemed like a small boy running toward the couch we were in. I immediately sat up and braced for impact. Now, I would normally chalk it up to falling asleep and having a weird dream, but my mom and dad also bolted awake at the same time.
Before I could explain, my dad told me he saw a boy running toward us. His description of the boy matched mine, while my mother confirmed seeing this as well.
37. A Change Of Heart
I grew up in a house that was haunted, so I know what’s out there, but my wife has always been a skeptic and gave me a hard time for believing in the paranormal and being spiritual. That is, until we moved into our house. She has seen and still sees a couple dressed in white in our backyard staring at our house. At night, she will hear a giggle and doors close.
She tried to rationalize what she saw, until one day she saw a lady floating over our bed. That did it. She now takes what I say about my past experiences seriously.
38. A Ghost, Doing It His Way
Ghosts would be pushing it, but I believe in some kind of supernatural spiritual presence. My brother passed when he was young, only 25 years old. He for some reason was always a big Frank Sinatra fan. Shortly after his passing, my sister and I were flipping through the channels and we stumbled on an old Sinatra concert. We smiled and kept it on, conjuring up good memories of our brother.
Fast forward three minutes, we realized we're not big Sinatra fans, so I move the channel up or down one station. It was the TV show Taxi, the one where Iggy Jim Ignatowski was trying to be the best cab driver he could be by offering impeccable service. We jumped to this channel at the exact moment the character was offering his fare some coffee and asked him if he'd like to hear some music.
The music turned out to be a Sinatra rendition sung by Iggy himself, a very funny scene. To us, it was as if my brother was still there, understood we weren't big Sinatra fans, and said "Okay, here's one you'll like, have a laugh with me!"
39. An Old Friend
My brother was looking through some old photographs with my mom and me one night. At one point, he pointed to one of my grandfathers and said "That's my friend Tom! He plays pretend with me!" He'd never seen a picture of that grandfather before in his life. He's never even heard his name. And that's not even the creepiest part. That grandfather had been deceased for nearly three decades, since long before even I had been born…
40. Bubbling Over
The weirdest thing that happened to me was a story my mom told me a few years ago, which brought me from feeling adamant that ghosts don't exist to thinking that maybe they do. A few weeks before I was born, my great-grandma passed. She was so excited to meet me and hold me, since I was to be her only great-granddaughter. I've always felt a strong connection to her, even though we never met.
Well, apparently, when I was five years old, my mom was driving me home from school one day and, completely out of the blue, I said to her: "Mom, I really want to take a bath when I get home. Grandma Wilson told me last night that baths are a lot of fun". My mom was completely blown away. I wish I could remember what my brain had thought it experienced way back then.
41. Filling The Void
We were in the process of moving from an apartment over a business and I told the landlord about an experience I had one night. I got up to go to the bathroom and in the hallway I saw three dark shadows moving along the wall. They were all man-shaped, and it looked as if you could reach through them into an infinite void.
I was terrified and started yelling. My father came out of his bedroom to see what the matter was. He tried to convince me that I was just dreaming it all. I know to this day that I wasn't. It was very distinct and I was standing in the hallway. So as I tell the guy I am glad to leave the place, no offense of course, he tells me sincerely that years ago the shop was a bakery and there was a fire that burned the place down and it was rented by three brothers who had perished in the incident.
He had the most bizarre look on his face while listening to my story, like he was trying to see if I was pranking him. Totally weirds me out to this day.
42. I’ll Drink To That
After losing my boyfriend last year, weird things started happening in the house that could not be explained in any other way than concluding that ghosts must have been behind it. Doors shutting by themselves, reminders of him showing up in weird places, etc. But the biggest one was that any time I would drink what used to be his favorite soda, it would inevitably end up falling off the table and onto the floor. This would not happen with any other drinks.
43. Monkey Business
I'm Cambodian-American, born and raised in America, never been to Cambodia. This takes place in California. My mom believes in good spirits and getting blessings for good luck and protection by putting out food offerings for them on our dining room table. My mom does this for special days and, after she's done with her prayers, that's when anyone can eat the food.
She usually does it in the morning, and then by the afternoon that's when food is free for the taking. So it's a typical afternoon, this one day. I was online on my laptop in my room and I got hungry. My room was connected to a small hallway, and at the end of the hallway is the living room and the dining table. So I opened my door and stepped out into the hallway. What I saw stopped me in my tracks.
Something was on top of the table, eating. It was hard to make it out at first because I'm nearsighted and this thing was kinda transparent. I got closer and stopped halfway through the hallway. That’s when I realized there was a literal transparent brown monkey on the table. It was making motions as if it was eating some of the fruit offerings.
It didn't notice me yet and, in my disbelief, I got even closer. But when I stopped in my tracks again right at the end of the hallway, it noticed me and got startled. I'm startled, the monkey's startled, and I'm just standing there and not believing my eyes. Very quickly, this transparent monkey just jumps off the table and ambles off hastily towards the exit where the outer door is locked.
That's it. I just stood there staring at the door where it fled and I'm just like...wow I really can't believe what I just saw. In American horror movies and scary stories, there's hardly anything about ghost monkeys. I don't consume that kind of content. Who'd have thunk it? Anyway, later on, I told my mom about what I saw and she didn't even blink.
I might as well have told her that the sky is blue. She really believes in spirits that much and didn't doubt my story at all. Also, years later, I told one of my coworkers (who is also Cambodian, around my age, speaks fluently, and has also been to Cambodia) about my experience. He said that there's a lot of monkeys in Cambodia.
I didn't know this at all and have never seen a monkey in real life. My mom doesn't talk about monkeys and owns nothing related to monkeys. But lo and behold, they are apparently a big part of the culture from which she was claiming to conjure up spirits. So that's my story. Neither me nor a ghost monkey expected to be spooked that day. But we apparently both were.
44. With A Little Help From My Friends
When I was in fifth grade, I once forgot to put my school uniform in the laundry basket, so the next day I needed it for school but it was dirty. I went to have breakfast in my pajamas while I was thinking about how to break the news to my mom that I didn't have my uniform clean. When I came back to my room, there was a woman I had never seen before standing there.
She appeared to be in her 40s, with a brown dress and dark hair. She was ironing my uniform. I blinked and she was gone. I would have assumed I hallucinated the whole thing, but my uniform was really there, clean, dried, ironed, and ready for me to use. And it couldn't have been ironed by anyone else, because my parents were in the kitchen having breakfast and my sister was just a baby.
45. Getting With The Times
This is my mom’s story, but she is completely sane and I believe it. My parents went to South Carolina for a wedding. They stayed at some old plantation bed and breakfast spot. She was sleeping when she woke up all of a sudden. She had her cell phone plugged into the wall, and it was sitting on her nightstand.
There was a notification on the phone, so it was blinking. As my mom sat up to check the message, she noticed a female ghost staring at the phone. The spirit was dressed in a full-on old formal dress and she was fixated on the cellphone’s blinking light. She started apprehensively walking toward it. My mom said, “It’s okay, it’s just a phone”.
The ghost turned and made eye contact with my mom for a couple moments, and then disappeared.
46. Mirror, Mirror On The Wall
One time, I saw a reflection of myself at the end of a hallway in a friend's apartment building. It was kind of trippy, so I told him about it. His response made my blood run cold. Totally confused, he told me that there aren't any mirrors in his hallways. I have no idea what could possibly have been the explanation for this, but I do know that I saw my reflection very clearly. I’ve believed in ghosts ever since that experience.
47. The Great Outdoors
This is my dad’s story, not mine. Back in the early 1980s, he was working a summer job at Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. One day, he and his friend Mark hiked up to the top of one of the mountains. They set up their tent inside an “Indian Pit,” a man-made hole dug out by Native Americans hundreds of years ago.
The Indian Pits were either used as hunting blinds, or spots where young braves came for their vision quest. Late in the night, my dad wakes up and has to use the bathroom. He crawled out of the tent, out of the Pit, and went walking a respectable distance away from the tent. Suddenly, he felt a hand on his shoulder pull him backward.
My dad calls out, “Hey Mark, what are you doing?” He turns around, turns on his flashlight, and sees that there is nobody there. He shines the light at his feet, and discovers that his next couple steps would have taken him directly over a steep cliff. He did his business and hurried back to the tent. The next morning, the two friends are waking up and his buddy says to him, “I know this sounds crazy, but I woke up in the middle of the night and, I swear to you, there was a Native American man standing outside our tent”.
Whatever really happened that night, my dad is alive, he met my mom in Yellowstone, and here I am writing this story to you today.
48. Up Close And Personal
When I was in my late twenties, I was dating my girlfriend and soon-to-be wife. We had been together for a while. One summer night, a nightmare ensued. Her sister was abducted and slain by a group of six men. All of the men were eventually caught and tried. The trials and the aftermath for the family were devastating and debilitating for them for many, many years.
Fast forward three months, after the memorial service. I arrived at my girlfriend's house to wait for her to get off from her job as a nurse at a local hospital. Neither of her parents were home. Just me, alone in the house. So I went into the family room, turned on the TV, sat down on the couch, got comfortable, and began to watch.
Clear as a bell, I heard my girlfriend's sister's voice in my right ear, just off my shoulder, calling my name. I turned to look at the seat next to me, and of course there was nobody there. I was so shocked I couldn't move. I stared at the spot on the couch next to me for a long while. Feeling a bit uneasy, I turned off the TV and went outside to wait on the porch.
49. House Of The Rising Plates
Up until my mid-20s, I would have told you there's no such thing as ghosts. Most things that people say I think is just their imagination, or wishful thinking. Now, I don't know. I ...just... don't know. When I was in my 20s and newly married, my spouse and I moved for his job. We needed to find a place to live pretty quickly. We lucked into the perfect house.
It was old. In its previous life, it had been someone's beach cottage. Which I loved. What's better than living in a resort town, close enough to walk to the beach? Plus, it wasn't in a resort area. It was on the back half of someone's property, with one road in and out, and lots of trees and shade. Very quiet. No other people around.
Because the house was originally a weekend cottage, it was one big room, with a small addition to one side that contained a kitchen and bath, and another addition off the back that had a bedroom. The big room was awesome. All windows on three sides, with a nice breeze most of the time. A fireplace. Lots of open areas. It seemed too good to be true—because it was.
The only thing that kinda pinged my radar was the landlord. When we rented, he was overly insistent that we sign a year lease and that we couldn't break it for any reason. No matter what, we needed to pay out the lease, whether we lived in the house or not. I thought that was a little weird, the way he kept repeating that over and over because he wanted to make absolutely sure that we understood.
But, it didn't really register at the time. Other than the fact that I was a bit worried that maybe there were troublemakers or noisy parties on the beach or something. He assured us that it was a very quiet neighborhood, but he repeated again that we couldn't break the lease. I worked a normal nine-to-five job. My spouse worked 12-hour on and off shifts.
So there were lots of times when I would be home by myself. The first month or two were fine. I liked the house. I liked the neighborhood. I liked the beach. I'm mostly a homebody, so when the spouse was at work, I would stay at home reading or watching a little TV or cooking. I'd always wanted to learn to knit, so I bought some yarn and started teaching myself.
Then, some time around the third month, I started to get very strong feelings that someone would be standing behind me while I was reading. You know, like looking over my shoulder. It only happened when I was alone in the house, and only when I was in the main room. Without thinking about it too much, I started sitting in places where my back was to the wall, or reading in the bedroom. But this was just the beginning.
When I went to bed at night, I started closing the door between the bedroom and the rest of the house. I felt safe in the bedroom. Sometimes, when I fell asleep in front of the TV late at night, I'd wake up to catch someone standing in front of the fireplace, just out of the corner of my eye. I thought I needed to stop dreaming so much.
But I started to stay in the bedroom after dark, with the door shut. Things started not being where I put them in the big room. I got kinda irritated with my spouse for messing with my stuff. I spent five or ten minutes almost every day searching for my handbag, or my car keys. Then, one day, when I came home after work, I found my knitting yarn wrapped and tangled around all the furniture in the big room.
I don't mean just a little bit. I mean the yarn was strung between couches and wrapped around the legs of the chairs. I told myself that my spouse was playing a trick on me and I cleaned it up. Then I decided that I wouldn't mention it to him, just to see how long it took him to come clean. He never did. I moved my knitting to the bedroom.
My sister came to visit for a long weekend. I'd gushed so much about our lovely beach house that she came to visit and see the beach. She came for a four-day weekend. She slept on the pull-out sofa in the big room. Whatever happened to her, something changed. After the first night, she told us that the sofa wasn't very comfortable and she thought she was coming down with something, so she changed her travel arrangements and she was now leaving that same afternoon.
She seemed agitated, but she wouldn't talk about it. A few days after she went home, she called me. She started the conversation with, "I know you don't believe in ghosts and maybe I'm just being stupid..". My heart dropped. I thought I was the only one and I was being so stoic and pretending I never saw or heard anything.
She went on to tell me that after she went to sleep that night in the big room, noises woke her up in the middle of the night. She thought it was one of us, but no one was there. Then, while she was sitting in the bed looking around, the windows started opening and closing. It just kinda went around the room. One window opened and closed.
Then the one next to that. Then the next one. And the next one. Then she heard footsteps walking straight towards her. But no one was there. The footsteps walked right up to the bed where she was sitting, then over the bed, continued across the room, and out through the side door into the kitchen area. She said she ran out the front door and spent the rest of the night on the front porch.
She came back inside when the sun came up, waited for us to wake up, and made excuses to go home. She didn't want to spend another night in that house. She said, "I know you won't believe me. That's okay. But I'm not ever sleeping in your house again". I told myself that my sister had always been a little nutty about stuff like that, so knowing that the house was old, she probably just had a very vivid dream.
I kept telling myself that. A few weeks after that, just when I'd stopped jumping at every stray noise, I woke up one Sunday morning and went to cook a leisurely breakfast for me and my spouse. And y'all, I still don't know how to explain this. I opened the kitchen cabinets to get the dishes out to start cooking. And all the dishes were rearranged.
Not messy. Not tumbled about. They were all very neat and orderly, but everything was on the wrong shelf. The shelf that normally held glasses now had plates stacked on them. The shelves that normally held bowls now had glasses on them. Now I'm starting to get really nervous. My first thought was that someone had been in the house during the night.
I checked all the locks. Still locked. We didn't know many people and I couldn't think of anyone who would pull a trick like that. Besides, there was so much stuff moved that no one could do it quietly without disturbing people sleeping in practically the next room. So I did what any half-crazed, scared out of their mind person would do.
I pretended it never happened. I pretended that I always kept the glasses on that shelf, and there was nothing strange about having all the plates on this shelf. I sure as heck wasn't moving anything back because I didn't want to see what would happen if I did. I cooked breakfast. I went on with my day. And later that afternoon, I told my spouse that I wasn't really comfortable in this house anymore.
Could we find somewhere else to live? Amazingly enough, my spouse never asked me why. He simply said that was probably a good idea and let's find something quick. And we moved out. We called the landlord after we'd already packed and moved the furniture. He came over and picked up the keys. He never, not once, asked why we were moving.
In fact, he never met our eyes. Just kept looking at the ground. We agreed to keep paying rent until he could get some new tenants. Months later, I asked my spouse if he ever felt anything strange in that house. He said, "Yeah, that wasn't a good house. Glad we moved". And we never talked about it again. Who knows what the explanation was for all that…
50. Out Of The Clear Blue Sky
I’m still not sure if I believe in ghosts or not, but there have been some weird things in my life that I can’t explain. When I was five years old, I woke up in the night and my grandma was standing at the end of my bed, wearing a teal blue skirt and a matching blouse. I remember that it was summer and the sky was still light out, but not light enough for me to read, so I guess it was about 9:00 in the evening.
I sat up. She put her finger to her lips and I rubbed my eyes a couple of times, ‘cause I was sleepy. And when I looked back she was gone. I just snuggled back under my covers, thinking how nice it was to see her because I hadn’t seen her for AGES, and I hoped that she would still be there when I woke up. The next morning, my house was eerily quiet.
My mum was in a worse mood than normal, and she had visibly been crying. So I asked her what was wrong. When she answered, I was too shocked to respond. My grandma had passed the night before. She had been crossing a road after her bingo game ended, at 8:30 PM, about 60 miles away from where we lived. She had a massive brain hemorrhage in the middle of the road and didn’t even make it to the other side, let alone to my house 60 miles away.
When it happened, she was wearing a teal blue skirt and matching blouse.
Sources: Reddit,
