BOO!!

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Posted: Sun Sep 30, 2012 6:12 pm

BOO!!

Having spent a fun yet freaky afternoon browsing the Fortean Times message boards (seriously, some of those stories boggle the mind) I wonder if any baiters have had a spooky experience they wouldn't mind sharing? Any first hand accounts of ghosties, aliens, dog-headed men, chupacabra, bigfoot, nessie, or general unexplained weirdness?

Tis nearly the great pumpkin holiday, so what better way to prepare? Very Happy

Posted: Sun Sep 30, 2012 7:21 pm

This is not my own spooky experience, but it was told to me by my grandmother, and happened to her mother (my great-grandmother) when she was just a little girl.

This happened circa 1900 in Arkansas.

My great grandmother's family was returning home late one night. No one remembers where they had been. The kids (there were 6 or 7 of them) were in the back of the wagon while the mother and father drove. Wherever they had been, they had not taken the tarp for their wagon with them. A tremendous rain storm had come up, and the family is now soaked, cold and miserable.

The road they were on was barely a narrow trail through dense woods. The only light was flashes of lightning but, since it was flashing lightning every couple of seconds, they could see pretty well.

Suddenly, the horses shied. Standing in the road in front of them was a man. He wore a dark-green rain slicker, and a cap of the same material. They could not see his face, because he was looking at the ground in front of him, but they could see he had a beard. He stood absolutely silent and motionless.

The father called out to the stranger to move out of the way, since the trail was too narrow for the wagon to pass with him standing in the middle. The stranger did not respond in any way. After several demands for the stranger to move (I am sure some four letter words were uttered!), the father handed the reins to the mother, and climbed down from the wagon.

As he reached the ground, a flash of lightning illuminated the stranger, still standing motionless.

The father squished through the ankle-deep mud toward the stranger - it only took him a few steps to reach the spot where the stranger was standing. Then, there was another flash of lightning, and the stranger was gone.

In the couple of seconds between flashes of lightning, the stranger had no time to really go anyplace. What's more, had he moved his feet would have made a lot of squishing noises in the deep mud, but no one heard any sounds from the stranger's direction.

After looking about perplexed, the father remounted the wagon and the family drove on home. To this day, there has never been any explanation of who stopped the family wagon on that dark and stormy night.

Bruin

Posted: Sun Sep 30, 2012 7:40 pm

Many years ago, living at my mother-in-law's while waiting for our townhouse to be finished, my MIL, my daughters and I would take an afternoon nap after lunch and before high tea. (MIL was British).

I decided to rest in the living room on the first floor; the others were on the second floor.

After a while I heard footsteps come up the basement stairs, walk through the kitchen and dining room and going up the stairs to the second floor. The footsteps stopped outside the first bedroom.

I got up to have a look around and knew all the doors were locked. I saw nothing.

Later at dinner I mentioned it. My MIL and my husband gave each other a knowing look and said we would discuss after dinner when the children were not at the table.

hmmm.

Turns out they believed the house was haunted. That this had been going on for years. Well, this made perfect sense, MIL was British and they believe in ghosts and poltergeists, right??

They had had a problem with the dinning room light fixture (on and off during the night) and an electricians could find no problem. Eventually the light fixture was removed.

Now here is my theory.

* That town in Michigan was famous during the 1920's for the mobsters frequently the mineral baths there.

* The basement had one room that had an earthen floor.

* I believe a gangster might have been murdered there and buried where the earthen floor was.

It was a L O N G 7 weeks until our house was finished and every afternoon when we were settled down and MIL and the children took their naps, I heard those footsteps.

Master of Master Baiters Joined: 05 Mar 2009 Posts: 582

I arrived home one nice afternoon and decided to open the curtains in the kitchen, grabbed myself a glass of coke and settled down to watch tv. After a bit, I went back to the kitchen to refill the glass, the curtains were closed.

hmmm, ok maybe I just thought about opening the curtains but didn't. So I pulled them back. Went back to tv viewing. Dinner time comes and I head back to kitchen, curtains are pulled together again.

While I suppose the curtains could have slid closed, the curtain rod was a bit bowed down in the middle. However, the rod was a painted wooded dowel, never sanded, just painted, not the smoothest surface for cloth to slide on.

Another time I went to take a shower and realized I had left the bathroom floor mat in the basement laundry room. I decided against walking thru the house, downstairs and back up just to put down a clean rug so I grabbed the roommate's bath towel and tossed that on the floor. I figured I could wash, dry and re hang before he arrived back the next day and he would never know I used it on the floor as a mat.

While I was drying off, I heard a "plunk" behind me. I slowly turned to discover a clean, folded bath towel had somehow leapt from the top shelf above the toilet and landed, still folded, on the toilet seat. The towel shelf is the top one, nearest the ceiling so the towel had fallen a good 6 feet to land square on the the seat. The other 3-4 towels stayed folded on the shelf. I took the hint and hung that towel on the bar and tossed the used one in the hamper.

The roommate came home that evening.

That shelf is narrow so I suppose the towel could have off balanced and just fallen but no towels had fallen before or after that one time and I have now been in this house for 12 years.

Posted: Mon Oct 01, 2012 1:09 pm

On holiday with my parents about 40 years ago, we were in a caravan overlooking Loch Ness. One evening sitting at the dinner table looking out over the Loch I spotted what looked like a black "hump" just breaking the surface, maybe about 100 yards offshore. I pointed this out to my father who grabbed his binoculars and trained them on the hump. Turned out it was a mother duck with several ducklings following immediately behind her all in a line. Makes you think that if we didn't have these binoculars handy, I would be going round telling people "Oh yes, I've seen Nessie".

Not quite a Newb Joined: 14 Jul 2005 Posts: 41

I have many.

I will share that both my Grandpa and Granny (whom I was very close with) visited me when they died, and before I had been notified.

When I was a young lad of 19, and stationed in Germany, my Grandpa came to talk to me very early in the morning while I slept. He explained that he had passed and other personal things.

It was a nice conversation.

A few hours later I was called to my Squadron Commander's office - he had just been notified by the Red Cross about my Grandpa passing away, and had to relay this.

He was completely nonplussed when I told him that I knew.

Posted: Mon Oct 01, 2012 3:26 pm

I don't believe in ghosts or the paranormal in any way, and have been to many places you would expect to be haunted (ie battlefields, the Colosseum, Pompeii, aircrash sites etc) and felt absolutely zilch. I have had a couple of passionate arguments with those who do believe about the sheer implausibility of the dead leaving any kind of message or presence, and where are all the ghost cows, and ghost dogs and cats?

However....

I camped on the edge of a First World war battlefield, at Aulthille on the Somme, with my friend J and his sister, in the middle of the night J started in ranting away in pretty convincing sounding German to the amazement of myself and his sister. If you knew him, you would know how unlikely he was to have been faking it - a dedicated non linguist he thought I was spoiling the holiday by using my smattering of schoolboy French!

Elite Baiter Joined: 19 Jun 2011 Posts: 1066

I would also like to say that I staunchly do not believe in ghosts or paranormal phenomena. So, I'm sure there's a perfectly plausible, scientific explanation for this... but it was still nerve-wracking.

I was at party at an apartment belonging to a couple of friends. They had two bathrooms, one by the living room and one in the back near the bedrooms. I was sitting on the couch, chatting with one of my friends when I saw a pale figure standing in the bathroom. It was a very tall man in a black trenchcoat. It was a packed party so people were going in and out of the bathroom on a pretty constant basis but no one seemed to notice this ghostly figure.

Now, the strobe-light was going at the time and I was also pretty inebriated so I just wrote the whole thing off as my eyes playing tricks on me. Still, the thing made me nervous enough that I made it a point to use the rear bathroom for the rest of the night.

The next morning, I woke up at another friend's place (she lived across the street from where the party was). I quietly admonished myself for believing I had seen a ghost the previous night... until my friend and I were talking over coffee. Out of nowhere, she says, "Oh, did you know the place across the street is haunted?" Huh? "Yeah it used to be a speak-easy in the 20's. The real estate agent that sold the place to them told them it was haunted."

Ok, so that's pretty weird. But still, probably a coincidence. Then she tells me that one of the guys that lived there had told her a story about how he got up in the middle of the night and saw a ghost-like person standing in the hallway. Of course, I asked my friend if he described this person to her.

Extremely tall and wearing a long, black coat.

Posted: Mon Oct 01, 2012 9:53 pm

I had two weird near-misses with fate.

Back in 1987, I'd arranged a visit to a friend, and had the choice to drop by a week early. I took that chance. Had I gone with the original plan, I'd have been caught in the middle of the Hoddle Street shootings.

Same year, a few months later - I'd applied for a job with Australia Post at the Queens Street office; didn't get it - if I had, I've have been caught up in the Queens Street massacre.

With the second... I wonder if someone died in my place.

Posted: Mon Oct 01, 2012 10:10 pm

I do believe in ghosts for many reasons. Firstly, I live in a haunted early Victorian house which has a graveyard immediately at the rear of the house. We regularly have somebody running up and down the stairs and I have many EVP's from the attic bedrooms. A young girl saying "Come play with me daddy" was the eeriest one.
I used to work on the lighthouses some years ago. One of the lights I used to visit regularly was the Flannan Isles where all 3 of the lightkeepers vanished in 1900. Many times during the day we would hear somebody walking around the old accomodation whistling. On the occasions when I had to stay overnight we would be woken by doors opening and closing and somebody walking heavily about. At this time the accomodation block had the interior gutted out as the light was unmanned so there were no doors to open or close.... Shocked

Posted: Mon Oct 01, 2012 10:59 pm

We had the smartest dog I have ever seen when I was growing up. It was a yellow lab and German Shepard mix that knew the difference between the hand signals for "speak" and "little bark". One day we came home and every breakable dish, cup, saucer, and glass is on the floor and the normally well behaved dog is in a cupboard going for more. This dog would not come in the house if its feet were muddy. We found out later that its mother, the German Shepard had been leashed, had jumped over a wall and hung herself that evening many miles away.

Posted: Mon Oct 01, 2012 11:43 pm

I've never seen a ghost or anything, but I have had several near-death experiences where *something* saved me.

***
1982--fishing in a rubber raft on the Mad River in Dayton Ohio (Wright-Patterson AFB). Drifting slowly, and then suddenly river was fast. Huge fallen tree lying across the river right in front of me and my buddy. Like an idiot, I reached up and grabbed a tree branch behind me hoping it would slow us down. I still remember him yelling "nnooooo......" The raft, naturally capsized and I was sucked underwater, and suddenly entangled in the tree lying across the river. I could not move and was trapped. Suddenly, the water was just warm, and green, and I was at peace. No panic. I suddenly found myself on the bank of the river a good 50 yards away. I didn't swim to it and I have no idea how I got there. I was just lying there. Was able to get to my friend and get him back. But--how did I end up on that bank when I was trapped in tree branches and roots underwater?
***
1992 (approximately). Am golfing with friends and the course was busy. We were allowed to three in a cart (I was sitting in back by where the bags go). Going straight down-hill to the green, and we hit a bump. I go flying out of the cart. I take one roll (while landing on my head/neck, scoop up my glasses), and am suddenly on my feet, something on both sides of me holding me up. I should have rolled down that hill and broken my neck or something. I mean, 90 degree hill, I roll once and hit my feet (and scoop my eyeglasses in one swoop)?
***
2008--Am going to my local bar after work to have a beer or two. See my friends outside and were are jawing back and forth. I look both ways for traffic, and seeing no traffic, I trot across the street. Suddenly it's like I'm frozen in time. My right foot is going forward and and then suddenly I am violently jerked back. Imagine this in slow motion. At that instant, a white Ford truck went zooming by, and the driver side mirror just missed my head by a few inches (the prick never stopped either to see what happened). I was literally an inch or two away from death, and in mid-step, when something pulled me back. It is hard to explain, but....it was all slow motion, and mid-step, I was yanked back from the path of that truck. It was like someone yanked me by the back of my shirt or collar.

Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2012 1:25 am

I don't believe in any of this and never will although there is nothing better than a good ghost story in my books....

Our first house was a run down, one room, Limestone schoolhouse ( circa 1860) that was nearly impossible to heat. Consequently, whenever I went on Safari there was a need to have a house/cat sitter. Two different people from completely different backgrounds simply refused to go to my house ever again due to seeing or hearing strange things. They did fulfill their duties but were terrified and would never spend another night there. Casual visits were fine but come dark they Skeddadled in short order.

We spent five plus years there and never had anything odd happen to us although I always wonder if my house Sitters had gotten into my Stash!

*** BANNED *** Joined: 26 Jul 2012 Posts: 1123

dwatina: I am with you. No ghost sitings or paranormal, plenty of near death experiences though.

One of the better personal and not professional stories was doing some offroading in the middle of the night. This was definitely not my first time doing this kind of stuff in the middle of the night. I have flipped an offroading vehicle more than once and even on steep hills and walked out to tell the tale. This night was different. A friend and I had finished doing some work on a Toyota Hi-Lux I had just purchased for a very reasonable rate and we decided to take it for a roll and see how it handled. Long and short of it was we were skidding around a rough dirt road corner that had the washboard going and we had forgot to tighten down the battery strap. On one side is a hill and on the other side is a nice little cliff no one would have survived going down..... unless a rock or tree stopped us but we had not even installed the roller bars yet. Right as I was pulling out of the corner to hit a small 50 meter straight way the lights, engine, and all electronics went dead. It was like time slowed down.... the lights come on for a split second that felt like an eternity or at least long enough for me to get my bearings and realize I had navigated out of the curve and properly onto the straight way of a hellishly tattered dirt road. The lights turn back off again and I slam on the brakes. The Hi-Lux begins spinning uncontrollably in the pitch black and all I know is I have a cliff on one side and a hill to crash into on the other. We come to a stop. Pitch black.... cloudy night with no moon and no city lights as we were far away from anything like a city at this point. Nothing but pure silence except for the distressed breathing of my friend and I. We let our eyes adjust to the darkness. I then realize I need to get out on the passenger side where my friend sits. My side is butted up right against the cliffs jagged razor edge. Any further and......

It turns out the negative terminal on the battery popped off on the washboard and skidding around the bend. We called that ride the razors edge and laughed about the fact that should we have gone over the cliffs edge we would have died but the Hi-Lux probably would have lived on to fight another day.

There was also another ride down a small dirt road in the middle of hell that had landmine signs scattered all across it and me telling a friend not to worry as they wouldn't mine the road... just make sure to stay on the thing and not take the path less traveled.

Industry stories ranging from a 1 centimeter diameter steel cable under tension snapping and slicing through a work vehicles cab while two guys sat there, me and a company secretary talking to one guy at the window to other more interesting stories.

Live life while you got it is my motto. You never know when something might come back and bite you.

Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2012 3:45 am

Cougar wrote:

general unexplained weirdness

More then 4 years ago i joined eater. Shocked

Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2012 3:07 pm

Ok, here is a second contribution from me - - This did not happen to me (nothing like this has ever happened to me personally) but it was told to me by an older friend - since I do not have permission to use her name, I will call her "Jane". It is the most incredible ghost story I have ever heard, and yet my source is impeccable and level-headed.

Back in about 1980, Jane and her husband bought a circa 1890 Victorian in an older neighborhood of the city where I live. This neighborhood had gotten very run-down, but was being revived circa 1980 by a lot of "yuppie's" moving in. Anyway, they restored the house to its original glory and lived there for many years, with nothing spooky ever happening - except once.

One day, Jane was in the laundry room on the first floor, doing laundry. The only other person in the house is her toddler son, who was upstairs taking a nap. The laundry had once been maid's quarters, back in the Victorian era.

She turned to pick up an armload of laundry, turned and faced the room again, and saw not a cluttered laundry room but a rather spartan, stark, old fashioned bedroom, complete with armoire and wash basin.

In the bed, she saw a boy, about 12 years old. She could not see how he was dressed (the blanket was pulled up almost to his shoulders) but he did not seem to be wearing a shirt. His hair was wet and - and most distinctively, there was a lot of blood on one side of his head, and on the pillow beside him.

She stared at him almost in a trance for some seconds, then he turned his head, opened his eyes, MADE EYE CONTACT with her, and whispered "hurry upstairs, the baby is in danger, please hurry" or words to that effect.

Suddenly, in a blink of an eye, he is gone - the room is restored to its laundry room status.

Jane ran upstairs and found her toddler choking on a bit off of some toy. She was able to do a Heinrich hug on him and saved his life.

This is how matters stood for several years. One day, Jane was doing some genealogy, running through a microfilm of old newspapers at the library, looking for an obituary of a relative. She stopped fast forwarding to check the date on the paper, and her eye spotted the name "Hugh Wallace" on the page. Now, Hugh Wallace was the guy who built her house circa 1890. Naturally, she read the article. And as she read, she got a chill.....

The article described how a group of local boys, circa 1890, had gone swimming in a creek not too far from her house. One of the boys, diving into the creek, had slipped, fallen and hit his head on a rock. His comrades shouts for help attracted the attention of nearby workmen, who carried the boy to the nearest completed home, the house of Hugh Wallace. The article did not say to which bedroom the boy was carried, but the maid's quarters would have been the only downstairs bedroom.

The article said that the boy was very agitated and kept begging those in attendance to help a child who was in danger in the Wallace house. According to the article, the boy suddenly relaxed, said "he is safe now" and then died....

So, did the ghost of a boy from 1890 reach out almost a century to warn Jane that her son was in danger?

Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2012 9:10 pm

^^^THAT is f***ing spooky, BRUIN!!!!!

@Joker--that was quite a story about a cliff. I had one time when I was driving home from South Carolina to New York State (on leave from the Air Force), and it was raining like a son-of-a-bitch, and I was in the mountains of Pennsylvania. I almost drove off a cliff...

Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2012 11:16 pm

Reading dwatina's stories reminded me of another. I don't attribute this one to ghosts, etc. More like answered prayer maybe.

I was dealing with a huge problem involving a move to another country. I had been giving it much thought and prayer.

One day sitting at a stop sign I let out a sigh and asked what am I to do -- go forward or stay put.

About that time I felt a hand yanking on my blouse. There was no one in the car but me. I vividly felt a hand and the blouse being pulled back.

I mentioned it to my priest who just replied "Answered prayer."

I did not make the final move out of the country and it was the best thing for me.

---------

And still occasionally, to this day, I still receive "visits" from someone to whom I was married (now deceased). The visits consist of him sitting in what was his favorite chair quietly talking to me. These consist more of dreams. Funny thing is what he says usually happens.

Posted: Wed Oct 03, 2012 12:58 am

^This and others such tales are giving me the Creeps!! Keep it up!

If anyone is interested, I am ready for the Zombies! I have plenty of room, many types of Weaponry and a pretty good spot( or fifty) to dispose of the remains.

Please bring beer !!!!

Posted: Wed Oct 03, 2012 12:52 pm

In the 1980's I lived in a house trailer on 96 acres. The previous owner had died in the trailer from alcoholism. One night I was dreaming that there was someone standing at the foot of my bed. I sat up in my sleep and was yelling "Get the "F" out of here!!" as I woke up only to see a faint shadow turn and walk away from the foot of my bed. It only happened one time.

I had another dream one time where I kept telling people to take my Dad a drink of water. I thought about calling my Mom & telling her to take Dad some water but decided she'd think I lost my marbles. 3 days later I learned that he had been admitted to the hospital with the flu and severe dehydration.