Haunted house

A few years ago, we built an addition to our house (link to build log here) for my wife's parents.  Unfortunately, her father passed away in August at the age of 90 after suffering from Alzheimer's for many years.  Unlike many dementia patients, though, he kept his polite manner and wonderful sense of humor right to the end.  He was a great man that will be sorely missed.

Last week, my mother-in-law was watching TV in her wheelchair when she felt someone tap her on the shoulder.  When she turned her wheelchair, there was no one there.

Over the weekend, my wife stayed up late to finish some laundry while I went to bed.  When she came into the bedroom with the lights off, she felt her way to the bed and started to pull down the top sheet on her side.  When she reached for the sheet, she felt a hand on it, describing the fingers as "cold and dead".  What the f..., she thought and ran back to the wall to turn on the light.  Looking back at the bed, she saw me sleeping soundly on my side, facing away from her side with my hands in front of me, and our cat curled up in the middle of the bed.

There was nothing else there.

Ooooooooooh!

I've never actually met anyone with first hand possible haunting experiences. Please continue adding to this thread as things develop or not.

I've never actually seen anything, but I have been in some houses that made me uncomfortable.  Recently at work we have been in an old house that is getting remodeled, and myself and a co-worker both mentioned separately that we got a strange feeling in the basement.

Disclaimer- I do not believe in spirits, or ghosts or anything like that- except I've totally seen one. My old apartment was haunted. 

One night I was at home and I heard a thump and saw that my rollerblades had shot out of the closet. I would have yelled at the cat, except the cat was next to me, and the other one was nowhere near the closet. 

Also woke up to a woman in a nightgown floating at the foot of my bed. I suppose I should have been scared, but she didn't seem to be harmful, so I just kinda went back to sleep. EXTREMELY surreal. 

Another similar incident happened last night.  As my wife got into bed, she felt something tap her on the hip. It wasn't me; I was curled up and facing the other way as I often sleep, and there was no cat in the bed either.  She felt around on the bed - nothing there.

The lights just blinked as I typed this. 

He won't stay long.

We bought our house from the family of an older woman that died (in the house?).  Trish is a BIG fan of hardwood floors and not wearing shoes so she is always vacuuming, hands & knees damp swipe with a rage etc.  She just gets done with the dining room, dumps the bucket out and there's a bobby pin in the middle of the floor.

She doesn't own any bobby pins.

She's taking a bath, I'm in bed, she walks in and says "Oh, you're here".  Yeah.....  "I heard you walk through the dining room".

Mrs. Peters eventually left.  Your FIL will leave when he sees all is well.

Dan

So, when's Halloween this year?

I'm the kind of practical guy who says there's an explanation for every "weird" thing. But....

My previous home was haunted. Single family home in a city neighborhood of two family  and single family homes. I lived there for about 25 years and can tell many stories. 1st wife, second wife, step kids, GFs, and others all witnessed things. Most of the things didn't cause anyone physical harm but one of the kids friends suffered a broken arm. The kids were young teenagers at the time and their friends were all aware of weird happenings in the house and that it was "normal".  Said friend was in stepsons room after school (even though no friends allowed in house when parents at work) and a dresser drawer just opened by itself. The friend freaked out and ran right off the top of the 2nd floor stairs breaking his arm at the bottom. Story we got that day was he broke his arm crashing bike in the street, got the truth years later when discussing all the "ghost stories" at dinner one night.

While there were many one time occurrences of weird things, small chrome curved scissors I used for trimming my mustache disappeared out of the bathroom medicine cabinet at a rate of 2-3-4-5 per year probably 75 or more total over the years, never found them anywhere. Didn't matter who else lived there or if I lived alone. Never lost them before I lived there or since moving out. Been over 10 years now and haven't lost the 2 pair I had when I moved. Always kept a spare set because they disappeared so often.

The very last thing that happened was just before I sold the house and really strange. A customer came into my store and I recognized the name as the people I'd bought the house from 25 years earlier. So I mentioned it. The woman asked me "Ever notice anything unusual at the house?" and of course my reply was "Ghost" and both of us had stories and chatted for quite a while. She explained that her husband couldn't handle it and that's why they'd sold the house only 6 months after buying it. When I went home after work that night a hanging potted plant that was in a window was upside down in the middle of the floor in my bedroom about 10' from the window.  No dirt between the window and the upside down pot which was flipped perfectly upside down not laying on it's side. The pot holder was still in place on the window so the pot had to be lifted out of the holder & moved 10' before being flipped. I lived alone, no pets, and no one else had keys. 

I sold the house to a relative of the original owners of the house which was built in the late 1800's. The extended family originally had 4 houses next to each other, two were apartment buildings and two single family homes which were sold off over the years. The man who bought my house had grown up in one of the four homes and had inherited the two apartment buildings around the corner. He was an old man near the end of life and said he wanted to buy it so he could control who lived there but did not want to live in it. He had moved into one of the apartment buildings several years earlier, long after retiring, and remained living in a really crappy 3 room apartment next door to my house.  He rented my old house to a friend of mine who moved into the house when I moved out. I warned him their might be some weird happenings. My buddy stayed several years and said nothing unusual ever happened.

Turned out the old man who bought the house and lived in the crappy 3 room apartment had millions and millions. IIRC 7 mil + in liquid assets plus multiple properties and no heirs. He left my friend who was renting the house enough to live very well in a much nicer neighborhood and never have to work the rest of his life. My old home and the two apartment buildings were sold when the old man died.

Here's the house. Looks the same as when I sold it other than needing a good bit of yard maintenance. https://www.instantstreetview.com/@41.340616,-73.086171,176.34h,-1.48p,0.14z

In reply to NOT A TA :

Wow, cool story. Thanks for sharing that.

My teen age step son came to live with us after years with his father.

He often did his home work in the living room late at night.

One day he asked me if the house was haunted .  He felt like someone was watching him.  I said yes.

 Since I have been living quietly alone for a time,I haven't seen her lately.

I e had a few experiences but nothing visual. I have heard some stories from people I trusted that were pretty out there. I've got an uncle that's a contractor and went through multiple crews on one particular historic home on Fairborn OH because the tools kept rearranging themselves every night. And that wasn't the only time weird things happened in houses he was working on.

I think a lot of what people experience is some sort of energy echo that we just dont understand yet.

FYI, if you believe in "spirits", then you believe in demons, you believe In Demons, you believe in god, you believe in god, get down and pray.

_ said:

FYI, if you believe in "spirits", then you believe in demons, you believe In Demons, you believe in god, you believe in god, get down and pray.

Aww man, someone voted down my upvote

This is a joke or "Dear Penthouse" type thread, right?  Ghosts?  This one time at band camp....

Well, others are jumping in, why not me.  I'm probably too old to become rich and famouse at this point, so no one is going to dig this up and splatter it all over the front page as (further?) proof I'm nuts.

After my brother in law passed suddenly there were several things that happened.  On several occasions, I heard a voice talking to me when there was either no one else in the house, or they were at the other end and I couldn't have heard them.  Still, I explain most of them away as my imagination, echo's etc.  But there's one I simply can't explain.  I was carrying a load of laundry to the back hall and the washer.  The dryer is next to the washer and was already running.  It was one of those older front loaders where the large square door is hinged along the bottom.  While I was loading the washer, the dryer, still running, slowly opened all the way then slowly closed all the way and the dryer never stopped running.  Of course, I immediately tried opening and closing the door and it stopped the dryer.  No matter how fast I did it, the dryer always stopped, yet I just washed it open and close slowly yet keep running.  I tried the opening and closing thing frequently over the next few years but I never got it to stay running, let alone open and close on it's own.  What it was I'll never know, but to me it was my BIL saying goodbye.  

I had a few girlfriends when I was younger who swear things happened to them.  One I'd give 50/50 on the truth, the other I'd still trust 110% to this day.  One link that I find hard to igrnore is that every report I"ve heard that I count as credible has been soon after someone close passed, and usually in a sudden unexpected manor.  

I'm not saying I believe in ghosts, but I do accept there's things we don't understand.  

I've had a few odd things happen at my house.

Its been a few years now, but in our hallway, there is an access door/hatch to the attic. There's nothing up there, and I've actually never been up there in the 11 years we've lived there. I've stuck my head up there, but nothing else. No steps or anything, just a door. It's 8' up, so I can barely reach it on my tippy toes, and the wife and kids can not reach it. You'd need a ladder to get up there. We can home one day and I felt a draft in the hall. I found the the door not only off and askew, but broken. I have a VERY protective large, loud dog. No one else came in the house. No idea on that one. 
 

Another one that happened to my wife... 

She awoke one night in the middle of the night to see a young boy standing at the foot of our bed (we have girls.) She said he was just standing there looking at her, and he eventually just disappeared. She said she didn't feel frightened, so she didn't wake me until after. My dad had passed away in the house about a year earlier... and about a month later she was diagnosed with cancer. Whether it's related to either, I really don't know. 

Well, the weird stuff has subsided at our house, but seems to have moved to my brother-in-law's house.

This morning at about 6 am,  Rob texted my wife with a question mark and said, "Are you sleepwalking?" My wife didn't respond until almost 10 because she was sleeping in, but she said, "What are you talking about?" Rob said that he received a text message from her at 5:16 am that said, "Yes, and we saw Dad walking, which was wonderful."  We looked on her phone, and no such message was ever sent to him.  I can vouch for the fact that she was asleep at that time.

We were discussing the topic on the phone with Rob this evening when our 13 year-old niece came on and started relating all the weird things that have been happening to her the last couple of weeks.  Her phone beeped as if a message or notification came in, but there was nothing on it.  She hung up from a phone conversation, but continued to hear voices for a few seconds after she hung up.  She was whistling a tune while alone in the house, and after she stopped, she could hear that same tune being mimicked for about 15 seconds.  She has also seen doors opening by themselves.  And weirdest of all. she got up at 3 am to go to the bathroom and saw a strange blue light in the house where there couldn't possibly be light coming in from outside.  She saw the blue light again a week or so later, this time pulsating in a random pattern.

Dad's favorite color was blue.

My only experience was in an old hotel in Dorking, England (called the White Horse ... really old, like 13th century). Business trip back in the early eighties. It was real for me ... middle of the night, never experienced anything like that before or since, made the hairs on my neck stand up, and made me think a bit more reasonably about this "haunted" phenomena.

I don't believe in ghosts... but for the "lingering energy" theory, I have two anecdotes.

1) The haunted chair. When I was in H.S., a kid in my church group had a party at his house. Which was exactly as fun as it sounds. And at one point during the party, seeing us all drifting, he said something to the effect of "hey! We have a haunted chair! Check it out!"

The chair was a design I have Googled many times over the ensuing decades; apparently it's a not-uncommon antique Chinese chair style that has two snakes coiling up from the back legs to twist into the chair's back. This one had the snakes' heads emerging from the back to form the arms, and was beautifully carved with fine scales all over and detailed faces complete with what looked like mother-of-pearl for the snakes' eyes. It looked exotic and wholly out of place in this kid's 1960s rancher.

I said exotic, fine, but haunted? And this kid, who was younger than me and I understood was trying to impress me, reeled off a list of strange happenings he claimed around the chair: It sometimes moved around the house on its own; the one person they'd ever tracked down who claimed to know what it was (a sterotypically strange and musty old Chinese character  I recognized a few years later when I saw "Gremlins") backed away from their picture of it and told them it was an executioner's chair, and evil; it was nearly impossible to photograph; and the eyes turned red when you rubbed the snakes' heads.

BullE36 M3, I said, and started rubbing one of the heads. The eyes turned red, all right, and it was not just a color change; they seemed to light with a fire that was alive, malicious, aware--and made me very uncomfortable.

Which is probably why it suddenly became very important to me to debunk the kid's entire story. Obviously he was trying to impress me, and obviously the story was crap--who keeps an evil chair in their house that moves around at night?? Fortunately I had the perfect weapon to prove him wrong, a Polaroid camera I had just bought myself to document all those not-to-be-forgotten H.S. moments. It was in my friend's car, and I fetched it. And stood myself in front of Mr. Evil Chair to snap me a picture.

I don't actually remember taking that first picture, but I do remember gradually realizing, as I flapped the developing photo back and forth, that the chair wasn't in it. Uhhh. Must've gotten distracted and snapped the wall above it, because the photo only showed a blank expanse of green paint.

I do remember taking the next picture, and the next and the next, until the rest of my pack of 10 expensive Polaroids was  all used up. And I remember shaking as I shook those developing prints, not so much that anyone would notice except me. Most of all, I remember the sound of the little motor pushing those photos out of the camera, because it had gotten very quiet in the room.

The chair WAS in a few of the shots--upside-down, wavy, blurred like it'd been shot with crazy filters--but others captured impossible stuff: the wall behind me and the picture on it, I remember especially.

And here's where "real" ghost stories are different from the fake ones. Once I was out of film, we all said quick goodnights and left. All of us just walked away from the whole experience. We didn't talk about it. We didn't tell anyone about it. I felt like I had seen something I wasn't supposed to see, something malevolent that I didn't want to follow me. So I threw away the "proof"--the photos--and not long after, when I picked up that Polaroid camera I had saved to buy and looked into the viewfinder to find a spider curled up in it, I threw it away like I'd been burned. It was years before I even tried to tell the story.

I rarely do tell it, because for one, telling ghost stories makes you sound a little unhinged. More than that? Any real experience is not something you want to revisit, even if it's only a creepy piece of furniture you ran into once. I'm still a little afraid, so I push that story down under the other, lighter ones. This is why I don't believe most ghost stories--they tend to be so over the top, and I can tell you, it only takes the tiniest tilt to your world to make you never want to think or talk about it again, never mind tempt fate by calling it out.

Story 2 is for another time, because I am done with ghost tales for tonight.

Margie

My mom got a phone call in a dream from her mother, shortly after she’d passed. In and of itself nothing really to talk about. No, it became odd when she got a call from her sister. All 4 of them, mom+3 sisters got a call that night. 

In reply to Marjorie Suddard :

Oh come on. That story was so great, let's hear another!

Margie, that is spooky! Thanks for sharing

In reply to Gary :

Nooo. Tim's still at SEMA, and as it is I'm already gonna have to sleep with the light on!

Anything seemingly paranormal I've ever seen happened when I was asleep or close to it so I'd chalk that up to dreaming or half-dreaming...but the first thing that left physical evidence happened at this year's Challenge, actually. First night in the room, as I was going to sleep I heard some bumps. People moving in neighboring rooms, I thought. Then a loud wooden BANG. Someone in the next room dropped a suitcase against the wall, I thought. Eventually I fell asleep.

Next morning, as soon as I wake up, I see that a cabinet drawer is pulled all the way out. I didn't touch those, went to sleep with all of them shut. It's against the wall where I thought someone dropped a suitcase. I test the drawer a bit, it doesn't seem like it could "fall open" and has a decent amount of friction to it. All the drawers feel similar. Maybe there was a tremor and that drawer moved just a little easier than the others? Asked some people the next morning, nobody felt one...

Anyway nothing odd happened over the next 3 nights. Unless there were unnatural cold spots in the room, I chose the bed next to the AC unit so I wouldn't know

As a kid, I had very similar experiences to the ones posted here. It was common knowledge that the house we grew up in was haunted.

In College, I signed up for a class called "Paranormal Forensics," hoping to get a greater understanding of some of the weird stuff I'd experienced as a child.

Anyway, the first day I show up to the class, it's PACKED. Apparently this class was an "easy A" for a lot of people. Even with easily 80+ seats in the room, I ended up stuck in the back of the class.

The Professor introduced himself, and immediately asked "By a show of hands, how many of you believe in the existence of ghosts?" About half the hands in the class went up, including mine.

He then asked "How many of you have ever had any sort of interaction with a ghost?" Less hands this time, but mine went up again.

"How many of you have had PHYSICAL interaction with a ghost?" he asked. My hand went up again, along with two or three others.

"Finally," he asked, "Has anyone in this class had 'intimate' or 'sexual' interaction with a ghost?"

Everyone in the class started looking around. Reluctantly, I raised my hand.

The professor called me down from the back of the room to the front of the class, had me introduce myself, and asked "Mr. White, do you mean to tell me you've had intimate, sexual contact with a ghost?" "GHOST!?" I replied. "Motherberkeleyer, I thought you said "GOAT!"