1. Mommy’s New Husband

So, my mom remarried about two years ago. My dad died when I was twelve so she had been widowed for over ten years. This new relationship was very whirlwind with them meeting, dating, and getting married within three months. I didn’t know much about the guy, but my mom was happy, so I just tried to be supportive. She moved into his house in upstate Virginia and invited my fiance and I to spend a weekend in her new home getting to know her new husband.

My mom’s new home was pretty isolated. It sat on a few hundred acres of lovely rolling hills, and was very picturesque. I was nervous about getting to know this guy, but really trying to make the most of it. Over the course of our first day there though, I felt more and more uneasy. I didn’t think it was weird, just silly. My mom’s new husband was being very welcoming and friendly. We were being made to feel very at home, yet I still couldn’t shake this oppressive feeling. I finally chalked it up to me being more upset about my mom getting remarried than I was willing to admit to myself. We spent most of the day wandering around outside since I felt worse when indoors.

That night my fiance and I showered together. When I turned my back to him he stopped talking mid sentence and asked, “What did you do to your back?”. Well, nothing. Why? “You have a large bruise.” I hopped out to try and see it in the mirror. I got back in and we finished showering in silence. Then it was off to bed. The one window in our room looked out over a pitch black empty field, but I couldn’t sleep until I hung something over the window. I felt sure that otherwise someone would watch us through the window.

The next morning I had a complete meltdown. I woke up and just couldn’t stop crying. I told my finance we had to leave. He tried to calm me down by telling me all the things I had been telling myself. My feelings of anxiety were just a result of seeing my mom with someone. The longer I spent with the them the easier it would become. But I just had to leave. It was only Saturday morning and we were supposed to stay until Monday, but I felt completely hysterical. I knew I was on the verge of a panic attack and my only concrete thought was I had to stop crying long enough to make our excuses and get the hell out. We did.

As soon as we were on the road I felt like a weight had been lifted. I was even feeling embarrassed for my behavior, hoping I hadn’t insulted my mom’s husband by leaving early. Then my fiance broke the silence, “That bruise on your back….did you get a good look at it?” I had. It looked like some had touched the middle of back, with fingers spread wide, with their hand at a tilt. I want to make completely clear, no one had touched my back the previous day, especially hard enough to bruise me.

Cut to three weeks later. My mom comes to visit me. The entire time she’s hounding me to come stay with her again. After finally trying to change the subject for the fifth time, I level with her. Before I’ve even finished telling the story her face is white as a sheet. She tells me she has been feeling the same way in the house. She hates it. She wants them to move as soon as possible. And the real kicker…her new husband’s previous wife shot and killed herself right outside in the same field our room window overlooked.

2. A Week From Christmas

I moved to my dad’s when I was 10 and didn’t know anyone in the area, except for the family my dad was friends with. Single mom with 3 kids, luckily there was a girl a couple years older than me (12 at the time I met her) and we got to know each other a little over a couple years.

We weren’t close, but ended up having the same friends. One night my friend Rob was hanging out with her and her younger brother. They happened to be in the house alone because my friends mom was at work. Which is where this gets terrifying and sad. Her mother has been helping this one lady (through her work) and got to know her fairly well. She found out her sister was in a mental institution and was let out recently…

The night Rob is hanging out with my friend, they get a knock on the door. My friend thought it was just their mom (she knocks a certain way when coming in) and answered it without thinking. Rob wasn’t supposed to be there and he took off through the window to his house down the road. He never thought twice about it.

Wasn’t her mom. It was the sister of the lady her mom was helping, and she figured out through talking to her sister where her family lived and her moms working schedule. She came in, and this is where is don’t know details and I’m glad I don’t. My friend’s younger brother got away to the neighbors to call the police. The lady brutally murdered my friend a week from Christmas. Decapitated her and left her body, naked in a bathtub. Hid her head. They had to look through the presents and I don’t know where they found it, but they did. I wasn’t allowed to go to her funeral.

3. “That’s A Good Girl”

I was sitting in my room, after getting out of work, on the second floor. Little bro is downstairs watching TV, the dog is in the hallway outside my door sleeping.

All of a sudden dog starts making all kinds of racket, jumping round, barking, clacking nails, howling. I go to get up to see what’s up and I hear “Aw that’s a good girl” in a male voice. It didn’t sound like little bro so I go “Oh you’re home early!” thinking it is my dad’s friend/our roomie as I open the door.

Soon as I’m out there there is no one at all but the dog wagging her tail staring at the empty end of the hallway. Little bro comes upstairs to yell at me for getting his dog riled up, said he heard the same voice thinking it was me or our roommate.

We did a once over of the house with my butterfly knife and his BB gun and there was NOBODY. Still gives me the spooks to this day.

4. The Abandoned House

There’s an abandoned house next to mine, the previous owner moved out to California 25 years prior and never sold it. I got a flashlight, gloves, and pushed the window open and went inside, starting with the basement. In the basement was a grand piano (still plays, but very much out of tune), old WW2 stuff, what seemed to be a signed Elvis poster, some other really cool shit no one should ever leave behind. There’s basically a whole story in that basement, including a broken wedding picture frame and instruments everywhere. On the main floor was an unmade bed, molded food still in the fridge and on the stovetop, half-empty beers turned solid, lights that still hadn’t been turned off. Then I started walking upstairs when I heard crying from one of the side rooms. That’s when I freaked the fuck out and haven’t been there since.

5. Someone’s At The Door

This is the late 80s/early 90s, I was around 6-7 years old. I am at home with my sister who is 14-15 at the time. We grew up in a small Texas town, everyone knows everybody. We are home alone this particular night, and my folks let my sister babysit me frequently. We always got along due to our age gap.

Anyway, it is about 8pm in the winter (deserts get pretty damn cold) so it is dark and we are in the common room since that is where the TV was. Watching 60-Minutes or 48-hours or Hard Copy or some shit (those 1 hour news pieces on CBS that chronicle large crimes in depth; trafficking, murders, kidnappings and the like. Basically a gritty Lifetime special). This one was a typical story, guy next door that was quiet went on a rampage in his next door neighbor’s house mutilating them and kidnapping their young daughter.

Well, the thing about our house common room is the door leading to the back yard was a large glass door on a wall of floor to ceiling windows. Nothing but blackness beyond it unless you have the back light on (we did not). The front door is on the other side of the room with a small entry-way. This is a solid door, so you cannot see what is beyond it, with a glass storm door on the outside of it.

About 45 minutes into the show, they are talking about the ongoing manhunt for this crazy guy and BAMBAMBAM, front door bangs like crazy. We jump the fuck up and scream like banshees. Dead silence now. The only lights on in the house are the kitchen down the hall from the common room we were in and the light from the TV. We start thinking something on the porch (we had some planters and a rocking chair out there) had simply blown against the door. This was west Texas, crazy strong winds out that way. Well, a minute or two of silence and us holding each other post adrenaline overdose passes. Just when we are about to declare everything is safe we hear the storm door on the outside of our front door close. Fuck. Someone had to have opened that door to be able to bang on the front door like that. Shitshitshit. We are both frozen in the middle of the room on the floor where we had been watching TV. My sister crawls over to the TV and turns it off. It was an old TV, so you had to turn that metal dial to switch it off, which it does with a mildly loud THUNK.

Now it is just us in a room dimly lit by the kitchen light down the hall. I do not remember how much time passed with my frozen and my sister still crouched by the now off TV, but we kept making eye contact then looking at the front door. I remember this part vividly, I am on my knees sitting on my feet and I turn around to look at the back wall of windows and glass door. We hear and I see the back door knob turn, it was locked on the knob but not deadbolted. It rattles slightly as if someone is gently trying the handle. Neither of us make a sound, just held breath. Then BAMBAMBAMBAM loud as all hell someone is trying to force the door open just jerking it back and forth. The whole wall of windows is vibrating violently and I can see with each jerk of the door how my slight reflection gets fuzzy then clear then fuzzy.

My sister flips her shit and screams bloody murder. I am still frozen on the floor. She gets up and basically drags me into her bedroom, slams the door, throws her mattress and anything she can in front of her door. Thankfully she had remembered the phone (one of those ungodly heavy beige plastic long metal antenna portable phones). We still had to direct dial the sheriff there and in her panic didn’t remember the number. She just hit redial on the phone. It was one of her friends and she tells them in broken gasps that someone is trying to get into our house and needs to get there right fucking now (The profanity sticks out here more than anything else, who knows, young brain). I am curled up on the floor and cannot stop shaking. We don’t hear anything else until we see the headlights of my sister’s friend and her parents driving up to the house.

We never did find out who was at the door or why, there were no signs of anything happening but a couple of scuff-marks on the bottom of the back door that we could not remember if they were there beforehand or not. Nothing like that has happened to me or her since, but for damn sure we never forget to lock a door after that.

6. Childhood Memories

When I was about thirteen, my Mum and Dad invited round our previous neighbors from the block of flats we lived in until I was five years old. Anyway, I’d been sent to bed but could still hear everyone talking about this and that, until the woman neighbor said ‘Hey Brian’s Mum, do you remember when Brian used to complain that there was someone in his room? Well there’s a family that’s just moved in to the floor above who have a three year old son. He is complaining of the exact same things Brian did.’

This creeped me out. I had no recollection of any of this, so the next day asked my Mum. Her first reaction was ‘You don’t remember?’ then she told me all about the weird stuff that used to happen, footsteps up and down the hall, shit going missing and stuff. She said the final thing to happen was when she was listening to a record one day, and it started to slow down, like someone was holding a finger gently on the platter till it finally came to a stop. My Mum said she snapped at this point, and started shouting ‘WILL YOU LEAVE US THE FUCK ALONE!’ As soon as she said this, the record went straight back to playing normally, and we never experienced anything again. I’ve never experienced anything like that since, and these days I’m quite skeptical of such stories, but I believe my Mum. Strangest thing is how I found out about it, from someone else ten years later experiencing something similar.

7. The Old Dormitory

Back when I was in college there was an old dormitory that was empty and locked up. The first floor windows were covered up with thick black curtains and the doors had chains and padlocks on them. Well my second year of school I got my EMT certification and started working for the campus EMS squad. That was easily my coolest job ever and there were perks other students couldn’t get. One of those were keys for everything.

So obviously we used those keys to go everywhere. Most places were pretty boring. My now best friend who was the other EMT I worked with decided to make the old dorm our hang out place. We would sneak in with friends and drink there on the weekends or nights where we didn’t have class. We usually stayed on the first floor on just one wing of the dorm. The one closest to the back entrance. We didn’t stray because the place was dirty and had cobwebs.

So one night we were drinking in the one room we set up with tables and chairs that we seized. We were all together. Nobody was missing when somebody very close to our room and very loudly screamed “WHO THE FUCK IS THERE?!” to which one of use drunkenly responded “Who the fuck do you think it is?” a very confused voice responded back “you’re not coming with me then, John?”. They sounded like they were walking away from us towards the center of the building, away from the stairwell. Incidentally, none of us were named John. A few minutes later we could hear on the floor above us, a very old building floor that’s super thick, a rumbling sound that kind of shook the walls. The rumbling stopped right above us with a giant crash. Shit officially just got creepy. We all run up the stairs and make our way to the hallway above the one we were hanging out at. Right at where our room would be on the first floor was a giant filing cabinet on wheels. It was just there. Nobody else was there. You could see the wheel tracks on the floor because it was dusty as shit. But there were no other footprints around besides our own. We all fucking bolted without getting our stuff. No stopping to get our booze, or turning off our radio, or turning off our battery powered lantern.

So we obviously have to back and get our shit. We waited a few days. A friend of mine and I went one evening to go get it. First we go to the window and see if we can see if we can see our stuff in there. My friend looks in. I didn’t. He said he thought he saw somebody in the doorway. I thought he was acting retarded because of what happened the other night. We sneak in and make it to the room and get our shit. Somewhere down in towards the center of the building we hear a door shut. It’s completely dark that way. We hear a door closer open and we don’t wait to find out what the fuck that’s about.

So I’m not a person who believes in supernatural stuff, and the same goes for my friends. We decide that we need to figure out what the hell is going on with this building. So about 6 of us devise a pretty easy plan to go about with. We circle the building one night and check all the doors and windows to make sure they were all locked up. Then we went to our usual entrance. Left two people on the inside of it to make sure nobody cam in or out. Then the rest started going from dorm room to dorm room checking to make sure nobody else was there. We’d go “hello?” and obviously get no response. We make it through our hallway we hang out at and our tensions ease up. One of the people at the outside door moves up to where we stopped and we go to the second floor where the filing cabinet was. Was. Because it’s back at the original place with the wheel tracks and no fucking foot prints. Tension in the group rise. We start doing the whole “hello?” and no response thing again. We get about halfway though the hall and one of us gets the idea of saying “Oh come on, it’s your friend Johnny”. A giant thud below us. Muffled screams from the two we left as lookouts probably saying something along the lines of “what the fuck was/is that?!” A giant thud behind us on the same floor. where nobody could have been because we went through those rooms and we would have noticed somebody else slamming a door right fucking behind us. It turns into a race to get back out the way we came. Past the doors that were just slammed. As we get into our hallway we can hear doors opening and closing in a way that something was coming toward us from the center of the building again. We get a few hundred yards away before we all stop running and make sure we all made it.

We found another place to hang out after that. It’s torn down now and a real dorm is built over it.

8. The Old Woman

When I was really little my parents would let me stay up late on the weekends and watch TV until I fell asleep. I really loved these times and I would stay up later than anybody else just because I could. Well one night I was almost asleep on the couch when I heard a noise on our front porch. It was the sound of our old fashioned porch swing moving back and forth. I was a little scared so I crept toward the bay windows of my living room and peeked out towards the porch. Sitting on my front porch swing was an older woman, probably in her 50’s wearing nothing but a night gown, covered in blood and holding a huge kitchen knife.

I flipped out immediately and ran screaming into my parents room but was too terrified to form words. My parents saw that I was upset, but when I finally was able to tell them what I saw, my dad got really angry and told me that it was just a dream and to go back to bed. I refused and kept crying and screaming until he had had enough and snatched my arm and dragged me towards the front door to prove that nothing was there. I kicked and screamed all the way trying to make him stop, but he kept pulling me. Finally we got to the door, he unlocked it, swung it open and said “See theres nothing th-” To this day, I have never seen the look of fear and shock that was on his face when that woman turned and stared at both of us and slowly stood up with the knife.

My dad slammed the door shut and got my mom to call the police while he went and got his gun. He went back to the door with a 12 gauge and cracked the door enough to stick the barrel out. He asked her what she was doing and she said “Somebody killed my husband, but it wasn’t me.” My dad told her that the police were coming, and she freaked out, grabbed the knife and walked away.

I never slept in the living room again.

9. The Boy On The Bridge

My university was bisected by a big lake, with a bridge going across it with an island gazebo in the middle. One night I was walking down the side of the lake about to cross the bridge to go to a dorm on the other side. As I was walking down the sidewalk, I noticed some kid in a grey/white hoodie (with the hood up) walking across the section of the bridge on my side of the gazebo, towards my sidewalk. I didn’t think anything of him…until I walked by a big tree which blocked my line of sight for a second. When I got past the tree, I happened to glance back at the bridge…and there was no one there. He couldn’t have possibly walked off the bridge (he would have had to go right by me), and if he had turned around in the split second I couldn’t see him, he wouldn’t have had any time to get all the way back to the island, either. He was just GONE.

This gets creepier: about a year later, I was about to tell this story to my friend who had been abroad that semester. He’d never heard it, and before I even got to what I saw, he cut in with “Wait, did you see a guy in a hoodie disappear?” Yes- he had seen something just like this freshmen year. Fucking weird. I hated walking across that bridge alone from there on out.

10. Simon Says

I’m not sure how freaky it is, since it’s not paranormal or anything, but when I was about 7 years old I went on a walk with my babysitter. We were walking back a mile or so to my house on a fairly busy road and about half way there she says we should play Simon Says. At first we walk faster, then skip, and then jog lightly. Then she says “Simon says run as fast as you can. Simon says turn here.” I was slightly confused, but played along. As we turned down the driveway I looked back and saw two guys chasing after us, one with a bat and the other with a knife.

We ran up to a house and some old people living there let us in thankfully. At the time I didn’t grasp how fucked up it was that we were getting chased and I still have no clue why they were.

11. Tunnels

When I was younger we frequently visited my grandparents around holidays even though we didn’t live in the same town. My aunt lived two houses down from my grandparents. The lady in the house between was creepy. She was a large woman, over six feet. She wore logging chains around her neck, a dress and work boots. The only time I remember seeing her outside was either in her garden in the back or when she was washing the outside of her house. Scrubbing the actual building. She did this often. During these times she would yell at us kids and call us all kinds of things. She would tell us the Devil would be coming for us. The adults told us to leave her alone and to avoid her. We would run the distance between my aunts and my grandparents because when you passed by she was watching out the windows. It was creepy and we never went alone.

One Halloween one of the cousins dared us to trick or treat her house. I remember how scared I was, but I didn’t want to be a ‘chicken.’ Plus I was going with the group. One of us rang the door bell and there was a lot of banging noises in the house suddenly like doors slamming. When she answered the door she had a severed head in her hands and we all went screaming. The adults told us it was a Halloween prop and we knew we shouldn’t be bothering her and deserved to be scared.

About a month later my parents got a phone call that the lady had tried to kill my aunt while she was bringing in groceries and had my young cousin in her arms. The lady had one of them rope saws and had come up behind my aunt with it. She put it over her head and around her neck and proceeded to saw. My aunt naturally flipped and started kicking the door. My uncle came and beat the lady down with a fire poker.

The police investigation revealed that the woman had been digging tunnels under her home which were coming up under my aunts, my grandparents and another neighbors house. She had been bringing the dirt up and putting it in the raised beds of the gardens. She also had a shrine of some sort underground which had a few severed heads around it.

My aunt survived btw but has a long scar across her neck.

12. Bumps In The Night

Firstly, my wife has been severely traumatized by our recent experience. She does not like to talk about this.

My wife and I buy our first house in February of 2010. We immediately fell in love with it as soon as we laid eyes on it. It had everything we wanted and plus a few extras. For the first month, everything was great. Lots of painting and decorating, getting it just the way we wanted. Then, weird things started to randomly happen. First it was small things, like things upstairs being moved (put in completely different rooms than where they belonged). I chalked it up to my wife just forgetting to put things back where they belonged. The house also started to creak, pretty loud. This is a fairly new house, so I just figured it was probably settling, as most new houses tend to do.

One day, the wife and I was preparing dinner in the kitchen. Our stairs sit right next to the kitchen entrance, so any noises upstairs were clearly audible into the kitchen. I turned off the water at the sink and as soon as I did, we both heard a cough. We have no kids and no one was visiting. The windows were all shut, the television was not on. This send the coldest chill down my spine and I could feel the blood running out of my face. I look to my wife and she too had gone pale and had this look of absolute fear. Someone was in our house and they were upstairs. I quickly grabbed the sharpest knife I could find and my wife called the police. I walked to the bottom of the steps and stood silently and heard a loud pop/creak, just like the ones I had always heard the house make. My hands were shaking and my wife was whispering to the 911 operator, telling them we think we may have a robber in our home.

The police arrive in minutes. Thankfully, they had been patrolling nearby. The office walks slowly up the stairs, gun drawn. He calls out “This is the police, is anyone upstairs?” No response. I’m right behind him, walking up the stairs. We look into the first bedroom and closet. Empty. No one in the half bath either. Last room is my office where I have my PC. No one in the room or the closet. I felt the tension ease away and felt like a complete tool, making this officer search the house, only to find nothing. We turn to walk out of the room and right above us….creek! I just about shat brix. In my office closet, there is an attic access. The officer pulls the steps down and again calls out “Is anyone up there? This is the police!” No response. He turns on his flashlight and peeks his head up.

He finds a man, in his 40s, kneeling there in the attic, looking dead at him. Gun drawn, he tells the man to come out and put his hands behind his head. They arrest the man. He didn’t say a word the whole time and would not look anyone in the eye. He was scruffy looking and had dirty clothes on. Me and my wife we’re freaking out. I don’t think either of us have fully gotten over it. After questioning the man in the police station, we found out that he was a homeless man who found refuge in the house while it was still on the market. He said the doors were unlocked and so he stayed there. Apparently, a realtor much have forgotten to lock the door after showing someone the house. He said that when people would come to the house, he would hide in the 2nd floor attic. We bought the house, and this guy was living in it for a whole month, without us even knowing. It really freaks me out still just thinking about it.

Don’t shrug off all those bumps in the night.

13. A Mystery On Route 66

When I was a freshman in college I was on a film shoot near Barstow on Route 66. We were shooting on the property of the café known for the film Bagdad Café. This property has an abandoned motel attached to it, which is where we were shooting this unbelievably bad horror film.

The motel’s floor was full of papers, something I initially figured was a relic from the past, while the motel was actually doing business. A while into the shoot, we started picking up the papers and reading them.

They were handwritten letters from the seventies, perhaps never sent. They were addressed to dozens of different people, starting out normal, but going on to describe some really, really fucked up things. This was a guy who literally had some demons. He kept talking about how “they” were watching him and the like. The handwriting also got more and more messed up as we assembled the letters chronologically.

Meanwhile, outside the motel there was a storage container with “KEEP OUT” spray-painted on it. Naturally, we were curious. There was a hole in the side, and someone reached in and pulled out some documents. Among them was a letter, on government typeface (I think it was the VA), telling the person who wrote those crazy letters that he was (unknowingly) a participant of some tests of hallucinogenic substances while he was in the army.

This whole time, there was a room in the abandoned motel that was sealed off, that we were strictly forbidden from entering. All the windows were covered by plywood, and the door was barricaded shut. It smelled like death. Seriously the worst smell I’ve ever encountered in my life.

14. The Dogs Knew

I don’t have any way to verify whether this is actually a family story or whether it’s an urban legend, but here:

My family has lived in rural Nebraska since they immigrated from Germany in the mid-1800s. Near the turn of the century disease was pretty rampant in the homesteading area and it killed off members of almost every family. When someone died from illness, time was of the essence in burying them as not to let the virus spread from the deceased to the living. This meant no wake periods.

So an aunt of some unknown number of “greats” preceding her relationship to me dies of some disease and she gets buried in the family cemetery on the the homestead. The dogs were very fond of her so it wasn’t too surprising that after the funeral the two dogs stuck near the grave.

The rest of the family began to think something of it when, a week and a half later, the dogs were still visiting her grave almost constantly. But they weren’t just at the grave. They were visibly distressed, frantic, and often barking while there.

This goes on for maybe two weeks when the family decides to check it out. They dig the casket up and open it.

The deceased’s hair has all been pulled out. Her fingers are raw and bloody and mangled from where, on the inside of the casket door, they can see deep scratches in the wood.

She was comatose when they buried her, and she came to while underground, spending probably her last five or so days alive in a buried casket.

15. I Want To Play

Ever since I was really little my family has always encountered really weird ghostly phenomenon. The house we live in now has been the worst by far however with an almost constant stream of events happening. One of the stories that always freaks people out the most is that there was this little girl who knew our names and would approach us all at different times. One night I was asleep and i heard a knocking on my door and a girls voice saying “Open the door!!! Let me in! I want to play!! Open the door!!” At first I thought it was my sister but as I woke up I realized it was a much younger girl’s voice.

I sat there silently (freaking the fuck out) until it eventually stopped but just as I was about to go haul ass into my sister’s room there was a relentless pounding on the two separate doors that enter my room and this little girl screaming with laughter saying “I KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE!! LET ME IN!!” After a few minutes I just ended up yelling “STOP IT” and then the pounding stopped. The next morning my mom and my sister, who I hadn’t told, were talking about strange footsteps and giggling sounds all throughout the house but neither of them had heard any pounding or me yelling.

16. The Unknown Roommate

I was about four or five years old and my parents had just separated. My mom was living in a two bedroom apartment, I had my own room but I preferred to sleep in her bed whenever I was staying with her. Our two bedrooms were at the end of a hallway, directly across from each other. Our apartment was on the first floor and I remember that it was in the middle of the summer and my mom had a window open her room, which was directly behind the bed (above the headboard).

Anyways, I woke up in the middle of the night and remember sitting up and seeing that our cat was sitting in the door frame of my mom’s room (her door was open and you could partially see into my bedroom), this was strange because our cat was typically always in bed with us. As I was watching him he walked into my bedroom and meowed. I turned to face my mom and wake her up. In the three/four seconds it took her to wake up and ask me what was wrong we both looked back up in the door frame and there was a man standing by my open door, making his way out of my bedroom. I still don’t know how she managed to do it so quickly, but my mother proceeded to pick me up and literally throw me out of the screen window (again, we were on the first floor and it was maybe a three foot drop to the ground). She quickly followed and we were able to start screaming for help and someone called 911.

The police came but didn’t see any signs of forced entry. Only that our front door was unlocked which led them to believe the man must have exited that way. The strange thing was that my mom swore up and down that she had locked the door that night, with the deadbolt and chain lock. About a week later she was cleaning the kitchen and opened up our water heater closet and found a notebook with names and drawings, as well as a pair of gloves and some gum wrappers. The police were called again but all they could do was speculate that the man had been in our house and hid until we were asleep.

17. A Woman And A Cat

My sister used to claim she saw a lady in a black dress in our stairway when she was little, and my uncle who got divorced and moved in with us said he used feel like a cat was in the room with him. He claimed he felt a cat jump on the bed at night and knock things off the window sill.

Well, when my dad was redoing the drywall in the stairway he found an old black and white picture of a lady in a black dress with a cat on her lap.

18. The Farmer’s House

Back in high school, around the end of my junior year I believe, it became popular to go on these adventurous endeavors to “haunted” places. Literally a group of about thirty of us would carpool to some abandoned house one weekend, or to some secluded forest the next, spending the days at school in between searching for more places like this in the area. Anyhow, we had this cavalier nature about us when it came to potential hauntings.

At some point, a friend of mine who was several years older than me told me about how he and his friends would do similar things when they were young. His childhood home backed up to a huge farm and he and his friends would spend their days fishing or hanging out on this farm, so they were quite familiar with it. The owner, apparently a very religious man (a priest or pastor maybe), had owned the farm and a small house on the property. The story went that the owner had been locked up for murder and died in prison, leaving the farm to whomever and it wasn’t kept up. However, upon hearing the news of this man’s demise, my friend told me that he and his friends had decided to go into this house. I guess the windows had been busted out and they opened a door and walked in. He described them fooling around and trying to scare one another. But, he had decided to walk up the stairs and upon his reaching the second floor he saw a coffin in the main, open room. The way he had explained it to me was that he didn’t know what it was immediately and sort of sauntered over to check it out only to have the sudden flash of realization that this was a coffin in an abandoned house. I suppose he and his friends made a quick retreat from the house. Of course, he told this part of the story much better, peppering in more details about the man who owned the property that gave the story that mythical, supernatural sort of feel. I remember being frightened by his delivery and sincerity, though it is quite likely he had rehearsed it before for occasions like that.

This story had taken place fifteen years or so previous to him telling me. I told one of my adventurous cohorts the story and we thought it would be a good idea to investigate it. I knew where this person had lived, so we assumed we could simply walk behind his house, find the farm, then find the house. We had a grand plan to bring the whole group out on the weekend, but we weren’t sure if we were being strung on a lie, or if this place was still there if it were true. Anyhow, after football practice one weekday, he and I drove out to the street my friend lived on. There was definitely a farm behind his and his entire streets’ homes. We decided to go ahead and sneak through someone’s yard and onto the farm to see if the house was there. Once we made it through the manicured, suburban yard and through the brush separating the farm, we were knee deep in an overgrown field. We sort of hacked our way through a bit, and sure enough as we made it to the edge of a hill the house was only a hundred or so yards away. We had made it that far so we decided to go in and investigate. As we approached this house, there was a huge, black bird perched on its roof. Once we were within twenty feet of the house, the bird flew away from the house and perched upon a tree adjacent to the house. Being a bit nervous, we began questioning why the bird had made such an odd move, but thought better of making a big deal about it. Now, this house is the prototypical haunted house. It had that quant, historic look to it, with the broken windows, eerie shadows, and sort of ominous stature one associates with a haunted house. There was even a grave marker in the front yard. So, again, we were increasingly nervous as we approached this house. The door was jammed shut, but the window had been completely removed, so we played rock-paper-scissor for who would climb through first. I had the luxury of going in second, but did so quickly as being on the porch by myself was just as unsettling. The inside of the house had literally not been touched. Besides weather damage, most everything was intact. There were pictures, and decorations still up, with a bit of furniture remaining. We eventually became comfortable with being inside and began to snoop around. Of course, we were fearful of trekking upstairs, afraid to find something we didn’t want to find. Alas, we squeamishly crept up the stairs only to find an empty space. At this point, we became at ease with walking around the house, laughing off the “ghost story” mystique. As we looked through the main floor again, I noticed that there was a tiny door in the kitchen. It was about knee high.

Undaunted, we flung it open only to reveal a dark, stone stairwell that a person would literally have to crawl down. Its presence alone was terrifying, for some reason, but it had a landing about halfway down, with the stairs turning a different direction and out of our sight. However, perched on the landing and partly concealed by the walls to the other part of the stairwell was a large, rectangular, wooden box: a coffin. Now, my friend and I weren’t exactly small people, so I would imagine the sight of us pale faced, with a cartoonish hair-on-neck shocked expression trying to both squeeze out of a window at the same time would have been quite comical. Not to mention the both of us in a dead sprint heading away from this house through waist high weeds. I still laugh thinking about both of us running like that. Anyhow, we turned to look back about halfway to the end of the farm just in time to see that massive, black bird fly back from the tree and onto the house. We probably made double-time from that point on.