Mystery guest

A few years back, I lived with my mother and german shepherd in a two bedroom rented town home. I got home from work one day and went about my daily routine. When it came time to eat dinner i knocked on my mom’s door to come and eat. I smelled cigarette smoke and heard her grunt a response. So I went back down and ate alone. I figured i would just put a plate away for her. Fast forward to about 2 am, I am awoken by someone holding my hand and gently shaking it. I immediately shoot straight up and look around. My dog, who is overly protective and sleeps with me every single night, isn’t in bed. She isnt even in the room. She most definitely was on my bed when i went to sleep. I sleep with the bedroom door shut and locked. She is scratching at my closed and LOCKED bedroom door from the hallway. Frantic. I bolt for the door. Let her in and she is searching the whole room. I’m now yelling for my mother. No answer. I force my dog to walk down the hallway with me. I still smell cigarette smoke. I bang on my mom’s door. No answer. So i just open it. She ISN’T even home. The bed is made and her tv is off. My dog and i search the whole entire house. Nothing is out of place. All the doors and windows are still locked. I was freaked out to say the least. The next day i called my mom and she told me she left early the day before to go visit my sick grandfather.

An ‘abandoned’ farm

I used to have a penchant for wandering around abandoned buildings when I was in high school. One time a friend and I decided it would be a good idea to explore a farmstead that hadn’t been in use for years. The whole experience was really bizarre.

The farmstead was accessible by a long gravel road that brought you to a cluster of dilapidated buildings around a central barn. We parked at the end of the gravel road near the turn off to the main road so we could walk around the property and just pull out quickly later. We went into the barn first and there were deer bones arranged in a circle around the skull and a bunch of blankets and wood stacked in a corner of the room. We thought it was really cult-ish and weird, noped our, and started walking back to the car.

Halfway down the gravel road we heard crunching, heavy footsteps and someone screeching behind us. Blood curdling screeching. We sprinted back to my car and tried to peel out of there as fast as possible but it had snowed the night prior and my back tire was stuck in a puddle of melted snow. My friend was screaming because she was so freaked out but wouldn’t turn to look at the path behind us. By the time I had gotten the car unstuck she turned around to see if there was someone following us and there was no one there.

I could have been a bird or something, but we both swear up and down to this day that someone was following us. I actually thought I was going to die that day.

A clan ritual

A friend of mine, who I think is trustworthy, was driving home on country roads late one night. He decided to take the gravel short cut past an old cemetery. He noticed several trucks and lights at the cemetery so he started to pull over to see what was going on. There were a bunch of motherfuckers in white hoodies in a circle. Some sort of Clan ritual we think, but don’t really know. He noped out of there really fast but some of them saw him and followed him in his car all the way back to town.

Walking in the dark

So, I visited my ex-MIL in rural Georgia over the summer couple years back. We’re talking deep, deep, deep rural South. No light pollution, so you can see a billion stars and the actual Milky Way across the sky. Well, the night I went it was one of those slim crescent moons, so it was even darker than normal. I can’t see my hand at the end of my outstretched arm levels of dark.

I’m walking their little rat dog around the yard along the edge of a forest and I’m probably 200 yards from their little trailer (which is the only source of light besides my flashlight). This little rat dog stops dead in his tracks and starts trembling. He looks up at me with his bug eyes popping out. I hear a rustle of leaves and a twig snap, maybe 20 feet to my left. I scoop the rat up and start powerwalking back to the house, looking in all directions with the flashlight.

Once I get halfway back, I hear a bloodcurdling, high-pitched scream from hell. It sounded like a woman was getting stabbed. Oh shit, this is some Hills Have Eyes shit and I’m gonna die. I ran as fast as I could back to the trailer.

A gift from a ghost

This one is kinda creepy, but also kinda comforting. This story was told to me by my grandmother, who is a no-nonsense kinda broad, so I believe every word of it.

My grandma had a neighbor/friend who unfortunately lost her husband when she was young, about 40 or so years ago. It was a sudden death, cardiac arrest or something like that. So this woman was so upset, because for a couple years after his death, she couldn’t dream of her husband. For some reason it really bothered her that she couldn’t experience a dream with him in it. It’s almost like she wanted it for the comfort.

Anyway some time passes, and this woman is preparing to sell her house and move closer to her kids (they lived a state over). Suddenly, she gets her wish. She starts dreaming, and her husband is in them. She has multiple of these dreams, and in every one her husband wakes her up, sits down on the bed, and starts speaking to her. However, his speech horrifies her. It was described to me as “backwards” or “garbled”. I imagine it to be something similar to the way Twin Peaks characters speak in the Black Lodge. So yeah, pretty goddamn creepy. She can’t make a single word out.

A few days before she’s about to move out for good, she goes to bed and dreams of him again. The dream is the same – except she understands ONE word he says. He grabs her in the dream and repeatedly says “rafters” – almost seeming panicked. She wakes up rattled, but returns to sleep.

The next day, as she’s finishing up packing in the basement, she looks up and sees the rafters. She remembers the dream, and is compelled to reach into them. She does, and pulls out thousands of dollars worth of WW2 bonds her husband had purchased without her knowledge. She swears he never told her about them. So he appeared in her dream to tell her so she wouldn’t leave all those bonds behind when she sold the house.

Story still gives me chills today.

Mystery tooth fairy

This is less scary/horrifying/creepy and more “unsolved mystery that still bugs me.”

When I was 5, the tooth fairy came and left me a quarter for my tooth. She also left me this beautiful intricately carved wooden pencil box.

In the morning, my parents both asked me where I got it. I told them the tooth fairy brought it.

Almost 30 years later, my parents still swear up and down it wasn’t them. They’ve confessed tons of other things they did, so I believe them when they say it wasn’t them. I would like to know where that thing came from and who put it there.

Tea shop of horror

When I was younger, my mom, my grandma and I liked to go to this little frou-frou tea shop that was about 40 miles from our home. It was a cute little place where you could get the classic tea and sandwiches and cute little desserts and all. One time we went, all was normal, but on the way home we received a call that my other grandma had passed away. Very sad, but as she had been battling cancer not exactly unexpected. The next time we went, a few months later, on the way home we received a call that my uncle had died suddenly of a heart attack. Creepy coincidence for sure, but we still did not think too much of it at the time. We went back a third time a few months after that, and for the third time on the way home, we received the phone call that someone had died. This time it was my grandpa’s brother. We never went back to that tea shop again. Now all of these people were elderly and not exactly in the best of health, so them passing away around the same time was not exactly creepy. But the fact that three separate times that we went to this place, three people died the same day and we received the calls on the way home, makes me think something about that place was cursed. It has since closed but I’m still nervous to even go to that area to this day.

And… another haunted tea room

This was circa 2001-2003 in Morgantown IN at a place called Auntie M’s Tea Room, sadly it is no longer there.

On three separate occasions while cleaning up after closing time I heard what sounded like a small child crying. It was soft and every time I tried to walk towards the sound it seems to grow further away or move into a different part of the restaurant altogether. It was unnerving to say the least.

A friend of mine worked there with me and once after hours she heard me call her name from inside the stock room and at the same time I heard her call my name from the front of the restaurant. We ran into each other on our way to answer the calls. We were both very confused when we realized neither of us had actually called the other at all.

Lastly and most chillingly… two people I knew passed away very shortly after eating at Auntie M’s and I was the person that served them their last meals on both occasions. One passed in an accident the other of a heart attack. Was just their time to go… but it really creeps me out that in that restaurant I served two different people their last meals on Earth.

Abandoned amusement park

I used to go explore abandoned places with my friends too! The weirdest experience was at this abandoned amusement park we went to.

The last time we had been there a skeleton of a cat had fallen from a ceiling tile inside of one of the buildings and freaked one of my friends out, but I wasn’t there, so I don’t know much about that incident.

But this park has a long walk to get to the entrance, and the gate has been bent just enough that you can step through it at the right angle. So we walk probably a mile across a field to get to this gate, and step inside. The first building is some sort of old storefront type of thing. We walk up to it and one of my friends notices a light coming from inside and we all fall silent as he steps forward to peek in. He looks back wide eyed, and naturally, the urbanexploringrest of us go over to the doorway and check what he saw.

The whole wall opposite from us was on fire.

It looked like it had purposely been lit on fire like no less than 10 minutes before we got there and we straight sprinted back to our cars after that.

Freaky shit.

No one was home

A few years ago I was trying to get hold of my parents for something, can’t remember what. Neither of them answered their cell phone so I called their home phone. The line picked up, and it sounded like someone was talking, but it was very distorted. After about 10 seconds the line disconnected. That was at 9 PM. My parents called me back around 10:30 – they had been out at a movie, which had started at 8:30. They live alone.

Stranger’s gifts

So, this is going on as we speak, but let’s take you back a couple of months to when this all started.
One nice warm day, end of August, early September I go outside and find this little ball of fur/feathers/hair and a dangling earring hooked in on my porch. Weird, I thought. I brought it up to my husband and said that there was some weird juju shit on our porch and it freaked me out. I was not touching it but it needed to go. He suggested that it was a nice gift from the tomcat next door, or something that our dog dragged home. My dog has never done that before, but hey, a way more logical reason than someone leaving weird juju shit on our porch. Cool.

Then last week, this fully intact lower mandible bone of a whitetail deer shows up on our porch in the exact same place as where the hair/feather/fur ball was placed. Again, I ask my husband about it and he says that the dog must have brought it with him. Again, something that he’s never done but logical. I still wasn’t going to touch it. The weird fur/feather/earring ball was still fresh in my mind and if someone was leaving weird shit on the porch I wasn’t going to touch it (thanks for taking that danger on, hon). It stayed on the porch for a while.

Yesterday, I was studying, facing my front door. Around lunchtime, my dog starts freaking out and I look up and there’s this older, disheveled looking lady (I think?) on our porch, who I had never seen before, walking toward our front door. She leaves something on the bench we have out there and turns around and walks away. After a beat, I get up to grab whatever pamphlet she left on our porch. Except, she didn’t leave a pamphlet. She came onto our porch. Took the lower mandible bone and moved it onto the bench. Right in the middle of two posts of the porch fence, right in line with a bright ray of sunshine. So, now I’m pretty convinced that there IS someone leaving weird shit on our porch and here’s hoping we’re not cursed!

Abducted in plain sight

My family and I went to Dubai in 2004 (I was 7) and we were in the hotel pool when we see 2 big men suddenly come in and steal this family’s little girl who looked around the same age as me and sped of into a car. There’s nothing anyone could’ve done because we were all in the pool and the daughters mother started crying historically. We ended up having to write a witness report for the police. I still wonder if they got their little girl back.

A voice saved my life

I was in a major car accident over a decade ago. My car was hit by another car in such a way where I lost control of the car, the car somehow went on a full circle on the highway. I t-boned a jersey wall, completely destorying it and cracking the next two in line, and I bounced off that onto an off-ramp, with my side of the car facing traffic.

I am about to exhale when I hear “hey kid. When I start counting you have 8 seconds to move your car or you’re going to be hit by an 18 wheeler. Do you understand? 8…7…6”

Voice didn’t have to tell me twice, I threw my car into drive and got onto the shoulder. At 1, an 18 wheeler drove by the spot my car was parked on.

I should have died, according to the cops surveying the crash site later, but I walked away with a few bruises and I needed a root canal a few days later. I probably imagined the voice, but damn I’m believing it was something other worldly.

Bell-bottom ghost

I’ve posted about this before, but when I was about 9 years old, 1995, in the middle of a bright summer day, I went to the refrigerator to get a popsicle. Suddenly a roughly teenage-looking guy, with long brown hair (like this), wearing a beige turtleneck and red plaid bell-bottoms (like this, but with dark green and black lines), turned around the corner into the hallway to my left, then vanished from toe to head as I looked at him. Told no one about it for years, until after my mother mentioned meeting the (now grown) kids who lived in the house before us, who asked her if she’d seen “the bell-bottom ghost”.

A friend

Walking home forest at night with a friend at like 2am (dont even ask…), we were about 14. We were having good time, talking etc. When out of nowhere our “friend” shows up and starts talking to us. Our friend started chatting with us and I felt a really strong sense of euphoria.

This friend knew both of our names, and things that he shouldnt have like exact details of inside my room, and things that happened to me before I moved into the country. Then he was just gone, and we both collapsed, physically exhausted.

It was then that we realised that we had never met this “friend” and we were still 10km from town and another 2km from our campsite. We just lay there for for so long, recovering. I never actually properly saw my “friend” I kind of just knew he was with us, and I can’t recall his voice either, All I remember is him asking to take us to his house “just turn left”. My real friend luckily had the sense to not let me go. That left turn led to this unfenced lookout with like a 5m drop to rocks. Dont even want to think about what wouldve happened if i had listened. Scary shit

Lost key

My friend asked me if I would go to her house after work and feed her dog as she would not be home until 3am or so (she worked in a bar).

I arrived at her house at 8:30pm and got the key she had left under the mat to unlock the door. Once I unlocked the door I turned off the alarm and put the key in a white bowl by the door (I am 100 percent sure I put the key in the bowl)

I fed the dog and played with him for a little while then went to lock up the house again and leave but the key was gone. Just then the dog started furiously barking and ran full speed out of the kitchen and up the stairs. He just sat there growling at nothing. The feeling that came over me at that time was so strange. I randomly burst out crying and couldn’t stop. Eventually I calmed down, put the dog back into the kitchen and looked for the key.

It was literally nowhere. I ended up finding another key that worked so I just locked the house and left. I told my friend and she looked daily for about a week. Then one day, the key was back in the white bowl.

A shadow person?

When I was in elementary school, I shared a queen size bed with my older sister and our family dog (a mutt that looked like a short haired Lassie) would sleep at the foot of our bed every night. When I was about 6 years old, I woke up one night around midnight and saw a dark figure standing at the foot of the bed. The figure was entirely in black without any eyes or a face. I tried to wake my sister up, but she rolled over to go back to sleep. My sister must have accidentally kicked the dog, because the dog woke up and raised her head and started growling at the figure at the foot of the bed. The growling then woke my sister up and she saw the figure and started screaming. When my parents came into the room and turned the light on, nothing was there.

Speaking in tongues

My wife has told me that very occasionally I talk in my sleep in some other language. She has no idea what I’m saying, but the language sounds a little bit familiar to her. When smartphones became a thing, she recorded me one time.

I listened to it the next day, and at first I thought it was Italian since some of the sounds and cadences were similar. I don’t know Italian, so that seemed really odd. I shared it with a colleague who grew up with Italian – turns out I was speaking Latin, which he had learned as a student.

I studied a bit of Latin as a kid. It’s long gone now, although I can recognize some words and know some Latin conjugations. He said that as far as he could tell, it was pretty grammatically correct and that I was talking about a mountain and a lake.

Weird as hell.

Loose screw

About a year before my son was born, my boyfriend’s father died. I had never met bfs father, but heard stories of his twisted sense of humor and how he liked to screw with people.

My boyfriend was not particularly close with his Dad. We lived in NC and his dad had taken off to Seattle when my bf was young. I don’t thing bf really grieved until our son was born and he realized that his dad would never meet him. That hit him hard.

Over the first month of caring for our newborn, we started to notice screws that had fallen out of household items. Kitchen chairs, towel rack, screen door, outlet cover… The most random shit. More than a dozen loose screws in the span of a week. Kinda weird, but we were sleep deprived parents and didn’t really have the mental stamina to waste trying to figure it out.

One day we’re chilling in the living room and a screw falls out of the light fixture and lands in my bfs lap. He starts laughing hysterically, so hard he can’t breathe. When he finally calms down enough to tell me what set him off he holds up the screw and says, “I finally get it. My dad is screwing with me!”

Never had a loose screw since.

Footsteps

So as a youngster me and my brother were staying up late playing video games since we didn’t have school the next morning. It was maybe 3am when we decided to shut it down and get in bed. My room is at the end of the hall while my brothers was right next to mine. After we shut it off and put the controllers away we both hear these heavy slow footsteps coming from the kitchen. The kitchen was the only room without carpet so they sounded pretty ominous.

We gave each other a look and I called out down the hall “Dad?”. Well then the footstep sounds trailed back towards our laundry room and stopped. That’s also where our basement door is. Well we knew something wasnt right so we both start yelling for our mom and dad and they come rushing to us all sleepy and confused. And we frantically explain what we heard. My dad goes and checks it out and tells us that all the doors are still locked and closed and there wasnt anything showing anyone was in the house.

Plausible explanation could be that it was just a murderer that broke in and scurried off when we called out but I always wondered what if it was a murder ghost instead.

Night visitor

My dad told me the story of when he was just out of college and visited friends in California. This was just prior to the Night Stalker killings in the 80s. My mom stayed home because she was not feeling well (actually was pregnant with me). My dad was sleeping on his friend’s couch and heard someone walking around. He called out his friend’s name, then his roommate’s and the walking stopped. He heard a window close after that and then nothing.

It’s very possible someone had climbed in the back window, was in the house, and my 6’4″ 240lb college football player of a dad scared him off by calling out. It’s kind of a family dark joke that my dad scared Richard Ramirez away, but my mom hates thinking about it because the dates and location works out that it very well could have been him in his early years “trying it out” before he started killing.

My wife is here

Used to do hospice home care. People who are actively dying see shit. Thing is it’s almost ALWAYS friends or family who have passed before, angels or demons. Never, like, a random dog. Or a kid they never met. Or a plate of spaghetti.

The rational explanation: It’s cultural. Even if you’re not a believer, everyone hears stories about white light and beckoning relatives and anegls and demons. So that’s what people see when their oxygen levels drop and their bodies are shutting down and they start hallucinating.

The explanation that scares the fuck out of me: someone with one foot in this world and one in the next can see things I can’t. The scariest one was a man who seemed TOTALLY LUCID. Normally dying people don’t make tons of sense and will occasionally say something like “My son is here, do you see him?” and then back to nonsense. This guy was otherwise in his right mind – except he was telling me about his wife who was sitting at the end of his bed. And she had dyed her hair again, despite him always liking her natural grey, but at least she had on that blue dress she always looked so good in. He had a perfectly rational conversation with her about how he missed her but the doctors said he would see her soon and not to worry, he wasn’t scared, he knew he was a very old man and no one lives forever.

Part of me thinks he was just having a different experience of death/hallucination. Part of me thinks he was fucking with me. Part of me believes she was there, I just couldn’t see her because I’m not dying.

I always worried one day I WOULD be able to see what they saw? What then, huh?

Lock your doors

I lived in one of the oldest apartments in the town I was living in. Couldn’t sleep one night but eventually I must’ve dosed off as I started having an incredibly vivid dream of myself laying in bed – everything the exact same as in reality – except my door opened and a creepy old lady started ominously walking towards me. I woke up and freaked out. I always lock my door, but just to be sure, I went and checked it. It was unlocked.

In utero memory

When I was pregnant with my first I had the worst night terrors. One night I was having a night terror where aliens were hovering over the house and had taken me to the dining room where they laid me on the table and tried to remove the baby from my uterus. I never got back to sleep that night.

Never thought of it again until a few years later, my son was now 4. We are driving home from somewhere when he pipes up from the back seat,

“Hey Mom – do you remember the night the aliens tried to take me from your belly and you said no?”

The goose bumps were instant and the husband and I just looked at each other out of the corner of our eyes……….still freaks me out!

Grandfather

My grandfather was a truck driver and taught me everything I know about driving, especially in snow.

I used to work at a drugstore and one night, I was closing another store in our chain and we had a snow squall that unexpectedly dropped a few inches of snow in our area. I wasn’t very familiar with the area, and I had my mom’s car so I wasn’t used to the car either. The snow was still coming down and I couldn’t see, so I was creeping home and panicking as I saw cars spinning out all around me. All of a sudden, I saw a light in my passenger side-view mirror, and I turned my head and sitting in the passenger seat, plain as day, I saw my dead grandfather. I heard him say he knew that I wasn’t freaked out by a little snow, and then I heard his voice rattling off all the things he taught me about driving in the snow. I looked back towards the road, and then he was gone.

It was a calming experience, when I saw him it was more “okay, Pop’s here, I’m okay,” instead of “OMG you’re supposed to be dead WTF,” and I stopped panicking and got home without a problem. It was most likely just my brain/eyes/whatever playing tricks on me to get me to stop panicking, but to this day it still freaks me out.

Evil laughter

Me and my family woke up in the night to the sound of manic laughing. Like evil manic laughing. All of us heard it, it was coming from the attic. My dad being not superstitious or scared of anything was white as a sheet. He pulled the attic ladder down and went up to find an old Dairylea Cow alarm clock that had faulty sound randomly going off. Don’t believe any supernatural activity made it go off, just hearing a manic evil laugh in the middle of the night from the attic made us shit ourselves.

Someone watching me from the woods

One time, I drove back to college after Christmas but before the winter break was over, so I was the first of my roommates to get back to the house we were renting. Our house was in a pretty isolated spot on the outskirts of a town in upstate New York. I pulled into the driveway behind the house, went to the trunk and grabbed one of my bags and then ran inside because I had to use the bathroom so badly- I’d been one the road for over five hours. I was inside the house using the bathroom for maybe five minutes.

Afterwards, I went back outside to get the rest of my stuff from the car. And there were footprints in the snow all around it.

Now, as I said, I was alone in the middle of nowhere. The only set of footprints should’ve been mine from where I’d gotten out of the car on the driver’s side, walked to the trunk, and then walked to the back door. Yet now, there was another set of footprints circling the car, and then leading into the woods at the back of the property. It appeared that the footprints had originally come from the woods as well. I had left my trunk open when I was inside because I’d assumed I was alone, and nothing had been taken. But someone had seen me arrive, come out of the woods, circled my car, and returned to the woods.

I grabbed the rest of my shit, locked my car, ran into the house, and locked the doors.

Mountain cottage

Moved into a cottage on the mountain. My back yard was a tree line. The moon lit everything so beautifully well, it hardly seemed like night at all. I began having recurring dreams. It was the same dream every single time. In my dream I would see myself laying asleep in my bed and then It switched from third person view to first person view. In the dream, I awoke to a whispering female voice. The thirst hit me. In the dream it was unbearable. I would climb out of bed , open the French doors, and head to the kitchen sink to get a glass of water. As I neared the sink, the voice would get louder and louder but I still couldn’t make it out. It was as if it were a foreign language but not one that I had heard before nor since.

Then, standing in my kitchen and looking out the window right above the sink to the tree line in my back yard well lit by the moons light, the voice suddenly became clear. She said “the devil is in the woods”. At this point a shadow darted quickly behind the tree line. I would then wake up from my dream , standing in my kitchen in the exact spot that I was in the dream. This happened almost every week for the entire duration of time that I lived in that house. It also always happened close to or right at 3 A.M.

Ghost mom

I remember one time as a child, I was home on a Saturday morning. For a bit of context, back then, my mom would usually go into work on Saturday mornings and be home usually by 12 pm. Now back to the story, I was sitting on the couch watching tv. The time started approaching 12 which meant that my mom was almost home. I very vividly remember hearing a car door close, hearing the car lock, and my mom walking into the house calling my name. When i got up to go greet her, there was no one there. Still creeps me out.

The window

When I was younger my older cousin lived with us for a bit because she was having behavioral problems at home. My parents had to go at night to pick someone up from the airport so the left my brother and I with her. My brother and I were both in bed in my room at this point (I think it was a school night) and she was up in the other room doing homework or something. But she finished up so she comes into my room to lay down with us but as soon as she opens the door or house alarm starts going off.

She quickly shut the door and come over to me to tell me to be quiet before goin back to hold the door closed since it didn’t have a lock. My brother (who’s older than me by a year) then woke up very confused about what was going on. So the alarms going off were all scared out of our minds and we can’t even call for help because her phone was taken away and we were too young to have one.

Our only option is to get to one of the landlines. One in the kitchen and one in my parents bed room. So we all get ready and at the same time we all run to my parents room and lock their door. My cousin checks their bathroom and closet to make sure no one is hiding in there before calling my parents to let them know what’s happening. They say they’re only two minutes away so don’t worry. But let me tell you those were the worst two minutes of my life.

After all is said and done we find out through the alarm company that the window in my parents room is what tripped the alarm. AND THATS THE ROOM WE MOVED TO!!! To this day my parents are convinced she was just trying to sneak in a boyfriend or something but I’m certain someone was trying to rob the place or worse and got scared off by the alarm because of how completely terrified my cousin looked.

No!

Personally, I’ve had an extremely strange experience and I don’t know whether to chalk it up to my 12-year-old brain at the time, or if it actually was of the paranormal nature.

My best childhood friend used to live in this house that was technically two houses merged into one, both were very old. The first night that I ever slept over, he told me about how a woman who lived in one of the houses lost her mind one day and drowned her children in a basin in the back, many years ago.

It was around 4 A.M. and I woke up in the middle of the night needing a drink of water. I came out of his bedroom, passing the staircase that leads to the second floor on my right, and walked out into the kitchen. On my way back to his room, for some reason I stopped dead in my tracks at the foot of the stairs, which I hadn’t really been looking at in my haste to make it back to his room.

I turned my head to look at them, and instead of a staircase leading up to the second floor there was a set of stairs going downwards on an intense angle, into what looked like nothingness. It was pitch black.

I stood there for what felt like 20 minutes, just gazing into this abyss that was before me, that wasn’t there before. My brain didn’t even register it as strange.

That’s when I heard an ear piercing (I mean, it sounded like it came from inside of my head) woman’s voice scream “NO!”. Needless to say, I booked it back to his room and I haven’t really said anything about it since it happened. The weird thing is that I can remember it like it was yesterday, even though so many years have passed and I’ve probably forgotten about more important events since then.

Haunted living room

A couple of weeks ago, I was laying in bed trying to go to sleep and I hear my TV come on. I lay in bed a few seconds hoping to hear my fat ass cat jump off the coffee table. I get up and go out to the living room and said fat ass cat is posted up on a table by the window and nowhere near the TV remote.

The way my house is setup, my bedroom is behind the living room and my living room TV is perpendicular to the wall, not parallel.

So I walk up to the back of the tv and right when I get next to it, it shuts off. Glow of the screen disappears, sound stops. I am 100% freaked the fuck out so I unplug it.

I go lay back down in bed. My heart is still going thump thump thump and I’m trying my best to pretend everything is a-okay.

So I lay there a few more minutes and then I HEAR MORE GOD DAMN NOISE FROM THE LIVING ROOM. I am so freaked out. I get my stun baton out to go check out the new noise. Because I might be able to tase a poltergeist?

I poke my head into the living room. The tv definitely isn’t on. I listen for a few seconds and realize this noise is coming from my laptop. The laptop I haven’t opened in probably two weeks.

I lift the lid on it and utorrent has decided to open itself and start running pop-up ads. I mute the laptop, go back to bed, and lay in bed awake until 4 am.

In the morning I’m texting my boyfriend about it. He does so googling. Turns out almost dead tv remote batteries can send garbage signals that the tv will interpret as the on signal. I’ve had my tv since 2011 and the remote still has vizio branded batteries.

I still don’t have a good explanation for the laptop.

Cursed

In two cases, my wife and I had dinner at a restaurant that then burned down that same night.

One was a pizzeria that was next to a sport hall (indoor tennis courts). We had dinner there, then read the next morning that the whole building was destroyed.

A couple of years later, we were on vacation in Namibia and went with the whole tour group for dinner to Joe’s Beer House in Swakopmund. The next morning, our tour guide told us that the place burned to the ground after we left that night.

Will-o’-the-wisp

I once saw a will-o’-the-wisp. It scared me shitless.

For those who don’t know, it’s a light seen at night in desolate areas of the countryside, hovering in the distance like a ghostly lantern. It’s one of the most widespread legends in the world, having many different versions in a variety of cultures, and it’s believe to be a ghost or a demon.

Scientifically speaking, the most plausible explanation regards to the decomposition of certain chemicals in a corpse (often cattle) which creates phosphoric acid, which can create a light.

However, when you’re in the middle of nowhere in the dead of night, fight or flight gives very few fucks about science.

Dark shadows

When I was about 14 for I started sleeping on the floor in my room (it helped with my back pains). I finished watching a movie on my laptop and for some reason I was looking at the light coming from the gap under the door to my bathroom. Then I saw two shadows pass, like two slow foot steps. There was no one in there. It scared the living shit out of me I started crying. I got up to check the bathroom but it was empty aside from a few beetles that had gotten through the hole In the fly screen. In all honesty that’s probably what it was – just some bugs over a light. Had me sleeping in my sisters bed for a month.