50 True Stories From People Who Have Lived In A Haunted House

50 True Stories From People Who Have Lived In A Haunted House

These people from Ask Reddit have lived in a haunted house and survived to tell the tale.

1. Lived in a house from 1938. I would wake up and sit up in bed every single night at 2:59-3:01am. I thought I saw something move quickly out of the corner of my eye on occasion but assumed it was me being sleepy/bad vision without my glasses.

One night the curtain on my closet moved. I pulled the lamp chain and the room lit up. My husband thought I was crazy. I saw nothing so I pulled the chain again to turn off the lamp. I tried to sleep again but a few minutes later I heard the lamp chain swinging against the lamp base. When I reached out to see if I felt it swinging and to stop it, something cold touched me. It didn’t feel like the shape of a hand or finger but like a wet washcloth.

We moved soon after that due to relocating but I stopped waking up every morning at the new house and haven’t had any weird feelings since.

2. I watched one of our cats being pulled backwards about 5 feet by her tail. She was walking through the dining area and suddenly was sliding backwards, as if someone was pulling her by her tail. Only there wasn’t. She freaked out and tried to run, but couldn’t immediately as something held on for a brief second before letter her go. I tend to think that was the handy work of a 4 or 5 year old girl ghost who hangs out and she just wanted to play with the kitty.

3. One night when I was about 12 I was drifting off to sleep then I clearly heard a baby laugh for 1-2 seconds. Presumed it was just my imagination and went to sleep. The next morning my sister mentioned that she’d been woken up by the sound of a baby crying. I don’t really believe in ghosts but I’ve never been able to explain that.

4. I lived in a house for about 5 years that was haunted, but not in a malicious way. In a ‘shitty roommate’ kind of way. I’d come home to the windows on the second floor being open when it was raining. To food containers being open in the fridge that I hadn’t touched yet.

The worst was that the ‘ghost’ hated clocks. She hated them. I had antique cukoo clocks that had worked for 50 years that would just stop. Brand new wall clocks that ate through batteries like it was candy. My watch ended up on the floor one morning, the crystal shattered, even though I knew I slept with it on. The one that pissed me off the most was that I got a brand new kit-kat clock for Christmas – and the bitch threw it off the wall. I was cooking and out of corner of my eye saw the cat freaking FLY. Turned around and it was across the kitchen. Broken. It was brand new!

Man, she was a bitch.

5. I am typically a skeptic and can usually apply logic to a situation and figure out a plausible explanation. When I bought my house, they had to disclose reports of paranormal activity concerning the house. I thought “Yay, whatever” but entertained it in good humor even addressing said ghost by name.

There is nothing concrete that I can tell you. Nothing hovering in the air. No furniture appearing on the ceiling. Nothing that shows as any type of blip on anyone’s typical paranormal radar.

However, the number of times I have had to rationalize an event, or come up with explanations for why or how something happened, borders on obsessive.

  • The typical footsteps upstairs, children laughing. (Before I had children). Knocking on walls or doors. Hey, it’s an old house, creaks, groans, hot water pipes pinging, etc… it all happens.

  • Light bulbs smashed on the floor having removed themselves from the metal base.

  • One plant in particular that would get overturned often, on one occasion ending up halfway across the room

  • The stereo turning on at random times of the day, almost always to classical music. So frequently, that I would always keep one classical CD in a random slot in the CD player just to see if that is the one that gets played.

  • Various “lost” objects showing up in highly noticeable places. Like how can you lose your watch in the middle of the completely cleared kitchen table? Yet, after half an hour of searching, there it is.

But the ones that get me the most are the ones where I am completely stumped.

  • On the same day, every year, is the smell of something burning. It can be detected in only two specific but unrelated parts of the house. You can even define the limits of where you can smell it by walking around. After about two hours it goes away. Until the next year.

  • The other one is the presence of “hot-spots” in the house. Not by temperature. But when you stand in a certain place, you feel something. This has been witnessed by people aware as well as unaware of the phenomenon itself. And some of the spots have a direction associated with them. When you stand in one, you feel compelled to face a certain way. I watched a police officer get completely freaked as he turned in mid-sentence to stare at the wall, looking it up and down, then took two solid steps backwards while looking at the floor and when he turned around, he was visibly shaken.

But hey, no spinning chandeliers or dead girls climbing out of television sets, so I’m good.

6. My son, about 4 years old at the time, would jabber away in his room by himself. One day, my wife asked him who he was talking to. He said he was talking with Alice and that she used to feed the men who lived here. He went on to say that she died because she couldn’t breathe. Our house used to be a boarding house before World War II.

7. My sister and then four year old niece moved into a townhouse apartment complex (niece is 14 now and still remembers this vividly). Ran into my sister’s room not long after screaming about the man in her room yelling at her. My sister jumps out of bed and searches around for anyone or anything out of place. Finds nothing. Doors and windows still locked. Happens a couple more times over the next few nights. Niece doesn’t want to sleep there. Won’t go into her room. Etc. So my sister is chatting with one of the other moms at the complex playground one day and the other lady mentions how creepy that is considering the guy that overdosed in that apartment a few years back. (Apparently his sons room was now my nieces room). So my mom does some digging and found the guys name, which lead to his obituary. Pulled up the picture from the obituary, and called my niece into the computer room. She got half a step into the room when she saw the photo on the monitor and ran out screaming about the man. Have absolutely no explanation as to how she recognized this guy’s picture.

8. So my husband and I rented a really old house. We had to fix it up a bit before my son came home from the hospital. (He was very premature. In NICU for almost 5 months.) We took down the wallpaper and painted, took down the popcorn ceiling, the whole 9 yards. The basement was very unfinished and vandalized by the teenagers that lived there before. Swastikas everywhere. We didn’t bother finishing it because we didn’t really need the room. I went down there once out of the year we lived there. Creepy feeling. Like someone was watching you, pissed. Sometimes that creepy feeling would come upstairs. I would give it a week or so thinking it was in my head and then I would sit in the car with the baby while my husband burned sage to clear it out. He says the feeling while he did so was heavy. Very angry and he would see figures coming at him through the smoke. There were countless experiences there. The 2 that stick out in my head are as followed.

  1. I was showering and the baby was in a little bouncer seat in the doorway. I open the curtain and just as I do the can of air freshener that was sitting on the back of my toilet goes flying twords my baby. If the door wasn’t just slightly shut it would have nailed him. I went full on bat shit crazy. I started yelling telling them if they are gonna mess with anyone mess with me. He is just a baby, blah blah blah. As I’m doing so the detachable shower head I had went flying off at me, hit the end of his rope and swings down. Shut me right up.

  2. My husband and I were in bed. My son in his room right down the very small hallway, fast asleep. We had a baby monitor because he was on oxygen and therefore on a pulse ox monitor so I wanted to be able to hear his alarm go off. So my husband and I were laying in bed together. We usually will talk for a while and then say our good nights and fall asleep. We say our good nights this particular night and not even 5 minutes later we both hear, clear as day, a little girl laughing in the baby monitor. My husband jumped up out of bed ready to kick some ass. But I already knew no one was there. I was stunned. Literally. Couldn’t move until finally I fell asleep. … I do not miss that place.

9. Hearing lots of things – screams in the basement, a child and older man laughing when I’m in the shower, furniture being dragged around on my porch, music playing randomly with glasses clinking and groups of people chatting.

I’ve had lights turn on when I leave the house briefly. This happened for years.

I’ve had important documents go missing over the weekend and then when I walk back into the room to search for them for the 3rd time they are all neatly arranged in a stack on the center of the table.

All my cabinets would be open when I got home.

I would feel what felt like people sitting on my bed at night and then getting up shortly after.

My blinds would start shaking.

There’s some more and a weird potential alien story that I won’t get into. But yeah, creepy stuff. Hated that house.

10. When I was around 9-10 years old, I remember waking up to see a large shadow stood at the foot of my bed

I was living with my dad at the time, he has a very large (5 floors) terrace house built in the 1800s, every so often there would be an unexplainable event happen, such as footsteps when there’s no one there or voices

On the night this happened, it was just my dad and I in the house, my sister was staying with my mum at the time.

I woke up and noticed the door to my room was wide open, I normally sleep with it closed. I then became aware of a large (around 7ft tall) shadow-like figure watching me from the end of the bed.

When the figure noticed me it seemed to ‘melt’ into the floor and the door to my room slammed shut, understandably I was slightly traumatized by the whole experience

Asked my dad the next day if he was in my room and he denied any knowledge of the event (he’s not the type of person that likes jokes)

11. Green Eyes. Lived in turnquist in MD, plane went down in the area killing 300. Lighting struck the fuel or something. Well the house was out of code and electrical was always fritzy. I would go down the fix the power, and these eyes would show up. Green floating eyes. Green like mountain dew and all of the eye is green not just the iris. My dog would not go down there with me to fix the power, and when the power came back up the eyes would be gone. The eyes never appeared the same place.

12. I lived in a big 1840s colonial house with three of my friends for a while. It was set back in 80+ acres of state wildlife property and it was a gorgeous house.

The bedrooms were all upstairs and all lined up down the hall. Our third night in the house, right about 30 minutes after we had all sort of called it a night, my doorknob rattled, like someone was fiddling with it. Then I heard the door next to mine rattle, and the next, and the next, all the way down the hall one at a time.

The next morning one of my housemates asked why I was messing with the doors, since she had asked the two guys in the house and neither of them knew what she was talking about.

One night I woke up with an intense urge to get out of bed, like my brain screaming at me to get up. I laid still for a while thinking maybe I had been woken up by a noise but it was around 3 am and dead quiet. I went into the hallway and as soon as I walked out into the hall all of my roommates opened their doors and came out too. We were all woken up but no one heard anything, and they had the same urgent get up feeling I did.

We just shrugged and went back to sleep.

Weird things would happen there. Strange objects would show up in the basement or crawlspace, like old old suitcases or a kids rocking chair, once a vase, just random stuff.

You would occasionally hear footsteps running down the bedroom hall and down the stairs if you were in the living room below.

I could go on. That house was really strange. NEVER felt threatened, just weird.

13. From ages 5-17 i lived in a house with activity. It was all pretty basic run of the mill stuff: footsteps, voices, lights turning on and off, doors opening and shutting, batteries draining, etc. If we started renovating, which we almost always were, they’d get more active and start throwing stuff. I got used to it. They didn’t hurt us, so we just let it go. Even my father started believing after a while.

But the worst thing they ever did was while we were moving in. I was 5. My friend and I were playing in the only room that was finished in the basement while my parents were moving the stuff in. My friend’s parents were helping.

Suddenly, the door to the room slammed shut. No wind, no draft, no explanation. Then the lock engaged with a click, and someone started laughing. We were stuck in the room for two hours.

14. Living in Chicago last year in a top floor apartment of a three-flat style building. The kitchen at the back of the apartment had a door leading to a staircase down to the basement, connecting all the apartments and to outside.

My housemate was cooking, she left the back door open as we had no AC or windows big enough for ventilation. As I walked into the kitchen she ran to the back door and slammed it shut as I heard a woman’s voice saying “hello” over and over coming from the stairs. We stood behind our door listening and we could hear someone was coming up the stairs really slowly, the steps creaking all the way up to our back door. Then they reached the top, turned around and went back down again.

After 5 minutes of being quite freaked out, another housemate and I slowly went down to the basement with some makeshift weapons and checked it out. Looked around and inside everything possible and calmly saying hello back. Nothing there. A lady did live in the basement apartment but would never have any reason to come upstairs to the top, and was nowhere to be seen either. The landlord then let us know his mother haunts the whole building.

15. I lived in an older home for about 5 or so years. My step dad, who knew the man who had lived there before us, told me he hung himself in the attic. I honestly didn’t think much of it, that is until I heard the footsteps.

Like clockwork, every night at 3 a.m. I would heart footsteps walking along the length of the attic, which would go over my room. The steps were heavy and you could clearly tell the pace was at a normal walking speed. It sounded like a man contemplating something, thinking about his next move. If it was really the former owner, were those his final moments being played out every night before his fateful decision? Who can say?

There were other stories, but those footsteps, which went on for years, still freak me out.

16. Many different things have happened but this one sticks out the most. It was my mom who had it happen, not myself directly.

Backstory: The house we lived in was photographed in the 1860s in a book in the local library. It was shown to be one of the first houses to have a radio and some sort of headphone device on top of someone’s head.

The story: I go on my merry way to school one day. My mom is home alone cleaning up after breakfast not too soon after I leave. So she is doing her thing when she begins to hear music upstairs. She thinks to herself that I had left the radio on. She is pissed because we are poor and try to save every penny we can on our electric bill. She gets to the top of the stairs which has an open railing. She looks to the right, and there is a pair of legs standing there tapping feet to the music. She didn’t even stay to look up for a body. She noped the fuck out as the music stopped and the legs began to turn to her.

My mom made me sleep with her for like a week. I was 15 at the time. I’ve had numerous experiences in that house though. It made a skeptical, big, burly construction worker with sun kissed skin turn pale as a ghost. Shit is no joke.

17. My ex wife was staying at her grandparents house which used to be a church. All the cousins have stories from this place, but my wife’s was an odd one. They are all listening to the radio one night when the window drapes start moving a lot and nothing but static started coming from the radio. The girls freaked out and started screaming. As soon as they started screaming it stopped and a voice came out of the radio saying “sorry to have bothered you, I’ll leave you alone now”… Drapes went back in place, music comes back on.

18. Used to have regular repeating nightmares where you know someone’s in the house, you walk down the hall, find your family murdered in the kitchen (the old kitchen, before remodeling), and run for the door with only a faint chance of escape before getting caught. Years after we moved out I learned that my brother’d been having the same exact nightmare. Neither of us had ever talked about it before.

19. Rebuilt 100 year old mansion. One night, both my wife and I heard a clear voice say “LISTEN”. Empty house, except us. Very spooky. Later found out my uncle knew the family that had lived there decades ago and the father committed suicide by jumping off the 3rd story balcony. It was NOT questionable. we both heard it and quizzed each other as to what exactly each heard.

20. Too many to tell. But I’ll tell the one that fucked with me most. I work night shift so I sleep during the day (duh) Bf and MIL went out for the day. I know for a fact no one was home. I woke up, laid there for a second. Groaned and stretched, and a man’s voice groaned back right beside my head. I noped out of there pretty fast, checked the house, home alone. Fun fact; the previous owner was an elderly man who died in the front room. He likes to shut and lock our doors when we’re not paying attention.

21. My mom worked 3-11 and usually got groceries and what not on a Friday or Saturday night when she knew I’d be home to help bring them in. I was playing video games and she called the house phone to let me know she was almost there. Normal.

I went and waited for her to pull in the driveway and was noticed a woman that, was nobody I knew, standing behind me in the reflection from the light in the kitchen. She stared at me for probably 5 seconds before walking into the adjacent hallway leading to my bedroom. I asked my mom about it and she said it was probably my grandmother and to not worry about it.

Yeah. Okay.

22. As a kid I would make stupid videos with my friends, and sometimes I like to rewatch them and cringe at our shenanigans.

Quite recently I rewatched a video a friend and I made in 08/09. The video consists of our usual fucking about, halfway through the video there is a short 2 second clip, wherein my friend is flailing a toy sword around and screaming in my room. My friend is sitting with his back to the open door. A dark figure is seen walking down the hallway past the open door. The figure is only visible a split second, but there is no doubt something passed by. The thing is I remember vividly being home alone that day.

My father always told me a guy burned to death in that hallway, and my mother swore she sometimes heard coughing at night. I remember the hallway always smelling faintly of smoke, even though no one in my family smoked.

Idk kinda spooky

23. Several people, myself included, have seen or felt a presence which we have affectionately called the man in white. in order here are the stories:

  • My brother was cooking with his girlfriend in the kitchen, and from the periphery he saw a white figure pass in front of the kitchen door, as walking through the hallway. I was in my room, he asked me if I had passed through there, I hadn’t.

  • A maid was cleaning the bathroom and she felt in a really intense manner that something was looking at her from the bathroom’s door. She told my mom about it really affected by it.

  • A different maid was walking through the hallway that connects the bedroom, on her way to clean the bathroom that’s on the way to my room. When she got to the bathroom, the door was open and saw a figure standing in front of the toilet. She assumed it was me peeing with the door open and quickly turned away, and continued on to the bedrooms to tidy them up. I was in my room so when she got to it and saw me she turned around to the bathroom to check if there was someone. She screamed and sat at my bed pale and with goosebumps when she notices it wasn’t there anymore.

  • While I was in that same bathroom brushing my teeth I saw a shadow pass through the hallway. Granted, I don’t give my story much importance because it might have been nothing, and just my brain forming patterns.

  • My mother’s sneakers fell to the floor from on top of the washing machine (it wasn’t turned on).

My mother even brought an uncle of her’s who is a priest to cleanse the house. That was before the second maid and I saw him.

I know these stories are pretty mild, but the man in white is pretty chill. He’s become a recurrent joke at our house. “The dogs are looking fixedly at the hall? The man in white.” “I lose my socks? The man in white.” “Someone feels a presence somehow? Chill, man in white.”

24. My house was abandoned for two years before we bought it. When we went for the viewing there was a bedroom closet that was pad locked shut; think barn door latch with a lock through it. Realtor said they had no key and we couldn’t open it unless we bought it. Well, we ended up buying it and priority #1 was opening that door! After a few minutes with a pry door we get in to reveal a child’s play area. Bright colored walls, glow in the dark stick on stars and planets cover the ceiling, checkered tile for the floor; no lights, no air vents, no windows. My little brother chimes in “whelp, this must be where they kept the kids before they died!”

Fast forward through 3mos of renovations to when we move in and are live there. The loft area has a daylight sensing, motion sensor light as there was no easy way to install a switch. The light comes on by itself, all hours of the day. No matter what way we position the sensor, it randomly trips and we jokingly shout out “will you darn kids quit running in the house!” That’s usually the last time it comes on that day.

A year in to living there we have turned the creepy closet bedroom into our computer room. We leave for work at the same time each day but arrive home about two hours apart. I get a call from a very confused wife one day asking why I had come back home after we had left together. I did not go back home. Upon returning from work she was greeted by our computer room chair, in our kitchen. The chair had to travel through two doorways, down a hallway and a flight of stairs to reach the kitchen. Seemingly by itself. We thought it odd but blamed the dead kids. Those heathenistic kids!

About six months after that we have our last big doozy of an event for awhile. We go to bed one night to a house in perfect order. Upon waking, we find that all of our kitchen knives have been removed from the butcher block. In their place, all of our butter knifes. The sharp, dangerous knives have been placed behind the kitchen sink instead. We neither one had moved them. We both were pretty freaked out and spent the whole day away from the house trying to sort it out. We decided we were being unreasonable and went home to forget the ordeal. Ghosts aren’t real and there weren’t actually any kids who died there….

Talking to the neighbor one day and he confirms that no kids died in the house; a grown man had. The room with the creepy closet was the room where the previous owners brother committed suicide. When his wife left and they failed to work it out he couldn’t handle life anymore, cut his wrists and bled out. The previous owner kept living there afterwards but upon finding out he was foreclosed on, attempted suicide in the same room. His children found him and he lived.

Later that year our family grows. The rooms all get shuffled to make room for baby. That creepy closet room? It gets emptied. The weird things? All stopped happening. To this day (9yrs later) that room is only used for storage. My 4yr old son plays in there occasionally but even in the day time with all the light the window let’s into the bedroom, he turns every light on. When asked why, he just said “it makes it less weird to play there”.

25. The house I grew up in had a slightly strange design in that all the bedrooms were clumped together at one end of the house and the kitchen and living room were at the other end. The two areas were connected by a long, narrow hallway that had a bathroom in the middle and approximately 900 closets on either side. My bedroom door was at the end of the hall, with two other bedroom doors facing each other across the hall on either side. Basically this meant that if you were sitting in our living room you could look straight down the hallway to my bedroom door.

Now, lots of strange and frightening things happened in that house, but the one thing that we could never rationalize away or lie to ourselves about was the darkness at the end of the hall. Like I said above, the hallway was very long and narrow, and it was also paneled in dark wood, so it was pretty dark down there. But with the living room lights on there was always enough light to see down the hall and make out my bedroom door. But sometimes we’d be sitting in the living room and get the feeling that we were being watched, or that something was about to happen.

When that would come over us, the end of the hallway would be completely blacked out. It was like someone dropped a curtain over the end of the hall. You could see part of the way down, and then there was just blackness. When this would happen, our three little dogs, god bless ’em, would go to the mouth of the hallway and sit in a line across it, staring down into the darkness. Sometimes they’d bark a little, or growl, but mostly they just sat and stared. Once in a while one of them would get brave enough to walk down the hall, but they never got more than halfway to the darkness before they’d stop and back up. They would walk backwards up the hall, never turning their back on whatever they were looking at.

After a little while the oppressive feeling would lift, the darkness would disappear, and the dogs would wander off. This didn’t happen often, but compared to all the “normal” spookiness in that house (things disappearing, stuff flying off shelves, strange voices or breezes, etc) that was the one thing we could never convince ourselves was just in our heads.

26. When I was a kid about 8 or 9 years old, I had a tv stand in front of my window. The lights from the street always were on so in the dark I could easily make out the outline of where my TV was. I started seeing a shadow figure of a girl standing right next to my TV. I could make out her figure so clear. Hair and everything. I spent nights just looking at her. i couldn’t even sleep. One night I got sick of it and threw a pillow at her. As soon as I did I put my head under the other pillow. I have it a couple minutes and looked up and she was right next to me at the edge of my bed. I screamed so loud and my parents came in and turned on the lights. A few days later my little sister told me that she has been seeing a little girl in her room. I never told my little sister about my experience prior to that. Weird.

27. I was around sixteen when this happened. I happened to lay in bed, reading something. The room at first would feel normal. Then it started to feel really ‘icy. Not that the room got cold, but just the feeling it gave me if that makes sense. It felt really uncomfortable. Next it would feel as if something/somebody just stared at you. There wasn’t nobody there, nor did I see a thing. But just the feeling that something looked at you hate filled was enough for me. Often I got the feeling: leave the room. So I did and then just played a video game of some sort. The ‘thing’ had left the room after about an hour or so. This happened about three times.

In the same home (flat really) three other things happened that were weird:

The first was a shadow “person” sneaking along the walls of my bedroom during the day.

Second, We had a dog, a small one named DJ. Think something along the size of a Fox Terrier and you’ve got it. One day I came to collect something from my room. It was during the day and DJ followed me in. I heard a deep growling from under the bad. At first, I thought: Must’ve been the dog. But I already knew that DJ wasn’t capable of making this deep of an noise. It sounded either like a really big dog or a man doing his best and kinda scary growling impression. This happened only once, but the experience just stuck with me.

Another weird thing with the dog was the time he was afraid to come to the living room. Next to my bedroom there was a small room, we used it as a computer room. DJ was in there at the time and I heard him whimpering and pacing. Even growling lowly at a “thing” that was in the hallway. I called him, but he didn’t budge. I had to come and pick him up and then remove him from the room.

They all happened at the same flat. I lived there a few years with my mom after the divorce. Things happened, and I left her home to live with my dad. She moved a few months later, but I think she was the one that carried this “thing” with her. At my dad, a few small things happened but nothing like the experiences with my mother.

28. Moved from the US to the UK and our parents bought an old beat up house. It still had lead pipes for the water. Nightmare all on its own. Anyway work proceeded on the house whilst we lived there. We started seeing bright lights in the corners of rooms at night. Foot steps on floor boards, the house had carpet. I was about 6 at the time and started getting woken up in the night by a little girl, who would dance on my chest of drawers for me. I was fricken terrified. My mum just fobbed it off as me dreaming. Workmen complained of strange things happening like tools being moved and odd feeling like being watched. After about a year of this my eldest sisters friend stayed over night. She woke the whole house up screaming, saying a little girl had been in her room, she had apparently pulled her from the bed. The friend left the house and refused to ever come back. Mum decided she might need to do something about it and got some advice. He suggested my mum and the whole family should treat the presences as part of the family. So when we got home we shout “hi we’re home, did you have a good day?” Over time the house settled and we didn’t get anymore trouble. We also found out a little girl did die in the house of asthma. My parents still live there and it is a beautiful homely place now.

29. A little backstory. Growing up, my brother and I lived with our single mother. The house was a little 500 square foot home, but we were young so it wasn’t a huge deal. My mom remarried, and the newly weds decided to tear down the old house and build a ranch on the land. Strange, but explainable, things started happening after we moved back in.

One of the strangest things to happen was when my brother and I were in the house alone. We were hanging out at an island in the kitchen, talking about what teenage boys talk about, when I hear the faintest whisper of someone saying my brothers name. Probably just hearing things. About 30 seconds later, a little louder, my brothers name again. He was talking when I heard the second whisper, and he seemed to hear it too because he stopped what he was saying briefly. Finally, about 15 seconds after the second interruption, clearly and angrily, a raspy voice says his name. We looked at each other and he asked, “Did someone just say my name?” I told him I’d heard it more than once. He said “three times, right?” We grabbed our coats and went to get Burger King.

30. So I used to live in a big house (6 Bedrooms, 4 bath, basement, etc.) by myself. I was there as a hiring perk and to look after the place for my boss who lived out of state but owned the home, one of those win-win situations. The first couple of month were fine, but when winter came I started hearing things coming from the second floor. (I lived pretty much exclusively on the 1st floor) It started with little bumps and bangs coming from above where I had my computer set up and progressed to distinct footsteps coming and going across the 2nd floor.

I had been up to the second floor to check up on it from time to time and I knew that there were unfinished areas up there. One place always stuck out- an unfinished room that was a sort of walk-in closet for one of the upstairs bedrooms. It was attached to the garage attic (complete unlit). It was open when I went up to investigate the noises. I shut the door- and locked it.

Two nights later, more noises. Footsteps- leading from unfinished room to the bathroom- then nothing. The worst part- the door. The door that led to the unfinished room would not stay closed or locked. I tried everything. Eventually I pushed the bed up against the door to keep it from opening. That seemed to work , a few months went by without the door coming open, but I would find it unlocked all the time.

As time passed- I would hear noises all over the house. Mostly footsteps, but the occasional THUMP with no explanation. I cannot explain how horrifying it is to hear little taps up and down the hall from the other side of a bathroom door during your morning shower.

I eventually moved out- but another employee moved in to take my place. His stay there only lasted about a month. The story he told me is that he was shaving one morning before work an d he heard a SLAM like someone dropped a heavy stack of books right outside his bedroom door, then heavy footsteps like someone running down the hall. He won’t stay there anymore and no one in the company will live in the house.

31. My 3yo daughter talks about a guy called Mr. Longneck and says creepy stuff about it.

I’ll begin by saying I’m personally more on the side of a skeptic frame of mind with any paranormal experience, but enough things have happened in the last year to make me at least question that and entertain the possibility that this is legit and not just my daughter’s active imagination. These events have occurred only in the house my husband and I bought in June of 2017, which was built in the 1920’s.

First, in October of 2017, I was laying her down for bed, in the dark, with only moonlight lighting the bedroom. She pointed across the room and asked, “Mom, who’s that guy?” I looked for a toy or something she could be referring to but saw nothing, so I asked, “What guy, honey?” She responded that he was “right there” and gestured toward the closed bedroom door. Still curious, I asked her what he was doing, in case I could piece together some recent episode of pretend play or a toy she commonly talked about. She said he was hiding. I asked if he was scared. She said, “No, he’s hiding.” CREEPY. During this whole exchange, she was calm and chipper, not scared. What made it strange was that she was 2 at the time and didn’t really engage in pretend play or storytelling at that point, and as I mentioned, no toys were in sight.

From there we just had a funny toddler story to tell our friends and family that we affectionately named That Guy. This is the umbrella name we generally use for any other “episodes” or weird stuff that happens around the house – That Guy is pulling a prank.

Next, in Jan or Feb of 2018, I was again laying her down for bed along with her then 6 month old brother. We were doing the usual cuddle up night-night talk, when she said something along the lines of, “Now it’s time for bed. Just me and you and him and her.” My skeptic mind would argue that “him” could easily have been her little bro, but at the time she was still adjusting to having a sibling and rarely mentioned him, and he wasn’t included in any of her talk that we were just having. What really was strange, was “her”. Who’s “her”? The only other female in the house is our cat and she wasn’t in the room at the time. Also, no toys were in bed with us and none were in the near vicinity of her bed that she could have been talking about.

A little later that spring, a new name came into conversation – Mr. Longneck. Short back story: my daughter has this weird thing where she likes touching necks. Sometimes it’s cuddly, sometimes it’s when she’s playing. We can’t really explain it other than kids do weird stuff sometimes, and it started before we moved into this house. Anyway, she was getting put down for a nap and was a little high strung. She was doing her usual neck grabbing thing and suddenly did it a little tougher than usual (but not enough to hurt), and said in a growly voice, “Mr. Longneck. Mr. Longneck!” I had never heard her use this name and it isn’t a character in any YouTube or Netflix show she watches, so I asked who Mr. Longneck was. She just kind of giggled it off and was asleep 10 minutes later. This was when I started getting creeped out a bit by her stories.

In April of 2018, my husband found a time capsule in one of our heating vents and we spent the afternoon looking through it. There had been a fire in our home in 2009, which we knew about and in which no one was hurt. During the renovation after the fire, the owners at the time found a BUNCH of old stuff in the walls and included it with some pictures of the fire and a couple newspaper clippings. Among the “old” stuff was a pack of pearl buttons, some store catalogs from the 1940’s, and a small notebook with some handwritten names inside. I presume these are the names of the original inhabitants, and I plan to find the book again and look up the history behind the names inside as well as the home. After all this, my husband and I are suspicious that if there IS something paranormal going on, maybe these objects are keeping some energy here or something.

I know this is long, but we’re almost done here. In about October 2018, I was driving to my mothers house with only my son and daughter in the car. Along the way, daughter, now 3, asked from the back seat, “Mom, is that grandpa??” I said “Where?” She pointed to the empty front seat and said “Right there!” I told her grandpa was at home, as he had just recently moved in with us due to health issues. There was no one around on the street or sidewalks for her to point at, either.

Now, there have been minor other events that have happened, but these were the biggest ones to describe in detail. I’ve posted this in another subreddit as well, and received advice to engage her further in conversation when it comes up. While we have to an extent, to encourage her to be comfortable talking about it, I never pushed it, in order to avoid leading the conversation or pulling answers out of her that she would offer just to appease the conversation. One day, though, and a few times after, I just decided to ask her about it. Below is a brief detail of what she has said in roughly the past month.

Me: Can you tell me about That Guy? Daughter: What Guy? M: You don’t remember That Guy? D: No. M: What about Mr. Longneck? D: Oh! Yeah! face lights up M: Can you tell me about him? And various other questions lead to…

Mr. Longneck is a grown up. He wears “a monster” clothes and a hat. He is nice but also scary. He says Trick or Treat but doesn’t wear a costume. He lives far away, and goes with Santa in the sky to his house where he belongs.

She says he comes to our house at nap time, which she no longer has but was generally the afternoon. He knocks on our big door (patio door), walks through the kitchen. These were her exact words and while she was telling me this, was pointing a path from the door to one of our living room windows.

I asked what he says or does, and among a few things, she mentioned he played in the kitchen with her with the “spinny cow toy”. This is one of those fisher price pull string farm toys. She NEVER plays with it, I rarely see it, and have never seen it in the kitchen. The specific details of this piqued my interest for sure.

I also asked if he ever brought a friend, to see if I could follow up on the “her” mentioned earlier. He brings a friend, she is a little girl, not a grown up, and “has yellow hair like me”.

She is never scared of these talks, although she withdraws from the conversation when I ask about his neck and why it is long.

So that’s pretty much it. Thanks if you read the whole thing. I welcome any comments and advice. We HAVE saged the house, but quite a while ago and plan to do it again. I think we will probably also get rid of the old items from the walls after we find out more about them, which is sad because it’s the home’s history. Looking forward to hearing what you guys have to say!

32. So this is currently happening in the house I’m living in, in NJ. A week or so ago at 3am I was just getting up to turn the heating off and potter around after falling asleep on the sofa. I was yawning and rubbing my eyes a lot and was just about to get up to go to bed when I realized this noise getting louder and louder, like you don’t realize it’s happening until it’s super loud. I suddenly realize and turn my head around to see the kettle boiling by itself. You have to push a button down and it glows blue, which was highlighting the shadow of the button that had definitely been pressed. I freak out thinking I’ve lost time and it was me but I’ve forgotten soil rationalize and before I can stop myself the words ‘But I don’t want tea or coffee’ come out of my mouth and at which point the kettle clicks off. Like I literally heard the switch. It wasn’t at the end of the boil either, I’m English and so used to 220 watt outlets which do everything twice as fast so I know it was in the middle of the boil. Also as soon as I said that I felt guilty like I shouldn’t have been scared. Like it was a friendly offer. Two days later I was with a friend at the dining room table, both of us at least 5 foot and round the corner from the kettle. Nobody else in the house, when it starts boiling again. My friend rushes over and points out the button has been pushed. So much relief came over me that I wasn’t insane and I explain to my friend that this happened to me at night. A few nights ago I was lying in bed and could hear a conversation, at 4am, no one around, neighbors are 20 feet away either side. Then the kettle starts boiling. I’m pissed, so I literally say out loud ‘please stop boiling the kettle, we have people asleep upstairs’ and it clicked off again. This could just be a faulty kettle and coincidence, I don’t believe in ghosts whatsoever and have never seen or felt anything before. Its just freaky, but it’s not scary. Only my first instinct. I feel as though someone is trying to take care of me, like when you were sick off school and lying in bed and your mum or dad would take care of you and bring you soup and stuff. Very very strange.

33. As a kid I saw a lot of shadows, heard a lot of weird noises, the usual. My sister who lived on the 3d floor came down to my room a lot at night to stare at me (sleepwalking) and sometimes slept in my room and forgot about it the next night. The doors creaked and opened and closed on themselves a lot. Which can happen in an old house due to draft. Now this is all stuff that any kid can imagine due to the suggestive state an old house can give a person; nothing really scary. Also the alarm went off a lot during the night; triggered by air?

One time; my parents were in China for business. Me and my brother and sisters slept at other places because my parents were away for quite a time. I had to go to hockey practice but I forgot some gear so me and my friend went to get it.

The house was engulfed in darkness en very silent. As we walked out of my room; we her footsteps in the attic. Two of my siblings had their bedrooms there; so I thought one of them was at home. I shouted at them which made the footsteps stop. After 5 seconds or so we heard the footsteps coming closer to the stairs and actually setting foot on the very old wooden creaky steps. One step at a time. I actually felt a “weight” setting foot in front of me. Very strange. But I saw nothing. Nevertheless; we were 12 so we noped the fuck out of there.

Outside my friend had a total nervous breakdown because he saw some scary face / form that looked like an alien to him. He never set foot in my house again.

I credit it all to the creepiness of the house; but that one night with my friend still gives me the chills.

34. So 2 weeks before we moved, my dad and I toured our house and I noticed this guy was painting the water heater which I thought was weird af but I was like 10 so whatever. Anyway we moved in on a Wednesday and my parents let me stay home from school until the following Monday and preoccupied me with coloring books and a new doll house. In my brand new crayons pack, there literally wasn’t a blue crayon, like it was a 64 pack but there were only 63 crayons in it. One day I went downstairs into the basement and my blue crayon was next to the hot water heater and scribbled on there it said “hi fitnurse6 —Kevin” I was so confused. I started school and my new classmates were like “omg do you live in Kevin’s house?! Your house is gonna be haunted!!” It turned out that Kevin was a little 8 year old boy that lived in our house prior to us and he got hit by a car in the front yard.

He would write notes if you left out a pen and paper, open and close doors, adjust the thermostat (the kind where you had to turn a knob), and always turn on Christmas music when it was that time of year :) we had a swing set in the backyard and even on the hottest, calmest days of summer, only the left swing would be moving back and forth.

We had this dumb cat that I would lock in my bedroom at night and every morning, my parents would open the door and let him out, then close it back. One night I woke up and the cat was meowing at the door and it woke me up, but the door opened and the cat hissed and ran out really fast. I asked my mom the next morning why they didn’t close my door and they said they didn’t open it??

The last story is when I was very upset and nearly suicidal one year during Christmas break, the police just randomly showed up at my house. The policeman said he was patrolling our neighborhood and felt like something was wrong at our house. I’m absolutely certain Kevin had something to do with it.

35. Lived in a basement apartment with a roommate in college back in 2010. We were eating dinner in the living room watching a movie one night and his bedroom is like 3 feet away from the couch we’re sitting on and closed over but not latched.

So we’re eating dinner and watching this movie and then his door starts opening and creaking so we pause the movie and watch as the door swings slowly open all the way. It stopped there and we looked at each other and claimed a breeze or a loose hinge.

Then the door started closing again only this time, about halfway through the movement, the handle turned so that it was perpendicular to the ground, the door closed all the way and the handle released slowly latching the door closed.

The handle in question was sort of like the ones velociraptors can open in jurassic park.

36. I used to be a server for an old church/school that was definitely haunted. I’d be there early to get ready, no one else around, and I’d hear a scream sometimes. Most of the time, the metronome on the piano would turn on by itself.

It didn’t really bother me though, because I grew up around the “ghost” of my older brother, who died before I was born. Lights and toothbrushes would turn on/off on their own, pictures would move or DVDs would fall for no reason.

One time we placed a candy on a baby photo of him and “asked” him to move it. It moved. Thanks, older bro.

37. I lived in one when I was a teen, along with my parents. Several instances come to mind. We were remodeling an old farmhouse and had been there a couple of months before witnessing anything.

One day I was underneath my truck, which was supported by only a jack. (stupid, I know) I was in the middle of working on it, with no good reason to get out at that moment. Suddenly the overwhelming urge to get out from underneath overwhelmed me. No sooner than I got out, the truck fell to the ground, the jack had slipped. Freaked dad out, he thought I was under it. When mom got home, we mentioned it, and she started crying, sobbing pretty hard. It turns out the previous owner died in the driveway, under a vehicle, in that spot.

I would often see moving shadows, and strangely hear music from the upstairs area. The windows of the old house were caulked shut, and blackbirds would often get caught between the panes. We ended up replacing all the windows but we had to break three inside panes to get them out. One of the more disturbing things happened when my mother was cooking breakfast, she turned away to get something out of the cabinet and when she turned back around, all the forks set out were bent straight up.

38. When I was younger, I used to take naps upstairs but by the time I was 8 years old I absolutely REFUSED to go upstairs. The upstairs had two large… Closets? Attics? They ran from one side of the upstairs all the way to the other side on both sides. It was essentially a crawl space that was maybe 30 feet long.

It started one day when a friend and I went crawling from one side to the other with flashlights like kids normally do. Then I saw a girl, sitting there, in the corner acting like she wanted to play with us.

I know a lot of people say when they see a ghost they aren’t scared. Just interested. Nope, I was beyond terrified. This girl looked normal, had blonde hair, a nice dress and seemed friendly. I stayed silent, kept crawling behind my friend and got out of the closet. Told him what I saw in there, he said he didn’t see it, but felt like he didn’t want to go back in.

Then my parents would occasionally send me upstairs to get something and when I would get up there I would see the doors swing open. As if they were trying to get me to come inside. I would lose toys and wouldn’t be able to find them anywhere. Suddenly, my parents would be fishing out christmas presents out of the attic and we would find some of my toys in there.

I remember being 8 years old, my parents are asleep still in the morning and I leashed up my dog to go take on the monster in the attic. My dog, usually up for anything REFUSED to go off the top step into the attic.

My parents never believed me with all the weird things that happened in that house. I would get blamed for things that happened all over the house. Leaving lights on, toys all over, things I knew I didn’t do.

Well, anyway we move out of there when I am 10. Not a week passes before the new owners call us up and ask if the house is haunted. There daughter sleeps upstairs, she says that she has been playing with a blonde haired girl at night.

My parents laughed at how crazy these new homeowners must be. To make an already long story short, the girl started appearing in other parts of the house for them (they kept in contact with us.) They would look over while watching tv and see the girl sitting on their daughters lap etc. They looked up on the computer the past owners of the house, found an old dress maker that lived there and yep, a picture of the little girl wearing one of the ladies dresses.

The family that moved in there were absolutely torn apart by the events. Got divorced, dad stayed living in the house and ended up taking his own life in that house.

39. My father-in-law died before my son was born, so he never meet him. When we moved into our new home, my son would often be laughing in the middle of the night by himself. No biggie, kids will play with anything. One day, we were finally putting pictures up in the house and once I put up the picture of my father in law, he said “oh mommy why do you have a picture of the man that comes and play with me at night?” He had never ever seen a picture of my father in law before.

40. One recurring incident involved hearing the voices of my family members who weren’t home. Sometimes I would wake up to hear my parents fighting, or my brother and one of my parents, but would find myself home alone when I went to check. It would usually occur on the opposite floor as I was– upstairs if I was downstairs and downstairs if I was upstairs, and would stop right when I got onto the same floor. One time was different, though. I was brushing my teeth with the bathroom door shut when I heard one knock and my dad saying my name in a strange and teasing voice. When I opened the door he wasn’t there, and when I asked my mom where he was, she said he’d went out to work hours ago (he was a lineman with crazy hours). I went back to the bathroom and almost right after I shut the door again I heard more knocking. Didn’t open the door that time.

I didn’t have “shy” ghosts– I told my friends when I was a preteen that my house was haunted, and when they stayed over they would always see for themselves. One of my skeptical friends saw a shadow person watching her from the staircase. Another was up late with me and heard banging in the kitchen and when we came out, every cabinet was open. One friend never returned to my house because of an incident– we were in the kitchen and heard distinct knocking on the outside of the house, about 10 feet up from the ground out there. When we went to follow the noise, it was returned with knocking inside, then more knocking outside, then knocking inside again in a line towards the room we were sleeping in. When we cracked open the door to peek in, every shade and curtain blew open violently. We didn’t sleep in there, and her mom told my mom the next day that her daughter would not be coming back to our haunted house. That was the day my mom admitted that she’d had strange experiences as well.

41. I used to live in an old big 5-bedroom house with 6 other people. My SO and I shared one of the rooms.

I “saw” a stranger in my room when I was in my 20s. It wasn’t exactly visible, but I somewhat knew it was right there in the corner of the room. My SO was next to me sleeping. While I had my eyes open, I knew it was there.

So I closed my eyes. I tried to wish it away. I opened my eyes, and it was now next to the bed, looking at me. I closed my eyes again, and suddenly relief came. I opened my eyes, nothing there.

I saw it once again at the stairs. It was only a brief moment this time, and then it was gone.

42. One of my exes lived in a haunted condo, but the ghost was pretty cool. He would just open doors and cabinets at night. Of course, she had failed to mention this to me when I started staying over so the first time it happened I thought someone had broken in. When I woke her up to tell her an to listen she said “Oh, that’s probably just the ghost. Hey, Norman? Could you please stop for tonight? I haven’t told him about you yet.” There was one more sound of a door closing and that was it. “You should be fine now. He went back in the closet.” Then she went back to sleep. Me though, I couldn’t sleep after that so I went downstairs to check locks and windows. Everything was secure, but most of the cabinet doors in the kitchen were open.

The next morning she told me all about old Norman. I guess when her kid was smaller, he used to talk to Norman. That’s how they knew his name. He was just an old happy guy that had lived there at one point and wanted to stick around. Eventually, the kid could no longer talk to Norman, and that’s when the door and cabinet thing started. From what I understand, he also used to move things around, but that stopped when my ex asked him to.

He was plenty active too. Over the course of the year her and I dated, Norm made countless other visits at night. The coolest encounter was when we were both up late watching a movie and the closest door opened. My ex greeted him with a “Hey, Norm!” and he returned the gesture with a knock on the wall behind us.

Never could explain any of it, but it was pretty cool.

43. When I was younger, I was in a band with a drummer named John. John’s parents were divorced, so he spent half the year with his father, and half with his mother.

His father was an airline pilot, and lived in a townhome community that was once some big farm (this was outside a major east coast city). Apparently this ghost haunted all the houses in this community, living with one family for a few days or whatever, then another for a week. The people in tis community were mostly older and retired there, so they were all used to it, and called the ghost Charlie.

John would tell me shit like he and his dad would be watching tv, and the radio would come on. His dad would say, “Come on, Charlie, we’re watching tv, go listen to the radio upstairs.” and the radio would go off and the one upstairs would come on. Another story I remember is that his dad was ironing some pants, and the phone rang, so he went to answer it. No one was there, so he went back to the ironing board, and the pants were gone. He said, “Come on, Charlie, I need those pants for work,” and the doorbell rang, and the pants were folded on the front steps. Shit like that.

I, early 20s badass, didn’t believe a word of this.

One day, I was helping John move his drum kit from his father’s basement to his mother’s house, because it was his mther’s turn to have him or something. This was the first time I had ever been in John’s house, and I was on the look out all day for something weird.

So, I’m carrying the last high hat or whatever up these stairs, and I go “Ok, Ghost, if you’re really here, I want to see a sign, right now.”

The light above me in the stairwell got super super bright then exploded.

To this day, my speed in leaving that house remains unmatched by any olympic athlete and most land predators.

44. I live in a house built in the 1800’s. It’s survived the 2 world wars and it’s seen some shit I imagine. One of the previous owners had 2 sons, who both committed suicide.

A lot of strange stuff happens. The animals (dog and parrots) will wake up from their naps and follow something with their heads just as they would follow me if I walk around. Also, before I switched rooms in the house, my brother had a room and he refused to sleep there as he would hear voices. He slept with my parents (he was a child) until the day he got my old room and since then has slept in that room without problems. There’s also a whole floor we don’t use and I sleep in the attic, and I pass through that floor to get to my attic (weird explanation but it’s a weird house) and I have a motion activated light there that goes on as I’m walking the stairs to that unused floor. It would also switch on in the middle of the night while nobody is walking under the motion detector. Also, there’s cold spots.

45. I had fallen asleep at night with my fan running, and woke up freezing – I turned it off. Not long after, I woke up hot, and turned it back on. This happened several times. The last time, I woke up hot once again, and the moment I opened my eyes, I heard the pull of my fan and looked up to see it slowly start speeding up.

I said, “thank you,” and fell back asleep.

46. A lady who had 2 husbands die on her in the same house. That’s the house my dad decides to buy. The first one hung himself from the rafters in the garage and the second one fell ill and died in his bed in the basement. I lived in the basement room and often just felt like I was being watched all the time. The bedroom in the basement has a secret storage room behind a bookshelf with a locking latch. I would always wake up to find the door wide open. It happened so often that I would wake up cold and routinely go shut and lock the latch of the door in the middle of the night. For the longest time I thought it was my dad or step brothers messing with me but it wasn’t. My stepbrother now occupies that room and he says it still happens to him and that he’s even seen it open on its own! There are no air vents or anything so I’ve ruled out wind.

Also in the garage, I always see light coming from under the door through the crack only to open the door to pitch black. I’ve heard sounds coming from the garage only to find saw blades clanging together and slightly rotating in their place on the hole storage wall. Didn’t think anything of it at first, but when you find shit moving on more than one occasion, it makes you look over your shoulder at the rafters and wonder…

47. There was a lot of weird stuff that happened in my childhood home. It was originally built in the 1960’s but it burned down soon after my parents bought it in the early 2000’s (our pets in the house died but no humans).

1.) A strange Star of David pattern used to show up on shiny surfaces in my room (I’m not Jewish, neither is my family and I didn’t know anyone that was Jewish). It showed up on a belt buckle of mine and then appeared on my mirror soon after (I still have a picture of it on the buckle). It stopped showing up and a few months later my sisters were taking down posters in their room (the room was downstairs on the opposite side of the house) and the pattern was on the back of the poster by their bedroom door. The poster had been up for over a year and had never been moved.

2.) It was about 2-3am on Christmas day and I went to use the bathroom. There was a vent on the floor by the toilet (all the vents in the house all led to the laundry room). I clearly heard the echoes of a grown woman lightly sobbing. The only grown woman in the house was my mom and I asked her if she had been down in the laundry room. She said no.

3.) I was sleeping on the floor of our den with the blanket over my head. I was laying on my side and I suddenly felt something small and cool apply pressure on the side of my elbow (it was about the weight of a small cat stepping on you). It was like someone was pressing two cool fingers on my arm. Thinking it was one of my siblings messing with me, I hurried up and threw the blanket over my head. No one was there. The den was a big open space, there was nowhere for anyone to hide in that short amount of time.

4.) My mom had a little workshop in our laundry room. She said she had put a coin in a certain spot on her work table and turned around to do something. She then clearly heard the scraping sound of metal being moved across unpolished wood. She turned back around and the coin had been moved to the other side of the table.

5.) We had a deck overlooking a pond in our backyard and my mom had taken my two siblings out there to look at the fish. My mom was sitting there when she suddenly heard a man urgently whisper my sister’s name right by her. She went to go flip out on my dad when she realized she wasn’t home. There were no other men in the household.

6.) My grandma (my mom’s mom) did a lot of bad things in her life including abandon my mom as a newborn. My mom’s grandparents (my grandma’s parents so my great grandparents) adopted her. My mom went to walk out of her room when she clearly heard her grandfather’s voice angrily say, “Your mother!” He was angry with her when he was alive. He had been dead for over a decade at this point.

7.) There was a lightning storm we were having one summer. We had french doors that overlooked our backyard so I could see our deck and pond. The lightning flashed (this sounds cheesy and movie-ish) but I saw a man of about six feet with his back turned to me standing on our deck. I freaked out and got my parents. They looked and no one was there.

8.) My sister’s boyfriend was over one time and he was in our family room which was right next to the laundry room. My mom had shut the door with the light still on in there and he said he saw a shadow pacing back and forth across the door. Another time, him and my sister saw a gray mass standing at the end up the stairs that led to the family room. As soon as they saw it, it shot up the stairs and disappeared.

9.) I was in my room on my bed when I heard heavy, labored breathing at the end of my bed where I couldn’t see (the lights were off). Like this breathing was so fucking scary, I still sleep with the lights on 10+ years later. I ran out of my room to get one of my sisters to see if they could hear it, too. Silence. My sister sat there for about 20 minutes, then left. Not long after she left, the same guttural, loud breathing began again.

10.) This wasn’t in my childhood home but in my boyfriend’s family house in a different country. His sister was telling me about she had heard loud stomping on the stairs when no one was in the house before. A couple of months later, it was just me in my boyfriend in the house. He was taking a nap on the couch and I was sitting there with him. I suddenly heard someone stomp onto what sounded like the first step of the stairs that led into the living room. The stomping quickly became extremely loud and boisterous. I sat frozen in shock at the noise and heard the stomping nearly reach the end of the stairs before it turned around and started back up to the top. It then began to descend the stairs again, louder this time, like they were trying to break through the wood. It got about halfway until I screamed, “STOP!” The sound ceased and I didn’t hear it again. There were also strange, fleeting shadows you would see upstairs sometimes accompanied by a strong feeling of being watched.

48. I lived in an old, haunted house in college. Things got so weird that everyone moved out except for me and one roommate. Here’s a few:

  1. I woke up at 3am because my roommates door kept opening and slamming shut. From bed, I yelled for him to stop only to realize I was the only one home that weekend. As soon as I yelled, the slamming stopped, but the hippy beads I had hanging outside my closed door began to sway perfectly, yet violently, against the door frame, for a half hour, while I debated if I should pop out my air condition unit and jump out of the window. I laid in the fetal position in bed til it stopped.

  2. I woke up at 3am, alone again, hearing the nintendo in the back porch playing loudly. I figured a drunk kid came in and started playing. I grabbed a bat and walked towards the back of the house as the music got louder and louder. As soon as I opened the door, it was completely quiet, mind you it was loud enough to wake me up.

  3. I had friends over and told them the house was haunted. No one believe me so I asked the ghost to do anything to prove it was there. As soon as I asked, all the lights in the house began flickering for about a minute straight. This was the middle of the day, everyone witnessed it.

  4. Almost everyone who stayed at my house had sleep paralysis at least once in the house.

  5. Every time something spooky happened, the house would smell like old lady, flowery, strong perfume.

  6. This house had a door built into the flooring that led to the basement. We always had a rug covering it up so no one knew it was there. Things would constantly go missing in the house, and turning up in the basement. This house had a coal-shoot from when it was heated by coal back in the day. Missing stuff would always be placed on the shoot for us to come and get.

  7. Roommate had some issues, once while playing video games late at night he saw mist kind of hovering from the kitchen then move into the bathroom. The bathroom had a trap door that led to the attic, that’s where we figured the old-lady ghost used to like to hang out.

  8. Roommate was up late, he went to go lock the doors and turn off lights. When he turned his back on the room and walked to the door, someone breathed into his ear “haaa”. He thought it was me, I was sleeping, he turned around, pissed himself, and ran to his room. He was too afraid to come out and turn off lights and TV.

  9. Loud thumps in attic at all hours. For peace of mind, we told ourselves squirrels must’ve gotten in there.

  10. Voices would wake us up in the middle of the night. I spent many mornings on the front porch waiting for the sun to come up before I went back in the house.

  11. Coincidentally, I had a friend years later that rented from the same landlord (same town, different house) where he and all of his roommates moved out because that house was also haunted. I didn’t think it was too weird, until he was telling me that when all of the weird stuff happened, it was accompanied by old-lady, flowery, stanky perfume. Also, a lot of people had sleep paralysis in that house as well.

49. Closest I’ve got to a haunted house is a haunted room:

I used to sleep on the 2nd floor (the bottom one being the 1st) and my sister in the attic. She used to have sleep paralysis often. Then she moved out and now I have her old room.

She no longer has sleep paralysis, but I do.

50. My uncle’s house out on a very eastern part of NY was said to be haunted due to the family that used to own it in the 1800’s decided not to give it to the stableman and sold it instead. He and the maid were said to have haunted the place.

We always used to joke that you would hear people or things moving at night but since the house is so old, we used to just laugh it off.

My uncle’s friend had her and her sister stay over the house one night and the friend noticed a maid bringing towels down the stairs when she woke. She saw the maid again, bringing what looked like a percolator, down the stairs.

She was so impressed by my uncle hiring staff (he is a Neurologist in NYC so he had a habit of spending a little bit extra). She went back to bed and woke up later downstairs to see my uncle and his friend just chatting.

She asked where the maid went and she thought that the maid was cooking breakfast. My uncle had no idea what she was talking about and asked what she looked like. The sister explained and he laughed. Walked her to the living room and pointed to an old picture. She said that was the woman.

My uncle replied, “Yea, she has been dead for about 100 years.” Thought Catalog Logo Mark

January Nelson is a writer, editor, and dreamer. She writes about astrology, games, love, relationships, and entertainment. January graduated with an English and Literature degree from Columbia University.