1. My grandfather found and tore down a fake wall containing a hidden room

“When my grandparents bought their house for a family of 10, my grandpa found a fake wall upstairs. He tore it down to make more room for the family. Behind the wall we’re children’s clothes and play toys, almost like they walked off the room in a hurry. My mom told me stories of sitting in her room and something circling the walls around her sounding like wall paper being torn. When she moved out, my aunt moved into the same room. She would wake up with pictures she hung up laying on her chest in the morning. My cousins also have stories of hearing footsteps coming up the stairs and stopping outside their door in the middle of the night. I still don’t go upstairs at their house because it’s always cold and I get weird vibes up there. Even in my adult life I have scary dreams that take place in their upstairs.” — DickRubnuts

2. I had to move out of my apartment because it was haunted 

“I lived in an old apartment in 2002. The place was built in 1900, so it was just over 100 years old when I moved in. The living room and kitchen were fine, but the bathroom and bedroom we’re unnerving, like I just always felt like I was being watched, especially in the bedroom if the closet door was open. Those unnerving feelings just became moderately uncomfortable as I settled in. I felt safe in the bedroom, but only if the door was locked. One night I was dead asleep when there was a loud BANG on my bedroom door. When I got up the courage to get out of bed, I checked the apartment and all the windows were closed and locked from the inside, the door still had the chain secured, no one was in there. I mentioned the closet in the bedroom, I never liked going in there, and I never liked if the door was open. For some reason, in my head I would hear gasping noises. So for that reason, the closet stayed closed.

A month or more after I was woken to the bang on my door, I was dead asleep. But something woke me up, and it was a pressure on me like being held down. It was pitch black in my room, I couldn’t see anything, but I knew some was standing over me. When I could finally turn on a bedside lamp no one was there. After then I couldn’t sleep in the dark, I had to sleep with a lamp on. That incident scared the life out of me. And after that the unnerving feeling of being watched intensified. Friends would come over, and comment about being uncomfortable in the bathroom like being watched. It became so uncomfortable for me, when I had the chance to move to another unit, I jumped at it. I packed up and got out.

After me, several people rented the apartment, and they would move out within months. I became friendly with the building manager, and I told him that I felt the place was haunted. He kind of laughed it off.

Years after, they were renovating the place, building manager was doing some painting in there, the building owner was there too. I went and checked out the apartment, and it looked nicer, it didn’t feel as creepy. I got to talking with the building owner, and through the course of conversation he just throws it out there that a former tenant committed suicide in the closet by hanging themselves. He also mentioned that the original designer of the building lived in that apartment, and died in there. I wasn’t mad when I heard that, but felt validated that what I experienced was real.” — tightiewhities37

3. I heard the sounds of a baby crying

“When I was in high school my uncle would throw me a couple bucks to help babysit his kids with my aunt. They lived in a two story house by the water, nice area. The kids were about 3 and 6.

One day I was sitting in their den on my phone when I started to hear a baby crying. Thinking it was the three year old, I headed to the bottom of the stairs to check and see if my aunt was up there dealing with it. I called for her a couple times with no response. The baby kept crying. I called for her one more time, and when I got no response I started walking up the stairs. Then I heard my cousins and aunt playing outside.

All the hairs on my body stood up and I literally felt a chill run down my spine. I quietly turned around, walked down the stairs, got in my car and drove away. The ‘baby’ was still crying when I closed the door behind me.

A few years later I was drunk at a family party and told my uncle the story. He told me that he and his wife used to hear the baby too, and apparently the previous owners had a kid die of SIDS in that room upstairs. He’s uber Catholic and had a Mass said for the baby. He said after that it never happened again. Still gives me the willies when I talk about it though.” — urgehal666

4. We spoke to a spirit through an Ouija board

“In high school my friends and I were messing around with a Ouija board one night. We had done it before and nothing remarkable had ever happened. We usually did it to try and scare each other or are girlfriends. We all thought it was a joke. That night there was no one else home except the 7 of us and we were all together around the board. One of the girls there wanted to try it. She had never done it before.

This time was different. The board misspelled some of the words the same way every time. It gave answers that seemed really historically accurate for our town (things we neither knew or cared about). Long story short, the ‘spirit’ claimed it was a 10 year old boy who had died on the property in the 1800s and was buried there too in an unmarked grave (my friends house was on a farm in the edge of town). We were all a little freaked out because the board had never been so detailed and consistent. However, we were still skeptical and we were all assuming one of us was trying to scare the rest.

Finally, my friend asked if the spirit could do something to prove he was there with us. It went to Yes and then spelled out k-n-o-c-k. Then the planchette stopped moving. We just all stared at it silently and then there was a rap-rap-rap on the window right next to us. The lights were on outside and there was absolutely no one out there.

We never touched that f-ing board again.” — ExcrementCranium

5. They saw the ghost of a man strangling a woman

“I personally have quite a few spooky stories but my mum has a good one so I will tell hers. When she was younger her and a group of friends were driving down a desolate road at night and there was a house that they passed that had a window lit up upstairs so they slowed down to look and she said there was a lantern in the window and a man and a woman sat facing each other. She then said that a second man wearing a top hat came into view, walked up behind the woman and started strangling her. At this point my mum and her friends freaked out and drove off. When they went back to see what had happened they drove up to where they had seen it happen and it wasn’t even a window they had seen it was a plastic sheet so they didn’t know what to make of it but they all ended up agreeing they had seen a ghost.” — judentude

6. We saw the ghost of an old man inside of the bedroom

“One night me and my little brother slept in my sisters room on her floor (kind of like a Friday night sleepover when we were kids) when we woke up the next morning the mirror from her bedroom wall had been taken off and was now between me and my brother. I woke up staring into my reflection. I still get the chills when I think about all the stuff myself, my friends and family saw there. Including the ghost of an old man that was seen three times in my bedroom, once by myself.” — Chemical_Robot

7. I saw a shadow person inside of my home

“I’ve posted in the past a story about some weird thing I saw in the woods at my grandparents’ house (tl;dr, silhouette of a deer against the curtains suddenly changed into a man’s silhouette. Usual suggestions are skinwalker or wendigo, though one I liked was maybe it was just Pan joking around), but I’m gonna post about another instance of weird shit.

This was at the house we lived in for about seven years. Many strange things happened in that house (you could hear voices murmuring from time to time, I saw a shadow person, saw someone stick their head into the room once). None of it felt hostile, but the same couldn’t be said for this pervasive feeling my mother and I both felt if we went out front at night. She and I both felt like there was something watching and it wasn’t friendly.

On this particular night, it was about midnight or so and I felt like driving to the 24/7 grocery store since I wanted some snacks. As I stepped out the front door, I saw something out of the corner of my eye, and turned to look.

There was this very tall thing just floating, for lack of a better term (I’d almost describe it as hanging but there was nothing holding it up), outside of my brother’s window. It was seemingly covered in a sheet that had once been white, but was extremely dirty so it was more off-white, and got brown with mud and dirt the further down it went. There were no visible feet, nor eyes or face, but I could tell it was staring at my brother’s window. As I stared at it, it turned to ‘look’ at me and I remember feeling like one of those butterfly specimens, pinned to a board. It was as though its stare was physically holding me in place. It felt like an eternity but only a second or two passed, and it looked back at the window, the pressure lifting, and then vanished. Right as it vanished, there was a fluttering of wings in the tree above, and one of our neighborhood’s owls came to perch there. In a way it felt like the owl came to my defense, as silly as that may sound.

Our cul-de-sac loved the pair of owls, they were more like neighbors to us, so maybe it was just protective of a fellow neighbor. That’s how I like to think of it, anyway.

In any event, I decided that it might be best to just…make some popcorn or something that night instead.

Come to think of it, I don’t think I ever told my brother about the thing. I probably should.” — Kii_at_work

8. A white haired woman appeared inside of my garden

“We moved into an old three story house that was built at the turn of the century. From the deeds we saw it was owned by a single woman for many years before being sold to a man, and then us – my husband and my grandmother.

It needed a lot of work doing but luckily the next door neighbor was a builder. He came in to do work while my grandmother visited my parents in another city. On the final day he said “Your grandmother is always out working on the garden, it looks great!”

After I questioned him a bit I realised he had been seeing a white haired woman walking outside of the back bedroom window in the garden. It was definitely not my grandmother, she was 100 miles away. I never told him because he’s really superstitious and probably wouldn’t have come back!

In the same house while we were eating dinner I looked up and saw what looked like a huge black hooded figure hide behind the doorframe into the hallway. It was so big it looked like it was ducking down and peering into the room, before whipping up and away when I glanced over. That scared the hell out of me, particularly as I only looked up because the dogs were whining. I never went in that corridor again when the lights were off!” — Laylelo

9. Children emerged from the closet 

“I have a few stories that happened over the course of my life but nothing freaked me out more then my younger brother one night when we were kids.

I lived in an older house, built in the early 80s and there were some weird things that would happen. Objects in places we didn’t leave them, voices, lights, nothing particularly creepy though. Except after this.

I have 2 brothers and we are all exactly 2 years apart. When I was young, roughly 9, my brothers about 7 and 5 shared a room. Across the hall was my room. Our doorways looked at each other. I awoke late into the night/early morning as it was still dark to a methodic click sound. I could see my brothers light turning on. Off. On. Off. Periodically and in succession. I wandered into the doorway and watched as my brother B sat in the top bunk, a look of horror on his drained looking face with his little arm reached down clicking the light switch.

I don’t know how long I stood there but soon my mother was at my back, watching for a moment before scolding my brother for being up so late and playing with the light. He turned, dead eyed, to my mother and I and stared coldly for a few moments. In the most monotone voice I’ve ever heard from a 7 year old he told my mom ‘They can only move in the dark. They keep getting closer. When I turn the light off, they can almost touch me now. Goodbye.’ My mom freaked, took all 3 of us to her room, shut and locked the door and we slept with the light on.

The next morning I asked my brother what he saw. He again got a very dark look about him before explaining to me that children kept coming out of his closet. Except they were darker than the darkest shadow except for white lines that surrounded the outline of their forms. They had empty white eyes. Every time the light was off they inched closer. When the light was on, they vanished. When the light turned back off more descended from the closet and made their way to his bed, climbing up the bunk bed and reaching for him, but leaving the youngest alone and asleep. It freaked me out. But from here it only got worse.

This became a nightly occurrence and both my brothers soon began asking for a chained lock on the closet door. My mother obliged so they could finally get some sleep. I started staying with them at night to help them sleep. The night the lock was placed on the door, we fell asleep with relaxed fears.

Until the door violently slammed open as far as the chain would allow and I swear to God all three of us saw small black hands clawing through the gap. This became almost nightly. It quickly evolved into whispering comming from the door of the closet. Coos and coaxes to near the door. Desperate pleads to “just let us out”. My mom thought we had overactive and gruesome imaginations. Maybe she was right. This continued for almost a year and as suddenly as it began it just stopped on the year mark. No sounds no traces. No nothing.

We carried on with life, other strange things occurred from time to time. Some scary some odd. We grew older. We stayed in that house for 13 years. We moved and I moved out of my mom’s house. I got my own place and by some stroke of absent mindedness moved into the house directly beside my childhood home. By now I had forgotten about all the strange things of my childhood and didn’t remember them until I was walking my dog one night close to 3am.

You see I work until midnight. So I’m up all night. My brothers childhood bedroom window faces the backyard of my current home. I looked up as my dog started staring in that direction to find the light going on and off. Methodically. Very slowly. I found it strange. It became a nightly occurrence on my walk to look up and see the light. I remembered The children from The closet. The strangest part for me, is the family that moved into my old home is a single mother of 3 boys. Just like my family. And just like my family, the children were fairly close to the ages of 9, 7, and 5 give or take a year or two.

After doing some research I found that that particular house was built in 1980 or 1981, it held a nice young family until 1987 when an electrical fire broke out. The family was a father who worked in the mines and was often away, a stay At home mom, and her 3 boys, roughly 8, 6, and 4. When the fire broke out The boys became trapped in the bedroom my brothers slept in. The boys of the original family died of smoke inhalation. Only 2 of the 3 bodies were recovered. The mother made it out of alive and later took her own life. The house laid in ruin for 2 years and was rebuilt in 1989-1990. In that time several strange deaths occurred. A husband and wife moved in with an infant daughter who died of sids 5 months after moving in. In 1991 a single man moved in and hung himself in the basement. In 1993 or 1994 a large family of 6 containing a mother, father, 3 boys and a daughter moved in. The daughter slit her wrists in the bathtub and died of blood loss. A year later the oldest son shot himself in the basement. The house remained empty until 1997 when a widow and her daughter moved in. No incidents were recorded and the family moved out in 1999, the year my brother was born. Families were in and out without incident until 2004 when my family moved in. We moved out in 2012.” — RealAbstractSquidII

10. A severed hand appeared behind the refrigerator 

“A hand appeared behind the refrigerator, it slapped a bag of bread to the floor. Thought it was just a prank and someone wedged themselves behind the fridge to pull off this ‘prank,’ but there was no one there and no way anyone could have been. Harmless but spooky.” — glittercatbear

11. I heard the voice inside of someone else’s head

“Early Sophomore year in college my girlfriend spends the night in my dorm room. She’d lost her virginity to me the night before and this was her first time ever spending the night in a boy’s bed.

That morning, she’s still half-asleep so I get into the shower. While showering I’m 100% certain I can hear someone calling out my name. But hey, I ignored it – there’s that thing were you end up hearing your own name in white noise just b/c it’s something you’re so attuned to hear.

The weird thing was it sounded very loud (like it was being shouted) but also very, very far away but also like the sound was coming from deep inside my own head. Like I was wearing headphones and hearing my own name called out in this tiny, tiny, panicked scream.

It was really odd, but again I dismissed it entirely. Finished my shower and went about my day, never mentioning it to anyone.

Two years later – we’re sitting around in someone’s dorm room and my girlfriend casually mentions, ‘Oh yeah, remember that first night I stayed in your room? And then you went to go to the shower? I was freaking out because it was so dark in your room and I started having a panic attack and started screaming your name in my head while you were in the shower.’

I try not to think about this too much, since I’m very much one of those ‘science uber allies’ types of guys who likes to mock new age crap. But this was the one thing I’ve personally experienced that feels like it was legit supernatural. No ghosts or angels or any of that bullshit – just a tiny experience of straight-up telepathy, or one really, really weird heck of a coincidence.” — sfinebyme

12. I saw a knife balancing on its tip

“One time I wanted a Coke and when I went into the kitchen there was, I shit you not, a knife balancing on its tip. Next to a full can of Coke. When I was home alone.” — ArcOfRuin

13. Something unseen climbed into bed beside me

“Four years ago , I lived in a very large farm house , that was converted into two apartments. The house was known as the ”old boys home”. It was used to house boys with behavioral issues but was closed due to allegations of molestation. Anyway , I was living with my boyfriend and three year old daughter at the time. My bedroom had a large fireplace that had been boarded up and painted over. I decided to push my bed up against it one day while I was rearranging things, it was like a headboard. That night, around 1 am I had heard a small voice saying ‘mom , mom , mommy’. I had sat up in bed but didn’t see anything so I reached over my boyfriend trying to grab down to grab my daughter and put her in our bed. I kept feeling around and I was still hearing the voice but I couldn’t feel her. My boyfriend woke up and turned the bedside lamp on asking me ‘What the hell are you doing.’ I explained that Amelia was trying to get in our bed and I was reaching for her. There was nobody there. My daughter was sound asleep in her room. Then the next night came. Around 1 am again my dog had started to whimper at out door so my boyfriend got up to take him outside. You know that feeling in a bed when someone lies down next to you? Where the bed pushes in and there is a warmth in your back? I felt that, So I assumed my boyfriend had come back to bed. I rolled over, my boyfriend wasn’t in the bed and I felt the fucking bed release pressure, whatever was laying next to me has gotten up in that second. I moved my bed the next day to the other side of the room and I never had another incident in the two years I remained in that house.” — GoatbustersBM

14. My cousins swore they saw a dead woman who was friends with my grandmother

“Back when I was a kid my grandmother had a really close friend who used to help her babysit us. One day she goes missing. Family doesn’t know where she is and we don’t either. About a week later police find her body in a dumpster, she had been dead for 4-5 days. She had been mugged and had several stab wounds. Incredibly tragic, who would mug an old lady?..

Here’s the spooky story. A few days just before she was found, my three cousins swore they saw her walking around in their backyard and knocking on their window. The following day had search going through the area.

It wasn’t until the body was found that we realized what they saw couldn’t be true according to police timeline, but they swore it was her.” — ObiMemeKenobi

15. We heard the sounds of a party — but when we investigated, nothing was there

“While at uni my friends and I ran out of booze. Hardly any shops were open because it was late on, so the only option was to walk the mile or so to the nearest 24 hour supermarket. Between the supermarket and the dorms we lived in was just row after row of suburban houses which all looked the same. As we were walking down one road we passed a field with a large camp fire and some people riding horses around it. There were people playing musical instruments, and general sounds of a good time going on – the horses and fire, and the lanterns which were dotted about, gave it a very old fashioned feel. Maybe 5 minutes after passing the field, now walking past houses again, one of my friends commented on how weird and out of place that gathering of people had been. My other friend and I had been thinking exactly the same thing so, curious, we turned around and walked back to find out exactly what was going on. There was nothing there. Not just no people or horses, there was no field; just more and more houses. Even though we were absolutely certain we were on the right road, as we’d simply turned around, we walked up and down the neighboring roads too. We found nothing. We weren’t drunk, though we’d had some drinks, and so I’ve got absolutely no idea what happened that night.” — luckycynic

16. Someone was knocking on my bedroom door

“To this day I don’t know if I was dreaming or not, but I clearly heard someone gently knocking on my bedroom door in the middle of the night.

I live alone.” — MMMLG

17. I live nearby a mass grave for the hospital for the insane 

“I lived next to a facility for developmentally handicapped people for 3 years. Everyday I would jog past this historical marker on their property, one day I decided to take a break, I love history so I finally walked over and read it.

It was a dedication to a mass grave of 300 people for what used to be the grounds for a ‘Hospital for the Insane.’

I nearly shat my track suit.” — wonder-maker

18. I heard footsteps and voices inside of my haunted house

“I currently live in a haunted house. I’ve heard voices, footsteps, lights have been turned on/off, one of the ghosts has a thing for silverware (I hear it clattering in the drawer all the time, and sometimes a knife or two will end up in the wrong slot in the drawer).

But the strangest/scariest experience I had was the first night I spent in the house. I wasn’t finished moving in, there were boxes everywhere, I didn’t even have my mattress up there yet. I was bedding on an old futon mattress, watching a video on my phone, when a get the pins & needles feeling of my feet falling sleep. Except it wasn’t on my feet, it was on the top of my head in the shape of a hand. I said, “Good night”, turned off my light and tried to sleep. When I woke up my closet door was ajar, but other than that everything was otherwise untouched.

I guess whoever my unseen roommate is, just wanted to check out who I was on my first night.” — mrttenor

19. A man from another decade appeared and disappeared

“A family friend of mine and her sister were once walking their dogs through a huge empty field, and they noticed an older looking man coming towards them on an even older looking bike, wearing clothes from what seemed to be the 1930’s. He looked right at them, smiled and said, ‘Good morning ladies.’ And they just smiled and nodded as he passed them.

They both turned to look around at him no less than 30 seconds later, to see no sign at all of him.

Very odd.” — aural89

20. Every single electronic turned on at once

“I have a bunch but I think the best one I have actually happened to my mom. We lived in a very creepy very old house when I was little. One day my mom was cleaning my little brother’s room while we were at school and every single one of his electronic toys turned on all at once.

Two of them did not have batteries in them.

She was so freaked out she had us “camp out” in the living room for three days cause she didn’t want my brother alone in his room.

Up until we moved, that would occasionally happen. Either one or two toys at a time.” — LameGhost

21. Someone was sitting at the foot of my bed

“I’m from Scotland, and when I was a child, my Mum and Dad took my sister and I on a trip to Fort William, which is a town up in the Highlands. People go there for skiing and hiking. It wasn’t winter, so we were there to do some easy hiking (my sister and I were quite young, I was about 11), and to stay for a couple of nights.

I can’t remember the name of the hotel we stayed at, but I do remember that it was old fashioned, and we were all in one room together. There was a single bed (where I was sleeping), a double bed in the middle (my parents were there), and another single on the other side (my sister’s).

I was often frightened when I was a girl. I didn’t like the dark, and I was super scared of the possibility of ghosts etc. I never found it easy to sleep because of this, even at home. I vividly remember tossing and turning that first night in the hotel for a long time, before lying on my back and trying to calm myself down.

I then felt the bed sink a little next to my feet. I heard the creak of the old mattress. Someone was sitting at the foot of my bed. My heart was honestly pounding. I hadn’t heard my sister or parents get up, so I was terrified. Whatever was sitting there quickly moved so it was sitting on my feet. I felt the weight of whatever it was. I heard the mattress creak again. My feet were freezing cold. It then moved off my feet, and settled down next to them again. The old mattress shifted and creaked again.

Within a second or two, I felt the coldest I’ve ever felt, but not throughout my whole body. The coldness was slowly rising up from my feet, accompanied by a feeling of pressure.

I was too scared to open my eyes.

I was willing myself to call for my Mum, but I was so scared that I just couldn’t at first. When I managed to shout out and wake the rest of my family, the cold, pressured feeling had reached up to my knees. When the lights were switched on, the feeling vanished.

I have no explanation for this whole situation. My Dad slept in that bed the next night, and I stayed awake the whole night in the double with my Mum.” — bruciabogtrotter

22. A random object appeared in the middle of the hallway with zero explanation 

“I came home from work one day to grab my spare tires. My sister was away at school 7 hours away and neither of my parents were going to be home for another 5 hours at minimum. I ran in, changed my clothes, grabbed my tires then drove to a garage to get them installed. I got home 2 hours later and as I walked into the living room, there was a chair just sitting in the middle of the hallway and was facing the front door. I thought nothing of it but didn’t recognize the chair as being one that we owned. It was a standard metal folding chair that you would buy for a couple bucks at a retail store. I folded it up and propped it up against my dads work bench in our garage. My mom gets home a couple hours later and I ask her in passing why she left a metal chair in the middle of the hallway. She tells me we don’t own any metal chairs and that she hadn’t been home up until an hour ago. I told her I came home and there was a metal chair just sitting in the middle of the hallway after I had gotten back from the garage. She told me to show her the chair and when I went out to the garage to show it to her, it was gone. I looked high and low for that metal chair but couldn’t find it. I swore to her that I wasn’t on drugs and that I wasn’t imagining things. She thought what I was telling her was strange but didn’t pay much attention to it. I never saw that chair again nor do I know where it came from or where it went.” — Interestingly_Boring

23. There was a loud zap right above my head

“This just happened to me two days ago:

I was walking into the house after work around 6 PM so it was already mostly dark, and suddenly the entire sky lit up bright green, and there was a super loud ZAP sound just like a movie laser or something, right over my head… so loud that I hit the deck and then fucking tore ass back into the house. One of my roommates was cooking dinner and I was like, ‘WHAT THE FUCK, DID YOU FUCKING SEE THAT’ but he didn’t. We went back outside, no transformers near or out, no house’s electricity out, no sign of disturbance at all.

now I’m a rational grown man…a believer in science and always the “there must be a rational explanation for this” guy, but this was truly truly a mindfuck and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.” — kmoneyrecords

24. We spent the night inside of a haunted hotel

“My wife and I stayed at a nice hotel in downtown Pittsburgh. It was where I asked her to marry me after a lavish meal. I picked the room because it came with a huge Japanese soaking tub that me, a 6’1 man, could barely see over the edge of.

Anyway, the first night we stayed there, we were sleeping in the single king bed. I believe the alarm clock said it was 2 or 3am. To my left, and just a few feet from me, I heard the sound of a what seemed like a pencil slowly rolling down a sloped surface. It was so deliberate and loud that it woke us both up. It was also so deliberate that, while my heart thumped in my chest from the sudden noise, I quickly convinced myself that it was a pencil sliding off the desk in our room and I went back to sleep.

The next morning, to my surprise, I found that a.) there were no pencils in the room and b.) there was no desk. It was my first night in the room so I assumed that it, like other hotels, had a place to sit and write. Well–that was not the case. The only thing I could find to write with were ballpoint pens with their caps on. They wouldn’t make that distinctive, loud noise that a ridged, wooden pencil makes as it rolls. Furthermore, there was no sloped surface in the room for anything to suddenly roll off of in the middle of the night / morning.

The whole thing was weird enough for us to talk about it that morning. I do not believe in ghosts but to be honest, I’d love to encounter something unexplained. I entertained the idea of a ghost pencil, but knew in my head it had an explanation grounded in reality.

But that’s not all that happened.

That night we were both in the soaking tub. The water was up to my chin. It was great–we were in the middle of February, a cold and miserable month in Pittsburgh. We were sloshing around in the tub having a blast, pretending we were rich.

And then, from the other room, we heard the buzzing of an old microphone hooked up to a PA system. Basically, that sound of feedback that precedes an announcement. The whole room filled with the buzzing sound of microphone feedback. Our hearts thumped in our chests yet again. And then we both practically jumped out of our own skins.

We heard the distinctive sound of someone blowing into a microphone to test it. ‘Whoooth Whooth.’ You could see it in your head it was so distinctive, just like the pencil. My heart went from thumping wildly to thrumming like a hummingbird’s. Naked, I lept from the tub and threw a towel around myself.

‘That was a man blowing into a microphone,’ I said. My wife stayed in the tub, scared and quiet. I searched our room and did not find a speaker, or any kind of speaker grill embedded into a wall or the ceiling. We could not for the life of us find a potential source for the sound other than an iHome speaker that was already playing music from my iPhone.

So that was our story. We still had one more night. We were exhilarated by our engagement and the ghosts that haunted the hotel.

A week later I had the thought to email the hotel. I asked them about their building. Pittsburgh is an old town. And downtown Pittsburgh is a very very old town. They got back to me and explained, as my jaw dropped, that they used to be an old telephone factory.

I don’t know why I found meaning in that explanation or why it made everything click so well. But my thoughts immediately went to the sounds of a factory–the PA system, the drafting table. All relics from another time in that building’s life.” — GilbertPersian

25. A black figure appeared inside of my bedroom

“At the time I was around 14, I’d asked my dad to wake me up early that morning at about 5am because I had some work to get done. That morning, I was woken up, and I flung my legs over the side of my bed. I felt a tug on both of them, what I thought at the time was just my dad trying to get me to hurry up, I reached over to pick up my phone and turned it on, 3:30 am, and I looked over at the black figure I assumed was my dad and it was gone.” — tom-evvans