17. The mystery figure in the photo.
I was at home sitting on the couch with a friend of mine and my mom leaves to go to the store. We’re hanging out doing nothing in particular and my friend falls asleep sitting up, so I take a picture with my new camera phone and show it to him, “Haha, you fell asleep, what a dufus,” something to that affect. Two weeks later I’m going through my pictures and I’m looking at it and I realize that someone is in the other room just 10 feet away. Even weirder is that this person has the same posture and stuff as my mom, same haircut (short and spiky) and whatever the thing was, was very dark and facing the camera, because the eyes caught my flash like a cat’s eyes. Just two brightish dots. The figure was in the brightest room in the house so there’s no reason it should have been so shadowy. I showed my friend in the picture, who knows my mom well and I don’t say anything to him except, “Who is that in the dining room?” And very typical of my friend, he sarcastically says, “Your mom, my god, don’t you know your own mother when you see her?” “Uh, G, remember, she wasn’t home when I took this picture?” And he just says, “Yeah…you’re right.” I didn’t push it further because I know he’s a little superstitious and junk and he seemed a little nervous. I looked at the pic constantly trying to figure it out and then one day, it just disappeared.
18. The stranger who knew where I lived.
When I was 12 I was on vacation with my parents. I left the room to head to the pool by myself.
On the elevator ride down to the pool a man entered the elevator.
He didn’t look at me. He just said the name of the town and state I lived in: “South Attleboro, Massachusetts.” Without looking at me. I was about 1000 miles from the town he spoke.
I, being young and a little naive said “yeah! How’d you know?!”
Silence.
Until the ground floor. He just said “I guess you just sorta look like it.”
He was probably 50. Wore sunglasses. Indoors. Looked ready for golf.
I told my parents and they wouldn’t let me go anywhere alone the rest of vacation. Don’t think I ever saw him again.
I was not wearing any clothing that gave my hometown away. I was wearing a Duke Blue Devils basketball hat and a Jordan Bulls jersey.
19. The demon masks from Ghana.
One summer my brother went to Ghana and came back with a bunch of souvenirs. He went back to school and left them all with my parents. My parents used to live in a two story bungalow, where my brother and I had bedrooms in the basement directly underneath theirs. One night around 2 am, I woke up to hear heavy footsteps right above me… I tried to ignore it and go back to sleep. Because he was such a loud snorer my dad would sleep in my brother’s room as well. In the morning my dad asked my mom what she was doing walking around at 2 am. She denied that she was, but I backed up my dad because I heard it too. She continued to say it wasn’t her, and the next night it was same thing… heavy footsteps at 2-3 in the morning. My dad and I attempted to recreate the footsteps, used hard-steel boots, but nothing came close to the sound.
I started having weird-ass dreams. In them I felt awake and would see a big dark figure in the middle of my room that would move closer to me, then when it would reach out to me I would wake up to more footsteps. I once had friends over after a party, who all between 2-3 am asked if there was someone in the house… I couldn’t really give them a response other than “oh yea those are just the ghosts.”
Finally we decided to try to move all the souvenirs my brother brought back, which included 6 African masks… when we really looked at them, there were a few that were terrifying, like really demonic looking, so we put them in the garage. This is what really got me…. For the next two days, birds would fly into the glass of my parents’ bay window in their bedroom and die. We had to pick up like 15 dead birds. It only stopped when my dad got rid of the masks…
We blame the masks, but I still have no clue why this shit went down.
