Hi, everyone. I have been totally flat-strapped today and caught out without a post.
I have been busy finishing off my Urban Fantasy Distant Shore, in particular trying to insert a few nice ghost sightings for my chief characters who are beginning to see the Other side of things.
Anyone out there want to share some real life ghost stories?
A few years ago I had a chilling run-in with a pair of possessed masks. That was one New Year’s Eve I’d rather forget. The cat never came back.
Anyone?
Mad Genius Club 
18 responses to “Ghost Stories”
Navy bootcamp, shortly before 9/11.
Sat up in a dead panic, because the afternoon light was hitting my eyes– look around, and see that the room is full of guys, in old uniform underthings, at attention at the foot of the metal bunks, and the light is coming from the wrong direction for the time of year. I saw a bootcamp instructor coming down the isle, turning to talk to one of the guys at attention at the foot of the bed.
Then the watch grabbed my arm because I was really freaking her out, and it was the middle of the night again.
I do not have dreams where you can feel the room’s temp, or see details like dust in the light, and nobody mentioned that the buildings were decades old until after 9/11 when one of the girls’ dads figured out we were in his old barracks, which had been old when he was there. I also don’t sit up when I’m asleep, I just talk. A lot. All sides of the conversation.
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Wow. That sounds really vivid. it must have freaked you out a bit. Often in fiction and new age literature there is the idea that past events linger as a memory in the physical. I have never experienced anything like that myself. The implication is that usually there is some significnat emotional ‘charge’ that make that event stay as a memory in a place or object. I wonder what was it about that scene that made it stand out to your senses? Maybe the connection with your friend’s Dad?
Not a clue– I was familiar with the “ghosts as a recording of history” thing, as well as the “ghosts as psychic impressions” thing, but I really thought that the “recording of history” was just over-active imagination. Still think it mostly is, but… kinda hard to argue with something you’ve seen.
If it hadn’t happened before 9/11, I’d have figured it was stress triggered.
It was very vivid– and didn’t fade, and didn’t have anything actually odd about it. (My dreams are usually a mish-mash of picture media and strange junk, and fade very quickly unless they’re reoccurring.)
Even the theory of “waking up might make you remember it differently” doesn’t work, because my siblings and husband have woken me up when I was talking in my sleep and sometimes I won’t remember waking up and never what I was dreaming about.
I’ve tried to find a way to dismiss it, but… it just doesn’t work; I’d be willing to hear any suggestions that don’t boil down to going on faith that it was imaginary!
All of my maternal uncles were Navy, but I know the blood-uncles went to San Diego, so the by-marriages probably did as well….
Heck, for all I know the gal has some sort of ESP thing and I just got part of her dad’s memory echoed through her.
Nothing myself. Had a friend, when visiting his mother, walked downstairs and had to step over the cat at the bottom of the stairs. Walked into the kitchen, where his mother was cooking breakfast. “I didn’t know you had a cat.” “I don’t.”
He looks back, but the cat’s gone. Just then his wife walks down, takes an extra large step off the last tread. “When did you get the cat?” She asks.
Oh – no way! They both saw it? Weird that it was just sitting on the stairs like that.
Maybe it’s the cat that disappeared from that unit I was house-sitting in Adelaide that New Year’s Eve:)
We rented a very old house in England in 1986, when I was stationed over there. We also had a young daughter (3 months) we’d adopted. She had her own room near ours. We would constantly hear her giggling. When we discussed it with our landlord, he suggested she was being entertained by the ghost of a governess who had died in the house of something weird, more than a hundred years before.
I’ve also FELT the presence of ghosts in other places, but never was able to confirm their presence. We’d hear footsteps across the floor upstairs when we were in the basement, and our dog would whine at odd times for no reason we could discover.
That must have been a creepy place to live in – particularly at night. I often get freaked out late at night downstairs, when the lights are out and I’ve just watched a horror movie – but that’s probably just my own imagination. It would be pretty intense to live somewhere with things like that happening.
It’s nice to think the old governess was friendly. I can fully relate to how upsetting it would be if you thought their was a malign spirit after a young child like that. The last house we lived in had a very negative presence in the room we used as a nursery. You tend to put things like that out of your mind, but my wife had a series of dreams about an old woman who was trying to lure our son out of the house. After that I reluctantly opened myself up to sensing it, but nothing I did shifted the thing. Eventually a friend who was into American Indian shamanism gave us an eagle feather that was a powerful artefact. I was not too hopeful, but somehow it worked! The presence moved on. Our son is 14 now and still has the feather on his bedroom wall.
You can find lots of ghost stories here:
http://theshadowlands.net/ghost/experiences.html
I haven’t had any real experiences myself, though some odd things happened at our last house. I would occasionally hear an adult woman’s voice coming from the room my daughter was playing in, but didn’t see anything. Recently my daughter said that house was weird, but all she really remembers is ducks flying at her at night.
Hi, Jasini. There ‘s nothing quite as creepy as thinking something in another room with your child (see the events I related above). The image of duck flying at your daughter is very specific. Makes you wonder what could be behind it. Another mystery:)
I have had no clear experiences of my own, so I’ll describe one of the favorite stories I have read. This is from one of the books by a man named Yrjö Kokko, who was a veterinary and a writer and an enthusiastic hunter and conservationist – one of his books, about whooper swans, is usually credited as being the initiator for the protection of those birds in Finland. Before the book they had been hunted to the point where there were only very few nesting yearly in the more far reaches of Lapland, but today they are common everywhere, and besides treated pretty much as holy, there is well enough now that they could be hunted, and could have been hunted for at least a couple of decades with no danger to the population, but people tend to get livid when any talk about hunting quotas comes up. So they are not hunted, period.
But anyway, he lived in Lapland for long periods of time, and wrote a lot about life there, and of the traditions of the Sami people. And a few ghost stories. One concerns a spring when he was alone in his cabin and became very sick. A young Sami woman happened by and stayed a few days while his fewer spiked, tending him until he was on the way to recovery again. But when she left she left, to his alarm, by walking across the lake, one from which the ice was just melting off, and no longer able to support the weight of a human. He tried to follow but fell through right at the beginning, and then returned to the shore and watched, as she went on, with no problems, right to the opposite shore where she disappeared into the trees. And when he afterwards tried to find out who the woman might have been – this was a time when everybody knew everybody in an area, and visitors were noted – nobody had any idea who she might have been, and nobody knew of any strangers passing by.
So his conclusion was that she had either been a ghost, or some sort of spirit. Or he’d been off his mind with the fewer, and she, and her visit, had all been a detailed and long lasting hallucination, or a false memory.
It could also be just a story, he was known to, occasionally, mix some fiction in between the factual parts of his Lapland memoirs, but whether it’s true or not it’s still a good story, and very well written. Unfortunately I don’t know if any of his books have been translated to English, with the possible exception of ‘Pessi and Illusia’, a fairy tale he wrote while on the front lines during the war, but even if that exists it’s probably long out of print.
That’s a great story. It has a real archetypal feel to it & quite heartwarming actually. Cheers,
Let’s see…
One of them was when I lived in Louisiana. The people who owned the property we were renting said that when they were kids, they were camping outside one night when they were woken up by the sound of horses and a cart. They poke their nose outside their tent and see a half-visible horse and buggy of some sort rolling down the road, with all the clink and clack of tack one would expect and breath of the horse(s). Only somewhat transparent and more-so down towards the ground.
On that same property, my dad was shoved multiple times. Mostly in the sort of “boiler room”/storm shelter in the center of the house.
Where I’m living now used to be a cotton plantation. It’s a few streets over from where we used to live and our neighbor there said that one night when she was very sick, a “mammy” type lady was sitting on the edge of her bed, looking “very sorry and concerned”.
A few houses before that, I was completely unnerved by downstairs in the half-furnished, half-unfurnished basement.. I didn’t like being down there alone, even during the daytime. And I *really* didn’t like being around one particular area of the unfinished part of the basement. Maybe the wiring was bad. But since we never had it replaced… I never used my parents bathroom (upstairs) if I could help it. In the first weeks we lived there, the lights would flicker a lot. I was showering in there once and the lights went out entirely. I sort of shrieked and then quickly said, “Turn them back ON. And knock it off!” The lights went back on immediately. I wrapped up in a towel and bolted out of there and never took a shower there again. A few years later, on one of the last nights we lived there, I felt something behind me. The chair shook a little and there was an overwhelming scent of violets or some other floral type scent (my brain calls the scent “purple”). I remember saying something along the lines of we were moving and the people who used to live there would be returning, so I hoped they’d be happy having “their” people back. The feeling of presence left and so did the scent.
I also have a story about shadowpeople I saw in San Diego while staying with my then-boyfriend. And a story about the haunting activity at where I worked. But this post is getting huge and they’re more personal and I’m more sure that it’s real and not just me misinterpreting random happenstance as ghostly happenstance. But I’ll share if you like.
Hi, C.R. It certainly sounds like you have had more than your fair share of encounters. I must confess to experiences a chill as I read your stories, even though its about 26C and broad daylight in my study in Brisbane. Hey, I’d love to hear more. If you would rather email than post publically my add is chrismcmahonspeechnet.com.au.
I did have an experience similar to your shower one, except this time it was playing with the hot water! Hard to separate your imagination from reality in situations like that.
Chris? Is this the beginning of your story about the haunted masks?
The New Year Masques
Most people think of New Year’s as a time of celebration, when the old year ends and the new year rolls in. Singing Auld Lang Syne, drinking a toast, or kissing, the mood is one of nostalgia and cheer. Few people remember that in olden times, when the winter seemed long and cold, and winds blew and ice and snow wrapped the world in fear, that people prayed for the coming of the New Year, the start of the new fire, the turn from winter towards summer, and were sometimes fearful that there would be no spring, no warming, that the world would descend into frozen disaster.
Me? I just think of those two masks and shiver.
See, I live in New York. Modern city, bustle, business, all that good stuff. But Winona, the girl of my dreams, wanted to try a masked party for New Years that year. She invited friends, but I had to find the masks for both of us. So I asked someone, and they said they thought they saw some in an antique shop nearby.
I pushed the door open, and the little bell on a strip of curled metal overhead rang. I glanced up and smiled. I hadn’t seen one of those in years. Then when I looked down, I jumped. There was a hobbit standing in front of me! A second glance revealed that it was just an old man, with curly white hair, and a grey patched sweater over an old flannel shirt, with baggy tweed pants, but for some reason, he still reminded me of a hobbit.
“Can I help you?” he said.
I swallowed, then said, “Well, yes. I’m looking for masks for a New Years party.”
He looked at me, and his eyelids narrowed. His eyes were bright blue, and they twinkled, briefly, in the sunshine from the doorway behind me, before his eyelids dropped again. He nodded.
“Oh, I think I have just the thing. These are native american masks, and I’ve had them in the store for a while, but I think they will make your girlfriend very happy.”
I blinked. Had I mentioned Winona? Oh, he must just assume that I was buying them for a friend. After all, most business men wouldn’t be doing something like this unless it was for a friend, right?
He turned, and walked back into the shop. It was cluttered, with shelves to the ceiling, full of things.
TBC
Just wondered. It fell out on my monitor, and I thought maybe it was yours.
Hi, Mike. Nice one. I had not considered the fact that it was New Year’s Eve as too relevant, but it just so happened that it was. In my case we were in Adelaide minding a unit for friends. The two masks in question were Indonesian. We had intended to go out that night, but something turned us around every time and kept us inside.
Soon everything just started going wrong. Little things. Accidents. Then as midnight drew closer we found ourselves in the middle of a full on argument – the type were you have completely lost the plot and you stand outside yourself just watching the train wreck.
As it reached its height, we walked into the living room. I happened to glance at these two masks on the wall and by God – they swarmed with these fountains of shimmering energy. In a moment of insight I realised that each one contained some presence, and that one was wrapped around me and another around my wife. As soon as I realised it, we could fight it. I won’t go into how I did that, since to do so would make me sound even more like a nut, but we beat it.
Emerging from that state of – well – possession was like coming out of a storm at sea into calm water and sunshine. I can’t explain the feeling of freedom and hope after such darkness.
We took the masks off the wall and hit them under a bed in an unused room. While all this was going on, the owner’s cat was running around yowling – totally freaked. When we finally broke through – it took off like a shot. It never came back, that night or ever.
Of course, the owners thought we were nuts.
I never saw but I felt one of the ghosts at my college. I was out very early one morning and got a sense of someone walking beside me. I was in the area where the ghost lingered, so I shrugged and kept going. The feeling faded as the day grew brighter. The two others, one an art teacher killed in the art building, and the other a ghost horseman killed during the Battle of Atlanta, never appeared while I was around.
The most uncanny thing I’ve ever seen was one afternoon in late spring, eleven years ago, while flying from Ogallala Nebraska to northwest Iowa. I’d dropped passengers off at Ogallala, so it was just me in the plane. The usual thunderstorms were raining havoc down on Nebraska and South Dakota, and I’d just skirted around one monster, tornado-dropping cell. The air ahead of the storm stayed smooth, and I used the winds to get a push, which meant staying a few miles closer than usual to the storm. Not long after turning more north, I looked west, out my side window, into the storm.
A large, dark blue and gray, shadowy area appeared, almost like a room. Paler fingers of cloud, like figures of people, stood at the north end of the dark area, and a lone shape to the south. It made me think of someone being judged. An overwhelming feeling of wrongness hit me, as if I were looking into something private, something humans had no business seeing. The radio had remained silent the whole time, and I added a little power and changed course to get farther ahead of the storm. The hair on my neck stayed up until I landed and put the plane away.
Just happened to see an ad for an upcoming show here in Japan, and it reminded me of your question about ghost stories. The title is “My wife, the ghost.” I’m not sure how they are planning to play it, but the teasers seem to show that the husband can see his wife, but no one else can.
Actually, we’ve had a kind of chain of similar shows here in Japan. The first one I noticed was a year or so ago, which was “Mama is a ghost.” That one I know was a surprise hit, I think largely because the young boy was good, and the plots weren’t bad. I didn’t see most of the shows, but I did see one. Apparently Mama was a policewoman, and in the show I saw, she was still talking to her son, and solving crimes. The problem, of course, was that even when she told her son about it, having a young boy convince the police to investigate something wasn’t easy.
Unfortunately, after that hit, the TV people decided if one ghost is good, let’s have a family! So the next one had a whole family of ghosts. I’ve forgotten how or who the live person in that mess was, because the one time I watched it, it was terrible. Oh, I could see what they were trying to do, with one ghost terrified of the others, one angry, and so on, but basically a show about a family of ghosts arguing with each other isn’t terribly exciting.
So now we have my wife, the ghost. I wonder how well they will make this story play?