telophase | (no subject)

Entry tags:

(no subject)

On an amusing note, when I searched Google Images for "mello's fabulous ass," the first two pictures were my current default icon of Mello staring upwards in horror, and my icon of L saying "I'm not wearing any pants."

And in other news: tell me ghost stories! Stories, anecdotes, weird little unexplained things that happened to you, someone in your family, a friend, some chick you knew in highschool, that sort of thing. Entertain me!

It's not much of a story, and I will point out that I'm a hardline skeptic, but the storyteller and anthropologist in me love hearing Stories of the Unexplained.* Mine happened right before my senior year of highschool. I was dating a guy at that point (didn't last long), and he came over to my house on a day when both my parents were gone - it was the week before school started, so they were both at work preparing. He and I were back in my room, making out, when I clearly heard the front door opening and a male voice call out "Steph?" The guy heard it too, and jumped off the bed, tucking his shirt and smoothing his hair, and we both left the room and walked down the hall ... to find there was no one there. He was shaken up enough that he left and went home.

(Skeptical explanation - I was nervous enough already at my parents possibly discovering us, since my dad didn't keep regular hours and could show up at any moment. I probably heard something and interpreted it as that, and my sudden, panicked reaction may have cued the guy that I thought someone was home. We didn't talk about it, so I really can't be sure what he did or did not hear. All I know for sure is that at that point, he said "I better go home" and left. But it makes a good story anyway. :D)

* And I won't argue with anyone that nothing happened - obviously something happened to them. I may disagree about the ultimate cause of said event (something neurological or psychological, mistaken identity, leaping to conclusions on incorrect data, hoax, etc.), but that's not the important part - the anthropologist in me thinks that the meaning of the event, the event's interpretation, and the social context are the important and interesting bits.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

ok, I got one. One time me and my sister were sitting downstairs watchin TV. There's this table against one wall that had a sheet of paper on it and all of a sudden this paper starts fluttering and shit like it's caught in a draft of air. I get up off the couch and wave my hands around lookin for this draft of air. Nothing. Wtf. We both saw that and just went on upstairs D:

My mother and I booked a hotel room in India. We got in, dumped our luggage, and I remarked, "It's kind of dark, isn't it?"

Mom said, "Nonsense, the sun's coming in through the windows."

Sure enough, the room was bright. But it still, somehow, felt dark. We left our luggage and skedaddled out to do touristy stuff.

When we returned, at night, the room still seemed dark, and we went round and turned on all the lights, even the bathroom ones, to get enough to read... although, again, really the regular lights were quite normally bright. There was just this odd feeling of darkness.

So we both sat down on our beds, facing in the same direction, and began to read. After a while, we got in a conversation about the room seeming vaguely spooky. After we'd chewed over that for a while, still facing the wall right in front of our beds, I suddenly noticed something on that wall that we'd been looking at for at least an hour at by then, and pointed to it. "What's that?"

My mother swears that she used to hear children playing in the attic of the house I grew up in. The house had been built in 1909, so there had been two or three owners and several children living there. She said that she could hear them running and laughing, and bouncing a ball. When I was little, I believed her, but now I think it was just big wood rats, raccoons, or possums.

My mom also swears that she's seen ghosts and dreams about women who've been murdered. I think she's got an overactive imagination and is highly suggestible from watching too much Law & Order.

It was a reddish brown stain on the wall, about two feet off the ground and approximately the size of a basketball, and it looked exactly as if someone had thrown a bucket of paint against the wall. There were splatter marks, and it had dripped down to the floor, and the bottom of the drips were thicker.

The wall was otherwise painted white. This was an incredibly noticeable stain, we'd been looking in its direction for an hour, and I cannot imagine how we could have failed to notice it when we first arrived in the hotel, let alone after sitting there looking in its direction for an hour.

Mom and I stared at the wall. The feeling of spookiness was pretty intense by then, but unfortunately by then it was also too late to try to switch rooms. "How could we have both missed that?" asked Mom.

"Maybe it just appeared now," I suggested.

"Don't say that!" said Mom. "Anyway, it's just a paint stain."

"Funny that it's the exact color and thickness of dried blood," I said.

"Don't say that!" repeated Mom.

We ended up not-sleeping with the lights on, and booked it out of the hotel at dawn.

"There's a really big red stain on the wall," I told the hotel manager when we checked out."

He didn't look a bit surprised.

Okay, here's a weird one. Once upon a time, I was a prisoner in a Navy brig (never mind the details -- it's a long story) on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. One fine day, the brig's commanding officer summons me to his office and sits down across a desk from me. After a few moments of silence, he leans back in his chair and asks "Lewis, have you ever read Dune, by Frank Herbert?"

Somewhat taken aback by this unexpected line of questioning, I responded "The, uh, science fiction novel, sir? Yes, I have read it."

"Then you are familiar with the term 'Kwisatz Haderach'?"

This was really getting weird. "Uh, yes sir," I replied.

He leaned across the desk at me, templed his fingers, and spoke. "Lewis, did you ever wonder if you might be the Kwisatz Haderach?" He asked.

"Huh?" It was all I could think of to say. "Uh, me, sir? No!"

He looked at me for a moment, then waved towards the door. "Just wondering," he said. "Dismissed." I left, posthaste.

To this day I have no idea what the hell he was talking about. It really happened, though. It was in late 1985. I still don't understand it.

Of course, it is entirely possible that early feelings of spookiness were hindsight. People do miss things in front of their eyes, all the time, big spectacular things. Cheap hotels in India frequently have non-supernatural things wrong with them. And once we got the idea that something creepy was going on, of course we were scared.

But here's the part I can't explain: I am not particularly suggestible. I have often been in creepy situations, including ones where I had a creepy feeling and then found evidence to bolster it. But never in my life, before or after, have I experienced anything like the sense of horror and inexplicable, irrational fear that I felt all that night in that hotel room. I wasn't afraid that anything would happen to me; I just felt absolutely convinced that something terrible had happened there, and that as long as I stayed there, I was stuck in whatever vortex of emotion had impressed itself into those walls.

Even if all that was all completely inner-generated, it's odd that, although many of the inciting conditions had been met before and have been met since, that was the only time I've ever felt fear like that, pure irrational horror, like a nightmare in waking. And so my theory is that someone slit a child's throat there in that room, and though the blood was long since cleaned away and the walls repainted (and the white paint looked bright and fresh) every time the room is rented out, the people who stay there see that stain upon the wall.

Sweet dreams!

Hee! That beats my friend Clint's Psycho Magnet that compels insane people to approach him randomly all the time and start explaining their theories on barcodes or one-world government or religion or aliens or whatever.

My mum sometimes tells me about the time she was driving home late at night along some back lane between villages with a friend. It was a clear night, or so she says, but the road was hilly and at one point she had to go through a dip where some mist was hanging about for some inexplicable reason. She wasn't going very fast since she hates driving at night and is a careful driver anyway, but all of a sudden a person is right out in the middle of the road in front of her and though she braked hard she was absolutely convinced she'd hit them. Both her and her friend were pretty shook up, but they got out and they searched around for a good 15 minutes and found absolutely nothing, so eventually they got back in the care and continued home. My mum later found out that place was supposedly haunted and lots of other people had reported similar situations. My mum's friend also swears by this story, which is a bit strange in itself since she's the sort of no-nonsense, clear headed kind of person.

Hee. :D For the month or so after my dad died, objects on shelves near me seemed to hurl themselves off the shelves and at the floor at a high frequency. XD

Mom's got squirrels living in the walls of the house at the moment - the handyman keeps plugging the holes and they keep finding or making new ones - and they do make a lot of weird noises.

Around my region in Ohio there is an urban legend about Gore Orphanage (except this has nothing to do with Gore Orphanage) so my best friend and I thought it would be great to drive out there on Halloween and see if we could see the ghostly children and hear the screams and what not...except we can't read a map...so it's around twilight and we are completely lost in the hilly, misty Ohio country side when we pass a burned out church. A smoky colored cat slinks out of the church, I swear, and starts to pace the car. I would look and sometimes see it in the hedges or among the reeds by the roadside. I keep asking my friend if she sees it and she says no, and I am really, really worried at this point, because I am positive I am going to hit it. Anyway, I swear I see it behind us on the road in the rearview mirror, and I turn around to see if it's really there, but my friend starts screaming because the road dead ends in a gruard rail and a cliff. I hit the guard rail and we just kinda sit there and I ask her if she saw the cat. Of course not, so with some awesome driving skills, I manage to back the car away from the dead end of death and we head back out of the valley. As we are heading out, the damn cat is in the headlights. I try to swerve, but I swear to God I hit it. The car sure as hell shuddered like I hit it. But when we stopped and looked, no blood, no body, no nothing. So we're turning around because at this part car accidents seem about the only thing awaiting us in these valleys when we pass the church. My friend screams again because she sees a gray colored cat in the yard of the building. I didn't see, but needless to say, cats on the road make me nervous to this day. I don't believe in ghosts, just cats abilities to fuck with you.

My ghost-history is so boring. I have nothing to contribute other than seeing the upstairs bathroom light-switch turn itself off when I was seven, and what I think was my dead grandfather showing up and staring at me for about five seconds when I was a teenager.

Then again, maybe 'boring' is a good thing in this case.

When I was in Wales for a semester, one night I and a bunch of people watched The Silence of the Lambs in the room of some guys who lived in a hostel (dorm) in town, instead of on campus. Everyone else was spooked out enough to stay and watch about last night afterwards, but I hated that movie and had a paper I needed to write. So I set off back to my own hostel across town at night, not worried or nervous in the least.

I took the usual shortcut, which led through a sort of alley with houses on one side and a fence on the other. It was *pitch* dark. I could see just enough to know I wasn't running into a wall, but that was about it - if there were objects in front of me, I'd have tripped on them because I couldn't see them. About halfway through, there is this movement in the darkness, right next to my elbow, which caused me to jump out of my skin.

Turns out it was a completely black, fuzzy cat sitting on a fencepost at elbow height. XD

I think "dead grandfather showing up and staring at me for about five seconds" gets to count as "not boring."* :) What were the circumstances?

* Especialy with that icon, which is FREAKING ME OUT.

darkelf below had a vaguely similar event with her car. And I answered with my Wales spooky story. XD

Oh yeah. Had that happen. My cat escaped the house one night and no one knew it. So I'm walking up the drive and a piece of wind blown newspaper starts to move...except there is not wind. I scream, the cat scuttles into the bushes. There is chasing and cursing and mud...and the next week he stole all the pens from my desk convincing me that I couldn't retain office supplies to save my life. Except my mother caught him ferrying them up from my room to somewhere upstairs. There is a cache of pens and markers in my house that I would one day like to retrieve, but Artemis has remained silent as to where he put them.

Ooooh ghosts and other wierd stories!

When I was a baby my parents were in the habit of checking on me often in the night because I didn't cry very loud and they might not hear me. (Me? Quiet?!) One night my mom went to check on me and she couldn't enter my room. She said she pushed and pushed at the doorway, the door was open, but she couldn't step over the threshold. Finally it gave way and she stepped into the room. The room was very cold compared to the hall. She scooped me up and took me back to their room but the next day I had to be rushed to the hosptial with pneumonia.

Same house, a little later, my dad was up to check on me (why they kept me in that same room I don't know) and he had a bad feeling when he entered my nursery. He ran over to the crib and I had already started turning blue from not breathing. He performed mouth to mouth and brought me around again.

I was older and my brother was a baby, so I must have been three or four, and we were driving at dusk on our way home from someplace. My mom said they were driving on a bridge over a dried up lake/riverbed when the car suddenly died. My parents got out, with my baby brother, to look at the engine. I remember being annoyed because I had been napping and the car stopping woke me up. I don't remember anything else but my mom said she looked around the open hood to see if I was sleeping still and all the windows were fogged up and she couldn't see inside. She panicked and opened one of the doors to get at me and the engine suddenly started up again as if it had never stopped.

When I was in highschool and we moved into the house my mom currently lives in, at night I always got a vaguely creepy feeling about the place, especially in the hall. When I came back after grad school and lived there for 5 more years, the feeling was gone. Very strange.

I did have a really weird hypnogogic or hypnopompic (I can't ever remember which is which - the one that happens upon waking up) hallucination after I moved back. The sort of night paralysis with sense of presence that fits with the traditional night hag/night witch experience. At the time, my bed had its head towards a window. I woke up in the middle of the night with sleep paralysis and the sense that there was something small just off the foot of the bed. I wasn't scared, probably because when you grow up with cats there are often small, malicious presences somewhere in the room.

But this Thing was moving about down there, then said in a small voice, "Coming through!" and bounced up, off my chest, and out the (closed) window behind the head of the bed. I couldn't see anything other than my room (and may have been dreaming that - I'm not sure my eyes were open) but I got the distinct impression of something small and leggy and black.

And then the paralysis wore off, I was slightly more awake, and my first thought was, "Gee, Steph, couldn't your subconscious come up with anything better?" (I tend to recognize when I'm suffering sleep paralysis.)

Maybe you *are* your own strange presence! XD

My gran lived in a haunted house in Saskatchewan. They were renting a two story house, super cheap which had her suspicious, and for the first little while everything was fine. But during the day when gran was home all alone, she'd hear footsteps on the second floor.

Eventually the family started only living on the first floor because everyone had been so uncomfortable on the second floor. Gran's father, a devout Mennonite, told her it was absolute nonesense and against God to believe such things so he came over to put a stop to it.

She said it was after dinner, and everyone was sitting around waiting for something to happen upstairs when they heard the footfalls walking across where the bedroom would be to the rocker granny had there for when she was nursing. They heard the squeaking of the rocker moving then the footfalls again, walking across the room and down the hall to the stairs. Gran's father quietly crept to the cupboard that held the stairs to the second floor with the intention of surprising whoever was walking down the stairs. (I don't know if you have seen this before? I lived in a house once where the stairs were concealed in a cupboard, you just open the door like any pantry or cupboard but instead of shelves there is a set of stairs.) He waited, listening to the foot falls going down the stairs and when it seemed that whoever was there had reached the bottom he flung the door open to reveal an empty staircase.

Gran said he helped board up that stair cupboard and they moved out as soon as they were able. She also found out that EVERYONE in town knew that was a haunted house but the owner had begged people not to tell his tenants so he could get rent for it.

dude...you're like Carol Ann from Poltergeist D:

*uses icon again!*

Really, it's not too spooky. It happened the summer after he died and I'd gone to stay with my grandmother for a few weeks. I was sitting in my room reading and heard some heavy footsteps come down the hall and stop in the doorway. Glanced up, saw the person's shoes and thought it was my uncle, who was also visiting, so I kept reading...until a few seconds passed and I realized that whoever it was hadn't moved or said anything. So I looked up and saw that it was definitely not my uncle.

I jumped and blinked (though I didn't scream) and the person was gone. I can't say for sure that it was my grandfather, as I didn't get a good look at his face, but I'm certain the experience itself wasn't the result of imagination/weird light and shadow/whatever--and I later found out that I'd been alone in the house at the time.

So, no portents of doom or messages from beyond or anything--just a slightly odd experience. :D

Ahahaha! XD I still maintain it is my mom who attracts the wierdness.

I have a lot of other stories of wierd stuff happening; my current condo is the first place this sort of stuff hasn't happened in and I believe it is because it is such a new build.

OH! This one is strange...

I was cycling to work on early Saturday morning, probably around seven or eight in the morning, down a quiet, residential street when I saw a man in a suit hanging from a noose in a tree down a side street. I braked so hard I nearly went arse over teakettle but when I looked down the street again there was nothing there. I put it down to it being early in the morning and me being half asleep.

I wonder why my mom even thought to tell me about these things? XD
Watch, I go in to donate a kidney and find out I am a chimera; twins that have absorbed each other so you have two different sets of DNA randomly dispersed through the body. I am haunting myself! Aieee!

In September we stayed a couple of nights in my husband's family's old country manor house (I think the oldest part is from the 13th/14th century, with lots of add-ons over the years). It has a really bizarre layout, especially since the attempts to cheaply modernize it in the last century, so I was taking a shower in the morning in this funky shower tucked into what was probably once a big closet or servants quarters. Anyway, part way through my shower the water just stopped. I thought there was a kink in the hose, so I tried straightening it out. Didn't work. Called my husband, he couldn't do anything with the hose. But then he checked the knobs and they were tightly off. And I definitely didn't turn them off. There may be a plumbing/water-pressure explanation, but it was creepy all the same. (We had also had bats in the room the night before and a critter--probably a little thing called a loire--scampering and cavorting around in the attic above our room and down into the wall above our headboard for most of the night, so we were kind of primed to be freaked. But still...)

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Page 1 of 3

(no subject)

no subject

Part I

no subject

Re: Part II

Worms, Spice, Whatever

Re: Part III: a logical explanation?

Re: Worms, Spice, Whatever

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

Re: Part III: a logical explanation?

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject