Ghosts XD Disclaimer: Not for the easily spooked

[Eimi]

I know its not Halloween, but I just heard a really fun ghost story in my town.  Next to my school in fact!  It's not scary, I don't think, just interesting, but I wanted to put a disclaimer up there just in case, like with spiders, some people just don't want to know XD


My school is along the old Samurai area of town where all the Lord's retainers lived about 500 years ago, at the foot of the hill where the Lord's castle was situated.  I don't know how old the temple is, but you can pretty much bet a temple has been there for at least as long.  Anyway, apparently a friend of a friend (isn't it always a friend of a friend?) was walking along that road at night, and when she reached the temple across from my school she saw a form walking towards her that looked just like a man in monks robes only it had no head.  It was just a body walking along the road towards her!  Of course she paniced and ran up to one of the houses, knocking frantically for someone to let her in.  A little old couple opened the door and she recounted her story.  They just smiled and said "Oh yes, he's seen from time to time.  He's harmless, but don't worry, we'll drive you home."  Now I don't know if its true or not, but you can bet that story will cross my mind the next time I walk down that road at night (which I sometimes do in winter when the sun goes down early...)

Are there any fun ghost stories in your town or around where you live?

[Amanda N]

Always a friend of a friend.  Didn't Anne McCaffrey see the ghost of one of her relatives or something?  I've never had such an experience.

[Devin]

Coooool! I love ghost stories!

[Jane]

Sadly we're not very ghost-y in New Zealand.  Is the age of the country significant?

The only ghost story I know is from 1886 when Mt Tarawera erupted.  Shortly before the eruption Pakeha tourists and their Maori guides all saw a ghostly canoe being paddled silently across Lake Tarawera.  A week or so later the volcano erupted with resultant loss of life and the destruction of the famous Pink and White Terraces.

http://www.anheizen.com/eruption/index. ... pectre.php

[Eimi]

You know, that's a good question, Jane.  You'd probably find more ghost stories on the East Coast of America, which is the older part of the country, than the west.  But is that becuase there are more people to have experiences?  More buildings?  Or more battlefields and a longer history?

Colleges, schools, libraries and theaters seem to be the big places for hauntings in the states.  I could kind of see it.  I mean, in a theater people like dramatic stories and romantic notions of ghostly hauntings.  Libraries are so quiet it can be rather eerie late at night.  School kids love to scare each other with stories, and so do college freshmen living in dorms away from home for the first time...  So is it really that these kinds of places attract ghosts?  Or is is more that it attracts the kind of people who believe in them?

[Amanda N]

I just thought of a ghost story.

Evidently, there's a ghost in Bruce Hall at the University of North Texas.  This door that is bolted keeps getting unlocked and opened and no one knows why.  People say it's haunted.

I think someone keeps passing down a key.

[Paula]

I'm not aware of any on the place I know live, but in the town here I grew up were supposed to have few haunted places. Like Svartholma, a fortified island, were they kept prisoners and some of them still haunt the island. The place was bombed to pieces during the Krim-war.

I think it has to do with the age and history of the place.

[Eimi]

My family lived in a house in Connecticut that had something there.  It just seemed like a typical house to me when I visited, but there was a ghost of a woman, apparently.  My father saw her once at the bottom of the stairs looking into the living room once.  I've always wondered what would have attracted her to stay there...

[Rochelle]

I know this is an older topic, but I've been gone and wanted to get my 2 cents in

I know not everyone believes in them, but ghosts are pretty much a fact of life to me. I've lived in at least three houses that could easily be called haunted, and when I was getting my bachelors, I attended a campus that had the reputation for being the most haunted college in the state. Every building with the exception of the union and the new library (which were both less than five years old) was reputed to have at least one ghost. My dorm was supposedly haunted by a girl who'd killed herself in the kitchen when she'd found out she was pregnant in the 60s, and in order to avoid problems with later girls getting creeped out the dorm management reordered the numbers on all the doors of the fourth floor. The problem that resulted was that the ghost can no longer find her room, and consequentially goes through the building opening  locked doors at random (it happened to me a few times, so I can vouch for this, it's really creepy watching a door handle turn and open without actually unlocking and then seeing no one on the other side!), banging on walls when no one was there, and the fourth floor is plagued with unexpected furniture rearrangements in the summer, when the staff arrives in the empty building to find all the chairs or beds and desks stacked on top of one another when the security camera showed no one in the building (my friend was actually there for this one).

I've got some freaky stories and funny ones too, but my favorite happened to my mother.  We were living in an old house in Missouri at the time, and her bedroom was on the ground floor. She couldn't sleep very well one night, and woke up thinking that my dad was moving around the room after a bathroom trip because she could hear movement. Except he was still in bed with her. So when she opened her eyes to see who was making the faint murmuring noises she was hearing, imagine her surprise to see an elderly man in a nightshirt on his knees praying beside the bed. She screamed, and he opened his eyes and then he screamed before he vanished and my dad woke up in a panic.

Some people are really ingrained in their routines I guess...

[Shale]

What a fun thread! I believe in ghosts, but I always get a weird feeling when I read peoples' ghost stories--like I'm on the verge of tears or something, because it's such a hard topic to wrap my mind around sometimes. Anyone else experience that?

Well, I have a few to contribute, although none of them are personal experiences. My mother worked on standardbred racing farms for the better part of her life, so she lived in some pretty old houses. She says that three of them were haunted. In one, she saw an older gentleman in a suit from time to time. A little girl in a sun hat lived in another house, and my mom never actually saw her, but her roommates did. Usually, our German shepherd would stand up and stare at nothing while wagging his tail, and then someone would spot her. (Here comes that weird feeling again.) In the third, something would always pound on the washing machine at night--you know,  that hollow metal sound. I can't even imagine how creepy that would be. They also started tugging on her pillow, and she let it go for a while, but one night, she yelled "e-NOUGH!" and they went back to banging on the washer. I guess it's the next best thing when you don't have chains to rattle.

[Eimi]

I've had three experiences with something I can't explain.  I can't say they were all ghosts per se, just something I can't explain.

The first one was when I was in high school.  My grandfather was dying of kidney failure, so of course my father drove across the state to be with him.  It was one of those "it could come any time" type things, so no one knew how long he'd hold on.  One night, I woke up suddenly - not waking up with a start like you do after a nightmare, but just opened my eyes and sat up.  I looked over at the clock and I saw it was 4:25 in the morning, and the words "Grandpa's gone" just flashed through my head.  I wasn't sad or surprised, I just laid back down and fell right back to sleep.  The next morning my Dad called and I picked up the phone, and he told me grandpa had died in the night, but that everyone had woken up for some reason just before he passed and were able to be with him when he died.  I asked him what time it had been, and he told me grandpa had passed a few minutes before 4:30.

The second one was at Alcatraz of all places XD  My friend and I were on a tour and we went up to this old hospital room.  The moment I walked in, I felt like something was standing next to the dark room (where they developed x-rays) looking at me.  It was just a weird feeling so I wasn't afriad or anything.  It was just strange.  We walked around for a while (and I even walked passed that spot) before the tour guide called us together.  Suddenly in the middle of his explaination he turned to me and asked "Are you sensitive to ghosts?"  And I felt a chill run down my back, considering what I had been experiencing, but I shook my head.  He said "Its funny you picked that spot, because that's where all the mediums say they feel someone standing when they walk in this room.  Do you feel anyone standing there with you?"  I wanted to say "No, he's not here, he's over by the door", but I just shook my head again XD

The third one was the house my parents lived in Connecticut.  I always figured if everyone else had been experiencing something, they would have told me, but no one said a word to me, so I thought I was going crazy.  I heard whispers and I felt like I was being watched.  I remember specifically feeling the same thing I felt in Alcatraz - someone standing at the bottom of the stairs watching me in the living room.  That didn't scare me, but it was just a feeling.  Anyway, when my parents were moving out of the house my mom called and casually dropped while we chatted "Oh, and our ghost is back".  It turns out they "forgot" to tell me about it, but they would hear whispers, feel people tugging on the blankets, things would move around in my brother's room while he was gone, and one night my father saw a woman standing at the bottom of the stairs looking into the living room!

[Devin]

I've got some freaky stories and funny ones too, but my favorite happened to my mother.  We were living in an old house in Missouri at the time, and her bedroom was on the ground floor. She couldn't sleep very well one night, and woke up thinking that my dad was moving around the room after a bathroom trip because she could hear movement. Except he was still in bed with her. So when she opened her eyes to see who was making the faint murmuring noises she was hearing, imagine her surprise to see an elderly man in a nightshirt on his knees praying beside the bed. She screamed, and he opened his eyes and then he screamed before he vanished and my dad woke up in a panic.

Some people are really ingrained in their routines I guess...

Scaring a ghost! LOL That's a great story.

[Paula]

Perhaps it wasn't a ghost but there was a rip in time, and they saw each other across time?
(Someone's been watching too much Torchwood)

[Eimi]

That's kind of a fun thought - some ghosts are a rip in time.  Actually I was thinking that the other day.  I finally watched a Ghosthunter episode where they go into a room reportedly haunted by this old woman who had lived in the hotel before she died, and they recorded some EVPs of her asking who the two men in her room was.  It was really interesting!  And I was thinking, what if a hundred years ago that woman was getting ready for bed and she saw these two "ghosts" in her room XD  wouldn't that be interesting... If we were ghosts to the ghosts...