The Official Scary Halloween Stories Thread

vanity

[bgill]

It's Halloween! Post your spooky ghost stories here. Boo!

[bgill]

I'll start with two true stories.

Back in my college days, I lived in the dorm. My room had a poltergeist. He played so many pranks that everyone knew about him and just accepted he was around. The usual ones were taking items and returning them a couple weeks later or opening the door which had one of those bolt locks where you had to have a key to open it. The door was metal set into a metal frame and the floor was cement so there was no warping of wood to let the door open on its own. But the door would open and we'd run out to see who was there but there would never be anyone in the long hallway which echoed the slightest noise. There was simply no one there, ever. But one semester, after a roommate disagreement, I moved to another room in the same dorm. There, no unusual pranks happened and shut doors stayed shut. IOW, it was quite boring. The next semester, I moved back to my original room and the mischievousness started up again but I knew he was peeved at me leaving. One day, shortly after I'd moved back in, I was standing beside the closet - well, the room was small so anywhere was near the closet. Anyway, the closet had storage doors above the hanging part. The storage doors were a tight fit and took effort to slide them open and closed. But that day, odd things kept happening and as I was standing there the storage door fell out of its track and went whoosh through me. Yes, I felt it go through me. I jumped as it landed with a crash onto the floor. Yes, I felt it go through me. I know it did. It was after the crash that I jumped back and the door was lying right where I had been standing. Like everyone knows, dorm rooms are small so there's not much room to jump around and mistake where you were two seconds before. Maintenance had to put the door back in and they couldn't make it giggle out of its track so didn't believe it had just fallen on its own.

Second true story. My grandmother had passed away a few months earlier so the family was going through some of her belongings. I'm the family genealogist, so they automatically handed me her briefcase that everyone knew had some family history stuff in it. The point is, she was the last person to open it. Some time later, I decided to go through it and file away the papers. I reached in and put my hand on an envelope that was lying face down so I didn't know who it had been addressed to or anything about it. For some reason, I knew what was in it and laughed so loud that hubby heard me from the other part of the house and asked what I was laughing about. I took the envelope to him and opened it as I was already telling him about an incident that happened when granny's sister came for a visit when I was little. My grandfather had told me to tell a joke to mother but he knew full well I'd mess it up and end up saying a bad word. Sure enough, that's what happened. He thought it was hilarious until mother became unglued and banished me to timeout. Granny had written to her sister after she'd returned home and apologized for what had happened. They rarely ever saw each other so I have no idea how the cancelled postage letter had gotten back into granny's possession or why she kept it for so many decades. I like to think that it was her way of making me laugh and to let me know that she was fine.

Ok, your turn!

[mrs. a]

Scariest thing I’ve seen all day...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5QlQkojQYI

[smokingfrog]

And when the electoral votes were counted, Barack Obama was declared the winner of the 2008 presidential election.

the end

[Mercat]

We were visiting some hippy friends of ours who were living in an old farm house in northern New Mexico. The house had one room upstairs where they slept and they recommended that we not try to sleep downstairs all of which was fine since our van was outfitted with beds. So my husband and I and our weiner dog settled down for the night. The reason they didn’t think we wanted to sleep in the downstairs part of the house was because they heard doors opening and closing and kitchen things being used. So in the middle of the night we’re awakened to the sound of a hammer on an anvil close at hand. Our dog, usually a barky little guy, hid under the covers. We did too and eventually it stopped. The next morning we explored the tumble down barn and found an old blacksmith shop - no hammer but an old anvil. There was no way to get in there without the rest of it falling on you and no sign anyone had been there in decades. My husband the next night also experienced walking through an icy cold patch on a warm night. There were three old extinct grave yards in the area.

[A message]

Here is my scary story.

We have a communist as president.

The end.

[Carl from Marietta]

Perry won the republican nomination and named Romney as his VP. That’s the scariest thing that could conceivably happen.

[mnehring]

This is guaranteed to creep you out more than clowns in a sewer telling you how well you can float down there.

[onyx]

---

To: FReepers; everyone; All

SPOOKY DUDE SOROS wants the LIGHTS OUT at FREE REPUBLIC!

Tell SOROS to 'move on & shove it!

DONATE HERE TONIGHT

SPOOKY DUDE SOROS wants the LIGHTS OUT at FREE REPUBLIC!

Tell SOROS to 'move on & shove it!

DONATE HERE TONIGHT

SPOOKY DUDE SOROS wants the LIGHTS OUT at FREE REPUBLIC!

Tell SOROS to 'move on & shove it!

DONATE HERE TONIGHT

[Kirkwood]

I’m here all alone in bed and there is a clown with an axe at the foot of the bed who keeps staring at me.

[Califreak]

Once upon a time, in 2012, Obama was re-elected.

FIN

[bgill]

That’s creepy!

Here’s another one. Hubby and I were out doing genealogy so were at an old cemetery in Lampasas county (Texas). Hubby called me over to one grave that had a rock slab covering it but the slab had slid off one corner so you could see a hole of sorts under it. I didn’t think anything about the hole and figured it was caused by an animal. Anyway, hubby pointed to the headstone and started joking about it saying this was the guy’s second burial. He then went over to the hole and tried looking in. Big mistake. There was a LOUD growl that sounded like it’d come from deep in the bowels of hell. He ran so fast outta there, lol! And never has gone cemetery hunting with me again. I won’t admit to him, but I was pretty unnerved by the growl, too but stood my ground. Still, I’d like to know why the guy’s first burial didn’t take and why he needed a heavy slab to keep him in the second grave.

[rabidralph]

Stories from childhood on YouTube.

Hitchcock stories, my favorite one.

[ProudFossil]

And when the electoral votes were counted, Barack Obama was declared the winner of the 2008 presidential election.

the end

And even scarier:

And when the electoral votes were counted, Barack Obama was declared the winner of the 2012 presidential election.

the real end of every thing

[NautiNurse]

An oldie but goodie Thrilling Car Ride

[Responsibility2nd]

Just relax.
Go to sleep. Nothing to worry about.

 

 

 

Good Night!

[archy]

The railroad bridge crosses the Embarrass River- the locals pronounce that "Ambraw"- about 10 miles west of Vincennes, Indiana, just to the east of the tank farm of the old Texaco refinery on the outskirts of the small Illinois town of Lawrenceville. The railroad tracks cut between the refinery's storage tank farm and catalytic cracking machinery, which needed water for cooling, so location near a river or sizable stream was a must. On the other, north side of the tracks was the engineering office where my dad worked, so the railroad and the refinery were pretty close neighbors.

The railroad was the Baltimore and Ohio, then. It's a part of the CSX Transportation corporation now, but in those days it was one of the best-known Class 1 railroads in the country. As one of the country's first railroads, it had a lot of history and its own unique character, from the locomotives and cabooses it built in its own shops, to its homebuilt special-purpose freight cars, to its beautiful and elegant passenger service units. The B&O was a class act in American Railroading, and often had its own peculiar way of doing things.

Sometimes I'd ride one of those B&O passenger trains across that bridge on the way to dinner at my grandmother's house, but I never thought there was anything special about it then. Every once in a while, an uncle would ask me if I had seen anything by that bridge, but I never noticed anything unusual about it. Of course, I was only ten years old or so, and I didn't know there was anything there except the pumping station for the coolant water for the refinery.

A few years later, I heard the first mumbles about some kind of a ghost story. It was something about a girl in a white dress, but that's a pretty common theme for ghost stories. You didn't hear the kids whose dads worked for the railroad talk about it though.

By the time I was to enter high school, we had moved to the next town down the railroad line from Lawrenceville, called Bridgeport, though it was no port and there was no bridge there. But that was where I heard a little more about the story of the girl on the bridge. She was said to be about our age, a high school girl or maybe just a little older. At some time in the past she had put on her nicest white dress, and walked the mile or so through the refinery stink and the tank car yard and walked out onto the bridge and waited for a train. When it came along she made no attempt to jump or get out of the way, she just stood there in her white dress and let it hit her.

A full train of cars at fifty tons apiece or more takes quite a ways to stop, and there was no way those trainmen could keep from hitting her. At forty, fifty miles an hour there's not much left when a train hits a person like that, and it doesn't matter if it's a pretty girl or not. At least it must have been over pretty quick.

She was said to have lost her boyfriend or husband in the early days of the war- though I never heard exactly which war. I always assumed it was meant that it was the Second World War, what they called "the Big One" then, and since we had lost a family member during the attack on Pearl Harbor, I sort of felt a little closer to that poor girl I never knew, who died before I was born. It could have been the Korean war, though, or even World War One, but it just felt like it was the sort of thing that fit in with the other stories I had heard about "the Big One."

Later I changed schools, and I graduated, and went on to the Army. When I came home to visit, I spent some time with a girlfriend I'd known from school. One night I got to her home just as she was leaving, and she told me to come along, to her brother's house. He worked for the railroad.

When we got to his house, her sister-in-law told us he had been crying. Then laughing. Then he cried some more, and then he started getting very, very drunk. I had seen a few drunks before. When we got to talking, he was laughing again, but he was shaking like he was real cold. He'd seen her, he said: the girl on the bridge. He told us about it.

It seems that sometimes since that first time, the train crew would see a girl standing out on the bridge right where the one had been hit before. It was no ghost either; when the train hit, there was blood across one side of the engine front on the fireman's side and as they went past they could see her white dress go under the wheels. The first few times, trains had stopped there and the fireman and head brakeman would go back to see who it was. When they got there, there'd be nothing there. They were told that it was probably a trick of some kind, a stunt by some kids with a dummy and some white rags. That was the official explanation anyway, and for a while at least, the trainmen were ordered not to stop at that bridge if they thought they had hit someone. It was always the trains that were coming from the same direction as the time the girl had been hit, though, but it wasn't always the same locomotive or crewmen. I don't know if it ever happened to anyone twice.

But I found out that there were other people who knew about it. And I heard other railroaders talk about it after they'd retired and couldn't be laid off. It happened through the 1950s, I was told, when they first put radios in the cabs of the locomotives and in the cabooses so the crews could talk to each other and to the stations they passed by. Sometimes a crew up front would hit the girl, and see her go under the wheels and they'd call on the radio back to the caboose and the crew in back would look for anything unusual. The ones in back never found anything.

The last guy I know of who worked for the railroad in that area told me he had spent nearly twenty years along that route, but he had never seen her. He'd heard the story, though, and he promised he'd let me know if he ever saw her. Maybe things have changed enough since the refinery shut down or the railroad changed its name that she doesn't come along any more. Maybe whatever she thought was worth dying about doesn't mean much to anyone now, or maybe there's just been enough water pass beneath that bridge, and enough trains across it, that she can get some rest, for good, at last.

Or maybe, the next train along that way, crossing that bridge when they come to it at about the same time as the one that hit that girl the first time, maybe the very next ones will see that same girl in her white dress with that same look on her face. They've got a few women running the locomotives on the CSX Railroad now, so I wonder whether one of them might be next to see that girl in the white dress. But like the men, like so many and a few I've known, I doubt if she'll talk about it much.

[dfwgator]

Bill Cosby - The Chicken Heart

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vPimtcK3-A&feature=related

[kimmie7]

Normally I would play along, but this is truly chilling: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2800553/posts?page=1

[Nip]

My story dates to the early 1970’s when I was a young crewdog pulling alert at Minot AFB, ND.

There was one position on the christmas tree that never had an aircraft spotted on it. When I asked I was told it was haunted by a crewdog who was killed on alert.

When ever a bird was spotted on that branch and left overnight all of its switches were repositioned. This was on an aircraft under constant guard by men who were authorized to “use deadly force.” One older crewdog chimed in saying one night the ghost was seen jumping the security fence and entering the crew compartment.

Never saw the ghost for the three years I pulled alert. But then, I don't ever remember seeing a BUFF parked on that spot either.

[momtothree]

Tell him that staring is rude! That should help...