Posted on 10/26/2006 4:29:07 AM PDT by CurlyBill
Here is the annual haunted thread. Post your true ghost stories here... This has been somewhat popular ovedr the last three years given the feedback I've received. We just need to keep bumping the thread and keep it active.
boo
About 20-30 years ago, a coworker of my father's told him the following experience she'd had. I can't personally vouch for the story, but my dad knew the woman very well and considered her credible.
This woman and a friend were driving down a deserted road late one night. She approached a railroad crossing. The weather was clear that night, the lights at the crossing were not flashing, the gates were up, and there was no sign of any approaching trains. She slowed the car down to drive across the bumpy crossing and clearly felt the bumps as she drove over the tracks.
As soon as she crossed the tracks, the car was enveloped in what she could only describe as nothingness. Absolutely nothing outside the car was visible - not the road, not the tracks, not anything at all. It was as though the car was floating in a complete void. She could still see inside the car. She looked over at her friend, who looked back at her, equally confused and flabbergasted.
She sensed she should not drive ahead into the void, so not knowing what else to do, she put the car into reverse. Once again, she clearly felt the bumps of the railroad tracks as she backed over them.
After she had the car backed completely over to the other side of the tracks and stopped, the real world returned to view... only this time, the railroad gates were down, the lights were flashing, and she found herself staring directly at what appeared to be the middle of a very long freight train speeding through the crossing, as though it had been passing through for several minutes.
The woman never did figure out how to explain what had happened, nor did her friend, who had witnessed the exact same thing.
#1- Flash back to the mid seventies when I was almost seventeen. My neck was even redder than it is now, as three neighbor kids and I were 'coon hunting one evening. We had just finished a short, unproductive walk and were cutting across an open meadow en route to our pickups. No trees or brush for a couple of hundred yards. {to conceal any "pranksters"}
As we neared the county road, we became aware of the sound of someone gasping for breath. Regularly at times, loud gasping every three or four seconds. It was cold enough to see our own breathing, so we made a quick circle and studied each others' face with our lamps. {Hoping to identify the comedian among us} The sound seemed to be coming from the center of our group and maybe slightly above also. As we all held our breath and the sound continued, we determined it was time to leave....Quickly.
Flash forward about thirty years;
I found out that about five years prior to our "experience", that a kid had accidentally shot himself to death with a .22 while crawling through a fence....at the same spot we heard the gasping. We were aware of this previous accident during our hunt, but we mistakenly believed it happened at another location. Knowing how teenagers run their mouth, I hope the tale of our adventure never made it back to the kid's family. I still haven't told anyone in our group the last part of the story. But all of them remember that night as clearly as I do.
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. #2- Mrs. labette and I recently bought a very old house that had been in her family. It was once a boarding house and some semi-famous people once stayed here. {Gene Autry would sometimes stay at a house a block down the street, but that is another story}
Our house has the "typical" haunts. Sounds mostly, usually the sound of people going up and down the stairs.
One event that gave me the creeps..I was home alone watching a ball game upstairs when I heard a lot of loud talking {undecipherable} downstairs. It sounded like a party. I assumed Mrs. labette had returned home and brought some of my in-laws with her. They can get a little loud. So I head downstairs to be sociable and discover..You guessed it! No one in the house but me!
Wow, that's one of the creepiest stories I've ever heard.
These are great stories!
I used to work the night shift in an office building and was frequently alone in the building late at night. One night another supervisor was working on a report that had to be ready first thing in the morning. I had finished for the night, so I stopped by her office to let her know that I was leaving. Just as I was about to go home, we heard a loud thud from the training room. It sounded like somebody had slammed a heavy box on the floor. I asked her if anybody else was in the building, to which she replied "No, but I heard that too!". We walked to the door and discovered... Nobody in the room and nothing had fallen in the floor that would have made such a loud thud or bang. I had an excuse, I was done for the night, so I made a quick exit. My coworker told me the next day that she called it a night before I had made it out of the parking lot. I often got a sixth sense feeling when I worked alone in that building late at night.
He has a great voice for radio, too. He has a book that I cannot recall the title of right now, but it's also very good. He knows a lot of Chicago cops and they have some really eerie stories.
For some reason one Chicago ghost story that really freaks me out is that people report seeing a man who has hung himself in the windows of the Water Tower on Michigan Ave. No one has ever been hung inside of the Water Tower, but it's been sighted for years.
bump again!
Very creepy! I'll have to remember that one.
This one happened to me last year. I work at an assisted living home. One day I was coming out of the bathroom, thinking about work-related issues, not ghosts. As I left the bathroom, I saw an old lady sitting on a sofa about 20 to 30 feet away. After one or two seconds, something odd about her made me look again (she was only about 90% solid), but she was gone. The area was large and open, so there was no way she would have had time to get up and take a few steps without me seeing her.
I returned to the office and asked my coworkers if the place is haunted. I was joking, but they said that people have seen several strange things through the years. I described the lady's appearance, hair color and style, clothes, etc. One of my coworkers immediately said, "You just described Betty. Her room was right down the hall and she used to sit on that sofa all the time."
I had no previous knowledge of Betty and the experience was not frightening. Several months later, I had another strange audio experience in the same building, during the day with plenty of people around.
A good friend of mine has been a night nurse for nearly 25 years at a well-established children's hospital. Her patients are very critically ill children, ones who generally stay in the hospital for extended periods of time, some never going home at all. It is sadly not unusual for these patients to finally lose their battles to survive.
Just recently, my friend was telling me about one of her patients a few years ago, a little girl. Due to her medical condition, this little girl was only allowed to have ice chips. Each night at the same time, the little girl would ring for the nurse to get her ice chips, something that the little girl greatly looked forward to. My friend described her as a very sweet child whose face would just light up when the ice chips were brought to her.
The little girl finally lost her fight against her condition. All the nurses who had cared for her were heartbroken that they had lost this sweet child and could do nothing more to help her.
On my friend's first night at work after the little girl passed away, she noticed that the ice machine dump all its ice into an adjacent sink, something it had never done before. Strangely enough, this happened at the same time the little girl would routinely ring the nurses for her ice chips. My friend asked the other nurses about it, and they told her that this was happening every night at the exact same time - yet not at any other time - and it had started the night the girl had passed away.
A repairman was called in to check the machine out for malfunction, and could find nothing wrong with it. Nor could he explain why it was suddenly behaving so strangely. Indeed, the unexlained occurance continued every night, only at the exact same time that the little girl had routinely rung the nurses for her ice chips, until that particular ward was eventually closed and relocated.
My friend told me that the nurses found it very comforting, as they interpreted it as the little girl telling them that she was finally well and okay.
You're not going to believe this, but just as I concluded typing this post, I heard the sound of something loudly falling in my living room. There is no one else at home. I went in there to see what it was and could find nothing out of place. Nothing unexplained has ever happened in my house, and I've lived here for 17 years. This is really weird...
BTT
1) The ghost ship north of Nantucket harbor. Over the years I've seen an image of a old sailing ship, like a brigantine, in the same area north of the channel opening in Nantucket harbor. It was always just the rigging, never the hull and the sails were never set. Every time I've seen I was in a boat north of Eel point, or about 5 miles to the west of the harbor. I've thought it could be refraction or something but there's nothing on that bearing from that vantage point until maybe Iceland, 2,500 miles away. The strangest thing was the color of the rigging. It was not just black but pitch black, like holes in the sky. Even though it was always in broad daylight there was no reflection or light at all coming off the rigging. I saw it probably 6 times and each time was from the same area/vantage point and under similar weather, lighting conditions.
2) When I was about 13 I was riding my bike down the street we lived on to downtown to get an icecream sandwich after getting out of school. It was my afternoon routine, particularly in the early fall. The day was a warm, pleasant afternoon. I knew I had to apply the bike's brake just past our house to stop before going into the T intersection at the bottom of the road. The next house down from ours was a creepy 1850s 2-story square concrete house. I think it was part of a business because I never saw anyone come in or out of it and rarely saw lights and there was a printing press behind it. Just as I passed our house and was infront of the creepy house there was a terrific blow to the middle of my back. It was so hard my face almost hit the handlebar of my bike. I looked back but no one was on the street. My bike didn't stop until it had gone across the T intersection and hit the curb on the far side. My back hurt and I was so alarmed I ran straight back to my house. There still wasn't anyone on the street. I ran into the bathroom and pulled up my shirt and turned to look at my back. To no surprise there was a big, red (left) hand print fingers and all, in the middle of my back. To this day I have sustained several injuries in that area including a painful and disabling long-term injury. It was an evil hand to be sure.
Wow! Now, for your first story, I'm thinking some kind of mirage, except you've seen it repeated times. But I think there are cases of reflections over several hundred miles. Anyway, that's very strange. The second story is simply "wow!" Both very good for late night around a fire!
On nearby St. Helena Island, one of the LowCountry Sea Islands on the Lower SC coast, there are the remains of Fort Fremont. The fort is a massive concrete structure built in 1899 to protect Port Royal, Parris Island and other vital parts of the coast during the Spanish-American War. Unused and eventually abandoned, it moldered and became overgrown. Years ago, on one of our first visits before moving to the coast, Mrs. SK and I stopped to explore the ruins. It was a dark, drizzly late Fall afternoon and the moss-covered liveoaks seemed to wrap us in a deep green blanket. Noises hung in the wet air and water dripped from every leaf and twig. The fort was a low silhouette of concrete embrasures, steel rails and gaping doorways.
Pretty forbidding. Mrs SK elected to stay in the car. Disappointed, I wandered alone through the fort down long passageways, outside under the trees and across the parapets. As I neared the center of the fort I sptted a massive iron door hanging from a hinge. As I approached through the trees I heard a noise, like a footfall. I was walking on soft earth and this was definitely a foot on stone. I stopped and noticed that the birds and squirrels that had been twittering in the undergrowth near the car were silent.
I heard more noises. Footsteps! Someone else was wandering inside the fort.
But we had seen no car, no other tell-tale human sounds.
I looked at the door and noticed that it led into a long passageway. One of the main ammunition and loading entrances for the Endicott era fort.
As I stood, the footsteps continued, softly, yet distinctly, coming down the passageway towards me and the outside. It was a measured tread, no hesitation, no shuffling like a wino or a vagrant amd definitely a man, not an animal.
Suddenly the hair stood up on my neck and my skin felt clammy. I turned and hustled back through the damp woods, brushing treelimbs and briars aside and made it to the car - startling Mrs. SK with my haste.
We started up and got out fast. I couldnt speak for a minute or two, but we were soon laughing.
A few years later, after we had moved to the LowCountry, I found a book on local legends and there was a chapter on the abandoned Ft. Fremont. It seemed it has a haunted reputation, the ghost of a young soldier killed in an accident in the fort. A ghost that manifests itself on occasion as a bright, floating light...or footsteps heard in the dark, abandoned passageways.
My hair stood up again as I read those words - my skin prickles now when writing this here on FR!
We've been back to the fort a few times, but only to park and walk the beach beyond the walls and not to explore. Recently it has come under a project to turn it into a county park. Good luck.
After a few months she begged off seeing me because she wasn’t feeling well. I figured I was being given a polite brush off. Then after a few months she called me and told me she had been diagnosed with cancer, specifically B-cell lymphoma, non-Hodgkins variety. It was 85% percent curable – if caught in time.
I went to the hospital to see her during chemotherapy. She had lost all her hair. I took out the lotion and gave her a rubdown, and she started to cry. She said it was the first time anyone had touched her without putting a needle in her.
Unfortunately, the medical profession had caught it too late. She now found herself undergoing a bone-marrow transplant. I visited her during that ordeal, putting on a surgical gown and face mask, and sitting by her in the dark in her isolation room while she drifted in and out of consciousness.
She survived the procedure and went back to work, but something inside her had snapped. She didn’t want to see me, and I sensed she had lost the will to go on. I was not surprised when I received a call in June 1987 from a co-worker that she had died.
That night I went to bed. I was lying on my back when the covers on either side of me came down suddenly as though pushed by the elbows of someone who was trying to lie on top of me. I was startled, and then the presence was gone.
I’ve come to believe she came for one last kiss before leaving.
Thanks for posting that. It is really sad but a great story at the same time.
BOOmark! ;)
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