OOoooOoo Creepy ghost story from a skeptic..

Relic · #1 08-09-2010, 12:49 PM

First off - I'm a skeptic. I'm also one of the TB guys who in any "ghost thread" will usually explain how the power of the mind and it's perception is far more amazing than a fairy tale about a disembodied person wafting around in desolate places..etc etc that, plus the fact that at one time I found the idea of ghosties to be interesting enough to do the whole ghost-hunting routine for a while. Which ultimately only further cemented my opinion that ghosts do not exist and the power of the mind, especially those who want to believe, is very persuasive indeed.

So with that, this is not a "I now believe in ghosts" thread, but I will admit that I had an unexplainable incident occur to my family and I late Thursday/ early Friday of last week. I'm curious to get input on this one because frankly, I'm at a loss....

Thursday night - the wife and youngest son go upstairs to bed, leaving my two older sons and I watching TV. Around 11 or so I decide to go upstairs as well, the two older sons want to stay up watching a movie.
I get to bed and I'm laying there for about maybe 20 mins or so, when I hear some sort of rustling or feet shuffling near my wife's side of the bed. It's pitch black but I open my eyes just in time to catch a glimpse of someone short near my wife's side of the bed. I even saw a lighter color of where the face and head would be of this person in spite of the fact that I'm as blind as a bat without my contacts or glasses. It was so obvious and "normal looking" that I got annoyed thinking it was my youngest son coming to creep into bed with us, so I sat up about to tell him to go back to bed, when I realized there was no one there...weird...I just wrote it off as some sort of optical illusion/hallucination whatever, I really wasn't overly creeped out or anything. About a minute later I hear my two older sons coming up to bed and I laid down and drift off to sleep after a little while.
The next morning, I hear my wife get up to start getting ready for work and as she was downstairs, I see something AGAIN move in our room. It was still dark with the sun just coming up but I swear that I saw a dark figure or shadow just sort of dart quickly into the corner of the room. Again, it was obvious enough for me to sit up with a start and stare into the corner. Nothing there once again! At this point, I'm still not scared as I really don't believe that every unexplainable thing is a "ghost". I figured that maybe I'm just hallucinating this stuff for whatever reason..?
Now the story doesn't end there, oh no folks, there's more! So I'm laying awake in bed when my wife comes up shortly before she was to leave for work and tells me, "I dont know why but I really have the creeps this morning, I feel almost as though someone is in the house..." So I go on a prowler hunt and in the end no one is there as can be guessed. It's not necessarily unusual for her to get creeped out because she's a big sissy,

but she's used to going downstairs in the dark to get ready for work, so as to why on THIS particular morning of all days she comes upstairs to tell me she has the creeps.. Now bear in mind that at this point I had absolutely not told her about my experiences so... OK, that's weird, but maybe just a wild coincidence.
Off she goes to work, and downstairs come my sons. My oldest son (16) comes into the kitchen and tells me "dad, I had a freaky experience last night..." He proceeds to tell me that just as he was drifting off to sleep out of the corner of his eye, he caught a dark shape of a person moving across their room (he shares a room with my middle son, 12) and whoever it was, was reaching for the TV as though trying to turn it on, or push a button etc. He turned to face it but then it was also gone. It scared him to the point where he ended up staying up all night on his laptop. His brother slept through the entire time.
Now again, this is doubly creepy because I had not told him either about my experiences!! Yikes! So that makes 3 out of 5 people in my house that saw or experienced something freaky overnight and into the morning. Again, I am a skeptic, I'm not going to cry "ghost" but something was up that night, just not sure what.
MAYBE it was one of my sons sleep-walking or something but how the heck could they move so fast, go through doors so silently without the lights from the hallway flooding in and so on...I don't know what the heck it was. Oh the irony of ghost hunting for a few years and seeing NOTHING, only to see something now when I'm not looking, not believing and couldn't care less...

codeinedreams · #2 08-09-2010, 01:09 PM

so who ya gonna call?

no really, keep us updated on this. reminds me of when I moved into my house and I looked over every nook and cranny of this house, but then a month later I found the skeleton key for all the old mortis locks in the house in a very obvious place on a shelf in the basement right under the light switch - a place I know I've looked at a hundred times. and I'm the only one living there.

Smokin' Toaster · #3 08-09-2010, 02:28 PM

I've had experiences with poltergeists. I've not seen or heard anything, but I've found things in places where I looked 3-4 times because I KNEW I had left it there, and when I looked for the 3rd or 4th time I found it exactly where I had been looking for it. Once it was a hammer, once it was my ex's wedding ring, and it was in her jewelery box after we had completely emptied everything out of it and searched the crevices 3 times. The hammer was in the garage next to the tool box in the exact spot where my knees had been on the ground 4 times as I searched the tool box for it. it would have been totally impossible in both of these cases to just overlook the item multiple times. I would have knelt on the friggin' hammer if it had been there. I'm convinced that a poltergeist was hiding them and then putting them back. If one of my basses dissappear I'm going to have to open a can of paranomal whoop-ass on them.

Marco A. Mayer · #4 08-09-2010, 02:29 PM

Maybe it was a cat or something similar. You know, cat's eyes often glow in the dark if there's a bit of light.

Relic · #5 08-09-2010, 02:31 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Marco A. Mayer

Maybe it was a cat or something similar. You know, cat's eyes often glow in the dark if there's a bit of light.

I do have a black cat as a matter of fact, but she was outside. I know that for sure because I let her out before going to bed.

I'm still not sure what happened. I'm not claiming that it's a real ghost but there was something odd about...

i_got_a_mohawk · #6 08-09-2010, 02:37 PM

You have a dwarf hiding in under the bed.

Puffin · #7 08-09-2010, 02:40 PM

Maybe it was a Gremlin?
Haha, but overall, freaky story man!

bmc · #8 08-09-2010, 02:46 PM

We have friends not far away in France, that live in a house built on 1073. That's right, 1073. They are the third owner. It was in two families until 10 years ago.

They have regular sightings of a gray animal in the kitchen/dining room area. Always out of the corner of their eye. Don't know if it's a cat or a dog. They've seen it 30-40 times each.

That's a very interesting story, Relic. Very interesting.

MatticusMania · #9 08-09-2010, 02:51 PM

Oooh, I love me a good ghost sighting!

Relic · #10 08-09-2010, 03:04 PM

Yeah it's really weird, but my wife wont allow me to try any EVP tests...

She figures that if I catch anything creepy she'll never be able to sleep there again.

Some side notes - the house right next door, (not the college kids for those who read my "animal house" thread) but the one on the other side - it used to belong to two old women. One died and the other is in a retirement home now - a new owner bought it a couple of weeks ago and is renovating the living crap out of it. Some people believe that renovating a house - especially an older one - can stir up some "activity". Who knows..
My oldest son's theory is that this was something caused or fueled by the recent geomagnetic storms/aurora borealus we were having last week... blah. Something happened I'm just not sure what.

BMC - 1073!???? That's the oldest house by far I've ever heard of! I lived in one at one time that was from the 1740's and thought that that was old....pfff..
I would love to live in a house like that!

Mazatleco17 · #11 08-09-2010, 03:13 PM

Same thing happened to me back at my grandmas house, I used to live with her back in the day and we would see a shadow walking, up to this day they keep on seeing it.

**Eric Perry** · #12 08-09-2010, 03:15 PM

Weird. And subscribbled for updates.

Webtroll · #13 08-09-2010, 03:23 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Relic

BMC - 1073!???? That's the oldest house by far I've ever heard of! I lived in one at one time that was from the 1740's and thought that that was old....pfff..
I would love to live in a house like that!

Even with the outhouse?

Digging the stories. I am a huge skeptic, make that I think the whole thing is baloney, but I do enjoy the stories.

Relic · #14 08-09-2010, 03:41 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Webtroll

Even with the outhouse?

Digging the stories. I am a huge skeptic, make that I think the whole thing is baloney, but I do enjoy the stories.

Well the thing is that I'm not so quick to take something like this at face value either. Remember - I'm not claiming a ghost story here. What I am claiming is that something kind of creepy happened and as of yet, I really cant explain it.

My feeling is that if any one person experienced something that night then I would absolutely positively just write it off to hypnagogic hallucination, or just an optical illusion, trick of the light -whatever. Anything like that would be far easier to believe than a situation where a disembodied human being just so happened to be wandering my house at night...

but still, what are the chances of 3 people in a house of 5 all independent of each other, claiming something weird happening over that one night?? Freaky

BTW - I usually work from home so I'm here right now just like every other day, and in 5 years here I have never experienced anything unexplainable like this at all..

MakiSupaStar · #15 08-09-2010, 06:34 PM

Didn't you tell us in another thread that your water was contaminated?

Relic · #16 08-09-2010, 07:22 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MakiSupaStar

Didn't you tell us in another thread that your water was contaminated?

That was probably in one of our many failed attempts to purchase a new house. We had the one that was right near a superfund site, then there was another in the mountains that had a beat septic system.. I just stopped posting about that stuff because it was getting downright embarrassing!

BurningSkies · #17 08-09-2010, 08:24 PM

Isn't it funny how easy it is to poke holes in ghost stories, until you've had the experience?

I lived in a place that had a lot of activity, witnessed by multiple people, both singularly and in groups and people always come back to disbelief....until they have it happen to themselves.

MEKer · #18 08-09-2010, 09:04 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by BurningSkies

Isn't it funny how easy it is to poke holes in ghost stories, until you've had the experience?

I lived in a place that had a lot of activity, witnessed by multiple people, both singularly and in groups and people always come back to disbelief....until they have it happen to themselves.

Tell me about it.

I have had a few, maybe 4-5, experiences that I would not want to repeat, including a very active poltergeist at my sister's apt years ago. Very creepy stuff. Put your own name to whatever the entities are---all I know is that sort of thing exists, it happens, and indications of intelligence are sometimes right along with it as well. Creepy is right.

Munjibunga · #19 08-09-2010, 09:08 PM

Sooaahhhhh ... what did you folks have for dinner that night?

Relic · #20 08-09-2010, 09:11 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by BurningSkies

Isn't it funny how easy it is to poke holes in ghost stories, until you've had the experience?

I lived in a place that had a lot of activity, witnessed by multiple people, both singularly and in groups and people always come back to disbelief....until they have it happen to themselves.

Well, I've never been one to claim that someone's ghost story is an outright lie or anything, I do absolutely believe that in most cases the person experienced something. I'm just not so sure that it's automatically a "ghost".
But in a way, you're right. It's easy to hear someone describe something bizarre then think in your head, "yeeeeah ok buddy what've you been smokin'?" Then something happens to you and it's almost frustrating to not be able to explain it away yourself.

What gets me is that I used to do the ghost-hunting thing a while back and was in some truly creepy places - old cemeteries, old prisons, battlefields, historical houses, etc and NEVER had a single unexplainable experience, none. Now in my own freaking house, totally unexpectedly, something happens..

My oldest son just brought up a funny and creepy point that's like something right out of a bad horror movie - I mentioned that the house next door is being renovated? They had an old in-ground swimming pool in the yard that the new owners broke down and filled in recently. Where did they buy the fill-dirt you ask? Why, from the local cemetery right down the road! I swear on Jaco's soul it's funny but true! I guess cemeteries must have extra dirt laying around? They must've carted off a ghost along with the fill dirt. Wonderful... I'll have to spray for ghosts now