Ghostly Stuff! (SPOOKYSCARYSKELLYTONS!)

Like I said, here's the thread where I'mma post my paranormal stuffs.

I've been able to sense 'other' things since I was a really young child. My mother has told me stories about when I was an infant and she would come into the room to find me staring at a blank wall, smiling and laughing, then stopping and waiting, and giggling again. She said it was like someone was playing peek-a-boo with me or something.

We discovered a bit later on that an elderly black lady had died in the house during a fire. She was overcome by smoke in the upstairs bedroom next to mine. I haven't lived in that house since I was three years old and I still recall hearing clear footsteps come out of my parents room (where the dear old lady passed away), come down the hall, stop at my door, move along and stop at my brothers' door, then go down the first small set of stairs to the landing, turn and go on downstairs. Like we were being checked on to make sure everyone was OK.

I used to have a recurring dream about that house. I would be coming down the stairs and there were these black shadowy people wandering around in the living room below. I would fall over the rail and land on the ground and my neck would hurt really bad. Then I would wake up. Happened for years and it was always the same until one day I managed to make myself scream "CATCH ME" and one of the shadows did. Never had the dream again. I sometimes wonder if I was reliving somebodies death, but I don't know and it's likely just a dream.

Once we moved you would think it would stop. But at the new house (actually built in 1945) I woke up from a nap one day as a kid and saw the grim reaper standing at the end of my bed. I was like "Oh, ok. Scary skeleton man. I'mma put my blankies back up and pretend I didn't see you. Please go away an' don't come back 'cause you're super duper scary." I've never seen him again and he didn't actually -do- anything except stand there leaning on his scythe and look at me.

Also at this house I saw a guy who looked like Santa Claus (I thought it was my dad being funny) but I followed him into my bedroom and there was no one there. Even checked the closet.

There was also "Shadow Mom". I was thirsty in the middle of the night as a kid and I called for my mom and -thought- she'd come up to my door. I said "I'm thirsty..." and hear something move away from the doorway and into the kitchen. I wait a while, wonder why mom isn't talking to me or running water and go turn the light on. Nobody in the kitchen. I go and wake my mom up and say "Why wouldn't you get me a drink?" and she says "I never heard you call." Still saw something there. So I dubbed it "Shadow Mom" 'cause it was like it was TRYING to help but couldn't figure out how to work the taps. XD

We moved from there and into a house in another town and I didn't have much of anything go on there but I started working at a movie theater in town and lo-and-behold there was a ghost there. He was rather...angry. Everyone kept saying it's "Mr. Smith" and I kept getting this hard feeling of "NO. I AM NOT."

It was bad when you had to go upstairs, you always had this feeling of someone breathing down your neck. I ended up having a dream where the building was a stage theater and suddenly caught on fire. A guy in a suit came upstairs and said "You have to get out of here right now." I wanted to check for other people and he said "No, I already did that. Go." So I went outside and ran across the street. When I turned around, it was the movie theater and it wasn't on fire.

After that, I -had- to figure out who this guy was. In the course of my research I discovered that the original owner was a vaudeville performer, he built the theater and it caught on fire in 1903, and he rebuilt it. He died very suddenly of a blood clot to the brain and had actually lived in the house right beside the theater. I went into work that night and said "I know it's you Mr. Clifford." And all I could feel was this "OMG. THANK YOU." kind of feeling. Like when people are about to fight and then they go "Aw, man, I love you. I can't be mad." and that tension leaves the air.

I'd still get the feeling that he was watching me, but it was curiosity and not irritation/anger. He did, however, scare the holy hell out of the manager. The manager told me I was a 'fucking idiot' because I said I found out who the ghost was. He went upstairs to reset the projectors and came right back down the steps three at a time, slammed the stairwell door open and tore into his office. He stayed in there with the door locked all night and refused to talk about what he'd seen. I had to actually go upstairs and finish the job because he refused to come out.

As I'm going upstairs I'm kind of laughing to myself. I'm resetting the projectors, glance up at the door and see a guy in a dark suit duck out of the doorway. Looked like the guy in my dream. I ended up quitting there (shamefully being too emotional about it...I feel like I might have been taking a backseat to Mr. Clifford in my exit speech. O_O) But the great news is that someone else bought the place, fixed it all back up and have both movies and live shows there that are family friendly. The town also put up placards acknowledging the life and accomplishments of Mr. Clifford. Which I think would have pleased him very much. They even declared his house a historical landmark. :3

The stuff that happened there was pretty damn intense, to be honest. Mr. Clifford also liked to screw up R rated movies that were 'dirty'. LOL It didn't matter what screen we showed American Pie on, it would break/jam up/blow a breaker/bulb. The manager thought he'd put it on the other side and switch a kiddy show to the other screen. That worked, and I own a piece of burned film from 102 Dalmations because of it, but the very next night American Pie jammed up and when we went up to see what was wrong it was like it had been taken off the reel and walked -around- the entire room to bind everything up. We ended up sending that film out of there and got Erin Brockovich which we had no trouble out of.

We moved again and I've had other little oddball crap happen, too. Like my stereo turning on in the middle of the day by itself. Twice. It was a push-button power switch. You had to physically press it until it clicked. I was less offended that it kept turning on and more that the station was crappy. LOL

I also had my blankets stolen one night. I wake up with the blanket starting to move and it just slides down and off the end of the bed. I raised up, reached down and pulled it back up. "Stop stealin' my blanket. If you're cold go get the one in the living room and stop taking the one I'm using. Twerp." The blanket was half-way up my chest. Only a corner was over the end and then it just goes over in a slow-motion "SWOOSH".

Also doors opening without my consent, missing things turning up in stupid locations like the center of the stove when you KNEW there wasn't anything there and hearing something say my name. Oh, and the shadow man in the living room who runs in terror if you come out with any kind of light source. No, it's not MY shadow. Trust me. I couldn't project the shadow across the room and in the shape of a male. I actually thought he was a burglar at first, then I realized. :laugh: So now I just go through the living room with the lights off so he can do whatever it is he's doing in there.

I told my niece about it and she said "I'll never stay at your house again!" And I said "Why? The stuff's always been going on, you just never knew about it before." She asked how I deal with it and I said "I just always have. It's 'normal' to me. I just learned early on not to mention the guy standing on the other side of the room if no one else did.

I have offered on several occasions to go along with some amateur ghost-hunting co-workers as their 'ghost hound'. XD They always get too creeped out to go.

As to whether people believe me or not, I don't really care one way or another. Is it possible that everything is a figment of my imagination? Sure. But it doesn't explain the oddball things I just 'know'. Like where the theater ghosts' grave was. My mother went to ask and I said "It's somewhere up this hill near the driveway. I'm sure." The guy had to dive into their old paper records and when he found it, it was at the top of the hill near the driveway. *shrugs*

(PS: I've gone into a shop and said "Why do I always feel like I need to be quiet in here?" And the lady working was like "Oh, maybe because this used to be a funeral parlor. There's still a slab in the basement." And I was like "Ah, makes sense." And there's one house I always side-eye extra hard because I know there's some bad juju in there. Not sure what it is, but I mentioned it and my grandmother said "Oh, yeah, your uncle used to live there back in the 1970's. It used to be a nursing home. He had a german shepherd who wouldn't go into that top floor for ANYTHING. He tried to force it to and the dog bit him open and ran off."

So when we purchased property to have our house on, my mom and dad took me over and made me take a walk all around. They asked "You like it?" And I said "Well, there's nothing spooky out here if that's what you mean. There might be something hanging around, but it's not -bad-." (That's the house I live in now and where the radio mischief and blanket thievery went on.)

My maternal grandmother (Who lived to be 100 and out lasted three husbands.) used to love telling the story of how her third husband had given her a set of diamond stud earrings as her weading gift. Which she then lost within the first week of the marriage. And how the night after his passing, she dreamed of him telling her that she should look behind the dresser. The next morning, (Ten years after the fact)... Yep you guessed it. She found her earrings behind the dresser right where he'd told her to look.

That is both cool and kind of sweetly adorable. Also that's the kind of stuff that's just kind of hard to explain. My dad, I think in an effort for me to not be scared of the stuff I was seeing as a kid, told me stuff that he's seen, like spotting his great aunt walking across a garden, except she'd been dead for a few years. He said "She wasn't scary or anything, just floating along like she was going somewhere except her dress went down to the ground but went transparent at the bottom. She had on a bonnet and everything."

My mom has done some really freaky stuff before involving murdered kids...I forget the case but we were watching them interview a mother on TV about her missing children. She said they'd been taking in a carjacking and they changed the camera angle to show a boat ramp and pier. My mom suddenly blurts out "That lying bitch! Those babies are right there at the end of the pier. She drove her car in there and let them die." Turns out that's pretty much exactly what happened. The mother was going to commit suicide and take her kids with her, but she chickened out after the car went into the water and managed to escape. Then she lied about the whole thing trying to get out of a murder charge on her kids. She also successfully guessed where another little girl's body was dumped ("She's in that dark water right there. Where that building was torn down and they left the hole of the basement." She was there when they drained the water.) and a couple of local children who were murdered by their step-father. "They're out there in a ditch around the potato farm." (They were but weren't found until later in the summer.)

I asked her how she always seems to know and she said she's not sure. *shrugs* I sometimes wonder if it's a sixth sense or something. But with me at least, it's not something I can do 'on command'. Like, "Go find a ghost!" That's not how it works. LOL And I'm always really suspect of people who go around saying stuff like they can go in and 'see the evil spirits'. I've never run into any evil spirits and in my experience you only 'see' them if they want you to. I find them to be like cats in that way. Some of them are like "HEY! Check this out! There's totally a hidden treasure under this cabinet. Just get down here and look underneath!" and others are like "Get away from me, plz. I do not like you." (And then there are the ones who are like "OMG PEOPLE" like the Shadow Man. XD)

Or maybe I have the good sense to be able to tell from a distance that something is not good and leave plenty of room. Like spotting a bear in the field. You just nope the heck out of there and leave it alone.

I'm a pagan witch, and I regularly work with… well, for ease of telling this story, we'll call them spirits. A friend of mine was feeling unwell and wanted to try a little extra mojo, so I, er, "enlisted" the help of a spirit whose favorite form is the king of the jungle.

I forgot to warn my friend about this. (Whoopsie?)

A day later she contacts me and tells me about a dream she had involving an ENORMOUS FRIENDLY LION, and that she feels much better.

That day any doubts I had about my craft vanished, lol. Also, I remembered that I am supposed to warn people when I do that as a favor.

CuddleWoozle said:

Like I said, here's the thread where I'mma post my paranormal stuffs.

I've been able to sense 'other' things since I was a really young child. My mother has told me stories about when I was an infant and she would come into the room to find me staring at a blank wall, smiling and laughing, then stopping and waiting, and giggling again. She said it was like someone was playing peek-a-boo with me or something.

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^^Super, super cool!! So many awesome stories!!^^

I haven't had nearly as much as that, but I did go through a phase of "ghost-busting" when I was married. I used to pick up ghosts that were hanging around people, needing to move on to the next world. A friend of mine's grandma - I told her I was getting an odd image in my head of those Jewish candles, the Menora, but she said her grandma was Christian. I asked her to check, because something didn't feel right. Two weeks later she bounds in to my house, all wide-eyed saying, "OMG Grandma lied about being Christian so that she could marry a Nazi and escape the coming holocaust!! She was born JEWISH!!"

Grandma had had a Christian burial, not a Jewish burial, and no one had ever known that it didn't sit well with her.

I "felt" a smile (which is a really odd thing), and felt her grandma hang around me. I figured that it was for a reason. Another week passed, and when I was at the market, I saw two Hasidic Jewish boys, in black and white clothing, square hats and curly side-burns, so I rushed over to ask them the first thing that popped into my head, "Excuse me, this might sound really odd, but could you tell me what happens in your religion when someone dies?" The lovely boys were eager to tell me their customs and practises, and during that brief conversation, I shivered, and then saw this kind of golden glint of happiness in the eyes of one of the boys. Grandma had left me to hang around him. I "knew" that there would be a death in their family within three weeks or so, and grandma would get to experience the burial.

Another time, I picked up a whole troupe of soldiers from the civil war that had all died after a single disastrous command from their sargeant (reincarnated as a friend of my then-wife). I had to go through all of them (nearly 20) to find out what was still outstanding that needed to be resolved, and the most heart-breaking was a lad who had lied about his age to sign up (he was 14) and all he wanted was a piece of his mom's cake! So sad. I baked him a cake and ate it in honour, and he was just so happy!

There have been many more, but now I don't seem to be so aware of them coming and going. It happens, but I figure it out fairly quickly and they're gone again.

I wouldn't say I have a connection to the paranormal, and anything I've experienced can be explained by psychology, but I still wanna share a bit.

My father passed away when I was nine. My mother, my brother and I would have dreams about him afterwards (which is totally normal), but while their dreams were peaceful and helped them say goodbye, mine were more like nightmares. I had a great relationship with my dad, so I don't really know why my subconscious decided to torture me...anyway, I was absolutely terrified to go into his study for years after and would refuse to even go down the stairs (the study was in the basement) unless I knew the door was closed because I was certain I'd see him sitting there. Somehow, some time, I got over that fear, and now that study is my sewing room/music room/summer bedroom, so I spend a lot of time there.
I am also ridiculously attached to his instruments. I inherited his two violins and viola since I'm the only one in the family who plays. A few years ago, I opened one of the violin cases, and it was in pieces. (The glue had come undone, it sometimes happens with old instruments.) I absolutely broke down and wouldn't calm down until it was clear that it could be fixed.
Now his viola, that instrument is absolutely ginormous, and a person my size shouldn't be able to play it, but somehow, it feels so right in my hands. I have tried to play on smaller violas, but they just feel wrong, so now I'm contiuing playing this one.
I have also been known to use gestures or favour songs that I couldn't really have picked up from him, but that made my mother break out in tears because they were a carbon copy of his mannerisms or preferences. Here it's debatable where nature (genetics), nurture or possibly paranormal factors come into play, but it is interesting how over a decade after his death people can come up to me and tell me how much I act like him. You would think that my brothers would be the more likely suspects for displaying this stuff, but no, his only daughter is practically his mirror image.

Lastly, the day he died...He'd been in hospital for cancer treatment for a while, but we were told he was on the way to recovery, they expected him to be able to come home within the month. I didn't have school that morning, so I was at home with my grandma. I came downstairs to find her on the phone, repeating his name as if to make sure she hadn't misheard, and I just knew.

Some other small bits that aren't as traumatic: I often hear sounds that other people can't, but as it's usually very high pitched sounds, I might just be able to hear higher frequencies. Sometimes it's really low sounds too. This mostly happens when I'm around technology or machinery, so I can usually pinpoint the source. I also sometimes randomly dislike people that I have never interacted with, only to have other people tell me "oh yes, they're an asshole". And once I bought a book, read it, and then developed such a fear of it that I literally had to get it out of my house before I felt comfortable again. It wasn't a scary book or anything, but I wanted it as far away from me as possible.

Compared to you, Woozles, my stories are kind of boring, but I've just never interacted with a spirit in a noticeable manner^^ Though I've met people where I instantly thought "I feel like I've known you for ages". Maybe Buddhism has a point?

I dunno, Schwanensee, maybe Buddhism is right about the reincarnation thing. XD It's pretty cool and sweet that you feel that connection to your dad's instruments. Even though it was sad, it gives me warm fuzzies that you're carrying on with his things.

I also 'read' people quickly...it's weird and sometimes makes people mad at me. There was a guy who was the manager at the theater for a very short time and I would never turn my back on him. He walked around me in a circle and I continued to turn so I could stare at him. I think it creeped him out, but then we found out he was going to be arrested for molesting one of the other girls who was working there. Right now I'm working with a guy that I'm always 'on edge' around. It's like I'm waiting for him to do something incredibly stupid. But I don't know. He just creeps me out like that manager. He's always talking about his booty calls with his fifteen 'hoes' and every time he talks I'm just bristling like an angry porcupine waiting to have to smack him with some quills.

I haven't had any -real- trouble with him to justify the feeling I get from him, but it's one of those things I just _know_. There's something off about him and I can't pinpoint what it is. :laugh:

I can hear high pitched noises, too. There's an alarm that goes off on the other end of the equipment line at work and I can hear it sitting on a forklift on the opposite end. No one else does, but I'll just sit there and scowl and say "The alarm system is going off." The line will come to a halt, someone with the override key will run past and reset it. People asked me how I could hear it and I'm just like "How can you NOT? It's sooooo annoying." XD

OmiOMy, I would have been super excited to have a dream with a big friendly lion helping me. XD "Are there more lions where you are? Are they all this cool? Can I pet your mane?"

Normalguy: That's really neat about your friends' grandmother. I can only imagine that she just wanted her true nature known at the very last. The young soldiers are always very sad. It's like, they went and still had that youthful "I'm never going to die! I'm invincible!" sort of mentality and then the worst happens and they're just kids. At the end they just wanted to see their mom and dad.

Speaking of Nazi's, they have a collection of artifacts from WWII at the Air Force Museum and I always move away from most of them. Like "Here's a Jewish star of David the Nazi's forced the prisoners to wear" and I'm like "Nope. NOOOOO. Not getting any of that." There's a couple of planes housed there that I don't want to go near. Like "Eff off, Bockscar, you're INFECTED WITH SADNESS." (It is. I can't walk past the thing without feeling like someone is piling weight on me. I've turned around and walked all the way back through the museum the other direction just so I wouldn't have to pass that plane on particularly bad days. Bockscar dropped the bomb on Nagasaki and I feel like it's carrying that weight still.

Some cool and interesting stories/experiences here.

While I'd consider myself a healthy skeptic as nothing remotely paranormal seems to occur to me directly and I will always maintain that there's usually some sort of logical or scientific explanation for just about anything, I still marvel at things like coincidence and happenstance and I'm still a sucker for a good ghost story or a paranormal activity type program on the TV.

My grandparents are firm believers though, in many supernatural phenomena, they've claimed to have seen UFOs, strange creatures on lonely stretches of highway and they said that there was a myriad of ghostly activity that congregated around my Great Grandmother. My Great Grandmother was Ukrainian, Gypsy and Jewish and she practiced her own brand of religion that was a mixture between Agnosticism, Greek Orthodoxy and Paganism, she was a very superstitious woman, threw salt over her shoulders, used playing cards for fortune telling and she read wax splatterings too. My grandmother remembers there being some sort of black spectre in the basement of her childhood home that prevented her from accessing that space whenever my Great Grandmother wasn't accompanying her. My Grandfather said he once woke up from a nap in my Great Grandmother's house to a distorted human face looking back at him, he blinked and it was gone. Now, I'm not gonna tell my grandparents that they're full of it, but I have to figure there was a more reasonable explanation for these occurrences, an explanation not tied to the supernatural, but still I think they're cool stories nonetheless.

If we are talking the unexplained or moments of startling coincidence/foresight, I've noticed such things occur around my Mother, who is also a firm believer of the supernatural and the unknown. My mother and my Aunt, who is a skeptic like me, both bring up a story about when they used a ouija board with some friends back in their high school years. One of my Mother's friends was a notorious bad boy and the group asked the board if he was going to get himself killed, they said that the planchet kept pivoting between yes and no. After the party they heard that this same friend had tried some bad acid at another party across town and that it fried his brains. This person now lives in a facility and is not completely independent, sort of in limbo.

My Mother also took after my Great Grandmother and she does fortune telling with playing cards for her close friends. I've overheard and seen some of her readings and a few of her predictions get quite out there and shockingly enough, some of them have wound up right. She predicted that one of her girlfriends should leave the man she was dating because his previous girlfriend was driven to suicide, sure enough, her current boyfriend did have a girlfriend in the past who committed suicide, whether he was the cause is unknown and unlikely, but still, that's an eerie coincidence. On another occasion, she did a reading for a family friend, she said that he and his current girlfriend would experience a miscarriage and then their relationship would end. The family friend scoffed at it and said that his current girlfriend wasn't even pregnant. Well, 5 months down the line, his girlfriend has a miscarriage and they drifted apart.

Now, I don't know if the above stories are proof of supernatural powers at work, I highly doubt that routine playing cards can be imbued by the powers of clairvoyance, but the sheer coincidence is quite startling. I think that's what I find most frightening and captivating, that such moments of happenstance and such insane coincidences can occur in the everyday world. At the end of the day though, I remain a skeptic, I'll always say it's just that, a coincidence or that there's a logical explanation over the supernatural, but it's still cool to hear about and to share these stories.

As I have always understood it, the cards are just cards. Nothing special, it's the person using them that has the 'powers'. But then again I've never really been able to use them or even tarot cards. I've tried and can never remember the meanings of the cards. LOL Just that 'Death' is not nearly as terrifying as people think, it just means an ending. But it could be to something terrible in your life, like your cancer will be ending or something as mundane as your favorite TV show will end.

CuddleWoozle said:

As I have always understood it, the cards are just cards. Nothing special, it's the person using them that has the 'powers'. But then again I've never really been able to use them or even tarot cards. I've tried and can never remember the meanings of the cards. LOL Just that 'Death' is not nearly as terrifying as people think, it just means an ending. But it could be to something terrible in your life, like your cancer will be ending or something as mundane as your favorite TV show will end.

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You might be right on that. Still, it's hard for me to believe that people can have supernatural abilities or that a bicycle deck can foretell the future.

I have a friend who is obsessed with Tarot and the spirit world. You are most correct on the Death card, it's usually symbolic of transformation or things being drawn to a close, it's actually one of the more open-ended and optimistic cards in the set, despite being the most visually distressing. In Tarot, the cards to watch out for are The Hanged Man and The Tower as they symbolize complacency, inner conflict and chaos respectively.

From what I've gathered from my mother's playing card readings, it's an inverted Ace of Spades that is the worst card to draw as it means quite literally, death and despair. In the readings I mentioned above, she drew the upside down Ace of Spades both times... another chilling coincidence.

As I said, I'm a skeptic, but still I find these stories fun, chilling and exhilarating nonetheless, urban legends too, anything vaguely supernatural or unexplained is just interesting to me, even though I doubt the perceived paranormal aspects of such stories/instances.

Sometimes it's fun to be creeped out and scared a little. ;D

I've told this experience a number of times on this site, so one day I wrote out a more detailed explanation and saved it to my computer. This is my very real experience with the supernatural. I apologize for the length.

When I was 15 or 16, we moved across town to the smallish cape cod house along the beautiful Toms River in New Jersey. The street, 123 Pine St., was lined with Mimosa trees which smelled like sweet peaches when they were in bloom during the hot, humid summer. We had lived in a cap cod house in Holly Park, years ago, so when we moved into this house, my mom did the same as she had in Holly Park, which was to make the second downstairs bedroom, one that looked across from the kitchen, into a dining room, and my bedroom was in the attic. Being a cape cod, the attic had four dormer windows built into the roof, creating four nooks and more head room in the sides of the sloping roof. The attic was finished with wallboard and I actually repainted the walls a soft yellow. There were two rooms separated by a wall and of course, a door.

The far room became a sitting room, two chairs and a black and white TV. The other room was my bedroom along with my desk where I did my homework, and my stereo. It also had a new piano on the wall with the door, and I had purchased an old, antique, wind up clock which bonged on the hour. I still have the clock. Since this upstairs was the attic of the house, short walls were built and they ran the entire length of the attic. I think there were four doors in each room on these short walls, where things could be stored in the eves of the attic. Some of them had shelves. The doors were on hinges of course, and had handles which latched and kept the small closet doors closed.....most of the time.

So I moved up there and it wasn't long that I noticed, as I lay in bed, that there would begin, a tapping noise in the farthest closet, always on one side. I would try to go to sleep but I would hear, "tap, tap, tap" coming from the farthest closet. Then as time past, the tapping would move to the next closet, still in the other room, tapping and tapping, stopping and tapping. Then after some time, the tapping would come into the bed room, tapping in the closet furthest from the bed, tapping and stopping, silence, and then tapping and then of course, I would hear the tapping in the closet next to my night stand, the closet next to my pillow and me. This would go on every night without fail.

One morning I went down stairs and my mom asked me why I was walking around in the middle of the night, but I wasn't. They simply heard footsteps. This happened a number of times. I finally grew tired of being afraid of the tapping, so I stayed up and with my hand on the handle to the closet by my bed. I waited patiently for the tapping, and it most definitely came: tapping and tapping, first in one closet and then the next. I waited and waited knowing that eventually it would tap on my closet where my hand lay in wait, and I would be ready. It came all right, but it didn't tap. It banged, hard enough that I could feel it in my hand, feel how wood vibrates when it's been hit hard, and with that I yanked the door open, only to find nothing, all the noises stopped.

But that isn't the weirdest. Not by far. One summer day, a Saturday, I was watching television in the living room with my parents. Suddenly from upstairs, it sounded like every window, all six of them, had shattered, and the sound was deafening, like one of the THX movie theater affects sounds. My dad went running upstairs and I followed, my heart pounding. When we got into the attic, my bedroom, there was nothing out of place. I expected to see glass all over the floor in both rooms, but there was nothing. But that's not the worst thing that happened in that room. This is:

My first year in college, I brought my best friend, also my SO, home for the weekend, and it meant a good, home cooked meal for the two of us. This was in the fall, he and I were 18. We had one drink with my parents before dinner, but nothing after. I had told him about my room so he brought a Ouija board with him. He had and still does, ESP abilities. We waited until 12 midnight and put the Ouija board on the end of the bed, each one of us sitting on the edge of the bed, and our hands on the Planchet. He started asking the usual silly questions, and the plastic pointer was moving around the board. I of course assumed he was moving it. Later he would tell me that he thought I was deliberately moving it. He asked if a presence was here, and the pointer pointed to yes. This went on until he said, "Well if there's a spirit here, show yourself, God damn it!" and at that very moment, a full figured ghost appeared in the doorway, the door being open. Not only could we both see the image of what appeared to be a man, but also his skeletal frame inside this white, translucent, nebulous form. We both were standing up at this point, frozen in terror, because this thing filled us with both a feeling of terror and dread. It floated forward, passing through my left half and all of him as it turned right and drifted through the wall, disappearing.

The half that passed through me became cold. Buzzy, my friend, told me right after, that all of him was cold. The worst part of this was that we felt that whatever we brought forth, was evil. Worse, we felt that it wanted our very souls. I had to still sleep in that room when I was home from college. The only way I could was to close the door, and then imagine that the room was filled with candles, candles hanging from chandeliers, candles everywhere, and in my mind, I would begin to light them, one candle at a time until the entire room was filled with light. I felt that I had to dispel the darkness that this thing brought, with light, meeting evil with something that was everlastingly good.

Years later when I married and brought my wife home for the first time, I had to close the door between the rooms, in some sort of effort to prevent whatever that was from re materializing. My friend Buzzy and I have since talked about that strange night, and it is still just as vivid for him as it is for me. There's a part of my mind that says it couldn't have happened, that you can't see the dead or the other side, and if it had happened to just me up in that room, I would have thought something had happened to my mind. But it happened to both of us, and we both saw exactly the same thing. We had gotten into a habit of writing things down, and we wrote down our experiences and shared them before we talked about them. Our experiences were identical.

Years later, my dad would die suddenly in that house from a cerebral aneurysm. Two years later, my mom would die of cancer. When she knew she was terminal, she sold the house to a young couple. They were excited to live near the beautiful river. They even built a fireplace in the living room. Several years later they were divorced. I believe the house is cursed and I pity those who move into it. As wonderful a place as it was to live, even when my parents were still living, you could walk down Pine St., and if you knew the families who lived in those houses, for every fourth house you passed, you could say, "Cancer." Years later I did it. "Cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer." Ciba was and probably still is, the big employer. My mom worked for Ciba-Gigy. Many of the people on our street did, and Ciba made dyes and plastics, dumping them into the Toms River along with Gliddon Paint and other industries. "Cancer....cancer....cancer....cancer.....", every fourth house; our next door neighbor, another neighbor two houses down, even my mom's boss, all dead of cancer. So what did my best friend and I stir up, and from where.

This is all true. When I tell this, I always suspect that no one believes it. Why would they. This can't happen. To this day, my mind tries not to accept it, like it was a dream. Buzzy and I know differently. Until next time, my friend.

Speck said:

I had a haunted stereo once that would turn on in the middle of the night at full volume, turns out it was two bad capacitors. Replaced them, never happened again.

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We had a haunted tv. XD But it wasn't really, it got hit with a power surge and it messed up the connections inside somehow. We had insurance on it from the place we got it from so they sent out a new set and took that one back. They didn't believe that it would turn itself on and turn up the volume. So they put it out on the floor to sell used and it kept turning itself on and off and turning the volume up and down. LOL The poor delivery guys that had to set it up told us they were scared of it. The company had someone come look at it and they said the circuit board that controlled the tv was out of whack and it would need a new one. They put in a new one and it was fine...but if we went to that store for a while afterwards the delivery guys would be like "No more haunted tvs, right?"

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dogboy said:

Years later, my dad would die suddenly in that house from a cerebral aneurysm. Two years later, my mom would die of cancer. When she knew she was terminal, she sold the house to a young couple. They were excited to live near the beautiful river. They even built a fireplace in the living room. Several years later they were divorced. I believe the house is cursed and I pity those who move into it. As wonderful a place as it was to live, even when my parents were still living, you could walk down Pine St., and if you knew the families who lived in those houses, for every fourth house you passed, you could say, "Cancer." Years later I did it. "Cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer." Ciba was and probably still is, the big employer. My mom worked for Ciba-Gigy. Many of the people on our street did, and Ciba made dyes and plastics, dumping them into the Toms River along with Gliddon Paint and other industries. "Cancer....cancer....cancer....cancer.....", every fourth house; our next door neighbor, another neighbor two houses down, even my mom's boss, all dead of cancer. So what did my best friend and I stir up, and from where.

This is all true. When I tell this, I always suspect that no one believes it. Why would they. This can't happen. To this day, my mind tries not to accept it, like it was a dream. Buzzy and I know differently. Until next time, my friend.

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I believe you, but I don't think that you guys caused all that cancer, even if you did get a dead spooky malevolent ghost. You mentioned that the industrial companies were dumping their waste products into the water and I would say -that- is where the cancer was stemming from. Even though they were dumping it into the water, it was probably filtering down into the water table and the people in the area were actually drinking the stuff in the water. My dad worked for a place that worked with plastics and all of the people working there were getting sick with lung problems, some of them got lung cancer and everything. And they determined it was the dust being stirred up from the powdered plastic and no one had a respirator to wear. They also used to just walk outside and dump all of their plating chemicals onto the ground out behind the building. Before they closed the company, they were installing pumps and filter systems to actually pull the groundwater up, filter it and move it elsewhere because the chemicals were killing the people who lived in a small trailer park behind the factory. (This is mostly what led to the company closing the location and moving to Mexico. They didn't want to deal with any more employees becoming sick from drinking the tap water there.) That whole side of town is still at risk and gets their water checked all the time.

CuddleWoozle said:

We had a haunted tv. XD But it wasn't really, it got hit with a power surge and it messed up the connections inside somehow. We had insurance on it from the place we got it from so they sent out a new set and took that one back. They didn't believe that it would turn itself on and turn up the volume. So they put it out on the floor to sell used and it kept turning itself on and off and turning the volume up and down. LOL The poor delivery guys that had to set it up told us they were scared of it. The company had someone come look at it and they said the circuit board that controlled the tv was out of whack and it would need a new one. They put in a new one and it was fine...but if we went to that store for a while afterwards the delivery guys would be like "No more haunted tvs, right?"

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I believe you, but I don't think that you guys caused all that cancer, even if you did get a dead spooky malevolent ghost. You mentioned that the industrial companies were dumping their waste products into the water and I would say -that- is where the cancer was stemming from. Even though they were dumping it into the water, it was probably filtering down into the water table and the people in the area were actually drinking the stuff in the water. My dad worked for a place that worked with plastics and all of the people working there were getting sick with lung problems, some of them got lung cancer and everything. And they determined it was the dust being stirred up from the powdered plastic and no one had a respirator to wear. They also used to just walk outside and dump all of their plating chemicals onto the ground out behind the building. Before they closed the company, they were installing pumps and filter systems to actually pull the groundwater up, filter it and move it elsewhere because the chemicals were killing the people who lived in a small trailer park behind the factory. (This is mostly what led to the company closing the location and moving to Mexico. They didn't want to deal with any more employees becoming sick from drinking the tap water there.) That whole side of town is still at risk and gets their water checked all the time.

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Oh yeah, that was added as this narrative was part of a bigger explanation. There's a Pulitzer prize book about Toms River titled, "Toms River" and it's all about Ciba Chemical Co. polluting the drinking water with carcinogens. Toms River is a cancer cluster. Eventually the victims sued and won a big class action suit. I still get a check from them to this day though it isn't much because there were so many infected. The saddest cases were the children who died.

I went to school with the son of the president of the chemical company. I remember when his younger brother died from leukemia, yet his father did nothing to stop the pollution. When I wrote my novel several years ago, it was about a cursed town, one that had a terrible past. Some of the events in my book were based on real things that happened in that house.

CuddleWoozle said:

As I have always understood it, the cards are just cards. Nothing special, it's the person using them that has the 'powers'. But then again I've never really been able to use them or even tarot cards. I've tried and can never remember the meanings of the cards. LOL Just that 'Death' is not nearly as terrifying as people think, it just means an ending. But it could be to something terrible in your life, like your cancer will be ending or something as mundane as your favorite TV show will end.

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Tarot cards illuminate a probable path, not a concrete-set-in-stone thing. And Death means transformative change, not literal death. Personally, The Tower (abrupt upheaval) and the Three of Swords (often, a heartbreak) are the cards that worry me the most. And even then, you have to remember that it's in the context of the query in question.

(I've been reading tarot for seventeen years. I've only seen ONE actual death.)

I've seen so many gorgeous decks. In my time I've become something of a collector. All my decks are working decks--they all see use--but all of them are in my A E S T H E T I C of fluttery, flowing art.