I tend to be a skeptic, but I’ve had a few odd things happen that I can’t explain logically.
Most happen in our office like the above file. a little history.
My co worker claimed to have seen a shadow about 6 foot 5 in front of our door as she pulled up to an empty office at 6AM to open up. She went in, and no one was around. a few days later, I purchased a small recorder and set it next to a door where no one knew it was there (so no one would mess with it). a few days after she spotted the shadow, we got this creepy sound. It was recorded 10PM on a Saturday night when no one was supposed to be in the office. IF it was wa co worker messing around, they stayed in character as you can CLEARLY hear the raspy growl move off away from the recorder and then come back.
We have no idea what this is, and no one claims to have messed with it. when they STARTED messing with it a few days later (after hearing this), the fakes where VERY easy to spot. I even posted a few for comparison. This one still creeps me out, however.
A few people have died on our block. A Body was found in a parking lot down the streeet near a medical building, and someone died in the woods behind our office long before we got there. and now there is a black church down the street that does funerals, so we get extra hearses from time to time. but that was after this was recorded, so we know it can’t be that.
Needless to say after Iheard this, I did not want to be in the office alone after dark for a while, and gave Ghost Adventures a bit of a break in watching
There are two ghosts that hang around my parents’ house.
The one that has been seen the most and by the most people is a girl in a white dress who just kind of wanders around. No one has any clue who she is, but my parents live on a lake that used to have a logging camp on it so there are a lot of possibilities. She apparently showed herself at my graduation party and freaked one of my mom’s friends out.
The other one is a man in a flannel shirt who only shows himself as a 3/4th portrait like a school yearbook photo. Unlike the girl in the white dress, we figured out that the man in the flannel shirt is someone who used to live in the house a few families/generations ago, but we’re pretty sure he didn’t die in it. He showed himself to my dad while he was doing some work in the crawlspace under the bathroom, so we joke that he’s still around because he wants to give homeowner advice.
There used to be an old Black man. Skinny, clean-shaven, hair cut kinda close. He wore a green jumpsuit, like janitorial, or like the guys who do gas utility work. He was never clear enough for me to read his patches and things. He’d hang around in my dining room, watching the cats.
My old cat Saam was his favorite. Saam was a massive cat. Easily over 20 lbs, but long and muscled. Saam was a total lamb though. He loved to just cuddle up next to you or in your lap or anywhere you could reach him and you could pet him for ages.
The ghost would pet Saam. I could watch the cat lean into his hands. I could see the cat stretch out and wriggle like he was getting a good belly rub. It wasn’t daily and there wasn’t a schedule. It was more like the ghost came by for a visit when he was in the area. When I moved two doors up from that house he came too. Or he just visited us in our new location.
Saam died back in 2006. The ghost showed up a few more times after he died. The ghost liked my other cats, but Saam was his favorite and after a while he just stopped coming around.
Does your office have a night cleaning crew? That could be the sound of something being dragged along the floor, but it does sound kind of growlish.
I’m about as psychic as a brick, and cannot claim to have ever seen a ghost (or thought I did) with my own eyes. The only incident I’ve ever experienced was auditory, and was probably hypnogogic. After my grandfather died when I was 12, the extended family all gathered in the very large house for the funeral and so forth. All the beds were taken so my father and I bunked down on the dining room floor in sleeping bags. It was in the spot where my grandfather’s sickbed had been in his final weeks – though he didn’t die there, he died in the hospital. Just as I was falling asleep I heard my name whispered in my ear – like, right up close. It wasn’t in my grandfather’s voice, but it scared me enough that I spent the rest of the night sitting up in the other room, jumping out of my skin every time the refrigerator cooler came on.
I’ve always been interested in the paranormal and used to spend a lot of time on the ghost-cam for Ordsall Hall in Salford, England. I got quite a few interesting screen caps, the best of which I’ll post here.
This is the first time I’ve set a conversation to “watching”. Sadly, I have no ghost stories of my own (though I saw a UFO when I was 12). Looking forward to reading/hearing/seeing more of your ghost stories. Great topic and a perfect start to spooky season. Thank you!
My family thought we saw a UFO once too. It was green and glowing and made slow spirals waaay up in the night sky. We found out later it was part of a Russian rocket re-entering the atmosphere. At least that’s what they told us.
The one I saw was also glowing green. It was triangle shaped and flew in a straight line. It was silent. This was in the summer of 1993 in Canada. It was surreal because it was so familiar and yet so unlike anything I’d seen before or have seen since.
I randomly had a nightmare about a person in my grandpa’s house prowling around and the next morning it bugged me so much that I called my mom about it only to hear that gramps had passed away in her care overnight
The comments often have better stories than the selected submissions. Personally, I think I find them so affecting because they aren’t written by writers and have a “sitting around a campfire” vibe.
we DO have a cleaning crew. but they ALWAYS come in on Wensday at 4PM, a few days too early for it to be them :). and they don’t have a key, so they can’t get in when no one else is around.
What I find intersting is that the foot steps happen AFTER the first growl is heard. like whatever it was materialized by the door, noticed the recorder, hated it, and THEN stalked off.
RE- UFO’s. it’s Odd. While I agree that there is probably more of a chance we’ll prove Aliens are real and UFO’s are too in my lifetime, I don’t find them as interesting as ghosts. Always been more attracted to ghost stories like Poltergeist, or Pet Semetary.
My definitive experience with things I can’t see can be simply summed up: I was on the computer in the afternoon surfing in the living room. Totally wasting some time and out of thin air a male voice said my name clearly and distinctly. Startled, I said “I hear you and I’m busy on the computer, do you mind?”
Not another peep.
On the UFO part that has cropped up into the thread. Early this Summer, I was sitting in the driveway enjoying the late afternoon. The sun was bright, the sky was mostly clear. I live on the outskirts of a smaller urban area. Looking over the garage towards the city center I see a cube, suspended. Just hanging there like cubes aren’t supposed to in the air. I watch it for several minutes and beg my wife to go grab my DSLR. This is object is tiny in my sight, but the shape is distinct as the surfaces had some reflective property. It’s not rotating and a point of the cube is pointed groundward.
When I looked away to accept the camera, yup, I lost track of it. Size wise to me it was about as big as half a grain of rice held at arms length. I easily watched it for several minutes as my partner did not exercise any sense of urgency.
Back in 1992 or so I had played a gig in Morehead City, NC, finishing at either midnight or 1 AM, and was making the 90 minute drive back home through rural nowhere. As I came around a curve to a long, straight stretch of 2-lane road there was a bright blue oval just hovering in the sky ahead of me. I took my foot off the gas and coasted to a stop—it’s not like anyone else was going to come along at that time of night. I looked at it for a little while, trying to make sense of what I was seeing but not having any luck. I opened my door and stepped out of the car, and that’s when I heard the sound … like a giant airborne lawnmower. No U, just FO.
I looked it up later to see where they were coming from and where they were going, but I still contend that those Goodyear pilots knew exactly what they were doing by flying over the boonies at a fairly low altitude in the middle of the night with the blimp completely lit up.
I personally do not believe in ghosts. And most of the incidents that have been related to me have other possible explanations that I can think of. That aside, I’m certainly not a definitive authority on the subject (I don’t think anyone is really), and while I may believe there is a logical explanation for something, even one not conceived of just yet, I’m not going to rain on anyone’s parade by being that person proclaiming proudly “Ghosts aren’t real!”. Just because I myself have not had any experiences that couldn’t be explained doesn’t mean they don’t happen after all. I will likely maintain my skepticism despite reading and enjoying all of your stories though.
Now, ghosts aside, I did see a UFO once. I don’t honestly believe it was an alien spacecraft, and I’m also highly skeptical that most of the things people see in the sky are alien spacecraft, but as I do not have a definitive explanation of what it was I saw, well, UFO is the correct appellation for it. It was an object that was unidentifiable and was flying in the air; UFO. As I recall, I was on a playground outside of a motel my family was staying at up on Skyline Drive in Virginia. It was a completely overcast day and the sun was not visible at all. I should also mention I was completely alone. As I was sitting on the swing and idly swinging back and forth, I glanced up and saw a bright white disk in the sky; at first I thought it was the sun suddenly becoming visible through the clouds, but then I realized it was visibly moving at a speed far too quick to be the sun. As I watched it traveled across the sky in about five minutes or so before disappearing in the distance. To this day I am not sure what it was I saw; I’ve seen several potential explanations, including ball lightning as an example, but I cannot be definitively sure of what it was. I didn’t experience any missing time or anything else sometimes associated with so-called “alien spacecraft” visits, so if it was an alien spacecraft they clearly had no interest in one little girl alone on a playground with no one in sight.
I will say one of my gripes with people seeing UFOs is that all too often the UFO enthusiasts immediately jump to the “aliens!” explanation without taking into account the first letter of that acronym, which is “unidentified”. Could it be an alien spacecraft? Sure, although I don’t know why the heck any aliens would want to visit our neck of the galaxy, since we’re way the heck out in the boonies, space-wise. But there’s any number of other possible explanations too. I’d rather just be the person that admits that I simply do not know what it is, but just because I don’t have an explanation doesn’t mean the alien explanation is the correct one. Take it or leave it. shrug
I believe in ghosts, though it wouldn’t surprise me too much to find out they don’t exist. If they don’t I’d really love to know what’s really going on in some of the videos and photos I’ve seen.
I like to watch paranormal videos on YouTube (Nuke’s Top 5 is my favorite), and I often wish I could project myself into the clips to see whether or not the vidders were setting up a hoax beforehand (or having a hoax set up on them).
I believe in UFOs but I have trouble believing they’re extraterrestrials, because I don’t think faster-than-light travel is possible, I don’t know why ETs would be here without establishing contact… and no, I don’t for a minute believe our government would be competent enought to cover up 100% of encounters or give them plausible deniability.
Bigfoot is another one that interests me. Scientifically their existence is impossible beyond any reasonable doubt… but there are so many sightings, most of them anonymous, by people who don’t profit at all either monetarily or in terms of notoriety. Either there is something there or it’s a truly amazing social phenomenon at work.
I’m with you on Bigfoot. The idea is fascinating to me, likely goosed by being a kid in the '70s when the subject seemed to pop up a lot in mainstream culture.
My wife playfully shakes her head at me when she catches me watching something like Finding Bigfoot. I tell her that I enjoy the wilderness settings in most of them (which I do).
Though the existence of such creatures seems…hmmm…tough to reconcile, it is those wilderness settings that gives me considerable pause. As much as it might seem otherwise, there are some awfully remote places in North America, miles and miles of dense forest where few, if any people venture.
If Bigfoot reports only came from very remote places… like the vast forests of the Pacific Northwest where they originated… I’d have a lot easier time thinking they were plausible. But they come from every state in the country except Hawaii, from several Canadian provinces and even from Mexico. Some of the reports are from locations very near towns. Hard to believe that they could be that widespread, and that close to us, without us ever finding even a scrap of physical proof. Even just considering the past few decades when we had the scientific means to really analyze evidence other than an actual body, dead or alive.
I thought that in the age when everyone has a camera in their pocket, we would get a lot more really compelling evidence. But we haven’t, really.
The sheer number of reports, the seeming sincerity and (in many cases) vividness of those reports, and the absence of any possible ulterior motives for lying still give me a lot of pause, though. If these creatures don’t exist, I really want to know what it is some of these people are seeing. But if they DO exist, I want to know how they have stayed so totally hidden from science for so long.
I was at a movie in an old theater (1920s) in Southern CA with a guy who used to work there, and he was trying to convince me the place was haunted. He started on this story about a guy who hanged himself backstage and wasn’t found for months
What, no one smelled him? I interrupted
He just frowned at me and continued: and when they found him his body was rotted away but his head was still in the noose
You know that’s physically impossible, right?
He gave up on that one and started telling me about all the weird noises they’d hear when the the theater was empty
You know we live somewhere that has an average of 40 earth tremors a day, right?
He finally gave up when I suggested it wasn’t ghosts, it was fairies.
I admit I have no patience with the ‘we don’t know what it is, so it must be ghosts’ crowd.
