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Nvm, started writing this post before going out with a friend and came back to it hours later, missed the follow-up. I don't think I told my stories in the past thread, but I've got a few of my own. The Ghost in the Garage When I was 10-11, my family lived in a house on a corner of two streets by a lake. It was nestled on a small hill, and so the bottom floor consisted of the garage, which led to the carpeted basement that functioned as my sister and I's playroom. Another door led to a small staircase that led up to the kitchen, living room and bedrooms. The house itself was probably around 60 years old at the time of the story, and had been renovated repeatedly, so it was a pretty nice place. One afternoon, I was downstairs in the basement playing with my legos and watching TV as I frequently did, when the door to the garage blew open. I didn't really think anything of it- it had happened before, and like I said, it was an old house and I understood that old houses produce weird drafts occasionally. What differed from previous times is that the door leading to the staircase upstairs shut by itself a few seconds later- about the same amount of time that it would have taken if you walked from the garage to the staircase. Now I was a little on edge, because the garage door and the stair door opened and shut in different directions, so it couldn't have been the same draft for both doors. It was then that I noticed that the door to the garage was staying open. I got up and stood in front of the door to the garage, and although it was really dark in there, I could make out the outline of one of our cars and our household junk that we stored in there. Then, the shadow of a human figure crossed directly in front of the car, completely obscuring it. I freaked out, and ran upstairs screaming for my dad. Thinking that someone was breaking in, he charged back downstairs just in time to see the door to the garage swing the last few inches and shut. He threw the door open, and we proceeded to check everywhere, including the crawlspace and creepy wine storage room that my parents had knocked out from underneath the stone staircase leading to our front door. Obviously, we found nothing. Some months later, we moved out of that house for a number of reasons, none of which had anything to do with that incident. However, my parents stayed tight with the neighbors, and a few years later, they were at a party in the old neighborhood when they were introduced to someone who had also owned that same house a few years before we did. They got to talking about the kinds of renovations they had done/wanted to do, and the topic came up of how much they'd bought and sold it for. The old owner told my parents that they had gotten it for pretty cheap, because they had bought it via the estate sale. My parents then found out that the owner before the person they had just met was apparently a middle-aged woman with no family to speak of and had struggled with severe depression for years. One day, she went into the garage, ran a hose from her exhaust pipe into her car window, and quietly gassed herself to death. It was some matter of time- well over a week- before someone got worried and found her body in her car. It was years after this that my mom inadvertently slipped up and referred to the woman who died in the garage, and even more years after that she finally told me the whole story. She had initially dismissed what happened in the basement that one afternoon, but in recent years, she's told me that there were times when she would be doing laundry in the basement and simultaneously feel a crushing sadness and a presence watching her. Neither feeling would go away until she left the basement, and on those days, she wouldn't let me or my sister play downstairs. I had never really picked up on those days when she would have us eat our after school snacks upstairs, or when we would take the dog to a park clear across town. Now, it makes sense. I don't think that whatever was in the garage was evil or a threat. Maybe it was just a sad, lonely woman who wanted a family of her own and never had one. That being said, the thought of that poor woman dying alone in her car and remaining there until the gas eventually ran out and someone found her still makes my skin crawl. The Self-Playing Organ Some years later, when I was in college, I lived in a lovely rental house with a bunch of my friends. There wasn't anything especially weird in the house's history- it had been a rental for 20 some years, and as far as we knew, it wasn't built on an Native American burial ground or was the site of ritualistic mass murders or anything. One of the previous residents was something of a musician, and when we moved in, there was an old electric organ in one corner of the garage. One night, I was out bowling with my girlfriend at the time and two of my other roommates, while my other roommate was at home with his girlfriend. It was about 10 pm when I got a call from the guy who stayed home. His voice was frantic and hushed, and he said, "You need to come home now. There's someone in the garage." I asked him how he knew, and he said that he had heard footsteps, things moving around, and someone playing the organ. (Before you ask, the reason why he didn't do what most people would do and call the cops was because one of my other roommates had a lovely little pot grow going in his closet.) We pulled up, and two of my roommates stood in front of the garage door to block it, while I picked up a pickax from my neighbor's lawn (they had been putting in a little stone pathway) and walked to the side door. I threw it open while my roommates simultaneously lifted up the garage door, and we were greeted by...nothing. There was no one there and there were no signs of anything missing- none of our bikes, surfboards or stuff easily pawnable by a meth head were gone. However, the electric organ was on. I pounded on the locked door leading from the garage into the house, and my roommate and his even more terrified girlfriend opened the door. We swept the rest of the house and found nothing, obviously. I never really encountered anything in that house myself, although there were a few times when I felt like someone was at my bedroom door, opened it expecting to find one of my roommates, and found nothing. However, one other creepy thing happened- one weekend when I was out of town, another roommate and his girlfriend heard what they described as "muffled, but angry" voices in my bedroom and something that sounded like my furniture being tipped over. They barricaded themselves in their own room for the rest of the day, and nothing else happened. The Woods The area where I went to college was surrounded by woods. During the day, it was beautiful and serene, but at night, it got a lot creepier. There was one night my freshman year of college where a bunch of people decided to go hike out with sleeping bags and camp out in a clearing. We set out in the late afternoon, and when we made it to our spot, the sun was well on its way to the horizon. We were all just kind of messing around when I noticed one of the girls, who I'll call Kelly, kind of just staring off into the bush. "What's up, Kelly?" I said. "I keep thinking I see a guy in dark clothes watching us from behind those trees about 100 feet out." We both stood there watching for a few minutes, and didn't see anything. Some hours later, it was late at night and pitch black. Most of our group had drunk themselves into slumber courtesy of a 24-pack one of the guys brought out. I didn't drink at this point, so I was lying in my sleeping bag and talking with another girl, Aly, who herself was a few feet away. Suddenly, she stopped in mid-sentence, and said, "Did you hear that?" I strained my ears, and lo and behold, footsteps. Coming closer. We were kind of out of the way and off a path, so there wasn't any real way for someone to find us unless they were looking for us. I struggled to find my flashlight and the 2" Swiss Army knife I had brought with me, and managed to turn the light on and shine it onto the back of a man, dressed in dark clothing, disappear into some bushes about five feet away from us. Aly saw this and started crying. I yelled at the guy, but there was no response. There were no more footsteps either, no sounds of rustling in the bushes. Amazingly enough, no one else woke up through her crying and me yelling. Nothing else happened the rest of the night, but Aly and I sleep at all. I don't think Kelly or Aly went out into those woods again at night after that. This isn't to say that anything supernatural or ghostly was going on- there were people who actually LIVED in those woods. We called them woodsies, and I encountered a few of them. Most were pretty cool and some built these crazy forts out of sticks and branches; others made really elaborate tree forts that they lived in for months on end. Maybe we got too close to some guy's secret little camp and he decided to gently caress with us. I scouted out my own spot that was even further nestled out of the way, and used to go up there and camp by myself on occasion. Nothing creepy ever happened to me in my solo camping, but one day, I read an article in the paper about the mostly skeletal remains of a homeless guy being found back there. Based on the description of where his body was found, he had to have been within 100' of my secret spot. The thought of camping out in such close proximity to that still makes me feel a little weird even until this day. Adventures in Babysitting I'll end this on a lighter note. I grew up in Oregon, and had a pretty lucrative little job babysitting the neighborhood kids. One of my most frequent charges were two little boys, Alex and Patrick, who were respectively five and seven at the time of this story. The second time I ever babysat for them was on one of your typical Oregon winter nights- rainy, windy and generally gloomy. I had already put the kids to bed, so I did what any responsible 13 year old babysitter would do: eat the leftover Burger King that their parents had bought us for dinner, and watch Hellraiser 2 on the Sci-Fi channel. It was some particular scene where some horrifying thing had happened, so I was already freaked out of my mind when I heard a bloodcurdling scream come from the boys' bedroom area. Oh poo poo. Thinking that my mind was playing tricks on me, I paused for a second, then heard a second, louder scream. Oh poo poo OH poo poo! Realizing that it probably wouldn't be good for my business if one of my clients got eaten by some sort of skinless abomination demon, I picked up a fireplace poker and crept toward the source of the noise. It was coming from Alex the five year old's bedroom. Steeling myself for whatever came next, I threw open the door. The only light in the room came from his nightlight, but that was enough. I could see that Alex was standing up in his bed, wearing only his underwear, with his eyes rolled all the way back in his head, screaming in my direction. Oh gently caress, a demon isn't eating Alex. Alex IS the demon. Trying to think of what to do and realizing that ME getting eaten by a demon would be even worse for business, I kind of just paused in the doorway for a few long seconds. Suddenly, Alex blinked, looked around, laid back down in his bed, and fell back asleep. When his parents got home a few hours later, they found me huddled in a chair in the living room with every other light on in the house, watching Cartoon Network while still clutching the fireplace poker. It was at this point that they realized that they had been living with their son's night terrors for so long that they had simply forgotten to tell me about it. I grew accustomed to it too- I babysat for them dozens of other times and encountered his night terrors on roughly 1/3 of the nights, and by the end of it, all I really had to do was shout "Alex, you're okay, shut up and go back to bed" and that was the end of it. tl; dr- garages are scary, the woods are scary, and night terrors suck. pantslesswithwolves has a new favorite as of 06:53 on Feb 11, 2015 |
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Feb 11, 2015 06:49
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| # ¿ May 11, 2024 12:30 |
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The 12 Belt story reminds me of another one involving a haunted part of a dam. I know it's in the Ghost Goons pdf but I'm phone posting and can't trawl through my copy for it, but it was also really atmospheric and creepy.
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Sep 29, 2015 15:50
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Dr. Gitmo Moneyson posted:That's 50 Foot Ant, now posting as Nostalgia4coldwar, and no he hasn't. In fact he's been outed as a fraud. None of his stories here or anywhere else ever happened, he was never in the military, Humper-monkey was an alternate persona he made up and killed off, and every single thing he posted in these threads was a lie. Wow, that's wild. Was there a thread where he admitted it or got called out?
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Dec 20, 2015 21:52
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