I dont believe
I was working in a listed building, not the most protected whatever that is but had strict instructions on what I couldn't touch. I only had to put a few cables in anyway away from protected bits. Turned out to be a sketch like the only fools and horses chandeleir thing, a piece of protected wall fell off while I was nowhere near. Now I am crapping myself about how much it will cost in repair and how I am going to try and cover it up if I can because it wasnt my fault but couldnt prove it. Went to the local diy shop to get some stuff to patch it up and got back to the place to find that there was nothing to be seen of the damage. Now at this stage I am looking about like its some kind of hidden camera program expecting Mr. small hand to appear with a microphone and have a good laugh at me but nothing. I spent the next half hour trying to work out what happened. Now the strange thing is that the decorative stuff was crap looking anyway and did have an old broken look to it but there was no trace of the fallen bits, apart from general dust and crap around. Spent the next 5 hours finishing the job in complete confusion and *slight terror. To this day I remember it but it becomes less and less clear and I have no record like mobile phone photos and even I cant believe it myself really.


*wasnt terror like horror films but kind of freaked me out walking about the place from then on. If it had been real terror I would have run away like a screaming schoolgirl I think.
(resistanceisfutile, Fri 14 Sep 2012, 0:22, 1 reply)

I'm not entirely sure that this is a ghost story, it's just something that happened, and we're not precisely sure about it.
Back in the mid nineties, I was staying with my cousins on their farm. In a wooded area above the farm was an old mansion that had been burned out in 1921, and we decided to go up and camp there one night, so we could get away from the adults and sip cider and so forth.
The farm was right on the border, and there were still army patrols back and forth, and this was the tail end of the days when the provos were active in the area, and the old mansion had a reputation as a place where people got taken and bad things happened to them.
We went up there anyway, and rolled out our sleeping bags, and drank our cider and smoked a tiny joint, and then fell asleep.
The following morning, we went home.
( Dr Preference AjcuiVd289, Thu 13 Sep 2012, 23:51, 3 replies)

So where do ghost stories come from?
Apart from to frighten the fucking jiggeries out of children around a camp fire?

Is it just that as humans we want some enduring link to our lost, loved after their death - no matter how unearthly or scary it may seem?

Kinda glad the other-worldly spirit of my mum isn't around - I don't think she'd have been very pround of me about 1/2 an hour ago! ;)
(Misery McUglywife an attention seeking sociopathic fuckstain., Thu 13 Sep 2012, 22:41, 17 replies)

I had series of incidents last year where I'd wake in the middle of the night to a 'presence' in my bedroom despite living on my own. Sometimes it opened wardrobe doors I'd firmly and deliberately shut before getting into bed, other times it would loiter at the end of my bed ...I felt its presence more than I could see it but it felt pretty bloody real and scared me witless sometimes. I guess much of this sounds like those sleep paralysis things that seem totally real to those experiencing it but not so typical was the time I 'woke' up to find the ghost tenderly wanking me off. Again, this may have been one of these elaborate waking dream type events but by Christ it felt real. The most vivid thing I remember though is the slow, gradual transition from sheer, heart-hammering cold-sweat terror and desperate clawing for clarity, for answers, "is this a ghost, oh God, what is it...is it even female...? " through to a kind of calculated reasoning that maybe I shouldn't be so hasty to turn the light on, that I shouldn't look at the dark shadowy figure too closely and instead should just lay back and continue to enjoy what was undoubtedly one of the best handjobs I'd ever received, ghost or not. Bizarrely, a few days later there was a programme on telly about people who claimed to have been molested, even raped by ghosts. It's never happened again, nor do I want it to...I think.
(Amberleaf, Thu 13 Sep 2012, 22:28, 1 reply)

I once saw the ghost of Decent QOTW,
many years ago, just after it had died.
( BraynDedd Natasha Kaplinsky's labia majora, Thu 13 Sep 2012, 21:53, 4 replies)

I saw a dead baby ghost once
turns out someone had dropped a their hankie
( High Lord Phanty, Thu 13 Sep 2012, 21:02, 2 replies)

When I was young I took train journey travelling by myself
Even though it was during the day, it was really dark as the train had entered a long tunnel. I suddenly heard a ghost-like cackling "Ho Ho Ho Ho" and what sounded like a woman screaming. I looked around to see if anybody else had heard it, but it turned out I was alone in the carriage. I was starting to feel quite disconcerted, when out of the darkness besides the tracks a ghost with a human skull jumped out at me.
We'll I jumped out of my chair and stood bolt upright in fright, only to hear a man's voice say, "Sit the fuck back down in the seat, kid, or I'll kick you off the ride"
( cumquat may will not be commenting further on the allegations, Thu 13 Sep 2012, 20:31, 1 reply)

My old shed was haunted...
...things would keep being moved around and any food that I left in there kept going missing. The wife said that it was probably a mouse, but I had to tell her that such things don't exist. I had a good laugh at her expense that night.
I decided to get an expert opinion, so Bob from B&Q came down and had a look. He reckoned that it was the ghost of a Scottish nobleman who died as the result of a hideous wanking accident involving a ferret and a map of Swindon.
Bob set up some ghost traps and burned some basil leaves to cleanse the shed's meridian lines... or something.
Come morning, we had caught the ghost. Small furry bastard with a long tail. Put him in the bin.
(NoStrings Tastes like zombies!!, Thu 13 Sep 2012, 19:20, 1 reply)

almost a seance
I didn't witness any of the haunted events, but two friends were so freaked out by multiple mysteries that they asked me to hold a seance with them.
It started because their TV would turn off for no reason with nobody near either it or the remote. There was a cold spot in the hall when you walked through it. Keys put one place at night would be in another in the morning.
Ever the skeptic, I proposed natural causes, but they were so certain and scared that they wanted to try a seance. A week later I asked when the seance would be. They sheepishly told me that, after they discovered that their tv had a sleep button that would turn the tv off 90 minutes after the button was pressed, they came to realize none of the other mysteries were that inexplicable either.
(thatguyjoe, Thu 13 Sep 2012, 19:15, 1 reply)

What a great question for a site where the vast majority of users actively show disdain for people who believe in the supernatural.

( The Awful Puppy Bakery is still bored, Thu 13 Sep 2012, 18:59, 4 replies)

A walk in the park
I didn't drink as a teenager - something about it didn't work with me until much later - this is important to this story.

July probably - I was about 19, it was a hot overcast night with occasional flickers of lightning between the clouds but no rumbles and no rainfall. No moon either. I'd been with friends across town, chilling, and was going home around midnight on my mountain bike. To avoid going through the town centre (bit rowdy at that time of night) I decided to cross the park down to the main road and continue from there... it was slightly further but meant I'd have quite flat roads for cycling on, as always without lights

We'll call this park Gadebridge Park, as that was its name.
I dismounted as I left the roads into the park as it was dark, I had no lights, my bike was nearly knackered and the ground was bumpy.. the crossing over to the main road was only about 300 metres so this wouldnt add any time but might save me piling into one of the many bushes along the way

Halfway across: I was passing between a clump of about 6 trees when I spotted someone walking on a path that would cross my own if I continued out into the open again. I was by chance dressed in black, wheeling an unlit green bicycle, and among trees.. so I paused to see who was coming, whether they were actually heading for me or just crossing my path.

he passed about 20 metres away without changing course. He was bald, heavily muscled, and naked apart from what seemed like a brown towel around his waist, he didn't even have shoes on. He never looked my way and I was convinced he hadn't seen me. I waited for him to get a reasonable distance away, congratulating myself on avoiding some sort of pervert and preparing to slip away back down his course and out of the park onto lit roads.

I watched right up til the point he walked through a very well-established and large tree. Then I mounted up and sped.
(Carpe Cyprinidae, Thu 13 Sep 2012, 18:44, 5 replies)

CHOBB haunts my shed.

( Dr. Shambolic je suis charlie, Thu 13 Sep 2012, 18:00, 8 replies)

Used to live in Cornwall. Superstition abounds.
But so does mining.

All the 'My door suddenly slammed shut, must be a ghost' stories, the tales of 'The crockery rattled mysteriously', or 'The unexplained knocking sounds at night' anecdotes, the 'I heard the floorboards creak as though an invisible ghostly presence was walking outside my bedroom door' guesses.

SCIENCE! Cornwall is riddled with old mines, uncharted mines, extensive mines, that are so widespread that some of the galleries go a mile offshore under the sea bed. I actually had to pay extra for a mining survey when I applied for the mortgage to buy the house.

But suspicions aside, there are plenty of reports where Camborne/Redruth people wake one morning to find their back gardens have vanished into a hole in the ground because there was no knowledge that the house had been built over a minework.

e.g. news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/real_story/6405519.stm

Solid rock is a very good conductor of sounds so the mechanical drilling and blasting done deep underground will form seismic waves that might make your best china rattle. Also, rockfalls in old areas where the wooden pit props have rotted through.

Then there's the fact that in the modern age we tend to understand things a bit better, i.e. if the back door is open and you then open the front door, an air pressure differential can cause the other door to be sucked/blown shut, usually with a slam. Makes you jump but you don't usually thing 'Zoiks! A g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-GHOST!'

The house I lived in down there was a newbuild and it has settled over time so that doorframes become distorted and things can pop open whereas once they used to fit. Add subsidence on top and it could become quite odd... 'this door wasn't locked 4 minutes ago!'.. well, no, it may be jammed though.

Because it's a modern house, it was not built with wooden timber planks for floorboards (which contract at night when it gets cold and may creak as they pull on the nails) as MDF is cheaper, so it's not potentially haunted because it doesn't make noises at night.

As olden time rumours of hauntings go, in a time of gas lamps and candles (and in certain rural areas of Cornwall we could be talking up to the 1950s here) a non-understanding about ventilation in closed quarters will not help. If all the lights (lamps, candles gaslights etc) in the room go out at once it's probably because the air in the room has become oxygen depleted- that would bring on the dual effect that combustion is impossible as the air/fuel ratio is wrong, and you're about to die of Carbon Monoxide poisoning and simultaneously are hallucinating like a champ.

So, in essence beliefs in ghosts can be almost as much as primitive assumption as religious beliefs about miracles- just because you don't understand a thing doesn't mean that it must have been made to happen by a paranormal, supernatural, mysterious or religious agent trying to scare you.

ALT- you live on a deserted fairground and the janitor is trying to scare you away so he can search for the missing treasure without interruption.
( Rotating Wobbly Hat That's not a banana. THIS is a banana., Thu 13 Sep 2012, 17:49, Reply)

When I was a kid, I was often kept awake by unexplained sounds and footsteps coming from the ceiling above my bed
Then my dad peeled up the steel roofing and put rat poison there.
For many nights after I was kept awake by the stench of the inaccessable rotting carcasses of a family of possums that had perished in the ceiling above my bed.
( cumquat may will not be commenting further on the allegations, Thu 13 Sep 2012, 17:37, 4 replies)

if a clusterfuck, is something insanely bad
Does that make the person who decided this should be qotw a clustercunt?


Also...BOO
(Bushcricket, Thu 13 Sep 2012, 17:17, 3 replies)

Woman I was seeing* was describing how her brother had died
It was all a very dreadful workaday story about how she was having a nice day, quite oblivious, want out into her mum's garden in Aberystwyth to hang out the washing, and saw her brother walk past the garden gate. She waved, he smiled and waved back, but kept going around the corner and disappeared from view.

Later that day, they get a phone call to say that the brother had in fact been killed in a road accident outside his house in London that very afternoon. Woooooooooooooooooooooooo......

...Clearly, what had happened wasn't that she (an attractive blonde with a big bouncy chest) had wandered out of the house without her glasses on, seen a blurry male figure that looked a bit like her brother & waved at him at some time between noon and six o'clock that evening. And he, seeing an attractive blonde with big bazongas smiling and waving at him, had smiled and waved back. Then, she found out later that he'd been killed, and in her (quite reasonable) grief and confusion had imagined it really had been him, because that's a more comforting thought than him dying a painful and bloody death 200 miles away with nobody that loved him nearby. None of that happened.

No, what had definitely happened is that her dear brother (they were very close) had been hit by the car that very moment, and his ghost had gone to West Wales to wave one last goodbye to his sis.

Of course, that might be true. It might also be true that I was pissed off she'd changed the subject from me talking candidly for the first time about my dad's death and finally saying some of the things I'd been carrying around for ten years or so, without any resort or reference to woo-woo, so I was a bit more bitterly dismissive than perhaps I would normally have been, she got upset and angry that I dismissed her real (to her) feelings for her brother, demanded I stopped the car and stalked out.**

But there's still no such thing as ghosts (or, if there is, it's something natural like infrasound and not the return of the spirits of the dead).

*shagging

**Don't worry, she got back in and we went home. We split up soon after, for any number of reasons, she got married and had kids, divorced, and has just remarried a guy she's nuts about (who presumably has a higher tolerance than me for solipsism and talking shit).
( shinyshinyscalp less a man, more a way of life, Thu 13 Sep 2012, 17:08, Reply)

The only thing
I know about ghosties and ghoulies is that I'd rather be kicked in the ghosties.

Sorry...
( social hand grenade I was a lurker before you were a lurker, Thu 13 Sep 2012, 17:07, Reply)

I don't know how to explain this, but
once this thing happened to me that I can't really explain.

It's inexplicable, basically.

Amazing.

Really freaked me out, I can tell you!
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Thu 13 Sep 2012, 16:42, 6 replies)

I dont believe in ghosts
I could give you 1000 reasons why they make no sense. However say 10 years ago, something happened which i still caant explain.

I was sitting in the front room. We had the baby monitor plugged in - on a power cord. the nearest plug was on the other side of the wall, through a door. So we would plug the monitor in, and run the 1.5 metre cable through and leave it on a shelf on the otherside of the wall. SO the plug and monitor where back to back on the same wall.

We had been watching TV for about an hour, everything was still, when all of a sudden the baby monitor jumped into the air. The power cable then went taught, and then pulled it down to the ground with a crash.

Ive often looked back and wondered what could have caused it, and the only explanation I can think of would be a mouse had jumped on the wire in the other room... its an extremely weak excuse mind, as I had never seen mice in the house... or outside the house for that matter.

Only 3 of us in the small house, me, partner, baby.
(Dan dan dan They tik urh jerbs!!!, Thu 13 Sep 2012, 16:13, 2 replies)

Night time fishing fright
A few years ago, myself and my brother were having a night time eel fishing session at a flooded quarry not far from where we lived. Course, there were the old rumours of the 2 kids drowned by the depressed dad in the water and the odd summer drowning but as sensible adults we didn't believe in ghosts.
So, we were sitting there on our camp stools in the poor but strangely warming glow of an old paraffin lamp, talking shite, drinking beer and generally just passing time until the bite indicators went off when this HUGE white ghostly shape floated out of the darkness and over the top of us. We fell off our stools, hearts going, sphincters loosening.
Was it a ghost? An apparition? The last echoes of a poor departed soul?
Was it fuck.
It was a heron with wings spread wide, probably as shocked to see us as we were it.
(Darth Thump, Thu 13 Sep 2012, 16:06, 4 replies)

PANTS
Alt: BRA.
(Catomiagi is in with a chance, Thu 13 Sep 2012, 15:51, 3 replies)

I'd put this message first
but somehow it's ended up here...

spoooooky....
( Ya What Skiddlyboop, Thu 13 Sep 2012, 15:49, Reply)

Kitchen roll ghost
I remember when I was about 12 I was in my room and the rest of the family was downstairs. I went downstairs for some reason or other and, like the bastard I am, must've pulled some prank on my sister, making her cry (sorry for sketchy details)... I recall my dad telling me to get out and go to my room, so I did, feigning indifference all the way in the traditional juvenile manner.

When I got back to my room there was a small square of folded kitchen roll on my pillow... and on it was written in faint biro 'h e l l o' - physically, this artefact hadn't actually appeared out of thin air - the folded kitchen roll had been on my bedside table as an impromptu coaster (along with a biro) - but still: who had done this? No-one had come upstairs while I was busy bullying my sister and even if they had why on earth would they do something so obtuse?

(I'm convinced now that in the future I'll invent a rudimentary form of time-travel and this was an attempt to contact my past self. And inform them of the all-important message 'hello'.)
( The Silent Channel is getting his recommended 5-a-day, Thu 13 Sep 2012, 15:40, Reply)

I was just a little jobber at the time...
I was 5 or 6 at the time. Laying in bed on my side, I saw a shadow appear, cast by the nightlight. It just peeked up over the edge of the bed, vaguely semicircular, perhaps as if a head had popped up and looked at me, although i seem to recall something protruding from the top of it. It disappeared shortly thereafter, and reappeared a couple minutes later for a split second. By this time I was petrified. I then felt something shake my bed, as if someone was underneath grabbing the springs and giving it a good wrench. That was enough for me -- I literally jumped out of my bed and no doubt to the safety of my parents room.

I've no idea what it could have been -- I could chalk the shadows up to imagination or whatnot, but my bed shaking -- well that was something else.
( Foxglove -- it all ends in tears anyway..., Thu 13 Sep 2012, 15:27, 7 replies)

FIRST
pricks
(Concerned of Tunbridge Wells "my apron comes down and crushes the handle", Thu 13 Sep 2012, 15:21, Reply)

I'm a bit psychic, actually, and have a real thing for being able to tell people's auras.
I don't do black magic, though, only white magic, and I use healing crystals, because "Do what thou wilt, an' it harm none", right, and the Pagan rule of three means you'll get back three times whatever you do, and "Wicca" means "Of The Earth" actually.

(cont p.94)
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Thu 13 Sep 2012, 15:15, 7 replies)

Old Cornish hotel
I used to go on holiday to Cornwall to a particular hotel (about 22 years ago) which used to be a smugglers house. It sits about some cliffs and there’s a trap door in the basement leading to the caves below where the smugglers would stash their goods and ship them out.

It was a run down old place (it’s been fully renovated now and actually looks quite nice), and was looked after by an old couple. Mealtimes were the same. Full English every day with cold white toast and butter, then a roast in the evening. Very quaint.

But they were more than happy to tell us the place was haunted by an old monk who’d been murdered there (it’s always monks). The man said things would turn themselves on and off, such as his lawnmower which then ran over his hand, resulting in lost fingers. There were apparent sightings too, especially along the top floor corridor where my 8 year old cousin and I shared a room – alone.

I don’t believe in ghosts, but as a child I was so terrified that rather than heading down the corridor, I pissed into a towel instead.
(Deskbound You insignificant speck of dust, Thu 13 Sep 2012, 15:08, 3 replies)

Late night, walking tour of Edinburgh.
Great fun, all ghosts and gory tales. Had my ear mock nailed to a post, too.
Part of the tour takes us under the streets, to the old Edinburgh, long since built over. Pretty spooky: dark, cramped, and with plenty of pitch black areas, behind rusty-looking metal grilles.
Guide is telling some story involving the ghosts of suffering children, and the terrified workmen who discovered them whilst unearthing the buried city. Cue much nervous laughter, and huddling together. Suddenly, something clanks, away in the darkness, behind the forbidding grilles. Laughter stops, and the guide brings us out, no one particularly keen to be bringing up the rear.
A fine end to an enjoyably spooky evening, a close encounter with something from the other side. Certainly, it was nothing to do with that stone that I idly kicked through one of the grilles. Oh, no, certainly not that.
( monster munch person, man, woman... camera... TV?, Thu 13 Sep 2012, 15:04, Reply)