My mate reckoned his room was haunted.
Apparently everytime he had a wank he could hear a clap sound after it. We all told him this was bollocks but i'll never forget him angrily shouting "nah it's real, you don't believe me? COME ROUND AND HAVE A WANK IN THERE THEN"
( Slippery Mick ‏, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 17:50, 3 replies)

True story.
My dad nearly died about 10 years ago, of a heart attack. As he was laying in the bed on his way out, he yells "Fuck off", and the nurse was confused. He saw his own dad, who he hated, telling my dad to come with him.
( G/PP 💩💩💩💩💩&#128, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 17:33, Reply)

I have a spooky immunity
I have realised that I am completely immune to lightning. I could climb up a tree in a thunderstorm with a kite, covered in saline gel, and be perfectly safe.

You see, you are 3 times as likely to be struck by lightning as you are to win the lottery.

And I don't play the lottery...
( Amish Information Systems hates misplaced, commas, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 17:23, 4 replies)

Tiny Hair and Tiny Teeth
When i was a toddler I almost died from a huge tumour in my chest. Luckily all worked out and the bugger was removed and I went on to live a pretty normal life.
Cue me in my 20's chatting to my mum about an article I'd read about a boy who 'gave birth' to his twin which he'd absorbed in the womb.

Mum pipes up 'you were one of those...sort of'.

She went on to regail me with the tale that the tumour I had taken out had 'features' such as tiny teeth and bits of hair - there's even a pathology report detailing these delights (mine was a rare type of tumour in the first place).

Given the fact that my father is an identical twin and my mother is a fraternal twin the general thought is that i was the stronger one of a set of twins and I absorbed my weaker sibling in utero and his/her remains became a tumour in my chest.

I just hope to god that i'm not the evil twin a la Bart/Hugo Simpson .....

GAHHHHHHH!!!!!
( the_log_knows ..to pay cheeses, to the leopards in your head, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 17:22, 7 replies)

Deutsche Hauntings
Last summer my boyfriend and I had been staying at his late grandmothers wierd bavarian house in the depths of...Bavaria. We had been out for the day and were returning home pretty late at night. There was smoke coming out of the chimney attached to the house. It was deifnitely smoke, coming out in whisps, not steam. We shat ourselves thinking the house was on fire - rushed in, but there was no fire or anything in any of the fire places. When we came back outside, the smoke had gone, but we had watched it for at least a minute not daring to go in.

I always sleep really badly when I am there, and I wont go to the three bedrooms upstairs that haven't changed since the turn of the century. Am going back there as part of our holiday next week but will be armed the best herbal sleeping tablets I can find.
(neveryoumind, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 17:22, Reply)

supernatural
i hear things. my name being called is most common. and the imtense feeling of someone else sat in the room when i am alone.

I first found out when i was in a mock exam, dicking about and not concentrating and heard someone male shout my name. i sat bolt upright and thought i was being rumbled for cheating when i was innocently thinking about something else but staring off into space. i looked around and no-one else had flinched. i re-focused and went back to work.

about 6 months later i was talking to a medium at my girlfriends house and was told of my great grandad shouting at me to concentrate during my exam. i had told no-one of it, not even alluded to it. i am also generally sceptical so straight yes no answers is the only way to keep the psychics honest.

since then it has happened a load of times, but i really try to ignore it. it feels odd cracking one out to know old family members are watching over your every whimper.

i also get big deja vu. i remembered dreaming of a 4 lane wide road down a mountain from the age of about 7 until 18. When we got married we went on honeymoon to Jamaica and as we drove over the blue mountains i found myself in the really weird position of having seen it all before. not sure how that could happen - but i was really dis-orientated as it was such a perfect replica of my dreams, or my dreams were of such perfect form of the reality.

my mum see's stuff all the time, and my dad and sister. I however, and colourblind and find picking up visuals difficult in day to day stuff. I have pukka hearing though - and according the the wise psychic woman clairaudient. I am just a bit too scared to accept it!!

i also had a big moment when in another country and my grandad died unexpectedly. i felt really short of breath and had chest pains, heartburn and immense stomach cramps and spent all day in bed. (Norway in February meant i missed the 3 hours of daylight). i tried to get sorted but nothing would touch it. about 9.15 pm i noticed it had all eased up - it had peaked around 8.45 then started to mellow to nothing over half hour.

When i got home i had a brilliant relaxing sunny day and drove round to see my mates before going back to work next day. Exceptionally peaceful. My dad then rang to say he thought i was only back today and that Grandad Charlie had passed with a bad stomach condition and finally a seizure and heart attack to finish the job. Time of death - around 845 Friday night Norwegian time.

My heart absolutely sunk. He was my hero. I try to be like him in every possible way.

He also saw things. When in dire trouble in malaya after the war when he served with the Ghurkas he saw a vision of my Gran and my mum in the forest. About 5 years later he saw them in hyde park, just after my Gran left her husband with her 1 year old child - my mum. He went over and spoke to her and our family started there. I only found out he wasn't my blood grandad when i was 16 and it hasn't mattered one bit.

Strangely, my blood grandad shared many similarities with Charlie.

1. BSA motorbikes.
2. both lost the use of the left leg.
3. shared the same birthday, same year. 9th August.
4. Had identical families - 4 kids (including my mum at the top). Each born in the same year. 3 girls and one boy.

We only found out on my blood grandad's deathbed as he told his wife "by the way, there was another woman before you and i had a child......"

Now that is a final line to sign off with.

I am off to cry a bit, and say truth is often stranger than fiction
( bazza van der trance , ooh baby baby, baby baby. Get up on this., Tue 8 Jul 2008, 17:07, 1 reply)

just thought of another
I don't know how often this happens to other, but I get stuff in my head all the time, like when you have a song or quote in your head and then I'll press next on my iPod and said song will magically be chosen from the 2000-odd songs I have on there. It's quite nice actually.

Disclaimer: obviously it's bound to happen some of the time I just seem to notice it happening quite a bit recently
(europe-who, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 17:00, 4 replies)

The Pickeral Inn, Cambridge
Is a great old pub on the outskirts of the town centre by the river, and perfect for a few pints before heading into idiotsville for the rest of the evening. My friends and I have been drinking there for about 12 years on and off.

Probably about 3 or 4 times while we have been in there by the little nook for the quiz machine / fruit machine (for anyone local)where we always end up all of us have smelt a really strong musky almost druggy perfume scent for a couple of seconds, not weed or solid but similar, and every time there has been no-one near us inside or out, or any smokers in the vicinity (when you still could smoke in a pub obviously) but it always went as quickly as it came, and always when we were in the same place.

A couple of years ago while bored a gang of us decided to go on the Cambridge ghost tour one sunday night for a giggle. It was cool, cruising around various college properties, old houses , churches etc and the final story related to how a sailor fell asleep while smoking opium, his pipe was still lit, set fire to the bed and he died in his lodgings, and occasionally you can smell the ghostly sailor smoking his final pipe of drugs.

We were standing in an alley next to the Pickeral Inn, and the room he died in was smack bang above where we have been when we got the smell.

Halfy
(Halfy By light alone, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 16:54, 2 replies)

it was a dark and stormy night...
actually it was quite an ok night. Anyway, I was in my room at uni, it was 1am and I was watching some TV. All of a sudden my bed started to vibrate violently as if there was someone - or something - underneath making my bed, perhaps trying to make me leave the safety of the duvet so it could eat me...

Fortunately it turned out to be a mild earthquake
(europe-who, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 16:53, 3 replies)

I couldn't sleep one night
laying there with thoughts running through my head I stupidly thought of ghosts, which didn't help.
Suddenly it felt like a very large person had sat on the end of my bed, sitting up with shock I was relieved to be able to pull my legs away instead of them being pinned as I had read in tales of hauntings when I was in primary school (yeah, not a smart move with an active imagination). The bed continued to shake though, so I jumped out and the shaking stopped a second after.

Trying to rationalise what had just taken place I realised it may have been a tremor from an earthquake. I forced myself to accept the fact and after a little while got to sleep.

I was right. Not so unexplained I guess.
(sailorspoon started wiping his own arse from, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 16:44, Reply)

A serious story
I've been debating posting this all week, and finally decided to, what with this being about the closest I can imagine to a QOTW topic that'll draw this story out of me.
This is long by the way, and not funny, just to warn you.

The Tale of Kaol and the Haunted House

My parents have lived in the same house for my whole life, and so did I until I was 18.
This house is in a tiny hamlet, in the middle of the countryside, next door to a church. The other side of the garden hedge is a grave yard, and there was an abbey in the field behind the house, until it was "Dissolused" by Henry VIII, forcibly, with several of the monks being killed in the struggle.
There are several local legends about headless monks haunting the ruins, along with more recent stories of a big black cat (ie. escaped puma) that had been seen taking chickens, attacking dogs and so on.

The house itself was built in 1640, and is pretty creaky, but I was used to it.
I'd never seen a ghost, never seen the cat, never had anything strange happen to me.
Part of the deal with living in that house is that you have a key to the church, and lock it up at night, and unlock it in the morning.
Wandering through a pitch black graveyard at night, into a dark church? Not a problem.

Then around my seventeenth birthday things started to get odd.

I would hear indistinct voices whispering in my house when I was there on my own. This worried me, so I told my parents, who said "It's just the house creaking, or the wind in the trees."
It wasn't, and I knew damn fucking well it wasn't.
Then I started seeing dark, flickery shadows. They would move quickly, close to the walls, in the corners of my vision.
It was at this point that I had to stop going to lock the church up at night. What had once been a peaceful place to me had become a terrifying ordeal that I had no wish to go through with.

Things in the house then got worse, and the shadows became indistinct figures, who seemed, disturbingly, to be very aware of my existance.
I remember sitting down for a family meal when a dark, person-shaped shadow walked across the room, through the table and stopped in front of me, pointing at me accusingly.

It was around this time that I started drinking heavily to make these kind of horrible things easier to deal with. It helped quite a lot, as it turned out.

The scary apparitions and voices didn't stop though, and I became quieter and more withdrawn. I'm not going into to much detail here, as I'm still not comfortable with it myself, but suffice to say I was a very unhappy young man.

To cut this story to the conclusion, the drinking got worse, to the point that I ended up in hospital, where I was psychiatrically evaluated, and diagnosed with a wonderful combination of mental health issues.

After a few years of crappy medication and some half-arsed counciling I decided that the only person who could sort me out was me, and I got my fuckin' act together, giving you the lovely young man that you have, writing this, today.

I still get odd things happen to me, but being able to rationalise is one of the most powerful aspects of the human mind.

So, in my opinion, ghosts don't exist, but the human mind isn't perfect and can make a lot of convincing mistakes.
( Cawl, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 16:34, 12 replies)

Not me, but the parents
I seem to have loads of stories which could go in this qotw even though I'm kinda on the fence as to whether I believe in things or not, but this story always surprises me about my Dad as even now if somebody tells a ghost story in his general vicinity his reaction is always; "what a load of bollocks". So here goes...

Whilst my Mum and Dad were 'courting' as my Gran always called it they went on a date to a country pub for dinner (I'll ring my Mum tonight and see if she remembers the name). During the course of the meal my Dad went to the bar (they were sat in the restaurant section) and apparantly was able to look up some stairs which led up to the landlords accomodation, now as he went by he noticed there was a little girl sat towards the top of the steps in a nightdress looking at him, and she was still there in the same position when he went back to his table with the drinks.
When he got back he told my Mum saying "I think the landlords daughter is waiting up, she's at the top of the stairs". My Mum then went to the toilets later in the evening and also walked past the stairs, sure enough she could also see the little girl sat at the top of the stairs.
Even later in the evening my Dad went to the bar for drinks again, and yet again noticed the little girl sat at the top of the stairs, this time he said to the barman, which he correctly assumed was the landlord, "I don't mean to be rude pointing this out, but just in case, your daughter appears to be waiting at the top of the stairs, she's been there most of the evening."
To which the landlord replied (I'm sure you've guessed!) "Thats alright you're not being rude, but we don't have a daughter, but we do have a ghost which is a little girl"

I've always been interested in this little story, mainly because my Dad is such a skeptic and also because my Mum also saw it so I've able to ask them both what the little girl looked like....you always seem to have ideas that maybe a ghost is see-through, or bathed in light, etc, but both my Mum and Dad have both said they just thought she was a normal little girl and looked as if she was really there.
( MonkeyOfCode is your favourite waste of time, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 16:28, Reply)

i knew that xbox was evil.
well, it all started sometime around 2001. i wasrather young back then,and i remember having a strage dream, that went as such.

I seemed to be following - and directing- a squad of four soldiers. however, instead of being one of them myself, it was more like i was floating behind them, a sort of third-person omniscient type of view. We were in a desert-ish location, similar to the middle east.

We were moving down a narrow street, and in the building at the end of the street, on a balcony, was an enemy terrorist, or whatever. he was pretty entrenched there, so we were moving in for a better shot. I order them behind a large steel dumpster for cover. Out of nowhere, our entrenched militant friend produces a rocket launcher, and fires! being somewhat intelligent (or having poor aim), he doesn't hit the front of our cover, he hits the ground beside it, killing three members of the squad instantly.

Fast Forward 4 years, to the summer of 2005.

I'm now at my friends house, playing his xbox. The game full Spectrum Warrior had just been released. As it was mainly single player, we would take turns playing when one of us died. sure enough, it was my turn. Having long since forgotten that dream, I moved into a narrow street. lo and behold,at the other end of the street was a terrorist. Hunkered down on a balcony.

The events continued to play out exactly like in my dream. I didn't even remember until the rocket hit. Needless to say, I was rather stunned. Certainly the nerdiest premonition I've ever heard of.

If anyone is interested, i think it was at the beginning of chapter 5...

Also, hello all!
(Freeman163, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 16:10, 3 replies)

Shegetz' Tales of Oddness, Part 3: Liverpool
At the same time as I was supposed to be in Manchester, I was spending a lot of time in Liverpool (well, Birkenhead - sorry, plassie Scousers!) seeing my lady of the time, mostly, apart from the sexings, indulging in the long-standing north-west tradition of sitting around one family members' house and drinking tea until you're sick. In this case, it was her aunt's house, and very weird it was too.

The garden was completely surrounded with wooden fencing, and you looked out onto it from the living room window. Whenever I sat in that room and wasn't looking directly out of the window, I can't really describe it, but I could not shake the idea that the garden was ringed by wire fencing, like chicken wire. I kept being genuinely surprised that it was wood, not wire, whenever I would actually look outside, as whenever my mind was 'filling in the blanks', it was always daylight, and always wire fencing. I could even see the light from outside coming into the room, even in pitch night. I asked, and about twenty years ago when they had first moved in, there was wire fencing that they had fairly rapidly replaced. I don't know why I kept seeing it like that, as it was a pretty pointless 'vision'.

There were also several incidences where I would get a strange feeling going down my back and the atmosphere would almost visibly become darker and more dingy. Several people said they could see a dark ring behind my head and moving down my back, and in the end I just learned to ignore it.

There was also the time when we - me and the then-gf - were walking to the massive Tescos just past the church at the end of Laird Street, and I suddenly paused and announced that the perfectly normal house we were walking past was somewhere I definitely didn't like. I was then told that it's locally known as a bit of a weird house.

All of this is completely pointless, I know, and I wish I knew the reasons why whatever these things are persist in bothering with me as I try my best not to be interested. I'm sure a lot of it can be explained away through science, too.

All very weird though.

I'm done now. Combined length? Don't be so filthy.
( Shegetz Chris Kamara's comedy moustache, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 16:08, Reply)

Shegetz' Tales of Oddness, Part 2: Manchester
Living in Manchester last year, I was party to three strange events that I recall, these ones slightly less ghostly than the Essex lot but still very odd.

1. The first was when my then-girlfriend had just moved into her new place at the same time as I had just moved into my university halls, so neither of us had seen our respective new dwellings. All of a sudden I was struck with the mental picture of *exactly* what her new room looked like, right down to the odd cloth wardrobe thing she had just bought, and the only clear bit of floor being the arc behind the door, with her sitting at her computer chair. I rang her up and described it to her and it was completely right. I asked her if she was on her computer and she said she was, and popped up on MSN to prove it. Webcam revealed the room to be exactly as I had imagined it, and I was very weirded out.

2. At around 2am while indulging in a typically studenty pursuit of trying to make myself a Pro Evo god so I could thrash my flatmates next time a tournament was roused up, I was suddenly struck with a feeling that something, somewhere was badly and violently wrong. It got so powerful that I had to go outside and wake one of my flatmates to talk to so I could distract myself from it, and eventually it went away and I gave up and returned to my room. The next day my mate from home (who was going to the same university but in a different accomodation area) banged on my door massively upset that, in the night, the schizophrenic ex-boyfriend of his housemate back home had broken into his house and attacked his mum with a hammer. More creeped out this time.

and 3. Talking to the (again) then-girlfriend on MSN, and I was making use of the voice recorder feature to whisper - for reasons I can't remember - whisper sweet nothings to her in German. One thing I kept saying, I can't remember what it was, but I remember that three times the recording came out garbled in exactly the same place. I tried a fourth time, and she freaked out; I asked her why, and she said to play the recording MSN had just sent her, and in exactly the same place as it had garbled previously, there was the distinct sound of a baby laughing. Things suddenly felt very cold and I told her I was getting out of there for a while as things suddenly felt very oppressive.

Fucking scary that was.

One more, that'll be Liverpool, and then I'm done.
( Shegetz Chris Kamara's comedy moustache, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 15:59, 1 reply)

i didn't actually see anything,
but when me and a collegue had to go and remove some ancient equipment from the old morgue here i was left alone in the post mortum room for a while.

white, slightly age weathered tiles,
steel tables,
not much light (electric was off and window was small)
all amounts a very creep ten minutes!

all the staff that worked nights in there all have their stories though, about things seen in the corner in the eye or objects not where they were left or unexplained noises....
( ivesb Highly specialised Clinical Physiologist crapbag, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 15:54, Reply)

Chester Thorntons Branch
I've heard a tale that there is a ghost in the Chester Thornton's and that every year, on valentines day the staff come in and have to tidy all the decorations and chocolate that has been strewn about by the spirit.

Truth or Fiction? I don't know
(Fuckarma was masturbating into your handbag, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 15:49, Reply)

Near death
And by near death, I do mean nearly dying, versus a neurological stress induced white light/tunnel hallucination.

Even at my very birth, I nearly died, as did my mother, it was a very close miss, for both of us. This seemed to start a trend of almost dying.

When I was around eight, I fell off a roof backwards onto a garden bamboo cane, and should of been impaled, instead I managed to scrape against it, bizarrely unharmed.

At ten I made a complete arse of getting over a fence, doing a 180 dangle and drop manouvre. Despite royally screwing up my ankle in the dangle, when I did drop, I avoided another impaling courtesy of a closely located piece of pointy garden equipment.

At twelve or so, I was believed to have a possible life ending medical condition. The same condition that had killed a number of my family then, and even more by now. After tests, the diagnosis was, thankfully, inaccurate and based on similar, albeit false positive symptoms.

Shortly after I learned to drive, I was out in the parent's car at dusk, and had carelessly forgotten to put on the lights (a habit very firmly ingrained in me now). This led to what, in all rights, should of been a fatal car crash, but was instead just an embarassing lambasting.

A few years ago, whilst cycling home from work, I looked behind me before signalling, and in doing so managed to cause the front wheel to spaz off in a different direction and throw me off. During the fall I managed to remember there was a bus behind me, quite close, and this being Oxford, the driver was likely to be a cyclist hater. When my head did hit the floor, I was somewhat relieved to see the bus go past me and not over me. As it turn's out I'd managed to fall out of the path of said bus, just enough to be safe.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think I have a guardian angel/spirit/whatever, but these are the more major close call's I've had (so far) out of a still larger list, and I can't help but think my luck will run out at some point. This is mostly due to the coup de grace of my "almost" stories, where the amount of luck was considerable:

Again on my cycle, around fourteen, I arrived home from school and in true teenage cyclist style I was hoping to leave a rubber stripe when applying my brakes. Only when I pulled the brake, the brake cable simply popped out of the top of the brake and left me to hurdle into a fence. The near death part happened about 30 seconds previous, when I had last used the brake, to slow down at a junction, where a particularly large HGV was passing in front of me. Had the brake broken there, I would have been splattered over the road in a particularly gruesome pattern.

Apologies for length, it just seem's to keep happening
(ShiftyBastard won the World Cup on World Soccer Champs 2010!, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 15:41, 1 reply)

Shegetz' Tales of Oddness, Part 1: Essex
My family on one side have been, for generations, seers, mediums, psychics, sensitives, whatever you wish to call them. My gran was one of these people that used to get dead family members telling her when major events were afoot, my mother spent a long time repressing any ability she might have, and I seem to have picked up something of it. My gran used to physically see things, I don't, I just feel things and would probably shit myself if a ghost popped up in front of me. I'm not into the whole 'psychic' thing and try to ignore it most of the time, but as other people in this situation will tell you that's pretty difficult when things are trying very hard to be noticed.

Anyway, the spookiness. There is definitely something in my house - or at least there used to be. The dining room in my mother's house is a place where several people have recalled experiencing a slowly creeping feeling of dread for no reasons at all, and there is a 'presence' that likes to stand in doorways and intimidate people that is connected to the same thing - an ex girlfriend of mine that 'saw' things (like me, not massively into all the ghost stuff, just someone unfortunate enough to be affected by these things) was in the garden and saw it looking out at her from the back window of the living room and it was all I could do to ever get her back in that room after that. It spooked my mother enough for her to have gotten the place 'cleansed' by a medium of some sort and I can't say I've felt anything since.

Apart from that, the most vivid memory I have of something strange going on in this house is I remember sitting once happily reading away in my bedroom (I think it was Rob Grant's 'Colony' - Great book) when I felt strangely compelled to open the door to let something out. As I got up I felt there was something standing right by the door, and as I reached for the handle, so did it, or I should say 'she', as it definitely felt female. I flung the door open as fast as I could and recoiled back in fear - I absolutely hated the idea of being 'touched' by a ghost. The feeling immediately went away. I wasn't sleepy, I hadn't been drinking anything stronger than tea and I can remember every detail clear as day.

I also several times caught a glimpse of the shadow of a man at the top of my stairs as I was walking through the hall at the bottom - there's a window right at the top and the light normally shines down, and it's only a glimpse, but it's definitely a shadow of a man. I tried asking whoever it was very nicely to leave and he hasn't been back.

You can all commence laughing at me now, and I'll get back to writing the other two places of weirdness I've experienced.

I fully accept that I am probably a mental.
( Shegetz Chris Kamara's comedy moustache, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 15:39, Reply)

Sat on a ghost
I’ve been lurking so long I almost forgot I could join in. I’ve got a couple.
I was visiting Warwick castle years ago with an ex and her mum and we went into the ghost tower which is meant to be haunted by a Sir Fulke Greville who was murdered by his manservant. They both felt that there was something strange about the upstairs room and proclaimed there to be a grey cloudy mass around a chair. So obviously I went over and sat on it. They both said that I shouldn’t be doing that and now the grey cloud was all over me. So I’ve possibly sat on a ghost. Not that I saw/felt anything untoward.
Next one occurred when I was living in a crappy house with a load of mates. We had some travellers move in with us for a bit and three of them claimed to have seen a little boy in Victorian type clothing sat on the end of the bed watching them in the mirror. They could only see it the mirror, if they looked straight at the bed he wasn’t there.
I dismissed this as bollocks as they were all rampant drug fiends. However, one day we were sat in another room having a smoke and started to hear a scraping sound. Turned the music off to listen properly and we discovered it was the ceiling light bulb slowly unscrewing itself. Sat there watching as it finally came loose and dropped to the floor. We all looked at each other and went over to look at the light bulb on the floor which then exploded, sending us running like girls. Got no explanation for that one.
And I’ve had a visit from the Old Hag, which is explained as a hypnagogic state and fucking scary. I felt movement on the bottom of my duvet which I just thought was the cat jumping onto the bed and then I felt myself pressed hard into my bed by something heavy. My heart was racing and I attempted to move but couldn’t, I tried to scream but nothing would come out. Then suddenly I was free and jumped straight up to put the light on before lying in bed reading until the sun came up. Horrible.
(Man Worm, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 15:37, 1 reply)

Angry property owner
Back in the 1970's I bought a property in New York with the intention to rent out various rooms and make a shedload of cash on the side. Things went exceedingley well for the first 10 years or so then one of the tenants brought home her new boyfriend (He said he was a parapsychologist who had opened a new business with some mates).

Shortly after he turned up all sorts of crazy shit happens, with other residents complaining of odd things happening.

Everything came to head when I was at a party for one of the residents when one of the people there brought a dog with them. The dog was a vicious little bugger and chased the poor bloke who rented the flat out the door. That mutt left me with a few bills to pay for repairs to damaged walls and carpet tiles replaced (there was poop everywhere). Allegedly noone in the building owned this animal and it must have been an evil apparition.

Just when I think it cant get any worse Mr Parapsychologist turns up with his mates and go to fight some 80's chick in spandex who had been squatting on my buildings roof. The gang and this woman fight, things get broken and a massive bloke dressed as a sailor turns up to help her.

They then decided to let off some fireworks (or something) which blew up most of the top floor and I ended up being covered in melted marshmallow.

The worst part about this was that my insurance refused to pay out for the damage as it was an act of Zuul and not an act of God!
(mon bison powered by magnets, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 15:21, 2 replies)

How can this possibly work?
HERE

STOP CHUCKING PHYSICS AT ME!

It am alien hammers, obviously.

(is embedding disabled in the QOTW? probably for the best, actually)

edit: here's a picture of it! OMFG!


( chart cat has an itch, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 14:54, 14 replies)

My Mum
I have never, to my knowledge, seen a ghost. I did hear our dead dog once who had a very characteristic whimper, shortly after she died, but that’s about it. I would be terrified if I saw or heard anything else. My Mum, on the other hand, and long dead herself unfortunately, had a few ghost stories she would tell me. I think the best story is from WW II.
She worked mainly in service when she was younger and would work in big houses with large kitchens. During the war she was working in one such building at the same time the Luftwaffe took a liking to it and dropped a few bombs while she was in it.
The explosion caused a lot of damage and she and another female colleague were trapped in the kitchen in the building’s basement. They could not see a way out. There was so much dust and crap in the air that they could scarcely see each other.
Then the chef, a man known only as “The Carver” to my mother, found them and directed them to an exit that was less blocked than any of the others and my mother and her friend took to shifting the rubble out of the way. The chef didn’t attempt to help at all despite my mother and her friend shouting at him to help. He simply shook his head and carried on pointing at the exit.
After some time, there was enough rubble shifted for the two women to scramble to safety and the waiting ambulances waiting on the surface.
I expect you’ve guessed where this is going already, as I did when she told me, but stick with it. You are right but I haven’t finished yet.
The emergency services immediately asked her if anyone else was trapped in the basement.
“Only the carver,” my Mum replied.
“The carver?”
“Yes, the chef.”
“Sorry, love, but he was brought out dead an hour ago.”
(BearWithLittleBrain, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 14:39, Reply)

Enough to give you goosebumps
Back when I was fresh out of school I started working in this pub down the road from me in Dover. The owners actually lived upstairs from the bar and would often regale us with after-hours stories about the resident spirit (the pub was apparently one of the oldest in the country) known to previous owners as 'George'. Over the first few weeks working there many mundane occurances were attributed to this phantom such as glasses randomly falling off shelves, strange creeking noises (the type you aren't surprised to hear in such an old building) and other easily explained phenomena. Little was I to know how malevolent the bastard really was!

So for some reason I've forgotten the owners were going to be away for the night so they asked me to open up the pub in the morning and suggested that I spend the night in the guest room to facilitate this. This was the very night that our chef had finally come good on his promise to roll me a massive fuck-off spliff for me to take home. So after closing time we set about preparing the pub for the morning then I waited for the owners to leave before venturing on to the patio to get well and truly munted.

Once blazed I climbed the stairs to the very top of the building and promptly prepared to pass out in one of the spare beds. Then the noises started. The general background creaking had already set my still spinning head on edge. This soon transformed into abject terror as the loud crashing of what sounded like objects being thrown around downstairs began. Occasionally it sounded like breaking glass. Then it was gone. I put on my headphones and tried to forget about it and get some sleep. But ten minutes later it started up again. I looked across the room and an eery red light shone up the stairs between the iron railings at the top and the noise appeared to be getting louder. And then it was gone. This continued every 10 to 15 minutes for what must have been two hours before I could bear it no more. Tired, petrified and still pretty baked, I summoned the courage to leave my pillowy sanctuary and confront whatever it was...

Grabbing a screwdriver from the nearby chest of drawers I held it above my head as I decended the stairs in the silence. In the dim red light of the smoke alarm I entered the kitchen when from behind me louder than ever came a crash. I jumped round and found myself face-to-face with... the ice machine. It was refilling itself by dropping the icecubes it had just made into its container. So I took a moment to reflect on how stupid I was and went to bed. The ice machine was subsequently named George.

I apologise for nothing.
( Raindance Work is inversely proportional to post-count, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 14:39, Reply)

Just thought of another one...
When I was a kid I looked out of my bedroom window one Saturday afternoon and saw a light in the sky above the houses across the field. It looked like the white lights you occasionally see on the front of helicopters or aeroplanes, except that there didn't appear to be anything behind it.

It just hovered above the houses for a few seconds, then shot up into the sky really quickly (but not in a straight line) and then disappeared.

My mum was in the room at the time and she saw it too... after a couple of seconds silence she said "Well what was that then?". We're both quite into planes and aviation; it moved far too quickly to be a helicopter or aeroplane, and the sky was clear so it didn't disappear into some clouds or anything like that.
(Professor Kenny Martin Hmm? What?, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 14:36, Reply)

Might as well add my own
Professor Kenny's replenishing story reminded me of this. I used to live in a terraced house, that had a staircase running right up the middle of it. At the top of the staircase were two doors, one leading to the bedroom at the front of the house, one leading to the bedroom at the back.

I was doing some DIY type stuff in the back bedroom right next to the door, so I had the door closed. I heard my girlfriend come in the front door, so I shouted "Hello!" and heard her start to come upstairs. The door opened inwards and I didn't want to get hit by it, so as she got to the door I opened it for her. I swear I even felt the doorknob move under my hand - just in time, then. Except when I opened the door, she wasn't there.

It was a pretty strange feeling, I must say. She wasn't downstairs, either. I can only assume that it was someone coming in next door and going up their stairs - we could often hear them moving about, being a terraced house - and I just extrapolated the rest. At least, I assume it was that, and not the shades of previous owners trotting up to bed. Wooooo, etc.
(richardm, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 14:28, Reply)

I'm Afraid
That I can't take credit for this. It's an old post from my blog where I adapted and complied a bunch of stuff to advise people on what to do if faced with the supernatural. Very little of is it my own work.

Cheers


When it appears that you have killed the monster, *never* check to see if it's really dead.

If you find that your house is built upon or near a cemetery, was once a church used for black masses, had previous inhabitants who went mad or committed suicide or died in some horrible fashion, or had inhabitants who performed satanic practices in your house, move away immediately.

Never read a book of demon summoning aloud, even as a joke.

Do not search the cellar, especially if the power has gone out.

If your children speak to you in Latin or any other language which they should not know, or if they speak to you using a voice which is other than their own, shoot them immediately. It will save you a lot of grief in the long run. NOTE: It will probably take several rounds to kill them, so be prepared.

When you have the benefit of numbers, *never* pair off and go it alone.

As a general rule, don't solve puzzles that open portals to Hell.

Never stand in, on, above, below, beside, or anywhere near a grave, tomb, crypt, mausoleum, or other house of the dead.

If you're searching for something which caused a noise and find out that it's just the cat, leave the room immediately if you value your life.

If appliances start operating by themselves, move out.

Do not take *anything* from the dead.

If you find a town which looks deserted, it's probably for a reason. Take the hint and stay away.

Don't fool with recombinant DNA technology unless you're sure you know what you're doing.

If you're running from the monster, expect to trip or fall down at least twice, more if you are of the female persuasion. Also note that, despite the fact that you are running and the monster is merely shambling along, it's still moving fast enough to catch up with you.

If your companions suddenly begin to exhibit uncharacteristic behaviour such as hissing, fascination for blood, glowing eyes, increasing hairiness, and so on, get away from them as fast as possible.

Stay away from certain geographical locations, some of which are listed here: Amityville, Elm Street, Transylvania, Nilbog (you're in trouble if you recognize this one), the Bermuda Triangle, or any small town in Maine.

If your car runs out of petrol at night, do not go to the nearby deserted-looking house to phone for help.

And again,

Cheers
( Legless Mister Stabby - shanks for the memory, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 14:21, 4 replies)

Final one for now...
My girlfriend (the lovely Jessie) and I both work; me 9-5 and her on shifts. While we're apart we quite often text each other, as you can imagine.

What's spooky though, is the regularity with which one of us will receive a text from the other whilst composing a text of their own to the other.
(Professor Kenny Martin Hmm? What?, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 14:20, 2 replies)

My ex-girlfriend was a few years older than me and had a teenage daughter
One day, during a visit to my girlfriend's gran's (Marie's) house, the conversation turned to the past and Marie was telling us of her first husband and how he died, then how she re-married.

"I knew great-grandad" piped in my girlfriend's daughter "He used to sit on the end of my bed and tell me stories didn't he?"

Marie told her that no, she hadn't met him, and in fact he'd died before she was born, to which the daughter replied "No, I did know him", and proceeded to describe him perfectly.

Marie went white - the only time I've ever actually seen someone do that - and agreed that yes, that was indeed him. But since he had in fact died several years before the daughter was born and she had no photos of him, how the daughter knew his was a mystery.
(Professor Kenny Martin Hmm? What?, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 14:16, 1 reply)