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I grew up in a 19th-century house a few blocks from the Mississippi River in northern Illinois, with my parents and my paternal grandparents. When I was very young, I would hear someone calling my name in the back bedroom, which was a large unheated room with lots of windows that had been built over the kitchen as a sunroom. The bathroom was a scary place for me, because the door to the attic was in the bathroom and I was terrified to turn my back to the door, fearful of whatever might decide to come out of the darkness of the attic. My two sisters were in the back bedroom for a few years, then my brother and I moved in there.
My grandmother was part Irish and believed in things like banshees, and her cousin was a medium; my grandmother would use a crystal pendulum for divination, and she and her cousin held seances with a Ouija board when I was very young. She was always getting occult mail, and I think she was a Rosicrucian at one point. Many years later, my mother told me that at one seance the dining room table was moving around the room ... they freaked out and burned the board in the back yard the next day, and my mother told me the smoke curling up formed something like a menacing figure. I have often wondered if they opened the house to something that day ... or if we kids were simply susceptible to my grandmother's occult interests and stories.
When my sisters were in the back room, they reported feeling the beds shake and seeing dark figures ... and when my brother and I were in there, my brother sat up hollering on one or more occasions; his bed was shaking violently, and when he looked at the foot of the bed he saw something small and dark trying to climb in.
There was a small room next to the dining room, and my father (who worked nights) would come home and have a snack before going to bed, and reported seeing a figure pass from the dining room into the side room many times ... and one night, my mother and sister came to me distressed and asked me to go into the side room; there was the sound of a woman weeping, coming from the corner of the room. It went on for a few minutes, then stopped. I went outside to see if it might be the woman who lived in the house next to ours, but there was no sound outside.
Fast forward many years ... my brother and I were back for the holidays, and my brother, who had gotten into paranormal investigating decided to have a seance to "talk" to whatever was in the house. I refused to join ... as he talked, my youngest sister began weeping and jerking back and forth, yelling "Make it stop!" (she told me later it felt like something was trying to "take her over") I forced my brother to break the circle and he wasn't happy about it ... but when my sister was crying I felt something like fingers crawling up the back of my head, as though they were probing my brain (this very well might have been my hair standing up, but I have no other experience of my hair standing up to compare to it).
There was a boarded up side to the attic, and one day we pulled off a board; inside were a few Victorian children's toys, and a blackboard, and it looked like there had been a fire in there. Very strange. I don't know what to make of these experiences, whether they were products of our overactive imaginations misinterpreting things, our watching too many Twilight Zone episodes on TV, or whether they were evidence of something else. I'll tell you this, the experiences I had didn't make me eager to repeat them ... but I'll report what happened in a house I rented with some friends the year before I went back to finish college in another story. Hope you enjoyed this ... if enjoy is the right word.
Vasily, I enjoyed reading it very much. Wow what experiences!
The only time we had shaking beds (in our haunted house) was during earthquakes.
I wrote a bit about that house on the other thread about haunted dwellings. I wrote a ghost story - that probably should have gone in this thread, but works in either.
What did you do with the items you found in the attic?
Maybe you should call the Haunted Collector and ask him to check if they are haunted.
Vasily, I enjoyed reading it very much. Wow what experiences!
...
What did you do with the items you found in the attic?
Maybe you should call the Haunted Collector and ask him to check if they are haunted.
My mother sold the house in the late 1970s and I have no idea what she did with the stuff ... Knowing her, they probably went in a dumpster.
Most of this happened in the 1950s and 1960s, with the exception of the seance my brother conducted which was in the mid 1970s, so Chango's cautionary note about the unreliability of memory applies. What these experiences have left me with is the sneaking suspicion that there are aspects of being human that are beyond our current science.
Here's what happened in the house I rented with friends the year before I went back to college. In 1970, two friends and I decided to rent a house in the Iowa town across the river from the town where I grew up. They worked during the day, and I worked second shift so when they found a place we decided to meet at a house they'd found when I got off work at midnight. It was a big old two-story 19th century house on the north side of town, in an area that was agricultural when it was built. There was a garage in the back of the lot, and on the north side cherry trees and an old well. The power was off in the house, so we had to explore it with flashlights. It was considerably larger than my family house and beautiful inside: a large living room with a bay window, large kitchen and pantry, dining room off the living room, and a stairway to the second floor with a landing at the bottom that had two short flights of stairs going into the kitchen and the dining room. There was a sun porch off the kitchen. Upstairs, there were three bedrooms, a bath, and stairs to a large finished attic.
I was impressed with the place, and told my friends I was as excited about renting it as they were. While we were looking around upstairs, we heard voices downstairs ... I thought perhaps the owner had let someone else in to see the house. It sounded like several people talking; suddenly a woman screamed, and we looked at each other, terrified. We rushed downstairs but there was no one else in the house and chalked it up to there being people walking in front of the house; but that didn't explain why all sounds stopped suddenly after the scream or how sounds from the sidewalk 50 feet from the front door carried into the house so they sounded like they were inside.
As the weeks went by, we noticed an increasing number of odd little things that happened on pretty much a daily basis. There would be a golden sparkling in the corners of the living room, reminiscent of the "beam me up" effect from Star Trek. Once I was talking with a roommate who was facing the dining room, and he suddenly grew fearful looking into the dining room, and his eyes began to water; he said he had seen a dark shape rising up and curling around like smoke above the dining room table. My other roommate came tearing downstairs one night, looking over his shoulder and reported he had been leaving the bathroom when he saw a dark shadow figure cross the hall in front of him. And when the lights went out on us one night, he and I went up to the attic to check the fusebox; when we opened the box, the fuse for the living room fell out into his hands.
Why did we stay? It was a great house, and was quiet during the day though it always had this sleepy feeling about it, as though you were dreaming you were there ... it was easy in the light of day to shrug your shoulders and dismiss what you'd experienced the night before. Sometimes I'd hear someone talking just outside the back door when I was cooking breakfast on a weekend, but when I looked, I see the people talking three or four yards down. Space and time seemed to be a bit "off" in this house. My sisters visited the house once, but refused to return.
Over time, things became more intense. We were coming back from dinner one still summer night and one of my roommates said, "take a look at the drapes in the sun porch". They were curling against the glass of the windows ... not as though the wind was blowing them, but as though they were ... crawling against the glass. There were no fans on in the house, the windows were all closed, and there was no air conditioning so we had no reasonable explanation for this. Another night, a friend was visiting and we decided to go out for donuts; it was a beautiful late autumn night, and we were both looking at the full moon and the stars. Suddenly, I heard someone walking across the grass near the cherry trees; my friend and I both looked up at the same time. "Did you hear someone walking across the lawn?" I asked him; "Yeah", he said. For the next ten or fifteen minutes there was the sound of footsteps walking or running criss-crossing the lawn and sometimes passing between the two of us, but there was no one there. We left to get our donuts.
One weekend, a couple of people were in the attic on a sunny day moving things around, and they reported hearing a whirring sound; when they looked around, they saw some sort of sparkling golden form over the stairwell to the second floor that gradually faded away. I didn't see this, but had my own experience with the attic stairs. I was falling to sleep one night in my bedroom, which was right next to the attic stairs. Suddenly I heard something heavy tumble down the stairs and crash into the door. Heart pounding, I went to the attic stairs, opened the door, and flipped on the light. "Hello?" I said, but there was no response ... so I went back to bed. For the next 15 minutes or so I heard the same sounds over and over: thump thump thump thump CRASH.
The worst was yet to come. One night my roommates and I were sitting on the landing going into the dining room, and one of them commented there was a column of cold air rising from the flooring. I passed my hand through it; yep, cold spot. He got up to go into the living room and stopped at the doorway, his head cocked to one side. I went up to him and asked what was up; "Listen" he said ... as I listened, I heard what sounded like a baby breathing in its sleep. We looked at each other and walked into the living room; the sound was coming from the air above the couch.
At a later point in time, an acquaintance was staying at our house and sleeping on that living room couch(his parents had kicked him out) . One night there was a knock on my bedroom door, and it was the acquaintance asking if he could sleep on the floor in my room. I told him OK, though I thought this was a strange request. The next day, my roommate told me that the friend heard footsteps coming to the couch, felt he was being watched, then felt hands touching his body. He found somewhere else to stay until his parents let him back in the house.
The friend who heard the footsteps was over another night listening to music in our living room. When I went over to the stereo to change the record, and heard a pounding coming through the window; it sounded like one of those machines they use to break pavement, but this made no sense because it was nighttime. I went to the front door and stepped outside; there were no pounding sounds out there. When I went back in my friend asked what was up; "Listen to this", I told him and we both went to the window. As we listened to the pounding, it sounded like it was getting closer and clearer; finally, the window began to shake in its frame as though someone were pounding on it ... then the pounding moved to the next window in the bay window area over the couch, then the next, then the next. A kind of whirring sound started, intermixed with what sounded like voices muttering strange things. My friend and I got up, and he said, "Let's go out and get some dinner". So we did. He would not talk about these events later, and became very uncomfortable and angry when I tried bringing them up.
I began sitting on a lawn chair outside if I came home and my roommates weren't there ... even so, it felt like I was being watched from the house. My worst experience happened when I was alone in the house, typing at the dining room table, and heard a dragging sound from the basement, like someone was dragging a heavy chest across the floor. I figured there was someone who had broken into the basement and was ripping us off, so I grabbed something heavy and opened the door to the basement. I flipped on the light and said "Who's there?" but there was no one in the basement ... there was a storm door, but it was securely locked, and I checked everywhere in the basement ... no intruders.
I began typing again ... suddenly the dragging sound began again ... I was filled with terror, and all I could think was get out get out get out GET OUT. I decided to visit my folks across the river, and left the house to go to my car next to the garage. I looked up at the house, and it felt like it was watching me leave. As I approached the car, I heard my name whispered from the bushes next to the garage ... but of course there was no one there.
I went away to finish my undergrad degree in the fall of 1971, and my friends moved out. I know nothing about the history of the property. When I'd come home for visits, I'd find myself driving through the neighborhood to look at the house, sometimes stopping across the street to just look at it; it was as though it had some sort of hold on me or on my imagination. Today it's a day care center, of all things. :0
Since then, I haven't lived in another house or apartment where there were strange goings-on reminiscent of a haunting, and I have to wonder: was it some cognitive thing having to do with my age, and I grew out of it when I moved away? Did I bring something eldritch to the second house that I'd picked up in my family home and lost it when I moved away? Or was it a case of too many spooky stories from granny, and an overactive youthful imagination?
These are all quite interesting. What I have noticed though is ghost sightings are rare, usually people feel a presence or some sort of sound without actually seeing a form. Im really interested in what these things look like.
You might find this post interesting in an effort to answer your question as to what ghost look like.
I posted this a while back, and printed a section of the book that explains what we do , and don't see.
" What did you see.
In many threads and post in this forum dealing with the spirits, and paranormal behavior, many have said they saw a deceased relative or love one, while others claim to see "ghost" in a variety of places, and situations.
I know through experience, we are capable of communicating with those who have passed on, but seeing them is another thing.
Our human minds are capable of conjuring up all kinds of things, and seeing a spirit is just one of them.
As those who have read any of my post on the subject, I often recommend one particular book because I find that in all my research, this one particular edition seems to be right on the money when it comes to explaining spirits,and the worlds in which they exist.
I find no reason why the author of this book would use this medium to tell falsehoods.
There is nothing to be gained by doing this.
Many of the things I read in this book seem to offer a logical explanation to the many things we as humans fail to understand.
Getting back to humans "seeing" ghost or spirits; To understand why that is not possible, we need to know what a spirit is made of.
The Spirits' Book by author Alan Kardec, of which I speak, for the most part, is written in a question answer format.
The Author, and those mediums working with him, are the ones asking the question, and the spirits are the ones answering them.
I am going to quote just a few question and answers from that book that deal with the "makeup" of spirits, and should provide enough proof that as humans we are not capable of seeing these ghost or spirits.
To begin:
Question- " Have souls a determinate,circumscribed,and unvarying form?"
Answer- "Not for eyes such as yours; but, for us, they have a form, though only to be vaguely imagined by you as a flame, a gleam, or an ethereal spark."
Question- "Is this flame or spark of any colour"?
Answer- "If you could see it, it would appear to you to vary from a dull grey to the brilliancy of the ruby, according to the degree of the spirit's purity."
Question- "Is the spirit properly so called, without a covering,or is it, as some declare, surrounded by a substance of some kind?"
Answer- "The spirit is enveloped in a substance which would appear to you as mere vapor, but which, nevertheless, appears very gross to us, though it is sufficiently vaporous to allow the spirit to float in the atmosphere, and to transport itself through space at pleasure".
These qualities described by the spirits themselves make it a mere impossibility for we humans to see a ghost or spirit as so many have claimed to have done.
These people who swear they have seen a loved one are seeing what they want to see, so they believe they are seeing these things.
The mind is a persuasive tool, and sometimes things are not as they seem."
Bob.
Not sure this qualifies as a ghost story but here it is. My FIL and I were fishing on the far side of Aransas Bay on the Texas coast in the early 70's. Fishing was great, lot's of trout of good size were biting. We were in FILs boat, an 18 foot Brunswick Cutter that had lots of freeboard so it could handle pretty rough water. It was powered by a Johnson 100 outboard. Storm clouds came up pretty quick which are common in the later summer time. WE decided we were on the wrong side of the bay to just sit it out so we picked up and started off across the bay. We were almost instantly hit with hurricane force winds and the waves were not only high but close together. We were taking on water pretty bad and a common trick in the old boats is while underway to take the drain plug out and as long as you are moving forward it will drain water. We were taking on water almost faster than the open plug could handle as we had about 8" of water in the back of the boat already. It was getting dicey if we were going to make it. Out of the rain came a shrimp boat, an old shrimp boat which were common to the area. He ran in front of us cutting the rough water and soon the boat had no standing water in it. We followed the guy across the bay and if it weren't for him, I doubt we would have made it. As we got to the safe harbor, he turned off. Not thinking anything about but very grateful to this guy, we trailered the boat and went into the baitshop to get out of the rain. We told our story to the lady behind the counter and she turned real white when we told her the Paradise Island had broken the water for us to come home. Seems the Paradise Island, the shrimp boat that brought us home, sank some 25 years earlier with all hands never to be found- it just disappeared in a bad storm. We were not the only boat in trouble that the Paradise Island brought home, there were others with the same story. For me it's one of those- this has to be a local joke, kinda thing. But after doing a little local research, there was a Paradise Island that disappeared in Aransas Bay and was never heard from again. Was it another boat like it, hard to say. But I do know that our getting across the bay safely was due to a shrimp boat named Paradise Island that matches the description of an apparent sunken shrimp boat that shouldn't have been there- but he was.
I grew up in a 19th-century house a few blocks from the Mississippi River in northern Illinois, with my parents and my paternal grandparents. When I was very young, I would hear someone calling my name in the back bedroom, which was a large unheated room with lots of windows that had been built over the kitchen as a sunroom. The bathroom was a scary place for me, because the door to the attic was in the bathroom and I was terrified to turn my back to the door, fearful of whatever might decide to come out of the darkness of the attic. My two sisters were in the back bedroom for a few years, then my brother and I moved in there.
My grandmother was part Irish and believed in things like banshees, and her cousin was a medium; my grandmother would use a crystal pendulum for divination, and she and her cousin held seances with a Ouija board when I was very young. She was always getting occult mail, and I think she was a Rosicrucian at one point. Many years later, my mother told me that at one seance the dining room table was moving around the room ... they freaked out and burned the board in the back yard the next day, and my mother told me the smoke curling up formed something like a menacing figure. I have often wondered if they opened the house to something that day ... or if we kids were simply susceptible to my grandmother's occult interests and stories.
When my sisters were in the back room, they reported feeling the beds shake and seeing dark figures ... and when my brother and I were in there, my brother sat up hollering on one or more occasions; his bed was shaking violently, and when he looked at the foot of the bed he saw something small and dark trying to climb in.
There was a small room next to the dining room, and my father (who worked nights) would come home and have a snack before going to bed, and reported seeing a figure pass from the dining room into the side room many times ... and one night, my mother and sister came to me distressed and asked me to go into the side room; there was the sound of a woman weeping, coming from the corner of the room. It went on for a few minutes, then stopped. I went outside to see if it might be the woman who lived in the house next to ours, but there was no sound outside.
Fast forward many years ... my brother and I were back for the holidays, and my brother, who had gotten into paranormal investigating decided to have a seance to "talk" to whatever was in the house. I refused to join ... as he talked, my youngest sister began weeping and jerking back and forth, yelling "Make it stop!" (she told me later it felt like something was trying to "take her over") I forced my brother to break the circle and he wasn't happy about it ... but when my sister was crying I felt something like fingers crawling up the back of my head, as though they were probing my brain (this very well might have been my hair standing up, but I have no other experience of my hair standing up to compare to it).
There was a boarded up side to the attic, and one day we pulled off a board; inside were a few Victorian children's toys, and a blackboard, and it looked like there had been a fire in there. Very strange. I don't know what to make of these experiences, whether they were products of our overactive imaginations misinterpreting things, our watching too many Twilight Zone episodes on TV, or whether they were evidence of something else. I'll tell you this, the experiences I had didn't make me eager to repeat them ... but I'll report what happened in a house I rented with some friends the year before I went back to finish college in another story. Hope you enjoyed this ... if enjoy is the right word.
You might find this post interesting in an effort to answer your question as to what ghost look like.
I posted this a while back, and printed a section of the book that explains what we do , and don't see.
" What did you see.
In many threads and post in this forum dealing with the spirits, and paranormal behavior, many have said they saw a deceased relative or love one, while others claim to see "ghost" in a variety of places, and situations.
I know through experience, we are capable of communicating with those who have passed on, but seeing them is another thing.
Our human minds are capable of conjuring up all kinds of things, and seeing a spirit is just one of them.
As those who have read any of my post on the subject, I often recommend one particular book because I find that in all my research, this one particular edition seems to be right on the money when it comes to explaining spirits,and the worlds in which they exist.
I find no reason why the author of this book would use this medium to tell falsehoods.
There is nothing to be gained by doing this.
Many of the things I read in this book seem to offer a logical explanation to the many things we as humans fail to understand.
Getting back to humans "seeing" ghost or spirits; To understand why that is not possible, we need to know what a spirit is made of.
The Spirits' Book by author Alan Kardec, of which I speak, for the most part, is written in a question answer format.
The Author, and those mediums working with him, are the ones asking the question, and the spirits are the ones answering them.
I am going to quote just a few question and answers from that book that deal with the "makeup" of spirits, and should provide enough proof that as humans we are not capable of seeing these ghost or spirits.
To begin:
Question- " Have souls a determinate,circumscribed,and unvarying form?"
Answer- "Not for eyes such as yours; but, for us, they have a form, though only to be vaguely imagined by you as a flame, a gleam, or an ethereal spark."
Question- "Is this flame or spark of any colour"?
Answer- "If you could see it, it would appear to you to vary from a dull grey to the brilliancy of the ruby, according to the degree of the spirit's purity."
Question- "Is the spirit properly so called, without a covering,or is it, as some declare, surrounded by a substance of some kind?"
Answer- "The spirit is enveloped in a substance which would appear to you as mere vapor, but which, nevertheless, appears very gross to us, though it is sufficiently vaporous to allow the spirit to float in the atmosphere, and to transport itself through space at pleasure".
These qualities described by the spirits themselves make it a mere impossibility for we humans to see a ghost or spirit as so many have claimed to have done.
These people who swear they have seen a loved one are seeing what they want to see, so they believe they are seeing these things.
The mind is a persuasive tool, and sometimes things are not as they seem."
Bob.
Thanks CAL. If you look at the posts on here almost all of them say they heard sounds, tapping or other stuff but not the actual form of a ghost. I am the only one on here to have seen something, and being able to describe it.
Not sure this qualifies as a ghost story but here it is. My FIL and I were fishing on the far side of Aransas Bay on the Texas coast in the early 70's. Fishing was great, lot's of trout of good size were biting. We were in FILs boat, an 18 foot Brunswick Cutter that had lots of freeboard so it could handle pretty rough water. It was powered by a Johnson 100 outboard. Storm clouds came up pretty quick which are common in the later summer time. WE decided we were on the wrong side of the bay to just sit it out so we picked up and started off across the bay. We were almost instantly hit with hurricane force winds and the waves were not only high but close together. We were taking on water pretty bad and a common trick in the old boats is while underway to take the drain plug out and as long as you are moving forward it will drain water. We were taking on water almost faster than the open plug could handle as we had about 8" of water in the back of the boat already. It was getting dicey if we were going to make it. Out of the rain came a shrimp boat, an old shrimp boat which were common to the area. He ran in front of us cutting the rough water and soon the boat had no standing water in it. We followed the guy across the bay and if it weren't for him, I doubt we would have made it. As we got to the safe harbor, he turned off. Not thinking anything about but very grateful to this guy, we trailered the boat and went into the baitshop to get out of the rain. We told our story to the lady behind the counter and she turned real white when we told her the Paradise Island had broken the water for us to come home. Seems the Paradise Island, the shrimp boat that brought us home, sank some 25 years earlier with all hands never to be found- it just disappeared in a bad storm. We were not the only boat in trouble that the Paradise Island brought home, there were others with the same story. For me it's one of those- this has to be a local joke, kinda thing. But after doing a little local research, there was a Paradise Island that disappeared in Aransas Bay and was never heard from again. Was it another boat like it, hard to say. But I do know that our getting across the bay safely was due to a shrimp boat named Paradise Island that matches the description of an apparent sunken shrimp boat that shouldn't have been there- but he was.
Great story. Sometimes I guess spirits or whatever they are, are helpers.
An older couple I know was on vacation and travelling down a windy mountain road. It only fit (2) cars and barely that! The wife had a pop she just bought and for some reason she could not get the cap off of it. Her hsuband was driving and he kept telling her it was a twist off cap and that she should just twist.
Well twist she did and still nothing, finally out of frustration she told him to open it. He pulls off the road to open her coke bottle and a huge semi came roaring down their lane around the bend at the exact moment they had pulled off the road.
Had they not pulled out they would have been killed. After the incident the couple says they believe divine intervention saved them and that an angel or something was literally sitting in that car with his hand on the bottle cap, to stop it from opening.
In that vein -- years ago, a friend of mine was riding a motorcycle with her boyfriend. He was a very cautious driver, and when they went to pass a slow moving 18 wheeler truck, another semi truck zoomed out of nowhere and clipped them.
The went off the bike.
They both swear they felt as if they were being held aloft as they zoomed across the lanes, and then were placed into the grassy median. He was fine -- she has a rip in her jeans. Not a bruise on either of them.
The bike was crushed into pieces.
There is no way they should have lived through that.
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