Asklemmy

A friend and I were walking home at night alongside a forest. When in the trees we both spot a lady in a white nightgown just standing there looking toward the road.

It was an urban legend in our community that the white lady would frequent the woods and steal kids. So we were properly freaked out and ran home as fast as humanly possible.

It's not quite paranormal, but it was at least back then when I was a child very scary for me:

When I was a catholic 9 years old boy lying in my bed and thinking about what the priest has been talking about in church the other day I didn't feel anxious about the idea of being in hell and burning there but instead a different part of the threat frightened me much more, staying there for eternity.

I was so afraid of the thought of an eternity that not even the prospect of spending eternity in heaven was anything I could look forward too, it didn't seem really much better then a eternity in hell, and actually still doesn't.

I was riding my moped on a dark gravel road back home with my buddy and as I make a left turn, I can see in my headlights someone doing jumping jacks on the middle of the road ahead. I pull aside thinking what the hell did I just see as my friend who was following me pulls next to me, lifts up his visor and is like 'did you fucking see that?!' We immediately go back to inspect and there's no sign of anyone anywhere.

My mom got me this "protection" charm from a woo-ass lady at a farmer's market once. It was cool looking, so I wore it on a tight necklace that couldn't slip over my head, and I never took it off.

A couple years later, I was in a nasty rollover car accident that could easily have killed me. I walked away only mildly banged up. I realized later that day that the necklace was gone. I scoured the car and even went to the crash site looking for it. Never saw the thing again.

Rather long, once posted this on ... another forum. Sorry for the length but it's fairly complete.

When my daughter was around 2 years old we moved to a (new to us) 4-bedroom house, built in the 1950s. We may have even bought it from the original owners, I'm not certain. Anyway, master bedroom was for my wife and me, the other, smaller bedroom was to be our daughter's room.

Soon after moving in we noticed that after putting her to bed for the night, we'd hear her talking and laughing long after she should have been asleep. Peeking in after about the third night of this we found her standing at the end of her crib, chattering away, seeming to be talking with the closet door about 5 feet away. Typical new parents, we'd tell her to lie down and go to sleep. Probably a shadow on the door or something like that.

This continued for many nights, and then we noticed she was actually holding conversations - talk a little, listen some, answer "yes" or "no" or "I don't know".

When we asked her about it, she said she was talking to "the lady in the green dress". When we asked what she talked about, she either said "stuff", or "School" (daycare) or "I don't know.". This continued sporadically over the space of about a year, and eventually died down to where if she was continuing the conversations, we weren't catching them.

Her little brother was born, and after the initial months of the baby-in-the-parent's room phase, we moved them together into the room. At about age 1 or so, when he could stand on his own, pulling himself up on things, the same thing happened. We'd hear him babbling, and peek in to see him doing the same thing his sister did - stand at the end of the crib, talking to the closet. On each occasion we peeked in to find him doing this, his sister lay fast asleep in her bed. His pattern followed hers exactly, sounding exactly like we were eavesdropping on one side of a conversation. We even got the same answers when asking about them: talking about "stuff", or "school".

Again, this behavior continues sporadically, slows, stops.

Almost three years go by. Everyone's two years apart. Two boys now, so Big Sister gets her own room and the two boys share The Room. Around age 1-ish the youngest gets to where he's able to pull himself up to stand, there he is in the crib, babbling to the closet.

We have no way of knowing if they discussed this among themselves, but each described a "lady in a green dress". In asking them separately, our daughter might mention "she has long hair". Youngest son might say "She has black hair". If asked if it's long or short, curly or straight, he'd say "It's long". And so on in many details. When we requested a new detail from one, and gave a multiple choice for that detail to the other, they'd always agree - belt or no belt, color, shoes, white lady/black lady/Indian lady, whatever. At this point though, we're thinking they could all be remembering the same picture from a story book or something, so no conclusions here.

Again, the conversations slowed, then stopped. Then the weird stuff starts happening.

Now, the wife and I were both smokers, and the rule was one could smoke outside, or in the bathroom upstairs (which had a ceiling exhaust fan) but nowhere else in the house. One fine cold evening, too cold to go outside for just a smoke, I used this rule. My wife was out of the house until later, and I'd put the youngest to bed. The two older children were downstairs watching a movie.

Suddenly I hear the two oldest running through the house, yelling the youngest child's name.

This makes more sense if you know the downstairs came up into the kitchen; cross the kitchen to the right and you're in the dining room; cross the dining room and turn right, you're in the hallway; follow the hallway to the right and you're in the living room; pass through the living room which connects back to the kitchen. Just a big circle really, through several rooms.

The older two kids were running this circle and yelling the youngest's name in an exasperated way.

So I stub out my smoke and exit the bathroom just as the older two were making the circuit again.

"What's going on you guys?" "We're chasing (youngest). He's supposed to be in bed!" I peek into the bedroom. "Yes, he is in bed." "No he's not. He just went into the kitchen again. We heard him on the stairs and just saw him run up. He's not supposed to be awake watching movies now so we tried to tell him but he kept going around the corner so we ran after him."

So, basically, they'd each heard and then glimpsed someone on the steps and chased the figure. Every time they turned a corner in this circuit, they caught just a glimpse of the figure turning the next corner, and continued the chase. My youngest was truly asleep. This sort of game might have repeated once or twice more over the next 12 months or so, then ended.

Turned bedroom #4 into a study. It was downstairs. One day I'm home in my study, wife at work, kids at school. Someone is pacing the floor above me. A slow walk from one end of the living room directly above me, then back again. Since I know no-one is home I guess it's my sister-in-law, who has a key and a penchant for dropping by from time to time unannounced. I wait a while for her to announce herself, but all she does is pace back and forth. And she sounds... heavy. Finally I go upstairs, doors are all locked, nobody there. Could be street traffic? But it was exactly the sound of someone walking above, that one squeaky floorboard and everything.

That evening I mention this to my wife. "Oh, you heard The Walking Man. When I stayed home sick that day last month I heard it all the time. Someone walking back and forth in the living room, but nobody ever there when I checked." Why did she call it the Walking "Man" then, I asked. "Heavy-sounding steps, more like a man's."

Okay, so we got that going for us, which is nice. I'm wondering how to enlist this character to push a vacuum cleaner while he's at it. I mean, if he's bending floorboards he has mass, and could push a vacuum...

No more Green Lady chats; no more phantom kids running around the house. The Walking Man is heard from time to time but I've learned to ignore him. He doesn't answer to questions or anything like that. We've left out pen and paper, nada, okay, we're cool, he's cool, whatever.

We're moving - just need a bigger house. The realtor [with a sideways roll of the eyes] assures us we don't have to mention the other residents to prospective buyers, so that's nice. She thinks we're nuts. Most of the stuff is packed up, moved into storage so the house "shows" well. Someone buys it and we start packing the last of everything so we can move later in the week. With the "shows well" it just looked... roomy. Now it actually looks like a place someone is leaving.

My oldest son is now 12, and still in the second upstairs room, the Green Lady bedroom, where he shares bunk beds with his younger brother. He gets up in the night to use the bathroom.

In the living room, clearly visible down the hall, is a tall man standing and staring at the wall, his back to my son. My son said he knew instantly it wasn't me. This tall figure begins to turn slowly towards my son. My son changes his mind about using the bathroom and runs back into his own room, where there's a woman wearing a green dress, sitting on the floor. In her lap is a small child. They're both looking at my son, who at this point is screaming his head off and running into our room/bed/covers.

So we check, and there's nobody else in the house of course. His brother was asleep in the same room as the lady/kid, and didn't hear anything until my son yelled. He didn't see anything on waking.

We now had a video camera, though! For the next couple of nights, just because, we set up the video camera in the corner of the living room that would give the most coverage: Living room, hallway, kitchen on the left. We don't have motion sensors, and the tape runs 8 hours or so on lowest quality, but in the two or three nights we taped after bedtime nothing happened, at least nothing caught on tape.

And we moved, and that's it.

Except -

We never really noticed until the move, but when you walk into a house and there's nobody home, you somehow feel that. "I'm home, and I'm the first one home, and I'm the only one home". We realized that we had never felt that since 1988, only in the new house. My wife also said it felt "lonely" being the first one to come home to the new house. So at some level, maybe we all sensed something.

I don't know.

The house I grew up in was definitely cursed. Nobody had ever died there as far as I know but when they built this house in the late seventies weird things started happening.

This is not a joke, they built the house they got it 75% completed and a tornado came through and tore it down.

So the builders got the insurance money and rebuilt it. And mysteriously it burned to the ground one day when it was 80% completed.

So the insurance people got the money and built it again and finished the house and a tornado came back through and tore it to the ground again.

And they got the insurance money for the third time and built the house for the fourth time and for the fourth time it stayed up.

My mom was not the first owner of the house she was the second owner, she had bought it after it was 10 years old or so.

A few years later my sister reported waking up seeing a brown haired woman all in white holding her feet down to the bed and just crying and crying and crying.

As far as me, the only thing that I ever noticed was one day I was in the basement doing laundry and I noticed a full grown man wearing a hat and a full fucking trench coat walk around behind the air conditioning unit and I freaked the fuck out ran after them yelling, "what the hell are you doing oh my fucking god" and they just dis a fucking peared.

But aside from these relatively innocuous weird events nothing really crazy or bad ever happened and it was just a sad but normal home to grow up in.

A raccoon ran straight into my window at midnight, that was spooky as fuck

I was walking around a computer centre, comparing prices of games. There was one store with a really low price, so I marked down the name and kept comparing.

After all the comparisons, that store was still the lowest, so I was planning to head back to it. I walked through the entire centre 3 times and couldn't find it.

I asked the staff at the information counter. She said, "this store you're looking for doesn't exist".

I have a few explanations for this. If you don't want to ruin the fun, don't read the following.

1. !The store was so small that I walked past it multiple times without noticing.!<

2. !I actually got the name wrong, so the staff said it doesn't exist.!<

3. !The staff was getting minimum pay and had no responsibility to guide me correctly.!<

One time I was on a road trip with some friends. One of my friend's grandparents owned a small farm in northern Iowa. We stopped there for the night to take a break and rest up. At one point in the night I heard a spooky howling sound that woke me up. I looked out the window and the sky was glowing green and had a magical spookiness about it. I went outside to stare at it and came to the realization that the howling was wind moving between the grain silos and the sky was green because of solar wind interacting with the Earth's magnetosphere. But there was a moment when I thought I was on a haunted farm

I'm both a total skeptic who likes to debunk everything possible and also a firm believer that there are just some weird things in this world. I've had a bunch of odd experiences, this one is honestly one of the least creepiest but it's weird because it happened in broad daylight when my brain was fully turned on, focused, and not in a state that you'd think I'd "make up" something.

So anyway, back when I was an EMT on the ambulance, my partner and I got dispatched to respond to assist state police who were already on scene for a call. The address we were dispatched to was kind of a rural road, and there was a small cluster of houses, a business with a couple outbuildings, and a parking lot for the business in between. Dispatch told us ahead of time that the call was in the houses but per the state police we were supposed to come into the parking lot where they were parked.

My partner is driving, I'm in the passenger seat navigating. It's the middle of the day, broad daylight, and I wasn't tired or stressed or anything. We get on scene and my partner pulls the ambulance into the parking lot and we're both looking around to see where the police are. I catch movement from the outbuildings of the business and very distinctly see the face, upper torso, and right arm of a dark haired man in a dark blue long sleeved shirt casually lean out from between two of the outbuildings of the business, make eye contact with me, and wave his arm in the universal "over here" gesture before leaning back out of sight. I remember saying to my partner "hey, they're over there, that's weird, they were supposed to be at the houses not at the business, but whatever" just as a few things happened simultaneously. First, we both realized that the police cruisers were parked on the other side of the parking lot by the houses where they said they'd be, second, it hits me that state police in that state don't wear dark blue, and third my partner pulled the ambulance to where I had seen the man wave and we both realized that no one was there. There was no possible way anyone could have disappeared that fast as the time from me seeing him to us pulling up was seconds and the outbuildings he had been between were both long with no doors or windows to enter and there was nothing on the ground between them that someone could have ducked under or behind.

I was like ok, well that's really odd because I definitely saw someone but anyway there's no one there now so let's proceed down to where the police actually are. My partner was weirded out and asked if I was feeling ok or seeing things and I had no idea what to say except that I was fine and had no explanation. That was years ago and I still think back to that and wonder wtf I saw because most spooky experiences you hear about are at night or in a creepy location but this was neither of those.

I don't really remember it at the time, but recall stories from my family.

We were staying in a château in France. It was me, my brother, my mom and dad, my auntie and my grandparents.

The château was basically like a small old dilapidated mansion with central heating and a couple rugs here and there to keep it livable. Pretty cool experience at the time :D

Got a couple stories. Bit mild but still spooky to think about.

One from my aunt. She was staying in a bedroom that had a framed painting of a child at the foot of her bed and a desk with a chair in the corner. Apparently, she woke up in the middle of the night and saw a figure of a child sitting in the desk chair. When she tried turning a bedside lamp on, I think right as she reached for it, she saw the figure turn around, but when the light was on it wasn't in the room. She kept the bedside lamp on for the rest of the nights we stayed there, understandably >~<

Another one from my mother. needs some context, me and my brother were young enough at the time that we still needed help going to the toilet and stuff. According to my mother, she was helping my brother go to the toilet and waiting outside of the bathroom in the middle of the night, then heard footsteps behind her running across the hall. She turned around and saw a small figure, thought it was me and didn't think anything of it. But when she got back to my and my brother's room, I was completely asleep. I never got up in the nights we stayed there from what I remember. Maybe it was me sleepwalking or something. or maybe related to the thing with my aunt.

scary stuff to think about, but pretty mild stuff overall :D

I get premonitions 5-10s to the future about 1-3 times a year. Totally random, totally useless.

Been writing it off as a some kind of memory glitch, similar to deja vu.

I could fill an ama with stuff I've experienced.

The first time I ever experienced something was when I was 5 or 6. I was playing on the floor of my bedroom with my door closed. All of a sudden I felt a sensation like putting your hand on an old crt monitor or tube TV, but all over my body. Then I heard my door knob rattle, I looked up to see it turn and the door open, but no one was there. I even got up to look and everyone was on the otherside of the house.

I lived in an old broken down farm house growing up. I saw some weird things, such as an old knife-lady. However, I was a child, and therefore retarded. I'm just an idiot.

My daddy says he saw her too, but he was probably just messing with me

I'm somewhere between a skeptic and a believer. I'm happy to accept that there may be something to the paranormal. Magic is just science we don't understand, etc. I also know plenty of people who are dead serious about their experiences, and I've also had some. Most I can find a way to explain. Especially when I knew there might be a haunting ahead of time. But there are two instances where I did not have knowledge beforehand, yet the experiences matched up very closely.

The university I went to has a number of hauntings and paranormal stories. I did not learn about these or any details until after I graduated and I was setting up a Monster of the Week RPG for my friends who also went to the university and I was making for source material.

I quickly realized that the man who I often saw hanging out on the balcony of the "old main" building when walking around campus late at night/early morning was, in fact, a known haunting. Same description. Everything. I remember thinking it was weird at the time, especially since the building was being renovated, but it also wasn't entirely closed off to the public. A classic situation of a ghost you notice, but when you look back they are gone.

There was also a more paranormal haunting in another building. Apparently a student was dumped in a ditch in the early 30s and not found, but then when they built the building in the 60s they found bones and figured it had to be that particular cold case based on some other material found. We would often use that building after football games to watch the halftime show (marching band) and do some post-game wrap up. University football game, so we'd be in that space around 11pm to midnight or later depending on the game length. There was one time a bunch of us were taking our time packing up and chatting and we were down a hallway a bit further away from the majority of people. Everyone else had pretty much left and, even the faculty had locked up thinking no one else was left. Just the always-on emergency/safety lighting. Then it just felt... awful. Unwelcome, not a good place to be, the mental image of "get out". And we all wordlessly just got up and started heading out. The way you might all as a friend group collectively decide "well, time to bounce", but without any of the semi-ritualisric awkward conversarion cues or learned signals. Once we were away and took a moment to think about what happened, we all felt very uncomfortable and it felt almost like we were compelled to leave. Learned later that it was similar to other reports of the building.

I’m the last person to believe in anything paranormal, but I’ve still got a story that one could have interpreted in that way if one was so inclined.

Age 12, lying in bed thinking about how great everything was, starting to get to a point of realising not everything was going to last forever and things sometimes change. Said to myself “I hope nothing will ever change”, had an overwhelming sense to look through my window. Saw a massive shooting star. Next day my parents announced we were moving to a different country.

When I was about 15 I woke up at about 4am, super distressed, and I knew someone had died. I didn't want to go look so I just hoped it wasn't my mother or father, shamefully I thought it would be better if it was a grandparent. There was a lot of going over possibilities and mental bargaining.

Eventually I calmed down and realised it was irrational and finally got back to sleep, the following day I found out it was a close friend of my mother's. She'd killed herself. I don't understand what happened, I don't really believe in the supernatural but it was very strange.

Was walking around my childhood neighborhood around dusk with my friend and his dad. I was around 12 years old at the time. This was in the suburbs but it was an old neighborhood and was very wooded.

We walked around the back side of the neighborhood where this abandoned old mansion was. The property had been overgrown since before I was born and it was so wooded that you couldn’t see the house from the road. Apparently the old man who owned the mansion built this large man-made pond in the front of the property for his wife. It was near the road side of the property.

As we were almost past the mansion, I suddenly got this ominous feeling and whipped my head around to scan the trees. At the far side of the pond I saw something that was disappearing behind a tree. It “walked” upright like a person, but it had the back legs of an alligator and a long, round tail. I wouldn’t come to find out until years later when I saw one in person, but the tail looked and moved just like a kangaroo tail.

I was at first fascinated by what I was seeing, then felt overcome with fear. I told my friend and my dad that I thought I saw something and that we had better get home before dark.

No idea what it was, but over the following years when I would walk by that property, I’d always stop and try to see if I could spot it again. Though I never could look for long before getting creeped out.

Once at a rave at an abandoned psychiatric ward, while wandering through the rooms and hallways, far away from any music or noise, my friend suddenly said 'its like someone's screaming in here'. He was so creeped out that we left before the party even started.

Another friend claimed she knew that a woman hanged herself in her new room before she found out that that's what actually happened.

I grew up in the a house from around the 1900s. I swear i woke up in the middle of the night and and looked down the stairs and saw a couple in older period dress standing at the foot of the stairs.

I also remember being terrified of the cellar door which I would feel a distinct force whenever I went to close and lock it.

Both of these things I know weren't dreams because I remember them vividly even today when dreams usually fade

Be 9. I woke up to the crash of breaking glass from the direction of the kitchen. Heart racing, listening as hard as I could for someone breaking in. I hear men's dress shoe footsteps, slow and methodical. They're coming closer to the hallway to the bedrooms. The hallway light turns on. Someone jiggles my parents' locked bedroom doorknob. The light turns off, the steps walk slowly back towards the kitchen. Silence.

I woke up the next morning to find out the cat knocked my toy off the kitchen table and the pieces scattered all over the floor. No sign of entry; apparently my mind fabricated the lights and sounds that I knew were real.

My Arch system did not boot - again! Something weird is going on.

It's not exactly paranormal but just very strange.

It took place on a weekday morning, in the late 2000s, I dropped my ex at her workplace, and then I start driving towards my own workplace. I need to take a tunnel downtown, there's a traffic light just before the tunnel. The light is red, I wait. The light turns green, I go ahead, along with another car next to me.

Right behind me, in my mirror, I see police cars blocking the street at the traffic light. I'm the last car that went through the traffic light. No other cars can make it behind me.

I'm kinda freaking out. Why are the police cars blocking the way to the tunnel?

I then realize there are only two cars in the tunnel, mine, and the car just before me. No other car. At 9am. On a weekday. What the hell is going on?

I keep on driving, everything seems normal, apart from the complete lack of cars.

Eventually, I see the end of the tunnel, with police cars on either side of the road. And police officers making OBVIOUS signs with their arms : "Get the fuck out of there, quick, faster!".

Me and the other car make it out of the tunnel, then In my mirror, again, I see 4 police cars blocking the way out of the tunnel.

I turned on the radio. Nothing about this event. I searched the news websites for the whole day, I didn't find anything. I asked around, at work, in social media, nobody knew about this. I didn't think of calling the police station. I never learned what the hell happened in this tunnel.

My bet is it was either a bomb threat, or they had to catch a known criminal in this tunnel, or maybe a collapse danger of some kind. But the fact that it didn't make local news is mind boggling to me. I sometimes wonder if I dreamed this.

My wife used to work for one of those “paranormal investigation” companies. She saw it as a bit of fun but lots of people took it very seriously. One night I went along to a spooky old Manor House to see what it was about and I had this digital camera with an IR night mode. I took this one photo during the night and you could see a ghostly figure standing in the background. The camera used long exposures along with the infra red to get the night shots so I knew it wasn’t really a ghost but I showed my wife, she showed the organisers who shared it with the “community” and a few months later I got calls from a paranormal magazine wanting to run the picture.

Hanging out in old houses at 3am is super fun though and I enjoyed it a lot.

Could you share your experiences?

Meatspin