Hi guys!

I’m curious, what’s the best ghost story you’ve ever heard? It could be from camp over a bonfire, maybe on a road trip with friends, whatever! I pretty much live an actual ghost story, so I don’t have any cool ones to tell.

Not really a ghost story, but one time someone told me they felt something touch them while they were on the toilet so I'm actually always a tiny bit scared every time I sit on a toilet that a ghost person is just gonna pull me in. So that's fun. Beware of toilet hand! Poo in the woods!

So not really stories, but yeah.

1. I was alone in the house for the weekend and did my usual routine for bedtime. Brush teeth, double check everything is closed and locked, close my bedroom door (because I am odd and can't really sleep with it open), go to bed. I ended up having a nightmare that something was chasing me. Not sure what, but something, and I was scared. I woke up, bolted up right and said, out loud, 'He's here, he's here.' ... My door was now open. Nothing else was open, everything was still closed and locked, but my door was open.

2. One time, a shockingly nice day in Cali weather where I didn't need the cool air on, I decided to lie down on my couch when I started feeling pressure on my chest like someone was holding me down. I couldn't breathe, couldn't move, nothing. After struggling for a bit (and in some major need of air) I was able to jump up. At that moment the blinds in the back sliding glass door went flying everywhere as if something had crashed into them.

3. I and pretty much everyone who has ever stayed at this house has seen a little girl around the bathroom. If you wake up to go pee, open the bathroom door, or simply turn the corner at night, there's a high chance you'll walk right into her. She's gone as soon as you realize what's happened, but she's always around there. If you're lucky, you'll see her move out of the corner of your eye while sitting in the living room.

I had this friend when i was growing up that swore up and down she saw figures in her house at night. She said it happened more than once and she swears she was awake. The people would be dressed all in black and they would go down the stairs and gather around her sisters bed and they would watch her sleeping.

A friend of mine was dogsitting/housesitting for friends of ours that had just gotten married and freaked out one night. She called me whispering from the master bathroom that she heard something move downstairs even though both dogs were with her in the bedroom. I tried to calm her down, but she was like I'M GONNA GO BUST A GHOST. She found a sword (we're not quite sure why our friends had a sword tbh) and waited a few minutes with me on the phone before opening the door. After opening the door, she screamed into the phone that the office door was open and the door to the guest bedroom (both being the only rooms available upstairs other than the master bedroom), which she swore were both closed before. I tried to tell her that if someone was in the house, screaming really wasn't the solution. She had the dogs and sword with her as she investigated the house. The doors leading outside were all locked along with any accessible windows, so she has no clue what happened. We both decided on ghost and I was very glad I wasn't there. :x

Also ruined mirrors for me because he told me and a neighbor about Bloody Mary at an early age and had us basically draw runes on our skin to "protect us". He got really into scaring us. :(

I once worked for an attorney whose office was in a two-story old Victorian home. Her office was on the lower level of the house and one night she said she was working late and was the only one in the house. She said she started hearing noises upstairs like someone walking around and bumping noises. She said she yelled out "cut it out, you're scaring me" and the noises stopped. She had been told that there was a ghost that occupied the house and that sometimes other people would hear weird stuff. She had also been told that the ghost saved a child from falling down the stairs by catching the child.

It was rumored that one of the previous owners of the home had died of old age in the home and he still lived there.

There was this story about an old mill that used to be at this fishing spot on a river I would frequent when I was a wee lad where he got stuck in the wheel and drowned and haunts the river now. It creeped me out, but I was a wuss lol even though there was certainly never even a mill near there.

Here's a real-life ghost story I heard on a This American Life episode, verified and everything. It was told in a magazine, and it was a letter written in by a woman identified as Mrs. H. She and her family moved into this big old house in November of 1921, a real gloomy place in fairly bad repair.

Shortly after they moved in, she started hearing footsteps in the upper floor, despite nobody being up there and the floors being thickly carpeted so servants could move about without disturbing the family. At night, she'd hear loud noises from the store room, like furniture being moved or wailing. No matter where they went in the house, the family started to feel like they were being followed, like someone was just out of their field of vision. You know that prickly feeling you get when someone is behind you? It was like that, all the time. Other people in the family were hearing things, too, so it wasn't just Mrs. H.

The children of the family got weaker and weaker, and the houseplants started to die off. The entire family starts experiencing terrifying episodes of sleep paralysis, feeling like they're being held down by shadowing figures and can't breathe. Mrs. H. starts seeing a young woman in a large hat around the house that nobody else can see. It's terrible!

She asks around about what's happening, and her brother-in-law suggests they might be suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning, having read a similar account. See, their house, outdated as it is, is still lit by gas lamps, and as previously mentioned, it's quite out of repair. An investigation from that angle soon showed the furnace was venting the carbon monoxide into the house instead of up the chimney, and as soon as that gets fixed, the weird moods and sounds and sights stop, the energy of the kids come back, and the plants stop dying. As terrifying and eerie as everything that happened was, it was merely a case of low-level chronic poisoning, and if people hadn't taken the family seriously, it might have caused serious brain damage or killed them!

My city was featured in an episode of a ghost-hunting show. It was terrible, don't watch it. But the gist of the story is that downtown, we have lots of factories that started up in the mid 1800s, and there's a dam on the creek that helped supply power to them. Working conditions being awful as they were, lots of people died for awful reasons, and that leads to disgruntled ghosts. I think all the variations of the story agree that a lady clad in black often lurks around the (now abandoned) factories and dam some nights. At least one version says its the ghost of a woman who lost both her husband and her son(s) in factory accidents. Some people say that the ghosts of young boys can be seen crossing the dam as well - whether they were factory workers or kids trespassing for fun who met their unfortunate fate, no one really knows.

Worth noting, perhaps, is that downtown is also overlooked by a cemetery on a hill where our town's namesake and his family are buried.

Kudzu is slowly overtaking the factories, old ramshackle houses, abandoned plantations, and...just about everything, really, if you don't keep your guard up. The creek and the swampy areas around it are home to snakes and alligators and other things with sharp teeth and watchful eyes. They lay in the murky water, beneath old trees draped in Spanish moss. At night you won't hear them over the sound of cicadas screaming. (Cicadas -- just cicadas, I promise.)

Late in the night, when the little businesses have closed their doors and turned off their lights, downtown is a creepy place to be. You'll see things moving in the distance, or right in the edge of your vision. You'll smell a whiff of something you can't quite name. You'll feel prickles down your spine and know you're being watched.

The best flash fiction I have ever read came from Creepypasta:

A young girl is playing in her bedroom when she hears her mother call to her from the kitchen, so she runs downstairs to meet her mother.

As she's running through the hallway, the door to the cupboard under the stairs opens, and a hand reaches out and pulls her in. It's her mother. She whispers to her child, "Don't go into the kitchen. I heard it too."

During the times I would be unable to sleep, If it were on a Sunday a local radio station would broadcast a nationally run program called La Hora de Chihuahua. Fifteen minutes before signing off, a ghost story would be told. All of them from that particular part of Mexico. Some were of ghost sightings, or unexplained events. All were narrated by a character whose vocal tone only augmented the narratives. But since then I've been able to sleep, and cannot muster the nerve to stay up with out sacrificing the entire night.

These are all great stories! It's fascinating to hear how ghost stories evolve over time and get passed around.

You would dig the stories, My favorite was the car that drove itself to save the life of its driver.

I think some of my favorite ghost stories are the ones with mystery. I don't know too many real-life ones, especially interesting ones, but I've read a lot of M.R. James especially, so I got your fictitious back. (BBC used to show films of James' stories during their ghosts of Christmas marathons, so campy 70s movies to watch if you're bored!)

Anyway one of the earliest, shortest, but in some ways best ghost stories I remember is: "He woke up frightened and reached for the matches, and the matches were put in his hand."

I think Bruce Coville retold that one, and it leaves a lot to the imagination. Mostly it's only creepy if you let yourself think about it too much in the middle of the night, alone, when you're not sure if that noise was your cat or some sort of demon.

Well I have had a few experiences I can share...most occurred at my grandma's house when I was a kid. I do believe it was haunted and I'm not to only only who had experiences there. I remember my grandma telling me of several instances where she saw or felt something. She once saw a man sitting in her hallway and felt someone sit on the edge of her bed. Also, shortly after she lost one of her cats she saw a pure white, almost translucent, kitten in her window (a window so high up that no animal could physically reach) I found that one to be sweet, as if her cat's spirit had visited her. I had something similar happen after my childhood dog went to the "rainbow bridge", I was crying myself to sleep when I felt someone press against my back in the same way he always had. That experience wasn't spooky at all, I took a great amount of comfort in it.

As for the other experiences in my grandma's house the first I remember is when I was walking up the stairs with my mom. We both heard a strange whispering in the walls. No one else was in the house except for us and my grandma, who was in the kitchen at the time and nowhere near the stairs. I also once had something very strange happen when I was half-awake, it was as if something had pinned me down and I couldn't move. It hurt too, a really hard pressing sensation that stopped as suddenly as it had started.

Then there was the time we were in the basement and I had my cat Mytec with me. I was holding her in my arms when she fixated on something in the other room. Whatever she'd seen freaked her out something awful because she suddenly jumped out of my arms and FLEW up the stairs as fast as she could. When I went to get her she was standing on her back legs hissing and swatting. She absolutely refused to go back in the basement. I found out later the room she was staring at was the same my mom and her friends had played with the Ouija board in when they were kids.

Speaking of the Ouija board I also played with it when I was little, for the most part it was just me and my friends being stupid but I still to this day believe we made contact with someone named Tobias. Ever since then I always had the feeling something was in my room...maybe just my imagination...maybe not.

If you made contact with a demon--it will follow you, no matter where you go.

I had a weird experience in my kitchen tonight. My tea spoon (the ones you can buy to scoop your tea from Teavana), fell off my rock sugar jar, down to my feet. That spoon never falls. Maybe I didn't push it far back enough the last time I used it. I don't know, but I didn't think much of it.

I doubt it was a demon because I haven't felt that presence in years and I live in a different house now. I always like to think it's something paranormal when things like that happen, even when most of the time it's not. Never actually seen anything move on it's own (aside from the planchette on the Ouija board and I was never really sure if it was just my friends goofing around or not)

Hi Quentin! I love you!

man & girl go out to drive under moonlight. they stop at on at a side of road.

he turn to his girl and say:

"baby, i love you very much"

"what is it honey?"

"our car is broken down. i think the engine is broken. ill walk and get some more fuel."

"ok. ill stay here and look after our stereo. there have been news report of steres being stolen."

"good idea. keep the doors locked no matter what. i love you sweaty"

so the guy left to get full for the car. after two hours the girl say "where is my baby, he was supposed to be back by now". then the girl here a scratching sound and voice say "LET ME IN"

the girl doesnt do it and then after a while she goes to sleep. the next morning she wakes up and finds her boyfriend still not there. she gets out to check and man door hand hook car door

Probably the ones where people had no idea they were interacting with a ghost. Heard a few of those. Like they'd talk to someone only to find out they were deceased. Creepy af.

Personal stories:

Friend had a ghost that talked to his daughter and her friends. "Who are you talking to?" "That man, he says he lives here." Now, it would have all been fine and dandy if furniture didn't move on its own. Then it could be a little girl's imagination, but noooooo.

Creepiest sudden thing was when a friend was doing the dishes and looked out the window to find a man staring at her. Behind the fence. Which was like 5+ feet tall on its own. He looked differently dressed (she was able to see around the top half of him). The second she looked away to call for help and look back he disappeared and as she ran outside she saw no trace of him (which also would be really hard because all the houses next to hers also had tall fences and the land behind the house had a fence too so there was really only one way to go to go out and onto the main neighborhood road).

loving this thread O

We've often joked that our bookstore may be haunted and we lucked out hiring a girl who is an avid ghost hunter with the fancy tools on all the shows. She thinks the place may be haunted, but we work in the oldest parts of town. I have been semi convinced to have a "lock-in" after hours with the employees so we can use all the bells and whistles while having a good time outside of work hours. Maybe I'll have a ghost story to tell! (: