Don't laugh...anybody have "ghosts" in their homes?

[Scott Lee]

No I haven't escaped from a looney hatch. But there is some mondo weird stuff happening in the home that we have occupied for only three months.

You can hear noises like someone's rummaging around in the living room, when there is no one there.

Items will disappear, cause you to turn the house upside down looking for them, and then reappear suddenly in a place you checked a dozen times.

The porch light will NOT stay off even though we all have checked to make sure it's off five times a day.

What gives? I'm a skeptic but.....anybody have similar things going on in their homes? Do I need a shrink?

[MuseRider]

1. Not currently

but I used to live in an apartment that was haunted as hell. I would see shadows of people in old timey clothing, especially a man with a derby on. It was pretty cool actually but it was nothing like what you are dealing with.

[Fenris]

2. No shrink needed. You've got a ghost.

I say as long as your spiritual roomates don't do anything to harm you, you shouldn't worry about it. Ghosts like to play pranks.

[Nikia]

3. I haven't experienced ghosts or have I?

I have had friends that have experienced ghosts. To my knowledge, I have not experienced them. I was very afraid of experiencing a ghost as a kid though. My husband has a friend that said that my part of Ohio has one of the highest concentrations of ghost activity in the U.S. though. Maybe, there was a reason that I was afraid. I was most afraid when I was in junior high and lived in a big pre Civil War house. When I went to college, I did not feel that fear anymore except in the oldest dorm and the old science hall. I have Pagan friends that experienced ghosts there. I experienced the fear before they told me. Perhaps, I can feel them even though I don't see or hear them.

[DivinBreuvage]

26. Where in Ohio, Nikia?

I'm in Northeast Ohio (Portage County); I never knew any part of the state was supposed to have one of the highest concentration of ghostly activity in the country!

I do remember reading once that the Southern Ohio/West Virginia area was left curiously vacant by Native Americans, who would pass through but didn't settle there, which I always thought rather weird, but I have no idea if the article was accurate or even if the explanation wasn't something perfectly mundane.

Françoise

[madrchsod]

4. art bell where are you????

it`s the "shadow people".......

[mmm]

5. get that ghost on film, turning your porch lite on

live ghost action has never been filmed...
(I wonder why?)

[La_Serpiente]

6. Ask Carlos (jiancito)

if he has ghosts.

[blueraven95]

7. Don't panic

We've had doors opening and closing, voices talking to us, phantom cats, rocking chairs that rock by themselves, people coming up the steps and saying hello, and many, many things disappearing when you need them most.

Overall though, we put our ghost down to the personality of the house and live in peace. So don't worry, if you don't harm it, it won't harm you.

[NNN0LHI]

8. No. But I seen a green fire breathing dragon once back in the early 70's..

...while tripping.

Don

[Character Assassin]

9. Have you tried a different diet? Perhaps themed toilet paper?

[4323Lopez]

10. Dude I believe you...

I had a ghost once who jiggled the bed near my left foot whenever I was in it. So weird. I'd wake up in the middle of the night, it was soooo annoying! It must have been the place, it was an OLD apartment. Finally we moved. I don't know what to tell you, obviously its hard to win against a ghost.

[Melsky]

11. I had a ghostly experience

I sat down on my bed and someone sat down beside me, but there was no one there! I felt it as they sat down. All the stereotypical ghost seeing things happened - my heart leapt into my throat, I broke out in a cold sweat, my hair stood on end, etc. My roomates also experienced some strange things like hearing voices mumbling when no one was home, and having things move around on the mantlepiece.

It was a victorian house in San Francisco.

[parasim]

12. I don't think you need a shrink

I live in an old Victorian and am quite sure I've got spirits of some sort. Same kind of things, lights turning on and off, weird sounds plus a ghost cat. The first time I encountered the ghost cat it kinda freaked me out, but my cat doesn't mind it, so I figure it's all good.

I actually feel quite safe in this house and would certainly miss them if they left. We get along just fine.

[Amaya]

13. I have one or two in my house

it's no biggie.. They leave me alone pretty much. They like to make noise in my basement..but that's about it :)

[Nikia]

14. My friend recommends loud music

Everyone told him that he had bought a haunted house. Being freaked out from the family ghost cat incident (Their run over cat haunted them for a while), he played loud music all the time. His family has not experienced a ghost in that house despite the fact that previous owners did.

[Scott Lee]

15. Thanks for your responses. I had no idea this was so "common"

And at least I feel like I'm not losing my mind.

[geniph]

16. Nope, and several have died in this house

including at least one who hung himself here. Even the cats don't see anything. Well, except for fruit flies, but I blame the iguana's spilled food for that.

[Scott Lee]

17. Wanna trade homes?

[geniph]

42. Hell no!

I like sleeping at night! The cats chasing poltergeists would keep me awake!

Maybe it's time to scatter dreamcatchers and rowan berries and such around the house. Hell, it can't hurt.

[DoNotRefill]

18. Point by point:

"You can hear noises like someone's rummaging around in the living room, when there is no one there."

Rodents or big cockroaches.

"Items will disappear, cause you to turn the house upside down looking for them, and then reappear suddenly in a place you checked a dozen times."

Your S.O. is funnin' ya.

"The porch light will NOT stay off even though we all have checked to make sure it's off five times a day."

Remove the motion detector.

Pretty simple... :evilgrin:

[BiggJawn]

19. Yeah, all my ex-girlfriends...How do they DO that?

AFAIK, only one of them has "crossed over" but there they are, every night, sitting on the end of my bed telling me how much I fucked up my life by not kissing their asses to make 'em stay...

[Punkingal]

20. Yes....

We have lived in our house for 2 years, and things disappear all the time...some have returned, but most have not. We don't hear any noises, although I do "feel" someone behind me sometimes when I am in my chair reading.

[Blue_Chill]

21. My parents house did

Same stuff. When you were down stairs at night you could hear things walking up and down the stairs, down the hall etc. It would also say your name a few times when you where alone or alone with someone that didn't live there (friend girlfriend etc)

freaky shit.

My cats used to go crazy for no reason too. They'd leap out of our laps and his at something we couldn't see.

[Blue_Chill]

22. BTW THIS PROVES NOTHING!!!!!!!!

Even though you can see the amazing amount of replies, and if you took the time you'd notice that many many many people have the same wierd shit going on. We are still told ghosts are absolute fantasy.

Just something to think about.

[LastKnight]

23. i didnt know this was so common

i havent really expierenced anything... but now im kinda freaked out remembering things that happened when i stayed over at my grandparents house or a friends' old house or something, and now im kinda suspicious of a few things that happen now and then in my house. freaky freaky freaky, gonna be hard to sleep tonight lol

-LK

[jayfish]

24. I’ve experienced some crazy happenings...

at my mother’s house. I lived there for 15 years and it seemed to be tied to me somehow. When I went away to school there was no activity and only after I was home for long periods of time would anything begin to manifest. My drum kit used to be in her basement and one of the most common things that would happen is the kit drum going off ever so slightly. You could always tell what it was because it would rattle the snares on my snare drum. It was so common that, after awhile you wouldn’t notice it. About 3 seconds after it happened I’d think to myself: was that my snare drum? A lot of other weird stuff went down too. Strange thing is I live in a turn of the century house, with quite a colorful history, and nothing

Jay

[CSI Willows]

25. You aren't crazy

You don't need a shrink. If you needed a shrink I would be required to be locked up in a mental institution.
I guess you can say I'm a skeptic, but leaning toward the very real possiblity that their are some kind of spirit in my house. Though I tell my brother every time there's a noise in the attic it's a random Republican tossing in my sleep (that's another story), I have experienced some weird things in my house.
We've lived in our house for about two years, and since we've moved in I've noticed some strange things. First of all, when I sit in our living room watching television I have seen on four non-consecutive occasions a person in a white night gown hunched over walking toward the stairs. Every time I saw it I asked my family if they had been up but they haven't, and none of them own a robe like that.
Also, when I'm trying to fall asleep, I can hear someone entering my room occasionally. See, first you have to know that we have what my mother calls a noise machine, which emits a white nose type sound. I know when someone comes in my room because when the door is opened, the noise grows louder, and when it is cracked open slightly like it normally is, it is softer. So what usually happens is that i can hear it grow louder and stay louder and i hear scuffing footsteps on my bedroom carpet. Everytime I look no ones there.
I'm not crazy I swear. I'm dead serious.

[ironflange]

27. If you were close enough,

I could bring my daughter over; she claims to be able to tell if a place has ghosts or not. She also communicates with trees, and the scary part is that she can be right.

[DivinBreuvage]

28. What do the trees tell her? I ask this seriously.

Supposedly Hitler used to talk to trees when he was a young schoolboy. Not that I'm comparing your daughter to him, but the idea is freaky.

Françoise

[scarlet_owl]

30. I think a lot of people find they have a certain kinship with trees.

I know most of the ones in the forest where I volunteer, and yes, I can feel their spiritual energy. I feel like they are old friends, and sometimes I say hello to them. I am not a kook and I'm not what you would call "New Age". I believe the above poster's daughter is just extra sensitive to biological and spiritual signals.

[DivinBreuvage]

32. I don't think there's anything kooky about that...

and in light of your post I see how I probably misread what ironflange was intending to say.

Also, I used a bad choice of words when I said "freaky"; what I really meant to say was that the idea of people being able to have meaningful conversations with trees -- by which I don't mean long involved talks about politics and art and so on, nor yet simply being in tune with the life-force of the tree, but something more sentient, a conscious exchange of thought or emotion -- is an idea that creeps me out because there's a tiny part of me that accepts that it might possibly be true. To this day I haven't entirely divested myself of the thought that inanimate objects, plants and the like might have some degree of mental awareness or sentience.

Françoise

[ironflange]

40. It's mostly just small talk

Sometimes they want water (usually they really do). One time however, Mrs. Ironflange and I were saying that one smaller tree really needed pruning, no way Maddy could have heard us, but she came to us a couple of days later and informed us that the tree told her it needed some branches removed. That was mighty freaky! So I did it. Later she said the tree felt much better, that I did a good job, and that it hadn't hurt at all.

Edit: As the poster said above, I, too, talk to trees at times, usually in the solitude of the forest. They've never said anything back, though.

[scarlet_owl]

29. When I was a kid, we had a ghost named Bernie.

Sometimes when we were all in the dining room having dinner, she would stomp loudly on the floor that was directly over us. The chandelier would shake, and all the pets were under the table (that's where they would all congregate at dinner, catching any scraps). She would lock my stepmother in the basement. One time, my father was yelling at my little sister, and all the sudden her picture goes flying off the shelf and hits him in the head. She would hide my dad's Preparation H cream and goose him in the shower. There were cold spots on the steps and one would always get a weird feeling when walking into the upstairs bath. Years later after I had moved out, I was staying over at my father's and I was sleeping downstairs in the living room. I was lying on the couch and I saw a ball of light flying around on the ceiling. I wasn't scared, because I knew it was Bernie. After that, I could feel her on the steps watching me. It was a wonderfully peaceful feeling and I went right to sleep. They live in a different house now, but everyone still misses Bernie. She was very protective of us.

[CandyCrim21]

31. Your aight!

So when I was a kid. I lived in this small town about 9000 people if not less. Well, we lived in this not huge but bigger three story house there were my grandparents used to live before us. We moved in and my sister and I got the bedroom closest to the bathroom, because I had to sleep with the light on. LOL, anyway, there was a hallway in between the bathroom and the bedroom. Well, I SWEAR, for years I would wake up in the middle of the night and there would be this man pacing back and forth in that hallway in a trench coat and a weird hat with a breifcase. Kind of like Dick Tracy but this was real. I could never see his face or anything like that it was always just like a siloette. To this day I swear that happened. I don't think your crazy at all!;)

[DivinBreuvage]

33. OK, here's my story

and it's going to be disappointingly dull, I'm afraid.

My husband and I have been in this house for about five years now, and both of us have repeatedly woken up in the middle of the night and seen things floating in the air above the bed. He tends to see indefinite shapes (though once he saw a floating head); I've seen armored knights, disembodied arms, giant caterpillars, ironing boards, and other household objects. Neither of us ever had this experience before we moved into this house. I'm aware of the idea of "night terrors", that is waking up when you're not yet fully awake and seeing things that aren't really there, but what strikes me as odd is the fact that both of us see things now when neither of us did before. I wonder sometimes if the furnace isn't leaking carbon monoxide or something.

The other experience happened about 15 years ago. I've always enjoyed walking in the woods behind my father's house when I go to visit him, but one year for some reason there were 3 or 4 times while walking back there that I was suddenly overwhelmed by an ice-cold wave of sheer terror that swept over me apparently out of nowhere. I've shared this story many times since then but to this day I still feel a twinge of that terror every time I describe it.

Françoise

[AlienGirl]

34. I grew up in a house with ghosts

We had noises like people going up and down the stairs, items moved around, and random things that didn't belong to any of us appear in strange places. The interesting thing is the house was built by my dad, and we were the only people ever to have lived in it, so I don't know where the ghost came from!

Tucker

[radfringe]

35. have experienced ghosts

a couple of friends and I rented an old house for the winter. The owners used it only in the summer and needed someone to care for the home during the winter. It had 17 rooms.

without going into detail - things that happened

- pots and pans banging in the kitchen when no one was in the kitchen

- footsteps running up and down the stairs, and back hall

- feeling "weight" on the bed like someone sitting there

- sounds like someone shoveling coal into the furnace (house was heated with coal at one point but had been converted to oil years before

- doors opening, nobody there (wind, drafts, loose floorboards as possible causes investigated and found nothing)

- little girl in striped dress stood at the foot of one friend's bed in the middle of the night

- rooms and areas in the house you just didn't want to be in

- fresh cut roses that were brought into the house would be black and dead the next morning

- wake up in the middle of the night with a real creepy and frightening feeling that someone was watching you

- stereo would go on by itself and play a stack of records

- wicker chair (not a rocking one) would shift backwards like someone getting out of it quickly when you went by it

[murielm99]

36. Most of you seem so calm about this...

For the last twenty-five years, I have lived in a comfortable farm house that was built about 1899. Although my house is old, we are the second family to own it. We bought it from the youngest of six sons, whose family had always lived and farmed on this property. The man who sold it to us was in his sixties at the time, and wanted to retire to town. He was a wonderful man, who died last year at ninety-one. If he or any other member of his family would choose to haunt this place, they would probably do so as benign guardian spirits. They would know we love this place as much as they did.

My haunting did not take place in an picturesque Victorian, or an old family home rich in history. It took place in a neat little bungalow that was probably built in the early 1950's.

After World War II, my mother married and stayed in Illinois. Her two sisters moved out West. Her sister Mary had a husband who supervised logging crews for a big company. Her sister Beth, barely out of her teens, had tagged along for adventure, and worked in a nearby town. In July of 1957, one month before my ninth birthday, my mom, my five-year-old brother and I, went out to visit them.

My Aunt Mary and her husband lived in a nice three-bedroom bungalow that was provided by the logging company. Mary and her husband, of course, shared the master bedroom. My five-year-old cousin Jannie and her baby brother shared another bedroom. The back bedroom, the adults told us, was just for storage. Stay out of there, they said.

Across a wide driveway from the bungalow was a neat little bunkhouse where logging crews sometimes stayed. I thought it was the best playhouse in the whole world. My mom, my brother and I slept there. My young Aunt Beth joined us on that vacation, and she slept in the bunkhouse, too.

While my mother and her sisters caught up, I played house with my brother and cousin. Sometimes we explored the nearby woods. But I was a well-behaved baby-boomer daughter, a regular little housewife-in-training. I often helped my Aunt Mary with household chores, like laundry and dishes.

One day, I was helping Aunt Mary fold towels and sheets as we took them off the clothesline. When we brought the towels and sheets into the house, I offered to put them away.

"No, you don't have to," Mary said. "Those towels belong in storage, in the back bedroom. I will take care of them later."

All right, I was not always well-behaved. I sailed off down the hall, towels stacked in my arms, towards the back bedroom. I opened the door, and went in.

The room contained only a double bed, and a dresser with a mirror. It was that ugly blonde furniture popular in the 1950's. There were two uncurtained crank-out windows, high on the wall. The bedspread was that horrid green popular in those days. I think it was referred to as chartruese. The room had the closed and slightly mildewed odor of any unused space.

However, the cold in the room was so intense that I sucked in my breath. And the cold was the least of it! I was assaulted by a wave of emotion so intense and terrifying that I had to sit down on the bed. I did not see anything, or hear any voices in my head, but I felt a wave of deep sadness. It was sadness so desperate, it bordered on insanity. I felt like something was calling, "help me, help me," over and over, without using words. I do not remember what I did with those towels, but I remember first pressing my hands to my ears, then rising and opening the door that had closed behind me, and running blindly down the hall. I ran until I hit a wall of four frightened-looking adults: my two aunts, my mother, and my uncle.

My aunt grabbed and hugged me. I remember that my skin felt cold next to hers, after the intense chill of the room. She asked me if I was all right. I sobbed once, and nodded.

Then she took me by the shoulders, shook me, and said, "I told you to stay out of there!"

The four adults dispersed to take up their interuppted business. No one said another word.

For the rest of the visit, I could sense that Aunt Mary remained angry with me.

On the train ride home, I thought about that room. I thought then that something had died in there. It was not until I was older that I understood that whomever had died in that room was still reaching out for comfort and help.

During the early years of my uncle's employment, the logging company moved him around quite a bit. By the next time we visited, they lived in a much nicer house, and I shared a cheerful bedroom with my counsin Jannie.

To this day, no member of my family has ever mentioned this incident. In fact, this is the first time I have ever told anyone.

[RebelOne]

37. It's a possibility you could have rats or some other critter.

I would hear noises in my kitchen. Found out later that it was rats.
Also I hear noises under the house. But it is some feral cats that have taken up residence. They gotta go.

[populistmom]

38. We've had some funky things happen since my FIL died

Things just falling over out of nowhere. Electronic equipment turning on by itself. I don't know if it's him, a "ghost" persay, or just some energy I don't understand, but if I feel something, I just talk calmly, and say "hello" or "it's time to stop now" and it seems to help. At least it makes me feel better. I don't pretend to know enough to say for sure what it is, but sometimes weird things have happened I can't otherwise explain.

[JohnKleeb]

39. No

but I do believe in ghosts and shit.

[scottcsmith]

41. No ghosts!

Ghosts belong in the same category as elves, pixies, unicorns, Bigfoot, and the Loch Ness monster.

I don't believe in them.

Sorry.