GHOST STORIES
We are approaching Halloween and I thought it would be interesting to ask the blogging community about eerie experiences. I was only able to get three responses and I was a bit surprised because when publishers ask on their Facebook pages the threads blow up with activity! I think there is a ghost cat here in the library. I wonder what we should name it?
My first response was from our friend Jolene over at JO'S BOOK BLOG. She told me she doesn't believe in ghosts, but had an odd experience at her brother's home...
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"I was staying at my brother's house one night and I couldn't fall asleep. I was laying on my stomach and I could hear what sounded like papers rustling on the desk. The ceiling fan was on but I didn't want to get up and turn it off so I just laid there listening to papers rustle. The next morning I expected to see a mess on the desk but everything was in neat piles. Not one paper was disturbed.
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I went downstairs and my sister-in-law asked how I slept, and I said terrible and told her about the rustling papers. Her eyes got huge and she said that lately her 5 year old had been talking about a little boy she had been seeing upstairs, and that her daughter always seemed to be talking to someone when she was playing!" ~ Jolene
Because I wasn't getting that many responses I offered to add anonymous stories, so here is the one I got via Twitter from a blogger I don't know.
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"I was taking care of two elderly women in a large home they owned. They were both basically bedridden so only the first floor was being lived in. I was usually their morning caretaker, but the overnight girl had a wedding to go to, so I volunteered to sit with them that night. I had already heard stories from that girl about strange noises upstairs. She would tell me when we changed shifts and exchanged caretaking notes over coffee in the mornings.
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She said she heard things like footsteps, shuffling, and sometimes coughing coming from upstairs at night. The women's niece told her that one of the old ladies used to say her husband was haunting the upstairs where his study was. The neice also said the coughing part was scary because the man was a heavy smoker and had a bad smoker's cough.
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That night I heard shuffling noises upstairs, and not being much of a believer in things like ghosts I figured it was the cat, so I went to the bottom of the staircase and called for the cat. When I looked up, on the landing there was this weird sparkly misty cloud thing. I was so scared I went into the bedroom where the ladies were sleeping and jammed a chair under the doorknob to brace it closed. When I looked around the room the cat was curled up asleep at the foot of one of the beds. All night I heard footsteps off and on over my head. I didn't open the door until it was full daylight outside. They next day I found out that the room above the women's bedroom had been the man's study. " ~ Anonymous
Next I have my buddy Shannon from REX ROBOT REVIEWS.
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Ok, so I have a couple of stories. Now they didn't happen to me directly, so...grain of salt.
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"The first one happened to my grandmother. My dad's father was very sick in the hospital. My dad was 9 at the time and he remembers sitting at the kitchen table with his mom. All of a sudden, his mother stares off into space and won't respond to him. A few seconds later she comes to and tells him that she had a vision of St. Jude (the patron saint of lost causes) come to my grandfather's bed side, look down and shake his head and walk away. He died a day later."
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"The second one was similar. My mom's coworker suddenly heard this music coming from nowhere. It was a song her father used to sing to her. A minute later the phone rang. She answered it and it was her father's voice saying her name and then she found out a couple hours later than he had died... before the time the phone call took place. Incidentally, I had this little music box that played Edelweiss. It randomly started playing one day and my mom got a horrified look on her face and immediately called my granddad to make sure he was ok as Edelweiss was one of his favorite songs. Thankfully, he was okay." ~ Shannon
Here are a couple of my personal encounters
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My first personal ghost tale happened around me, and not to me. When I was nine years old we moved into an old farmhouse near where our new home was being built, so that my mother and stepfather could keep an eye on the construction. We found out later that the house had originally been a stagecoach stop tavern and inn in the 1700s, which made what happened make much more sense after the fact.
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My grandmother lived with us and she and her girl friend were going on a trip and leaving really early in the morning, so her friend stayed over night on the couch in the living room downstairs. The next morning she told my grandmother that she woke up out of a sound sleep because the room had gotten cold (it was summer) and when she looked up there was a man in knee pants with buckled shoes and a shirt that had frilly cuffs, staring at her from across the room. She said he was see through. He nodded at her and then disappeared. Now, everyone was instructed not to tell me, or any of my cousins who stayed overnight regularly because we were already scared enough with all the creaking and rattling of the old house.
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My cousin Darrell was spending the night a couple of months later and he was given the living room couch to sleep on. He woke up in the middle of the night because he had to use the bathroom. When he sat up and put his glasses on he saw the same transparent man in knickers, white stockings, and buckle shoes. This time the ghost nodded and walked into the main hallway. Of course he told all of us the next day. I was afraid to get up to use the only bathroom in the house all the way downstairs and in the back of the house before that, and after I was petrified! We didn't know about the house being a stagecoach stop until the landlord came to get the keys when we moved out and my mother was telling him about the buckle shoe man.
My next experience was in the large Victorian house I lived in during my first college stint, but that story would much too long because the poltergeist type haunting lasted for a week and affected every tenant in the house. Maybe I will post a full account on Halloween night. So we will skip to Toadstone Cottage.
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We moved from Binghamton to the countryside to be nearer to my mother and sister when The Manchild was small because my ex was gone a lot being a roadie and sound tech; plus he worked the over nights at our PBS station. The cottage was converted from a tractor barn to a summer house in the 1940's, when a family bought a parcel of land with three small buildings on it, from the farm owner. The two things I think contributed to the "occurances" were the cottage was over a spring fed water table, and there was no cellar under the original part of the building. It was a natural stone foundation sitting flush with the ground.
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I always felt uneasy in The Manchild's room. It was in the original part of the house. In fact, I was so uneasy about the room I would not let him sleep in it. He slept with me when his father was away anyway, so I put his old crib mattress on the floor of our bedroom and made him a little corner fort around it. I was happy I did this because one night when I thought I heard my ex pull in the driveway, but no one came into the house, I went to look out the front window and coming from my son's room was the sound of a lot of people whispering. It sounded like the room was packed full of people! The front doorbell would ring and no one would be there, and in the short hall between the bathroom and the kitchen I could hear two women conversing from time to time.
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Then after my son started kindergarten I started hearing the little girl. She would giggle, and hum songs, and somtimes call out, "mommy", in a singsong way. One night when The Manchild was spending the night at his grandmother's, and I was cutting coupons in the living room, I her her say, " Look, look," from the kitchen (where the lights were off, heh heh). No way was I going to look. Ha! My ex thought I was nuts until one day when we were getting ready to go shopping and our son was at school, I heard... mommmmmeeeeee! I looked at him and I could tell by the expression on his face that he heard it, too. When I started daycaring a baby, she went away and never came back.
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The last thing that happened before we moved back to Binghamton was one night we arrived home really late from a family party and I went to let our outdoor cat, outdoor only because he was mean to the two indoor cats, onto the back enclosed porch for the night. The back light was off so I was walking to the door in the dark. Right next to my ear a man said, "Well hello there." I snapped my head to the side and there was no one there. I ran and turned on the backdoor light and there was nobody around. The cottage was situated in the middle of a large treeless area with no place to hide.
So, what do you think?
Do you have any of your own stories to tell?
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