Ghost story telling time.

[Lunabell]

It's October and here in N. Florida. There is the promise of a "cold" front in the next day or two. (50° in Florida is a cold front, lol) I feel like telling my true story of my FIRST ghost encounter. I've had many since then, but here goes what happened to me when I was 21.

One afternoon I woke up to a young man petting my cat, Lucy. She was sleeping at my feet and seemed to be enjoying the petting. This was a crisp cold November afternoon and the sun was shining and the sky clear in 1982. The young man was in a red lumberjack shirt and jeans. His hair was blond, longish, parted on the side and swept over his brow in the 70's style. He smiled and walked toward the door and disappeared but I continued to hear footsteps in the old apartment where I lived.

I called out to my roommate, "Bridget?" But nobody was there. Later, when I told her what happened, she told me someone had called her name one night and woke her up.

Fast forward a few years, the Tallahassee Democrat newspaper asked for local ghost stories one October. I sent mine in complete with the address and my name. A guy called me and said he was a friend of the young man who had died in 1976 in a parachuting accident in Gadsden county Florida and he had lived in that same apartment. He said his friend was blond and always dressed in flannel shirts and jeans, even in summer. He sent me a picture of his friend and it really resembled the young man.

Fast forward a few years, I was working at a facility for disabled adults and the teacher wanted to tell ghost stories in, of course, October. He started. He said he was at a party on Bronough street a few years back. My ears perked up. "Bronough street in Tallahassee? Was it 800 Bronough street?" He said yes and went on to say he and his friends were partying and through the front window, they saw a BLOND HAIRED GUY IN A RED FLANNEL SHIRT walking up the stairs and knock on the door. When they answered the door, nobody was there. Wow, then I told him what happened to me in the apartment next door.

Fast forward to 2003 and I was working as a nurse at a rehab facility with a patient paralyzed in a motorcycle accident. Well, we were talking about paranormal experiences and I told him mine. Then, he said he knew who it was and the other survivor of the accident was a friend of his and was visiting the next day. I met his friend the next day and he corroborated the whole story to me, where his friend lived and the description of him.

I recently tried to look up the parachuting accident online, but there was no record of it. I wish I had kept the picture the friend sent or got names.

That is just one experience. I lived in place out in the country where covers were pulled off, weird music came from one room, a bread box flew off the top of the refrigerator, apparitions were seen, and the lights flipped on and off. As my wife and a friend of ours were laughing about the lights one night, the light in the hallway flipped on. We laughed even harder.

And that's just a bit of my many true experiences. I'd love to hear your true ghost encounters.

[wendyb-NC]

1. That's an incredible account

Wow, with corroboration from other people who lived in the same house, or area. If I woke up to see a stranger petting one of my cats I'd probably have jumped through the ceiling. Sounds like this dear soul is obviously a gentle spirit, just returning to a home base.

I have through the years had odd experiences, like sounds of someone walking, my name called, certain sensations of a presence in a room, but being alone at the time. Members of my family have told stories of a deceased relative or friend showing up in the middle of the night. I love hearing people tell of their experiences. Yours is a memory for the ages. Thank you for sharing it.

[Lunabell]

2. You're welcome.

At the time, I really thought he was a friend of my roommate's and was just so stunned that anyone would just walk into my room while I was napping. What I didn't say in the story, (just to keep it short) was that at first, I woke to what I thought was a conversation going on in the living room. I thought it was my roommate and some of her friends casually talking.That is why I thought he was a friend of my roommate's. He looked so solid at first. And by the time I realized he was not a friend of hers and that he was a complete stranger, he had left the room. Not by opening the door, but by by just heading in that direction and kind of fading out.

Now, I'm a very rational person. I don't believe in astrology. I don't believe in "woo." I am an atheist. I trust science and honestly search to debunk. I love watching "ghost" or "paranormal " videos, especially on the show, "The Truth Is Out There" because there's legitimate, scientific debunking. But,my experiences have left me only one rational explanation: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

[highplainsdem]

4. Great story! Especially with the later confirmations. A relative of mine who'd

recently bought a lovely old house woke up from a nap one day to see a very real-looking old gentleman dressed in oldfashioned clothes smiling at her. He disappeared a few seconds later. When she told a neighbor about the experience, she was was shown an old photo of the man who'd built the house and lived in it till he crossed over.

A friend of mine who'd had a pet go missing long ago when he and his wife lived in London felt the cat rubbing against his legs weeks later, when they were sitting in their parlor (liviing room) one sunny morning. They looked down and both saw the tabby they'd lost, who looked translucent, not solid, in the morning sun, and who vanished quickly. But they both felt and saw the cat.

And the evening after I learned a friend and neighbor of mine had died, I was sitting up reading in my bedroom when I noticed a faint light in the hall and realized a light I'd turned off was on. Got up and saw it was the floor lamp behind the recliner that friend had usually sat in when visiting. And there was an extremely strong smell of vanilla in the air. Gary had loved vanilla - vanilla Coke, vanilla wafers, etc. I couldn't locate any source for the vanilla odor, which was gone by the next morning. I thanked Gary for the visit and told him I was so sorry he was gone.

[wnylib]

5. I have a couple of "false ghost" stories and

one that I call a spooky coincidence, but others call it a ghost presence.

This is one false ghost story that I've told here before, so apologies to anyone who has already read it. It happened at Thanksgiving, 1956, in Erie, PA. I was 6 years old.

My mother's cousin, Willie, and his wife, Jennie, drove from Buffalo to have Thanksgiving dinner with us, normally a two hour drive. They planned on staying overnight with other Erie relatives before going back to Buffalo. Willie would not stay in our house after dark. My parents had bought the house from a family friend after her husband had died in the house. Willie believed in ghosts.

Erie had an unpredicted very heavy snowstorm that Thanksgiving, much worse than surrounding areas, so Jennie and Willie did not know how bad it was until they got too close to Erie to turn back. Throughout dinner, Willie stared out the window while several inches of snow per hour fell fast and the wind got stronger. By the end of dinner, visibility was zero, roads were impassable, and Willie's car was buried. They had to stay overnight.

My brothers offered them their room, but Willie refused. He would sleep in the living room, so Jennie took the couch and Willie chose a lounge chair. After the rest of us were in bed, Willie went into the bathroom, which was right next to my bedroom. I could hear him brush his teeth and gargle.

My door was open so I saw my older brother (13 at the time) sneak up to the closed bathroom door. He gave me the shhh signal and then called out in a spooky voice, "Wiiiiilliiieee." Willie yelled back, "Who is that? What do you want?" My brother said, in the same spooky tone, "You know me, Willie. It's Joe."

Willie ran into the hallway screaming, "He's here!! I heard him!" My brother ducked into my room, still shushing me, and then joined everyone else in the hall who had come running. Willie insisted that Joe's ghost had spoken to him and my father kept saying, "Mind over matter, Willie. There's no such thing as ghosts."

Next morning at breakfast, while the adults were arguing over the ghost, I could not help giggling, which my father noticed. I didn't dare "rat" on my brother, who was kicking me under the table, but my father knew because my brother was the practical joker in the family. Jennie burst out laughing and talked my father into letting my brother off easy.

The snow was blocking our door, so my father gave my brother the job of clearing it away. My brother dropped from a dining room window into a clear area below it and my father handed him the kitchen broom and a shovel from the enclosed back porch. Once the door was clear, my father and Willie joined my brother in clearing enough snow to walk in. A few main streets were getting cleared and a relative with a jeep came to rescue Jennie and Willie from the ghost house. (They came back for their car the next day, when the city had dug out from the snow.)

[wnylib]

6. I call this a spooky coincidence, but some people who have heard it

call it a "ghost presence," although I did not see or hear one.

It was in the mid 1980s, in the summer. The day was sunny and warm, with a nice, cooling breeze. I drove to a small village in PA, about an hour's drive south of Erie, where my great-grandmother was buried in a family plot. I wanted pictures of their tombstones for genealogy research.

I took my cat with me. He was a long-haired, solid black kitten named Merlin, which fits this story perfectly, but I swear that he really was black and his name really was Merlin.

I'd seen the grave once, about 10 years earlier, so I knew the general area of the cemetery, but not the specific row. It is a HUGE cemetery for a little village because it services other villages, too.

I parked in the general area, grabbed my camera (before cell phones), and let Merlin out for exercise. The lawn was newly mown, but the higher grass around the edges of the tombstones had not yet been trimmed. I started down one row in my search. Merlin took off a couple rows away, pouncing on the higher, untrimmed grass when it moved in the breeze.

After a while I looked up to check on Merlin. He was still in a row a couple rows away from me, but he was in a stalking position at some high grass. I hurried over because I did not want him catching any moles or field mice and snacking on them. When I reached him, he was still in a stalking posture, slinking around the higher grass that grew around a tombstone. It looked so funny to me, kind of Halloween-ish to see a black cat stalking a tombstone, so I took a picture of him as he moved behind the stone. Then I looked through the viewer to catch him coming out from behind it. But, as I looked in the viewer, I saw that the name on the stone was my great-grandmother's. Merlin was stalking her grave.

I got the picture of her stone and her husband's, sister's, and parents'. It was a bit spooky to me, but I chalked it up to random coincidence. How could a kitten know what I was lookng for and which one it was? Impossible.

I told my uncle about it later, and he said that his "Grandma Jennie" (my great-grandmother) loved cats, always had a few, and would have loved the fact that a kitten played on her grave.

[betsuni]

8. In the '90s I went to a cousin's wedding in the Midwest, we stayed at my mother's Iowa family farm

and visited the cemetery to take pictures of family tombstones. When the photos came back from developing it was creepy-hilarious.

We'd stopped at the Cheers bar at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport and took lots of pictures. Bar and tombstones were combined, what's it called, superimposed? So the photo was a grave and also with us gripping huge mugs of beer and grinning like idiots. Literally: eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you die.

[wnylib]

9. That's a much more amusing coincidence than the spooky one

that I had. I have called my experience a weird coincidence, but a few people that have heard the story told me that they believed that my great-grandmother's spirit lured the cat to her grave in order to help me in my search.

One other coincidence, of the kind that Jung called synchronicity, really freaked me out. I was reading the intro in a book about a Spanish philosopher. The intro was all about the philosopher's view that modern humans lack the animal nature of the hunt that our ancient "cave man" ancestors had. For today's hunters, it is a sport. This intro went on to describe, in gory detail, the behavior of predatory animals when they catch their prey.

I had an apartment at the time which was the entire second floor. Trees grew close to the building, giving the apartment almost the effect of being in a tree house, with branches right up against the windows.

While reading the book intro's description of predatory birds like hawks tearing their small mammal prey apart, I looked away from the book to get relief from the gory image that it was portraying. Instead of relief, I got a view at my window of a hawk tearing apart a squirrel that was clutched in its claws. I could see torn bits of fur in its beak, with blood streaking through it. For a moment, the hawk's eyes met mine, or seemed to. Maybe it was looking at something else. Whatever the case, I was so freaked out that I closed both the book and the window blinds and turned on my TV to take my mind off of that image.

[betsuni]

10. That hawk was definitely messing with you. Gross.

[wnylib]

11. I think it was just being itself, a predatory bird.

But the timing with what I'd just been reading was ......? I don't even know what to call it. Freakish? Bizarre coincidence?

[betsuni]

7. Jezebel has an annual Scary Story Contest.

http://jezebel.com/scary-story-contest-Halloween-1850886671

Some years are better than others, but I always read them!

My FIL haunted his house, beginning the night of his funeral. Next morning we told my MIL about noises, the light going on by itself in the bedroom. Lighting fixtures were large florescent things you turn on by yanking a string. I hate them and we never used it. MIL said she'd heard knocking and tapping noises that kept her awake, finally yelled at FIL to leave her alone, she was exhausted and had a lot to deal with.

Few weeks later MIL wakes up in the middle of the night, terrified to see the lights on in the adjacent room (the Death Room where the FIL's shrine is). Afraid it was an intruder, she lay there until morning. No sign of a break-in. It continued to happen, and loud crashes from upstairs but no evidence of anything having fallen. Only the lights in the Death Room and my husband's old bedroom went on by themselves. When we visited on weekends, things were scattered on the bedroom floor, things moved around.

In summer we slept in the living room where there was air conditioning and sometimes saw the light in the Death Room go on by itself (I was the ghostbuster awake at three in the morning to see it, woke up the husband to have another witness). It was taken for granted by other family members that FIL was haunting the place, we all felt it. He was a grumpy, stubborn curmudgeon in life, why not in death. Lots of other things happened too.

I don't want to know how much the family spent over the years having their Shinto priest come and do his prayer thing. After MIL's death, husband decided to tear down the Haunted House and build a small one. More money to the Shinto priest for blessing ceremonies. SIL was having bad dreams, went to a diviner or something who told her MIL was angry. More Shinto ceremonies. Finally even the priest was tired of it, said just go to your neighborhood Shinto shrine and pray.

Almost two years living in our new house, no ghosts. There's a tiny Death Closet where FIL and MIL's shrines are. The husband gives them treat offerings and a prayer every morning. I don't. Come on, man. Enough is enough.

[highplainsdem]

12. Thanks for the link!

[Elessar Zappa]

13. I have an unexplainable event.

I was in a hotel once and was napping during the day. I woke up (and I was 100% awake) and a young woman was standing at the foot of my bed. I was shocked and asked her ‘Can I help you” and she just looked at me for a moment and disappeared. I was a complete non-believer in the paranormal until this incident. I’ve also had a few instances of feeling my cat jump on the bed and cuddle next to me a few nights after he died. Don’t know if this was just my imagination or not.