This is so stupid

[MontiLee]

As I'll be on my own for the next 30 days, I'd love to hear some of your favorite creepy haunted tales - true ones would be awesome.

Researching Dudleytown, CT right now as well as the LaLaurie Mansion in NOLA, which is stupid because I'm afraid of ghosts and this will keep me up nights for sure.

What hauntings do you find yourself drawn to over and over? Resurrection Cemetary? QE2? Whaley House?

[makozlowski]

My family has property in Forester, Michigan. Uncle and his sons have a dairy farm, many other Aunts and Uncles have property surrounding, parents have a place, brother has a place, etc. etc.
This is the site of the Minnie Quay legend (a young girl who threw herself into Lake Huron after the sailor boyfriend that she was forbidden to see perished on the lake. Her grave is in the small, local cemetery.
I have been doing some research on the story, which has been passed down through the family, over the years and have even been working on some ideas for a ghost story novel featuring Minnie.
There are lots of reports of sightings on the beach and at the cemetery. No personal experience (yet) but it still gives me chills to wander the area at night.

[MontiLee]

Minnie Quay sounds fascinating!

I do love romantic lost at sea stories.

[annuvin]

My cousin has lived in a 165 year old farmhouse for the better part of 30 years that can only be described as 'haunted as all hell'. I mean this in the most sincerest sense... One could make a movie about her experiences living there and it would be far more disturbing than anything Hollywood has put out in recent memory. The house is an old style farmhouse consisting of a dirt-floor basement, a first floor split between a kitchen, a living room, a small bathroom and laundry room. The second floor had four bedrooms and a converted sunroom that my cousin used for sewing and crafts.

To begin with, my cousin did not buy this house. It was owned by her first husband Ed, who died after slipping on some ice and breaking his neck on the property. Ed was a nice guy but he had a bit of a drinking problem. One night shortly after my cousin moved in, she woke up to the sound of Ed having quite an animated converstion with someone in the kitchen. As she came downstairs it became apparent that the conversation Ed was having was somewhat one-sided; Ed would speak or ask a question but no one would answer. A moment later Ed would resume talking as if someone had replied to him.

As she entered the kitchen, she found Ed piss-loaded drunk at the kitchen table facing two vacant chairs on the other side of it. He was still asking questions, and seemingly getting replies that only he could hear. My cousin stood in the kitchen doorway watching for a while before asking, "Ed, who in the hell are you talking to?"

Ed turned and replied. "The two ghosts. Can't you see them?" He pointed to the two chairs. "There's a big one sitting there and a little one sitting there."

My cousin, thinking Ed was suffering delerium tremens or some other alcohol-induced madness, simply replied, "well keep it down for god's sake. You woke me up."

At this time, my cousin was unaware that the place was spooked. In retrospect, she did recall one disturbing question Ed had asked the spirits: "When did you get out of the nuthouse?"

* * *
After that night, she began to notice weird things happening around the house. A common occurance was hearing Ed call her name but he would deny calling her when asked. They both reported footsteps and stomping above them when nobody was upstairs, and she also began to experience what she decribed as "someone jumping out at you" when you came around a corner. She stated she felt exactly as if somebody was hiding around a corner that would jump in her face to try to scare her, but nobody would be there. Her and Ed also sensed that there was the spirit of a woman sitting on a bench and looking out the window at the end of the upstairs hallway.

In the summertime, they kept a radio on in the kitchen when they sat out on the back porch. The radio was an old-school one with an analogue dial tuner and it was up on a high shelf above the kitchen table. On more than one occasion, the radio would start randomly changing stations as if somebody was playing with the tuning dial. This would stop the moment anyone stuck their head in the kitchen, yet would resume as soon as they sat back down on the porch.

* * *
After Ed passed away, my cousin met her current husband, Lenny. After Lenny moved in things started to get even weirder. They had a dog, Rizzo, that would look into empty rooms and wag its tail like it saw somebody it new. Other times, Rizzo would be upstairs and they would hear its ball being thrown against the wall. They would then hear Rizzo chase the ball, only to hear the ball be thrown against the opposite wall for him to chase. When they looked upstairs later, the ball would be found in a place that wasn't normal for a dog to leave it (like shoved down the side of the couch, for example).

Another time, my cousin had a friend over and they were discussing the general weirdness of the place. Her friend had brought a guy my cousin had never met before that claimed to have psychic abilities. After hearing several stories about the place, he suddenly walked outside and pointed at the back lawn.

"You used to have a barn here," he stated.

My cousin replied that there never was one to her knowledge, but he kept insisting. "Yes! There was a barn here. Something terrible happened in it, too. Whatever it was, it started in the barn and finished in the basement."

He then asked to leave as he was visibly shaken. Later when digging up the back lawn to install a fountain, the remains of a large, previously unknown structure were found there. My cousin has been afraid to dig up the basement floor ever since.

* * *
When my cousin and Lenny wanted to have kids, the decision was made to renovate much of the old house. During this time weird occurances became the everyday norm: footsteps, bangings, voices, misplaced items and general poltergeist-type activity. As these types of things became commonplace they started to seem less out of the ordinary. "There was a time," Lenny told me, "when it only seemed weird if something didn't happen for a week." However, one day my cousin came home to find Lenny on the back porch chainsmoking and visibly shaken. She had gone to town while he was alone in the house doing some renovations in what would later be the kids' rooms. He told my cousin he suddenly heard what sounded exactly like someone throwing "a body" around the house. The "body" was banging into the walls and floor, shaking the house. It freaked him out so bad he stayed outside until my cousin returned home.

One night, Lenny went into the kitchen to get a piece of cheesecake my cousin made for dinner. The kitchen has a pantry off to one side (opposite the living room) that was large enough for both a boot closet along with all their dry and canned goods. While Lenny was rooting around the fridge looking for the cheesecake, he saw my cousin walk out of the living room and into the pantry, turning the pantry light on in the process. Having trouble finding the cheesecake, he called my cousin.

"What?" she asked as she walked in from the living room.

Lenny spun around to the pantry, confused. There was nobody in the pantry but the pantry light was still on. He told me later he wasn't really hungry for cheesecake after that.

* * *
When my cousin was pregnant with her son, she still insisted on helping with the usual chores around the farm. Lenny had baled up the alfalfa field and she was driving the tractor as he was loading the bales on the haywagon. They were working for a while when they noticed Lenny's parents pull in. After a moment they walked up to the house, but just stood there as if they were confused. Lenny walked back to the house and asked what was wrong. They told him they thought my cousin was being rude to them.

"What do you mean?" asked Lenny.

His mother explained that they drove up and saw my cousin in the sunroom window. She had waved down to them like she was coming to greet them, but never came down or opened the door.

"I don't know who you think you saw up there," said Lenny. "But we are both out in the field bringing the hay in and there is nobody at all in the house right now."

* * *
When their daughter was around four, Lenny and my cousin were up watching TV one night while the kids were in bed. Suddenly there was a vicious slam like someone had tried to rip their daughter's bedroom door right through the frame, aand at the same time their daughter started screaming bloody murder. Lenny ran up the stairs two at a time and found the daughter's bedroom door closed. He grabbed the doorknob but the door seemed stuck fast in its frame. He put his shoulder into it and forced the door open. As they entered the room, they found their daughter sitting up in bed still screaming with her face as white as a ghost. Lenny tried to comfort her but she was in hysterics. After finally calming her down, Lenny asked what had happened.

"I saw a monster," she said between sobs. "A scary monster with two tails."

It was years before she would sleep alone in that room again, opting instead to sleep on her brother's top bunk until she was almost 10.

* * *
My cousin is pretty insistant on keeping lights turned off when not in use to keep the electric bill low. Coming back from my aunt's house one winter night, they passed a gully on Edgerton where they can see the farmhouse clear across the valley. After they come up over the ridge, they can't see the house again until they pull down the driveway. As they passed the gully they could all see the house lit up like a Christmas tree in the distance. It appeared that every light in the house had been left on when they left. My cousin, who had insisted that all the lights be checked when they left hours earlier, lost her temper and turned around to give the kids hell about it. She was still lecturing them as they turned off Edgerton and on to the driveway.

"You can stop that now," said Lenny.

My cousin, who is not one to give quarter easily, quickly turned around to face Lenny when she suddenly stopped. The house lay at the bottom of the driveway in total darkness with not a single light bulb burning within.

"See mommy," whispered her son. "We told you we didn't leave the lights on."

* * *
My cousin and some friends of hers decided one weekend to have a psychic party at the old farmhouse. They ended up hiring a local psychic who is somewhat famous in that part of Ontario. When my cousin's turn came up, the old woman told her that Ed was still with her and wanted her to be happy with Lenny. She continued the reading and when she was finished, my cousin told her there were a few things she wanted to ask about the house.

"Yes," said the psychic before my cousin could continue. "There are two ghosts here. A woman and an young child. They stay here because they like this house and because they like you. They will bring you no harm."

At this, my cousin suddenly remembered that conversation she had with Ed years before... when she had first moved into the creepy old farmhouse on Edgerton Road.

[sjp]

Wow. Don't have any stories along those lines. The closest thing I have is a friend who had weird things happen around the house after his uncle died. Nothing real creepy, just blurs in the background of pictures, or images in TV screens.

When I was a kid, though, there was a weird house within biking distance of my neighborhood in Indiana. It was not too far from the interstate, but it was all by itself at a dirt crossroad, a two story farmhouse. Since we had very little to do at that time in our lives, me and a couple of friends hung around it, daring each other to go inside, as it had clearly been abandoned. We never did, though...a car drove by and two guys got out, and said it probably wasn't a good idea. They were probably just guys telling a bunch of dumb kids they could get themselves hurt, but we always thought afterwards that they had a bunch of money hidden away in there, or knew the place was haunted.

Actually, a LOT of weird stuff happened in that neighborhood, now that I think about it. Not necessarily HAUNTED, but it was still creepy. And it was a fairly suburban neighborhood, too, not some middle of nowhere patch of land (though we did have a lot of cornfields, I admit).

[Jim Leach]

I am just LOVING these ghost stories.

I live in what I refer to as a "lighly haunted" house. A friend of mine who is a self-proclaimed ghost expert says that they're just energy trails, not "real" ghosts. Other people have cats; we have ghosts.

My partner has had more vivid experiences like seeing a little girl with long dark hair looking out of what would have been a second story window. She's also experienced... ah, less pleasant things, nothing crazy enough to make her scared but definitely a WTF moment. Like a large spectral monkey-dog thing that watched her while she was baking. It didn't exactly scare her but it freaked her out enough that I did a quickie blessing of the house / exorcism.

And then there are what we call the "window ghosts." Frequently she'll see someone "walk by" our kitchen windows... though due to the angles and the height of the house, it's physically impossible. She's even written about them. I realized the other day I wasn't entirely taking her seriously... because I saw one. It was a dark figure that either had an extremely long head or was wearing a top hat. I ran to check the other window and confirm that nothing "normal" was out there. This happened in the middle of the afternoon with lots of sunshine and despite the heat, I got gooseflesh up and down my arms.