In honour of Hallowe'en I thought a thread containing favourite ghost stories might be appropriate.

Calgary has a number of ghosts but one of my favourite is the stories surrounding the old fire hall. In the old days the fire engine was pulled by a team of horses. When the fire bell ran the horses would get restless and excited - knowing it was time to go to work. They'd be harnessed up to the water pump and pull it out to the fire and back.
Modern days came and the horses retired. They were replaced by the combustion engine. They got to spend their last days well looked after but it appears their spirits are not at rest. When the fire bell rings there is still the sound of restless horses ready to do their bit even when no horses have been at the fire hall for many, many years.

Would you be wanting real ghost stories or fictional ones?

I say we should start with real ghost stories.

I was hoping for real ghost stories but they can be ones that you've read or heard. I heard the horses one on the radio one hallowe'en. I only have one RL, honest to God happened to me, ghost story to tell.

Victoria, B.C. has many ghosts but the one I'm thinking of is known as the April ghost. She haunts a local golf course on the seaside. Her tale is that she was separated from her husband when he met with her after work to talk things over. The went walking and that was the last time they were seen alive. Her body was found, strangled, at the golf course. He washed up on shore two days later with her shoes in his pocket. Since then she has been seen walking on the golf course. Either wearing white or in tweed. She is bad luck for couples. If seen by a couple the couple usually breaks off their relationship within a year.
The golf course in April is subject to rising columns of mist. I think it's due to them watering the course near sundown and then the cooler air coming in off the sea. There is also a public roadway that runs through the golf course and it's very scenic so cars will sometimes take that route over the quicker routes through the part of town known as Oak Bay.
So in April of that year there was a comet very visible in the night sky. I'm not sure which year but it was easily six years ago. I had finished up work and wanted to do some stargazing. The then boyfriend was at a party, my coffee buddy had already taken his telescope and driven somewhere, and so I called up an old flame who had turned into a friend. He suggested the golf course as it didn't have as many streetlamps and was a nice place to be. So we drove out there and ended up sitting on a piece of driftwood on the ocean side watching the comet and the night sky. The golf course was a few steps up from the beach. Talk led to kissing and my glasses got a bit steamed. Coming up for air, I removed my glasses (without which things at a distance are quite blurry), looked over his shoulder and thought I saw a woman in white. Quickly putting my glasses back on - there was nothing there. The then boyfriend and I parted ways two weeks later. The old flame and I also quit talking for over three years. (All I did that evening was kiss him, really, it was probably the wine he'd had earlier in the evening that brought on his behaviour.)
Now, did I see the April ghost? Did I see car headlights illuminate a column of mist and imagination take over? You can decide.

Okay, maybe it should be expanded to include amazing fictional ghosts that you love also.

The best ghost story I've read in a long time is a short story by Steven King. The fans of the King could please PM me the book and I'll edit it in. It takes place in a hotel room. Our hero is a fellow who stays overnight in haunted places and then writes up the story afterward. The story has a very lovecraftian feel, evil lurks beyond our ken, to it. I specifically remember the telephone. five, the number is five. *shudders*

The story is 1408. The movie's not as good.

Ghost stories, eh? I was gonna tell you one but it's gone. Ah well, it'll come to me. Anyway, I thought I'd make a reply as this post looks a little lonely...

I'd thought people may be more keen but meh.

Victoria B.C. again. Ross Bay cemetary on the coast is a beautiful cemetary. It's right in a residencial neighborhood on the oceanside and there's a bus stop beside it. Due to these factors it's not usual for people to go walking through the cemetary. This particular day workmen were repairing some of the tombstones and when finished for the day draped a dropcloth over their work and went home.

It was a nice evening that evening and two young women went for a walk in the cemetary. They drew their coats around them as there was a cold breeze from the ocean. Suddenly a white flapping figure appeared among the tombstones and chased the pair out of the cemetary. With gathered friends and bravery the two returned to the scene of the haunting to discover...they'd been chased out by a dropcloth grabbed by the breeze off the ocean. No ghost at all. Chased out by their own imaginations.

My ghost stories aren't very scary, I'm afraid, but they are real...

My mother and aunts report that, when they were growing up, a ghost used to visit the upstairs bedrooms they slept in. A light would climb the stairs, then move along the walls, to a door that lead outside. Now, and at the time, the door was/is sealed, as it only leads/lead out to a section of roof Above a passageway that connects the house to a garage.

That passageway had been put in after a sunporch had been torn down.

The woman who owned the house before my grandparents died of tuberculosis. As part of her treatment, she would often venture upstairs, and out the door, to a sunporch, where she would sunbathe. Apparently, she continued this habit long after she died.

The epilog to this story is that she has not been seen in years. Not since my grandfather passed on after a long bout with MS. My grandmother says that this 'hussy' was just waiting for him to pass on, so they could run away together...

My ex now lives in an area fairly unpopulated. He lives in the house his grandfather grew up in and died in. One day, while I was talking to him on the phone, we heard someone chopping wood. His family was gone, he was the only one there, and well.. considering I lived alone, it was slightly less than normal. He got up, walked to the door, and the chopping stopped. He sat back down and it resumed. That night, before he went to bed, he called to say goodnight and freaked out because he saw something. To this day, he still swears he sees his grandfather watching him when he starts to fall asleep.


The apartment I used to live in was slightly scary at night. There were two levels - the basement was unfinished and had a door with a deadbolt blocking off a storage area. One night, I came home from work and thought I saw lights downstairs as I was walking down the hall. I went downstairs, and the lights went out. I figured my sister was downstairs in the storage area, so I went back upstairs and didn't think anything about it. I went to bed, and through the heater vent, I could see lights on downstairs again. I looked into my sister's room, and she was fast asleep. I figured she'd just left the lights on when she came upstairs, so I went down there to shut them off. The light, it turns out, was coming from the storage area, with the deadbolt still locked. As I started back upstairs to get the key, the light went out again. I "felt" something brush past me on third stair.. needless to say, I didn't go down in the basement alone again.

I provide guided tours of Ross Bay Cemetary in Victoria BC. Although this is not really a ghost story it was odd and I hope interesting. In august 2009, having finished doing a tour, one of my guest came up to me and showed me a series of pictures he had taken in front of the pooley monument. there were three pictures which he claimed were taken in a row as quickly as you could possibly snap the shutter ( do digital cams have shutters?). I appear in all three pictures standing in front of the grave. In two of the pictures there is a raven clearly visable behind me on the monument, staring into the camera, in the third picture it was gone . I personally do not apear to have moved in the pictures and the photographer claimed not to have seen the raven leave yet in that third picture there is absolutly no sign of it. given the apparent rapidness of the picture taking I would have expected to see some sign of the raven leaving the picture. A ghost story, not really, odd and a little spooky at the time, yes

talk about a newbie-deus-ex-necropost...

Would someone fix this please?

Fix what?

I'm going to leave it, because it's not spam, it's sort of on topic and oh well if it's a necropost.

Fine by me. Hi JDLane! Sorry for the odd welcome, it's just that if a thread gets resurrected from so far in the past then it's usually because someone is trying to sell us something or hide links in their posts to boost the ranking of another website. Due to this, we've become a bit suspicious of 'necroposting' (resurrecting very old threads).

On topic:

My mother told me this. My grandmother (her mother) had died a month before and she had gone to visit her father. She let herself into his house with her own key. He walked around the corner from the living room to stand in the doorway of the hall. He looked at her with a sad and somehow apologetic expression on his face, she greeted him but he didn't reply, then he faded and disappeared. When my mother walked around the corner she saw his body on the floor. He had died from a heart attack.

That's a true story and my mother's not the kind of person to make up things or see weird stuff. There's no benefit to lying about something like that. I guess she could have convinced herself that it happened after the event. The mind is a strange thing, and it could do that, but who knows?

My ex-fiancee, amongst many other eccentricities (), also claimed to be capable of 'sensing' spirits or negative history of a place. However, she was so fearful of learning or seeing too much that she would do her best to ignore it, or remove herself from the location. One of her aunts is a 'professional'* clairvoyant/spiritualist/medium, and would tell her to use her gift and not waste it. I personally err between scepticism and belief, depending on the story and who tells it, but I certainly felt that if my ex was able to "see dead people", then she should do her best to use it.

Anyways.... a couple of stories from her mouth...

---

One weekend, her second husband booked them into a hotel in Mistley, North Essex, called The Thorn Inn. That night, she was unable to sleep due to a horrible sense of fear and, in want of a better word, evil. It kept her awake throughout the night, and made it a very unpleasant experience. The following morning, whilst her husband paid the bill, she read through the history of the inn and discovered that there was history surrounding the inn to suggest that Matthew Hopkins - the Witchfinder General - used the Inn as a base for his witchhunt, and may have even interrogated (i.e. intimidated) some of the accused women in that hotel.

---

From a sceptics point of view, the inn's history is locally well-known, and my ex was quite into local history. So, chances are, she may well have heard of the Witchfinder's time there and, whilst not consciouslly remembering it, may have subconsciously had her experience there affected by the knowledge. In other words, maybe she actually already knew of the events that had taken place there, and so it caused to have such feelings.

The second story is as follows...

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During her late-teens, her boyfriend at that had convinced his parent to allow her to stay overnight at their house. However, the parents insisted the young couple slept in separate rooms. The boyfriend's mother, especially, hadn't taken a particular liking to my ex, barely muttering a word to her at all. Eventually, it was time for all to go to bed, and my ex was shown her surprisingly large room. She found it strange that her boyfriend had a small room as his bedroom, and that the guest room was larger, but didn't question it.

During the very early hours of the morning she awoke, and immediately had the feeling that she was not alone in the room. She stayed silent, pretending to be asleep, and remained as still as possible. She could hear voices behind her, on the other side of the room, that sounded like two children giggling with one another. After more laughter and whispering, things went quiet, and my ex - now very much wide awake - shuffled slightly. She heard movement behind her, and then suddenly the bed sheet slipped (was pulled?) off of her. Terrified, she ran out of the room and into her boyfriend's, where she spent the rest of the night.

The next morning, when the boyfriend's mother asked to speak to her in private, she feared being reprimanded for ending up in the same room, and bed, as her boyfriend. However, it turned out that the boyfriend had told his mother what had happened, and my ex was not in trouble. Instead, the mother told my ex that they'd managed to get a good deal on the house when it was up for sale. It had been on the market a while, but with no buyers, due to what had happened there. Apparently, two young children (a boy and his sister) had been murdered by their parents, and were found dead in their room (where my ex had slept). This was why the boyfriend didn't sleep in that room, because throughout his life the mother had also felt a presence in the room and didn't want her son to sleep in there.

---

* I'm not entirely sure whether 'professional' is the right word or not for something that raises a lot of criticism and disbelief in some, and support in others. Can you be a professional in something which is not (yet) regarded as being possible/true? *shrug*

Heh, goosebumps at the second story, and I'm ridiculously skeptical when it comes to this type of stuff..

Yep, the second one is defintely creepy.

Ghosts are one of those things that seems like they are so common to mythology around the world that it's hard to say that they don't exist. This said, and Jung and others have found, there are many archetypal myths that seem to represent commonalities in the human psyche. I feel fairly confident in saying that the majority of the world doesn't believe in vampires, but they are still a universal myth. Why should blood-drinking be something that every culture needs to invent? I guess it's to explain the simple observation that blood-loss equals death, and therefore blood must equal life. If you drink blood then surely you must get more life, or something like it.

Ghosts must be the same as vampires, they help us cope with a fundamental problem: this person was alive and talking at one point, and now they are dead. The deaths that seem most shocking to us (murders, accidents, painful circumstances) are the ones that are most surprising to us and perhaps our minds have the hardest time coping with them. It seems illogical that a person can be alive at one moment, then at the next they are gone forever. Wouldn't spirits and ghosts be a comforting thing? Believing that there is something else after this life, whatever it may be.

I think my point is that ghosts can nearly always be explained through retrospective reasoning - in my mother's example, it could be said that she has imagained that she saw my grandfather walk around the corner (before finding his body) as a way of making the incident less traumatic. Perhaps the cushion of life-after-death, or th apparent apology in his look is what her brain needs to cope with the shock of finding her father dead only a month after her mother died. Perhaps she made it up afterwards...

... But once you start down that line of reasoning then you get into very metaphysical discussions about the nature of historical truth and whether you can trust anything you remember. My mother's experience was enough to convince me that ghosts might be real, but even her word is not enough for me to fully accept their reality.

As a funny prelude: when reading this thread, my bedroom door swung open of its own accord.

However, that's because someone opened a door downstairs, and the pressure difference/ wind blowing through the house was enough to open it. Happens aaaaall the time. Anyway...

I have always been able to "feel" things. This one time, in an old house we lived in, there was a something that used to follow me round the house. Used to annoy the hell out of me- I was a paranoid 11 year old- especially when it sat on the toilet whilst I was in the bath. It also used to sit on the corner of my desk when I was in bed (the top bunk). I could never see it, but I could feel something was there- like how you can feel that someone is standing behind you, or looking at you when you can't see them.
That house was an old council house built in the 1950's, and we moved in after the old occupant died. It was a creepy house, but there were never any ghostly moving of things. Anyway, we moved into a newer house after a couple of years, and this energy followed us. It was never indoors, but I could feel it being outside of the window. Since growing up and discussing it with my mother, she said that the woman next door (the council houses were semi-detached) one time complained of something poking her when she was hoovering the stairs, and as though someone was trying to walk past.

There was also this other house we lived in that I hated going into the bathroom by myself- I was about 8, and my mum told me I was just being silly and trying to get out of having a bath. Later on, when we were discussing houses and ghosts, she said that she once saw a woman in her bedroom, waving to a man in the house over the road, and that she had felt and seen various things when we lived there. She told me I was being silly because she didn't want me to freak out.

And this OTHER time, we were looking at a house in a village where we were going to move to and so my mum took us kids to go have a look around (I was about 2 and I still remember this) and I burst into tears as soon as we stepped through the front door. I was inconsolable, and my granpa took me outside to calm me down- which I did, as soon as we got outside. Same thing happened when I was taken indoors again. My sister, apparently, was also quite distressed and didn't want to be in the house, so we soon left and because of our reaction, my parents decided not to move there. About 18 years later, still no one lives there and the cottages are just crumbling away. Amusingly, it's on the village website http://old.stradbroke.org.uk/index.php?mod...amp;PAGE_id=133


I believe in ghosts and ghostly things insofar as they are the spiritual plane overlapping into the physical plane. It's also how magic works.

...


I have my upbringing to blame for my theories >_>

There is something very blair witch about that building and the photographs. Creepy! Darn Suffolk ghosts

A friend-of-a-friend took some photos of an abandoned cottage that is situated not far from some modern quarries nearby. Again, the photos are very eery indeed. There's something about crumbling plaster, low beams, and disused fireplaces that really evoke a sense of foreboding.



It's a difficult one, isn't it? Maybe it runs along similar lines to childbirth? The question being that if childbirth is as painful as it would seem (I'm not gonna question it! ), then why do women have more than one child? The answer is often given that the brain - or the hormones - 'alters' the memory, perhaps blocking out the pain to ensure that reproduction continues. That it helps maintain survival. Perhaps it is the case that some individuals rewrite a bit of history to make things more emotional stable? I dunno...

Becky's door thing actually just reminded me of something.

When I was about 11, my friends Stephanie and Sarah were sleeping over. We were all in my room telling ghost stories. I didn't buy into them (Stephanie was primarily the one telling them, because she claimed her house was haunted (I've slept there millions of times and never saw/heard/felt anything) and that should could always see/hear things.) She wasn't scared because she was used to it, I wasn't scared because I couldn't believe any of it, but Sarah was trying to hug us, completely freaked out. She started blaming the moonlight coming through the window through the gap in the blinds on ghosts. I asked Stephanie if ghosts were present in my house, and she said yes, but only a few. I demanded they show themselves, and a few seconds later, a hat hanging on one of the thumbtacks keeping on of the posters in my room up fell to the ground. Stephanie laughed. Sarah was freaked out. I was kind of scared because of the timing.

Sarah actually has two really creepy ghost stories (depending on your definition of creepy and whether or not you believe them.. I sorta think she was hallucinating/playing a trick on people and now thinks it's real) that I might get her to type up later because I always mess up when telling them.

I suppose a lot of scepticism is fuelled by T.V. programmes such as 'Most Haunted' and somesuch. I don't think they really serve as a scientific exploration into the supernatural, particularly when small pieces of dust passing through the light across a camera's lens are regarded as "ghostly orbs". There is so much doubt thrown into the air BECAUSE of these programmes, that I actually think they almost defeat their own purpose. Rather than encouraging a sensible investigation into the 'truth', they instead invoke criticism - where nothing somehow suddenly becomes something.

I like this topic very much

But what's the difference between these TV shows and the anecdotal evidence provided by a ghost story? I think it is much easier to be skeptical of the tv shows because you so detached from the situation, whereas if you were actually there you would be much more affected by the spooky atmosphere and more likely to interpret what you see as evidence of the supernatural.


Of course you can't trust anything you remember! Memory is actually a lot more unreliable than most people realise and peoples' memories of things that happen to them tend to get distorted after the event, especially as you tell the story to other people and begin to interpret the event in a way that makes sense to you. I think this is especially true for ghost stories because they have to be told in a way that makes them sound very mysterious and spooky to the listener - nobody says "I saw a bright light in the sky and something that looked kind of like a face in the trees", they say they saw a UFO, or a ghost, or whatever supernatural phenomenon they think would explain it.

There are issues of unreliability in the memory of a person, then again there's 'unreliability' (not recalling the expression on someone's face, for example) and then there's seeing a person you know walking around the corner then vanishing in front of you. It's a very different scale of inaccuracy! Ghosts can rely on the willingness of the individual to reframe their experiences. In my mother's case it's possible that the trauma may have made her create something which should really be a binary question: did a full body ghost of my grandfather walk around the corner or not? It's not something that could be halfway true.

One of my uncles is a big fan of Most Haunted. He says it's absolute tosh, but he also says that twice in something like four seasons (at that time) there had been something genuinely very strange that had happened. It's a lot of noise compared to the signal, but he really believed that there were rare things on the show that were truly supernatural.

I am a total believer in ghosts, considering that I grew up in a haunted house I don't have much of a choice in the matter. It's been my experience that some people are just more sensitive in seeing or feeling these things and that they can be seen or felt to varying degrees. That being said, I can't seem to get away from ghosts (as in they've been everywhere I've lived and in two places that I've worked) and that has given me many things I could share, but I'll stay to just a few of the stories.

First off in my house there is a little girl, a middle aged man, and and old man with a black cat. The girl is mischievous and playful, the middle aged man is creepy and paces a lot, and the old guy hasn't been around much since my sister moved out. The girl is the most active and will get bored and turn electronic equipment on and off and open the shower door when we're in it (frequently so that it smacks us in the butt). Those are the common occurrences.

One of the more extreme ones was when my first real boyfriend came to visit me for the first time. My ghosts apparently didn't like him, because his first trip through the house with his luggage a picture came flying off of the piano at him, and his second time through the smoke detector came flying off of the piano at him as well. With the force that these items came flying off the piano it's not something that could have just fallen off due to him walking by, in fact the second time he walked through he was farther away from the piano because of what happened the first time and the smoke detector came at him with a harder force.

When I lived in Tennessee I had some things happen in the house I lived at there. When my ex and I first checked out the house I was overcome with a bad feeling and I begged my ex to not make me live there. The rent was very cheep though and it was a house, so in the end we took it. I was in the shower twice when I felt my feet be pushed out from under me and I fell very hard. Both times it happened when I was home alone. Most of the time I just would feel like I was unwelcome. When I broke up with my ex and was packing my things to move out, I saw a man walk through the living room, stop to look at me as I packed and give me a satisfied smile, like he had succeeded.

When I was working at the music store we had a ghost who would walk through the back of the store and then disappear. This ghost would often do this right after I had closed and I would think there was still a customer in the store or that one of my employees was in an area they weren't supposed to be.

The last place that I worked was a very old building and we had three ghosts there. The most frequently spotted was one that we called Earl and he hung out upstairs. He wore a gray suit and gray fedora, and would often watch us as we rang people up. Sometimes people would hear him singing upstairs with a woman. There also was another woman who really liked looking at our lace, and I would often go over to help her and she would vanish as soon as I got to that section. Most of the time these ghosts would cause us to go to help them, and they would go away, and sometimes they would even startle the customers.

Ah the joys of old buildings.

I really like the idea of ghosts singing together. Did you recognise any of the songs?

Most of the time is seemed like gospel or old timey, but nothing that I can recognize.

Ah, shame. It would be great to say that you had a sing-a-long with a couple of ghosts. I wonder if the ghosts would have reacted to you joining in?

I've no great ghost stories of my own, but my best friend's uncle has a very funny, if untrue (i've no idea if it is or not. who knows?) one -

The Apartment he moved in to had previously been owned by an elderly man, who passed shortly before Toby (the uncle) moved in. Every morning, Toby would go the fridge and take out a diet coke, and drink it before moving on with his day. After a month of doing so, Toby walked into the kitchen one morning and found a coke, fresh out of the fridge, waiting for him. This apparently continued for the rest of the time he lived in the apartment.
Not very spooky, but rather entertaining.

That would be a very useful ghost, but if I come back from the afterlife I think I might try to be a bit more communicative.

There's a belief in my family that my Grandfather used to pop in for a visit occasionally. My Mom or Aunt would feel that someone was there, know/feel it was their Dad and then fill him in on what was happening in their life at the time. The feeling of a presence would then fade or leave.

Mom threatened that I'd feel a ghostly rap on the back of my head if I didn't behave and then I'd know she was around. So far either I've been good or she's not had a chance to visit.

There is a group, the Old Cemetary Society, that gives ghost tours here in Victoria. Welcome to one of their members.