Spooky

[eye_of_a_cat]

Tell me your creepy stories. Ghosts, coincidences, things that went bump in the night that time you were completely alone in the house. Or your friend was, or whoever. I'm not interested in whittling them down to a rational explanation, and I promise not to judge you for whatever you do or don't believe; I just like the stories, and I need some distracting at the moment.

My favourites, not all of which happened to me:

1. My childhood best friend still swears she saw a UFO once. She was out with her mother, walking the dog in the hills behind their house, and her mother pointed out a 'firework' somewhere down in the fields below them. They watched it slow down, and then stop, mid-air, and then start spiralling in big, lazy circles, up and up and up into the sky. When it was entirely out of sight, her mother said "Let's go home," and they did. They haven't talked about it since.

2. That time - have I told you about this already? - I woke up in the night convinced someone was watching me, and the dog who used to sleep on the end of my bed woke up with me, stared into an empty corner, and snarled. I never saw that dog even raise her hackles before. I was ten, and couldn't sleep without a light on for weeks.

3. Still on the animals: Candy, the horse I had when I was fifteen, known affectionately as 'Daughter Of Satan' and afraid of nothing on this earth except lambs and miniature ponies (she broke a plastic window once by biting her reflection, and I swear I once saw her go for a tractor, but cute things were anathema), stopped in the middle of a track one day and would not go one inch further. Horses will often pretend to be scared of things when it suits them ("I'm bored, and I want to go home, and OHMYGOD AN EMPTY TWIX WRAPPER RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!"), but this was between us and home on a track we came along every other day, and she would not budge past a certain point. She'd happily turn around and go in any other direction; she'd even walk in the direction of the Unseen Scary Thing up to the point in question, looking incrasingly worried the whole way; but she'd go no further, and all her attention was fixed on the path immediately in front of her. We were there for about fifteen minutes, with her literally trembling with fear and me trying to calm her down (which I don't think she even noticed), and then whatever-it-was seemed to disappear. She snorted, looked around, and then tore off for home like a crazy thing. (She was back to biting tractors the next day.)

4. The time I missed my flight home and spent two days in a youth hostel, I was sharing a room with three other girls. The French girl who spent most of her time reading Agatha Christie on the balcony was, I already knew, only staying for one night; the Romanian girl in the bunk below her had had her own flight cancelled, and was killing a few days before heading home via Norway (I know, I know); and the Italian girl, in the bunk below me, we only met when she stumbled in drunk and tearful in the early hours of the morning asking if any of us knew any pre-emptive cures for a red wine hangover.

White wine hangovers, I can help with. Red wine hangovers, though - and she had drunk a <i>lot</i> of red wine - are best dealt with by medicinally induced comas, and even then you'll probably discover whole new levels of wishing you were dead. There was little to be done for her, but we brought her water anyway, and bread and butter, and tomatoes (which I'd never heard of as a hangover cure before, but the French girl swore by them). She crawled into her bed looking no better, and we sent off vague waves of pity and went back to trying to sleep in a south-of-France heatwave.

The French girl left the next morning, and the Romanian girl, who by then had been staying in the hostel long enough to have unpacked all her clothes and put up posters (Internet, I tell you truth), slept in. The Italian girl woke up, looked at her watch, groaned, and was dressed and gone in under ten minutes with her case spilling out clothes all over the floor. And I spent a day reading and sightseeing, and didn't get back until the early hours of the morning.

By general agreement, youth hostel etiquette forbids turning on the lights after dark. I could see well enough to get changed, though, and I could see that the French girl's former bed was still unoccupied. The Romanian girl seemed to be in bed already, from the huddled lump I could just make out under the sheets, but I couldn't see if the Italian girl had come back yet. I couldn't see her cases, but then, it was dark, and I couldn't see much; for all I knew she'd already left, but she'd talked as if she was going to be around a while longer, from what I could remember.

I was a little worried about her after the night before, so I tried to work out whether she was there or not by listening. It was too hot to sleep, really, anyway, and I had to get a flight early the next morning that I really didn't want to miss, and it was too noisy to get any real rest anyway. I'm a light sleeper, there was traffic outside, and even if the Italian girl hadn't come back, the Romanian girl in the bed opposite her was making enough noise for both of them: sighing, mumbling in her sleep, shifting the sheets and blankets around.
It was so hot I couldn't blame her, but I still couldn't tell if it was just her sleeping badly or whether the Italian girl was there too, and I ended up lying awake for the four hours until I needed to be up, trying to work out whether I could hear two other people in the room or just one.

When it was light enough to get up, and I climbed down from the top bunk, the Italian girl's bed was empty. So was the Romanian girl's. So was the rest of the room - all luggage gone, all posters taken down. I've never packed and cleared out of a room that fast in my life, I can tell you.

So, anyway. Those are some of my stories. What've you got?

Comments

[kittiethedragon.livejournal.com]

I don't generally tell people this, because I'm still picking at it (Being a rationalist, I accept the supernatural as a possibility, but am still interested in some other possibility as well).

It was years ago in Edinburgh's famed Vaults, I was trailing the group because... well, because that's where I was. What other people thought happened: I tripped and went sideways into the wall (Not at all difficult to imagine, the Vaults aren't exactly handicap friendly). And I'm sure that's what it would have looked like if anyone was watching, but I distinctly felt shoved, forcefully enough that my head it the wall as well as my shoulder. I'm light enough of my feet that I recovered enough not to be anything more than irritated, but the expected fellow student was not there. The nearest person was just turning around to see what had happened and was five feet away.

I swear I heard laughter, but that could easily have been someone in the group laughing at something else (and likely was). But I was most certainly affected by something outside myself and gravity. I still don't believe in that which cannot be scientifically verified, but the facts are as presented. That was the most unusual thing that has ever happened to me in terms of the unexplainable.

[eye-of-a-cat.livejournal.com]

There is something creepy about those vaults. I've been down on tours twice, and never saw or felt anything (but did end up wishing the tour guide would play down the "and we never dare stay for more than two minutes in this room!" spiel, because... well, it wasn't that scary the first time), but the girl I know who did claim to have felt something down there also said she got pushed into a wall. Weird.

[kittiethedragon.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the "Most Haunted City In The World" bit gets real old, real quick. Luckily we had a guy who was obviously just having fun.

[mitchy.livejournal.com]

Morning of my 18th birthday party, and I was about to head downstairs when I suddenly felt cold all over, to the point of shivering, and had a sudden sense of dread. My mum saw me and asked me if I was OK, that I looked really strange. I said I didn't know, but I just had the horrible feeling something was going to go wrong that day. She didn't scoff, but tried to convince me all would be be well.

Five hours later, we got a phone call saying a dearly loved uncle had had a heart attack that morning and died. I can't honestly say I predicted it or had an idea, but I knew something was wrong.

A year later, something similar happened when my Gran passed away. Never had anything like that happen since, although I've lost people I've loved.

[eye-of-a-cat.livejournal.com]

Ai. It's probably a good thing it doesn't happen every time you lose someone, though...

[axmxz.livejournal.com]

When I was a junior in highschool, our outdoors club took a rock-climbing trip to West Texas. The canyon we were going to explore was literally in the middle of nowhere - a three-hour drive from the nearest outpost of civilization. After some frolicking by the canyon edge, we pitched out tents and went to bed. The plan was to rise early, descend into the canyon and spend the day exploring, climbing and swimming.

That night I had a dream that one of the boys in our group was in trouble. It wasn't clear what happened - the dream was sort of vague on the details - but it was easy enough to recognize who it was. (The kid was very bright blond, practically albino.)

I was sharing a tent with a friend. When I woke up the next morning, I told her: "Dude, I just had a dream about R____!" "Ew," said the girl. (R___ was considered to be rather creepy.) "Not *that* kidn of a dream, you idiot," I said. "The kind where something bad happens to him!"

Rock-climbing is, as you might know, the kind of endevour where accidents, often serious and sometimes fatal ones, can and do happen despite all precautions. After some deliberation, we decided to tell R____ nothing: a warning was likely to make him nervous 'on the rock' and turn the dream into a self-fulfilling prophecy. So we said nothing.

We descended into the canyon without trouble. Several hours later, we'd already both forgotten about everything and were sunning ourselves on a rock when we heard a stifled scream. It was R_____; he was hanging off a rock, entirely supported by his belayer, and gripping his leg.

There was a lot of blood and a lot of barely suppressed panic on the part of the teachers: they now had to pull everyone out of the canyon and evacuate R____ to a hospital, which, as I mentioned earlier, was a three-hour drive away.

The story had a more or less happy ending. R_____ got a cool scar across his calf to impress chicks with; as for me, I spent so much time thinking about this that I eventually developed something like a crush on him. Also, people started looking at me funny. My tent-mate must have blabbed.

[eye-of-a-cat.livejournal.com]

Eep. At least you don't have to worry about inadvertently causing the accident by telling him about the dream, I suppose.

[axmxz.livejournal.com]

Pretty much, yeah.

[angry-geologist.livejournal.com]

This isn't really creepy, but it is weird, and I've been alternately picking at it and finding comfort in it for years.

I tend to have lucid dreams, and even though I barely remember anything but snatches, I can usually piece together a good yarn out of them in the end. Like the time in the recent past when I dreamed I was trying to prevent someone from killing my chickens in a fire, and the smoke alarm went off. But this dream- I haven't had any like it before or since, even when I put myself into the right frame of mind to try and induce something like it.

It was during my freshman year of college when I had the dream. I was standing in the lobby of my dorm, not really having a purpose. The convenience store had just taken a pizza out of the oven, and you could smell the pepperoni and grease. My friend Denise was on duty, and I was just about ready to go over and say hi to her (I said I had lucid dreams), when this man in white walked up to me and asked him if I remembered him.

Of course I didn't- not right away- he was a lot younger than the last time I'd seen him. But when he got closer, I could recognize the smell. My grandpa, who had passed away in '89, had come to visit me.

I didn't get to see him sick. It was a series of strokes, and it was long before they had methods that would make it survivable. But we had gone to visit him in the hospital the day he died, and I knew when the nurse came out and told us that only my dad could go in, even when Mom was hustling my brother and I away. In that weird, perceptive, little kid way I knew I wouldn't get to see him again.

We hugged each other, and he told me that he was proud of me, and I told him that I missed him. He made me promise to take care of my family, and to keep doing well in school and making them proud. I told him that I loved him, and that he loved me, and the dream ended.

Like I said, I haven't had a dream like that since, but it's given me a very private faith that there's an afterlife, and that my grandparents are OK in it. That could have been that, but there's a bit more to the story that involves my brother.

My brother D, the history buff, was always very close to our Uncle F, the great uncle who had fought in WWII and gave my brother all his books and memorabillia. He passed away not too long after I had the dream. When it was my brother's freshman year in college, he had a very similar dream, where Uncle F greeted him in the lobby of his dorm, and told him in that soft voice of his that he was proud of him.

Again, what this means, I'm not entirely sure. I suppose I'll figure it out.

[eye-of-a-cat.livejournal.com]

That kind of dream's happened to someone else I know, as well. A good experience, I'm guessing, even if a little odd at the time.

[miladygrey.livejournal.com]

One night about a year ago, I had one of those freak-out nightmares where you think someone's in the room. I clearly remember opening my eyes and thinking "Oh, it was just a dream." And then my eyes focused, and there was someone standing in the doorway. I couldn't tell gender--male, or female with very short hair--and wearing some kind of military uniform. It was dark, and he/she was wearing dark grey, but I could see him/her quite clearly. And whoever it was, they did not like me, I could feel it. He/she started coming toward the bed, I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again, nobody was there.

I have the nightmares every now and then (stress-triggered), but the scary things have never followed me out into reality, before or since.

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

I've had dreams where you think you've woken up, and actually you're still dreaming. Reckon it was one of those?

[miladygrey.livejournal.com]

No, because after I opened my eyes and the figure was gone, I immediately turned on my light and read something light and funny until my heart rate returned to normal. *grins* If it was some angry ghost, my "Calvin and Hobbes" collection likely scared it away.

[eye-of-a-cat.livejournal.com]

Argh, dreams. I went through a phase of having really lucid nightmares a few years ago (sort of, in that I knew I was dreaming but couldn't control the world around me much), and worked out that if I stood still in the dream and really concentrated, I could wake myself up. Which worked fine for months, until the dream where I was running away from two men who were chasing me through a medieval village, and a woman hid me in her house - I cheerfully explained to her that it was okay because I was dreaming and would be safe as soon as I woke up, and she told me that not only did she already know I was dreaming, but so did they, and they were determined to kill me before I got a chance to wake myself up so that I'd die for real. Probably just my subconscious keeping two steps ahead of me, but argh all the same.

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

1. When I was 11, I played the harp. As I didn't have an instrument of my own, I practised on the school harp. It was kept in the teaching room of one of the cello teachers, a rather grouchy lady who tended to get very irritated when I popped in and out to borrow the harp, which I'd then take to the nearest vacant practice room. One day, a bit after school so probably 4ish, I was waiting outside her room to return the harp. I peered through the frosted glass pane by the door, and could see her sitting in her usual chair, with her bright blonde hair and the red knitting she often had. She didn't reply when I rapped a few times. One of her students, a friend of mine, was passing, and I asked her to go in for me I was eleven, ok?). There was no one in the room. It might have been a trick of the light (which was the blue of dusk at that point), but with blonde hair and red knitting? Who knows.

I have a couple of others, but DT's just arrived, so more later.

[eye-of-a-cat.livejournal.com]

Weird. It would be a very vivid trick of the light to create that, surely? Especially with bright colours.

[nonethewiser.livejournal.com]

Our old apartment was built in the early 1800s, and when I was working from home during the day, I'd constantly see the shape of small animals (I'd often think it was the cat) moving around in the other room... My husband would frequently see someone with his hand on the door to our apartment, too.

[eye-of-a-cat.livejournal.com]

I swear I've seen a cat running across two of the rooms in the old part of my parents' house, too. Possibly just an optical illusion (I only saw it once when I was looking directly at it), but my dad claims to have seen the same thing in the same places, too. At least it's only a cat, I suppose.