Anyone Ever Lived In A Haunted House?

In our second house, husband started talking about it feeling like it was haunted. He said there was a cat haunting it. In our bedroom was a cupboard, door flush with the wall, where he reckoned this cat 'lived'.

He got me so spooked (hah!) that in the end we blocked off the cupboard door with a piece of furniture. Then at some point that got moved.

One day I saw the ghost cat. It came from the direction of the cupboard, leapt in the air--and vanished.

I went round the house checking on our own cats (three) to make sure none of them could have been in the room. All were accounted for. I told my husband the story and we agreed to block the cupboard door again.

The cat never reappeared.

Frankly I think it was probably a trick of the light, but I was very worked up at the time I 'saw' the 'ghost'.

I think I've told a piece of this on here before, but I'm too lazy to find the thread. So apologies for the repetition to anyone with a long memory.

We lived in a haunted house when I was little--moved in before I was two, out when I was ten. We never felt like our ghost was evil, and odd things didn't happen very often anyway. But they did happen.

I remember one night my brother yelled out, terrified, and my mother ran to his room. I think my sister and I got up, but were told to get back to bed. In the morning, we were told my brother's bed had started shaking on its own. My mom saw it happen...and promptly went out and got him a new bed.

Another time my sister said she saw things shake on top of her dresser. I didn't see that, either. It's not impossible she was angling for a new dresser, given what my brother got.

Me, I never saw anything...'saw' being the operative word. I got home from school one day, opened the door and yelled "Anybody home?"

And a voice from the top of the stairs said, "Mommy?"

It was clearly a small child--the first thing I thought of was the toddler across the street. Nobody locked their doors, so it wasn't impossible he'd wandered across the street and into our house. I ran upstairs, calling his name, ready to take him back home before his mom freaked out.

Except he wasn't there. Nobody was there. Aha. I was the youngest of four. I was seven or eight years old, but I wasn't stupid. One of them had decided to scare me and was hiding. I didn't bother to search for them (him--my next-oldest sib was the prime suspect). I went downstairs, sat on the couch and read a book, determined not to give my brother the satisfaction of a reaction.

Then he came home. In his Cub Scouts uniform, latest badge project in his hand. My other brother got home from track practice. And my sister caught a ride home with my Mom.

It wasn't until I realized that I'd been totally alone in the house when the voice called from the top of the stairs that I finally thought "ghost."

The people we bought the house from? They didn't want to live there anymore--after their 3-year-old daughter died after falling down those stairs. That's why we never felt threatened, I think. We were just sad.

I remember someone telling me the story/a story of Drake's Drum when I was about six - all about ghostly drum sounds, warning of battle. I think that was my first introduction to the concept of ghosts - and at the time I thought they were real (as in don't now or if they are I don't see them). Left me scared of the dark for a while and a rare (because it was in a city) owl hooting outside literally had me jumping in fear.
Going to the loo in the night (had to do it by night light, so lots of looming shadows) was really scary for a while, I remember being very skittish about it, trying to run as fast as possible and looking round in every direction.
Didn't help it was a creaky old house, with high ceilings and plenty of shadows. Even though it was in a city with street lights, we had heavy curtains so it was dark.

So not a ghost as such, but I was sure they were just around the corner and it was very oppressive.

Sat Nam! (Literally "Truth Name"--a Sikh greeting)

Not a ghost story per se, but when I was 8 I watched our guinea pig die on our utility porch. Fast forward a dozen years. My parents got a Doberman and put her water and food bowl in the utility porch about a foot from where the guinea pig had died. Dog shook like crazy and obviously didn't want to eat or drink at that spot. My parents eventually moved the bowls.

Blessings,

Siri Kirpal

My husband lived in a Victorian house back in the Sixties when he was a kid. He and his brother had a number of experiences, including seeing a man with a handlebar mustache lighting his cigar using the gas stove in the kitchen, and a woman walking through his living room in Victorian dress, but her ankles were cut off as if she was walking on a level below the subfloor.

The house was in an older area of Toronto, but has since been torn down to make room for a park.

Im a skeptic too. The only experience I've ever had that I cant explain is the time I was in a basement, heard someone clearly walk down the basement steps, but found no one there when I went to see who it was. There was no place a person couldve hid (and no time for them to hide), so it couldnt have been someone playing a trick. I just stood there dumbfounded for a few seconds then got the hell out of there (skeptic or not, that's just plain creepy). Someone else was with me, and they heard the same thing and had the same reaction, so I know I didnt imagine it.

The first house I owned after college was a 100 year old victorian I purchased and remodeled.

Long story short the original owner died when she fell down the main staircase. Legend was that she was a dyed in the wool whisky drinker and if there was not a bottle of whisky out on the counter in the kitchen her ghost would stomp on the steps.

The first few days I lived there the bumps and creaks from the stair case kept me up non-stop. By the third day I went and purchased a bottle of whisky to keep out on the kitchen counter.

Never had an issue in the house till my last night in it and we packed up the kitchen. That night was filled with loud noises.

Never had any issues in the three other homes I have owned.

Oooh I have a story! Pick me, pick me

When I was 12, my family (mother, father, 9-year-old sister) moved into a new house. It was awesome and had everything we wanted: three floors (including one underground, more on that later), three bathrooms, a fireplace, a massive garden, and I even had my own bedroom. This was the early 2000s and the house was built in the 60s, so it was only about 40 years old and as far as I know nothing bad had happened there. It was beautiful and not creepy at all. Not the best candidate for a haunting, right?

My mother used to teach English classes in our living room, so we often had kids coming to our house after school. They weren't allowed to come upstairs, where the bedrooms were. One day I was sitting in my bedroom with the door open, when I saw a little boy run past. Of course I assumed he was one of my mother's students, so I called after him. He didn't answer so I walked out into the corridor, just in time to see him run into the bathroom. I ran in after him. The bathroom was empty.

I tried to tell my parents but, as you can guess, they didn't believe me. I was a 12-year-old kid with a massive imagination - either my mind was playing tricks on me, or I'd made it up for the attention. I was fairly sure of what I'd seen, but then maybe it was just my imagination. It didn't happen again.

What we all noticed, however, was an intense impression of being watched. At first it wasn't very bad, just a gut feeling that made you glance over your shoulder and feel uneasy that nobody was there. I gradually started to feel uncomfortable whenever I was home alone after dark. In our old house, I sometimes used to get up in the middle of the night to sit in the living room and enjoy the silence; here, even the thought of doing that scared me. Oh, and the lights would flicker for no reason, which was not awesome at all.

The worst was the basement. It had four rooms: a laundry, a wine cellar, a bomb shelter (totally normal for European houses built in the 60s) and an enormous playroom where we kept most of our books, toys and art supplies (paintbrushes, old cardboard, thread and beads, and so on). During the day, my sister and I loved to go down there and read, or play noisy games we couldn't do upstairs. But as soon as it started to get dark, we would leave. There was nothing creepy about the room in itself - the bomb shelter and the wine cellar were way creepier - but whenever I went there after dark, my heart would start beating really fast and I couldn't get out of there too soon. You know when you're terrified out of your mind but you have no idea why? That's what it felt like.

When I was 14, like a lot of teenagers, I became interested in ghosts and the paranormal. I remembered the little boy I'd seen two years ago and decided to investigate. With a couple of friends, we made our own Ouija Board (side note: don't use them, those things are creepy as hell). We got a "spirit" right away, who told us his name was Guillaume and he was nine years old. Bear in mind I hadn't told my friends about the little boy I'd seen.

"Are you the only ghost here?" We asked. The answer was no, so we asked how many others there were.

And Guillaume, super nonchalant as hell, was like:

"Oh, about twenty. Mainly in the basement."

Of course we totally freaked out and didn't touch the Ouija Board ever again.

Now comes the creepiest bit (as if we weren't creeped out already). I started feeling like I was being watched all the time, not only at night but during the day as well. My sister had the same feeling. I asked my mother and though she said she did as well, she pretty much dismissed it. She's always been a skeptic and hairs standing up on her neck whenever she turned around wasn't going to change that. As for my father, by this time he was getting pretty withdrawn and I didn't talk to him much. His relationship with my mother was deteriorating (they divorced when I was 15) and ghosts weren't his top priority just then.

But back to the creepies. I normally sleep very well, but around this time I started to have nightmares. They were all about this girl, about 10 years old, with long dark hair and a dirty white dress (picture the girl from The Ring - which, by the way, I hadn't seen at the time). Here are a few of the dreams to give you an idea:

Dream #1: I get up in the middle of the night to pee. As soon as I step out of my room, I notice The Girl standing in front of my sister's room, at the other end of the corridor. She's just standing there and staring at me. I back against the wall. She takes a step forward, and her eyes start to glow. "It's time for you to come with me", she says. Then her eyes become so bright that everything turns white, and I wake up.

Dream #2: I'm walking through the children's plot in the cemetery. I feel so sad for all the children who are buried here, and I'm putting flowers on their little graves. Then, next to me, The Girl appears. She stretches out her hands and grabs my wrist. "Please come with me", she says. "You need to go where you belong." I try to wrestle away but her grip is too strong. She pulls me towards the corner of the graveyard, which for some reason is the most terrifying corner I've ever seen. I can't resist her. Then, just before we reach the corner, I wake up.

Dream #3: I just got home from school, and the house is eerily empty and dark. I call out to my parents. Thinking I hear a sound upstairs, I walk up the staircase, but it's even darker on the first floor and nobody is there. My parents' bedroom door is closed. I reach out to open it, but just then, somebody grabs me around the neck and starts to strangle me. I fall onto my back, and then I see that the person trying to choke me is The Girl. "Now you're coming with me", she says. Then I wake up.

Every night when I went to bed, it felt like someone was standing in the shadows of my room and watching me sleep. I couldn't sleep with my back to the room, I had to have it against the wall. One time, I woke up in the middle of the night feeling like something warm was sitting on my feet. I could move the rest of my body, but nothing below the ankle. It was weird and after a while, the weight shifted and I was able to move again. Several other times, my iPod woke me up by randomly playing music at maximum volume. In the end I disconnected it from the speakers, and it stopped.

One day, my sister came into my room and asked if I was also creeped out by our house. I was like, "OMG TOTALLY". I told her about all the weird things I'd experienced and how I didn't even dare to go into the playroom in the basement anymore. My sister agreed and then said: "Hey, have you seen Samantha?"

I was like… um… who's Samantha?

"Oh, she's this ghost girl who hangs around the house", she said. "She's kind of a demon, I guess. She's got long black hair and she wears a white dress that's dirty at the bottom. She keeps telling me to come with her."

Cue me freaking out.

We ended up moving out of that house just after my 17th birthday, five years after we'd moved in. The first thing I noticed about our next house was that it didn't have an oppressive atmosphere, and that I didn't feel like I was being watched. It was a relief, in a strange way, to be able to come home late and not be terrified of what the shadows might hide. My mother still lives there now. She never mentions the weird things that happened in our old house.

Recently, however, I was visiting my father and the subject of that house came up. Right away, my father declared that it was haunted. He said that he'd felt uncomfortable ever since we moved in. Then, after a pause, he added:

"Hey, you know how it was a relatively new house and nothing bad had happened in it?"

"Yeah?" I said.

"It was built on the site of a battlefield. And the land next door turned out to be a prehistoric burial site."



So, that's my experience with a haunted house! Maybe there's a simple, plausible explanation to it - but in any case, it makes for a good story

I think I've mentioned this before, too, but...

When my folks first moved into our house, the neighbors kept asking when they could meet my grandmother. When my folks would explain that neither of their mothers lived with them, the neighbors would then ask who the old woman was who kept looking out of the upstairs window...

And I grew up with footsteps upstairs and on the steps, doors closing and not being able to be opened, voices in various rooms when no one was in them. The one thing that really spooked me happened a couple days after my father died. I was in the dining room, writing out thank you cards, and there was a sudden, huge bang on the outside of the wall. Then one on the outside of the living room wall. I followed the banging through every room in the house, each one on the outside of the house, including the stairwell and the upstairs rooms. When there had been a bang outside every room in the house, it stopped. I would like to believe it was my dad, but I know there's no natural explanation for it.

When I was a kid, we lived in a condo that had some weird stuff going on. The lights in my parents' room would flicker and go off randomly, and my mom swears that she woke up one night because someone was holding her hand. Around that same time, I supposedly told my cousin that I saw "demons" floating around the house. I don't remember saying this, but she said it really freaked her out.

As an adult, my husband and I entered what may have been a haunted apartment building, while we were searching for somewhere to live, just before our wedding. It was a normal-looking apartment, perhaps a bit rundown, but nothing terrible. It wasn't very old, either. But from the instant I walked inside, I felt a growing horror. I had the irrational urge to scream, for no apparent reason. I nearly had a panic attack, so after a cursory glance at the living room and kitchen, I excused myself and went outside. The panic eased and I felt better, although still uneasy.

My husband joined me after a few minutes. He hadn't experienced the same irrational fear, but said he'd felt distinctly uncomfortable in there. At least it wasn't all in my head! No idea what the deal was, but it was one of the creepiest things I've experienced.

Also, where I used to live in a very small town in the North Carolina mountains, there was this two-hundred-year-old mansion on the edge of town, called the Shook House. It's like a Southern plantation home--three stories tall, with wrap-around porches. But it was so rundown and desolate, it looked like a classic haunted house. Everyone in town had stories about how the furniture inside would move around on its own and people would die there. Probably all made up, but it certainly looked the part! Sometime after we moved away, the house was completely restored and turned into a museum. Now, it's gorgeous! (Here, you can see before and after pictures of the restoration.)

I stayed in a house in SW Victoria (Australia), which the owners claimed was haunted. Unfortunately, every incident that was used as evidence of the supernatural could be equally well explained by dodgy maintenance.

This is rather lovely. It's from a Sydney storytelling slam. The storyteller relates her attempts to rid her apartment of what she believes was a rather smelly ghost. (Audio, 6 mins, hopefully not geoblocked.)

Qui Amat Scribere said:

Lord o'mighty, StarryEyes. That's actually very scary, I feel terrible for your childhood self! Of course it makes a good tale now, but whatever was happening then, whether it was night terrors/imagination/spectral beings or what, it's pretty damn frightening.

Click to expand...

It was definitely scary! I myself am halfway between skeptic and believer, in that I believe in ghosts, but for me to accept a paranormal experience as true it has to be submitted to some rigourous testing. I'm still not sure if what happened in that house was real or my imagination, but it definitely freaked us all out!

BTW, I just thought of another story. In this case, I know the simple explanation but with a bit of tweaking it could easily be turned into something much more mysterious, say, in a story about possession.

One evening when I was 16-17 years old, I was watching a movie in the living room with my sister. My sister kept begging our mother to watch another movie after this, but it was quite late at night and of course we weren't allowed. Then our mother went to bed and the movie finished, and my sister decided she was going to watch another movie anyway. I was tired so I said she could watch it alone.

I went upstairs, brushed my teeth and went to sleep. The next morning, I got up as usual and when I came down for breakfast, my sister stared at me and asked about what happened the night before. I was like, "um... I went to bed?"

Apparently an hour or so after I'd gone to bed, my sister was still in the living room watching a movie (horror, no less) when she saw me come down the stairs. I just stood there with a blank expression and said something along the lines of: "It's dark in my room. I'm scared." My sister shrugged it off and told me to go back to sleep, but I just stood there.

In the end she suggested I should sit on the sofa with her, so I walked over and sat down. I asked a couple of questions about what was happening in the movie, then just sat there staring at the screen. After a while, our mother must have heard the noise and came downstairs to tell us off. I just sat there and stared at her while she shouted at us, then when she told us to go to bed I stood up and walked back to my room. All this without blinking an eye or showing any expression. Both my mother and sister confirmed this, but as for me... I don't remember a thing.

I know I was probably just sleepwalking, but my sister still insists it's the creepiest thing I've ever done.

I have nothing to add. My house is boring and warm and dry and safe. But I'm loving all these experiences and stories.

The house I grew up in was built in the 1890s. As a child, I was plagued by nightmares. But, it wasn't until I was a teenager and sleeping alone in that house that I felt like it was haunted. It was the same for other members of my family. The house only felt haunted when you were alone.

1) My cat refused to go downstairs at night. She'd often wake up in the middle of the night and start growling at the door.

2) More than once, I heard footsteps starting from the 1st story steps and going all the way up into the attic. It was a spiral staircase with very squeaky steps.

3) I heard footsteps in the attic over my head. It wasn't mice, as the attic was redone into an extra bedroom and very clean.

4) Unconsciously, I'd positioned my stuff animal collection (about a 100 from all different shelves in the room) to all have the same focal point at the bedroom door. I didn't notice this until my brother walked into my room and asked me why they were all staring at him.

5) Lights turned on and off by themselves.

6) I'd often wake up and there'd be a "presence" by my bedroom door or at the foot of my bed. I've had this in other houses, but very rare. This house was almost weekly.

7) The house was insanely cold and drafty.

8) I could never convince any of my friends to spend more than one night there with me.

9) I started having weird flashback, hallucinations when I wasn't at the house. I used to see people on the road at night, hear voices. I only lived by myself there for a few months. When I left the house, all these "hallucinations" stopped.

After talking with my mom and brother, who've had similar experiences in this house and others, I believe that some of us are more "sensitive" to experience these kind of things. I know that if I dwell in that mindset, I'll start seeing weird things again, so I try to keep myself closed off.

I lived in another house that I thought was haunted, but this one had positive energy and I never felt scared.

1) One night my husband, kid, and I were sleeping in our bed. I woke up, saw this bright light above my head. I started yelling and woke up my husband. He described seeing the same exact thing as me. It was like a hovering, white golf ball of light. It didn't go away until we turned on the light. He saw it once again a few weeks later, but I never did.

2) The TV and cable turned on by itself in the middle of the night, often at full blast. It did briefly scared me when this happened while I was in the shower.

3) My kids toys would act out. We had a color book that I videoed saying red, red, red....and then this spec of dust leaves the red button and it stops making noise. (Warning for the video: My kid is loud and annoying.)

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10200684539051697&set=vb.1107669945&type=3

EDIT: There are perfectly reasonable explanations for this happening, but the timing is coincidental.

But, this house had more of a guardian angel feel. My husband thought it was his father watching over the kid, since his father passed away right before our kid was born. It could also have to do with the two boxes of dog ashes that my husband feels like toting around instead of burying. I finally convinced him to put them into storage.

My younger son and I are very in tune with ghosts.

My bed headboard occasionally has sounds like someone tapping it repeatedly. That spirit has moved with us three times.

In a cape cod-style house we lived in, a little child spirit loved playing with our sons' toys. Bump-and-go trains would start up on their own, a toy hammer was used in the middle of the night, banging on the wood floor, and bowls were taken out of the kitchen cabinet, then put back and we could hear the patter of little feet (I checked--my kids were in bed).

In this house, the 1920s house I had grown up in and moved back into, there's the spirit of a former owner who was of the cranky type. One day I was very stormy and she shoved my shoulder. My sister and husband saw my shoulder move. I felt her hand.

She has called out "help" from where her old bedroom was. She recently threw a chocolate syrup bottle from the refrigertor shelf across the kitchen.

Oh, and she must have loved opera. We've heard the stereo turn on in the middle of the night and opera blasts from the speakers. Then it turns off. (And the stereo doesn't have a timer of any sort. It has to be manually turned on and off.)

She's more of a pain than scary.

Marlys said:

And a voice from the top of the stairs said, "Mommy?"

It was clearly a small child--the first thing I thought of was the toddler across the street. Nobody locked their doors, so it wasn't impossible he'd wandered across the street and into our house. I ran upstairs, calling his name, ready to take him back home before his mom freaked out....
The people we bought the house from? They didn't want to live there anymore--after their 3-year-old daughter died after falling down those stairs. That's why we never felt threatened, I think. We were just sad.

Click to expand...

Fabulous story, and well told. I refuse to believe in ghosts because that would upset my entire cosmology applecart. But stories like yours, StarryEyes and others here make it tempting.

Despite the aforementioned disbelief, I did have one odd experience, though I'm afraid it's a lot less impressive than some I've read here. I was staying in the summer house of a friend in Switzerland, a very old stone house near Lake Lucerne. It had been his grandfather's house and went back for additional generations: a beautiful, gracious home. The problem was that for some unknown reason, I was scared every moment that I spent in the house. The late grandfather's lab --he was a doctor---was particularly uncomfortable. I'm not easily spooked and I don't believe in ghosts, yet I couldn't overcome this fear, which spiked at night. It got so bad that I needed an escort to go to the bathroom. I never saw anything untoward, never felt anything similar anywhere else...it all seemed specific to the house. I did ask my friend if it was thought to be haunted. He said he'd never seen anything out of the ordinary, but his grandfather had died in his laboratory; and as it was a very old house, he supposed other people had died there as well.