Is your house haunted?

I used to work in a café, which was in the oldest part of Derby in the UK.  And Derby, fact fans, is supposed to be one of the most haunted places in England.  The upstairs of the building was a beauty salon and the lass in charge of it used to 'sense' things on the really dark and really creepy staircase that ran through the centre of the building...and when I used to close up at the end of a night I didn't like doing it on my own because a) I am a big girl's blouse and b) the vibes I got gave me the willies.  I never saw anything but had that whole "someone's watching you" atmosphere going on.  Brrr!  The chaps who owned/ran the shoe shop opposite us had a ghost on their stairs too because some fellow hanged himself on them years and years ago.  WOOOOOOOEEEEEOOOOOO!

We live in an old farmhouse built in 1896. Been here about 6 years now, done a lot of rennovation on it.
When we first moved in we'd hear sounds in one of the guest bedrooms downstairs that were like someone dragging furniture around. This stopped after we redid that room.
The wife often hears footsteps in the bedroom if I am in there asleep and she is awake in the living room, like someone is walking around the bed. She always goes and looks and it stops, me snoring away blissfully.
We both hear voices from the dining room/kitchen, like 2 people having a conversation.
One night we had the glass French doors to the hallway closed and were on the couch watching television and suddenly there was a massive BOOM! and the French doors were shaking back and forth like someone had just walked into them, that was weird and has never happened again.

Nope. We built the house. But the forty acres of woods are haunted.

40 acres! Nice
You could build a compound.

Ask the other Librarians. I've already built the compound. 100 yard cleared killing zone. Generator, well, septic system and tons and tons of guns and ammo.

We even have guards. They're our pygmie goats.

Living the dream! A moat, drawbridge and watchtower/killing tower would fit right in

Sounds to me like a lead-up to a joke about expenses, if you were a member of parliment!*

*topical English joke!  Go go current affairs!!!

Oooh--nice thread!  I don't currently live in a haunted house, but the last place we lived in was.  The very first day we moved in I was in the kitchen.  I set a box on the table and a voice asked "What are you doing?" and I thought it was my hubby being critical where I put the box so I said "What does it look like?" and turned around.  Nobody was there and I ran down the hall to find him outside at the truck.  Creepy.  It always felt like I was being watched and on more than one occasion my razor was "thrown" at me while I was showering.  And when I'd go downstairs to the basement I always felt like something was grabbing my ankles--one day I actually fell down them but something pushed me back against the wall.  It was really weird.  We found out while later that a previous owner had fallen down those stairs and died in the basement. 

My first novel, An American Haunting (which has nothing to do with that assinine movie, BTW), was inspired by an actual house that we lived in.  We had all kinds of strange occurrences in it, including my daughters and nephews seeing "him" peeking at them out of mirrors.  I thought it was just their imaginations until my wife saw "him" too.  Much of what happened in the book really happened, with a definite careen into weirdsville when I started fictionalizing.  But the house was real, and it really was haunted.  

Here's one.  This is hearsay, but I could tell by their faces and body language that I wasn't at the bit end of a joke.

I hade a roomate when I first moved into my house.  One day I come home from work and all the doors are shut.  Said roomate is in the living room with a friend I havent seen in years who has two young culdren.  They start telling me they had to shut all the doors because his five year old was wandering through the house.

In the house there is a room smack-dab in the middle that has no windows.  They found his son in that room lookig around all bemused--the room was vacant at the time with not so much as a piece of furniture in it.

His son says him, "what are all these people doing in here?"

At this point in time my roomate was preparing to move out, and I lived there alone for several years until I got married.  There were many little things that happened in that time including the dice story from another thread.  A shot glass went missing, the lid to the trashcan vanished.  My wife finds Tums sitting in the same spot on her bed from time to time and we believe the ghost doesn't like her mother as her cell phone constantly turns on and off while she's here.

Frankly, I don't really like her mother either.

The first night we moved into our current house, my wife got up in the middle of the night to adjust the thermostat.  The thermostat is in the hall directly across from the guest bathroom.  Just as she touched the thermostat, a radio that was in the bathroom came on at high volume, scaring her to death.

The radio continued to come on by itself several times, including a couple of times while I was at home by myself.  My wife left her Norah Jones CD in the player, and after that it switched to a certain song on that CD every time it came on by itself.  Once I was watching Saturday Night Live and Norah Jones came on and I decided I'd had enough, and unplugged the radio.

For some reason, that bathroom has been the center of other phenomena.  Every clock we put in there stops.  A couple of times we have come in there (it stays shut most of the time) to find it full of weird insects whose origins we couldn't trace.  My wife put a twine bow on the wall above the bathtub.  We found it on the floor clear across the room -- if it had just fallen off, it would have landed in the bathtub.

Several people have reported hearing noises, kind of like muddled conversation in the next room, or a TV or radio left on.  Once I was certain I heard the TV left on in the master bedroom.  I could hear noises and see a bluish light playing on the white door that led to the garage (which was directly opposite).  As soon as I rounded the corner and could see into the bedroom, it all stopped immediately.  The TV was not on.

The first Halloween we were in the house, we had a Halloween party.  At one point we got out a Ouija board and it went wild, zipping around claiming to be dead friends, relatives, and people we'd never heard of.  One told us that the house was an "easy" place to cross.  I don't know how much Ouija board lore I believe, but a lot of psychics and whatnot seem to think they're dangerous.  So maybe that wasn't our best idea... but most of the above were already happening before Halloween.

Oh, and I almost forgot one:  One night we were asleep in the bedroom, me, the missus and the family dog.  We heard a noise like a door slamming.  It was enough to wake up all three of us, and the dog started growling, just like she does when a stranger is at the door.  I picked up a big stick and the dog and I went to see what was up.  The dog charged the front door, still growling, but no one was there.  There are windows on both sides of the door, so I could see clearly; no one in the yard or running away.  All the doors were closed and deadbolted.  You would have to have a key to lock them back if they were unlocked.  Never did figure out what happened.  I might be able to dismiss it if it was one or even two of us, but the dog too?

   Here's my true haunted house tale.

True Scary Stories:

A Bump in The Night

     Have you ever gotten that creeping sensation on the back of your neck as you are walking up the basement stairs? You know, that feeling that if you turn around your going to see some kind of thing reaching out from the darkness to grab you from behind. It makes you want to run the rest of the way up the stairs without looking back, maybe because if you do, look back that is, you will see the very thing that you have imagined. Maybe you will avoid glancing back, because you really don’t want to see it, because looking back expectantly might make it real. How many times have you run up the stairs in fear for your life, holding your breath and the scream in it, all the way up to slam the basement door behind you?

     On that note, let me share with you, a little true scary story.                                                                                                                              

     I was living in Detroit at the time, renting an old house with a friend of mine. It was just the two of us living in this big old house, and my friend’s two dogs Nike and Cleo.

     Nike is a very large black male Doberman/Rott, who once growled at me threateningly when I yelled at him for crapping in my room. When he showed off his menacing teeth, I quickly added that it was ok if he wanted to crap in my room again, really, anytime. Cleo on the other hand, is a petite female red Doberman with a sweet disposition.

     This house, which my friend and I were renting, was not a typical old home. It had a fully finished basement with a bar, sitting area, and a bathroom. The main floor had a large living room, kitchen, dining room, one full bath, and one bedroom, which was my friend’s room. The upper floor had two bedrooms, one of which was mine, the other empty, as we were looking for another tenet to share rent with at the time. 

     I was home alone on the night that this story takes place, at around 11:30 or so, with only Cleo the sweet petite Doberman for company as Nike was spending the night at the vet. I had my nose deep into Stephen King’s The Stand, one of my very favorite novels, when something strange happened.

     At the time, I was sitting up in my bed with Cleo lying at my feet. I heard a noise from downstairs on the main floor. Cleo heard it as well and sat up with her ears perked towards my open bedroom door, and the stairs just beyond it. It was an unusual noise as I remember, a muffled thump, followed by a dragging sound. Kind of like the sound that a full garbage bag makes when you drag it across the kitchen floor. The noise, while soft, was clearly audible. It seemed to have come from the kitchen, which was just to the left of the stairway up to the second floor. After a few seconds of the dragging noise, the house returned to the silence in which I had been reading.

     As I said, I was home alone with Cleo; no one else was in the house other than me as far as I knew. I had not heard anyone come in, and my friend was not due in until the morning, as he worked the night shift at a steel mill, operating a loading crane.

     I waited for a moment, perhaps in confusion, or perhaps I was questioning whether I had really heard anything at all. Was my mind playing tricks on me, had I only imagined the noise? Cleo answered that question for me; she whined nervously and stood up on the end of the bed facing my open door. That settled it; I was definitely not hearing things.

     I jumped up from my bed, and tossed the book back onto it. I moved quickly to my doorway and stopped there to listen. Nothing, I heard only the empty silence of an old house settling, along with the muted noise from the outside world. Cleo whined again, I turned to look back at her and saw that she remained on the end of my bed with her tail tucked meekly between her legs. Cleo was not the brave type, but nevertheless this did not encourage me. I realized that I was trembling and tried to shake it off. Screwing up my courage, I called out.  

     “Hey, who’s home?” I hollered towards the stairway as loud as my shaking voice could muster. I could not believe that I felt the way I did at that moment. I was inexplicably terrified, I had that feeling you get when you turn off the basement light before walking up the stairs. You know that feeling don’t you? Like something is creeping up behind you on the stairs, and you want to run the rest of the way up to escape certain death.

     No answer came to my hollered question. I heard a thump from behind me and let out a little strangled scream in spite of myself. I spun in terror, only to realize that the thump had been Cleo jumping down from the bed. She had moved over to the farthest corner from the door in my room and turned to look back towards the doorway, growling softly. The sound she made was somewhere in the neighborhood between a mewling whine of terror, and a growl of impending violence. Now I was scared shitless.  

     I half expected to hear someone creeping up the steps to the upper floor, someone coming to get me. I was in Detroit after all, and our neighborhood had the usual number of break-ins per year. The carpeted steps that led to the second floor however, would surely muffle if not silence the sound of soft creeping footsteps. The light in my bedroom along with the kitchen light on the main floor, were the only lights on in the house. I quickly moved to change this, stepping out of my room I reached out and flipped on the stairway light.  

     “If there’s someone in this house, I have a fucking gun, and I’ll kill you dead so don’t fuck around with me!” I yelled down the stairs in what I hoped was a firm confident voice. I probably sounded more like someone asking, please don’t hurt me Mr. Killer. Again, no answer, and I was obviously bluffing about the gun. I did not own a gun at the time, but my friend did. His Remington shotgun was at that very minute, waiting downstairs in his bedroom closet for eager hands to pick it up. The thought of someone in the house getting to that gun before I did got me moving.

     “I’m coming down and I have a gun,” I called out again to any unwanted intruders.

     “I shit you not man, if someone is fucking with me you better say something before I fucking shoot you,” I shouted as I moved around the stair rail. Seeing no one there waiting for me and letting out the breath I had been holding, I slowly walked down the stairs to the main floor.  

     There was no door at the bottom of the steps, just an open doorway. Directly in front of me I could see the hallway closet door slightly open as it always was. It took quite an effort to close that door, and if you did close it, the door would be twice as hard to open, so we just left it ajar. This knowledge however did nothing to relieve the fear that someone might be hiding in there, waiting for me to walk past. The light from the kitchen shined from the left of the stairway in which I stood, the darkened hallway that led to the bathroom and my roommate’s bedroom door lay to my right. 

     Taking a deep breath, I ran into the dark hallway towards my roommate’s bedroom. I slammed into it in the semi darkness and fumbled at the doorknob in a near panic. For a one scary moment, I thought the door was locked, but it opened and I ran through and slammed it closed behind me. My breath was coming in gasps as I flipped on the light in his room, happy beyond belief to find it empty. I practically ran to the closet in the right corner. The closet had no door, and I was almost overjoyed to see my friend’s shotgun leaning barrel up in the corner. I pulled the gun out, checked to see if it was loaded, and found it was not. Though I did not own a gun myself, I was no stranger to them. I reached up into the upper shelf of the closet, and felt the box of shells. Pulling them out, I quickly loaded four shells into the gun, and pumped one into the firing chamber.

     Now, when I opened the door into the dark hallway and called out my warning about having a loaded gun, I was telling the truth, and even I could hear it in my voice. For the next fifteen minutes I moved through the house from room to room. Flipping on lights, throwing open doors, and calling out my warning. I searched every nook and cranny in that house, starting on the main floor, and then moving to the basement. I found nothing, no unlocked outter doors, and no broken windows where an intruder might have gotten in. I discovered no monsters in the dark corners of the basement, nothing. Nothing that is, except for that feeling, that creepy, something is coming up behind you feeling.

     Cleo remained up in my room for the rest of the night. She absolutely refused to come out, so I joined her. I went to sleep that night with Cleo at my side and the shotgun in my arms, behind my locked bedroom door.  

Mark M. Johnson.

you gave me the shivers!

No sadly. I bought my house brand new about 7 years ago. Got to pick all the stuff inside. The only remotely spooky thing is this:

We live pretty far fromm Seattle, about 40 miles. We are on a huge hill that looks at Mt. Rainier. The place we moved to used to be cow pasture but they built over all that stuff and put in housing. We have a lot of wildlife. Coyotes, deer and stuff. One night I saw some deer creeping around and I thought for sure they were eating my wife's flowers again. I broke out the video camera, turned out all the lights and moved to the window that looks out on the side of the house. 

I didn't record I just left it on Night vision. So I am panning it around and I stop and get chills because standing in front of my window is this little girl in an old fashion dress that buttons to her neck and she is holding a basket of flowers with both hands in front of her. 

That shit freaked me out!

This thread is guaranteed to give people the heebie jeebies!  I did a Ouija board, at a friend's house with a bunch of friends.  I'd read a lot of stuff that said they're safe to use as long as you take them seriously and use them with respect so off we went...

My friend's younger sister ended up in tears and had to leave the room, because of the gradually overwhelming sense of sadness we all started to feel, and I 'sensed' (is the best way I can describe it) a young girl next to my friend (who moved aside a little bit without anyone prompting him) and after we'd ended the q & a, I started to describe what I 'saw' and my other friends all finished off the description - we'd all 'seen' the same girl and got the same 'sense' of her being mistreated (tied up/beaten by harsh parents).  It was horrible!  I've never done one since (this was circa 1998).

Also, one of my friends acted as the designated 'speaker' and posed our questions to the spirit, and I wanted to know what it was like where she was - I figured, since it seemed to be working, why not try to find out about Heaven/Hell?  But my friend refused to ask her this as he said 'she might not realise she's dead and if you tell her it could make her angry' and none of us wanted a pissed-off spirit on our hands!

Okay, now we need a Ouija board experience thread...

Look closely at the window behind the boys.

Okay, now we need a Ouija board experience thread...

-scareyworms

Agreed!

My wife and I started using the ouija board on the night of our third wedding anniversary last month.  We've used the board once since, and every time the curser goies to the W and slides off the bottom of the board.

I'm such a skeptic that it took me a long time to believe that she wasn't moving the cursor.

Finally (after far too many drinks) my wife got so pissed off and started screaming at the board "WHAT IS YOUR NAME, WHAT IS YOUR NAME!"

I said, "That's it, we're done.  I've been living with this godamned ghost or spirit or whatever for too godamned long to go and piss it off."