[Lucien21]

Originally Posted by Jeysie

Spider: I'm familiar with both Penn & Teller and Randi. (Big fan of Penn & Teller, actually. Wish I had enough money to go see one of their shows in person...)

Zooty! Zoot zoot!

[Jeysie]

Lucien: Ah, I loved that episode, for a number of reasons, ranging from Penn & Teller to the brief return of one of my favorite characters.

"Any Emily Dickinson poem can be sung to the tune of the Yellow Rose of Texas."

Peace & Luv, Liz

[Lucien21]

Originally Posted by Jeysie

"Any Emily Dickinson poem can be sung to the tune of the Yellow Rose of Texas."

Or to the theme from "Gilligans Island" (So I hear)

"Day of the Dead" was one of my favourite episodes as it was written by Neil Gaiman who is one of my favourite authors.

[em-deecee]

My 1st encounter with a ghost was in Mobile, AL when I was 22 years old. During the 10 years I lived there, I had a total of 4 experiences with the supernatural. The most common was hear footsteps walking through the middle bedroom towards the back of the house. You know you're not imagining things when your cats hear the same noise & look at you like, "what the hell was that?!?"

When I moved to the Southside of Birmingham in the late 80s, sometimes I would feel someone sitting on my bed near the bottom, just before falling asleep. A couple of times I raised up to see who was there. I finally dismissed it as some sort of tactile hallucination. One day a young man drove down the street & got out of his car & stood on the sidewalk looking at the house I lived in. When he saw me, he asked if I lived there & told me he had lived there from age 5 to 18 & that he had wonderful memories of the place. Then he asked if I'd ever seen the ghost. No, I hadn't. When he was a little kid & his mother worked nights, sometimes he was left home alone. On those nights, a woman dressed in all white, with long red hair, would come in & sit at the bottom of his bed until he fell asleep. He said her presence was such a comfort & that somehow he knew she shouldn't tell anyone about her. I was the 1st person he'd ever told about her. Well, that explained what I felt sitting at the bottom of my bed.

[Jazhara7]

One of my teachers in my old school (either my French or Physics teacher) told how he used to have a clock in his cellar (probably a cellar used as rooms) that had the habit of stopping whenever someone in the family died (the exact time, and I don't remember if he said if it was an old or new clock, but if it was a new one, it probably was also the date). I don't remember if he said wether it was an old or a new clock, but he said that he got rid of it after some time, because it was just too creepy.


Also, I was quite creeped by Ben Jordan Case 4. The atmosphere was realistic, and I actually had to keep a nightlight on for some time after playing, so that I could be sure that the ghost doesn't come into my room.

That, and I believe we have a ghost or something checking out our house at some times. That one light bulb has been stolen out of the lamp again, and so has the Thomy(TM) Red-White (Ketchup and Mayonnaise). That, or that french guy suddenly felt some hunger and decided to eat the lightbulb.




-

[UPtimist]

[squarejawhero]

Which one's the ghost?

"Emily had an extraordinary talent when it came to fart-sculpting."

[samIamsad]

Oh stop it, I'm out of pants!

[natalia]

Not a ghost sighting or anything, but I wrote about this terrifying dream I had ages ago and still remember super vividly to this day:

My family had just moved to a small house in the middle of nowhere Texas a while back. I wasn’t very happy about the move, so maybe my stress and tension led to the very first dream (nightmare) I had in the house.

It was one of those dreams where you feel like you’re awake, but something seems slightly off. I was in bed in my room in the middle of the night just resting.

For some reason, I suddenly just knew that every one else in the house (my mom, my dad, my sister, and my dog) had all just been murdered. I couldn’t see or hear anything, but I just knew that whatever had killed everyone else was coming to my room next. I stayed paralyzed with terror in my bed staring at the door and waiting; waiting for whatever it was to slowly open the door and kill me.

Though paralyzed and unable to move, I was struggling to wake up. I could feel that it was just a dream and knew that if I could just wake up, everything would be okay. Finally, I bolted upright and opened my eyes and everything was fine. I sank back down into bed breathing a deep sigh of relief. There was a sudden movement and a rustling of sound. A dark shadow leaned over me and I felt something press its hands down on my shoulders.

“YOU’RE NEXT”

Aurrrggggh!!!!

(And at that moment, I really woke up with this terrible primal (in my sister’s words) scream that woke up everyone in the house up. It was the most horrifying dream I’ve every had. I really hate, hate, hate those dreams where you think you’ve woken up, but you really haven’t.)

[Melanie68]

Originally Posted by natalia

(And at that moment, I really woke up with this terrible primal (in my sister’s words) scream that woke up everyone in the house up. It was the most horrifying dream I’ve every had. I really hate, hate, hate those dreams where you think you’ve woken up, but you really haven’t.)

I have those occasionally. Someone has come into my apartment and I usually wake up right before they start to strangle me Those are the worst!

[squarejawhero]

Man, I hate those kind of dreams. I had som real nightmares at the beginning of this year, too. Things on or in the bed, something evil in the corner of the room, something growling in my ear just as I'm about to get to sleep... I must've had something really preying on my mind. I tend to get quite bad nightmares anyway, when I do have them... blame it on a hyperactive imagination!

When I do dream of something "haunting" me, it's normally shapeless, oppressive and inhabits dark space. I don't know what it looks like, but it's there and there's just a horrid feeling about it, like it's really wrong and won't just kill you, but do something to you too. If you've ever seen the original Ju-on; The Grudge or played Silent Hill 2, kind of like that. I think part of it is something to do with the film Alien - where the creature doesn't just kill you, it violates you. Kind of primordial fear stuff.

I read an interesting article some years back about our psychological need to be hunted, which is why we make up ghost and horror stories and create our own fantasy predators as we (arguably) have no natural ones of our own. I think dreams like this are an extension of that.

[natalia]

Originally Posted by squarejawhero

Man, I hate those kind of dreams. I had som real nightmares at the beginning of this year, too. Things on or in the bed, something evil in the corner of the room, something growling in my ear just as I'm about to get to sleep... I must've had something really preying on my mind. I tend to get quite bad nightmares anyway, when I do have them... blame it on a hyperactive imagination!

When I do dream of something "haunting" me, it's normally shapeless, oppressive and inhabits dark space. I don't know what it looks like, but it's there and there's just a horrid feeling about it, like it's really wrong and won't just kill you, but do something to you too. If you've ever seen the original Ju-on; The Grudge or played Silent Hill 2, kind of like that. I think part of it is something to do with the film Alien - where the creature doesn't just kill you, it violates you. Kind of primordial fear stuff.

I read an interesting article some years back about our psychological need to be hunted, which is why we make up ghost and horror stories and create our own fantasy predators as we (arguably) have no natural ones of our own. I think dreams like this are an extension of that.

Totally fascinating! I definitely have nightmares with things that are undefined, but that fill me with dread flitting around the periphery of my perception. And normally they're enough to wake me up, like the subtle hiss or soft buzz of a dark voice in my ear. Creeeepy! I wonder if it's just because I internalize so much stress or something.

Sticking more to the topic -- I love all things ghostly and haunted, even if I'm a total scaredy cat. I've never had a true ghostly experience, but there is something that springs to mind about the time back when I lived in California that I'm sure can be explained by mundane reality, but creeped me out big time.

At the time, my mother worked the nightshift and normally didn't come home until around 8 in the morning. One night, from my bedroom, I woke up because I heard the front door open and close. And then I heard the sliding glass door from our foyer into our living room slide open. These were the sounds I always heard in the morning when my mother came home from work.

Only thing is, it was around 2 in the morning when I heard it, so I just assumed that she had come home early. I got up to see if she was okay and nearly ran into my father in the hallway. He'd just come out of his bedroom because he'd heard the noises as well.

We both walked into the living room and saw that the sliding glass door (which my mom always closed and locked every night before going to work) was indeed half open, but there was no one in the house. It was so spooky, because the sounds of someone coming into the house is what woke both of us up.

[samIamsad]

Originally Posted by squarejawhero

I read an interesting article some years back about our psychological need to be hunted, which is why we make up ghost and horror stories and create our own fantasy predators as we (arguably) have no natural ones of our own. I think dreams like this are an extension of that.

"Der Mensch ist auch nur ein Tier", was my favourite saying during the first year at college.

[Captain Blondebeard]

When I was a child I used to have a recurring dream for about 2 weeks. Every night I would rememer my dreams of a kid using an old vintage type writer with no background. The typing sounds scared me to death. I would wake up 5 times a night in panic. The piece that tied it all together was an antique type writer that my parents bought at an auction. The night of the purchase it gave me the nightmares and all my family memebers fel uneasy about the aura of the house. The animals were constantly paniked. We donated the typewriter and my dreams went away.

Wierd.

[Jazhara7]

I used to occasionally have dreams (I think they were dreams), where I thought I was awake. I was in my room, only that it did not have a door or window. it was as though I was in a black box. I could see abolutely nothing. It was so dark, you couldn't even see your hand. Even though I was not able to see the walls, I knew I was in my room. I seem to recall not being able to move in that dream, so I think this might actually have been something like sleep paralysis setting out late, making me think the room was totally dark (probably one of those nights where my mother closed the Rollo nearly all the way down).

It always felt as if the shadows were gripping for me, something in the dark was not right, and I might have felt a bit klaustrophobic - as if I wanted to expand myself beyond the walls of the room, except that I was unable to do so because of that terrible darkness pushing me back. It was creepy (I don't actually suffer from Klaustrophobia, but I think those dreams gave me a pretty good impression how a Klaustrophobiac feels like).


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[Manhunter71]

I'm not sure if this is a ghost story or not because it involves me although I was way too young to recall the actual details!

When I was about 7yrs old I went with my Mum and Grandparents to stay with my Great-Grandparents for a short holiday. Apparently, at about 10 pm I had called downstairs to my Gran and was very distressed! When asked what was wrong I had told my grandparents that my great-grandad had just come into my room and told me to tell everyone that he had to go away.Naturally they were quite surprised by this, but when they went to his bedroom they found that he was dead. When the doctor came he confirmed that he had been dead for about for a few hours, and because he had been so ill already, there was no way he could have come into my bedroom to talk to me!

I was only told this story a few years ago after I happened to mention that whenever we stayed in that house I always had an unexplainable cold feeling and couldn't stand to be in any of the rooms by myself

[Nelza]

I have a story - I used to live in an outback town that is almost smack bang in the middle of Australia. I recall that most nights I'd lie awake because I could see a silhouette of an Aboriginal man standing in front of the window. I spent those nights with my head under the covers but I'd still put it down to me creating those visions and making myself scared.

Not too long after, my parents have a friend from Melbourne stay with us. I bunk with my sister while he stays in my room. The next morning he tells my parents that there is a spirit of a traditional Aboriginal man lingering around my room who is angry about the painting hanging up in there. They go and look at the painting he's talking about which is indeed an Aboriginal painting.

It doesn't make sense because it's a happy painting - painted by an Aboriginal woman depicting their tradition of honey ant collecting. My dad takes down the painting and rolls it up which lifts the vibe immediately.

The next time my dad's in town he runs into an Aboriginal local and tells him the story to see if he can make sense of it. The man tells my dad that our house is located on Aboriginal Man's land, meaning that no Aboriginal Women were allowed. Explains why he was angry at the painting depicting Aboriginal Women's tradition.

My parents didn't actually tell me those happenings until after we'd moved away. They thought it would keep my up at night.

[Hammerite]

My video recorder might be haunted.
The clock on it changes every so often completely at random.
I looked once and it said 6:51 (the wrong time) and then I went downstairs and, when I came up, it said the right time (11:11)

[ATMachine]

Originally Posted by Jazhara7

I don't actually suffer from Klaustrophobia

Good to know you're not afraid of people named Klaus. Or did you mean claustrophobia?

I'm afraid I don't really have any ghost stories myself. And though I do have nightmares sometimes, they aren't usually about evil spirits or people trying to kill me. (More often it's being signed up for a military draft, or finding myself back in high school.) I'm deprived, I guess.

[Catbert]

If I had a run in with a ghost I'd freakin kick his ass for scaring so many people. Getting off on making us poop our collective pants will ya?